Ink

It’s the beginning of the school year, raining hard. C’s parents never leave town, but tonight is sweet and swollen—their departure some kind of unconscious allowance for youthful dalliance. They’ve gone to see friends, will return tomorrow.

C is freshly sixteen, a sophomore, which means the evening possesses infinite potential for teenage ruckus, a chaos she would have gladly exploited, but is, instead, sitting cross-legged inside her bedroom closet. The choice to keep the fact of the empty house from friends is part of a new installment of withholding, not unlike two weekends ago when her friends tied themselves in corsets, legs crisscrossed in fishnets, eyes blackened and glittery, and couldn’t understand why C wouldn’t join them for Rocky Horror. To walk out like that at midnight, to indulge her bare skin to the end of summer air, was compelling, certainly, yet she’d refused, sat in a patio chair, half listening to CocoRosie, half expecting K not to show. That night, the odds were in her favor. K had shown up around 1 a.m., after her parents had fallen asleep, in that quiet, liminal hour that had, over the past three months, come to feel synonymous with him. Other nights, he wouldn’t show at all, leaving C alone with her writing and desire. If he comes tonight, C decides, she will give it to him if he asks—her body. Her virginity, a nagging, heavy thing she is ready to cast off. She pulses with nervousness.

—

Inside the closet she lights a small votive candle, enough for total luminescence. The closet in her room, her room inside the only house she’s ever lived in: suburban, old, creaky, wooden. The closet is barely a walk-in, tracks of carpet nails steal inches from the tight quarters, and there’s a wide wooden step separating the space into two tiers—the upper platform just large enough to sit on, which is where C is, tucked away behind a waterfall of clothes.

On her face, makeup. She’s dressed in a fitted shirt, tights—a stretchy black skirt lies outside on the bed, ready to slide into. She’d finished getting ready, sucking in, changing clothes, clamping the straightener over her hair until the entire room smelled of charred tissue paper. She’d paced, lit incense, opened the window to let the storm smell in and considered what she might do until K got there, if he even showed up at all. In the past she would take out her favorite book or a notebook, reading or writing until he arrived to find her that way: gripped, intellectual, withholding. “What are you doing?” he’d sometimes ask, and she’d smile coyly, close the book and say, “How are you, K?” This was in the summer when the nights were humid and the moon was always out.

Something urged her to the closet. The desire to feel contained, resume her waiting close to the womb of her consciousness, an innate teenage desire for dimness.

More books and papers than clothes. On the floor below her, a haphazard row of thrifted shoes and an old cardboard trunk. Inside, a matrix of journals, books, loose papers with black, blue, pencil writing, a beating drum of life. By the time she is a senior, there will be no room left inside the box, the material collapsed all over the floor, all angst and longing.

C’s phone vibrates: Walking. C and K’s houses are almost four miles apart; it will take him at least an hour to get here. The news of his distant travel on foot, in the rain no less, thrills her, proves something. She looks at the time: 8:36. She’ll wait until 8:40 to respond. From the depths of the trunk, C finds the clean manila folder, the one labeled C + K—a not-so-subtle attempt at encoding. Inside the folder is a thick packet of their online correspondence, so hefty it had taken all the printer ink. There are emails and Instant Message conversations going back three months, when K was bored one night and sent her a simple message, hello. She studies for clues to his inner workings, every utterance like a delicate poem worthy of dissection. She lets out a sigh. She flexes her muscles to release the anticipation running beneath the skin. She looks at her phone. 8:41. You must be getting soaked, she types and sends. A little wetness never hurt anyone, K replies. She reads into his words, smiles, buries her face into a jacket hanging above her head.

—

C is coming down from her first summer of men, John and Max interested in her at the same time—a sudden jolt of attention.

John’s main appeal resided in the fact that he is a year older and had a new obsession with C. “It’s lame,” he said when she asked him about his nickname, Coffee. “It’s just because I coughed a lot one time when we were all smoking. Now I’m stuck with it.”

“That is lame,” she agreed.

On their first hangout alone, Coffee took C to The Portal, a place she’d heard people talk about and which she discovered was nothing more than a family of shrubs, fucking bushes, alongside a neighborhood church. No one can see in, he emphasized, but from inside you can see out. He’d kissed her so hard, and she was so focused on doing it well, she didn’t feel her arm rubbing against the brick side of the church. When they came up for air, C’s arm was bleeding—it was bleeding a lot. “Oh shit,” he’d said. A few weeks later Coffee started confessing his love to C, and their hangouts consisted of him crying over her dating Max, her sweet, good-looking friend who would come over while her parents were at work. In broad daylight they’d watch movies in their entirety, not touching until the credits rolled and Max would get this boyish look on his face, lean in close and say, “I know what we can do now…” his dimples too cute, his tongue in her mouth like a torpedo.

Both wanted to be her boyfriend, but she was afraid of her own sexuality, too self-conscious, too in love with K, the one she knew she could never fully have, the fact of him like a sacred name embroidered in the skin, not fit for articulation. With K, she understood the urge of lovers to tattoo each other’s names onto the flesh. If asked, she would ink him into her, somewhere where it hurt, like down the long spindle of her spine.

She looks down to her body, to her hands smudged with ink. Yes, she says silently. Tonight is the night.

—

One might say C, barely a sophomore, is too young to reminisce over teendome, but she’d already completed one year, had accrued a rebellion, steadfast, miserable, thrilling. Her high school is large, the teachers terribly disengaged, sour. While most of her peers deal with the lack of care by erupting into violence, C and her friends opt to guzzle 40’s of High Life in the school’s basement, or ditch all together, go to the public library and read what’s useful—oh, the immaculate shelves, the books like dormant specimens, coming to life under C’s touch.

From the trunk, C pulls more paper, a wrinkled computer paper in her best friend’s large, masculine handwriting: Beauty has much more to do with an individual perception of something than any tangible or quantifiable quality, it begins. She doesn’t know how this private manifesto ended up in her box, although in the past she’d been guilty of stealing scraps of her friends. After two 40’s, the information strewn all over Naomi’s attic—cartoons depicting their own lives, paintings, journal entries—tantalized C in a drunken way and convinced her of their ability to reveal something subtle, yet remarkably true about this friend she loved. So she’d trace her hand over the floor—Naomi’s entire attic the equivalent of C’s closet, both always writing themselves out of something—and like a deck of cards, she would pull whatever felt smoothest under the pads of her fingers, slip the paper into her bag to open later, a piece of her friend to fold into the reservoir, Jung’s collective unconscious, a weak, murky attempt at reconciliation for her thievery. Her knowledge is my knowledge. Like most things, she didn’t think about getting caught, didn’t end up with anything that was, necessarily, personal, except the one that read: I am not very articulate, I am bad at math, I don’t consistently recycle, I steal alcohol from CVS, I’ve never had a boyfriend, I don’t play any sports, I think I know everything—a double-sided litany of self-loathing. C didn’t judge, liked the fact that she could read it impartially, fold it into the canon to dissolve with her own loopy thoughts.

The candlelight bobs, heat rises in the closet. A dark cherry smell grows, the smell of blunt papers kept hidden away in a shoebox above her head. She stands up, using the upper platform to peer over the top shelf that houses a typewriter, her grandma’s old hat rack, and in the very back, the box she’d painted gold. She removes the lid; inside it smells of bong water—papers, but no weed. She’ll have to wait for K.

Like Coffee, K has a street name, one that she would never use, but is there, sewn in, part of his identity, painted on the walls of their high school and the restaurant he worked at. He is two years older, their freshman-year drug dealer, that’s how it started. She loves what he does with words, the way he calls her Ma, as in, “Sup Ma,” as in, “I like how you think, Ma,” or can say, in all charm and seriousness, “Hello young love, the moon is bright and full, let’s make love on your roof beneath it,” perfectly delivered, astonishingly real. Yet the ins and outs of his everyday life are murky—he offers only snapshots—shards of parties, pieces of friends, shadowy nights alone making art—all of it so encrypted she’s left to design his hidden life for herself. Coffee had recently found out about the two of them, not that there was much to find out, and had messaged C a somber little message that read, You’re fucking K-Wil? You got yourself the player. She didn’t say anything. And they weren’t fucking.

K’s reputation is obsolete when he comes over, kisses C’s neck, plays whale songs on a small speaker. “This shit is real,” he’d say to the amniotic sounds. He’d say, “I want to be Rastafari, a poet, an artist; I want to leave my mom’s place, I want to take you for a drive.” He teaches C to drive down the slick streets of her childhood, and then sneaks away at sunrise. Addiction, obsession, crept up on her, slowly then all at once. Now she lied, gave up nights to see him on the flimsy chance he’d make it. How much time had she wasted waiting? She glances back to their folder, to the C and the K, finds an old pencil, and writes C + K, they make the same sound…but they are not interchangeable.

—

In the closet her palms sweat. He’s walking in the rain, four miles. She can hear the rain pounding down on the flat rooftop and wonders if the dining room ceiling has begun to leak. She thinks about getting up, but the thought of the house feels too big, too filled with her parents’ belongings—she wants to stay close to her things. Among the pile of books, Miranda July, Freud, zines, a dictionary whose pages she flutters between her fingers, the paper-wind wicking the candlelight. She closes her eyes, pretends she is on a train, the flicker practically audible on her eyelids. Then the fire goes out, and the darkness feels good too. You smell like a birthday cake, she can imagine him saying to her hair when he greets her. She gropes around for the lighter, lights the candle back up, lands her finger on a random word in the dictionary, on the word truncated, meaning shortened, sounding a lot like trunk, like the one in front of her housing her mess of thoughts, so dissimilar from abridged. For a moment C grows tired of her manic upheaval, her restless writing, her own obsession with his words and how he might use them on her tonight, all of it so cluttered. Had she a metal pail, she’d have all the tools to start burning, cleansed and ready for him. Blank, new, virginal. Instead she pulls from the trunk The Four Noble Truths, a packet from Political Philosophy, one of the few papers from last year that felt worth keeping.

…The truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. More simply put, suffering exists. The concept of pleasure is not denied, but acknowledged as fleeting. Pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. The same logic belies an understanding of happiness. In the end, only aging, sickness, and death are certain and unavoidable.

She’d written in the margins, and this marginalia makes her laugh, jolts her out of her own silence. Aside the truth of suffering she’d written school = imprisonment, and next to pleasure she’d drawn a pot leaf; unquenchable thirst, a simple heart. The predictability of her trope embarrasses her, brings heat to her cheeks. More intriguing, however, was what she’d written in a sloppy script barely recognizable at the bottom of the page: Every person, no matter how plain has one great erotic performance in her life; the second performance would only be a copy of the first. It was a quote from somewhere, a book or song lyrics. She scans her mind in search for a connection to The Truths, the two pools of ink like shadows of one another. She finally settles on the idea that they are related merely by the fact that knowledge builds on other knowledge—something else she’d heard and jotted down. Joined but unjoined. What would it feel like to finally let their bodies do the talking?

Her ass hurts. She grows restless, anxious. She won’t get up yet, afraid her thoughts will spread thinly over the furniture, like she’ll have nothing to say when he arrives. In the pocket-sized book, Freud has a lot to say about sexuality, dreams, the subconscious, and the points at which they intersect. Maybe this is something she can talk about. Plant the seed of seduction by talking psychology, quoting the dead. She yanks the jacket from the hanger, uses it as a cushion, crosses her legs again, and thinks of him walking in the rain. A lovely landscape of purple and blue erects in the hippocampus. This is how the night will build, like it always does. They’ll talk and talk and when their words have crescendoed themselves, after their speech draws into the folds of the long night, they will lie down, this time in her bed, this is that night.

—

Below her, she feels a light rumble, practically undetectable, then the sound of the kitchen door closing. Shit, she thinks. She’s still stocking-footed. She tiptoes out of the closet. Outside, the bedroom air is cool, humid, the spell broken. The rain comes on slower now. He doesn’t call out for her, but she can hear him making his way through the rooms downstairs. She quickly slides into her skirt. Lightning cracks the sky, illuminates two over-stuffed pillows on the bed so they look like storm clouds, or phantoms. The house is old, each stair with its own category of sound, so C can almost track K’s progression, his slow ascent.

“Hey!” she finally calls out, releasing her voice.

“Hello?” K slowly opens the bedroom door, where C stands still, shocked out of her solitude.

“Hey,” she says again, leaning in for a long, damp hug. More than how he looks, he smells so good—faintly vanilla, but more masculine, like figs and leather, brown sugar—a scent she believes was crafted for her own enjoyment. She could live off this smell. He carries an orange construction cone.

“For you. A gift from along the way.”

“Something I’ve always wanted.” She laughs. The cone is huge, streaked with traffic muck.

“So, what have you been up to, chica?” K’s eyes scan the room, land on the closet where candlelight dances softly and jagged corners of paper poke out. It must look like some strange séance, C thinks. She had wanted him to see the oddity of it all, to wonder about her as much as she wonders about him, but now she feels exposed, naked, wordless.

“I was just looking at stupid shit I’ve written,” she says, blowing the candle out and clicking on a lamp. “I can’t believe you walked here.” She waits for, it was worth it or, I’d walk longer to see you.

“The rain is my friend,” K says instead, setting the cone down.

“Do you want to head to the patio? I still have some of your beers from last time. They’re warm. I had to hide them.” C gestures toward the darkened closet, where two High Lifes lay nestled inside coat pockets.

“I actually can’t stay long, Ma. Zach needs me to hook him up with something tonight.”

“What?” The news is sharp, hits her like a frigid wind. “What do you mean? You just walked, like, four miles to get here.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. And it’s a beautiful night.” K lowers to the floor, sits at the closet’s threshold. “I’d much rather kick it with you. We’ll do this again.”

C grabs her bath towel off of the hook and hands it to him. She sits on her bed, tries to hide the sudden rush of disappointment, but it roils. Come here, she thinks, I’m ready.

“I’m still looking all into Rastafarianism. I want to write my own bible one day, write my own religion,” K says, patting himself dry. He goes on talking about things so abstractly she confuses it for his genius. She soaks him in, would be happy to skip the conversation for tonight if it means she could feel his mouth on hers, become absorbed in that smell. Instead she tells him about The Four Noble Truths and he tells her about the way he watches his mom suffer; she’s ill, an immigrant, divorced, and angry. No one else has heard this coming out of his mouth before, she thinks.

K points to the trunk. “Tell me what you’ve been writing,” he says again. From this angle, everything inside looks like nothing more than a messy pit, an unruly recycling bin.

“Oh, nothing. It’s stupid,” C says, cursing herself for leaving their folder out in plain sight. And how many of those documents were laced with his name? How many journal entries began in I need, or, I can’t stop, etc? Too many, probably.

“Nah, I bet your writing is dope,” K says. “I have a box, too, filled with photos of me as a little punk kid.” C tries to imagine K as an innocent, young boy, but nothing comes to mind. In front of her his arm muscles glisten from rain and his confidence spews like his own beautiful odor. “I think I see one of you right there.” K points to some gloss peeking out from behind the manila folder. Before C can protest, he reaches inside her closet and pulls a small deck of photos from the rubble, not seeing the folder. Missing it all together. Outside the storm resumes its pounding, shaking the wooden floorboards and lighting the room with its electricity. She cups her hands over his, over the photos.

“Come on, I bet you were cute,” K says. Together they peer down to the photo of C and her dad at the zoo; C lounging in a blue kiddie pool; C on her first bicycle; and she hopes, she prays the photo she doesn’t want to be there won’t be, and then K shuffles through and finds it: a young C, five or six years old, on her bed wearing white tights, a white turtle neck, and large, plush rabbit ears, lined in pink. Between her legs, a half-dozen rabbit stuffed animals: one sitting upright holding a small brush for grooming its long ears; another red-eyed, albino; two man and woman rabbits dressed in Victorian clothes, velcroed paw-to-paw—married rabbits. The image is innately sexual, of course taken innocently, a little girl dressed identical to her toys, on her dreamy, pastel bed. Outside a horn sounds off, K’s friend ready to take him away from her. But K is transfixed, doesn’t move. Please find this sexy, she thinks. Silence hangs between them, just the rain falls. He looks up at her.

“I liked my rabbits?” C says.

K reaches for her face, tugs at her hair a little, draws her close.

Kiss me, she thinks. But K doesn’t kiss her. He bypasses her lips, goes straight to her ear; the skin around the drum tightens.

“You look like. A little. Bunny. Porn star.” His words slide in. Explode. The car in waiting wails its horn, doesn’t let it up for several seconds. The two look at each other, and C cannot tell if it’s longing that she feels.

But still she says, “Stay.”

And still he says, “I have to go.”

“My parents will be gone all night.”

He gives her a hard kiss between the eyes before descending.

Downstairs, C watches the car rush away, making small waves in its hurry. The cavernous rooms and she alone among them. Isn’t that enough? But he is gone, and she is left with the same humid quiet, the same rain coming down in sheets, his words echoing in her ears. The dining room ceiling drips one drop at a time onto the floor. The rhythm has a numbing quality, but yearning has a way of jostling the body back to feeling. She meanders into her mom’s study, past the stacks of books that hold no interest to her. She grabs a fancy calligraphy pen off of the desk, then approaches the staircase and begins climbing, articulating her foot heel to toe, heel to toe, heel to toe, the way she’d read monks do in walking meditation. I am here, she thinks, I am here, but all the while her fist is tight around the pen, the nails carve red crescents in the flesh. The night is long ahead of her and there are words, she knows, that will make the time go by, but she’s not sure which ones or when they’ll find her.

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Evolution Kit

According to the manual, the “Theistic-Science World Building Kit” contains the following:

1. One forty-gallon terrarium (48″ x 12″ x 16″)

2. One shaker of “Evolution Mix” biosphere food (red)

3. One prepackaged rock to make the core

4. One shaker of “Planetary/Ecosystem Dust” (blue)

5. Something called “Matter,” which has the exact color and consistency of chalk dust

6. The Evolution Manual, as yellow and glossy as a school bus

The manual tells Katie that she should expect all life in her biosphere to map onto the evolutionary trails of Earth species. She can expect fish to crawl up on land, sprout into dinosaurs and birds: an inherited morphology spread throughout the ages.

STEP ONE: Pour Matter into biosphere and add one to five shakes of Evolutionary Dust.

STEP TWO: Begin.

Katie pours the chalk dust into the terrarium. She sprinkles a heavy dose of blue dust and a bit of red. It looks as though she has dumped food coloring into milk. The blue gains dominance, takes the red and drowns it. Katie imagines hydrothermal vents blasting within the rifts of the biosphere’s surface like primordial, cosmic wounds.

She does not regret her drunken purchase. The kit was purchased whilst shitfaced the night she got laid off. The package arrived on May 21st, which Katie remembers only because it was an ex-boyfriend’s birthday. The return address listed the town of Gammelstad, Sweden, but the box claimed manufacture in Stockholm, and the postage stamps revealed a journey from Oslo to Reykjavik to Paris for some reason to Reykjavik again to Halifax to Denton, Texas, where it found Katie’s front door. The return label said Play God Theistic-Science Company in block blue lettering, followed by a clip-art icon of a FedEx truck, even though the shipping service was a third party called Ilmarinen, Inc.

Katie adds more Planetary/Ecosystem Dust and goes to bed.

When she wakes, fish have formed in the theistic-biosphere. The terrarium is an aquatic underworld: jellyfish sway near the surface; shadowy agnatha—jawless fish—swarm at the bottom. Small, armored sharks with little plated spines of cartilage that the manual calls acanthodii appear. In the tank’s center, there is a tiny quadrant of shore.

STEP 3: So, you think you’re beginning to see fish.

Titaalik roseae, a four-limbed Devonian vertebrate fossil found in Nunavit, Canada is thought to be one of the first creatures to have walked on land from the sea. Both fish and tetrapod, the Titaalik supported gills, fins, a pelvic girdle, and partial wrists. Keep watching. The next step is dinosaurs.

Katie looks back at her terrarium. She wonders if the tiny creatures she sees emerging onto the shore resemble Titaalik, their toothy mouths gaping, marble eyes glistening like new olives.

The world around her but for these little creatures feels ill with the lack of hope.

It is sunset by the time there are dinosaurs. Evening coats Katie’s window in shades of blue. The dinosaurs are small at first, but by the time Katie is getting ready for bed, wings break through their scales in the most beautiful colors: Jupiter red, asteroid brown, Neptune green. Katie falls asleep in front of the terrarium.

In her dream a great wind blows through the house, far too powerful for her tiny dinosaurs to fly. To protect them Katie must huddle over the biosphere with a blanket around her shoulders, arms spread out like a mother bat, to block the wind.

When she wakes, the dinosaurs are the size of bumblebees, flying and bumping into the glass. One of them belches a candlewick cough of flame.

STEP 4: After archaeopteryx, notice mammals.

But there are no mammals, and Katie recognizes the dinosaurs for what they are: dragons. They buzz like trapped flies, spurting flame at each other. It is impossibly cute.

If any cryptozoological creatures appear, immediately implement World Extinction Kit (sold separately at a 15% percent discount with purchase of a second Theistic-Science World Building Kit).

Online, Katie looks up the Extinction Kit. There is a tiny rock that looks like an asteroid and a shaker of something called “Anti-matter.” There is no explanation as to why the dragons must die. Why can’t Katie have dragons instead of dinosaurs? She watches the dragons play with each other. They keep bumping into the glass. Katie opens the top of the terrarium.

One immediately begins to nest in the rafters. Another begins hoarding loose grains of rice in her pantry. It sits atop the rice as if on a bed of gold. Katie chucks the Evolutionary Manual in the trash. There is no real plan to a world, she knows this. Only chaos.

The terrarium is a dead planet now. No more creatures will appear. Katie wonders if the dragons feel like astronauts, like explorers. She wonders if they are triumphant or afraid. If the sound of her microwaving ramen sends a message of doom throughout the apartment. If they heave a tiny sigh of relief at the “ding.” She wonders what it feels like to have left behind the world of false order and live in the stars.

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To the Elk

They were hanging it against the barn wall. The head limp to the side. With a snowmobile they had dragged the dead elk from wherever in the mountains the pile lay where it had been gutted. For this bloody spectacle.

“That’s a big fucking animal.”

The porch of the main cabin: Wyatt was there with her, and so was this man Dale from Seattle plus the three highballs in his veins. That’s a big fucking thing, Dale kept saying. This was at the ranch that was in Wyatt’s family. The Smith River was nearby. It was Thanksgiving night.

“They got one last year too,” said Wyatt.

“It’s bigger than a buffalo.”

Savannah was thinking of her father and brother and this same performance. They would return home to the triplex by the refinery, north-side Great Falls, with a carcass in the truck bed and blood dripping from the tailgate. And she was saying to herself, for this….

Up the porch steps came the hunters. They had been out all day and were covered in mud, and Savannah thought they smelled. Wyatt congratulated them and asked about the hunt. An uncle said they’d been lucky to shoot it from fifty yards. It ran a hundred and died, and a young cousin took the killing shot.

Wyatt’s uncles and cousins started applauding. They shook hands all around. Even in daytime she didn’t remember their names, and it was not daytime. The dark was long past gathering; it had mustered.

“Last year they got a bigger one,” Wyatt said.

By now the hunters had gone off to their different cabins to clean up.

“Bigger?” said Dale. “Bigger than that?”

“It’s missing half its rack.”

Savannah looked at the head again and saw only one antler.

“Do they spar?” asked Dale.

“I think they grind them against the trees,” said Wyatt.

“Not as impressive.”

“True.”

Speaking to her now, Dale said, “Let me ask. As a Western woman, does this arouse you? These men returning from the hunt?”

“I hope not,” said Wyatt. “I’m related to them.”

“I don’t mean the men. I mean the blood. I mean the sight of this big, beautiful dead thing.”

Savannah said, “I’m used to it.”

In fact by now—being from this region and educated in a different one (the opportunity belonging to so few from that refinery neighborhood)—she had a rule for herself: no dead animals or fresh-caught fish, not in real life and not in any photographs in any public medium, app or profile, or anything else. None of that spectacle would be permitted with regard to whatever partner or friend she kept. Wyatt’s pictures were full of other things: the neoclassical façade of the apartment building where he used to live in Missoula, an Old Fashioned in a bar in Chicago where his roommate from college played jazz guitar, a portrait in graduation robes and the sandstone arcade columns flanking him, that one now six years old and his hair (shorter back then) tousled from doffing the cap, the PBK cord helpfully around his neck in the foreground….

“Does it arouse you, Dale?” Wyatt asked.

“No, I’m so boring. No kinks for me. For me it’s all dollars and cents.”

“You’ve seen more blood than any of us.”

Seattle Dale was a political communications consultant. Fundraising was his higher function.

“Violence to me is writing a strongly worded email. But—I mean—you look at this, and you know these men can provide. I mean, this is vacation—it’s fun—for us. But—I mean—it’s something, something more.”

His tumbler was down to the ice melt.

“It doesn’t arouse me,” Savannah said.

A cone of light and warmth and festivity spiraled out like a dust devil when the door opened. A terrier called Sonny with long distinguished whiskers came out and trotted down the steps and went to piss on the snowy lawn. Inside, Wyatt’s aunts and mother, and his father also, were preparing the table. His father specialized in sweet potatoes.

When the little dog came back Dale went in for another drink and called the dog in using baby sounds. At last they were alone.

She watched Wyatt’s face. There was nothing there but anticipation for dinner and for his wine. She had looked at him before and had seen whole worlds where they would go together and more from which he’d come. A lick of dark hair came down out of the front of his cap. He put himself together well and tried to dress of his time, but it did not subsume him. Not too clean with the effort, his good shirt just a little too big. He liked big clothes. To have something fit perfectly—was that another of the things that would make him feel ashamed of his upbringing?

The glass against Wyatt’s lips now. Rare content passed through his eyes as he swallowed, the fire weeping in them. He made his deep voice go high and feminine. “Does it arouse you?”

“Ask me again,” Savannah said.

“As a Western woman?”

She moved to hit him, and his arm was around her.

“It’s cold.”

“I’ll get a fire going in our cabin.”

“That sounds nice.”

“Thank you for doing this,” he said. “I know it’s unbearable.”

“It’s not. It’s really not. I love them.”

There were many people she didn’t know. But at length you would know them. It was not being away from home, that wasn’t the difficult thing. Anyway you only had to get through dinner and then go to the little cabin and go to sleep. The drive had been beautiful, and they hadn’t argued.

She stood on toes to kiss the bottom of his neck.

“Do you really?” he asked.

Tears were in that question. Tears were good. And her rule was a good rule, a necessary rule to have for men. Education in history and politics had made her question whether it was for the better passage of life not to have relationships with men. That was a resounding theory up until graduation. Anyway, at minimum you had to have a rule you stuck with.

He went to wash his hands before dinner. When he was gone she admired for a while the dark mountain on the horizon above the ranch gate. The cold clean air touching her eyes, inflaming the veins. She didn’t look at the dead elk on the side of the barn. Then she went in for dinner.

—

The table was so crowded with people that her shoulders never relaxed. Her shirt went too low, she thought.

The food was very good. The green beans were perfectly seasoned. There were two turkeys; one was local and lean and the other was a butterball. They filled their glasses with red wine out of towering decanters. She was at the end of the table beside Wyatt. His father was at the head. She was across from his mother. It was a good meal. Everyone talked to each other.

“How come you didn’t want to hike,” the mother was saying.

“I thought I’d stay around and get something done,” said the father.

“Get what done?”

“Work. Caught up on emails.”

She watched Wyatt. He was drinking fast. She touched his knee under the table. His leg was vibrating under her hand. You could duck under these little breakers of talk like a child playing in the surf, but Wyatt was not possessed of that lightness. Later they would have to talk at length about it—whatever thing was said at the table that stood out to him as particularly abhorrent.

Things got formally quiet as everyone took turns saying gratefuls. The woodstove atmosphere and the gray iron of the gun barrels on the walls and the smell of the old rugs and leather furniture gave the quiet an oppressive quality like overwhelming heat, inescapable intimacy, absorbing silence into it.

From the other head of the table, “To the elk.”

“To the elk.”

“Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

“It’s special.”

“There are times you’re facing an animal and you’re not ready to take a life. It’s not an easy thing. To the elk. And to Harrison. He took the shot.”

She drank a little faster after the toast. When her turn finally came, she said, “Thank you for welcoming me. It’s a wonderful place.”

“To the ranch.”

“The ranch.”

They drank. All agreed—the ranch and the dead elk held all that was beautiful and dear. She didn’t look at any particular face; from having run meetings she understood how to look between people when addressing a table. She went on, “It’s been a good year. Better than I expected.”

Wyatt mugged for the crowd, and everyone laughed.

“Really, thank you for having me.”

Later they stood around the long kitchen island and ate the pie she had baked. She explained again to one of the aunts the decision they’d made to move in and what went into it. The uncle who had toasted the elk asked what she was doing for work and followed her answer with, “Do you work together?”

“No,” said Wyatt. “She works for a Dean. I work in Admissions. The worst office to be in right now.”

“It’s a good place to work,” she said. “I can do four tens in the summer when I want. The benefits are good. Campus jobs are nice.”

“When you add your union dues to the premiums you’re losing half a paycheck,” said Wyatt.

“But you can’t have one without the other,” she said.

“It’s beautiful how that works.”

“Can you run this up the flagpole?” the uncle went on. He had not listened. “Why the cuts to English? You can’t cut English. What’s the point of having a public college if you’re going to get rid of English?”

“English isn’t going anywhere,” she promised, wearily. Because she thought there was more than just the appreciation of literature in his concern for the survival of English.

“Well, run it up the pole if you can. It’s terrible what’s happening over there with the cuts. And Will Tunt retiring is a big loss.”

“It’ll get better,” she said.

“Enrollment always goes up when there’s a recession,” said Wyatt. “Folks would rather be in grad school.”

The uncle had taken several big bites of her pie. He told her how delicious it was and asked if she had made it herself, yes. After a long while the grown-ups were too drunk to stay awake and the teenage boy cousins had grown too weary for the world outside their heads and the girl cousins were sleeping in the corners cuddling with the dogs and it was over, she had survived it, and Wyatt was not saying anything else about the college where they worked and how it was a poor school serving poor students who were going to stay poor, and they were on their way out.

“Take Sonny with you,” said his father. Handed the terrier’s leash to his son. “Don’t worry, he’ll be good.”

Together they walked the little dog from the big cabin to the small cabin where they were staying.

While Sonny sniffed around at the base of the cabin steps, they sat on the porch, on top of a bench covered with a buffalo hide, and they looked across the lawn at the barn where the dead elk was hanging. Savannah wondered if it was going to start smelling.

“I wish I’d been out there to see,” said Wyatt.

“I don’t.”

“I mean to see it when it was alive.”

“I’m glad you weren’t there to see it get killed.”

They were holding each other. The wind moved over their faces, and they squeezed closer.

“Not that I want to hunt,” Wyatt was saying. “But you sort of wish that you knew what it was like.”

“I don’t. I don’t want you to be like,” she raised her voice and imitated Seattle Dale, “Harrison.”

“Me neither. I just wish I knew.”

“It was fun walking to the cliff,” she said.

The hike they’d done in the afternoon took them across the western expanse of the family’s great tract, past a tipi erected for ambience, to the edge of the river gorge. Fathoms down, you could see the frozen banks. In summertime you could swing from a hammock between two ponderosas with a cocktail in hand, maybe a book in your lap. This was how she imagined him.

Then she thought that the dead elk had moved, swung a little.

“It’s—” he started. “My dad didn’t know how to field dress an animal. His dad never taught him how to hunt. I’m not any better because I don’t do it.”

“It’s not about being better.”

“One feels somehow emasculated,” he said.

“Because you don’t know how to hunt?”

“Not exactly. I don’t think you’d get it. You remember Chuck asking what I do?”

“He didn’t ask you. He asked me.”

“But then he asked if we work together.”

“So.”

“I always have to prove my worth. That’s what I mean: I don’t think hunting is impressive. But doing something impressive is impressive. Knowing how to do things.”

“I don’t think that’s what Chuck meant.”

“I know my family.”

She didn’t want to argue. She said something about how it would be cold and unpleasant to have to go pee in the middle of the night, since the nearest outhouse was across the lawn, behind the barn with the dead elk. After that they went inside and got changed for bed; or, she did, and he started trying to make the fire.

The plush duvet cover was cold on her bare legs. The hairs stood up, and while she waited for the fire to start she was self-conscious of having prickly legs. Sonny was on the ground, sitting obediently and anxiously, watching her in bed. Wyatt was kneeling and using a hatchet to make kindling. Erratic banging shook the door when he wedged the blade into a crack and slammed a log against the stone base of the fireplace to split off flakes of pine. He built a pyre in the iron woodstove with newspaper and tinder and tried to get the flames started and took a long time to do it and tried opening and closing the flue and could not get it right.

“It’s so cold,” she said.

“Almost got it. I smothered it last time.”

“Maybe you could just get in with me.”

“No, I have to do this.”

She could fall asleep even when she was freezing, especially after enduring something. Enduring did make you tired, but it was alright to be tired because you could sleep easily. Her father had said to her once, do you sleep easy because you’re a princess?

She was almost in a dream and Wyatt was still working on the fire, and she felt Sonny climb up onto the bed and lay down on top of her feet, and her legs got warmer, and then she was all the way in the dream and almost asleep but still heard the newspaper flare up quickly and burn out each time he tried and tried, Wyatt still in the waking world.

—

Much later in the night she woke up because she had to pee. It was hot in the cabin. The fire was going, she did not know for how long, and the twin bed beside the queen was unmade but empty.

She pulled sweatpants on and went to the door and had to push it very hard till it flew open and slammed against the wall. No other noise out there. She saw the moonlight, bright on the snowy lawn, and the big cabin like an embalmed giant. She saw the elk, its fur matted and dark, and the tongue spilling out of its cracked mouth. Its open eye was black.

And Wyatt was sitting on the bench next to the cabin door. He was all in his winter gear, which he had formerly peeled off when he labored to make the fire, and his elbows were on his knees and his cheeks were in his hands, and he was undoubtedly facing to look at the elk.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“It’s not too bad.”

“Do you want to talk?”

“About what?”

He wasn’t wearing shoes. His bare feet were on the ground, his toes a few inches from the pastry-thin ice. He had taken off his thick wool socks and left them between his feet, inside out.

“What are you doing? Come to bed.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Come on. Don’t do this.”

“I’ll be in later. I’m sorry.”

Savannah recalled that she had to pee. Without answering the apology she went down the cabin steps. The sudden reminder, the pressure in her stomach returning to the front of her conscience, was as heat coming back into a room after a door is shut against winter.

She walked out over the snow. The dead elk grew larger and larger in sight the closer she came to the barn. The texture of its fur was nauseating, more than the smell of the outhouse.

Sitting down, she hated herself for the lapse. It wasn’t useful to be bitter about anything, but it had gotten to you anyway. The transference: you’d caught it just as it was done.

When she returned he had already gone back in. The socks remained. She picked them up and shook a little ice from them. In the cabin he was lying flat on the twin mattress, with hands folded on his chest. She got on the queen and pushed all the bad air from her lungs.

“Come on up.”

“Just calming down.”

It was the same thing. Civilized men would kill something, civilized men would watch. In his pictures the elk was there. Strung up between the arcade columns, its outline and ghost.

“Get in with me.”

After a minute he said, “Alright.”

There was love too, that was true. He was the product of a rule, an algorithm that had narrowed so many variables to her preference. They resisted the same things. Like the logs and pine flakes and newspaper it would keep the fire going, but also they would be consumed and used up. There was no rule concerning what to feel.

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Freebirds

My mother calls to tell me she cannot get on the plane. She has had a premonition.

“You’re going to crash?” I sit upright in bed, sheet clutched to my chest. When she says stuff like this, my skin gets crawly.

“Not exactly a premonition.” She sighs. “I can’t say what will happen. A foreboding. Emmy, I’m not thinking straight. I can’t zip up my suitcase. And I wanted to get out of here so badly.”

“Are you sure it’s the plane?” I look to my left where the baby is sleeping in her bassinet. I look to the right where my husband is sleeping in our bed. “Could you be foreboding something else?” I say as I tiptoe out of the room, which is not actually a room. We put up a wall in the studio after the baby was born.

No, says my mother, she’s sure it’s the plane, and of course, I could try to reason with her. I could tell her to go ahead and pack that suitcase, get in a taxi, buy a tea and sit at the airport, see if the foreboding recedes. Until she’s actually on the plane, she has not committed to anything. Instead, I say, “I don’t know what to tell you.” Because really, what should I tell her to do? Get on the plane and then the plane crashes and then she’s gone and then it’s my fault? Because planes do crash. They do.

In the background, at my mother’s house, radio voices are murmuring. “I have to think,” she says. “I’ll call you back.”

—

As soon as I hang up the phone, the baby is up. By up, I mean that she’s screaming. She’s always screaming and we don’t know why. I don’t know why. My husband comes out of the bedroom and hands her to me. “I have to go,” he says.

“It’s six thirty in the morning.” I follow him into the bathroom. He’s a real estate broker, which means that he works on commission, which means that the more he works the more money he makes, at least in theory. I’m no longer sure I buy this direct correlation. He works seven days a week. Before we had a baby, this wasn’t a problem. But now we do have a baby.

I sit on the toilet, bouncing the baby in my lap, while my husband brushes his teeth. “My mother might not be coming,” I say.

He spits into the sink. “Is she sick?”

“Sick in the head!” I say. “You’d think she’d want to see Eva. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with this delightful creature?” I kiss the top of Eva’s head, which is covered in the silkiest hair, soft and ticklish on my lips. She smells like a baby, like white soap and milk. She likes to be bounced, likes the sound of the water and the echo of our voices in the tiny chamber of the bathroom. She and I spend a lot of time in this bathroom. On the rare occasions when she is content and awake, I adore her so much I want to stuff her whole hand in my mouth. Both hands at once.

My husband is sliding the stroller out of the way to get to the door when my mother calls me back. “I’m in line at security,” she says.

“What changed your mind?”

“I’m a fifty-four-year-old woman. I cannot live my life in fear.”

—

I spy her on my building’s doorstep, from four stories up. She is covered chin to foot in a camel-colored, fur-trimmed coat. Her bright blond hair spills over the collar. Since the divorce, she has made herself thin and sort of glamorous.

She is also late. More than two hours late. Thirty minutes ago she called from a taxi to say she was on her way but couldn’t talk. Before that, I was very worried. Fear gnawed my stomach from the inside out. I called the airline. The plane had landed safely, on time. So if something had happened, it had happened only to my mother. Baby in my arms, growing heavier by the minute, I paced the apartment. What had she been foreboding? A car accident? A fainting spell?

“I met the pilot,” she says, over coffee, at the cafe around the corner, Broadway and 100, where we have settled ourselves at a cozy table. The baby is asleep in her stroller and I am actually drinking my coffee, my guard down, more relaxed than I’ve felt in weeks. If I need to use the bathroom, my mother can stay with the baby. If the baby wakes unexpectedly, perhaps she can even hold the baby.

“He’s a very nice pilot.” She pauses. “He’s not actually a pilot.”

“What is he?”

“He’s a flight attendant.”

“How did you meet a flight attendant?” I say, pleased by the inanity, the frivolity of this conversation. Really, I am pleased to be having any conversation. I am so happy my mother is here and I am not sitting alone.

“It’s a long story,” she says. “But when I called you from a taxi, it wasn’t really a taxi.”

“What was it?” I say, stupidly, my brain dulled by motherhood, perhaps, which is what happens to you, they say.

“He keeps his car at the airport. He was kind enough to give me a ride.”

“If he gave you a ride, you should have been early. Or at least, not two hours late.” I pause, comprehension forming. “What did you do in his car? Mom?”

“Oh my goodness, nothing like that!” My mother flushes. “But he was very nice. We had a wonderful conversation.”

“That’s great,” I say and I mean it and I would ask for more details, such as whether she’s planning to see him again, but the baby is starting to stir. I watch her like I’m watching a bomb about to explode. Except, if a bomb were about to explode, I’d run. My mother is distracted. She hasn’t noticed yet. I stand from the table. “I’ll be right back. Could you watch her?” I don’t look back.

—

The last time my mother came to visit, I was very pregnant and my mother was the thinnest I’d ever seen her. She was on a mission. According to her surgeon, you were not supposed to touch your face until you had achieved your ideal weight. This was the reason she hadn’t gotten a mini-facelift years ago. For years, she was a slave to her daily pint of pecan ice cream, until, one day, she wasn’t. One day she realized she could live and thrive on little more than lettuce.

“Don’t lose any more weight,” I told her. “You’re thin enough.”

My mother patted my shoulder. “Don’t take this personally, honey, but your perspective might be a little skewed.” She was very concerned for me and how unwieldy I must feel, how uncomfortable I must be in my swollen body. But I thought I looked fine, maybe better than I’d ever looked. I’d asked her to wait a month before visiting so she could be in town for the birth, but she said she could not push off her trip because she needed to schedule her surgery before the doctor’s schedule was full and she really wanted to get my feedback before she made her final decision. There were so many options, she said—facelift, brow lift, botox. “We could Skype,” I said but she shot that down quickly. She needed me to see her in person, the texture of her skin, the full 360 degrees.

She had not been to the city in a while, since before the divorce. Like a flower, you could see her drinking in the energy; you could see her bloom. Smohio, Ohio, she said, she loved everything about the city, the noise and the streets and the interesting little apartments.

“When you were a baby,” she said, “we lived in an apartment like this.” I knew this story. Living in that apartment as a hopeful young wife was a shining time for her. Dad was gone all day, a low-level administrator, not yet the boss. The days were just us, playing in the complex playground, walking to the mall next door. She loved to tell how there was a hole in the fence between the mall and the complex, two missing boards. The shortcut saved ten minutes walking, a lot in the winter. The geometry of it was tricky, but after many attempts, she figured out how to take me out and angle the stroller through just right.

On that trip, we were both waiting, preparing for a big change. In the mornings, I put on my one pair of dress pants with the stretchy panel and took the train to my boss’s office in midtown East, where I worked as an executive assistant. In the afternoons my mother and I wandered the city in the late September heat, shifting from one café to the next, where I would sit back with my hands on my belly, under which I could feel the baby moving, poking and pushing from inside of my body, and my mind was overtaken with the strangeness of this, I couldn’t really think about anything else, but my mother’s mind was somewhere else. When the waiters came to ask us if we wanted something to drink, she’d be pulling at her face, lifting the skin with her fingers, asking if this was too tight or not tight enough. I wanted to be able to tell her that she looked fine how she was, but the truth was, she looked so much better, younger and fresher, when she lifted up her face.

A week after the baby was born, she backed out of her facelift, paying a steep penalty for the cancellation. She spent her deposit on a peel and fillers instead. “I’d love to come see how you look,” I told her. “But I really can’t leave this baby.”

Now, in the bathroom mirror, I look at my own face, which would look better with a little makeup. I luxuriate in the ease of washing my hands and smoothing out my hair without a baby tucked under my arm. I feel so light and unencumbered I could fly straight up to the sky.

—

When I get back, the baby is screaming. I hear her before I see her. The sound of her cry is the sound of pure uncomprehending terror. She always sounds like this when she cries. Are these her authentic emotions, I wonder, or is she the girl who cries wolf all day long?

“Where were you?” says my mother, thrusting her into my arms.

People are looking at us. “Let’s go,” I say, as I bounce the baby up and down, bouncing her into oblivion. She quiets and falls asleep. I put her hat on her head and zip her into my coat, which is about three sizes too large for me, chosen because she and I will fit in it together.

On the street, I secure the baby to my body with one hand and push the empty stroller with the other. We trudge uphill and duck our heads against the blustery wind. Snowflakes swirl in the air.

“I think I’m finally ready,” my mother says, “to go back to work.” Now she is skinny and presentable; she has plans to expand her hypnotherapy business, to move from one-on-one sessions to larger seminars on stopping smoking and losing weight. She’s had to stop seeing most of her personal clients because they were getting too personal with her—they told her too much and made her worry at night, made her feel that she should help them in ways that went beyond the scope of hypnotherapy.

I also want to go back to work, but I am only an assistant. By the time we pay a babysitter, we don’t know if it makes any sense. I have the idea that my mother could do it. She could move to the city, watch the baby. In my mind, this is something she ought to do, should want to do, should be asking to do. But she hasn’t asked.

A couple blocks from my apartment, we are brought to a halt. Shouting, brakes screeching, a bicycle tipped over in the street, and a man in sleek spandex clothes standing by, helmet on this head, looking dazed. The driver gets out of the car, a young woman who looks terrified. Her blond hair is sleek and perfect. Her makeup is perfect. She is wearing razor-thin heels and short, wide pants that display her pale, delicate ankles. Her ankles must be freezing. Perhaps she is on her way to an interview? I feel certain that the interview was for the girl’s dream job and that she would have gotten it except that now she will not make the interview. Tears run down her face. “Did I actually hit you?” she says.

“You hit me,” says the man.

We cannot look away. We stay until the police arrive. I bounce to keep the baby asleep. The snow thickens and falls down on our heads and on the scene, obscuring the people and the street and the buildings, obscuring the man on the bicycle and the woman who ran into him, but none of this obscures what my mother and I have seen, by which I mean, the things we have seen in our minds, the more terrible things that could have happened.

—

We take the baby home. While I am feeding her, my mother dresses for dinner. She puts on a camel-colored dress and a big gold necklace. She looks wonderful. I’ve decided her face looks wonderful, too. The baby presses her soft skin into my skin. Very gently, she pets my shoulder with her chubby baby hand. When she’s done, I put her down on a blanket. I give my mother a hug, and her body feels strange to me, so thin, not at all like the mother I know, a woman who might eat half a cheesecake for dinner then go power-walking through her Ohio neighborhood, at any time of night, arms pumping away, a bullet in white tennis shoes, Walkman tuned to her motivational tape of the moment. She’d come back red-faced and full of ideas. The world is awakening, she might say. Get enlightened or get left behind.

My husband is supposed to be meeting us but he calls to say that he’s running late and we should go on ahead. I don’t have anything to wear and I mean that very literally. The only clothes that fit me are yoga pants, so I put on my nicest yoga pants, the ones that look the most like real pants. I tuck the baby into her stroller and by the time we’re out on the street she’s fallen asleep. My mother and I walk to dinner. We are shown to a table close to the door, presumably because we are saddled with a baby and might need to make a fast escape. Every time someone exits or leaves, we are hit with a blast of cold air, which makes this a terrible table for a baby.

We order a bottle of wine, something my mother and I have never done together. I can’t drink much because of the baby but I assume my husband will take most of my share. I am drinking wine with my mother, who looks like a glamour girl, and she is talking to me about men, how much she wants to meet a man. She orders a salad without any dressing. She takes one tiny sip of wine. I eat all the bread in the basket. I can’t stop drinking the wine or asking my mother questions. I am having a wonderful time. “What about the pilot?” I say. “I mean the flight attendant.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I don’t think so. He’s always traveling all over the place.”

“There’s no reason why you can’t travel,” I say. “Shouldn’t you travel? You’re so free. There’s no reason for you to stay in Ohio. You’re unencumbered. You could travel all the time.” I am getting excited. I keep drinking wine. “You could do your seminars like that,” I say. “You could just travel and give your seminars wherever you travel. Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful life? Maybe you should marry the pilot.”

My mother puts down her fork. She is taking a break though she hasn’t eaten anything. “Mark hasn’t called me,” she says. “He said that he would call me but he hasn’t. So I think that we should forget about that.”

“It’s only been a couple of hours,” I say. “Maybe he’ll call you tomorrow.”

“I was hoping that he would meet us for dinner. I was hoping to have a date.”

“Well, I don’t have a date either,” I say. “So I guess we can be each other’s date.” Really, the baby is my date, and I’m worried that my date might be waking up. I watch her like I can hypnotize her with my will to go back to sleep.

“I’m tired,” my mother says.

“Move here!” I say. “There are men everywhere! You’ll get a place near me. You can help with the baby.” As soon as I say this out loud, I realize how badly I want it. “Wouldn’t you like to spend time with the baby? You can help me, I can help you.” I knock over my glass of wine, I am so overwhelmed with the perfection of this idea. As I mop up the mess, I think how this is what I need. This is what she needs. For the first time in many years, my mother and I will fulfill each other’s needs.

My mother shakes her head. “I can’t move here. I don’t like it here. All the people. That accident. I’d be afraid to cross the street.”

“I thought you loved it here,” I say.

“I want to work on my business. I want to work on myself. There are so many years—I really don’t know what I was doing. I need to make up for lost time.”

“The baby’s here,” I say. We both look at the baby, who is starting to stir in her stroller. Her face wrinkles and un-wrinkles. I turn to my mother and I can see that she is unmoved.

Before I can reach her, the baby escalates to a full-on scream. As quick as I can, I lift her out of the stroller, but the crying doesn’t stop. Everyone is looking at us. I bounce and bounce. I look for a nook. The bathroom is tiny. There’s nowhere to go. The screaming gets louder. I am starting to panic. The waiter is approaching. I was silly to bring a baby to this place. In a second, I will get kicked out.

“I’m going outside,” I say to my mother, zipping myself and the baby into my jacket, pulling our hats onto our heads. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll be back as fast as I can.”

Outside, the snow is falling. It lands gently on our heads while the baby screams. “Don’t cry, baby,” I say. “Don’t cry.” I feel a little woozy, my cheeks flushed and warm from the wine. Despite the crying, I am glad to be outside, where the air is bracing and fresh, where the baby can scream to her heart’s content without disturbing anyone—anyone other than me. This is where we belong.

We walk to the end of the block and come back. The baby is starting to quiet but I can’t quite bring her inside. Through the window, I watch my mother, who is eating her salad, one leaf at a time. She does not touch the bread. She looks lonely to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe she wants to be lonely. Maybe being lonely is better than the alternatives.

After a couple minutes, my husband shows up with a camel scarf around his neck and ear clips on his ears, huffing from the cold. He is finally here. He is my most familiar person, but I feel like I haven’t seen him in weeks.

“Hey,” he says. “What are you doing out here?” He puts an arm around my shoulder, kisses the top of my head. The baby lets out a sigh and relaxes her body into my body. I relax my body into his body. The snow falls and falls on all of our heads.

“Go in there,” I say. “I’ll be in in a minute. Just sit with her at table, okay?”

“Okay,” says my husband. He opens the door. Warm air rushes out. Cold air rushes in. He greets my mother. He gives her a hug. He takes off his coat and sits in the chair across from her, the chair where I was sitting before. The snow is melting in his dark hair. I can make out the faint sheen of wet. He talks to her, she shows him something in her notebook, and I feel calm, the baby’s body against my body makes me calm, but underneath I am bereft. She starts to smile. He takes a sip of my wine. She takes a bite of her salad.

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The Crypt of Civilization

“It’s the size of a swimming pool,” I said, “and locked in stainless steel. Locked for six thousand years, in fact.” I was telling my son about the Crypt of Civilization, a time capsule in Atlanta. We were in the basement, sorting his toys into piles. An overdue project, because now he used electric razors; he studied for the driving test. I picked up a tiny plastic mare and her tinier plastic foal. I asked, “Do you want them, your Horse and Baby Joe?”

He shook his head. “Sounds ambitious,” he said, “that thing in Atlanta.” He was burning through the matchbox cars and the doll that looked like a businessman, the Lincoln Logs and the book in which the bear is forever snoring on. Discard, discard, discard.

“These are in there,” I said, holding up a log the size of a finger. “In the Crypt of Civilization.”

“Why save a bunch of sticks?” he said.

I kept talking. Other items in the crypt: recorded birdsong, aluminum foil, ashtrays, the form of a woman’s breast, a “Negro doll,” a piece of soap in the shape of a bull.

“Jesus,” he said, taking a pterosaur from my hands and tossing it with the discards. “Are you kidding me with that list?”

I shrugged. “It was 1940,” I said. “Not a great year for time capsules.” I didn’t say: As if there have been so many other, better years. Our hopes and our hubris, the human experiment laid bare, thanks to the Crypt of Civilization.

His class did a time capsule once, back when he was in the first grade. A moment in time, or, as the principal said, a moment in conversation. “What will we choose?” she’d asked. We were gathered in the gym on parents’ night, the thick heat of September rolling in through the propped-open door. “Will we choose something that says how far our civilization has come, like light bulbs, or will we choose things from today, from here in 2010?”

Later, his dad and I joked. Let’s put in some guns. A bottle of DEET. A white guy billionaire, maybe Jeff Bezos. But our coal hearts burned away when our son chose to add his stuffed lion. Other kids picked the yearbook, mechanical pencils, a photo of Phillip Stanning, the third grader who’d died of leukemia the year before. His parents gave the school their permission.

“Why tell me this now?” my son asked when I reminded him. He glanced at the clock, wanting to go upstairs, but I was thinking of stories unearthed. Of conversations between a dreamed-of future and the best and the worst of our past.

And what of the forgotten capsules? Conversations never had, conversations still in the earth, magnolia roots pushing against old tin boxes, letters in bulldozed attics, bottles left floating eternally at sea, through storms and under scorching skies. A metal ball orbiting the earth, the silence of that, its secrets tucked in like a heart.

“Mom,” he said. “Let’s be done. Let’s give it all away.” It was like this more and more with us. He looked forward, to the car he’d soon drive and the girls he’d soon kiss and to more distant visions—college, roommates, drugs, maybe—while I held his Horse, his Baby Joe and said, let’s build ourselves a capsule.

I scooped the discard pile my way. “I’m saving these,” I said, the Legos and the frog blanket and the board book with a dollop of oatmeal on it, long hardened into milky cement. The toys that came later—the stacking robots, the sticker sheets. He knew it would end this way, and I did too. An hour used or wasted, depending on who you asked.

“Time,” he said, standing up. “You always talk about time.”

As if this was so boring. As if time didn’t start and stop and shift to the left, didn’t corrode and make you whole. Didn’t change little boys who cried as they buried their lions into bigger boys who thought that Lincoln Logs were sticks, discard who they were for who they would become again and again and again.

And what of Phillip Stanning’s parents? Sometimes I wondered, across the hurried years, as the elementary school collected artifacts from one class and then another, moved from one principal to the next. As the Crypt of Civilization sat in its deluded wait. What did time become for them that April afternoon when they put their boy into the ground, when they tucked away that last thing with him, that final conversation, that favorite plushy bird?

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Evil Comes in Many Ways

Listen, don’t ever talk to strangers. If a stranger approaches you, run the other way and scream at the top of your lungs. Dios, I couldn’t live with myself if you were ever kidnapped. Sorry, Manuelito, no trick-or-treating this year. But Mom, we’ll have adults chaperoning and… I don’t care who’s doing what. You shouldn’t be outside at night, in the dark where it’s easier to kidnap someone. Look at poor Jimmy Ryce, the authorities still haven’t found him. He was walking home in broad daylight when he was taken. That could have been you. You’re both the same age. Oh, stop rolling your eyes at me. Forget about going to the movies—fasten yourself on the sofa and read those Goosebumps books you like so much. I don’t wanna read, Mom. I wanna go out and play hide-n-seek. You can’t. Armando, you’re his stepfather: tell Manuelito he can’t go to no sleepover. What am I gonna tell him that he doesn’t already know? There’s been talk of attempted kidnappings, the whole county is having a panic attack. Anyway, there’s no reason to go out. Oh, no, Dios. Armando, didn’t you hear? They found Jimmy; he was raped, his body mutilated with a bush hook, the parts buried inside planters, encased in cement. A Cuban balsero did it. I heard about it on La Cubanisima radio program. Do you know what this means, Armando? Yes, I do. Remember I’m a balsero, too. Now they’ll point a finger at us hardworking immigrants. They’ll tell us to go back from where we came. That we’re all rapists and murderers. That we don’t belong here. They’ve done it before. That man has left a scorch mark on us all. This never would have happened in Cuba, communism or no communism. Mom, that’ll never happen to me. But it can happen to you, Manuelito; you can be kidnapped and killed and buried inside planters. Mom, I need to go to school. I can homeschool you. What about my friends? You don’t need friends: they’re a distraction. Armando, tell him his friends are a distraction. Let the boy go out, willya? Ah! You’re no use. Manuelito, stay home and eat all the helado you want. Go on, read your little Goosebumps book—I’m never reading Goosebumps again! Jimmy Ryce never would have died if he was a character in a Goosebumps book. Stop screaming. Now, where is that boy hiding—? Oye, Armando! Where’s my son? I can’t find him. Call the police! He’s been kidnapped. Espera, wait, we don’t know that yet. Maybe he’s with un amigo? He’s dead, buried God knows where. Breathe, mija, breathe. Let’s look for him. Miralo, here he is, hiding under the kitchen cabinet. Manuelito, coño, why are you hiding? Stop crying. All I wanna do is play with my friends. Please, let me go! But there’s evil in every corner. Go out through the front door, and it smacks you like a strong gust of wind. Sit down on the sofa, stay home. You’re safe here, you’ll always be safe with me.

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The Bright Forest

My beloved spoke, and said unto me:

‘Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.’

—from “The Song of Songs,” attributed to King Solomon, circa 950 BCE

This planet may host a thousand worlds, or maybe millions: worlds within worlds, each nation a deck of cards, each citizen a new deal. But as certain as Gregory might be that many worlds must exist, he knew that he had claims in only two. He could live in the world which contained Sylvie, or he could live in the world which did not. He had a secret name for the world with Sylvie. He called it the Bright Forest.

Sometimes she could draw him into that world merely by speaking his name on the telephone. “Gregory?” she would begin uncertainly, and then pause. The uncertainty itself seemed to undo the normal world. It was like a fairy-call, and in that brief silence Gregory would be drawn, sometimes against his will, into the forest ruled by the misrule of Sylvie: a fairy queen, dark, with the serious expression of a girl, not of a woman. In the forest, she was at times openly a child, but no less the author of the tale. Much later, when he lived in the other world full time, the world without Sylvie, the Big World as he called it, he liked to say that he once knew someone who had thought about growing up but had thought better of it. People would smile when they heard this kind of thing, would joke about Peter Pan, but later, privately, he felt bad. Privately, he said, “What if innocence matters?” And he admitted to himself that when young with Sylvie he had looked up into windy sunlit birch trees and they had both seen the leaves flash in great numbers. And only when together! This was tantamount to a confession of faith by a fallen child, and it tore at him so much that sometimes long later he would pick up his phone and call her, and begin, uncertainly: “Sylvie…” then pause for the fairy-call in return and say, again like a child himself: “Oh Sylvie, today I turned forty-one.”

As a boy, Gregory was pale, with pale eyes that you could look straight through without interest. Drive into the suburbs and you might see dozens like him—boys with bikes and the pettiest temptations. He had gone to college as a studious lad without a clue on how to make friends or find a lover. He wrote to his parents: “Dear Mom and Dad: All is well. It looks like I have made peace with my Econ 12 T.A. and have been to the beach three times. I should be able to make your check last until February.” When it rained outside his dormitory, however, he opened his window for the wet smell. And sometimes, like a premonition, he would walk out into a night of crickets and feel a largeness in the sky—but nothing much more than that until he met Sylvie.

They met as freshmen in English Lit 221: The Romantics, where they were in the same section, and Sylvie was the only one who really cared about Byron, who she called an elitist pig. He just thought Byron a bore, though there was something to some of that stuff by Keats. She loved Keats and Shelley, too, but hardly bothered to turn in assignments. Sylvie was no “college girl,” but merely “in college” the way an animal wanders into a serious place, an office or a classroom, sniffs, and wanders out again. She told him seriously that professors murdered all poetry. That poets were in fact real people who really cared about what they were writing, and not in the least what stupid college students or professors said about it. That poets had actually seen the magic in the world and tried to communicate it, and that he should try reading their stuff under a tree without looking for the fucking underlying themes. “Seriously, Gregory. Tonight.” And she took him out at ten p.m. with his book and a flashlight and a jar of peanut butter in case they got hungry.

Of course they kissed, and her hands roamed, and they fell in love.

—

In love! There came a day when he walked into a city park in the full knowledge of being in love—looking at the other people in wonder, as if they must know. Of sharing secret amazements in the eyes of other young people, who must be, like himself, in love. If only he had known that it was all true, all along, all of it. Neither Gregory nor Sylvie were handsome people, but love does not require physical beauty, it only requires an alliance with beauty. So the two of them forgot about literature and sought beauty together everywhere—parks, houses, restaurants, bed.

In the face of this alliance with beauty, other things fell away. And so there came another amazing day when Gregory walked down the main street of the college town in full knowledge of Sylvie failing in all her classes. Not just one, but all. This information overwhelmed his previous knowledge of how the world operated. He saw how provisional and fraudulent the Big World was, and he ran into a store to buy champagne and potato chips to bring them back to her for a celebration of freedom. In the right light, this was a magnificent act, the act of a prince to his princess—and of course, after that, there was nothing for it but to fail along with her. He wrote to his parents, announcing his decision to drop out of college: “Dear Mom and Dad, I am finally taking responsibility for my own life. I think I’m about to discover a great truth, but I’m not sure what it is.”

He was, of course, about to discover the deepest extents of the Bright Forest, a world where anything might become beautiful. In the Bright Forest were green bottles and mossy curbsides, wet iron railings, bits of colored paper caught in the trees. A world like a fine photograph. He could see roads leading to dilapidated gas stations, sudden rocky overhangs, rows of maple, the gathering places of strangers. In the Bright Forest no one read newspapers on trains; they ran their fingers across the cold windowpanes, drawing circles. Later, at the station, people did not speak of schedules, they huddled against each other on benches and whispered. Or played guitars. Sometimes these same men and women would walk into the alleyways behind restaurants or lie naked together behind the hedges in a public park. In the Bright Forest, goals did not matter, only each step mattered, each momentary act—each meal of crackers and cheese, each raindrop in wintertime, each glance, each motion of the hand before the eyes. Sylvie and Gregory rented a shabby room together, got low-paying jobs, and before long the Bright Forest was everywhere: painted on the vinyl cushions of diner booths and tall against the blank stares of cars in parking lots. Each object in the natural world was but a marker for a potent force in the Bright Forest, each work along its paths a work of gods. In the distance, somewhere, was a lazy conductor beating a slow baton: Now you will sleep, will sleep, now you will make love. They would listen and lie together on long afternoons, would lose jobs for lying together on long afternoons.

Months passed effortlessly and grandly. Gregory let his head grow foggy and warm for whole weeks at a time. Sunlight would cross dusty rooms, grow weak with winter, strong with summer. He was for a long time a kind of prince, and in these, which he considered his finest hours, he was capable of the most royal actions: a quarter to a bum, a long night holding Sylvie when her father died. Prince Gregory could open his eyes to the near and the far and see them both as his dominion. Up close was Sylvie, her face, her hands, her frequent illnesses, her fears. In the distance were palaces: deeper glens, sea cliffs. Each palace they must find, or each palace would never be found by humankind, for there seemed to be no sight but their own. One afternoon in the year he was twenty would remain with Gregory for the rest of his life, a moment of greatness few people in this world can claim: the two of them standing on a small, grassy hill in a public park. A breeze was blowing, and hand in hand, the whole earth was telescoped into the power of Sylvie and Gregory, young and in love and owning it, just owning it all. Looking out, Gregory felt benevolence toward the scene, felt benevolence and generosity of spirit, as would any great man.

—

Over the course of four years, however, Sylvie and Gregory changed from eighteen to twenty, and then to twenty-two. Despite the best efforts of the forest, Sylvie discovered that Gregory retained ambitions. He found that she could sometimes look strong and serious. One night he brought a lamp up close to her face and declared that she had become a woman.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” he said.

She had no secrets from him, of course, and they began to talk about children. Carelessly, but they talked. “Imagine me having a baby,” Sylvie would say, squatting and pretending to pull a baby from her womb. “It would just come out, like this.” She did not know his secret term for their relationship, the “Bright Forest,” but she knew that theirs would be the first baby of some amazing world. This baby would walk with them hand in hand among its trees. They would found a dynasty born in the poverty of the Bright Forest. A dynasty!

Nevertheless, talk of a child triggered an ancient male fear which lay dormant but deep inside Gregory. Time, he saw, was hotting up. Conversations such as the following began to occur:

Gregory (condescendingly): “I don’t understand how you could have lost your fucking keys again. Look, I keep mine on this nail by the door. They’re always there and I can always find them.”

Sylvie (in tears): “What does it matter, Gregory? What does it fucking matter?”

Though such scenes became common, a greater threat arose. For the Bright Forest had a determined enemy, and his name was “Morning.” All was well when they slept in and kept the shades drawn, but sometimes Gregory would awake early with a curious restlessness, and, leaving Sylvie in the humid bedroom, he would walk out into the Morning. At Morning he heard the brass of trucks and streetcars, the cries of work and doing, could smell the clean hard smell of dew evaporating from the Big World, see mailmen. Eventually, Morning became a kind of religion with him. “Sylvie just doesn’t understand this,” he told himself, observing the early people and secretly smiling at their purpose. “These people understand something she just does not understand at all.” And when he returned to find Sylvie still asleep, the bedclothes warm to the touch and the shades peeking pinpricks of sunlight, when he touched the damp shine of sleep on her forehead and smelled the smell of long untidy human habitation, he began to be repelled.

Frightened, he’d close the door and go into the kitchen to make coffee. Once, he even called his parents for advice.

—

Sylvie began to sense a change in Gregory, and it became an uncomfortable joke between them that he was never home when she awoke. “I want to wake up together,” she would say. “We can open our eyes at the very same instant and then just lie there for a while before going to work or whatever.” And often, after his new routine of newspaper and coffee, Gregory would return to the bedroom, and, consciously steeling himself against—what, he didn’t know—he would crawl back into bed, and awaken her with much charm and grace. But this effort became deception and acting.

Gregory began to ask: was the Bright Forest merely a stepping stone to another, even finer world? And once that question had been asked, Morning was no longer enough. The idea of a baby born in the Bright Forest became more and more a threat. The Big World seemed more and more a release.

One day, Gregory got a real job downtown, to which he went at the appointed hours and worked not just for cash, but advancement. Such joy he took in arriving at a cold office in a gray a.m. would be hard to describe, but there he’d be, beaming inwardly to himself as he wrote things in files and passed messages to people in well-chosen clothing. At lunchtime, he would walk into the hustle of the city with a serious smile, and he would rejoice in the wind that tunneled through the office buildings and set the pant legs of busy men to flapping. The wind! Puzzling movements! Men themselves! The Big World held less beauty than the Bright Forest, but he found it strangely satisfying. He began to look collegiate again, tall and thin, with round glasses and a preppie vest. In the office he became liked, for he had a way of fixing his eyes on a person with an innocent concentration which brought him much good will.

His parents rejoiced that he had finally made a job last more than a few months. Hey, maybe he’d go back to school.

When Gregory told Sylvie that he enjoyed “this cycle of coming and going each day, being away from you and then with you again,” she at first believed him. She was too naive, perhaps, to realize what was going on. After all, what could really threaten the beauty of the Bright Forest? When he came home each day, she would throw herself around his neck and try to drag him into bed, but he would demur, would say he was tired, and again she would believe him. She didn’t realize that he had brought the Big World in with him, and that she, in her old sweater and sneakers, and with all that undisguised love in her eyes, looked merely out of place. Little by little, Gregory grew impatient with “her” cheap restaurants and “her” back roads, and he began to be repelled by sex. Seriously: a certain American Puritanism rose up in him against a life of pleasure. Worse, he now saw not a determined “poetry-in-real-life,” but a kind of desperate quality to all his days with Sylvie, an excess of beauty which might well appear ugly to the outsider. To people, for example, from his office.

At night, lying awake by Sylvie’s side, keeping a precious inch between himself and her flesh, Gregory would actually wonder how he could have given himself to this woman who was like none of the women he knew in his other, Big World of men and ideas. She, for example, could not keep facts straight and ask the right questions when taking a message over the phone. Just now, she was, for heaven’s sake, working in an organic food collective. She had no shine of rapid plans in her eyes, she wore no masculine jackets, and touched no colored shadows to her eyes.

“You should throw out that shirt,” he’d say. “It’s falling apart.”

“You look like a college boy in that jacket,” she would reply, as a joke. “Do they laugh at you at work?”

But he did not smile.

Late at night, he could hear the wind curl around the edges of the apartment building like a kind of warning, and sometimes, rising noiselessly, he would walk out onto the balcony and feel a kind of tremendous and lonely power in the darkness. At such times, even though it was not Morning, he would let a strength come into his limbs which thrilled him, which reminded him that he was young and might do anything. For a short time, at least, young.

—

In such a manner, little by little, Gregory became utterly alone from Sylvie, and entirely left the Bright Forest for the Big World. This should be no surprise: a new world is all we ever ask, and for the second time in his life, counting the moment he quit college, he felt mighty and free.

The final separation came in the worst way, when Sylvie was out of town, visiting her mother. Indeed, a whole month passed without a visit to the Bright Forest. Under the circumstances, far too long for it to survive.

During that month, Gregory relaxed visibly and worked late hours. So little did he think about Sylvie that he imagined that she did not think of him either. When he finally wrote his letter, on actual paper with a pen, he was sure it would come as no real surprise: “Dearest Sylvie, I’m sorry to write you a letter, but it must be done in a letter, if it is to be done at all. If you would find your own true strength, I know that you must leave me for a time. I am holding you back every moment we are together. We once said that the present should never destroy the beauty of the past, and in that spirit, I say that it has all been so beautiful that I am brought only to joy in looking back. You know what you have taught me, and I only hope the world can teach you what I cannot as time goes by. Write to me. Gregory.”

Lying face down on her childhood bed, Sylvie could only think of that word “strength.” Strength? What did strength have to fucking do with it? Either you stick with someone or you don’t. The letter had come at a dark moment with her mother, when she was hoping for a word from Gregory to cheer her, and now she thought the world had come to an end. Who was this jerk masquerading as Gregory, who had signed such a letter? A letter so full of ugliness and distrust? She reviewed the few weeks before their parting and could not remember having met this other Gregory, though looking back, she could see the signs that he had been growing inside her true Gregory.

“Now I am alone,” she thought, correctly.

This other Gregory grew a moustache, moved halfway across the country, enrolled at a new university—and after a few months he was no longer a child in the Bright Forest, but an adult in the Big World. City streets began to lose their shine and glimmer. He completed a tax return. He graduated. He obtained a job in a sales statistics firm. He fixed his own lunch to bring to work, and he began looking at advertisements for cameras and stereo systems and folding couches. In time he forgot the smell of women, or rather the women around him were so clean that he could not smell them through their blouses and sinless colognes.

About a third of the way into the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, there’s a curious moment when the chorus pauses for the orchestra to play a theme like a little brass band—a brief, bouncy military march, revving up for another grand entrance. Gregory whistled that little tune to himself almost every Morning. If he thought back to his time with Sylvie, he would say things like this to himself:

“Is it only the first moments of any new enterprise that set the whole image and beauty for what is to come? Surely everything that happened in that first moment beneath the oak when Sylvie’s hands roamed created everything that occurred in the next four years.”

Again and again he recalled specific moments of joy in the Bright Forest, but always he heard himself describing his former love to his new friends in disparaging terms: “Those were awful days after I left school, just floundering around. There was this girl who flunked out and took me with her. She, like, never grew up.”

But Gregory found no new woman in the Big World. And sure enough, six years further on, when he was nearing thirty, he began to dream again of making love to Sylvie. The dream of her would arise against his will around him in the night like a close and familiar room. He began to telephone her in Phoenix or Boulder or wherever she had moved that month and found himself talking to her in the small, childlike voice of his previous love.

“Sylvie?”

Sylvie was at first hesitant and kept her distance over the phone. Gregory took this as a sign of strength, and in his mind, judging by the new tone of her voice, his heart began to dress her in sleek, adult working jackets and straight slacks; he pictured her wearing makeup and staring him directly in the eye. Then she began to call, too. “Gregory,” would come the call. Each time, after they spoke, he would walk out into the city with new eyes and look briefly down graffiti-laden alleyways and into the beautiful shadows of the trees, revisiting the Bright Forest. But safely.

—

At last, one long holiday weekend, Gregory boarded a plane and met Sylvie in her latest town. Over the course of those six years, she had known many men and many jobs. Gregory had become the poet who was her first love, and her best, but who had abandoned her in some vague, artistic confusion. She lost her anger and told herself they had had to part in order to grow up. She could now speak in a more direct manner, dress in well-kept skirts (though not sleek adult jackets), own a car, make plans in advance, offend people less often, and generally pass as a citizen of the Big World.

When Gregory arrived, therefore, he was at first perfectly enchanted. He felt his fondest wish had come true. Sylvie had gained all the strength he had spoken of in his heartless letter! They went out to dinner without even holding hands, and Gregory was magnificent with charming talk and generous public behavior. He had learned how to smoke cigarettes, and he displayed this new talent with bravado, blowing smoke into a warm summer night. Sylvie, in her turn, acted witty, and she looked at him with the indulgence of a former lover, now grown mature, gently hinting at the secrets they had in the past, and laughing indulgently at the right moments.

Like in a movie made by the Big World.

No one in the restaurant looked at them oddly or suspected them to be refugees from another world altogether. And back at her apartment, they went about the business of getting ready for bed with coy efficiency. When the lights went out, Gregory crawled into Sylvie’s bed with confidence, eager to make love like men do to women in the Big World.

On the second day, however, Sylvie didn’t bother to comb her hair as carefully. Gregory overslept.

On the third day, spent idly at a beach, they didn’t walk as they’d both intended, with pants rolled and shoes held discreetly, but instead sprawled in the sand, making a mess with sandwich wrappers. Sylvie forgot to mention the plans she had for Gregory to meet her new friends—annoying and confusing him.

And by the end of the fourth day, when he awoke dreamy and lost, and looked deeply into the waxy magnolia leaves that rattled outside Sylvie’s window, he lost sight of Morning. He saw only that the Bright Forest had sprung up lush and fantastic from the ground all around them, once again. All day they slept and woke, slept and woke, missing the appointment to meet her friends. It wasn’t their fault, Gregory thought. When they got together, everything just went to hell.

As anyone will tell you, much is changed in one’s life merely by having a regular job. And so, even though he delayed his return flight until late into the night, Gregory did eventually drag himself to the airport.

For a time, as they sat together waiting for his flight to depart, it’s true that everyone else looked like a stranger.

Only after their final kiss, and when he found himself alone on the airplane, did Gregory begin to think about how to organize the next day. He checked his messages. His calendar. A few minutes later, he felt the vast cool relief of flying into the Big World forever.

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Overhang

I slipped and nearly twisted my ankle getting out of bed and trying to look out the window—as if it made a difference what the weather was. The day would be wasted at work, where I would mostly sit on the edge of the toilet, zooming in to towns in Greenland and Mozambique and the Russian Far East on my phone. My boss sat in a glass-enclosed office and scrolled Reddit all day, and it was clear from the way he talked to me that he didn’t know my name. I had lost my job as a sommelier and ended up here. I used to joke that I would rather be a day laborer than one of the petty tyrants I had spent my life tiptoeing around; that way, at least, I could keep to myself. Now my wish was granted.

I didn’t really know what my job duties were, although I was able to intuit that breaking down tomato boxes, wrapping them with twine, and setting them in the lot behind the building for pickup fell to me. Around six everyone left for the day, and I would work alone in the big empty facility until my shift ended at ten. The vaulted ceilings and troweled floor magnified every tap of my feet like snare hits. I dithered, playing on my phone; now and then I broke down a box and leaned it against the wall with the others, finishing by evening’s end however many were going to get done in my dithering style. The boss probably assumed I was sweeping and mopping. What did I care?—they paid me hardly enough to live.

Improved weather lured me outside—I spent the last couple of hours of my shifts in the lot behind the facility. I dragged out however many boxes I might realistically take care of. One night I flipped one on its back and tore off its flaps. With a razor blade I’d found on a windowsill, I cut two windows and a door in the front. My shadow reached into the bath of kudzu behind the barbed-wire fence.

I tore apart several more boxes and taped them together into some sort of hut, big enough for, say, a few cats to lounge around in.

Over time, I built the structures more and more elaborately, adding lookouts and flourishes, always thinking of symmetry. I cut out crenellations. I drew out entrance halls. I realized I needed this, enjoyed this little something. One night I made what you might call a castle, with four lookouts and a full-on gatehouse. I assembled a drawbridge that didn’t quite work, and then it was already five past ten. I would have to start the whole thing over the next day. I didn’t know where the boxes actually disappeared to—some kind of processing facility, I assumed.

On Memorial Day I was one of two employees scheduled. A professional cleaning crew was brought in. Nobody told me how I should interact, so I avoided them. I hauled every box I could find outside and built a room big enough for two people to have coffee in. I brought in two folding chairs and sat and put my feet up. I wrote “Hotel Pomodoro” over the entrance with a Sharpie. I liked to think I was daring them, whoever they were, to take it away. The next day my little cafe was gone, the asphalt clean.

I was supposed to have begun getting ready for work by now. The day was bright—I stood on my balcony and came alive in the sun. I was taking the day off: I wasn’t going to show up.

—

I walked to the corner store for cigarettes. An orange tabby sat at attention beside the door, pretending not to see me. “What is this, Buckingham Palace?” I said, never having felt more unselfconscious about dishing out tepid one-liners.

I bought my pack, saluted the cashier, stripped off the plastic, and strolled out into the sunshine. The skyline soared in the foreground; it looked as if the buildings were receiving medals, the tallest in the middle taking gold. They seemed to smile at me. The possibilities of today were almost overwhelming. I could walk all the way downtown. Maybe take in a movie. Or I could buy a novel and gobble up the whole thing in the park.

I decided I would take myself out for lunch downtown at the famous place I knew only by sight where the ramen was of the highest caliber.

I had no desire to call in and invent some excuse—I didn’t owe them a thing.

Was I quitting? Was that what I was doing?

At the bus stop a man I’d never seen before was dancing joyfully, barefoot, hair swinging. He leaned out from under the overhang and held out cupped hands, still bouncing. I handed him a dollar, we dapped, and the shop cat skittered out from behind the bench and scampered up the street as if our knuckles touching had launched him.

The cat stopped at the next corner and glanced back, waiting for me.

We let a car pass and crossed the street together. I started running to see if he would follow along. He did. We jogged past the shady schoolyard; a group of kindergarteners heaved a red ball toward the heavens and squealed.

The next intersection marked with an X the “downtown” of the neighborhood, a cluster of markets and restaurants with funny names: Victory Cigarettes, Zen Tool & Hardware, and, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Fruit.

Maybe I would buy myself something nice. Once a week I almost spent my entire savings on a giant television. If I were going to die on my feet, I might as well enjoy myself.

It was just now one o’clock, my in-time. If I snuck into the facility at two, when management had their daily meeting, maybe no one would see me come in late, and I could keep my paycheck after all.

The cat, who had gone ahead while I stopped to think, looked back at me expectantly. I caught up with him.

We reached the local ramen shop, the last shop on the last strip of this section of town. I had never eaten here. I assumed it was inferior to the fancy place, which I couldn’t imagine improving upon.

I looked at the menu, even though I knew it wouldn’t do. I wanted the real deal; I wanted something to look forward to.

The cat’s eyes blazed: he was fixated on something ahead, his heart thumping through his fur. He was staring into what I called the Zone, the fenced-off moonscape of wild grass and rubble between the inferior ramen shop and actual downtown. The road we stood on bisected the rocky terrain, rising up slightly before us and vanishing down. I knew it eventually led to the overpass I considered to be the border with actual downtown, only two blocks from the ramen mecca.

At the precipice of the Zone, the wind picked up. The cat paused, his body scrunched, the formerly linear stripes down his back now scrambled. He squinted nervously. I bent down to pet him goodbye and he shied away. I tried again, and he ran and hid behind a car.

The brightness of the chalky mass and the openness of the sky were paralyzing. I forged into the headwind, shifting my gaze to the sidewalk. The glaringly white concrete stung my eyes: there was nowhere to look.

I couldn’t walk straight; I slipped off the curb and veered into the road.

I was going to get hit by a car.

I stumbled back, blindly found the fence, grabbed on. I covered my face with my other arm, slid to the ground, and curled myself into a ball.

My eyes stayed shut for some time. I watched brain TV, avoiding myself. Maybe a few minutes passed, and I then heard the gentle crunch of slowing tires, and then an engine fan. I peeked through my knees—a taxi had stopped across the street. The window, opaque with reflective glare, came down, gradually revealing a woman’s impassive face, squinting at me.

In the car I asked if she could take me to the ramen place I’d just passed, the less exciting place. Taking the bus home from downtown didn’t sound pleasant, nor did I want to shell out for cab fare from there, which would approach the cost of lunch.

She asked if I meant the restaurant fifty feet behind us; I nodded. She searched my face.

—

The door chimed as it shut behind me. Someone—a waiter—emerged from a secret door in the wall and through the opening revealed the kitchen: immense steel cauldrons of bubbling broth, white-coated cooks. A woman stood at a steel table and portioned dry noodles into plastic bags, twisted them closed, and set them aside, staring vacantly ahead. The door closed and the scene ended.

I asked the waiter if I could sit at the bar. He led me through drawn curtains to an empty room—where was the bar? He set a menu on a table in the far corner, near the kitchen.

Although I already knew what I wanted, I picked up the menu and pretended to read him my order, envisioning the creamy, six-minute egg, the concentrated, nourishing broth, and the heap of soft yellow noodles from the other, better restaurant.

He nodded and took the menu. I waited.

Finally he came through the curtain holding my bowl, set it down, and left without saying anything. The ramen swayed—pork belly, seaweed, pickled mushrooms. This was not what I’d ordered.

The waiter burst through the curtains holding a jar of candies. I lifted my chin and writhed to get his attention.

He stomped his foot, acknowledging the mistake, set the candies on the table next to mine, and carried my bowl away.

I noticed my shoulders weren’t relaxed and dropped them. It’s only food.

A few minutes later an old man wearing chef’s whites limped into the room, holding a platter heaped with scallions and bean sprouts, clearly meant for a large party that was not there. He looked lost. Sweat streamed down his face.

The confusion on his face intensified when he saw me, as if he were just now realizing the restaurant was open.

He remained in his frightened stance, knees bent, five feet away, clutching the plate, staring past me. He seemed to be looking at my ear lobe. Then he glanced back toward the kitchen, maybe for guidance. I felt the urge to say something to him—I opened my mouth—and then the curtains flew back and the server rushed in, wove around the man as if he were a tree, and set before me something resembling what I’d ordered.

The broth was lukewarm and under-seasoned. The bewildered cook now held the heap of garnishes close to his knees, his arms tiring. He watched me eat.

He shuffled over and set it next to the candies on the table beside mine and returned to the kitchen.

—

The mizzling rain would have been refreshing on a certain kind of day. Not that it bothered me—it simply coated me, like a plant. My stomach growled; I had eaten three bites of ramen.

I walked in the general direction of home. Maybe it wasn’t too late to call in. Although now I would have to explain why I hadn’t contacted them earlier, in addition to lying about my absence. Lies on lies. I burst out laughing, which almost developed into weeping. I slowed to a halt, and stood, just stood there, water droplets quivering on my chin before leaping off like skydivers. At least that was how I imagined they appeared. A black SUV whooshed by, looking important.

On the bench at the bus stop sat the man to whom I had given a dollar, and sitting to his right was the cat, in loaf-of-bread position. A matching loaf—it was even the same color—of sandwich bread rested on the man’s lap. To his left were open jars of peanut butter and jelly.

He set one piece atop the loaf of bread, which he used as a table. Then he dunked his finger in the peanut butter and smeared it on the slice, and with deft, certain strokes he did the same with the jelly. He popped out another slice, slapped it on top of the filling, handed his creation to me without looking up, and went on producing sandwiches, piling them up between his legs. Now and then he glanced up at me. Maybe he was waiting for me to start eating. The window of time in which I could have plausibly said I was saving it—saving it for the first trash can once I was out of view—had passed.

I sat beside the cat. He didn’t acknowledge me. He knew I was there and accepted my presence, squinting and smiling, the way cats do. He was completely dry and smelled like fabric softener.

“Found him in a cardboard box,” the man said. “Taking a nap.”

“What did the box look like?” I said.

“What did it look like?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“It looked like a box.”

He stood, lifted the pile of sandwiches, opened a polyester knapsack, placed them inside, cinched the drawstring, set the bag of sandwiches on the concrete, sat back down, wiped his hands on his pants, and looked off into the distance.

“Anything unusual about the box?”

He looked over at me, and then at my sandwich, as if he hadn’t heard, or maybe he had and didn’t intend to respond.

I took a small bite. No granules, no razor blades. I nodded with approval, arching my eyebrows to make sure he got the message. He snorted and shook his head wildly, as if I had insulted his family and thrown the sandwich into the street.

“Crazy over there,” he said, motioning with his head toward the Zone. “Stadium is going to change everything. If they ever build it. Gonna wipe everything out. Gonna wipe out the whole neighborhood.”

Another SUV cruised by, looking official, its black-mirror windows reflecting the three of us like mangled dough.

“There’s gonna be a casino, too,” he said. “A goddamn casino. Can you believe they approved it?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I caught myself starting to speak, emitting a truncated, guttural sound. “Ahp.”

He assessed me, first my sneakers, then my legs and shorts, working his way up to my face.

I had another bite of the sandwich. It was delicious. The jelly was exploding with strawberry sweetness. I tilted my head back and nestled it in the bend of the Plexiglas overhang. Hundreds of beads of water constellated above me, jiggling on their own, as if they were alive; every so often one broke away, streaked down the plastic, and disappeared. I got to thinking about the last restaurant I would ever work in; in the summer we served watermelon granita in crystal glasses, which either I or a runner would pass from a silver tray to guests waiting for tables. I was the sommelier.

And then I wasn’t.

“That’s why we like you—you stick up for yourself,” the manager, Jamie, had told me as I sat down to sign my termination notice.

At the time, I didn’t think it was the end of my career. The strange thing about being blackballed is nobody tells you—you gradually figure it out on your own, to the extent you can affirm it. Nothing was stopping me from trying to break back in, technically.

I remember standing in the parlor in the early evening before the rush, empty tray under my arm as I looked through floor-to-ceiling windows onto the sidewalk, watching the uneven stream of bodies, some hurrying by, some stalling; and then a woman stopped to let her dog pee on some impatiens fenced around a tree.

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Cartilage

One night, when I was in grade school, my parents hosted a party. Other families came, co-workers. There were drinks. A man in a yellow tie had a margarita and then another and another. He said his ex-wife was a tramp. He stumbled as he passed from the living room into the den, where we kids were playing, entered the room looking unsure of why he walked into it.

“A bitch,” he said. “Total bitch.”

That night, I swore to my mom I’d never drink. She laughed, asked me why. I said I hated that man, that there was no need to drink, that I was happy without it. I was seven or maybe eight. She said I’d understand when I was older. I lay in bed, unable to sleep, knowing I’d prove my mom wrong.

The first time I got drunk was at Vlad’s, the summer after my freshman year of high school. We bought a handle of vodka so cheap, we thought, that the homeless man we’d given a twenty to buy it had given us seventeen dollars change. We passed the bottle with a shot glass and a chaser of store-brand cola. Around my fourth shot, everything started spinning. It felt good, wholesome, the ritual. Later, trying to sleep on Vlad’s floor, head resting on my bunched-up hoodie, I thought about what I swore to my mom, her laughter, and I felt an unmooring. Who knew what I’d believe in ten years? Twenty? Who would I be?

I was friends with Vlad because he and I rode the city bus together after school. By that point, my mom and dad had divorced, and on days at my dad’s house I’d ride one bus out from the suburbs into the core of downtown Seattle, where I’d walk up Stewart to wait by a garbage can on the backside of the convention center for the number 18, which then took me to school, just a stone’s throw from my mom’s. Vlad and I took advantage of our afternoons downtown, hitting the market for donuts or piroshkies or hum bao, drinking dollar tallboys of Arizona Iced Tea from minimarts where homeless people moved around in parallel to our thin reality, buying hot dogs or imitation crab sold on Styrofoam trays wrapped in cellophane.

Vlad had a knack for finding free food. At GameWorks we strolled the arcade, swiping a chicken leg off an abandoned plate, a slice of pizza at the bar. In the shampoo-scented hallways of downtown hotels, we found room service carts with scraps of porterhouse and baked potato, or the browned edges of a salmon frittata, the last bits of flesh out of the carcass of a Dungeness crab. We’d walk to the ballpark and talk down a scalper, or head up to the Starbucks on the forty-fourth floor of the Columbia Center to take in the view. Eventually, we’d split. I’d catch the 511 out way north, the ride quiet, still with the sodden air of evening commuters.

Vlad dropped out before the end of the school year. It made me wish I could drive. I’d sit alone in the back of the number 18, my biology textbook open on my lap, my gaze elsewhere, following the sequence of teriyaki joints and coffee shops, rain puddling at the curb.

My senior year, I saw Vlad in the parking lot at Leilani Lanes. I heard he’d been stealing cars. I’d tried to avoid him, but he caught up to me, put his hand on my shoulder. He asked if I wanted to buy some greeting cards and produced from under his jacket a small binder of samples. He told me I could make a good buck in the greeting-card game and invited me over to see how it was done.

His house, his parents’ house, smelled like chicken and mildew. None of his family was home but his friend was there, a guy with a gentle, fragile smile that made me anxious. He was seated in the parlor, where they’d spread a table with patterned cardstock, scissors, bottles of glue. Vlad asked if I was hungry and retrieved a roast chicken from the fridge, submerged in its own congealed juice. We ate it cold, with our hands, our fingers glistening.

We smoked a joint in the woods. His friend talked about how it easy it was to crib a Toyota. I got the sense he was trying to impress me. Vlad asked if I wanted to steal a car with them.

“Nah,” I said, and wondered why I hadn’t just said no.

We wandered the neighborhood in the wash of streetlight, going nowhere in particular. I kept smelling my hand, thinking about if my mom would smell the weed.

When I’d come home the morning after getting drunk for the first time, I’d been worried she would smell alcohol on my breath. I could feel booze in my mouth and lungs, in my pores, in my sweat. I stood in the entryway telling her we mostly played Xbox.

“Are you okay?” she said. I felt like I’d been emptied out and then filled with vapor. But from her tone and expression I knew that she knew what I’d done and also that she didn’t mind. It was like I’d crashed through some invisible barrier from one reality into another more like hers. She had known my whole life this feeling that felt so new, this hollowness and also the night’s strange spinning joy.

My hand didn’t smell like weed, but it did smell like chicken cartilage. Those days I thought a lot about the smell of food because I was working part-time washing dishes at a burger joint. I was terrible at it. Each day I’d come home soaked, my shirt thick with grease, ketchup, tartar.

“You going to college?” Vlad asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where?” his friend said.

“California,” I said. “Got a scholarship.”

Vlad said, “What are you gonna study?”

I’d been telling people business with a minor in art history but that was a lie. My mom had a fantasy of my future where I ran a restaurant and painted on the side, but all I knew was the certainty of a looming void stretching out before me. I still felt like a child, no direction, no idea what was next. And here was Vlad. Whatever next was, he was already living it.

We turned a corner and another, began to run out of small talk. I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw Vlad, but I didn’t not know it either. There was a damp gust, and I zipped my baggy raincoat shut. It was cold but not too cold, wet but not really raining.

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Professor Wyckhuis

Professor Wyckhuis would stand at the front of the classroom and lecture, his gaunt face tilted to the podium, his bare scalp growing red with fervor. He’d occasionally whirl toward the board behind him and scribble out etymologies, the chalk popping and splintering in his hand.

After class I’d join him for coffee in the Union. He would smoke cigarettes and touch his stout mustache and gently answer my questions about the Platonists and the Church Fathers, or describe his own scholarly projects: translations of commentaries by obscure saints and monks and mystics.

I once confessed to him that I was given to daydreaming, to making stories, and he, in a typically tender gesture, proposed that I might think of it as prayer and submit gratefully to it. We were walking beneath the trees of the quad, and he explained that the imagination might be exercised to understand our fears, and delight in the works of God, and grieve for our sins.

“Then,” he said, “if our devotion is deepened, and our minds not scattered, we may be called to the contemplative life.” He bowed his head and briefly closed his eyes to recite the words of—he later told me—a French parish priest, speaking so softly that I had to lean toward him. “The interior life is like a sea of love, in which the soul is plunged, and is drowned in love.” And then he opened his eyes and looked at me. “Just as a mother holds her child’s face in her hands to cover it with kisses, so does God hold the devout man.”

The story was that he’d left the priesthood in order to marry, his eyes still wetting with emotion whenever he’d speak of his wife, an elementary school teacher from Missouri, who’d passed from this earth twenty years before.

And there was also a competing and more dramatic story, that his wife had been a French girl, whom he’d impregnated when she was still at the lycée. It was then that he’d left the Church and married, and it was shortly afterwards that she and the baby died, the new bride hemorrhaging during childbirth, the infant’s neck bound with the umbilical cord.

If true, did he blame himself for the deaths of the schoolteacher or the French girl and the innocent child for whom he’d given up God, and whom God, in a show of spite and bile, cast to dust?

A reckless undergraduate was said to have mentioned the rumors to him, and he was reported to have smiled and said, “Charming,” and then, touching the student’s sleeve, “It is of course always easier to love the dead than the living.”

He once admitted to me that he’d stopped on the way home from campus the night before to buy a copy of Playboy. “I was angry,” he said, nodding his head. “I was very angry with God.” He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray upon the cafeteria table. “So then,” he said, his jaw thrust forward, and he shook his fist in the air.

Once, late at night, Greta and I were leaving a party at a house just off campus, and we saw him walking slowly along the dim sidewalk across the street, in the direction of his own house, two or three blocks away. Twice he stumbled, the second time falling to his knees.

“Oh, Joe,” Greta said, and we started toward him, but one of the hosts of the party, a graduate student, who was standing on the lawn and talking to some girls, said, “I’ll get him,” and trotted across the street, helped him up, and then, his arm around the old professor’s shoulder, escorted him home.

There was a small memorial service for Professor Wyckhuis in January of my senior year. His body had already been flown to Antwerp, where a lone surviving brother was to bury him. As Greta and I stood in the dim chapel near campus, I felt thin and frightened, as if I’d been scooped out.

“Joe?” I could hear Greta’s whisper at my shoulder, feel her hand on my arm.

Later, outside in the glare of the winter sun, she told me that I’d begun to whine, a sound so slight and high pitched that she at first become aware of it only at the breaking of her own breath.

When he heard I was engaged, Professor Wyckhuis told me not to enter into marriage easily. He said that only those who’ve never been married or are destined for divorce think that they’ll not tolerate woundings or pain. I could smell tobacco on his sweater as he sat near me, clenching his hands. “It is like faith,” he said. “Some do not understand the necessary agony of the relationship with God, and so their faith . . . ,” and he suddenly splayed his fingers, like an object scattering.

His brother had directed that his personal property be given away or destroyed. And so in rounds—faculty colleagues, graduate students, and then undergraduates—we strolled through his house—polite shoppers at an abandoned flea market—bending to examine books, peering into dark closets, smoky with old sweaters, glancing at the chipped china in the kitchen, looking for something to take with us.

Everyone stepped softly past the bathroom. Devil’s madness.

The walls in the living room and bedroom were yellowed and bare, the dresser and table tops white with dust. I stood before his narrow bed and picked up from the pillow his glasses, the gold spindly frames, the lenses smudged, the nose pads mossy with oil and skin.

And then my face began to ache, as if I’d been struck, and I left his house without taking anything.

During the time that I knew him, Professor Wyckhuis battled insomnia. We rarely spoke about it, but I’d sometimes notice a weary edginess as we had coffee, as he answered my questions, sometimes struggling to recall a name or find a word.

“Have you seen a doctor?” I would ask.

“Yes, yes,“ he would say, nodding, and he’d shrug. “But it is the cigarettes, I think.” Or he’d simply smile and recall the words of some medieval monk. “Suffering is short pain and long joy,” he’d say.

Once, during the fall of my senior year, he stopped me on the quad and gave me a copy of his latest book, a translation of The Cloud of Unknowing. He offered it to me and then bowed. “A gift,” he said.

On the title page he had written, in his small, cramped hand, “To Joseph, Thank you for your spiritual help in the past. I wish you the best always: Deus providebit.”

When Greta became pregnant, she and I would walk the small Kansas town to which we’d moved, out to a graveyard on its north edge, five flat acres in a pocket of mulberry trees. It was there that we decided upon the name Hannah. We’d been taken with the tall and graceful headstone of a woman named Hannah Jane Flax, who was born in 1859 and died in 1947, and who was surrounded by family members, some—a husband, two children, and a grandchild—preceding her there, all now lying peacefully beneath blizzards and droughts, removed from the welter of the world. Greta saw her in those terms—a life lived deeply and then the serene and slow re-absorption into the earth. I tried to reckon the anger and the grief of those left living, that which had been loosed over the years on these few acres, the weight of accumulated mourning, still, surely, in the air, the damp of it on our skin.

I labor at forgiveness, thinking of Professor Wyckhuis’s instruction, his quoting of Francis of Paola, that the recollection of injury adds to our anger and nurtures our sin. “It is,” he said, touching his breast, “a rusty arrow and poison for the soul.”

He once told me that Qoheleth, delivering one of most brutally honest books in the Bible, revealed that traditional wisdom has failed, that we can’t know God, that we lack control, and that life is short and death certain. “However,” he said, crouching, bending close to the surface of the cafeteria table, his fingers poised as if to pluck from it a crumb of bread, “joy can still come to us in small portions.” And he looked up at me and smiled. “We need to be attentive.”

The story was that Professor Wyckhuis’s landlady found him dead in his bathtub, three days after Christmas. In the wastebasket were, supposedly, empty bottles of lorazepam and Tylenol and a spent blister pack of Sudafed. On the bath mat was a half-full three liter bottle of Rosso di Montalcino. His wine glass wavered on the bottom of the tub, between his legs, beneath the skin of cold water.

The story was that at the beginning of his last final exam in December, he wrote upon the board, Faith is the agent of things un-hoped for, as the thief proved. And the students laughed, and he winked and wished them luck, and left the room, and the building, a graduate student arriving to proctor and pick up papers. And no one on campus ever saw him again.

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Category: Fiction

Ink

Evolution Kit

To the Elk

Freebirds

The Crypt of Civilization

Evil Comes in Many Ways

The Bright Forest

Overhang

Cartilage

Professor Wyckhuis

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