Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

First Person

Airplane

Rich People

My Favorite Dentist

Midgets Often Marry Each Other

Wizened

I: OTHER PEOPLE

II: ONE PERSON

III: ANOTHER PERSON (MYSELF)

A Woman with a Gardener

The Way She Loved Cats

Who Buried the Baby

Some Machines

CLOCK

PHONE

HEATING PAD

SUPERMARKET CHECKOUT MACHINE

REFRIGERATOR

MOTORCYCLE

GYM

RUBE GOLDBERG

PROJECTOR

AIR CONDITIONER

AIRPLANE

SOME MATH

CYBORGS, OR UNIVERSE AS MACHINE

YOGURT MAKER

PRINTING PRESS

VIBRATOR

TAXI

AMPLIFIER

MACHINE

STILL LIFE

MACHINES

MY MACHINE

MACHINE

BODIES AND PARTS

Baby in a Body Cast

The Entire Predicament

Incognito

Mice

Simpler Components

I: BLOOD AND GUTS

II: A REPRIMAND FOR AFFECTION

III: LIFE IN A BOX

IV: OTHER PEOPLE’S OBSESSIONS

V: THE EVERYONE OF WHOM WE SPEAK

VI: A GOOD DAY

Acknowledgements

Copyright Page

For Melissa Malouf writer, teacher, friend for life

Introduction

Lucy Corin is a fearless writer.

I came across her work for the first time while I was locked inside the stuffiest room on the University of California, Davis, campus, sitting in an uncomfortable chair, in front of four boxes filled with more than two hundred applications for a fiction position. And then all of a sudden I wasn’t there anymore: I was in a dentist’s chair; I was turning the soil in a garden; I was backed up against a Pottery Barn couch, making out with a girl with too much eyeliner.

In “My Favorite Dentist,” as in all of Corin’s fiction, it is not only the images that won’t let us go but also the words with which they are rendered, as if Corin has access to some Dr. Seuss-like On Beyond Zebra alphabet and is therefore capable of descriptors that are at once strange and strangely accurate, übervivid. Once readers have seen the world through Corin’s eyes, seeing straight will never seem like seeing straight again. We have become implicated in the process, brought to wonder with a mounting panic why we have never chosen a favorite dentist or seen the world through the eyes of a baby in a body cast. Corin has the absurdist’s knack for reversing the figure and the ground, and her stories shake us up, but almost kindly. Neither relentless nor insistent, they are playful, creepy, earnest, hopeful, and terrifying. That’s their true brilliance: how many things these stories can be at once.

The Entire Predicament is a dazzlingly successful experiment in first-person narration, an investigation of the apparent conflict between Corin’s love of the traditional (character-driven, forward-moving, action-centered dramas) and the experimental (language- and idea-centered works that challenge conventional modes of storytelling). The result is a book that locates the storytelling outside of the conflict, in a place of witnessing the world in its wild diversity and complexity and interacting with it via language. Corin uses the first person to create character, but she is also interested in how the first person can work as a conduit for what she calls, in “Mice,” “the shape of everything.” That is, her characters form the conceptual “white space” she creates, as defamiliarizing perspectives on the objective world, minutely rendered physiological reactions, and aphoristic pronouncements meet one another in a given monologue. As the housewife-narrator in the title story affirms (while floating upside down, suspended by ropes above her houseful of things), “There is simply no end to the suspense when one becomes one’s own psychic landscape.”

Corin’s fiction is interested in apocalypse, in how characters act “normally” in the most extreme situations and “extremely” with almost no provocation at all, until the notions of “normal” and “extreme” are not so much obliterated as given unlimited range. She takes ordinary spaces and makes us see how strange they are, ordinary machines (again, she makes us wonder if there are any ordinary machines) and makes them seem diabolical.

In the story “Airplane,” for example, the narrator observes the severely constricted world of a plane’s interior in acute detail. She panics, and her panic becomes prescient, as if it causes the ensuing plane crash instead of the other way around.This reversal allows Corin to write toward what passes in her fiction as a “big” lyrical ending, and yet she wisely leaves the crash itself off the page. The approach is representative of Corin’s entire fictional project: the way she interweaves the conventional with the fabulist, refusing to spin off entirely into the unrecognizable (on the level of sentence and on the level of story) but completely avoiding the predictable. Instead, she deftly volleys between satisfaction and surprise.

The congenial strangeness of these stories is completely beguiling: their depiction of natural history as a kind of contraption, their commitment to the idea that absurdity is a serious thing. Though aspects of her work are reminiscent of a number of admired twentieth-century writers—Donald Barthelme, Patricia Eakins, Russell Edson, Amy Hempel, Robert Coover, Carson McCullers, and, sometimes, Gertrude Stein—Corin’s voice and vision are highly original. Even when it is floating in a world disjunct and bobbing, inclusive of war and giraffes, her signature voice has a declaration of independence about it. The collection ends with an affirmation of the drive behind the first person: “I know that if I continue to speak, some recognition of difficulty will materialize, as if difficulty is produced from the interaction of my voice with the air it encounters.”

Corin’s writing is daring, original, stylistically and psychically courageous, and worthy of critical attention. There were some terrific writers in that stack of applications, but once we had read it, the members of the hiring committee could not get “My Favorite Dentist” out of our heads. This fiction is up to something wonderful and very serious. I envy your discovering it here, for the very first time.

—PAM HOUSTON

First Person

This is my day in the sun and I’ve got my arms in the air, my head tipped back like the hinged lid of a lighter. Contrary to popular belief, I am not alone. Everyone’s listening. All I see is the bulging gas above me and I’m shooting my mind at it. I’m as close to God as I’ll ever be. The people are tiny. They’re buckshot around my ankles. I could kneel and run my fingers through them.

Airplane

I get into my seat pretty early and look at my book here and there, but mostly feel edgy to see if I’ll luck out and keep my elbow room, the plane filling up and my heart beating in its cozy pocket with the suspense as seats fill but not next to me yet. A man hunches in the aisle, leaning his forehead on his fists on the overhead compartment, paunchy and affable. His kids are up there and he’s back here. I express my sorrow. Blowers blow in my face and when I reach to twist the little doohickeys the guy straightens up but that’s all and I surmise he’s supposed to cross me and sit but he doesn’t, shrugging a lot and not situating his stuff. A young guy, at this point, with a compact build like a wrestler (regular wrestler, not costume wrestler) comes over, with his shirt tucked in and a baseball cap. He takes off his cap as if this is a done deal and announces that he’s here to swap seats.

“My hero!” says the man, which makes me look at him sarcastically, squinty, like you’ve got to be kidding, because it’s, shall we say, odd to hear a big guy call a younger guy a hero when it’s not like it’s a child on local news who told his mother about his brother flailing in the pool and this is the reporter explaining about small packages, and it’s not like this affable man is a princess in a tower with a cone on his head. He looks at me in a way that is distinctly pissed off.

Let me see if I can think of when that look occurs that he gave me: we are at a dinner party and I am his wife and maybe a week before the party we had a fight but I figure it’s in the past, or I’m hoping it’s in the past but I’m not sure, so I say something in context like, “Hal loves baking pans,” (supposing his name is Hal), which is also a reference to the fight but no one in the room would know that, or if they did know it was about the fight it would just be me affirming our togetherness anyway because everyone has fights, it’s a sign of a healthy relationship, so when I make the carefully innocuous remark it’s sort of me giving him the chance to publicly get over it without making an announcement, and this elicits the look from him that I’m talking about right now with the plane.

What I mean is it’s an intimate kind of anger he’s looking at me with, that I should know him, and know better, and I am not taking care of my end of things. That I am not pulling my weight in this community.

They slap shoulders symmetrically, big pudgy affable and tight squat hero, holding their carry-ons in their hands. They shift sideways and turnstile around each other, their bellies nuzzling, their arms making spokes of a ferris wheel in the air or whatever you call it, it being the exact space between everyone and the ceiling, the corridor between overhead compartments. These men are the gears of the plane. It’s as if the plane needs them to do what it is preparing to do. Like they say, We need everyone to take their seats. We need everyone to look at the lighted signs.We need everyone to pass their cups to the flight attendant, remember about the seat belts and masks, push the button when you need something.

Everyone is bits of their clothing or hair from where I sit. It’s where artists got the idea for collage, I think, sitting in a crowd with a slot of erratic visibility. There’s only so much that can happen on a plane. Kids kicking the seat, babies screaming or being about to scream. The mile-high club. Do you or don’t you have a comic pilot. Actually, now that I try to list the things on the airplane it seems clear that anything can happen, just like anywhere else, it just usually doesn’t, but this time I’m here to tell the tale. Not to jack anything up here, but every airplane story has got to be about crashing or I swear to God, why bother?

Stubby yet handsome younger guy slips in. Slipping in is never graceful on a plane, but I tuck my knees to my chest like we’re already going down and he squeegees by, pooching his butt over and across the middle seat with happy little comradery noises and then, with an expressive exhale of self-satisfaction that means I can ask him anything now, he plops into the window seat and is mine for the duration. He puts his cap back on and adjusts it. The cap says “Marines.” Of course he’s a Marine, clearly he is, if plainclothes, if a tad squat, and I knew it.

There are ways to ensure almost anyone will not talk to you. It’s easy, especially on planes, and it is part of what books are for. Someplace to put your eyes. Any contained space has a protocol that is soothing, the Spanish fans of its social dance. This is why it will be a certain kind of relief, if terrifying, when everyone in the world either speaks English or shuts up for good. I consider cementing my eyes to my book.Three times I read this phrase: “It is not so much a matter of humanism,” and then I move on to the next one. My Marine takes his baseball cap off again and holds it in his lap, rubs his head, which is clipped but not severely, and then folds it—the hat—and stuffs it in with the magazines behind the elastic so the bill sticks out. The fabric on this plane is blue on blue, light blue with check marks of darker blue that make a pattern like scales.

Things are settling into the thick hum that will coat everything for who knows how long, until I shower, usually.There’s the safety show, which I listen to as background music, humming along less than consciously. Then, as the engines gun, as their pitch swirls higher and into the ends of human aural perception, I lean to look up the aisle. The seats and the centermost slivers of people’s bodies replicate as if by drunken vision, a movie projected out of focus, the seats with their aisle arms and the arms of people bulging into view like shadows and receding along this most primitive diagram of three dimensions, the blue aisle slithering beneath the curtain to first class and disappearing, its imaginary head presumably plunked down in the cockpit, grinning, all fanged, out the front window like a kid leaning up between parents, pilot, copilot. One of them pats it on the head.

A few rows up from me an arm comes loose from its regimen and flicks a coin. I’m lucky to catch this. I think I am the only one. I see no other heads in the aisle. I think the person with the arm did it secretly.The person with the arm is wearing a white shirt that buttons at the cuff and it’s far enough away that I can’t tell if it’s a man arm or a woman arm and I have no clue what precise color the hand is so I also have no clue about anything like the race or the age of the arm. It’s a generic arm. It’s Everyarm. It tosses a coin into the aisle and I think about it for a moment and then it comes to me like a transmission: this person has also been looking at the aisle, but the person has not seen a blue dragon; the person has seen a blue river and has tossed a coin in, for luck.

The hero beside me is trying to get something out from between his teeth by sucking and using his tongue. He’s also using the seat between us for his jacket. I give my book another shot and it says,“Past belief because beyond knowing,” and I think about luck, and how if the coin works everyone on the plane will get the luck unless there’s such a thing as one survivor from a 737, and as if being a sole survivor could possibly count as luck. So I think for a second that Everyarm might actually be generous. It makes me feel I’ve been behaving crabbily and unfairly, which in my experience is rarely the same thing, so I decide to give the Marine a chance, for the sake of luck, and don’t they say lucky dragon anyway?

This is the line of thinking that gets me to stick my book in with the magazines, and I stick it in there demonstratively, giving the elastic a solid snap. “Well!” says the Marine with a nod of approval and the kind of smile that is a fake frown like “that’ll show ’em,” and I know I’m in for it; I know I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. I grew up watching movies about encountering soldiers on trains. They wore their green uniforms and caps and gold pins.They encountered girls who had eyes of wonder. I can see him waiting for my eyes of wonder to come out. I’m as pretty as he is squat and I’ll do, I’m sure, in this real-life version. Chugga-chugga goes the airplane, gushing upward, and I grasp my armrests, and the Marine in street clothing watches over me as I do. I think of another set of movies where the girl encounters the soldier in his green outfit at a carnival and they go on a ride on a roller coaster, how she screams with glee and, I believe, if I remember correctly, what he does is sit grimly, knowing all too well what real fear is all about, something he will never be able to put into words.

So here the suspense is beating in my shirt pocket all over again as I’m waiting for him to launch into the speech I realize I’m expecting because of a couple previous travel experiences where there was a current soldier and he 1) sidled up to someone by doing them an easy favor 2) told a story that put into the situation that he was a soldier and was either headed out or coming back, which 3) left the opening to be congratulated, which actually took the form of the two people exchanging loudly their coincidentally identical ideas about the war and the heroism of the soldier, as well as the sixth man back home 4) this happened once in a smoking room when a soldier offered a light to a guy and I quit not long after that, related or unrelated, 5) another time it was a woman with little kids and a lot of colorful luggage, and one of the little kids slipped, and the soldier lifted the kid up by the arm, and the mother said,“I can get that, but thank you,” and he said, “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen kids!” and it went on from there 6) and also a couple other occasions, one of which, I suspected, watching, was between the soldier and a person who was actually against the war but had normal hair, or was without whatever other sign might make the soldier think this wasn’t a good time to be helpful, so here’s this look I catch that I can’t tell by the soldier’s look whether or not he catches it, but the look comes from this deeply uncomfortable guy with normal hair who is looking, looking for a sign of something in the eyes of the soldier as he straightens himself out from having started to bend down to pick up the thing he dropped that the soldier got to first and is holding out for him, grinning, hovering, affable as a pudgy family man flying with kids 7) waiting—the Marine on this airplane this time—waiting, I predict, for the moment in the conversation, batted so far in my imagination like eyes bat, like Spanish fans aflutter, like a volley in badminton, airy and coy, when he can launch into the speech he has adopted from his commanders, as if from memory, but memorized with colloquialism as intact as euphemism, with moments of deviously composed acknowledgment of personal human frailty to make it all sound personal no matter who says it, 8) hoping—me, now—in a shameful way, that what will happen instead is this soldier will turn to me and say, “You know what? Fuck the Marines,” the way I’ve read so many of them feel but I have yet to encounter while traveling, and shock me into the wet dream of having been wrong.

Still, all he’s said so far is “Well.” I think about luck of the draw. I think about the other sides of coins. I think about probability and about economics. We’ve taken off, and are past the concerted gunning upward through cloud layers, but before the fully leveled off, and before the plinking to dark of the no unbuckling and getting out of your seats sign. I’m self-aware enough to know that this, what I am doing, is panicking, and it might be being accompanied by nausea or shortness of breath, and I might be having difficulty noticing which one because of the panic, but either way the remedy is the same, I realize, and start pawing through the blue seat pocket, looking for the little white air-sickness bag with its wire closure thing constructed, disconcertingly, like bags for coffee beans. But there is no little bag in the pouch because they’ve gone the way of peanuts, I’m guessing, or it got used in a previous flight and because of gas prices no one goes through to restock. I scramble around in the middle pocket, too, and find nothing but magazines and headphones that have lost their foam ear cushions.

Then my jaw drops because I realize, in my panic, I am giving the Marine exactly what he wants, which is a chance to help me out by, perhaps, looking in his own seat pocket or asking me what’s wrong, because something is terribly, terribly wrong, as anyone could tell by my panicking demeanor. I keep my eyes buried in the seat pocket as these ideas come into focus for me and the ideas—mostly because there are a number of them and they come methodically paced and in a row—serve to calm me enough that by the time I turn my head on my neck with skeptical deliberation, I am actually feeling fine. I do feel tense and expectant in my back teeth, but relaxed almost everywhere else, which I notice as I turn my head like that nice guy in the airport who dropped something, because I am bracing myself to get a look at my Marine’s face, and when I do, I see he’s got headphones on, and his eyes are closed, and he’s either asleep or listening carefully to extremely boring music.

I think about this.The almost-completely-relaxed feeling I continue to experience arrived, I realize, from suddenly having no idea what was going to happen. Let me try to think of something it’s like: I’m married again, this time to the Everyarm, and we’re having a dinner party and we’ve been fighting again so I’m waiting for the fight to bubble up in conversation. I’m poised for it all evening long, which I’m used to by now because this is what they mean by marriage is work. At this point, we’re in the living room, which looks great because I spent a lot of time arranging the living room, and people are lounging on multiple levels, one on the sofa with his legs stretched out, one, a woman in a peach-colored outfit, on the carpet, leaning sideways against the ottoman at the knees of another woman, this one in lavender (it’s spring and I brought in a lot of tulips), both eating pie à la mode from china plates, all these darlings arranged as if by their own will on the platforms I set there for them (I used to be a window dresser and this brings back the days). So far the evening has gone in waves, each course, each tableau, as we move from the foyer to the patio, to the dining room, and so on, each another setting for the way I’m waiting for our argument to bubble, and then one of my invited guests, the one in lavender, stands up, and then the one in peach does, too—both of them do—they pull the barrettes from their hair, take their blazers off, take their shoes off, rip the sides of their skirts so they can waggle their knees freely, and, I don’t know, dance? Strip? Walk out? Start smacking people or juggling the fruit from my fruit bowl? Turn into butterflies? Are those the only options I can come up with? My point is that someone else takes over. Someone, preferably some nice girl in pastels with a sweet tooth, will start doing something, and I have no idea what, and I can stand there at ease in the doorway and not even wonder what Everyarm is doing behind me in the kitchen.

Plus, it makes something else beautiful happen, this moment when I give up, which is that in the process of leaning back into my seat to look at the Marine properly, I run my eyes along the job he did shaving, and along the lines that come from his eyes, and along the stray hairs of his eyebrows, which are quivering almost imperceptibly, and one or two are gray or at least look it for a shivery second, and only because of the care with which I am looking do I perceive this movement. It’s easy to see what has been produced. It’s a brief if bona fide affection, it’s the magic of silence and stillness, the pause that makes anything possible, the mystery of the interior lives of animals, the sense of character one gets from a blooming field, or a craggy beach, or a drenched log, or a tundra, or a lawn, or a curving range of mountains.

I just can’t take it for very long.

I lay one hand on my seat belt and with the other hand remove my book from the pocket. Then I fasten my eyes on the row of lighted signs, fasten more specifically on the one about getting up to move about the cabin. I tilt forward in my seat, draw one set of toes behind the other, poised, ready, and when the thing clicks off and emits a rounded-off version of “Bong!” I’ve ripped open my belt and am out of my seat so fast I think the vacuum I’ve left will surely wake him. Lucky I’m not there to see it. I sprint to the lavatory as if I’ve been expelled from a cannon, as if either this much speed, or something in the lavatory itself, will actually allow me out of the entire predicament.

I feel good about the lavatory because of how the door closes only if you latch it and if you latch the door, the message behind the glass changes colors and slides from vacant to occupied, words that mean a lot to me in this environment. Still, I experience a wave of anxiety, an echo of sorts, as I slide the latch from one place to the other. As a child, I spent the time in unfamiliar bathrooms imagining I lived there, that I snuck in and out a secret passageway and that the little room held everything I needed, that my bed folded down from a wall the way, it occurs to me now, the flight attendants’ seats pop out in some smaller aircraft designs. I’d picture where there’d be a burner for cooking or a refrigerated slot where I could push a button and the next thing to eat would slide out. What was attractive about this imagined way of life? Nothing wasted, everything merely sufficient, simply enough, no room left over, no confusion, a lot of silence. Elemental. But I was also a verbal child. I don’t know what childhood has to do with it anyway. People go there for easy answers.

I don’t throw up in the lavatory, and I don’t want to do any deep breathing in there, and as I said I’m calm enough now, so I look at myself in the mirror, and then in the stainless steel wall, and then try to picture myself back in the seat near my Marine, and I just want to cry or spit. I’m holding my book and I smack it down on the sink. It’s the size of a brick and slides around once as if oiled. It gets a little wet. I think maybe I’ll just put the lid down on the commode and sit there and read, so I try that, and the light is so bad the words fuzz apart, and I feel a little sick again. A wet book is depressing anyway, and then someone shakes the door.

Probably I shouldn’t worry because what will happen is I won’t talk with anybody until we touch down and I have to ask someone to help me get my bag.Talking is less and less the culture of airplanes, in any case, with the increasing electronics. Back in the heyday of airplanes, as I remember it, a much larger segment of the population got worked up to plop down next to a stranger; and as long as the stranger wasn’t too ugly, or too smelly, or couldn’t speak enough English, they’d spill it, just swap life stories while others swapped fluids in the lavatory, everyone ships in the night together. But when it comes down to it, I’m just not going to be able to talk to this Marine because the stakes are too high now, and when the stakes are this high there’s no way that if the guy opens his mouth and says anything he can possibly remain a whole human being. Once you fall into a camp, you’re gone, good as dead, and it’s been a long time since I saw anything that didn’t fall into a camp. I can do all kinds of gymnastic contortions around your head but if you believe what I know you believe I’m just going to spaz out by your ear, flicker like a firefly losing its bulb, and keel over like a doornail. This thought is what allows me to slide the latch back and get on with it.

Outside, a gathering has accumulated, and a flight attendant is already there shooing people back to their seats, and the speaker announcements are going on about one person at a time and, once again, where the several lavatories are located. I have to go back to back and then belly to belly with one and then more people, dragging my feet, still not knowing what I’ll do; maybe he’ll be sleeping and I can just sit there and get used to his face and what it’s like. But then I get to a row with a huge lady by the window and no one else, so on impulse I sit in the aisle seat and put my nose in my book as if that will make me invisible. I hear the lady making laughing breaths out of her nostrils until I look over. The flesh around her face is vibrating as if she’s angry, but she’s not, it’s just the plane I think, because the vibrating is somehow separate from the swallowed laughter. But who knows? She’s showing me how amused she is with her face and her eyebrows. Then she says, “My husband will be back, in case you’re wondering.” She has a superior voice that creeps me out anyway, so I get up, this time at least with a little hope that there’ll be another spot, and there is—I even pass up a window seat because there’s a person on the aisle and I don’t want to crawl over—so I sit in this next available aisle seat, thinking there can’t be too many people wandering around, it’s a big plane but the flight attendants seem on top of things, and this time the person by the window is a skinny man wearing a shriveled shirt and a fedora, and when I sit down he looks pissed but doesn’t say anything, although he does keep peering at me from under his brim until that creeps me out so much that I close my book and get up again, thinking this is turning into a picaresque minus actual adventure.

Now, with me standing in the aisle, and I’m the only one in the aisle at the moment that I can see, and I’m looking up the blue river at my near future, elbow after elbow, curved aspects of arm flesh, wisps of hair and clothing, now, in this moment, when I am about to push off, is when the plane starts shaking. It bobs and shakes and then everyone’s signs start plinking and the captain comes on and says about turbulence and air pockets. I stumble forward in the river and catch myself right by my seat, as if by chance, so I just take it, I just take my seat with the hero and sit in it like a spoiled brat, stick my book back behind its elastic band, adjust and readjust my seat belt and then stare at it, thinking of its shiny head like the head of a serpent that’s actually eating and spitting its tail out again in one suspended gulp. The plane rocks. The organs in my body stumble and float.The Marine is awake and stunned. His headphones wobble around his neck in a ring. I lean over for a peek into the aisle and a guy is tossing himself out of the lavatory, trying to hold his pants up and also drag himself along, seat by seat, as the plane bucks.

I sit back up and a flight attendant wheels by. Carts rattle, and people might be making noise, but somehow I don’t hear them.All I hear are things.The oxygen masks drop, dangle, and the plane is a sudden sea of jellyfish. I think of swimming laps with my eyes open, which I do; when I swim laps at home I keep my wary eyes on the blue lane stripe beneath me as it wiggles in the water. I think of how equidistant I remain from it when I swim, traveling as if at thirty thousand feet in the blue, the snake wiggling like an echo of my swimming body, vibrating and stretching down there, interminably headless and tailless. My book pops out of the seat pocket and slides down the aisle and under the curtain to first class. The Marine paws at his jacket in the seat between us. I take his hand. I just do. “Picture we’re on a roller coaster,” I tell him, and he sits back and nods, setting his face with determination.

Soon we are in a field of unidentified crops and smoking bits of organic and inorganic debris puff like campfires or small geysers as far as my eye can see. People are sitting around on suitcases like little islands while other people wander, clinging to their seat cushions, looking similar, different, and dazed by the sun, dotting the landscape but clearly in love with the moment, I can tell by the open looks on their faces, because now they know that the seat cushions really do detach, and they know that of all the things that could have happened, one being they died and one being they lived, one of them has already happened, allowing all of us who arrived to arrive in this other moment, when really, we have no idea what will happen next.

Rich People

I went to the beach with Jennifer, with her parents and their house. They’re rich. I said, “What’s that?” in the refrigerator, and she said pâté and took out a Coke I think it was and closed the door. Which got me curious, so I waited through three days of meals and snacks for the pâté to come out so I could eat some, and we ate lots of other things, a lot of fish, of course, and hamburgers with potato chips, and eggs, but then it was going to be my last day there and I’d hinted a couple times. We’d be eating something and I’d be sure to say, “Would pâté go with this?” But no pâté. So I snuck down to the kitchen to look at it in the night. On the way I walked very carefully, so that by the time I got down the hall and to the stairs I could kind of tell where the stairs were, and I leaned a lot on the banister in case any of the steps creaked, but either I did a good job or there weren’t any creaks. I got to the living room and edged myself along, touching one cushy chair and then the next, sliding one foot at a time ahead of me. In the kitchen, opening the refrigerator made the bottles in the door rattle. Light gushed onto the floor. I squatted and held the door open with my knee, and I took the pâté out. It was wrapped in cellophane on a little plate with blue flowers. It was the shape of a fat slice of bread and I tried to think of how to eat it.

I had to move to the counter and the refrigerator door shook closed. I turned on the light under the sink. I took out another small plate. I put the plate of pâté next to the plate. I took a butter knife and trimmed around it, keeping the shape, depositing the slivers of meat onto the other plate, which was white with small blue flowers, like the one from the refrigerator. I ate the slivers, there over the sink, my hands bright, the gray meat faintly, faintly pink in places. When I looked back at the pâté in the light that lit the clean sink I could not believe anyone could look at that piece of loaf and believe it. Jennifer, and her mom and dad, and her brother and his fiancée, and the fiancée’s parents, and a couple guys the two of them knew from college who also lived near them in Manhattan now, all of them sleeping upstairs except for one of the guys who was asleep in the living room on the sofa, which I didn’t know at the time but would know the next morning because he slept through breakfast, almost—all of them, they’d see a country mouse had nibbled at the pâté with a butter knife, all around.

With a thumping heart I pulled the sliding glass door open to the ocean, and the wave sounds bounded into the house. I ran to the ocean in the romantic night and threw the pâté as far as I could, using the plate to throw it into the dark. The moon was overhead, and the plate was over my head in my hand. Of course there was no splash and I could have tossed the pâté on bare sand for all I knew, but in my panic and shame it was all I’d thought to do.

It had been delicious. It had been more delicious than William Carlos Williams’s plum. Because it was yours but also because it was complicated.

I slipped the cellophane into the trash can, beneath other pieces of garbage. I went to bed in the room with Jennifer, with the twin twin beds and matching everything.

In the rush of people making breakfast I retrieved the two plates and the butter knife from my suitcase and slipped the plates into the sink with the dishes already accumulating. I put the butter knife at my place as I helped Jennifer set the table. “That’s dirty. Get another,” she said. The dishes slid around in the sink with their blue-flowered sisters and cousins. No one mentioned the pâté, which it seems had already disappeared into the history of all the other things the family might or might not have eaten.

My Favorite Dentist

You are my favorite dentist.You don’t look on my chart and ask me how my job is. You never duped me into listing my hobbies, not six months ago, and not six months before that. You never even tried.You say, “Look at this. Anything new?” and hand me a laminated list of diseases, symptoms, and reasons to be hospitalized. I’m reclining in the sprawling chair and you’re on your wheeled stool beside me. We can both see out the window, where you’ve placed a birdhouse. It’s fall. During my spring appointment I could see the birds fluttering around, framed. This year they were bluebirds. You’re such a grown-up, I think. You never lecture about floss. You say, and it’s a fact, “You should floss more.” Well put. We are all adults here, including your assistant, a pudgy, warm-looking woman with a soft voice.You are your own hygienist.

There are no Christian magazines in your waiting room. There are no faux-stencil borders on the wallpaper. Six months, cleaning to cleaning. Keeping tabs on my teeth, great leaps of time between. No small talk. I remove my glasses.

We’re all set up but then your assistant peeks back in and says, “You got a red Toyota? Next door called and you got your lights on.” I slip outside, half blind, in the drizzle, wearing my bib, and switch my lights off. It’s quick. Back in the chair I say, “Thanks. That was so nice of them.” And professional. A little while later in fact someone comes from next door to catch us up on the news. Police are coming closer to nabbing the sniper who’s been terrorizing the suburbs. It’s all so considerate. Even next door they know you listen to the classical station that doesn’t do news.

But except for dumb me and my lights, we get right to it. Your assistant joins us and sits in a chair in the corner, taking notes on a map of my mouth. You’re keeping an eye on a molar. Something else is at a certain number of millimeters. I appreciate your mask, and how even with it, the one time you cough you turn well away. I appreciate all the latex as well as the repeated raising, lowering, and tilting of the chair. How we cooperate with everything. How all I really have to do is spit.

It’s true. It hurts. But I find I can concentrate on the particular kind of pain. I relax into it. It thuds and scrapes. It’s a careful pain. I can feel bits of sand. I can hear a variety of noises. It’s sort of sexy, but like bad sex, the dull kind, which is not a bad thing when it’s not sex. It’s simply polite. After a while, when I spit, my blood is clumpy.

Your assistant comes over when I’m ready to polish. By the end, everyone’s fingers are in my mouth. But everyone acts like everything’s normal, so it is.

I’ve been thinking about forgettable time, like in an airport, or time loading up all the furniture and getting it into some other apartment. It’s intense while it’s happening, but once it’s over I forget it almost altogether. Still, some people, I have to remember, work in airports. I think about prostitutes, something I think about regularly. I’ve generally accepted that except for the aspects that dehumanize people I think I’d like it a lot, participating.

There’s something exquisite about everyone getting along. I think I’d like how people might come together and hold up two ends of an agreement.What a clean way to do something so variously messy. I like to think how if I went to a prostitute she would act like it was normal, and it would be for her. For her it would be forgettable time even though for me it would not. It’s true that I never think of you except when I’m with you, and I never remember my previous dentists except when I’m admiring my current dentist: you. I forget, but then I remember. For you it’s day in, day out. You live in it, with your sweet assistant and the sweet little birds out the window.

“I bet you miss your birds,” I say, after spitting one last time. “Now that it’s fall.” You say nothing, an excellent choice because it preserves the integrity of our distance. Instead, you move your head in a way that lets me know you’ve made a friendly expression under the mask. I love that apparently you’ve forgotten you’re wearing a mask. It makes it easy to imagine how fully human you must be. I wonder if you wonder why I think of the birds, because not only are my glasses off but my eyes are closed, as they have been since you first lowered my chair and turned on your light. Except for the moment I peeked and saw your mask move, I only imagine the window I know is in front of us. My teeth are so slick. My saliva moves easily between them. I can’t help it. I’m admiring the feeling of the inside of my mouth. I remember, back when I used to sleep with men, feeling an admiration for them when nothing went wrong and I was okay.This is what I should have done with the men, I think, is have them clean my teeth. I could have a little laugh and get back to my mouth, but the thought makes me feel an unexpected sense of loss, a thud of sorts, imagining years collapsing on my head. I feel, for a moment, like the princess’s pea under all those mattresses.

“Here’s another toothbrush,” says the assistant, and it arrives in my fist in its cardboard outfit.

“Hey. Floss,” you say, a last remark that feels like a gift: what care, what respect.

My dentist, I think. Fuck it. I like him. I think those exact words, watching your broad white back move down the hall and turn a corner. I hear a door open and shut. I picture you, alone with your desk and whatever you’ve hung on your walls.

My insurance covers everything but a dollar, which I pay in quarters over a smooth white countertop. Then I drive toward home through the drizzle, feeling my teeth. The sky is an unrumpled gray. Home is not far but it takes a long time with all the lights. Also, because of the sniper, a lot of people are trying to drive with their heads ducked.

In the car, my wipers jerk and bounce across the windshield. My belts make distant anguished cries when I turn. It’s a beautiful feeling, though.The noises my car makes add to the isolation I always feel driving around in traffic. Everyone driving around, obeying, struggling to obey. The weather is helping, too, the sky that could be near or a ways away, the drizzle that’s a mere step wetter than mist, just enough to actually drop. It’s all working together. The signs for the video stores, gas stations, idiotic food joints, all their garish colors and broad shapes, hard as their designers tried, as extremely bright as they wanted the buildings to be no matter what, orange and red roofs, greens that should only exist on wet baby plants—the weather’s muted them, and the whole tone of this day in my life in this world is muting them too. I feel completely alone, but I’m so clean that there’s no way I’d want anything near me. The way I wouldn’t eat a brownie—what an awful thought with a mouth like this—I also wouldn’t want anyone around.

By the time I get home, it’s still deeply gray, but no more actual precipitation. My neighbor Andrea is on her screened-in porch. We live in a neighborhood of ranch houses. Everyone has done something in an effort to get the poor things to bust out of their boxes. Decks, wings, bay windows, dynamic landscaping. The innocent low brick huts are a little overwhelmed by the attention. Inside the screened porch Andrea’s lined up her houseplants on a long fold-out table. She’s wearing a green apron and yellow-flowered gloves, and she’s plucking dead leaves with one hand and holding a pair of red-handled scissors in the other. Her hair is lush and shiny, with blondish highlights. She’s brassy. She’s a good-looking woman by a number of standards, including my own, but she has an obese ex-boyfriend who’s stalking her. I met him a few times, which is how I found out he’s obese, something she’s never seemed to think is important and I like to think is not.

What can I say? He’s not like you. I don’t like to think about him, but I do.

His name is Joey. I laughed when she told me about him, some of the things he said were so pitiful, but then I was around for a couple of incidents and it’s kind of scary, in part because I’m not sure if she really gets how scary the guy is. Like one time he was under her car with a flashlight. He said he was changing her oil the way he’d always done because otherwise her engine was going to freeze up on the road and he didn’t want her death on his hands. After he left, Andrea came running over to my house asking if I knew any mechanics who’d check it out just in case. Or another time I was reading on my porch, which is across the driveway from her porch, where they were having a fight. He called her a dyke and then said, “No offense” to me and I looked up from reading and said, “None taken.” When she came over later, I said, “With a guy like that, you really need to be careful.You need to watch it,” I remember saying. “If you’re scared, Andrea, I mean I’m not going to tell you not to be scared.You should be scared.” I said this frankly, flatly, a matter of fact. She walked around my kitchen with her fist to her forehead, clutching a clump of hair. I watched her as if from a distance and I noticed that I wasn’t scared. I tried to figure out if I was scared for her. I thought about him heaving around the porch, thud, thud, thud, shaking his fists in the air, his body moving around his bones, but I wasn’t scared.

Andrea reminds me of certain girls in high school—she has a kind of social confidence I remember some girls having that usually gets beaten out over time, but some of it’s left in her. She’s also obviously bright, and weird. I love that she kept some of the funny wallpaper in her house, and when I’m in her house I tend to run across things that surprise me, given that she’s in sales, that she drives up and down the highway with a truck full of samples, mugs and shirts and a three-ring binder detailing options for logos. I saw in her bookcase, for instance, the new translation of The Odyssey. Is she kidding? It’s next to her Major British Writers textbook from high school, which is next to a stack of home décor magazines, which is next to How to Make Friends and Influence People, which her boss gave her and she took as a compliment. But she also has a collection of one-foot rulers that she keeps in a vase. Rulers, as in with inches up one side and centimeters down the other. She has wooden ones, metal ones, and one that has holograms of dinosaurs on it. She has a red-painted fold-up yardstick with brass hinges. I like the idea of her measuring, and measuring carefully. I picture her stretched out on the floor of her empty house, measuring for incoming furniture. I like to picture her being quiet, easing along the floor, almost still. I like to picture her measured, because so often she is anything but. Still, I love seeing her, busy, busy, across the driveway, through the porch screen, our garages winking at each other from the edges of our yards.

Today, indeed, she looks a little frantic. I pause and lean with my back against my car. I know I’m making a wet patch on my shirt, but I’m trying to decide if I should go right in or if I should wave to her. I lick my teeth. I’m supposed to change clothes and go to work but, truly, can I even tell you how much I don’t want to go? You with your antiseptic office? Do you know that dread? Did you used to have it and then you put up the birdhouse? Got your great new assistant, fired the one with the stinky perm? Did that do the trick? I think you had the birdhouse up from the start. I think you anticipate and believe in cautious preventative measures, in living moderately so that whatever is going to happen will simply happen. Crossing bridges as you come to them. Burning nothing.

Andrea waves. Her hair is bright in the limp light. “Hey, can you come over? Hey, did you hear they want us to walk zigzag? You going in or you coming over? Decide or get down quick while you think, girl. I got my apron on but I don’t need to be cleaning up brains.” I’d almost forgotten the sniper entirely.

“There aren’t any sidewalks,” I say. “What are we supposed to zigzag on?”

“I walked zigzag from the Rite-Aid to my car, in and out. Are you coming? I’m getting a beer. No, wait, I’ll open wine.”

Wine I can imagine in my mouth.“Okay,” I say.“But white, okay?” I think, I’ll have a glass of wine and then I’ll go in to work. For all they know I stopped for lunch. I could very well be afraid of the sniper and not want to leave the house for all they know. In fact, at this point Andrea explains to me that the whole reason she’s home is her boss gave everyone the day off because he and his wife decided to keep their kids out of school and just, you know,“value them,” and he thought everyone should go home and do the same. So Andrea’s home freaking out with her plants, and she wants company. She opens the screen door for me and hugs me with her garden gloves on, still holding the scissors. She hugs me so her wrists are on my back, I guess because there might be potting soil on the gloves. But everything strikes me as clean on her porch, the cement floor, the shelving units. Even the potting soil. It’s the cleanest dirt possible. If you do compost right there’s a step in the process where you spread it on cookie sheets and bake it, to kill any bacteria. And besides, by this time I’m thinking about a sparkly fresh-tasting glass of wine to brighten a drizzly day.

Should I skip to the good part? Are you wondering behind your mask and its intricate filtering fibers? Are you looking at your own gloves, your skin dim under the powdered rubber? I’m wondering which clump of time is skimmable, what space is the space between things that count. Andrea says she wants distraction, she wants me to help her kill some time or all she’ll be able to think of is a bullet in her ear. She brings a bottle of wine onto the porch and we sit in wicker chairs facing the folding table, which now holds the line of plants in their terra-cotta pots and a spray-mister, along with her garden gloves, the wine, and our glasses when we set them down. She tells me a story about her father, who is currently sick in the hospital. The story is very funny, and also moving in almost underhanded bursts. I forget it immediately: I’m right there with it, feeling it, charmed by it, seeing and hearing her father through these new aspects of her, precise ways she uses her voice that I haven’t noticed before, little bits of information I plan to sock away—for instance, I think it becomes clear that she keeps peppermints in the glove compartment of her truck—but we move on and in a flutter in my brain a bit later I realize I’ve forgotten almost everything. I’m looking at the items assembled on the folding table. I’m thinking of your tools, the pokey ones and the scrapey ones, how homey they seemed, like silverware, stacked in their shiny compartmentalized tray. I’m listening. Also, I’m comparing her instruments to yours.

My wicker chair rocks, which is nice. Andrea’s resting her feet on an overturned bucket. She’s still wearing her apron. She slipped the wine key in the pocket along with the scissors and the cork. She says she’s going to think of something to do with all those corks. “Besides a cork board. I’ve seen one. They’re stupid.” After a while it starts raining again, this time really hard. “Do you think the sniper would go hunting in this much rain?” she asks. I’m starting to wonder if she’s actually frightened, or if she’s just playing with the idea of fear, the way I think I have been. I’ve had my moments, teasing the fear, but I haven’t believed myself. I remember when your neighbor came in with sniper news, how completely without interest you seemed to be. I was too, I guess. We were busy thinking about my teeth, I guess. I was. I thought you were thinking about my teeth, but suddenly I think your mind could have been anywhere at all. I have pretty good teeth, and I have pretty good hair, too. I regularly get compliments from hairdressers. They confess wanting very much to cut my hair but not wanting me to be without it, either. They say it’s both thick as in many strands per square inch of scalp and thick as in each strand has what you might call a hefty circumference. I realize I assumed you liked my teeth, were impressed with them in some way. But perhaps they simply bored you.

When the rain gets going hard enough that it’s blowing through the screens, Andrea and I move inside. We sit on the floral carpet in the living room and lean our backs against her white couch. I cross my ankles. She takes off her apron, folds it, and sets it next to her on the floor. She crosses her ankles, too. We put the bottle of wine between us. Our butts are on the small space of hardwood floor exposed between the carpet and the couch. At some point I take off my glasses, lean over her, and place them on her folded apron.We keep talking for a while and then we start making out, something I haven’t actually pictured happening before but suddenly realize I’ve been very interested in having occur. I think, vaguely, Oh, fuck, not my neighbor, that’ll be all kinds of mess . . . but I think it in a way that makes me feel happy because it comes with an image of the two of us tossing colored scarves from a ferris wheel. I also think, I wonder if she notices my teeth, because I didn’t mention you at all. Then, for quite some time I don’t think anything that I remember.

This is the good part. Making out. I have no idea how long it lasts.

It’s so beautiful. If I try hard to remember, I think it’s like sun coming out over snow, glowing, and stunningly, incongruously warm and clean.

Next, though, I remember the phone ringing and saying, “You want to get that?” and Andrea says,“Not really,” and looks at me—accusing—so I shrug. The machine does its thing, but it’s a hang up. “Joey,” she says, and takes the empty bottle, leaves the room, and every warm clean thing rolls over, revealing a stomach iced with soot, and every ferris wheel screeches to a halt, all scarves collapsing to the faraway ground.

Boy do I feel dumb. This is how dumb I feel: I feel more than dumb because the second Andrea leaves I am stunned by the sterility of the room without her and my ass is cold on the floor, and numb. I’d somehow thought I could separate this afternoon entirely from the rest of her life and mine, too. I imagine Joey in the bushes, peeking with his bulldog face and then, because he’s seen us, I see him drop back across the yard like a football player and I picture a brick coming though the window. Then I revise and picture Joey as the sniper. I might think somewhere in my mind that I’m getting carried away, but it’s so true the way I imagine it, like the sky has peeled back in a rush and revealed what hides behind it: there’s an awful distant sound, like something enormous breaking in one compact instant, and there’s a hole in the window with tiny spidering around it. But the way I imagine it the hole is followed by no more than a plink on the floor and a rolling sound, which I follow with my eyes. It’s as if making the hole through the window deflated the entire energy of the bullet, which it turns out is actually a pea-colored marble that rolls along the molding until it reaches a corner of the room, where it stops without even bouncing once. It makes a tiny thud, like someone shot dead, but far away.

I look around her living room. There are two tin lanterns and throw pillows with a batik print of zebras on them. I know exactly which store she got these from. I think of the whole suburban acreage from here to DC to Richmond and up into Maryland spidering out into who knows how many places. The whole paved-over, guardrail, speed-bump, exit-ramp landscape is shrouded in this in-between time.Why am I not frightened? Why am I thinking about you? Once this sniper is caught or shot, or they are, however many of them, this time will evaporate. It’ll snap back like elastic once the fat man’s belly is gone. It’ll be those weeks before they catch someone, or shoot someone in a wild chase, or whatever will happen happens. Why do I know it’ll end? Why am I so sure it won’t go on and on? What’s under your gloves and what’s under your mask? You’re looking in my mouth under such bright lights. You’re looking into my head but in your mind you’re thinking about your birds. They’re out the window, they’re in their house, they’re zooming through the air faster than anything I know how to imagine, they’re away, they’re hunting, gone for the winter; at least, either way, they’re gone.

Andrea comes back, this time with beer, with a whole six-pack. “What are you doing?” I ask.

She kneels before me on the rug. “Fuck Joey,” she says. She’s unbuttoning her shirt. It suddenly horrifies me that she’s wearing eyeliner.

“What are you trying to do?” I say.

“What do you think?” she says. She squints at me. She’s trying to see where I’m coming from. I think I hear the phone ringing again, but it’s not ringing. I think about how my tongue was recently inside her skull, and this she must see, she must see me thinking this, and she must be witnessing my repulsion, because she lets her hands drop to her sides. She sits back on her heels and lays her hands on her thighs, limp, with the palms up in a way that makes me think of lettuce leaves rocking on a countertop on their backs. Over her shoulder I can see out onto her porch. Even without my glasses her plants look lined up to be shot. When I look back at her face she’s looking down at her hands, watching them shake. “What do you want?” I say. “What do you want me to do?”

It hurts. In the break in time when we’re one-upping each other, hurt for hurt, I picture the prostitute like this: I picture her in a small room with a low mattress. She’s rigged a set of sheets like curtains around the bed and she’s lying on her side, half under the cheap covers. She’s looking at me and her face is maskless. I think I like her face. I lie near her on the bed. I can feel bits of sand. Then she puts her gloves on. She snaps them on her wrists, and I expect to see a puff of powder, poof, like magic, but there’s just the sound. She winks, which terrifies me, which she sees because she’s a professional. Like magic she has a scarf and she ties it behind her head so all I can see are her eyes. I know I should think harem, but I don’t; I think bandit, which is fine because it calms me. I am so relieved. She puts her fingers in my mouth. I concentrate. The glove is instantly slick, and I’m astounded that such a transformation can take place. I relax. I can hear a variety of noises. I begin to participate.

It could end here, with Andrea caught in the moment before china crumbles, covered in hairline cracks. She isn’t moving, but she’s collapsing, soundless. It could end here.We could both throw up our hands: I surrender, we say. You could throw up your hands, too, in the light, your face cupped in cotton, your hands encased in heat-conducting super-easy-to-feel-through rubber, wielding your shiny pointed scraping tool.You are my favorite dentist because you’re satisfied with my teeth.You are what I think I want to be. I could go home, my head bent low as I cross the driveway and duck into my house. Andrea and I could make up for making out. Cooperatively, we could shake on it and swap chrysanthemums.

Instead, I leave the room. I leave her on the floral carpet, go into her bathroom with its enormous orange butterflies, stand in front of her pedestal sink, and look in her mirror. I bare my teeth at myself for a second and then I open the medicine-cabinet door, as if I’m looking for something. A plastic container of allergy pills bounces into the sink. Inside the cabinet is an eight-pack of toothbrushes, seven heads visible through a cellophane window in the box. I close the cabinet door. There’s my head, in the mirror. Butterflies are spilling out of the frame all over the place. I go back to baring my teeth. Am I frightened? I almost growl. Why am I not frightened?

I’m thinking of you. I’m baring my skull. I’m trying to look inside. Way far up there is my brain.

You say, “Look at this. Anything new?”

I’m noticing all the chrome in the room. Her soap dish and her lotion dispenser are silver. The towel racks, the paper holder, the faucets in the sink and bathtub, too. I’m seeing your scrapers, your pokers, and your wheeled stool. I’m enumerating reasons to be hospitalized. I’m surrounding myself with orange butterflies, feeling wings surrounding my eyes and my ears. A shining bullet is easing through the air with speed, and clearly it’s moving from cleaning to cleaning. My teeth are so much yellower than they felt like they were, all day.They are so much more irregular, these misshapen nubs. My tongue is soft, and like my brain it wants to believe what it wants to believe. In dreams of death teeth crumble, or fall like soldiers, or they tumble into my mouth and down my tongue backward like a herd of miniature animals off a cliff. I can smell myself, and there’s an ancient tribal stink to my smell.

I picture the prostitute again. Her scarf hangs around her neck. I’m nowhere around. Who knows, maybe I went into her bathroom. I’ll tell you this, though: I can see her face, and the look on it makes me think of the glossy magazine that comes with my retirement plan. The magazine is called Participant. There’s always a glossy face on it. Every time it arrives in my mailbox I throw it into the garbage with a fury that astounds me. The fury comes, I realize—looking at this prostitute surrounded by curtains, looking at her face, which is far, far from glossy—from feeling dehumanized.This woman’s face is exhausted, fully human, and full of fear.

There is always terror. I know there is terror every day, and I know because sometimes I can actually feel it. In the small moments when I am actually able to look, I can see it in any face, a low rumble under every voice and any skin. In my office at work I sometimes feel so afraid that I spend hours cruising online. I look at people’s high school photos and I can see it. I look at mug shots of people and see it.Their faces, their heads. I can see it when I take the long walk to the water fountain and pass all these people at their desks.They’re generic, they’re encased, but I can see fear glowing through like a bulb from behind a wide white plate. I imagine I forget these times, that they contain themselves within the building where I work, within the hours I spend there, that they wad themselves into a pellet I could pocket, but it’s not true. Sometimes they reopen, they unfold, they bloom, and fill any space I’m in. Andrea is kneeling in the living room, and so far inside my mouth she’s in my mind. It’s where she’s moved since I left her in our standoff. Her face trembles.The distance between one moment and the next is shaking. I am forgetting nothing. You are my favorite dentist because I want to feel shiny and automatic. I’m not moving. I’m not moving. It won’t end.

Midgets Often Marry Each Other

Midgets often marry each other, like celebrities. Simpletons often marry each other. There were these simpletons who married each other, and they had a baby girl named Peanut who wasn’t simple at all. As a bright girl, by the time Peanut was four she was tricking her parents into leaving the house and then locking them out. They’d wander around the yard holding hands and Peanut would tear up the house like a lonely dog.

No-neck people tend to marry each other. There’s a birth defect, a missing gene or something, sometimes associated with mountain people, and it causes them to live without necks. Usually it’s the nonskinny mountain people; not the kind with rat eyes, pinched faces, and enormous Adam’s apples, but the bug-eyed ones who’ve moved to town and eat lots of potatoes, potato chips, and deep-fried potatoes from the grocer’s freezer. These are people whose bodies are sort of spheres and sort of cubes.You could fit a finger, maybe, between the shoulder and the jawbone, but that’s it, and good luck if it’s one of the especially fatter people with no neck. These people marry each other, and their kids have no necks either. They are called no-neck people, and sometimes you see a family of them walking around and it can make you feel like there’s something wrong with you for having so much neck.

Tennis people marry tennis people, but what else would they do? When you marry people, you have to meet them at school, at work.You have to meet them at church.You have to meet them at the bar, or you have to meet them at the park or the Alcoholics Anonymous.

Sometimes a celebrity marries an ugly celebrity, and there are other exceptions as well. Still, mostly people don’t want to have to carry a mirror around to look at themselves.

A child psychologist from the local university enrolled Peanut in a study. Peanut was really good at the test where you predict where pool balls will go. The one where you say whether the item is dead or alive, she had trouble with clay. She wasn’t sure. It sort of moved, and it sort of changed, but it sort of didn’t. She had trouble determining agency.

People who both like to cook shouldn’t marry each other. For example, the two of them like cooking, so they start cooking constantly. One gets into one country’s kind of cooking and takes pleasure placing special orders and pronouncing them correctly. The other calls pies: I do pies, she says. She builds a marble counter, and learns all about carpentry.They’re trying to be variations on a theme. Pie girl can’t win. Pies are in the other’s country along with lots of other dishes, and she feels like a minor cooker, doing pies. She quits cooking, nauseated, and takes up collecting exotic plants. Cooking is like the baby in the chalk circle, and they pull and pull, but when, finally, one gives up, it’s not for love, it’s for exotic plants. Then budgets are stretched, because they both need so many accessories, cooking, plants, cooking, plants, and it starts to feel like there’s an elastic cord between them. They’re forty-five degrees to the ground like plow horses, pulling in opposite directions. Sometimes they get exhausted and smack into each other, sometimes face-to-face but mostly rump first. Birds flying backward into windows.

When she grew into an old person, Peanut turned this over on her deathbed, in her mind, after having lived the life of a bright girl, but also particularly a bright girl with simpleton parents, if you can imagine that. She pictured her thinking, her turning, like the golf ball-size globule of mucus she’d recently produced, which was incandescent, white, and motable. It seemed alive, it was not alive, particles of it could be alive, and it meant death. One time she’d been sitting at a sidewalk café and saw a mother and child, holding hands, walking by. The mother had protruding from her forehead an egg-shaped lump. The child, too, had one bulging from his forehead, a slight variation on egg, his mottled like cauliflower. There are many possible explanations. Some things are given, and you don’t know how.

Wizened

I: OTHER PEOPLE

I begin with what I see plainly, before and around me. There is much to curtail. To one side, my neighbors are a family, extremely nuclear in a contemporary way. There’s a mother, a father, a girl, and a boy, both children from previous marriages, the girl blonde, the boy brunet, both juniors at the local private high school, both athletes (soccer). The kids, Jeff and Amie, own (that is, were given for Christmas) a basset hound named (by Jeff) Spliff, a word his parents pretend they don’t understand.

A good family: Mrs. Craven runs an antique store, and Mr. Craven is a corporate-theft deterrent specialist. Amie plays clarinet, and Jeff’s hair is longer than Amie’s. Spliff runs in small circles and bays like a donkey, true to his breed. When Mr. Craven goes to another town to deter theft, Mrs. Craven goes along. She says they are taking the opportunity for a romantic getaway. She says instead of missing each other, they are making applesauce and lemonade, so to speak.The kids say, “Yeah, mom, you just don’t want him screwing around.” Mom says, “That’s me, I smother,” and points at her cheek for a kiss.

I see it all through my sharp eyes, hear it all with my keen ears, and I’m mired by experience, dense with inaccessible wisdom. Mr. and Mrs. Craven pull out of the driveway, and soon a dozen private high school kids, along with a dozen of their friends who were kicked out in seventh grade, and a dozen of their friends from public school, and a dozen of their friends who dropped out last year . . . dozens and dozens of kids arrive. I am the one who waits until the two-foot water pipe is pulled from under the bed and passed around, and then I am the one who calls the police. I am the bitch from hell and what I need is a good fuck. I have nothing better to do, no business of my own to mind, and I don’t shave.You can smell my bitterness, it’s so old. When Mr. Craven does not have a business trip, I crouch in my car and wait for Amie and Jeff to sneak out their windows and hop into a van that waits up the block with its lights off.Then I follow the van to a neighboring development, and when the block is lined with cars and the house is filled with kids, I call the police on my cell phone, which I bought for this purpose and this purpose exclusively, since, regardless of the fact that I am a young maid, and not an old maid, this is the business I mind.

I wait until the police have come, dispersed the children, and vacated the premises.Then I wait for the kids to gather at the golf course because it is not raining, and once they have set up their keg in a thicket, I call the police again.They must think I’m having a good giggle, but I’m serious, in a dead sort of way, because I have come to this, and of all things, in this I believe. I know what happened to me. I became crotchety. En route to wisdom, I wizened. I terrorize with my morality. But I do take pleasure as well.

My neighbors to the other side are a homosexual couple about my age. They are graphic designers and work in a furnished garden shed in their backyard. In the morning, at eight o’clock, they walk out their front door with their briefcases, kiss like Europeans, and then one turns left and one turns right. Around the house they go, meet up at their shed, and shake hands. It’s such a good, old joke to them that they don’t have to laugh aloud for me to know how happy they are, how deep and ironic their ritual.When I go through my junk mail, I separate the good stuff, like “Herbal medicines enclosed” and “Check here for your free magazine.” I peel away my address and leave the fat envelopes in their mailbox. When their Dalmatian bitch Goody digs a hole in the Cravens’ yard, I fill it when no one is looking. I don’t want a spat raging across my yard. I don’t want the Cravens to have anything on the homosexuals.

Also, I experience compassion in my distanced way. Across the street lives a woman who is older than me, although no one knows it because I have adopted the role I have adopted. I wear appropriate thick stockings and waistless housecoats. Vivian’s husband left her a year ago, and so eager was he to travel around the world without her that he allowed her the house and makes the payments, and took with him only his credit cards, their daughter, their pet cockatoo, and, it is evident from my observations, his wife’s will to survive. The bird died in the baggage compartment on a plane to Israel, but the girl, who is eight and has yet to speak a word, flies in from places like Crete and Bangladesh for monthly visits, collecting exotic airline stickers on her suitcase. Various breeds of men hang around the house with Vivian, sometimes more than one at a time. They sit on her front porch in their boxer shorts. They play catch with the little girl in the dusk.

One at a time, each man’s immoral afflictions are revealed to me. One spent an afternoon in the yard aiming a gun (not registered) at Goody, Spliff, and the front door of the homosexuals’ house. One broke a bedroom window when he was trying to open it, then told Vivian it had always been that way. One slapped the little girl when she threw a ball and it hit his crotch. One refused to use a condom. One pocketed the change from Vivian’s bedside table. It’s the sneaks I can’t stand. There are too many people in the world for me to allow for sneaks. If there weren’t so many people, the sneaks wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t get tangled up. The sneaks could sneak all by themselves. One of Vivian’s men, though, a man with a willowy body and big, marble eyes, shot up heroin on my side of Vivian’s hedges, under a street lamp, at seven thirty in the evening. I left him alone. I admired his gumption. The rest: I find out where they work and let their bosses know. I find out where they live and tell their wives. This, if not all things, is possible if you do your research and commit the time.

This is my sphere of influence. I have drawn a circle around the homes, making a fine subset for my purposes. In its center, I have drawn a circle around myself. I cover myself with clothes. Somewhere, I am inside the circles, inside my clothes, seeing with none but the relevant eye, the eye that sees within my worldview. Irrelevant eyes are elsewhere, living in forms of sight I’ve rejected. Outside are the larger circles of the housing development, the earth, the orbits of other planets, and who-knows-what. If God appeared, He would be a circle.

When Spliff sneaks across my yard to have sex with Goody, I throw stones at him until he goes home, baying in circles. When Vivian’s mute daughter falls from her bicycle, I set her on the porch, ring the bell, and run away, the bike’s wheels still spinning. When Jeff and Amie ding the car, I spray paint a circle around it, so it can’t be missed. When the homosexuals begin to romance with the lights on, I close my shades so that they may have privacy, although, when I’ve had my nightcap already, I do allow myself to peek. Sometimes I spend the day making things for my house. I cut the bodice off an old sun-dress and sew curtains for the kitchen. I scrub the living room floor with sandpaper and paint it blue.

I am twenty-seven and I have been crotchety for a good three years. I moved here when I felt it coming on, a fear that began with other people’s genitals, which are taking over the world. The fear filled me; a city of fear grew inside me, unarticulated, a mess of fear with outdated maps. I was, in fact, living in a city when I articulated the fear for the first time. It was all the people, trying to organize themselves into buildings but spilling into the streets, stepping all over one another, erecting and imploding, and worst of all, when they felt their humanity at its height, humanity in the form of lust or sentiment, extracting their sex organs and producing more of themselves.

When it comes to genitals and humanity, I give the homosexuals a break, because I think they have promise. But I do not give my parents a break, and I do not give myself a break, either. My parents have moved from this, my childhood home, to an identical house in another development, another cul-de-sac, another state. I think they had nothing to do without a mortgage. Three years I’ve come to this and remained. My parents send me money because I hate them so much. I tried—I have—to believe that it’s time for something new to happen to me, some new idea. But I have already heard all the ideas. They’re towered in the city of my fear. And I swear, I never get over it, the prospect of cleaner space, wider spheres, consequent mass widenings of individual existences. It gets me gaga, floats my boats, recharges my engines when I imagine it, so I work on my scheme for reduction, which comes down, plainly, to people. It’s not the genitals as such that I mind, so much as the minds behind them, and what is done. A gun is not really a gun unless it’s shot, you know.

Jonathan Swift thought of this, more or less, when he proposed feeding the destitute with sick and starving children. People thought he was serious, but then smarter people caught up with his irony. Smarter people still, like me, know exactly what was going on. Swift knew he was right, and he knew the futility created by the condition of the biologic human heart: the heart says, “You can’t kill people,” and the mind says, “It sure would be good for those alive.” I mean, it was a good idea.

So I work on my scheme, which involves the identification of pressure points on fault lines, the poisoning of potato chips, the introduction of ravenous, rabid animals to a metropolis or two, a grand network of anonymous assassins. I’m working it all out, rubbing my hands together with private glee, putting my self-doubt and grandiosity alternately into perspective, trying to construct a way to allow the remaining population a pure mourning, one that cannot blame, one that results, finally, in cleansing.This one, this idea, after many small ones, fills my mind. I cannot conceive of a better one, and I’m currently convinced it simply can’t be done. The weaseling I commit each day with the Cravens, with Vivian’s men, the way I resort to the law of all things to clean my neighborhood—none would be necessary if I could finish the scheme. Not an easy job, but it keeps me going, and for now it keeps my great shakes in place.

But truly, I confess I am not stupid enough to believe I can do a thing to help people on such a scale, especially as I am no good at networking and hold no fascist claim to fame. So I keep the scheme to the sphere of my mind, because I haven’t got it done, and because despite my best intentions, I am a good person, and can therefore be no more than an itch on a person’s butt, a salve on a pimple, a bane to my own existence. I’m done examining why. It’s so old hat, and it smells up a room.

II: ONE PERSON

Which is not to say that I am always by myself, and which is not to say I never question the time I spend. For instance, merely months ago, someone knocked on my door. It’s true, I ran upstairs, afraid that something had fallen from something, but I did, eventually, discover the cause of the banging and interaction ensued.

It was a fellow, an up-front one as it turned out (I admire up-front), seventeen as it turned out. I invited him in, and he said, “Look, I’m not gonna dick around. Jeff next door, you know that kid, basically dared me to ask you out because he thinks I’ll fuck anything.” I considered. I straightened my stockings, which I wear even in the summer as part of my role, and asked him if he wanted tea. He said,“I drink coffee.” I said, “Okay. I have some here somewhere.”

The fellow’s name was Shannon, which as I remember can be difficult for a boy in school unless he is blessed with social acuity and popular acceptance, which this Shannon was. Good-looking in a contemporary way. Would make a pretty girl, but also played basketball.

It’s true, I am wizened, sullen, frustrated, crotchety, but although the world generally annoys me, I have not lost interest in it. “What does Jeff want you to do?” I asked, hoping my smile was as wry as intended. Shannon scratched an ear and leaned against my kitchen table.

“He wasn’t too clear, really,” Shannon said.“Everyone knows what you’re like. I guess old Jeff just said what he said. It’s the kind of thing, if I was seven, I’d of knocked and run away, that kind of thing. He’s laughing his ass off right now.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

I was still looking for coffee. Shannon walked around the room and then said he had to piss. I couldn’t find any coffee, so I put water on to boil. Shannon came back.

“I’m gonna take off, I guess,” he said.

“You’re not going to ask me out?” I scratched an ear and leaned against my kitchen counter.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Thirty-five,” I told him, settling for a balance between truths.

“Damn, girl. I’m in high school.” He considered. Then he said, “Okay, let’s go out. I’ll come over tonight.”

“It’s not like I’m eighty,” I said, feeling excited by the prospect of, well, a prospect I suppose. An inkling of kindness aimed at myself, I suppose, a lightness in my old bones.

So he came over that night. I opened the door to him and he said, “Let me in quick. I don’t want everyone to see.”

His hair was combed and wet. I’d taken my stockings off and dressed up the way I had in college when I went to the parties fraternities held at hotels. I’d looked at myself in the mirror for a while that afternoon and in a girlish way decided I would make a pretty boy. But by the time Shannon arrived, I’d almost forgotten my outfit, so busy had I been all evening, organizing my license plate file, which I use to keep track of people who speed on this road, and working on my scheme.

“You clean up good,” Shannon said, and I thought he meant he liked my house, so I showed him around, and then something happened to me for a moment, something really kicked in, calm, even poignant as I remember, a softness he culled and lent me. Then we had sex on the blue floor in the living room.

And that’s not all since I wizened: a couple years ago a friend of mine from college showed up on her way to visit someone else and borrowed my guest room for the night. She said it seemed I’d grown up a lot, which is what you say to someone who remains virtually silent for an entire visit, smiling in a wry way as you talk about a variety of things that are half-heard, old hat, and immediately forgotten.

Also, I wrote a letter to Ann Landers once, before I knew my scheme. Only half joking, I wrote, “Dear Ann Landers, I need some advice. So what should I do?” And I started a chain letter once, in an effort to solicit ideas. “Send me a good idea, a good idea to four more people, and so on. If the ideas are good we will all have good ideas!” Someone sent me a dollar, which is illegal, so I reported it, and that was that.

And my folks invited me for Thanksgiving, but I knew if I went I would seem to be giving solicitous thanks in exchange for food, which I believe is underhanded. So I let them know, by ignoring them, that I was still uncomfortable with their presence on the planet, and they sent me a check for fifty dollars.

So it’s not like nothing ever happens to me. In fact, things continue to happen, which, it turns out, is a potential problem when it comes to settling on a way of life or a sense of truth regarding one’s ideology. For instance, I was supposed to have my period about two weeks after I met Shannon, but I didn’t. I started jogging. I wanted my body to be strong in case I had to give birth. I went jogging with a pen and paper, so I could note the actions of sneaky people in the housing development sphere. I saw a man piss on his neighbor’s lawn. I saw a pizza guy exit a house zipping his pants. I saw a girl drop an enormous vase from a second-story window. I wrote little notes, planning to place them in appropriate mailboxes, so that people would know what was going on. But then I suddenly felt like cutting up my flannel sheets and sewing them into layered squares to make diapers. And then I knew it was about time to check on the homosexuals; they had never disappointed me, never required correction, but I knew that if I wasn’t vigilant, I could not be sure. And then I felt like cleaning out the guest room and painting it yellow.

In short, I felt different. I thought about how I should adjust my scheme so that only the right people would die. I had never wanted the homosexuals to die because they are so nice, and I hadn’t wanted Vivian to die, or her little girl, because they are so wounded, and, of course, I admire wounds. I knew all this was my human weakness, and I tried, in my own way, to get over it. Trying to calm my human weakness was part of what I did when I worked on the scheme. With this new development, this lack of my period, a mere month ago, I began to find it so frustrating to work on my scheme that I cried a lot. I couldn’t figure out how to sort through all those people.

It’s hypocrisy I can’t stand. It’s how I’m always two steps from paradox, if not residing in it, if not allowing it to reside in me.

I cried so much that soon I didn’t think I was upset about the loss of an ideological structure. I admitted that the scheme could, after all, be one in a series of ideas. I thought, Something else could still occur to me and ring true, something different. After all, I am only twenty-seven. Some people don’t get wizened until they’re old. Some people don’t at all. I wondered what I really meant by wizened. Did I mean bitter? Static? It is not necessary to think one thing and not another. It made sense, and felt good, to blame the tears on my newly churning hormones. It felt like something new, this unexpected lack of bleeding, a new something I had never before encountered, something of my own invention, that could not be thought up or done by anyone else, a thing that had nothing to do with anyone else. This went on for a week or two. I felt light. I felt like a child. I felt full of potential, and it was great.

III: ANOTHER PERSON (MYSELF)

A long time ago, I guess it was before high school because I was still trying to find God, I was looking through my parents’ desk.They shared one. Her stuff was in the drawers on the left, and his in the drawers on the right. The surface was for bills only. I found my father’s old cigarette roller, the kind with the handle you pull, and tried to make it roll various office supplies into post-its, which didn’t work out so well. Then I found a couple chess pieces and some nail polish, so I painted faces on the chess pieces, which made them look downright demonic. Then I found my mother’s collection of fortunes from Chinese restaurants, which was old, I knew, because my father hated and hates all that is Chinese. The fortunes said that her life was going to turn out in ways it had not, not then, not now, and they told her she possessed virtues I’ve never witnessed.

I found six photographs of our house, each taken from the same spot in our yard, right in front of the maple tree where I spent hours scribbling on a yellow legal pad. At the time, I was working on a novel. I’d been reading about Nazis, and asked my mother, “Who is our enemy now?” and Mother had said, “We don’t have enemies anymore. The Russians, I guess.” In my novel, a family would hear someone breaking into their house and whisper, “The Russians are coming!” and for pages and pages they would hide and plot and then emerge, trying to beat the Russians back with pitchforks and garden hoes, but the Russians would keep coming, so then the family got to live in the woods with kind animals.

In any case, the photos taken from in front of the maple tree preserved each color scheme in which the house had been painted—six colors—the primaries, a couple secondaries, even Williamsburg blue when that was the rage.All these colors and I was still just a kid, though I felt older. It was as if someone wanted to keep track of what they’d done, so they could check back, and see if they’d ever had it right. I remember thinking that they hadn’t, and that I didn’t even have a favorite. They hadn’t ever had it right.

I found a sketch my father had made of my mother holding me as an infant, but he’d never gotten around to my head. I found a box of cherry stems, in brittle knots. Buttons never returned to shirts. Rusty paper clips. Single, double, and quadruple gummed staples that would never do a thing because anyone who can afford a stapler can afford new staples. Idiocy, everywhere. Idiocy just crammed into a decent-seeming piece of furniture, and I remember every item of it, every bit of hidden, accumulated, puerile waste. An inventory of other people’s ideas.

That afternoon when I forgot I was looking for God and examined the items at hand, that afternoon stretches when I think of it and holds years of weight. A small period of time can mean years in a person’s life. A person knows only what a person knows, and time feels as big or small as it does according to how much space it takes up now, in a person’s heart and mind. The time I have been living through in this house is permanent in this way, and this is why I can call myself, why I can be, why I am old. History is all bunched up behind me: what I know other people do and have done, all categorized, lumped, the facts of lives and occurrences undermined by failure, by the constant increase of trouble taking and having taken place, of lives documented, or forgotten, or both, or worse, remembered and useless. Useless? Failed? What on earth can I mean by that? I mean Vivian’s men keep traipsing, the Craven kids are wallowing in banality, the homosexuals are shaking hands in their backyard. I mean, after a while, the pregnancy wore off. My period came back, innocent, saying, “Oops, I forgot, sorry,” and instantly, that new feeling, the new idea, crushed itself into a minor moment, and I woke as from a nightmare.

I think there are too many people, and that’s all I think. Still, looking from my little sphere with my relevant eye does not mean I’m without memory, or without imagination. For instance, I never likedVivian’s husband. I knew he would leave, or should, but I can see him, suited up for safari, plainly and purely glowing, standing where giraffes knuckle over to drink, where tigers and zebras materialize from the grass as his past recedes. His little daughter holds his hand and her first word is “Oh.” At seven thirty, the heroin addict steps off Vivian’s porch and stands under the street lamp until, at the end of the dusk, the light bursts on and he takes in his drug, linked, in his mind, with the stars. Vivian can see him from her window, and she allows him his pleasure, tacit, pretending for its sake that it doesn’t exist. Her hair is long, full, and dark, her skin shining through the nightgown she has worn all day.

No one is left out when I watch my people. I can see Amie’s subtle, appropriate sneer when she finds herself sleepless, watching the television sputter and chat. She makes tea, wanders the house and the yard. The night, the insomnia, is like years for her. She converses with it: she says,“I banish you, insomnia!” and walks it up and down the street. By morning she’s collapsed on the couch, and when Jeff finds her he pulls an afghan over her body. He’s a little confused, momentarily filled with a recognition of the vast spaces of which he’s never conceived and never experienced. The day passes like wind. At dinner, their father breaks down at the table, half weeping, half laughing at the stock of his life. “I can’t deter theft,” he says. “It’s too much. It’s just everywhere.” Mrs. Craven takes his plate of beans and potatoes and replaces it with berries in cream.

In the morning, the homosexuals lay a gingham tablecloth on the lawn and picnic for breakfast.They are dressed in their suits, but one stretches out and rests his head on his lover’s lap. For hours, it seems, his lover strokes his face from above. After a while Goody comes over, puts her head on the man’s chest as he sleeps, and I think it’s a family, whole.

A sphere, even if it is only one body wide, can be comfortable. Shannon gave me a good fuck, and I’m sure he will give many others, and better. He’ll draw tenderness from the cluttered world and let it spill, making other people feel as I felt. The weight of the world can rise, history all fog and ghosts. I lift my eyes from the cul-de-sac and take a jaunt around my own place.Years ago, I threw a yard sale and relieved myself of the furniture my parents left behind, pieces too big and cumbersome in design or content to move. I look at what I brought to this house on my own, what space is taken or empty. I look at what I see and what I know. I think about war, how it can make a person feel half a unity, and I grow frigid with my fear. I repaint the guest room a careful shade of neutral. I build a shelf in my kitchen and line it with empty jars.

In due course Mother and Dad Craven go out of town. Amie and Jeff throw a rockin’ shindig. Kids come from all over the county, and the cops hang up when I call. They recognize my voice.

Vivian slaps the shit out of her little daughter for walking in on her and the heroin addict. The girl, dumb in this country, finds the addict’s stash and mixes it with roach poison.

Spliff sneaks up on Goody and one night Goody births a litter of spotty, baying puppies. The homosexuals creep into their backyard in the dark, dig a hole, take one puppy at a time by the hind legs and slam it against the wall of their garden office, drop each into the hole and cover it up.

I am old, after all, and plenty dead. I’ve barely begun to work out the angles in my scheme, ridden as it is, still, with sloppy thinking, hypocrisy, and logistic impracticalities. As it is, with nothing new, there is too much work to be done.

A Woman with a Gardener

I’m with the caterers, a one-time job, a borrowed bow tie, old sneakers I’ve spray lacquered black. It was that or heels. Fifty bucks, four hours.

White turned rails swoop up the lawn and curve around the verandah. What’s a verandah? It’s what I think I’m seeing. There’s a funny white statue of a lithe angel holding a lamp at the walkway entrance, and then later, up nearer the house where the stairs start toward the entrance, nothing you could call a stoop, a baby one, what do you call it, a cherub? Like going in reverse, back in time. Next, great lion-headed knockers looking nothing like boobs, I think, annoying myself, scanning for a back entrance, somewhere I must be supposed to be going.There is one. Around back.You go in a door built into a hill and it’s a tunnel left over from slave days. I heard of these somewhere, in a class, maybe, this way to pretend you don’t have slaves, like it’s magic everything is so nice, but this place might be old or it might be replica. It doesn’t look old. What looks old and not dirty? This looks clean, a clean hill of grass, nice trees, a clean door in the hill, and inside, chunky rock walls. It could be a rich crazy lady’s delusional obsession. She could have built it for her demons. I don’t know enough to tell.

Either way I feel dumpy and defensive. Inside it’s an underground kitchen and the company is using it to do final prep. Long metal tables fold out from the walls on insectlike legs and people, mostly dropout-looking kids, are lined along it in narrow cook’s hats making piles of dices and squeezing butter into ramekins with pastry bags. Piles of baskets for rolls, buckets of utensils, trays of four kinds of glasses, mounds of grapes, and eight hams pegged with fruit, and platters of strung-up little birds, and supersized crosshatched pies . . . I don’t know anything about food, but I’m for it.

“Hi Amy, hi Jacob, hi Tandy, hi Joe.” These are kids I know from other sucky jobs.

“You should see upstairs,” Becky says. I like Becky and miss her sometimes. She’s holding a cleaver and there’s band-aids around the center three knuckles of her hand. Something is always happening with her. “Go upstairs and check in with Matt. Tell him you’re here. Wait til you see upstairs.” Becky got me the job. I did catering once before, a bar mitzvah with globes of gumballs instead of flowers on the tables. Gumballs all over the floor like marbles as soon as the boys landed.

Okay, upstairs. How do I get there? I can’t remember. I’ll tell you what else I don’t remember, is how I know how to say what I saw. But I know.

Upstairs first it’s all about chandeliers, then it’s about mosaic tile, then it’s inlaid wood all through the ballroom, marquetry borders, and walls of mirrors in gilt frames surrounded with ornate probably silk wallpaper, and dark carved wooden trim around everything and enormous arching glass doors, window seats lined with tasseled cushions, giant oil paintings of old men and bustled ladies with lace-up dress fronts, tables, tables, tables, with white cloths and centerpieces made from rosebuds and pearl beads. No metal folding chairs at this shindig.All six-tops waiting for six tops. I’m about to throw up from looking when server after server emerges from behind a staircase in a fashion so orderly I cannot believe I will ever blend in. These people who I might, a moment before, have recognized, weave like a mass of ants among the tables, surround them, cover the space, and then disappear in a wave back behind the stairs, leaving six place settings at each table where before there were none. In fact, as I watch, I begin to believe I am watching one person, over and over, as if time is stuttering and indeed there is only one person setting one table. But then somehow the whole place is set and I suspect I’ve seen dozens of servers, maybe hundreds. It feels like hundreds. How does it feel to see a hundred servers? I might have seen hundreds of servers over the plodding course of my idiotic life. But at once they’re not men and not women, and not kids, some of whom I know; they’re elements of the décor swooping in and returning like a living curtain.

I go back downstairs. I’m shaking, all the bits of me rattling like they’re strung together or just tossed in one bag. “I don’t know who Matt is,” I tell Becky. She’s there with the cleaver. She might have been one of the servers upstairs, but now she is herself again.

How will I possibly become one of them? I will stick out. My shoes will chip. I’ll fall. She tells me something. For a moment I remember what she looks like naked. I also remember what she looked like when she said, “I can’t take it anymore!” and I said, “Take what?” and she said, “It! It, it, it!” and started throwing her things around her crappy apartment. She didn’t mean me. She meant everything. I remember she broke this ceramic frog she’d kept from childhood that she had on her dresser and it held her rings in its mouth at night.

I can see the blade of her cleaver moving and flashing, just as beyond her I can see other hands on singing tongs and other hands spinning wooden salad bowls that clack like castanets, and even though I know Becky is talking, time shifts—it shifts because of memory—and even though I am a terrible server, I feel it: all I have to do is move and I am caught up in exactly what surrounds me. So I do, and there I am. I am one in a line of precisely undulating bodies from a long line of long lines, moving up twisting basement stairs that become increasingly shiny as I near the surface, and I am balancing an enormous silver tray of twenty glasses of champagne as if the glasses and the liquid in them are suspended over my palm as weightless as any idea I’ve ever had. I look for Becky; I want to mouth to her how elated I am, how okay I feel, how light I feel, and graceful, but everyone is blurred together and when I try to glance in the mirrors I’m moving past I cannot catch my own image, which bothers me for a moment. But then I see that my free hand is guiding glass after glass onto the tables as I pass with exquisite timing; I never stop moving my feet and yet each guest’s elbow shifts out of the way as I approach and each baubled dandy catches my eye to accept or pass as if we are breathing together, and just as I cannot tell one server from another I cannot tell one guest from another; I simply know as if by rhythm, yes or no, I want, I don’t, or yes, but here, or no, but soon. Their happy noises ring and hover, rumble and soar, and utensils punctuate, and behind me, Becky, or anyone, is slipping them pâté and crudité (what, did I pick this up in construction? did I learn it landscaping?) and golden bouncy bits of fish and vegetables. I’ve glided in figure eights so balanced I’m breathless, I’m elated, I’m gliding back down the stairs, and although the damp basement walls remain distant, somewhere I sense that if I slow down, moisture from the stones will begin to cling to the fragrant hairs on my arms. Luckily my friends in their crimped white hats fill my tray with meat pastries; the tray, in fact, seems to levee, and it guides me back around and up the stairs, the funny flaky bundles tugging along like a tiny pack of sleigh dogs until I’m sailing again among the tables, the nods, the orchestra of motion and sound, the pulsing colors, and light that ranges from staccato sparkle to low humming glow.

I loop down into the kitchen, the kitchen streams by, and when I next rise from the basement I pause at the entrance, to see if I can, of my own volition, and it turns out I can. I feel like a rock in a river, but it’s because I’m still that I am able to notice what I notice:

It’s a breath I’m taking, a breath like I have never taken before, one so discrete I can tell that it comes from somewhere. I am of the collective of servers, but then I take this breath that feels like an icy ribbon of vapor is being fed to me in this hotly buzzing room of kaleidoscopic bodies. It’s a breath that is coming from someone. As I take it, I can almost trace it, and then I do, I trace it back toward the kite it’s come from; I’m paused at the foot of the room and the other servers bend away from me convexly; I feel them pull, elastic, but I am held there with my tray; I am breathing the ribbon that has been sent to me. In the pause, I remember that I used to draw pictures as a child, something I stopped doing, I only now suspect, for some reason. In the pause, I remember drawing a picture of a road going into the distance. Did I draw it accidentally or is this something I learned? I remember that moment in my history when I discovered, just as some time in human history it was discovered, that a triangle in two dimensions can make two feel like three. It was sort of great, but it also ruined everything.

I stretch my neck and close my eyes, and I am being pulled by the center line of this perspective. Have I ever used the word perspective? Would Becky, Jacob, Tandy use that word? I am being wrenched, I am being dragged, and then I feel the last tendrils of my connection to the serving corpus plucked away like nerves in a surgical amputation—plink, pluck—although it appears I’ve been properly numbed or stung or filled via breath with druggy distance for this ordeal. I’m so loopy.Time is wobbly around me, and space is, too, and the thing that’s going to happen is about to happen.

I almost know I am on my way to being unimaginably blissed-out.

At the top of the room, a woman, the kite herself, has risen and she stands at her table at the head of everything. She is dinging her glass with a fork. Her gown is yellow with silver threads. I know it from way back here, hot gold and cold silver. Her pale hair swoops around the back of her head, loose enough to form a halo. She’s got diamonds on. I am dumb and I am awed. One is worse.

She looks wise, like an excellent actress.

I don’t know what happens, but she speaks.

There are bells, or applause.

She is as if born of the room, molten, but then her tone shifts and the room turns moony, or her tone shifts and everyone’s cheeks glow like roses at once and light dapples their spotty heads. It’s true she’s too far away to see but that doesn’t seem to be the point of this experience. Luckily I have no idea how time moves here.All I know is it’s not mine. Not my time, not my place. And thank God. Mine sucks. Luckily I don’t have to wait. Luckily as I stand there and her voice reaches and feeds me I am stunned as if by certain kinds of insects I have never studied. What’s sharp? What’s smooth? This is sharp and smooth. She’s done dinging, and finished speaking, and now it’s a banquet peopled with playing cards, jacks, queens, kings, and jokers that simply fall away from the grid of round tables and who knows where the rest of the deck went; back below, long ago.

Light pulses and spasms from the mirrors and the gilded ceiling. Then the light quiets and cools. The hall is a field of strewn white napkins. I see them blow away like petals. I see the tables take to their legs and scurry off stage. I see me at the foot of the hall. I see her at the head in her gown, dinging her glass and taking a breath to speak, but luckily I do not have to live through dessert or whatever social thing the mounds of guests might insist upon next because time here has moved as if for me and now they’re gone and now she’s laughing at them but she’s still exhausted and happy that the night was—what—swell? It was something. It was all right. It was exactly what we wanted. She throws her arm across my shoulder.

She’d looked very tall but up close she’s my size.

Her laugh is as soft as a charcoal line.

I can remember my parents like this. Two in the morning, coming home, tired and tipsy.This is when I slept on the couch because it was a one-room place with a curtain divider, and Dad flopped into the easy chair, laughing, and Mom flopped onto his lap, shushing, and I said, “I’m awake, you dopes.”

We’re pooped.We did it. It’s over. Let’s turn in.

But first, link arms. First, a walk in the garden.

We survey the lawn for a moment from the great front doors of the house.We leave the doors open as we descend the curving stairs, dramatic in the light behind us, and we pass the cherub, and then we pass the lithe angel, and then we stroll onto the lawn.The lawn is dotted with seven enormous trees, a leafy canopied kind. Old trees. Can’t transplant trees that old. There’s some light from the moon and some light from the lanterns the angel and the cherub are holding. Am I myself? I feel as if I am, if a little wobbly, and with an echo in those words: myself, wobbly. She left her yellow gown like an enormous rose head on the floor of the hall and now she wears only her underthings, a simple cotton shift, or something called something like that, and she’s taken her necklace off and strung it in her loosened hair so now she’s nymphy, as if we’ve made it to Deco, so perhaps I picked up a little more history than I like to remember.

Under one tree is a man and a woman stretched out next to each other, the man on an elbow. They’re making out near his floppy hat. Under another tree a fat old man is passed out, spread-eagle on his back, his pocket watch sliding from his pants. We’re arm in arm. We’re strolling. I’m barefoot with my trousers rolled halfway up my calves. The grass is cool. The breeze moves. I’ve untucked my white shirt, and it moves, and her white little shift thingy moves. A paper cup blows by from another era. We’re almost ghosts. We’d be ghosts to anyone watching. Nothing hurts.

When will we speak? Is it possible to speak in this condition? Back in my old life, we’d banter. I wouldn’t call it “banter,” I’d call it “reeling her in,” but that cannot happen here. Too coarse. Here, there are practically no edges. I already know her voice and it’s already an aspect of the bubbling of my own imagination, so what can we do? We weave among the seven trees of the rising and dipping lawn until we come upon a break in the hedges and are in a maze. She shifts half a step ahead of me, because the space is very narrow, quite dark, and I can feel the tips of boxwood leaves on my shoulders. It’s as if I hear the word boxwood and as if the maze is moving beneath my feet and I am still, peering past the motion of her hair, the maze turning and gliding. We emerge from it along a stone path in a garden of evenly spaced young trees with silver bark and leaves that clack. A glass greenhouse shines in shards in the dark like teeth, like shifting knives. We are also surrounded by roses, which is lucky, because it’s almost the only flower I know. As we walk we can smell them. Most of the roses smell pale, but we pass one that is sharper. “These are old roses,” she says. “Generation to generation. Passed down.” She is still a half step ahead and although I know the gleaming line of her jaw as if it’s always lived in my periphery, I haven’t seen her face since we entered the maze and I’m a little frightened. I’m afraid that if she turns to me her face might be cruel, after all. Then the voice that told me “boxwood” begins humming again under the leaves. She turns enough to meet my eyes and says,“It’s my gardener.” She is still herself.Then, around a bend, I see him, crouched beneath a plant that looks like a buffalo, peering at a turtle that is black as a stove and looks like a stone. He’s wrinkled, and muttering. He looks like my grandfather. He looks like a troll. He’s holding a lantern. Bugs and desperate moths flail around it, bouncing against the glass.

She says—and what should I call her? my lady? my girl?—she says, “What do you say?” and the gardener squints in the filmy light, his lips moving. I can see his throat push a little harder. I can see him pushing the sound out. I can tell he hates me. My own grandfather. Her gardener. A troll. He begins what is clearly incantation. I tell you, my education is singing. He says, or he recites:

oenanthe crocata the water dropwort,

argaricus xanthodermus, helleborus purpura,

taxus baccata, amanita pantherina,

deathcap, butlersweet, solanum dulcamara,

laburnum, sulfur tuft, atropa belladonna . . .

Is the turtle going to turn into something? “Ignore him,” she says. “Let’s go,” she says, and whisks me away before we can make a choice, before I am even certain there’s a choice to make. She whisks me away as if neither left nor right. She whisks me up. Up, up, and away. “He’s a creep,” she says. Then, we disappear.

Darkness and she is almost all sound and smell. I am made of particles. She calls me urchin. She calls me waif. I’m an urchin. “You’re my waif.You are.You are my urchin.” These smiling words, one from the sea, one a limp city leaf. Here I am, in a wave of water, a wave of air, in the motion that makes up matter. I am honey, sugar, darling, all of them. I have the memory of her already. It could be the reason it is so dark, the memory I will have of her filling everything. We remain placeless in a way I almost fathom.

This, love, is simply response to stimuli, I think, although I know enough to know I am not a thinker. An urchin knows nothing, knows only now, and now, and now.When I close my eyes I am overwhelmed by my own light.

Morning and the bed is a boatful of feathers and we are floating under yellow blooming sheets. Her windows are enormous. Minty leaves shiver out there, fringing the view. Beyond them, though, if I squint, the gardener is approaching with a red machine slung by a strap over his shoulder. He’s wearing a cap. He’s hunched and ugly.

What will become of me if I am someone who loves a woman with a gardener?

“I’ll be back,” she says.“I’m famished.” She crosses the room. She’s not wearing the sheet. She’s left the sheet with me. She remains astonishing. From a hook behind the bathroom door she lifts a golden bell. She cups it in her hand like a bird and keeps it noiseless. She holds it in front of her as if she’s going to present it to me, as if she’s going to present it wryly, knowingly, writhing with our in-joke, the joke of how I would never do this; I would never get caught up. “Look, baby bird.” Am I a bird? Is the bell a bird? She keeps it cupped and hovering in front of her abdomen, and when she lifts her knee to the bed her muscles shift and when she lifts her other knee they shift again, but differently.

I must be the bird; I am so fluttery.

She’s kneeling before me, although we are clearly on the same level. I’m resting on my elbow, head in my hand.This can go on. I can see it. I know it. I can do it. I can see my rags and riches. I can do this, I think. I am tough enough.

My hips are a hill under the blossoms. “Take the bell,” she says. She’s whispering. “Ring it. I give it to you. I give you everything.”

Outside, the gardener is muttering, still. He’s a voice from the past. I believe I remember all of this from childhood.

“I know this one,” she says. “You can listen but it’s best not to take it in. It’s actually a very funny tune.” He’s out of view, now, low, below the window. He revs his engine and under its roar and the spattering of the branches it encounters I hear the incantation rise:

polytrichum juniperinum,

festuca rubra, festuca arundinacea,

poa pratensis, poa trivialis,

lolium perenne, anthemis nobilis,

dactylis glomerata, phleum pratense,

agrostis stolonifera the creeping bent ...

What the spell does is make me remember my dream. In my dream my grandfather tells me the story of Thomas Jefferson from Virginia and his architecturally important house, and the slaves in the tunnels, and he tells me the story of Mrs. Winchester from California, haunted by a fortune made from guns, the house she built crazily bumping into itself, stairs into ceilings, halls into brick walls, wings tumbling over one another as if out of breath. The houses bookend the country. I know that in dreams, when you dream of houses, you are dreaming of yourself. I don’t know what this means. In the dream, I’m just a little kid. I don’t know anything. “Grampa,” I say, tugging at his nightshirt, “where did you learn this? Did you learn this in school?”

I stretch across the bed, pull myself to the windowsill to see if I can see down. She takes my hand and pulls me back in a swirl of sheets. She’s grinning, dazzling. She says, “Shut up, you fucker!” and slams the window, and the room shakes, and the bell rings in my palm, and several figs tumble into our laps, and breakfast, it turns out, is the most delicious of all.

The Way She Loved Cats

One of the things he liked best about her was the way she loved his cats. She’d never lived with cats before, but when Carol moved in, she commented about how cats made everything look picturesque, just by being there. She said the cats brought out the pattern on her dress, and how that was a funny, good sign about her moving in.Walker told her that in the eighties, Bloomingdale’s bred a bunch of cats to go with the upholstery of the couches they sold. When you got a couch, you got the cat to go with it, if you wanted. Some of their best times were watching television, whatever was on, really, it didn’t even matter, each with a cat on the lap. He sat stroking a cat on his lap, and she sat stroking a cat on her lap. Seeing the same thing, doing the same thing, it was almost like accidentally being the same for a while, unlike that awful feeling you can get on a family vacation that’s not working.

Sometimes if you’re at a stoplight and you and the car in front of you both have your turn signals on, it’s interesting to watch the car’s blinker and listen to your own, and notice how they ease in and out of sync. It’s mind-boggling and soothing at once. In fact, both of them, when they were sitting with separate cats, equated it somehow with what it was like to lie in bed next to each other, each masturbating, which they did routinely as well, although neither of them mentioned this equation.

About a year later, Carol got transferred, so they had to move several states over.Walker was supposed to make sure the movers got everything right and meet her there, in the new place she’d picked out. After the moving was complete, they were watching television and Carol said, “When will the cats get here?”

Walker said, “Good idea. I’ll get some tomorrow. I miss sitting here with the cats.”

It turned out Walker didn’t believe in moving cats. He said it wasn’t fair to uproot them. He said it was also unfair to just leave them, not fair to the cats, who were domestic and couldn’t be counted on to reassimilate into the natural order if abandoned, and could also cause a traffic collision. He’d shot them and buried them in the old backyard.

This was shocking; shocking enough that it shocked Carol, who generally wrinkled her nose at gore on television, or furrowed her eyebrows at the evening news, but made little more of it. Walker, certainly, didn’t do it to be shocking, but he did it. Carol’s face had both wrinkled and furrowed when he told her, and he said, “What? What? Are you mad?” but she didn’t say anything. She thought about saying something, and she thought enough to have the conversation out in her mind. It was one she didn’t like, and she didn’t want to have it.

She thought about it enough to see this aspect of him having been there all along, a wide and latent layer that had surfaced, states away, as if a memory he didn’t even remember had lifted itself and started walking around when she wasn’t looking. When she sat in her chair watching television and glanced at him as he sat on the couch watching television, she did it quickly—glanced in a flash to make sure that, indeed, their eyes were facing the same direction, and that he sat as he sat—and then she thought about the image of him sitting there as she watched the television. She kept her arms on the arms of her armchair, and thought about how he was sitting with both hands on his Pepsi, which was in its cozy, between his thighs. She started thinking there was a problem with the way they watched television, but of course it was more than that. I mean, suppose Carol and Walker had a thoroughly admirable relationship, whatever kind it is that everyone wants, instead of whatever kind of relationship they had. Like more books and less television, or hikes in the forest, or soul-dumping conversations into the night. I don’t see it saving them from the cats. They’re there or they’re not, and you know it or don’t. You can’t be too careful, and you can’t be careful enough.

And I’m not saying she was a cat, specifically, but about a year later, Carol got transferred again. “I don’t want to move,” she told her boss.“We’re really settled here, and we’d really like to stay,” she said. “I don’t want to uproot.”

Who Buried the Baby

The wind blew with such direct force that the porch swing rode up sideways and wrenched back, scraping the rail several times a minute, and my great-aunt Stacy was worried. She waited for a pause and then rushed to unhook it. The swing fell and the chain smacked her ankle in its horrible funny-bone place. She hopped to the open doorway and crouched on the threshold to rub it. In the premature dusk that comes with such weather, shadows fell as if with a bang. With so much movement in the air, only substantial items like houses and clouds were throwing shadows, cutouts incongruously still, as if sucked there by vacuums in the earth.

There was a lot of suspense.

Soon it was actually dusk, then night through which it rained like nuts, then morning. Stacy had stayed balanced in the doorway for a long time, watching the rain, but then gone to bed. That’s what she was doing.

She didn’t tell me the story at any particular time, nor did anyone else. I grew up knowing it. Even Stacy didn’t begin to know the plot until later, the next day, when she was told her three-month-old baby had been found dead.Two teenage girls a town over had been running around in a field, fools in the rain, and stumbled over the infant where she’d been buried in a depression so shallow a foot stuck out. The girls pulled the baby from the mud and ran with it back to the house. The house, which belonged to the family of one of the girls, stood at the edge of the field with its porch light glowing, like a gate to the rest of the world.

I don’t know what this has done to the girls.

One girl was spending the night with the other—you know that kind of terrific thirteen-year-old night, when you’re so cute you hop out of the bed you’re sharing because it’s a sleepover, out of your fluffy covers and into the rain, flailing your arms with the kind of energy that when you have it when you’re older, you’ll remember how you used to have it any old time it was called for. The field was wide and bumpy, and the girls, carrying the flopping baby, stumbled over clods of earth when before they’d tumbled like they meant it. In fact, it was the girl who was usually quieter who carried the baby. The other girl dashed ahead and back like a romping dog. She dashed ahead as if looking for a way to clear the way, wishing there was brush and a machete so she could do some good, and dashed back wishing she were taller and could shield them from the rain and the lightning should it strike them like the bumbling targets they’d become in the field in which they’d been targets all along, but not felt it.

By the time they got to the house the baby was clean of dirt except for its nostrils. One girl opened the baby’s mouth with her fingers and then said, “Should I pick its nose?” and the other girl said, “I’m scared you’ll push it in farther.”This happened on the porch of the house of the noisier girl’s family.

I know the story the way some adopted kids, for instance, never suffer a moment of finding out. They don’t know who told them, but they know, and when it comes up in conversation, their understanding of the details goes corroborated or corrected as often or not as those of any memory. Mostly it came up over dinner. So-and-so found out such and such, please pass that, thank you.

I also know about the family gathering for the occasion. Stacy says they flocked, so I have imagined my fat and skinny relatives zooming through the sky in Vs like geese with suitcases dangling, and waddling into the living room of the now-suburban farmhouse where Stacy still lives because time passes, cities encroach, and when you’re stuck you’re stuck. They fly in through bright skies but when they arrive it is still raining, so they waddle in wet and place their suitcases in a line by the fire, wringing their hair and dumping water from their hats onto the braided rug. They take turns holding Stacy’s hand, talking on the phone, carrying bowls of hot muffins from the kitchen. They’re on rotation, and remain as interchangeable as geese, their clothes variations on a theme of wet and luscious in color.This goes on.The relatives swap spots on the furniture and trade duties. Stacy sits on the edge of the blue wingback. Someone sits on the ottoman and holds her hand. They keep passing her hand from hand to hand.

Several years later, Stacy is no longer under suspicion, but no one else is, either. Not the girls from the field, or the husband who was out of town, or anyone. Everyone in the flock, by this time, several years later, has already been under suspicion, and equally so. While under suspicion, that person’s role shifted, and then the suspicion shifted, and that person went back to the post at the phone, the post with reporters, the post in the kitchen, the post with the policeman with the notepad, the post with a neighbor, the post that gets groceries. They devise tasks for one another. They decide to track down the killer. They write letters. They go to scenes of the crime, and scenes that at various times are possibly scenes of an aspect of the crime.They talk to the girls, and the husband, and Stacy, and this leads them to talk to other people. They drive places and talk to people. They tell newspaper reporters that they talked to people. They tell the police. By the time I was born, several of the gaggle were dead, a couple were in jail for tax evasion, the rest were scattered back where they’d flown in from, and in fact I have met none in any way that makes one more memorable than another. Still, under each person’s breath, whether the breath is in my face, memory, or imagination, there’s a current that says, “Justice, justice, we want justice,” catchy as the child’s rhyme it has become, and still I haven’t caught it.

In fact, in my life, I have to think hard for something to add when I’m gathered with a group of friends, eating and drinking, being unattached adults, and there’s a roundtable about our funny families:“I have a crazy cousin who wraps his fingers with electrical tape because he’s afraid of electrons.” “I have a cousin who got sent home from Europe for anorexia.” “I wish I could go to Europe.”

I want to join in the conversation, to be one of the girls, and I think: I wish I had a crazy cousin.Then I think, by golly, Aunt Stacy will do.

It’s been so long. She keeps sending letters all over the place. It’s become normal. It’s my normal life, this extravagant circumstance nearby. If she finds out who buried her baby, everyone will say she lived a life worth living. If she dies first, they’ll say two lives wasted. And this logic troubles me, when I think of it, because for one thing, it does not sound like justice either way. For another, I am sure I like justice, at its heart. I’m sure it would be great to have it, for Stacy to have it. I believe, however, that once you have gone through the gate that makes you sure that indeed you, of all people, because of your life, ought to have it, ought to have justice, because someone has buried your baby, and everyone can see that’s no justice—you know for sure, it’s obvious, no justice there with the burying of that baby—at this point, with you knowing you ought to have some, justice spies you from across the plains and shimmies toward you from that great distance and does a taunting school-yard dance in front of you, like a flashy bully or a Salome. Everyone goes limp in such a presence. Stacy goes limp. I go limp.This justice character, I do not like.

At my house, you go to the end of the backyard and out a gate. Pine needles cover the forest floor, like magic because all the foliage visible is deciduous, but not magic. Of course, this is because the pine trees reach above the others, and their needles fall from stories high. I remember first figuring this out, as a kid. I’d thought maybe wind had blown pine needles in from elsewhere, the way some beaches are laden with shells when down a mile or so there are none. I remember when first figuring this out, I was standing in a forest in a little clearing with pine needles, noticing that in my years of futzing around in the forest, this was the first time I hadn’t felt a desire to take a broom and tidy up. I thought, what a great idea, pine needles, and looked up to acknowledge the gift.The pleasure I felt in finding the logic, that the needles came from above the nearest canopy, was momentary. After that, I felt sad.

One time I was on the poetry committee in junior high school, and a kid handed in a poem called “The Mysteries of Life,” and as a main example he’d written that no one knows why birds fly in a V. Everyone liked the poem. I said, “But people know why birds fly in a V, don’t they?” Then everyone was mad at me, and, in fact, I understood. I was mad at myself for a moment—not for having criticized the poem, but for ruining everyone’s surety that they’d felt moved. Then I got defensive. I said, “Well jeez, for that matter, I don’t know why I walk upright.”

I’ve been trained from birth, or at least kindergarten, to track my favorite things.This requires devising a category and laying claim. We picked favorite foods and colors. We made books about favorites, with illustrations. Later, as schoolkids, we forced it on one another, and we had to declare our favorite rock bands. We wore tee-shirts about our favorites and collected cutouts from magazines. We began to lie. We chose to have the same favorites, for coincidence. Look: we’re both wearing kneesocks, we’re twins, we’re made for each other. Or we condescended while pretending to be super-accepting. You like ice cream. Well, I’m partial to grapefruit myself, so you can see I’m unique, I’ve acquired a taste. Or chocolate, who doesn’t like chocolate? Well, I like this particular kind of Belgian chocolate we have flown in . . .

I do not know when I stopped knowing what my real favorite was. I do know that I continue to tell myself what is my favorite, and that I always regret my choice. I believe that the result of being told we might choose created the ability to choose, and that all choices result in a lucky or unlucky lie. Still, it is difficult for me to sustain a sense of pleasure unless, upon feeling pleasure, I assign a favorite to it. You are my favorite person, which is good because you’re licking me there.This is my favorite route to work, which is good, because I took the time to take it.

This is my favorite weather: wind so high in the trees I know it’s there only because I can see it. Down here it is still. I look up, and concentrate. I try to feel the feathered edge of it. Down here it is still.There is a lot of suspense.

My great-aunt Stacy is old, weak, and dying. She has written me a letter. She wants me to run an errand that involves driving up the Smoky Mountains and talking to a person there who might have buried her baby. I’m thinking, this is not a family business, because it doesn’t and never did make any money. Her letter says it’s about justice. She says it’s about justice for her buried baby and soon it will be justice for her as well. I’m thinking, what are you saying here, that you have to die to have justice be for you, or are you trying to be self-deprecating to win my resolve? I’m thinking, jeez, Stacy, didn’t anyone ever say your baby would want you to move on and have a happy life, or did they say that and you said, Fuck off, she was just a baby and now she’s dead and she doesn’t want squat.

She has drawn me a map. It’s a terrific-looking map, drawn on fibrous paper with a felt-tip pen that bled a lot. It looks like a treasure map, and I appreciate the map.

If I go I could go because I appreciate the map as I might appreciate being given a business that makes money. If I go I could go because she’s not dead yet and I’m a nice person, and I think I might be her favorite. If I go I could go because something might happen. Something will happen anyway, but if I go something will also happen, but different.

One time, at a dinner party roundtable, one of my nice adult friends asked me what I thought. She remembered from the other dinner party roundtable that someone had buried that baby in my life. I remembered why I tried not to mention it. I thought, Oh shit, I forgot, and I mentioned it. So all of a sudden I wondered what I thought, because she asked, and I noticed I’d thought, overall, really, not much. I went through a period of time thinking, back when I was thirteen, the age of the girls.When I turned thirteen, I thought, I’m going through a gate, because I am now the age those girls were, and remain to me.The baby that had been flopping in my life since I was born had, at that point, only just appeared in theirs, years and years before.

I looked around the dinner party roundtable. There were my friends, these grown-up girls, four of them. One of them I’d been in love with for a long time without mentioning it. Another I liked well enough and had sex with when we were both lonely and giddy at the same time. Another I thought was the smartest person I’d ever met who felt like hanging out with me. Another was a great cook and hobbyist.

We are all adults. I do not want them to look at me and think of a flopping baby. I do not want them to look at me and suddenly remember that they weren’t thinking of a baby flopping around in my past. I hope it surprised those girls later that they didn’t think much about the baby, once it was buried again. Every so often, the noisier girl says to the quieter girl, Remember that baby? And the quieter girl says, Yeah. I hope they don’t picture themselves sparring with a Salome in a school yard. I hope they don’t think a couple girls can’t run around in a field in the rain.

I don’t know if I like Stacy. I find myself afraid that at some point, after they were cleared of suspicion, Stacy called the girls on the telephone and asked them for details so she could follow up. I don’t know if there is anything to like about Stacy, unless you agree with her about justice, which I don’t. In fact, I think agreeing with Stacy about justice is a bit of grabbing for straws. You could like grabbing for straws. I think Stacy must like grabbing for straws, and just keeps getting short ones. I think I would prefer a roll in the hay but the whole thing makes me giddy. Perhaps what you can’t resist is all right. I like Stacy all right.

Where is the husband now, where are the girls grown, where was the baby when Aunt Stacy was unhooking the swing in the wind and nursing her ankle?

The husband was out West, visiting family, when the baby was found. He flew back with the rest of them, but he wouldn’t go into the house. He stayed in a motel for a while. He and Stacy had a big fight about it. She wanted him to go back into the house, but he didn’t want to go into the house. He said, “Stacy, you cannot make me go into that house.” He said it was his baby, too. He bought a house out West and went there.

After the girls found the baby, they knelt with it on the noisy girl’s threshold with the door open, to let out the light, and looked at its nose and mouth. One time, a policeman asked one girl in one room, and then the other girl in another room, why they didn’t bring the baby inside immediately.The noisy girl said, “You don’t know.You weren’t there.”The quiet girl said, “We were afraid to bring it into the house.”What she meant was they brought the baby out of the rain and into the light, and there was enough light on the porch so they could see, and it didn’t matter whether they were inside or outside the house, that the boundaries he was asking about were arbitrary and you don’t think about, for God’s sake, architecture at a time like that. But the policeman thought maybe something was scary about the noisy girl’s parents, so he investigated them to find out about possible abuse.

I went to Aunt Stacy’s house with the map she’d sent me. I sat on the sofa next to the blue wingback chair. I held the map in my hand, and Stacy held my hand with the map in it and pointed to the map with her other hand. She said, Please go there, then there, then there. Call me from there, if they have a phone. She’s unhooking the swing. She’s nursing her ankle. When she looks at me, I’m burying the baby. When she looks at me, I’m the baby, buried.

I went back to my house, which was a good long drive.You never know how it feels until it happens to you, and then if it happens to you, you still have no idea if you know how it felt to anyone else. At that point, you’re pretty busy anyway. And later, you don’t remember so well.You feel what you are feeling now. I don’t know what it is.

When I got home, I opened the back door, which divides my kitchen from the path that leads to the woods. I set about washing some dishes. I got partway through, and then I took a bath. I’ve got a lousy, shallow tub, and while I was soaking, I thought about how a bathtub ought to be designed. It ought to be adjustable like a lawn chair, or big enough to have a lawn chair in it. It ought to have a faucet you can operate easily with your foot. It ought not to be shaped like a trough. I’d stopped washing my dishes because a moth flew out of my cupboard and it turns out moths were making babies in my beans. I dumped the beans in the trash can outside, and then I got into the tub.When I got out of the tub, I stood in my kitchen in my bathrobe and watched a bird that had flown in. Usually, earlier in the season perhaps, when a bird comes in it flaps around in a panic, and usually ends up really hurting itself. But with this bird, I had the sense it was attempting to migrate, that my house was simply, for the moment, in the way of the South, because it flew in, perched on a shelf, a plant, the dish rack, and then flew out, decent and calm as a bird can be. There was no drama, no righteous desperation.

I’m stuck at thirteen only when I think of the baby, and when I think of the baby, I’m stuck at thirteen. It’s not right, because there’s a lot more to me, I’m sure. In any case, the suspense is killing me.

Go to the mountain.There’s a sagging cabin with its mortar falling out in chunks. In it live some people.They’re up on the mountain, making a living. Ask at the door, Did you make a call from a pay phone on this date? Do you remember a man wearing yellow boots? Were you eating coleslaw at the diner? Did you tell this woman you were in a hurry? Do you or did you ever own a parakeet? Did this tumble from your pocket? Did you break this omelet pan? Have you traveled to Ecuador? And what about your family? And what about your friends? Have you buried a baby?

Did you bury this baby?

I dried my hair and then I crawled under my fluffy covers. Under the covers there is heat and air. As I was falling asleep, one of my friends called, and it could have been any one of them, they are all so fine and lovely. I spoke with her on the phone, bringing the phone with me under the covers. I told her about the bird in my kitchen, and then about this one time in junior high when we did a Christmas show at a nursing home. We made reindeer horns out of coat hangers and our fathers’ socks. We sang and gave out peppermints. We used the peppermints as the reason to go up to the old people and say, “Merry Christmas, how’d you like the show?”

I thought, Who told us to do that? Who said give peppermints to people with dentures? Who said do role reversal on the candy dish on gramma’s coffee table? Who said bad singing is good singing if it’s volunteer? I gave a peppermint to a woman who held an aluminum mixing bowl in her lap and spat great translucent globes of mucus that fell, like action heroes, in slow motion. I said, “Merry Christmas, how’d you like the show?” and she said, “It was stupid,” and I regret with might the indignation I felt, and how such simplicity stumped me.

Under the covers, we talked for hours, and I didn’t have to tell her how the thing I meant about the peppermints was I think you lose more if you lose so much you start living for convention. Instead, I told her all sorts of things, dumb little things that happened one time, and dumb little things I was thinking about now and then. We swapped off. I told her something and then she told me something back. We were on the phone for enough time that I got unsleepy and then sleepy again several times. She said, “I’m so sleepy,” and I said, “But now I’m awake,” and I said, “I’m so sleepy,” and she said, “But now I’m awake.” Finally, we were both sleepy at the same moment, and I hardly remember most of what we talked about, which is much of why it felt so lovely. There was some justice, I thought, later. A sweet, naked little bully, with scarves around her feet.

Some Machines

CLOCK

Started off I felt afraid of any electric cord. Could get disrupted, go back to twelve, never wake me. I could sleep and sleep, miss work, seem dead. So it was batteries, little fold-out clocks I liked. I got one and it took the place of a watch. I carried it around and it felt at once antiquated and unpretentious, a pocketwatch but practical, digital, black and plastic. Not masculine (chunky, leather) or feminine (slender, jeweled) and somehow, in my pocket, anti-time.

Countless people have solved their problems with clocks.

But I crushed mine, sitting on it too much. The numbers flickered and faded, washed into the pale khaki of dead electronic screen space. Meant I had to go shopping, a terrible, terrible thing. I rejected a flip-bottom silver-colored plastic one because its imitation alloy finish was so deadly cheap and lightweight, and then I rejected a simple black version with hands because the numbers glowed green and I couldn’t bear the resemblance to the Halloween masks on sale next to it, and now, after several stores and two returned purchases I have this round one, actual metal, with hands and a tiny white bulb that lights the face when I press a button in the back, and it slides in and out of a clever case.

It’s the ticks, though. I stay awake. I write this in my notebook leaning over my night table in the tiny bulb glow, angry at the weakness of the entire situation.

Here, in this imaginary epistolary, I’m ticking, too.

PHONE

At night, one night, I couldn’t reach you. You were visiting your parents.Their phone rang and rang but no one answered and no machine. I didn’t know the arrangement your family has with the computer. I hung up and I lay there, butt to butt with my dog, imagining the terrible things you could be going through, ranging from they took you to dinner and a movie to they bound you in a chair and asked you who the hell I was and why I kept calling.

HEATING PAD

It’s blue, with small blue roses on one side and words on the other.

I’m holding it.

It says: “This product has been engineered to put out the maximum temperature allowed by industry standards. Heating pad.Wetproof E12107. Danger.” It doesn’t have periods, commas, or semicolons, but I add them as I read and so I add them here, desperate for punctuation. “Burns will result from improper use,” it says. “To reduce the risk of burns, electric shock, and fire, this product must be used with the following instructions: do not use while sleeping; burns can occur before timer turns off; burns may occur regardless of timer or control setting; check skin under pad frequently to avoid burning and blistering; do not use on infant; this pad is not to be used by or on an invalid, a sleeping or unconscious person, a person with poor blood circulation, a paralyzed person or a person with diabetes; do not use if signs of appendicitis are present; do not use a heating pad on areas of sensitive skin; never use pad without removable cover in place; do not use in an oxygen enriched environment or near equipment that stores or emits oxygen; place pad on top of and not under the part of the body needing heat; do not sit on, or against, or crush pad; avoid sharp folds; never pull this pad by the supply cord and do not use the cord as a handle; unplug when not in use; never use pins or other metallic means to fasten this pad in place; carefully examine inner cover before each use; discard the pad if inner covering shows any signs of deterioration such as blistering or cracking; read and follow all instructions on box or packed with pad before using. Fabric content 100% polyester.”

I miss you.

SUPERMARKET CHECKOUT MACHINE

I have made eight mistakes checking myself out. (Not like that. This is not me trying to be sexy. I swear, desire is so embarrassing). I’m all revved up over it. It’s as if I feel I am demonstrating, by stamping my feet and talking back to the instruction screen, the need for qualified checkout machine operators, but I also know no one watching my animated frustration will be anything except annoyed. Can’t we all just cooperate and get through this? Jesus, no one likes this shit, who do you think you are?

Here are the mistakes I made: I did not get my discount card out of my wallet fast enough. I tried to replace the plastic bag on the rack with a bag from home. I took too long putting the bags back the way they were supposed to be and had to rescan my items. I put too many items in the plastic bag. I pushed star instead of pound. I decided not to buy a piece of cheese I thought I was going to buy. I wanted six eggs and not twelve. But that last one always happens.

I miss the rubber conveyor belt, even though it has so often mangled my parsley. No one wants this, I think, looking around for help. Everyone is immersed in the checkout process. People study the screens and handle their items like science projects, sudden experts. I miss the tellers at the banks, I miss the gas station attendants, and when I collect my receipt from the girl whose job it is to oversee all eight automated checkout stations I say,“Does it bother you that these machines are replacing you?” and she says, “No, I have this job,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean—” and she says,“We’ll just have different jobs,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean—” and she says, “We can get jobs at another store,” and I say,“Yeah but I mean—” and she cuts me off and says, “Yeah they suck, I know, everyone hates them,” but this time she’s whispering.

It’s exactly what I wanted her to say, and I go to my car and raise the hatchback, load the slippery bags, and they promptly slump and release their contents. I miss stiff brown bags with toothy edges. I miss those boys who used to load my bags. I feel old, and rich, and stupid.

REFRIGERATOR

The year I spent in the studio apartment, I let the bulbs burn out one by one until I was living by refrigerator light. In the dark, I’d want something, a pen, a cigarette, a sentence from a book, and I’d open the door. Light came to mean cold, and wanting something meant cold, too.

I could hear the man next door, everything he watched on television, and when he turned his television off I could suddenly hear him breathing and I knew we were sleeping side by side or head to head (I couldn’t decide which was worse), the one faint wall between us. I felt pinned between him and the refrigerator, which turned on and off so loudly—refrigerators are so loud, and hulking, you just never notice unless you’re trying to sleep in a kitchen.

Soon the refrigerator seemed as human as the man next door. I pictured the light still on inside it, pressing and humming, the rumbling life that we know is encased in a body’s skin.

Do you see what I mean?

MOTORCYCLE

The Judge asked, “Why are you on disability?” and the plaintiff said her arm had been reattached after fifteen hours of microsurgery.

The Judge asked, “Then why do you want the Harley-Davidson back from your brother, who has been keeping it as collateral and over this year rebuilt it from salvaged original parts along with ordering some new ones?”

The plaintiff said, “This is all I have left of my husband.”

He’d given her the motorcycle, and they’d been riding double. In the accident, her arm was severed, and he’d been killed.This is what I pieced together. What a gory moment in history. The motorcycle was scattered, and her husband’s body was scattered. She’d wandered around the dark road with her arm dangling by the inside flap of her skin and muscle, stumbling and unable to tell what was him and what was machine. Somebody sorted it out later, while she was in the ambulance and in the hospital. They divvied up the parts into two piles: people parts for burial in one box on the side of the road, and motorcycle parts in another box on the side of the road, for trash, they assumed, until her brother claimed the parts, knowing her.

“Knowing he could use me,” she said.

She couldn’t spell. The notes of agreement submitted to the Judge as evidence proved it. When the Judge said, “Give your brother the five hundred dollars, and you, sir, give her the motorcycle,” and then cracked the gavel, the plaintiff said, “Yes!”—a whispered hurrah—and made the kind of gesture you make to celebrate when you score in pinball.

Now comes what I have to confess.

Some things she didn’t say in court that I was hoping she’d say were:

“Brother, how could you have put that bike together when you knew I’d want to do it when my arm worked better? I wanted to line the parts in rows in my driveway. I wanted to lift them and fit them into one another. Not because I never learn and I’ll just get out on the road, reckless again, hair in the wind. And not because I don’t hate the machine for what it contributed to his death and my own wrecked body. But because I know that machine is my man’s body, and in my memory of wandering the glossy night road under the stars, I wanted to reconstruct the motorcycle because I could not reconstruct my husband. Because for all my recklessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and disregard for the well-being of my children, I have a soul that loves and knows beauty.”

I was by myself, watching the television in a waiting room, waiting for the guy to change my inspection sticker (yes, I still have that fucking car), and as soon as I knew that’s what I hoped, those words, those ideas, I felt embarrassed of the things I imagined wanting from her.

This is the problem with thinking and with wanting anything.

The couch felt funny against my skin. Inside my skin, my insides felt funny. It’s just not a nice way of speaking.

GYM

Remember what you said when we were walking down the street and we passed that window with all the treadmills, these guys running and running, trying and trying to get through the window, all these guys in the background, so earnest and voluntarily tangled in these contraptions like medieval torture machines, and remember how I said we should hook them up to a loom and you said no, a generator, and we debated the merits and you totally won, but I think now what I liked about my idea so much was that what a loom makes is warm and colorful, and power, well, power is awful and invisible.

RUBE GOLDBERG

As you walk past cobbler shop, hook (A) strikes suspended boot (B) causing it to kick football (C) through goalposts (D). Football drops into basket (E) and string (F) tilts sprinkling can (G), causing water to soak coattails (H). As coat shrinks, cord (I) opens door (J) of cage, allowing bird (K) to walk out on perch (L) and grab worm (M), which is attached to string (N). This pulls down window shade (O), on which is written,“YOU SAP. MAIL THAT LETTER.” A simple way to avoid all this trouble is to marry a wife who can’t write. (http://www.rube-goldberg.com/html/mail%20a%20letter.htm)

PROJECTOR

At the movies it was about a scary video and you had to watch the video really carefully, looking for anything, and I saw the circular blip in the corner of the film, the one that tells the operator to switch reels, and I thought it meant something, I thought it was like when Bergman burned the film but then in this movie nothing came of it. Then I kept thinking: it had to be something because are there even projector operators anymore?

Here are some of the machines in a different movie from this week: CD players with headphones and just all kinds of music-recording equipment, microphones, whole panels with knobs for adjusting levels, a bus, lots of cars in the traffic scenes and cityscapes as well as two or three car-fixing scenes, a factory machine that the guys count to two and push these giant buttons in unison and the machine presses car doors into shape, some guns (Is a gun a machine? You bet it’s a machine. I just never thought of it before), the whole regular cast of kitchen appliances in the kitchen (There was only one kitchen in this movie and it was in a trailer!) although I don’t think the stove made it into any shots.There weren’t any computers in this movie.

Some machines, I notice, are better than others for bouncing ideas off of, and for containing undesirable emotions.

AIR CONDITIONER

It goes like this: The house contains people and machines. The landlord owns the house. The landlord gets mad at the tenants when the machines break. The tenants get mad at the machines when he’s an asshole.

I hated him, all the tenants hated him, we all hated the landlord. He kept thinking of dumb upgrades so he could raise rent, thirty dollars and then thirty more for this other thing, and fixed everything with duct tape and got mad at you if anything broke. Haven’t I told you this before? He got mad at me when I got robbed, when that guy came in and stood over my bed, holding my TV. He was an overinvolved landlord, meddling, emotional. He’d come over in his tennis outfit and want everyone’s rent, stick his head in your kitchen. He’d come over and start talking with us as if we didn’t hate him.

I was on the porch smoking with Emma, who I must have mentioned, she was so pretty. Hippie girl downstairs, very pretty girl, lithe, always stoned, but intelligent. We were looking at how he’d put in a big hulking air-conditioning unit along the side of the house. We started talking about how stupid it was, how in those old Southern houses, you just open the doors and breezes go right through, you just don’t need air-conditioning. I love a real breeze, and it was another way for him to charge more money. We started talking about hating the landlord. Made fun of his accent and his wife, his car, his haircut, the way he walked, his nose, his mother we’d seen him riding with one day, her accent, the little dog she carried and how the dog would leap at the window and bounce against it, snarling. Emma did a snarling minidog imitation and then we sat smoking for a minute and then she just went down off the porch and stood next to the air conditioner and kicked it. I came down and stood next to her and then we just started kicking it in. Emma had clogs on but she could still kick great. We kicked in the part with the fan, very satisfying to kick in, and then we kicked at the grill until it flopped off and there was all that silvery fibrous filter stuff, which felt great to kick, because it crumbled and left the prints of my boots and her clogs. I can’t believe I haven’t told you this before.

The next day I looked down from my window and saw the top of his head. He was standing next to the kicked-in air conditioner, talking to Emma through her kitchen window about those idiots who’d backed their car into his unit. He said “unit. ” Even from my window I could see the marks our shoes left. “You sure it was a car?” Emma asked, but he was sure. “I should put in a curb,” he said.

I moved, but maybe six months later I saw Emma, and we got a bunch of dog shit, and we pushed it through the mail slot at his house.Would he think dogs did that? I asked Emma, who was looking through the slot into his house, “Is this satisfying to you?” She said, “Yes!”

AIRPLANE

My grandfather liked to fly so low over the villages he bombed that he’d return with blood on his fuselage, or at least that’s what he told his kids.

SOME MATH

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Poked him with their index fingers, told lies about his mother, smacked him in his funny bones, scratched his eyes out with their fingernails. Person Equals Torturer.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Chained him in the stocks, stuck him in a barrel, let the community take over. They peed on him. People Equals Torture.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Torture (an OED definition): to ‘twist’ (language, etc.) from the proper or natural meaning or form; to distort, pervert. For example: the Chair, the Pear, the Wheel, the Fork, the Ladder, the Hook, the Rack, the Saw, or the great Bronze Bowl. Jim surveyed the chamber. My God! Any ordinary thing, it seemed, could kill you. A chair. A sweet pear. For the rest of his days, though he walked away, his eyes shifted, his body crooked and leaping with nerves. He feared paper clips, cups and saucers, the toilet plunger, packing-tape rollers, newspaper caddies, golf clubs, typewriter covers, pocket protectors, humble onions, and any piece of furniture, especially pine. Object Equals Torture.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. His son Charlie kept hamsters in his bedroom, but when they overturned a bowl of rodents on Jim’s stomach and heated the bowl, the rodents burrowed. The pulley that raised his intestines had been so friendly when it lifted cargo from his ship. The apple rumps of the four horses set to draw and quarter him were rosy, broad, and quivered, ready and afraid. Animal Plus Person Equals Machine.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured.The Branks, the Breast Ripper, the Headcrusher, the Whirligig, the Ducking Stool, the Cat’s Paw, Phalaris’s Bull, the Rack, the Brodequin, but then, more wonderful, the Iron Maiden, which enclosed him like an exoskeleton, his body within a body, pierced and warm within cold metal. Then when they set up to strangle him, Jim expected a pair of stockings, as before, which had worked fine for a garrote when they first worked with objects, but this time they brought out a loop of metal with a screw that tightened it. There was something different about this strangling.The limp stocking had leaped to life and stiffened with action around his neck, but this, these specialized machines, he thought, meant someone knew all along he’d be tortured. They’d prepared and readied a machine to place between them, as if the torturer was entirely audience, as if the whole scenario was predetermined, Jim bound there prone, torture his fate. Machine Equals Torture; Torturer Equals Machine.

Outside the chamber, he saw no Iron Maidens, he saw no screw-laden loop devices as he wobbled from his shack to work and back. His eyes rolled, unfocused in his head because he could not place his fear; the machines were in the dungeons but he saw the dungeons everywhere.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. The Bed of Nails, the Hugging Stones, the Wooden Horse, or, best, I think, the Judas Cradle, which is nothing more than a spiked pyramid with ropes and pulleys above it. Only when they added Jim did it become a machine.They lowered his ass quietly onto the tip and let his weight work. Body Plus Object Equals Torture Machine.Tortured Equals Machine Equals Torturer.

Here the action of the machine destroyed the machine. Jim slumped, quiet, eyes closed. Outside, new parts waited in line.

CYBORGS, OR UNIVERSE AS MACHINE

Overnight, a line wormed into my face. I went to sleep and I had no control over what happened next. I hoped I’d slept on a pillow crease, but it felt like something might have gotten to me in the night. I rubbed my face and stretched the skin. It’s a puppet-mouth line, but only one. I’m aging lopsided.

Remember that guy who worked in the container factory? The tiny plastic bottles like thick thumbs, and then he puts them on a machine and they balloon into what we drink soda from. I’m looking at my thumb, a miniature torso.

I talked to Liz. As a kid, she was saying, she loved buttons. Anything she could push.Then I went to the movies again and it was a film about love, French, so I call it a film, but dumb, dumb, and then in the end the girl gets electroshock on one side of town and the man is hooked to a heart monitor on the other and the more they shock her the stronger he gets.

There are many more chemicals now than there were in the 1940s. Chemicals made only in laboratories are now peppering our bodies and twinkling in the stratosphere. Some of my DNA is patented. I don’t mean to be cryptic, but I know the line on my face could just go away tomorrow, as if traveling through. It doesn’t feel like it will, though. It will. I am closer and closer to being a mannequin. Honey, honey, honey, all my moving parts . . .

YOGURT MAKER

Your yogurt maker arrived.Thank you. It’s more compact than I expected. It’s the size of a swaddled infant. It’s shaped like a torpedo. It’s amazing what’s going to happen in there, deep in the constant temperature. Incubation.

You know how yeast weirds me out. You know the high stakes of canning. This yogurt is a risk. But I have to figure out what to do with my body. I’m so tired. Luckily, soon, I am going to see you.

PRINTING PRESS

How clean the computer is, how uninked the text. Paper is the body and the body is gone. It’s the ghost of a machine. It’s trying to pull one over.Without the paper nothing’s impressed. There’s nothing to feel.

I think a lot of people think the computer is sexy. Inside a computer there’s a lot of animated humping. There are a lot of slick aerodynamic images to associate with computers, gleaming, greaseless chrome in space. The computer is invisible : wires and light, tiny welded grids and dots somewhere behind sexy screen robots. I can only imagine.

Is a printing press sexy? Ink and weight. In a sex scene they’re naked on the printing press, butts on vast plates, letters looming, rolling around, getting printed. They’ve picked a special text or something. Kafka’s machine kills with words, garbled ones, the idea of them, remember?

On the computer there’s this database of missing persons.

VIBRATOR

I had one for a while but then I left it somewhere and forgot.

TAXI

When we get to the rally it’s in a packed auditorium with raked seating. This is me and Michael, my Jewish cousin. In the pauses the speakers leave for cheering we each decide to add our voice or not. All of us in the room are doing this. My voice, a voice, our voice. Ambiguous phrasing. We’re here to rile ourselves up, to feel collective, our breath, our bodies, our encased minds seeping into the noise from the orifices in our faces, but in each pause, some of us are silent and some are very, very loud. I refuse to chant one of the chants because it is so wrong and stupid. I might have forgotten I’m invisible in the crowd. I am having a private exercise, deciding what words to put in my mouth. Political machine. War machine. Then outside, after, we take a cab, me and Michael, who has it in him to be a loudmouth. Blah, blah, Israel, he says. Blah, blah, Iraq. There’s the barrier of plexiglass between us and the Arab driver and my cousin’s leaning up against the seat back, profile to me, profile to the driver when the driver puts his eyes to the mirror, which he does, he puts his eyes right to the mirror. Do you think you’re being friendly, Michael? Are you so convinced of your own goodness you think it’s okay for you to talk like this? I mean you’ve got the money, but right this second he’s got the machine.

AMPLIFIER

On my back, on the floor of this city basement, I’m moving my eyes along the brick ceiling, which is vaulted, mortared in waves, with a sloppy grid of pipes and beams suspended below it. Curves through a grid, like music itself.

I sit up long enough to watch you plug everything in. I watch you drag cords around. Plugging the cords into their places is one language I don’t know.Your guitarist telling you a whole new song by saying letters that aren’t words: that’s another. I look at the cords, amazed at how many turns one cord makes and then how another will barely reach and this shows how much distance doesn’t matter. Sound or electricity or some combination, something I can imagine only in cartoon will travel through it fast enough that no ears and surely not my stumpy ones could hear a difference. Sound turning corners. Your guitarist switches to sitar and I move my eyes back to the ceiling.

I see the ceiling for a long time before I notice the population balanced between the bricks and the beams. How did all these items come to reside in this space between surfaces? A banjo, a rubber monster mask, a bicycle, more cords, a stretched canvas, a row of buckets of water sealer, a wad of Christmas lights, an enormous can of tomatoes, the leg of a large pink doll, a push broom, a pole lamp, a rolled-up sleeping bag. And here I am among them.

My God, your voice. I am so used to it speaking but when you sing how will I ever be able to say anything to you again? You speak and I hear words but you sing and how unfamiliar you instantly become, how distant and still somehow mine for having known your voice before it took off with your violin, and amplified. You make the world bigger. You make everything disgusting disappear. You’ve covered it in a clean sheet. Everything is a cold lump once you erase its relevance with sound.

MACHINE

Okay, this one has no machines. Unless, as so much history and language would have us believe, our bodies are machines.

STILL LIFE

It’s late. You’re sleeping here in the warm shadows. I cannot even see you breathe. Verb, the word, is still. No moving parts. Silence. A machine, defunct. A machine, pre-force. Shoes, footless. Simple potential. A baby in a photograph. An eggplant, whole and raw, molecules moving invisibly. An eggplant, cooked, post-sizzle. A baby in a photograph, still. Past and future action, ambition, accomplishment. Having done. Will do.

Can we be still? How still can we be? How perpetually hungry?

Don’t go.You’re always so far away. Making, doing, making do.

MACHINES

Can opener. Electric pencil sharpener. Automatic garage door. Food processor. Remote-control dog collar. Dictaphone. Videotape rewinder. Hair-comb poison-dart deployer. Microwave oven. Six-slice toaster. Bush Hog and bulldozer. Long-range spy cam. Massage chair. White-noise maker. Cotton gin. 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory. Bubble machine. Stun gun.

Lawnmower, dishwasher, typesetter, welder, word processor, streetsweeper, engraver, and other people who are machines.

Cooper, Smith,Weaver, Cartwright, C arpenter, Miller, Potter, Baker, Barker, Shoemaker, Taylor, Mason, Plumber, Butler, Groom, Fisher, Shepherd, Hunter, Porter, Knight, Bishop, King, Dean, Parson, Proctor, Berger, Monger, Messenger, Mailer, Shipman, Skinner, Tanner, Butcher, Gardener, Singer, Cook.

Back at the supermarket, a guy with a heaping cart approaches the girl in charge of checkout. “Are you open?” the guy asks. “Oh, I’m not a line,” she says. “I’m automated.”

MY MACHINE

Even as you are my love, you are more. You are more than body.You are beyond words. Also imaginary.

MACHINE

The laboratory is filled with tanks of small octopuses, none larger than a glove, stacked floor to ceiling in individual plexiglass tanks, and they have been left alone for months except for feedings, performed automatically by a robot named Madge.The little octopuses stretch their icy limbs through the airholes, groping, and occasionally slide across one another, so forlorn their chromatophores are blinking darkly, and this continues until one octopus coils a tentacle around the tentacle of another octopus and pulls so hard she stretches thin and slips through the airhole, and although her partner does not, she drops from the tank and lands on one of the silver discs of a balance set to weigh a gathering of marbles in a plastic net sack with an open neck. The balance tips with a thud and marbles spill and scatter across the laboratory table, bouncing and rolling in four directions, sort-of-north, sort-of-south, sort-of-east, and sort-of-west, and the westward marble rolls into a mouse hole—one of those tiny black arches that in another cartoon would be a train tunnel but in this one is a mouse hole—and once inside it bowls the little mouse off her feet as she scrubs dishes in her kitchen and is caught up on the marble as it rolls, her feet pattering to keep up, and they roll on out the back mouse door and outside the laboratory, which is the bottom floor of a tall, dark-brick apartment building, patter, patter, go, go, down the paved path over hills into the distance, and meanwhile, the octopuses left in their tanks, terrified and frenzied, are circling in sync. They circle and circle and it sets up a rhythm, and the whole wall of them begins to creak and shake and then the tanks tumble, water gushing, plexiglass bouncing across the laboratory floor, and this makes enough ruckus that several stories up, a geranium in a terra-cotta pot that has been balanced on a windowsill shivers just enough that it inches and then topples and falls alongside the fire escape and smack, lands on the spoon end of a shovel and there’s a cat who, walking along, happens to be stepping over the shovel handle when the pot hits and is flung into the air, yowling and flailing, until he catches onto a lady’s undergarment that is hung from a clothesline and there he clings to it, dangling. Meanwhile, bouncing off the laboratory table, another marble plops onto a sleeping dog that wakes with a fart that lights a candle that burns through another clothesline, this one hung with seven shirts with silver buttons that shine so brightly in the sun they frighten two chickens who drop one egg each from their bottoms, and the eggs smack into an iron pan on a stove and a great wind comes and swooshes the eggshells away and thereby a bald man’s breakfast is cooked.

Some machines exist only in writing.

Plus, there are many more marbles.

BODIES AND PARTS

Our parts were in the bed. I lifted my fingers to your fingers, and inside, our mirrored veins bustled with vessels, just as I remember them bustling in grade-school filmstrips, corpuscles like sucking candies bumbling through corridors like bottles along a conveyor belt, top view so you’re looking at all caps, conveyor belt as bisected vein, veins in fingers, fingers to limbs, veins and vessels to mind. Without our skin we’d fall apart. Laverne and Shirley wobbled away from the factory on bicycles. We could hear the sound of distant faxing.

Baby in a Body Cast

In the corner, the baby looked in the direction his body cast cast him.

Birth did it to him, squished his bendy bones through the yawn of his mother’s pelvis and left him floppy. In one open moment his skin felt the white air. The world was loud. It gushed, prismatic, cold, sharp, dry, and gaspingly empty. He tingled in the starry light that lit him as if from within. His bones pushed at his skin, loosed from their joints, and while there was pain, he also felt his body loosed in the universe. His bones bobbed, noodles in soup, and then everyone in the room surrounded him, darkening the light, and soon he was wrapped, cupped, and wet in white. The world had taken one step away—noise sucked back where it came from, sounding again as it had from his mother’s belly, but without her humming insides. He heard distant sounds, and the only close ones were his own, his body’s sounds and the sounds of his body’s sticky contact with its cast. Soon the air left the plaster cold. Soon he lay like a doll at his mother’s breast, separated everywhere except his face. His eyes moved. He could move his eyes without hurting anything.

His parents worried for a while. It was all so new. They’d never had a baby before. But soon, to everyone, he was simply himself, only more triangular than he might always be, a shiny bar holding his legs apart, like a shower rod between his ankles, and overall immobile and numbed. The three of them went home, down to their cellar apartment, practically painless.

In the cement kitchen they were having words. They fought over what the word mean means. She accused him of accusing her. He accused her back. It was a whole word situation.

In the corner, the baby scooted his eyes like an owl’s head, because the baby’s neck was immobilized, his head as if earless, and only his face shone bare. The fluffy spotted dog lay on the linoleum by the radiator, chewing a feather. His father’s fists knuckled deep into a loaf ’s-worth of bread dough. A teal fan blew down from a cupboard. The surface of the dough moved, and the dog tried to toss the feather but it clung to his teeth.The baby’s eyes tired, a pendulum plus friction, until they settled, and whatever lay before them slunk in.

It was raining so hard and had been long enough that a puddle collected on the stoop outside and water pulsed under the kitchen door like a cat’s paw. Then his mother flung her oven mitts to the floor, snatched her purse by its macramé strap, and scooped him up by the bar. She balanced the strap on one shoulder and his bar on the other, facing the purse clasp toward her hip to discourage pickpockets, and facing his face away for obvious reasons. The baby’s gaze, upside down, remained placid. She checked to be sure. You can tell by its face how a baby feels. She peered at it.

She shifted her body sideways to ease them through the kitchen door, cursed the puddle, climbed the few stairs, and used both her hands to push the cellar trapdoors open, her arms blooming, doors the green outer petals, the baby and the bag swinging like a milkmaid’s pails. “Don’t get any ideas!” she called, her voice zooming into the street, and the air, and the buildings, and the sky, but her words aimed backward, toward her husband where he raised the dough in a gesture of defiance, and it sunk over his fist. Somewhere between the mitts and the cellar steps, the rain had stopped.The mother gathered her skirt, mounted her bicycle, balanced the baby across her lap, pushed off, and pedaled. A girl across the street watched from behind an iron railing and then returned to gazing into the mouths of the tulips.Tulips filled the courtyard garden, and the girl’s head bent among them.

The baby couldn’t recognize that he was seeing the world sideways and shifting with his mother’s knees. He didn’t know what was wrong, yet. He could feel the insides of his head slosh. He was so tired from being immobilized and surprised at moving so quickly that he didn’t cry. Inside the cast he jiggled, humid. His floating organs vibrated and shifted like raindrops on the window of a speedy car. The world looked brown and gray with flashes of bright mottled colors. The world had streaks and whenever the bicycle stopped at a curb the world stayed shaking. It bounced. It hummed and crackled. Leaves and bits of paper spattered through the bicycle spokes and zoomed under his head. He saw the scraps as fluid. He saw the world that encased and traveled with him. The low rosy sun warmed the surface of his cast, a slim inch from his gray-pink skin.

Then his mother stopped the bike and let it clatter to the ground as she disembarked, and then she righted him so that she clasped around the cast at his waist and he faced, over her shoulder, her hair, which surrounded him like an enthusiastic wig. He could not see down, but soon the bicycle emerged, distant, back wheel hovering over a white asphalt walkway, front wheel appearing first to have disappeared, but emerging simply sunk into a lawn of grass overtaken by Boston ivy. Behind his head he heard his mother knocking at a door, a sound like pancakes falling onto a plate. “Open sesame,” she murmured, just as she did when opening the trapdoor in his cast for diapers. Behind his head his old aunt opened up and said to the blank plaster balloon she faced, “Beautiful! Look how big!”The sisters were further apart than most, his mother born from a menopausal womb.

Inside they balanced him on a blossoming sofa. He stood, cast as if ready to hop, each foot set on a leaf that outlined it. His butt rested on one white bloom and his head rested on another, and on each side of his head, where his ears might have been, the sofa puckered with a button. His mother sat next to him, invisible, and his old aunt held up to him a fuzzy yellow-footed hooded bodysuit and tried to gauge what size he was inside. His smooth white cast outlined the yellow version. The aunt patted it, and the fabric and the plaster clung. He looked like a frosted cookie. She tilted her head from side to side, making her smile rock. Above him, behind the sofa, the landscape loomed in a picture window. A cloud the shape of a mountain crossed in front of a mountain. Across from him a blue parrot in a cage said, “That was delicious, I’ll have another.”When the aunt moved her head one way the parrot appeared on her shoulder, and when she moved it back the parrot was gone. Ticktock. His mother said, “I need a couple of days,” and the aunt rubbed her hands together as if they were cold or she wanted to make more static.

“That bad?” said the aunt. A telephone rang, the aunt left, and then she said, “Yes.Yes.Yes.”

“I have nothing to say,” said his mother and picked him up to comfort herself. She paced between the sofa and the coffee table. “Ass,” she said. “Bastard.” His head hovered near one shoulder and his mother’s hair lay on the other. She held him with one arm and pet the hair.The aunt returned with a silver tray and three martinis, olives lolling on their toothpick axes. His mother lay off her hair to sip while the aunt unlatched the parrot’s cage door. “I know, I know,” said the aunt and placed the second glass in the cage next to the cherrywood stick the parrot liked to gnaw on.

The parrot eyed the martini with terror and began to drink.

The baby’s mother sat on the sofa, balancing the cast bar crosswise on her thigh and now he could see behind her out the window. A woman walked along in a skin-colored jumpsuit. A man in a golf cart rode by them all. Evening settled into a fine dark film coating everything.

“You know what he has?” said his mother. “He has a turkey lure called ‘call girl.’”

“I know, I know.”

“Can’t you see him with his rifle on his shoulder—” she cleared her throat and switched the baby to the other side—“whistling in a field and then this poor thing in spiked heels comes galloping?”

“You’d miss that dog.”

“I’d miss the dog.”

Daily, each evening, starlings arranged themselves with regularity, evenly, like thousands of buttons along the phone wires, and then in a cloud they’d rise like static, and they did so now. Then more birds lined up, but this time when they left they left like tape pulled from its backing, the line of black birds separating from the black wire, one line leaving the frame like the side view of a page in a book, turning.This had never happened before, in all of history.The baby did not know what the organs in his body looked like, and he did not know history. When the cloud like a mountain crossed the mountain, this was the action of words that are sounds. In his mind floated an image: the woman in the jumpsuit having her skin unzipped for her, and nothing tumbling out but more skin.

“Like Pepper!” said his aunt.“I miss Pepper. I might not ever have mentioned him. Those years you were in Greece. With that man, what was his name? You loved that man. Pepper, what a wonderful little dog. Silky terrier. Little hero. Did I tell you? No. Well, one day I’m walking in the golf course with Bradley, the old pie-face—this was back in the day—and we see the most luminous mushrooms, so we pick them, and as we’re having guests, I sauté little slivers into an appetizer with gravy over polenta, bruschetta, something, and everyone arrives. I have the whole service for twelve and Pepper is yapping and hopping about on his legs. So, under the table where he can’t be seen I deliver him nibbles of the mushrooms from my plate, and Pepper collapses. Right under the table like a canary in a coal mine. I can feel him on my shoe as if I’ve spilled. Well, we all go to the hospital—me and Pie-face and all ten guests, including the Mustards and the Newmans, march, march—and there we are all saved by vomiting. They give us something bitter and bubbling and we stand in the hospital corridor with private buckets. Without Pepper we’d never have called the ambulance so quickly. A hero, that little dog.” Then the aunt lifted her olive from her empty glass and sucked it off its stick. “That was delicious,” she said. “I’ll have another. You’re here, my dear,” she shrugged. “We’ll make a thing of it.”

The baby fell asleep and in his dreams he saw the insides of tulips come to encase his face and then move past like red- and peach-colored mist. A series of yellow rubber balls bounced among houses and rolled into the golf course like fruit into a bowl. He woke very close to his mother’s moving mouth. It was dark because outside the cast he was inside a blanket. He felt wind ease through the fibers onto his eyes. He cried and distant vibrations thumped from his shoulders down.

“There, there,” his mother said.

He said, “Ink. Album. Bog,” and his mother tilted him away from her shoulder and looked at him. She arranged the blanket around his plaster shoulders and leaned him again against her cotton one.They’d moved to the porch, into lantern light. Three cicadas spun on the floorboards like clowns. A fourth dive-bombed and lay stunned among them, face like an old, mean man. A fat one. Then the baby smelled sugar and then, mystery instantly solved as if he’d wondered, his aunt moved through his vision and placed a bottle of hand cream on the windowsill.“Another failed lotion,” she said, leaned her elbows on the porch rail, and looked out over the hunching bushes into the canopy of the yard’s one large tree. Behind the remark tunneled the private history of time in drugstore aisles, testing textures and staring at her skin. Inside, the parrot squawked once. “Crock,” it said. Outside, the sign under the street lamp and over the hedges read, “English Muffin Rd.” His mother leaned back in her springy swivel porch chair and put her feet up. The one stunned cicada loomed closer, others having buzzed off, and the lotion slipped into the blank world overhead. The table was a giant wooden spool, shellacked, fitted with a round glass top, all of which the baby couldn’t see. Then the mother put her feet back on the ground and jiggled him fussily. She threaded the blanket between his arms and his body and it made a limp hoop around his waist.

“I will make you another martini and then I have a story for you,” said the aunt. “It’s about Narcissus. It’s a warning.” She gathered the two glasses into one hand, crossed at the stems so that the bowls looked both ways. “All right, I’ll tell you now. It’s not such a big story. I’m just telling it because you’re so sad.” A flock of geese flew overhead, sounding like noisemakers. The aunt said, “Knew a girl who wanted to kill herself, so she goes down to the river dock with a bag of quick-mix cement and a bucket and a watering can. Puts the bucket on the edge of the dock, stands in it, fills it with the stuff, waters herself, and waits. She watches her face stay still as the river moves by and thinks dreamily: that’s what I’ll soon be in the face of time, still as it moves, as still as it is moving. She thinks poetic because she’s suicidal. She weeps awhile. She looks at all the water wrinkles on her face. Soon she’s grounded in her resolve and she tries to wiggle her toes but cannot. She’s encased, she’s ready to go, and she makes the move to tip herself over but the bucket won’t budge. She’s rooted. She can’t even bend her knees and fall backward because she’s facing the river. She’d wanted to go head first.”

The aunt went into the house with the glasses and the baby saw an imaginary animal in the shapes of the shrubs. His father’s head rode along the hedgerow and then, at the top of the walkway, his body materialized. He strolled. Then he crouched next to the empty bicycle.

“To be brave,” said the aunt. “To look it in the eye,” she called from the house.

“A bull. Oboe,” the baby said, watching his father spin the wheels. “Taboo.”

“Did she wither there? Did someone come and cut her down? Did her knees buckle in the bucket?” asked the aunt, returning through the house with the glasses on a little silver tray in one hand, shaking a finger on the other as if to dry it, her head tipped contemplatively. She paused in the doorway. “That moon,” she said, “is hovering.” Then she said, “Well, hello Dan.” The baby and his mother clinked heads as his mother braced herself. Both his father’s hands were bare now, the dough replaced with flesh. He balanced, half risen, on the white strip of asphalt. Spokes flashed. Then he fully rose. Behind his head the moon bloomed, still hovering, and then, as his father neared, it seemed to sink.

“Hello, Meg,” he said. “I need some time with Beth.”

The baby heard breath. The baby heard tiny creaks from inside his mother’s neck, where many cords thrived. She turned in her swiveling porch chair. His father moved to where the baby’s ear would be. Past the lotion and through the screen, deep into the living room his aunt settled herself at the piano. She looked like a doll, playing: limbs all stretched out swimming. The piano’s angle in the house made it echo so that it sounded like a fleet of pianos. Flying. A flock. A fleet. Sound bouncing, making multiple Vs, invisible geometry.

“The cellar is empty without you,” his father said somewhere near his ear.“I’m sorry I ruined the bread,” he said,“but I gotta come clean.” He placed himself at the table, opposite. The baby, not having eyes in the back of his cast, only heard. “Are you ready to hear what I have to say? I saw one of those trucks stuffed with anguished chickens, but I couldn’t tell you, because of all those times.”

“That’s not what I meant, Dan, and I think you know it.”

“All those long drives, I’d see an animal dead on the road and I’d say anything to keep you looking the other way.‘Look! Balloon Chase Vehicle! Sudden Stops and Indecision!’ You must have thought I was crazy. But it wasn’t anything. Only in my past.”

“We have been through this and through this.”

“Honey: growing pig teeth in the stomachs of rats.That’s all I’m saying. It’s just something reminded me.”

“I know that’s how you see it, but I don’t.”

His father’s voice became its quietest. It cut a silent hole through the air and then traveled though it. “I only want to protect you.”

“I wish you could hear yourself sometimes,” his mother said, and snapped the tunnel shut with her teeth.

In the baby’s line of vision was the metal fold-out stand teetering on chrome legs. It held music that he saw from behind, and only on the other side were tiny lines with tiny dancing inked rods and dots. Even his aunt only saw the way they moved up and down, and followed, knowing the tune. She’d put the music on the music stand instead of the piano because she wanted to look past it, toward the porch. The music stand was for the clarinet, but the baby didn’t know this. He could see her staring. He could only imagine. He imagined goldfish and berries raining.

The baby could hear through the pores in his cast. “Abe,” he said. “Amok.” His parents continued to speak in code.

“They cut the burial suit down the back.”

“I remember.”

“The whole house was awake from your packing tape.”

“I know.”

“Doll,” said the baby. “Bone,” he said and then, in a sort of spasm, his mother moved him to face her, his moony helmet hugging his moony face, her dark curls like night clouds around hers, and said, “What did he say? What? What?” Her eyes were like panic buttons and her mouth was a wilted petunia and her skin glowed like underwater lit with lamp bulbs. The baby’s blanket slumped to the plank floor in a heap.

“I miss those cameos,” said his father. “I want all that stuff I said.”

“I believe we have covered this territory,” she said, but still looked at the baby as if he knew something she didn’t know, or had known only a very long time ago.

“God,” his father said.

She still looked at him.Then she put him back.

“I couldn’t see how you could understand. That’s why.” Over her shoulder, the window screen made the house inside gray.

“Oh,” she said. She shivered. “I don’t. I don’t understand.”

He could feel his mother hang there, a burnt coat. He could feel fuzzed edges of plastered fabric rubbing his sloughing skin. This is what he always felt. He could feel his blood beat. He could feel his body humming. His body hummed and sweat. His mother’s body beat beside him, very far away.

“Ba-ha,” said the baby.

Hum. Drum. Inside: the frazzled piano, his aunt pretending she couldn’t hear, pretending to be swept away.

“What does he mean, ‘Ba-ha?’” said his father. He walked around behind his wife and squatted, face-to-face with the baby. His father was bald, and even in the late summer he wore a black ski cap, as he did now. “Whatcha talking about baby, baby?” he said. He placed his hand on the round white cast-roof and rubbed as if it were furry. He made a frowny face. Then he stood and put the hand on his wife’s neck and drew her head back, leaned over her and kissed her from above. By the time he stopped, she was crying. He took the cap off his head and ambled into the night, swinging it like a lunch pail.

His mother cried. Then she looked at her baby. He still seemed placid, but truly, he had already learned to keep the muscles in his face relaxed because of all they connected. He’d already learned, because of pain, and without knowing anything, to remain constant in an unreadable way. “Look at you, little chicken,” she said clearly. “When will you get to crack your egg?”

Very far away, in other lands, but also in prisons and factories not so far, and in some of the houses on the aunt’s very street, the world was bad, beaten, beating, but here it wasn’t so. It was not too bad. People meant to be kind. They did all right. It’s hard to understand. The baby didn’t know he was in a cast. How could he want out? But he did want out. He tried to squirm.

Inside, the piano clunked to a stop midtune, the aunt no longer pretending she’d been playing except to make herself scarce. She slipped back onto the porch and watched, with her sister, his father’s retreat.

“Poor piano,” she said, wiggling her fingers. “All that music inside and no way out. Come, come, now, what was all that?”

“I don’t know,” said his mother. “Nonsense really. I think he was trying to warn me. I can see right through him. It’s just so much work.” Light from the porch lamp tented them, and the nature of the moon, a reflective surface with no light of its own, was especially appropriate.

“Coded. Coated,” said his aunt. “I know how it is. Look who I’m with. Not to mention the beak! Ha! Okay, not so funny. Here, I’ve got another one for you. When I was teaching, living in that crappy apartment. Had a neighbor. Shelley. How did I know her, really? I don’t remember. One day Shelley comes over, ravaged. It’s four in the afternoon. Man arrived to fix her sink and raped her. Pete. We learn this later. No question, girl was ravaged, heaving. Wouldn’t go to any hospital. Spent a couple of nights on my sofa. Said she had dreams of penises like feet.Then she went back to her place. I kept an eye on her but she retreated and soon enough there she is, lugging groceries up the staircase, huge, and then she’s having the baby.

“She tries to prosecute the guy. I’d see him around, still fixing apartments. He says no sex happened, they do a blood test, then he says, well, maybe sex but no rape, so she gets child support. I don’t know. Having that baby. Not moving away. I moved before she did. Here, in fact. But this is more my point: I had a student, year or two after Shelley’s baby, this lovely, bright girl, very put together. Rose, my student. She got an award from the department—clever, inventive girl, very steady. This is when I put it together. I’m at the award ceremony and turn around to meet the girl’s father, and it’s the guy: Pete. From the rape. I guess he knows I know because his face gets chaotic and then he flees.

“I can see his daughter, Rose. Then and now I can see her. She’s up on the stage where she’s supposed to be with those twats from the department.There behind the white tablecloth and that blue bunting, or what-d’ya-call-it, what they use to skirt folding tables.Table skirt. It that it? God, she’d been trying to catch his eye, to wave, watching for him and feeling happy to see him in the throng and meeting her professors, meeting me, and then there, he shakes my hand—my hand!—and, as soon as the guy starts fleeing, as soon as I put it together, I look up at the stage and I can see her change. It’s like something was cracking, this happy surface of hers. I could feel his vibrations still in my hand. Looking up at her. I just stood there and watched her whole world falling away. That rosy girl.” She gazed across the baby at her sister, who had laid him like a dulcimer across her lap. “She must have been suspecting something,” the aunt said. The consciousness of the aunt was, at this point, completely encased in her story. “Well,” she said, the case dissipating, “you can imagine.”

The baby’s mother wasn’t thinking about the story, which was filled with the names of people she didn’t know. She thought about her sister’s stories and her husband’s stories. She thought, It’s always one thing or another. She thought about growing up, knowing more and more things, and having no idea how to put them together. It just wasn’t right. It was, she felt, unjust.

The aunt looked at her and squinted. “Or perhaps, I see, you can’t,” she said.

“Why did the woman have that baby?” asked his mother.

“Hell, I don’t know. No offense, sugar,” said his aunt, leaning forward and patting his head as if it were his head. “But I was thinking about the girl. I mean Shelley, sure, same as always with raped people. But I mean that Rose who tried so hard and learned so much . . .”

“I hear what you’re saying, but Dan’s not a rapist,” said his mother. “I know he wants to tell me something. I’ll figure it out. I’ll get it out of him. I have my ways,” she said, her voice lightening.

“Cipher. Siphon,” said the aunt. “He’s something.”

“He’s not bad. He’s just my husband.”

“What’s bad? What’s bad enough?”

“He’ s not bad like that. I am not a beaten wife.”

“Just beaten? Just wife?”

“Meg, you are exhausting and predictable. Look at you.”

The aunt’s head hovered, damp and white, below the beaded porch ceiling.The baby didn’t know that he heard as if underwater, all sounds surrounded, glaze over a dark cake. Still, sounds moved for him like heavy-headed flowers on a faintly jiggling earth.

“Echo,” he said, bubbles at his lips. “Atone.”

“Look at this,” said the aunt, lifting an envelope from a pile of junk mail on the glass-top spool. “‘The information you requested is enclosed.’ Ha.”

“Ba-ha!” called the parrot from behind the screen and the skeleton of its complicated cage. “Doll! Bone!”

“Hold him,” said his mother. They shifted their springy swivel chairs toward each other and tilted the baby lap to lap. If he had not been wearing his cast, the baby could have felt the very top ribs of his aunt’s core against his back. His plaster brushed her clavicle. His mother wore a housedress decorated with tiny red apples, not what she’d been wearing before he’d slept. The apples lay along a grid in various phases of being eaten. Then his aunt turned him to face her. She looked into his round eyes with her crumpled ones. “Knock, knock,” she said, tapping his lid. “Is there anybody there? May I come in?” Some of the moon shone against the scalloped edge of the largest tree in the yard, the rest of it obscured by night-black leaves. His mother traveled from somewhere behind him to the corner of the porch and leaned on the rail with her elbows, holding the parrot’s feet in her fist. The parrot stood, cleanly outlined in the earliest of morning light, all silhouette and glow. Between his mother’s body and the parrot’s, white letters from the street sign shined, “uffin.”

“Why did you end up with Sonny and not me?” his mother asked.

“No one wants an inherited bird. Mother made me promise. And I liked him. And I was there.”

“I like him a little. Sonny must be very old now. How old must he be?” she asked, a little to the bird himself.

“Not old.That’s Sonny two. Sonny the second.”

“I don’t understand.”

“New bird.”

“No. It can’t be.”

“Absolutely. God, where were you? Entirely new bird.What the hell, Beth? Why are you crying?”

“Where was I? Where were you? It goes both ways.”

“Beth,” she said, “no one is trying to fool you.”

“I loved that bird. We grew up with that bird. First you, then me.”

“It’s funny, Beth. It’s a parrot,” said the aunt. “Gertrude Stein did it with dogs. It’s even funnier with a parrot.”

“Gertrude Stein is not funny. She’s incomprehensible, and that’s just mean.”

“Look, when Sonny died, Mother was saying she’d really named him Sunny—like bask in the sun—but nobody ever wrote his name down, as far as anyone knew, until there I was, filling out a form at the vet’s. So, you know, we got a new bird. Then Mom died. I’m sure you remember. I believe you were out of town. In fact, I believe you were having marital problems, surprise, surprise. But good news: refrain from suicide and you could inherit this fine bird. Only one letter off the original!”

“I thought I knew you,” said his mother. Then she opened her fist out of rage, and the parrot flew. He flew frantically, overcoming clipped feathers. He made it to the sign and rested over “Rd.” Then he heaved himself into the tree and disappeared within it. Dawn creaked, beginning to hum under the ending night. An entire family walked by: a man, a woman, and two little children, all wearing yellow rain gear and carrying fishing nets. In front of them, the baby saw his mother looking in his direction very angrily. Part of him knew his aunt’s face hovered above his, but he still felt it. “What happened to Sonny one?”

“Old bird,” said his aunt, sipping. “Drank too much.”

She stood, bringing her glass, and shifted him so that he hung by his bar on the crook of her elbow, upside down again. Then she went inside and collected the bird’s cage with her free hand. She took everything back to the porch and set the cage on the giant spool. Then they went back into the house: aunt, baby, glass.The baby saw the paneling in the living room, warm, thick, and deep brown, and the sudden white hallway, and then the blond kitchen cabinets with their glowing celestial knobs. He heard water sounds, and something like the sound of the factory you could hear from the cellar apartment—but this sound was as close as the counter and the other was far away and he knew nothing about a factory. He heard tap, tap and tinkle, tinkle. He heard ajar lid pop and he heard his aunt sucking her finger. He saw the knob blur and then the white hall all white but somehow still in motion, and then the ruddy wood, and then, shift, zoom, through the screen door.

His aunt put the new martini into the cage. She tapped its edge with a glass swizzle stick. They heard rustling in the tree. The bird emerged. He stumbled through the air, but when he lighted on the table a dignity fell into his body and he arranged his feathers along their paths, and he felt his weight on his spindly feet. He eyed the martini. He eyed it as if he could kill it. He walked toward it. He stepped over the threshold. He walked around to the far side of the glass and stood over it. He could have been gazing at his reflection in a pool. He did not drink yet.The aunt did not even close the cage door.

“Give him to me!” his mother said, and for a moment the baby was a bridge, a connection between them, a current, his aunt holding his bar in the suspense. “I don’t understand these people,” his aunt said, as if he were a puppet, but looking at his mother, which he could not see. “Do you understand these people? I mean they’re your parents.You’re made of them. And you’re going to become them.”Then she let go, and his mother clamped her baby to her body.The world jerked and bobbled and then he could see the house through his mother’s hair.“I’m going home. I’m going home,” she said like an incantation.

“You left your purse in the kitchen,” called her sister.

Between them groaned a great heaping gulf of air.

“Come on, I bought yellow jammies,” called her sister.

Between the sister and his mother shapes loomed in code, almost being things.

“He’s such an asshole,” she called, standing near her bird. “Elizabeth, you are marching to your doom!”

But couldn’t there be, in the future, some beautiful new thing?

They’d reached the bicycle where it sprawled, the mother and the baby. One wheel made its circle on the walkway and one pressed a mark in the yard. She lifted his bar to her shoulder but he kept slipping down and she couldn’t seem to lift the bike without getting tangled. They spilled. Her sneaker slipped in the green dew and the slick ivy and he landed on concrete.

Now, a cast is not all plaster or he’d have hatched in a fine full crumbling crash. As it was, he felt a small thud and a collapse. Air came in. His neck let his head turn to the side. The bar that held his legs apart dropped and rolled away. Asphalt was cool and pebbled against his cheek. The bird said, “Oboe! Ink! I’ll have another!” On a crack in the sidewalk, the baby bloomed.

The Entire Predicament

My head hovers over the floor, and my hair dangles, and my foot teeters near my ear, and my backside is exposed. I’m separated. I’m gagged and behind my gag I can’t feel my voice. Homebound, on my very own threshold, I am of two minds or more about most things. I am of no mind about the rest, suspended, here in the doorway, within a network of ropes. I’m dangling upside down, one foot bound to the door frame, an arm bending somewhere behind my back, another hip rotated, thigh stretching toward my ear, knee bent, a foot hovering somewhere above it. I have never felt so asymmetrical.

A bird yaks from a tree in the yard behind me. Bright air moves like a thousand singing bees as I breathe. I can release my head and look at the floor or I can raise it and gaze across my house. I can see beyond the living room, past the breakfast bar, into the shining kitchen, and beyond that, through the glass doors to my pool fuming with chemicals. Expensive house, cheaply made. Inside, the doors are hollow, the knobs brass plated. Nick a wall and it crumbles.

I’ve lost the education I worked so hard for, or at least, it turns out I know nothing. My money is down the drain; I can see my last dollar from here, where I swing in the doorway, shifting my weight enough to revolve; I can see it blooming in the kitchen sink. My dog caught two rabbits in the backyard, finally, after years of failure. He slung them in a bundle over his shoulder and went packing.

My country’s at war, and I don’t mean venereal disease.

I swing here, hung, dumb, limb after limb, by hook and crook, bound, naked, open. I’m also turning. I moon every direction I don’t face as I turn. I moon the blank world out my front door, and then I moon the desirable open floor plan inside. I moon my living room and its seven broad windows, and I moon the kitchen beyond it, mirrored deep in the appliances. I moon the patio set beyond the sliding glass doors. Sunshine hums in the windows and gushes along the walls, bounces and lolls on the flanks of my overturned furniture, the coffee table warming its belly, the sofa slashed, stuffing bulging, books like fallen moths, bits of china and glass from the buffet doors fairy-dusting my Pergo floors and tasseled throw pillows. How many hours has it been since my sunny eggs winked from their squares of toast? Since the tongue of my dog splashed in his water dish, since I sprinkled confetti for the fish, since my daughter donned her red boots and tromped to the school bus with bows in her hair and my husband, the dumb lug, backed over the roses on his way into town for the bacon? Enough hours for my hands to grow rubbery in their rope cuffs, for blood to fill my ears to bursting, my eyes rolling in their humble sockets, my brain rocking in its everlasting bath. How many hours since my dear withdrew himself from my cozy body and flopped onto his back in the moonlight, his grin sliding about his face, the silhouetted dots on the dotted bedroom curtains swaying in the breeze as I am swaying now, the motion moving them like a galaxy in a planetarium, night insects cruising and making their soft landings on the sill and on the branches of the tree that drags its nails across our shingles—

And before that the sleeping in feathers—

And before that the dog curled with the daughter in the wooden bed—

And before that the peace of nothing happening that I even thought to know of—

And before that the lives I could have led, and the cells that made me.

Anyone could see I can do nothing, nothing, but there’s nobody that I can see to see me. As I turn I can look across the planks of my porch and if I tuck my chin I can see my lawn above me and the broad black band of the street with no cars parked along it because everyone’s taken all their cars to work, and on errands and vacation. Or else the neighbors are cowering in their houses, cars tucked into garages with the doors squeezed shut, or else they’re peeking through their windows and they can see me and I make them afraid to come out. All I can see through my windows as I pass one and then the next are boiled reflections of the ideas of the colors of things like flowers, like hedges, like lampposts, like a cloud here and then there, and that’s all.

My vertebrae push at the skin of my back. My whole skeleton is apparent to me as it has never been before. It’s as if I don’t have the fat I have. It’s as if I’m stripped of more than clothes. What’s left of my breasts slides near my armpit on one side and under my chin on the other. When I turn, backside out, craned neck bulging, I feel my home and my body as intricate and intricately connected contraptions, a Rube Goldberg that produces the drip of my mere and continuing life. The ropes that stretch and support me are like the wires and pipes in the walls. My cavities are rooms, my organs are furniture, my blood, transporting air, is air. Now, truly for the first time since my babyhood, there is nothing I can do. I can cry or I can not cry. As a baby I cried, but now if I know anything I know better. I can hold my breath. I can open or I can close my eyes.

I close my eyes. Here, upside down and overbalanced, the thing that happens is not what I make happen, it’s what I am within the definition of suspense. First, my shoulders ache, and next they ache more. They ache in relation to how much my neck aches which aches in relation to my ankles which ache unlike each other because of how simultaneously bent and splayed I’m hung. The only other thing that happens in the time I can witness by the wall clock in the kitchen with the rooster on its face as I pass is the ticking of my mind as it tracks the shifting pulse of my body and maneuvers around the ideas lodged in its coils. My mind is a lost snake stuffed in a bowl and pressed. My mind is a snake too crushed to strike.

I open my eyes. I am turning, upside down and tangled, as if on a vertical spit, such that window after window passes in a rhythm, and then, as I let my eyes blur, I can begin to see the walls of my square house ease into curves and soon my windows make one watery strip of blue-green world. All this motion, and I am almost used to it, time passing and nothing happening outside my body’s placement within everything, in fact I am almost used to this level of pain, almost content to spin within it, when peeping into the windows I see bobbing mounds of heads of hair, and one has doffed a cap, and one has pigtails like ears on her head, and another has a blow pop in her mouth, and another has a backpack that bounces up behind him as he bounces, and another must be holding an enormous toy giraffe because the giraffe’s head bobs above his head and hops with him, and nods as the boy hits the ground below the sill, and bends as the boy is rising or falling each time I pass. Children are bouncing in no particular rhythm; they’re like whack-a-moles at a county fair.

I unblur my eyes a little and I can see mountains creeping up behind them, green and brown, and then the children rise in slow motion and stop, framed in groups of twos and threes in the windows, as if secreted in my shrubbery, looking into my house and at my family’s things, looking at me in my doorway, backdropped by the empty street. They wiggle but are almost still, as if making every effort at a dinner table.

Are these children I know? Are they from my daughter’s school? Is it a field trip? Is my daughter one of them? I just can’t tell—their faces and affectations, their clothing and hairdos—all aspects I recognize but aspects arbitrarily distributed to one being and then another. As individuals, not one child rings one hollow bell.

Then I remember to unblur my eyes entirely and the mountains in the background materialize into soldiers with camouflage outfits, their faces as stiff and suspicious as pioneers’ in photographs, lifting the children so that they can see. The children’s faces go slack, taking me in as I sparkle in my house. Some of the windows are open, with screens, and I can hear a child suck and swallow. I can hear the blow pop shift across her teeth. Then the children start squirming, because their armpits are uncomfortable and they’re bored. So here and then there the soldiers put them down and I can hear shoes and voices in the shrubbery. For a few moments the soldiers talk to one another on their walkie-talkies, looking across my living room at one another, window to window, nodding and shrugging, hatching ideas, making plans. They seem to come to a decision.The giraffe’s head is still in its window but I have no idea if there’s anyone down there supporting it.The soldier standing framed with it does not seem to know it’s there.The giraffe looks directly at me, and the soldier is in profile, with his walkie-talkie, and every burst of static has the rhythm of affirmation—roger that, ten-four—

But I’m still turning. Some of the children appear in the background, in the hilly yard of my neighbor next door. They are tossing a ball. They are jumping a jump rope. They are writing with chalk on the walkway. A soldier shifts from his window and shouts an order at them. Bark, spit, he says. One of the children comes to him, but the others ignore him.What can I do? Atrocities are imminent.

Outside another window a soldier is examining my barbecue.

Outside another a soldier is tying his boot.

Outside another a soldier continues to look at me each time I pass, because I am still turning, and turning as if the opening and closing of my eyes propels the turn, as if time itself is what turns me, as if my turning makes time move. He continues to look at me and I know everything he might do; I can see everything he might do move across his eyes in scenarios I remember from news and movies. Then he walks around the house. I can see him pass by window after window. I am following him as I turn, or my turning is pushing him along in a dance of magnets. He collects the giraffe as he passes. He hands the giraffe to the soldier who is standing with my barbecue. He’ s rounding the porch and I’m turning to meet him as he approaches the threshold, removing his flak helmet. His face is at my crotch. He is wiping his boots on my welcome mat.

Then I do, I cry. I try to control my breath enough so that I can do it with the duct tape gag. It’s all I can do.

My house is like the world. The furniture is islands and continents now, in sun and shadow, its inhabitants the bugs, the mice, the dust, and the knickknacks we collected on our travels. Air is water, and sky hangs, as always, above the roof, though here the roof is ozone, leaks intact. How did I get here? Sleepwalking? Sleephanging? Sleepbinding and sleep-gagging ? Sleepransacking of my home? Or did soldiers do this in the night?

He stops my spinning. He turns me and turns with me as if I’m a bookcase to a secret room and I can feel a shaft of sunlight settle onto my ass. He takes a poker from my fireplace and pokes me carefully so that I swing a little. Who do you think you are? Poke. What do you think you’re doing? Poke. He tucks it under his arm like an umbrella and goes into the kitchen and starts opening and closing drawers.Why don’t you have any pancake mix in this kitchen? (I do, but it’s in the cabinet and he’s still looking in drawers.) Don’t you have any decent snacks?

Outside, the soldiers are directing the children to do something, to ready something, and they’re scurrying about with their accessories. I am suddenly unsure if the soldiers are directing the children, or if the children are directing the soldiers, as if it’s simply their toys that have grown life-size. I spot the giraffe standing near the barbecue. It’s large for a toy, but it is not nearly life-size. And the soldier in my kitchen has opened his fly and let his penis flop out. This, I recognize, is nothing a grown doll could do.

Then my husband comes home. There’s no sign of the car, but he comes in the back gate, stands at the patio doors, kicks his boots off, and then, as if remembering my instructions, he retrieves and sets them tidily next to the geranium pot. I have no idea why he’s home so early, but the soldier has scooted back around me, taking the porch steps in one stride, setting me spinning again. He’s somewhere in the yard with the rest of them, and he must have zipped up because now I cannot tell him apart from the rest of the soldiers, some of whom have found fold-out lawn chairs and are setting them up around the grill. Others are primping the coals.

My husband comes inside and makes a peanut butter sandwich. Behind my gag I am trying to regulate my breath enough to make a noise, but then he pulls a stool from the breakfast bar over to where I’m hanging and stops my spinning so we can both look the same way, out the window to the grassy side yard where they have dragged the barbecue. It’s good to be still. It is so good to be still that I hardly wonder why my husband remains unalarmed. We watch as first they barbecue the giraffe and then they barbecue each other. A soldier, sitting lotus on the grill, salutes, and next it’s the boy with the backpack, grinning like wax, and like wax, his face moves from comedy to tragedy mask. One and then another disappears into smoke and flames, another soldier and then the child with lollies, everyone nodding appreciatively at everyone’s sacrifice.

I know there is blood, but I cannot see blood.There is a way that I want to see the blood because I feel it’s my responsibility to see the blood, and it must be there, given the circumstances, but I cannot see it. I sniff but all I can smell is my own salty fluids. I focus my mind on my ears and I hear bubbles, and I hear myself swallow saliva, and beyond that I hear only what could be the ambient liquid tune of a washer or of a toilet awry.

I hear my husband chewing.Then he rests the sandwich in his lap for a moment and unties one of the ropes around my wrists and I realize that I can feel his fingers on the rope as if it is a part of my body. I think about it, and I am not making this up.The rope is part of my body. It occurs to me that when I dream I almost never have a body, let alone a face, and then it occurs to me that this phenomenon is not one exclusively of sleep. If I am as I dream, as they say, then I am a blur to myself. Unless I am looking at my reflection I never look like anything.

In this suspense, what of myself can I see? The hand my husband released has fallen out of my vision, but the bound one has shifted such that I can see my wrist as if I am checking the time, but it’s ropes that I see there. They say you can tell a person’s age on her hands more clearly than on her face.You can see a person’s history in her hands. I’m facing the back of my hand. I know it like the back of my hand, I think, but it turns out I don’t know the back of my hand at all.There’s not much to my hand, now that I’m finally looking.This is not, for example, a farmer’s hand. And this is a hand that has been kept clean, that has washed itself of almost everything. Skin’s a little looser than it has been, the map or lake top made up by lines more pronounced than I might have guessed. On the other side of my hand, hidden on my palm, is my future.

Now I feel the rope dangling like a phantom limb. Now I remember how I came to this. I remember in slow motion that by midmorning—in the open space after “Bye-bye sweetums,” “Have a lovely, sugar,” and that final wag from my dog’s behind—in that open space the world had slipped two degrees farther in a direction it must have been shifting for a long time, like water from an eyedropper that heaps above the rim of a glass and then one more drop and it just spills. In such a way the substance of the air had suddenly thickened, becoming almost gelatinous, I remember now. I was elbow-deep in dishes and the water in the sink began to feel the same as the air, and soap bubbles felt like rubber pellets, and then I was moving through it like a deep-sea diver in all that gear, or not moving through it so much as moving with it, it guiding me as much as anything, no leading or following, just me shifting with the breath of the earth, and then these ropes growing from inside my body like extensions of my tendons as my clothes fell away, the gag rising like a scar across my face. I was moving toward the door because I wanted to get out—

I wanted to do something—

I wanted to change, and I wanted to change the world—

I opened the front door, but I couldn’t move through; the planks of the porch and the wide lawn yawned before me and gravity seemed to tip and I walked on up the space where the door had been as my furniture tumbled about the room, the chandelier catching on a sofa cushion and stuffing bulging from where it tore, coffee table cracking its back over the arm of a wingback armchair. I just walked on along where the door no longer hung and my ropes coiled around me and fastened to the door frame, merged there with house; I remember the crumbling feeling of the popcorn texture of the ceiling; and I could feel the guts of the house, the pipes, the ducts, the wires, the stretching and sagging two-by-fours clinging to the drywall, and then I could feel myself stretch into warm roads coursing across town and then the country, and then I could feel myself as the jet stream and the gulf stream, planetary currents of air and water. I felt it hard, and fully. It wore me out and perhaps I slept because when I woke the world seemed as loose as ever and there I hung as if I’d been abducted by my own home.

There is simply no end to the suspense when one becomes one’s own psychic landscape. Here, my unbound hand flops in the sunshine. My husband holds the dangling end of my rope in one hand, and I can feel the warmth of his hand, which is so familiar, as he resumes eating his sandwich with the other. I remember, and now I know. I am my home, and I am the world I live in. I am the ropes that bind me and the silver tape that stops my voice, hanging here, in this predicament. It did it to me, I did it to myself, I did it to it, all the same. My husband and I look out the window, head to head, although mine remains upside down, and outside, children are running about with soldiers. Some are helping each other onto the barbecue. They’re all squirting one another with sauce.

Incognito

When a guy microwaved his baby and they wanted me to stand on his front stoop with my microphone and my fuchsia suit and report it, and point to a microwave at my feet and say, “A microwave, like this one”—especially since I’d just turned in a report where I’m halfway across the state, standing knee-deep at the edge of floodwaters, pointing to bloated hogs floating by (“Here’s one now, it’s a horrible sight,” I say with my eyebrows crunched together, enunciating over the rain, cinching my green poncho at my waist with one hand to keep it from flying over my head or clear away in the wind and continuing rain) and pointing to trucks full of cats, dogs, sheep, cows, horses, goats, saying, “That one’s for live ones, and they’ll be taken to shelters and to the homes of volunteers, and that truck will take carcasses to special incinerators that have been running day and night for days and nights, it’s a terrible sight, and there’s a horrible stench,” as if they will always know the difference between live and dead, I think, and when I turn it back to the anchors they tell each other first how horrible and next how they each are animal lovers, but Darcy likes cats because they’re independent and Mark’s a dog guy because he likes to roughhouse, and how it’s already been such a tough year for farmers, and back where I am, in the rain, hours before the piece will air and Mark and Darcy will say this to each other, I am thinking, Where are the chickens and the snakes and the bunnies, and how many fish are drowning in homes that have filled with water that’s overtaken their tanks, especially since the flood’s not over; the flood’s not even crested yet? So when they handed me the microwave and said, “Wear the fuchsia suit,” well, I don’t know, it’s not that a baby in a microwave was especially bad, given the news in general, and as I’m not much of a fan of babies, it wasn’t, I don’t think, the baby, or the microwave, or even the flood per se, but I did, I threw down my wig: I threw it to the studio floor, and the sound guys, the camera guys, the director, the writers, Mark and Darcy and the whole weather center team saw my very-close-to-bald haircut that I’ve had under there since the eighties, and the scar on the back of my neck from when I clipped it myself, years ago, when I first started going to work incognito, dressed as myself, in the expensive chocolate-colored wig with auburn highlights that I’d had made to match the hair I used to have and which, I suspect, got me hired. I left my shoes there, too—walked across the set and walked right out of them, let them stay there like the poignant remnants of a disaster, one heel caught on the molding that holds the linoleum to the soundstage. I rubbed my head as I walked out, because the wig annoys me all day. I walked out in my stocking feet with my bag slung over my shoulder, and after a block on the sidewalk the nylons were shredded, so I stopped and took my socks and sneakers out of the bag and put them on.

I went home and sat on the front steps until my girlfriend arrived.We sat there and talked about what I could do for a job now.Twisty iron rails lined the stoop on every little house on the street, including ours, something I hadn’t noticed before.

“I wonder who’ll do the microwave story,” she said.

“I don’t care,” I said. “Let’s not watch it.”

I was feeling angry that somehow what I’d done was less meaningful because of her, that I couldn’t make a point unless it was that one single point: “Look what this reporter has under her hat!” I thought about that point, and I thought about the point I was trying to make about news. I could see how the points were different, but I could also see how there was no real difference at all. The points, and also the connections between the points: all of them sucked.

We didn’t go inside until it got dark. We sat on the steps, and she leaned her briefcase against the house, took her jacket off, and pulled her shirttails out of her trousers. She took her rings off and put them into a compartment of her briefcase and then leaned the briefcase back against the house. She took her shoes off and then she took her socks off, stuffed them into the shoes, and futzed in the dirt with her toes. I took my sneakers and socks off and looked at my shredded stockings for a while. She rolled her trouser legs up to midcalf and unbuttoned the cuffs of her shirt. She was wearing an undershirt, so then she just took her button-up off altogether. She took her sunglasses off and put them in another compartment of her briefcase and then leaned the briefcase against the house again. She stretched her legs out, leaned back on her elbows, and closed her eyes.

Mice

First my arm moved in an arc, and then the bee burst and lay ruptured, opened, entirely unhuman on the kitchen floor, as if my body and my mind had nothing to do with me at all. Angela’s allergic. My wife, too. But I know what I look like. Go ahead and do your worst when you put me in your imagination. I am a large and ugly man, but I not deserve to kill anything.

Moments later, looking at the black body against the blackness of the dustpan I saw it was not even a bee, but an ordinary housefly.

Meanwhile, my mouse epic raged.

“Live and let live,” I told Angela and my wife.

“Dog eat dog,” my wife said back.

We regarded the sounds in the walls. We agreed we had nothing against mice and sharing the wealth. But still, I could see there’d come a point.After a month the dog stopped tracking, and soon enough, if he lifted his head he did so as he would were it me, or Angela, or my wife skating the baseboards, burrowing through blankets, trailing pellets, leaving urine residue behind, and finally what it comes down to is that grossness overwhelms the overall adorableness of mice. I try to resist, but in the end I just won’t let them take over my stuff.

I know there are bears on a mountain in what—Montana? A bear is bigger than me. A moose is bigger than me. A moose gets mad but eats grass. This is what I considered at my desk at work, my office bulging light into the hall through its open door. Outside I knew sunlight smacked itself against the tower walls, still somehow leaving the windows gray. “Come on in here,” I could say to any of the people who worked up and down the hall, but I didn’t. “Take a look at this, see what you think,” I could say to Mike, who I did like to talk to, and then he’d come in with the whole bundle of his life experience strung through his weird body.“Pull up a chair, Mike,” I could say and run anything by him. Mike had a nodding chin and his own mousy affect.

Is this about germs and the smallest of life-forms?

Have I mentioned how huge I am?

I am a sort of opposite of life-under-microscopes. Life under microscopes is celestial, and I am the hairiest sort of American.

At home, my wife was focused not on me, not on mice. Mice were between us, one thing made of its duplicates. Also between us: sad air pulsing from her newspapers, humming from her monitor, springing from the television. Mice, and news of the world, and who would hold out longest within his or her perspective. My wife held out longest, even after one leaped from her boot, even after one galloped around the tub as she bathed and one trotted across her keyboard as she read. It was I who said, “Goddamnit, they could stay if they’d be civilized like all the other animals who live in this house!” Angela still wore diapers, which stretched my point a bit. She walked with a rattle in her fist, this thigh-high Godzilla, not quite a baby and possibly slow. Godzilla, I’m insinuating, was no Mr. Stephen J. Einstein. Darling blob of potential. What could she become? I pictured, with warmth, a fireman.

But a couple months later you really couldn’t cook using pans like that, and a family’s gotta eat, and they dragged stuffing from the couch, and a family wants a nice couch, so, okay, I decided to get rid of the mice, but I wanted to do it right, right with God.Well, if you’ve tumbled off that cliff, you know where it goes.

I went ahead and told Mike at work. “I’ve been through this very same thing,” he said in his nibbly way. I knew from the past that he was raised in the woods, played a lot of bow and arrow with his twin brother. Primarily homosexual. All around way closer to nature than me, as nature mostly came to me when I looked in the mirror and thought, What the fuck?! They burn the fields at the edge of town every year and mice run into the complexes, so he had experience. Mike recounted, fingers in his lap, going to the store and picking glue traps, thinking, I can only imagine, that if you don’t actually kill the mice that’s the better way to go. “There are many available options,” he said.That little man spent the next week washing glue off mice, shampooing mice in his sink, rubbing them down with a terry cloth. “Remember I missed a meeting?” He had to get the last of the crap off the last of the mice from the weekend and drop it, smelling like apples, back in the smoldering field on the way to work. He got a flat tire out there. Came in with his knees smudged from the carbon on the ground.

God, that idiot, Mike, he’s the nicest of anyone you ever heard of. Nice, nice, and with integrity. I gazed at my reflection in the sleeping monitor as he spoke, stars going by. I was so brown and far away.

So with this in mind, down I go to the local Saw This and stand at the rack, try to imagine myself as a hero, sacrificing one noble thing (sanctity of all life) for another, the one where I will do anything for my family. I studied the packages of mouse-poison pellets: cardboard cheese-shaped wedges on which were drawings of a mouse, flat on his back, tongue hanging out, feet in the air, Xs for eyes. Like mice are blind, I thought, sarcastically, as if someone, the world maybe, were watching me think. Like mice can’t see that picture. I thought of the rodents and bugs in commercials, their conversations about their fear of death.There must have been a seamlessness between me and the commercials to make me believe in mice this way.

What a variety of methods hung before me. I had been known to call our company hotline anonymously to discuss my ethical concerns. Also, when I pictured myself as a hero, do you know what it included? It included that long trip down the dark hall of my office and into the false light that bulged from my open door.

I chose no-kill traps, gray boxes with sliding lids, no larger than mice, but I pictured them in action, a small black hole in the night, and remembered that mice feel fine going into small holes. In the pet department the local shelter displayed puppies and cats, adoption forms, and bumper stickers. My orange basket swung from the crook of my crag of an elbow, and I felt effeminate, which naturally I rarely feel. In cartoons, the mouse lifts the hole from the stone wall of photographed ink so that the monster chasing smacks into it. I let the handle slide into my fist. Small plastic boxes jiggled in my basket. “Set them up with peanut butter in the bottom,” said Mike at work. “They can’t resist,” he said, and wiggled his fingers as in he can’t resist either.

A long time ago, and present in my mind with the mice, was a shot in a movie we were watching, me and my wife, a movie about the future, back before anything had happened to us.The hero, this guy in this fix, looks on the computer at a picture of a cornucopian street market filled with beggars and shoppers. The shot shows him swooping the view around, and looking close-up at parts of the picture. Whoosh, whoosh, the baskets of flowers, the glossy bins of fruit and fish, an old man’s hand grasping, a ragged girl’s rags ragged, the windows in the background kaleidoscopic with reflections. Then, in the corner, is someone’s sleek white arm with something along it, peculiar, which he zooms in on. It’s shiny and metallic, the barrel of a gun held by someone outside the frame, and he zooms in on it until he’s filling the screen with the grayscale sheen—this is the key motion, this rhythmic going into depth—and reflected in the barrel is the convex face of a woman in sunglasses (a spy!), so he zooms in on her with the infinite mechanical perception possible only in this land of the future because back in Antonioni it was photography, not video, making this same move, so the image grew increasingly close and increasingly particulate at once, both more and less visible, because to see anything up close meant you had to have been there for previous, more distant shots in order for this new image to make sense, because meaning came from perspective, it came from context and from history, otherwise up close all you had was an abstract shape or pattern—well—at least that’s how it was in the days of photography.

But here in the future and reflected in one lens of the lady spy’s sunglasses is a shiny wall, so he zooms in and it’s a whole city reflected in there, a crystal palace of towers bursting with light. This city of light is divine, you can tell by the way it fills the screen uniformly, making time seem to hover, here in this clarity, as the hero’s vision continues to move—forward, closer—pushing and then expanding, from one clarity to the next, into depth with perpetual vision. Now the reach is limitless, and the scene stops only when he finds what he’s looking for.

Sunk in the dark in the movies, a midnight show,back before Angela even twinkled in our four movie-going eyes, which, if you looked at them, held the movie in them, I looked at my wife who was not even my wife yet, she was just someone I wanted to fuck, and I could see that nothing at all was happening to her as she watched except maybe she was worried about the guy’s problems, whatever they were. She could just have it: that pure uncluttered connection. But for me, it was like I was watching the shape of everything, because I could see now that everything had infinity going on within it, which I sort of knew already, but here, infinity was suddenly this thing I could move into when I had never thought about doing that before.

I didn’t do it. I didn’t move into infinity. Not back then. I mean, how do you do that? I mean, it was only a date. But I could see it. I could see it happening.

I got home with the traps and my wife was watching TV in the dark in the bedroom and eating a popsicle, something I actually don’t find sexy and I knew she was going to drip. I took Angela to the kitchen and sat her on the counter. I could hear talking heads and explosions. I took the peanut butter out of the fridge and let her try to unscrew the cap while I tore the box traps out of their packaging. Just as she was about to cry because she likes peanut butter so much I opened the jar for her and let her have some on a spoon.Then I scooped some out with another spoon, and it was cold, and the stiff natural kind, so I rolled it into a ball and dropped it into the little plastic box. Angela showed no interest but I still felt like a hillbilly loading a gun. I felt dumb in my muscles. I stood there in front of Angela so she wouldn’t topple from the counter while she ate her peanut butter, watching her moony eyes as they wandered the kitchen within the world of what she was tasting, and then I lifted her down, took both our spoons, and washed them. I wanted the mice to go straight for the traps as soon as possible and not get sidetracked. Angela sat on the floor. I put traps along the countertops and in the cabinets and set their dainty lids.

I don’t think there’s a single political thing that my wife and I disagree about. The difference is that my wife, at least then, liked to know the specifics. Every new instance of brutality astonished her; every unveiling of corruption took her breath. I knew her to pace through the night.

Far away, in the kitchen, I thought about how Angela had come from me, but only in this totally counterintuitive way, via my wife. My wife, who looked at images of people and saw reflections of herself.

Come closer, I kept trying to say. Come over here so I can see you.

I could feel myself negotiating whether or not to feel this other person’s unhappiness. So what if you feel it. It’s still there, but now it’s spreading.

We are all unhappy enough.

Then I looked at Angela and it felt obvious: here she is, as if I am made of her. Here she is, obviously, and miraculous.

Took a week, but we caught one. I put Angela and the dog into the car and we drove with the plastic box to the edge of town. My wife stayed home. She said she’d prefer not to come as she was fine with the mice, being, naturally, a generous and compassionate person.

“You mean unsanitary,” I said.

“I mean fuck off,” she said and went back to stuffing herself with news.

I unloaded everyone. We were all really excited: Angela was moving up and down at her knees and saying, “Huh, huh, huh,” wearing a bunchy pink sweater, and when I lifted the lid, the mouse sprung into the air with all its limbs loose and flailing, its fingers spread like a cat pouncing on life itself.The dog lunged on his leash and the mouse bounce-bounce-bounced into the black and gold field. Clouds puffed around the super-blue sky. I laughed. I looked at Angela, thinking we were sharing this moment of freedom, but she peered at the ground as if this one piece of ash was exciting in a way that the others were not. It doesn’t matter, I thought. She feels it in the air.

But in the evening I did the bills at the dining table and one ran across my foot. I could see it through the glass top, looking exactly like the one I’d released. I realized I’d sort of imagined only one, maybe two. Mice are so identical, appearing on one and then another side of the room as if by magic, moving through walls. All that damage. Now they could be filling the walls and if I slit one with a machete they’d spill out like organs, or like corn from a sack. This could make the species more impressive, or less.

My wife had been taking a long bath with the paper. She came out in my robe and stood behind me. She put a wet candle from her bath on the table near the bills. I could feel her presence changing the air.

“Are you trying to be romantic?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said.“Maybe. Sort of. I’m going to bed.” I shifted my bulk so I could look at her, trying to gauge her tone. I could see the atrocities she’d consumed shining behind her eyes, as if she’d been hollow before. She had not been hollow. I remembered.

But even in the times I remembered, she might have been sad.

Next when I checked the traps and a lid had closed, it was raining out and I was on my way to work. I shook the trap to be sure there was something in there but I wasn’t sure. I put the trap on the counter and it didn’t move. Then suddenly it moved, tilting and rattling. I put the trap in my coat pocket and kissed Angela where she sat in her mother’s arms. At our feet, the dog swept his tail across the floor. I said, “Honey, I don’t have time to take him out if I’m going to stop at the field and release this mouse.”

“Okay,” said my wife, and I could tell it actually was okay, although it could just as well have not been okay, so I left. The moment warmed me a little. Good dog. I felt a little rise of hopefulness. But then it was cold out, and the rain hurt. The field looked like a Beckett play. I felt like a giant. I mean I could really feel my enormity, shoulders holding the coat wide, how imposing my hat looked on my head, how moodily my eyes squinted and scanned. My nostrils felt cavernous, pulling in the air and giving it the shape of my body. Densely black crows pecked in the field and lay against the gray sky like holes. I took the trap from my pocket and opened it, but nothing leaped out. I tipped the box and a tiny mouse fell from it and landed in the cinders, very young, with just enough soft brown hair that it was clumped and wet from sweat or urine, shivering, pink limbs and tiny blind face, curled like my thumb. I don’t know, what was I going to do? I looked at my boot, the boot of a man who knows how to weld, which I did for fun once a long time ago with an artist friend. I rushed to the car and pulled out of there like a coward.

What happened with Mike’s arrow is one day he shot his brother in the back. The boys were six. Their parents didn’t believe in toys. Nature was their toys.

I read a book where all that happens is a woman kills a cockroach, a translated book, from some place where “cockroach” might have a nicer name.You go through space and history in the woman’s mind while she considers killing it. She’s a maid. I kept reading, but I didn’t like it. I say this because mice had taken over, implying everything, including the feeling of being in one room with my wife in another room and I’m not sure if she hates me, or just everything but I’m nearby. I felt haunted by her and she wasn’t even dead, just across the wall from me. I felt this a lot, and especially in the kitchen, especially if Angela was already in bed so it was just me and my wife awake in the house, usually me in the kitchen producing the assertive clinks and patters of home, calling to her with the dishes and the turning of water on and off, the dull percussion of drawers, all this SOS.

I felt something else, too, a feeling like I was evolving. But evolution’s such a funny thing, as if it has a direction. It really only has the direction you’re looking in.

In the bright kitchen, when I closed my eyes, I saw the box traps encircling me from the darkness inside the gleaming cabinets. In the light I imagined the dark, and within the dark, dark holes where mice might go. With my eyes closed, I imagined my wife in her den. What made me go in? I knew the dog lay at her feet and I felt so alone once my daughter was asleep.

“Honey,” I said. She was sucking on a strawberry licorice whip in the shadows. Most of the computer was filled with text, but the corner of the screen held a photo that I did not want to actively take in. I stood behind her, above the blur of her hairline, the soft curling hairs that didn’t make it into her ponytail. I said, “I wish you’d stop eating that stuff.”

“Reading, babe. We call it ‘citizenship.’”

“Honey,” I said. I put my hand on her shoulder, which twitched. I tried to leave it there for her to relax into, but the shoulder didn’t relax. Under my hand her muscle was a separate animal in her body and something rose in my gut as I stared at it. My hand on her shoulder, her shoulder refusing my hand. In my mind I pushed back on what rose.

“I’m a citizen,” I said. I said, “We call it ‘the working man.’” I could see the side of her face shift but I couldn’t tell how.

“The Man, maybe,” she said. Still, I could not read her tone. I reached with all my capacity and I just couldn’t tell if she hated me or if she believed we were amused at the same thing. I wanted us to laugh at me together. I wanted, perhaps, also, to laugh at politics.

I mean war.

And then I didn’t want to be the sort of person my wife laughed at.

I had to muster something in order to move forward in the conversation.

It was so hard to push the moment forward. I am so huge, and it was so hard to make anything move.

“It’s just that it’s hurting you,” I said.

“Not like it’s hurting them.”

I could feel her mind swoop behind her and see through me. She exhaled sharply and then clicked her mouse (her mouse! I almost retched from humiliation at this connection) and then boom! the image filled the screen: a bombed open-air market, bodies, babies, blood, rust, burst animals and fruit, a soldier with his rifle slung over his shoulder, holding an arm in one hand and a chunk of bloody hair in the other, probably from a person I could see part of, caught under the rubble, who the soldier might have harmed, or might have been trying to rescue. The soldier looked blank, paralyzed, lost in this gory plenty. I saw all this in an assault, as if she’d bludgeoned me in my sleep, and I had to pull back with my mind, assert the flat haze of the photo’s history, its multiple reproductions, and register the texture of its transference from medium to medium, reiterate how far it had traveled and how that movement had coated it in layers to help separate me from it, life and death to camera to newspaper to internet, all that travel, resting now under the skin of her laptop.

I tilted her chair back into me so I could look down on her face.

There was her face, which I know.

I let myself relax into this perspective. I let myself enjoy it in a way that tickled the edge of cruelty.

She let her head drop back into my stomach. She took the licorice from her mouth and laid it on her desk next to her pencil. She let me look at her.

I know what I believe. I knew what needed to happen. Get a cat, Mike said next day at work, as if that’s a mature thing to do is get another living being to do your dirty work. Anyway, Angela’ s allergic. I went back to the Saw This. I looked at the guys and the lesbians loading lumber onto a truck in the rain. I went in through hardware and to the garden center. I bought those old-fashioned smacky spring traps. I bought like ten.

At home was a note. My wife had taken Angela and the dog on errands. First I cleaned the kitchen, keeping an eye over the breakfast bar and through the dining room window for them to come home. My cleaning was exhaustive and exhausting, but there I stood, heavy in the sparkling white room, and still they hadn’t come.Then I sat on the linoleum and set the traps. I put three of them under the sink, where I thought mice were getting in near the pipes. I put peanut butter on some, cheese rind on some, and pushed them into place with chopsticks. Then I waited. I stretched out on the clean floor on my back. It felt nice. It felt cool. I could see some of my nose, past that some of my belly, and past that, if I lifted my head, my furry toes. I let my head fall to the side and looked down the slope of my arm to my fist. I was a clod of dirt.Where the fuck were they? I thought. Evolve like what?

I woke when the door banged open, and as if I weren’t there I heard the panting dog trotting to his bowl, the rhythmic clanging of his tags against it, the huge noise of water, toenails, wet breath moving his mouth flaps. Angela made her babbling noises and my wife—I could hear her putting stuff on the dining table and pulling out a chair—made happy little noises back at Angela. If you don’t talk to her in actual words she’ll never talk back! I wanted to say but then I felt overwhelmed with the happiness I heard in their voices. I moved my eyes around and everything I could see was white or shiny. From this perspective, on the floor behind the countertop, their voices and the whiteness were singular, synthetic, and filled everything. I supposed, perhaps blithely, that I felt like the mouse and mice I’d been imagining.

Angela toddled around the counter and into the kitchen, hands and face sticky and pink, wearing a head kerchief with tiny apple trees on it and a pacifier on a string around her neck. She did a little rocky dance when she saw me, and burbled. Then she went over to the dog and splashed with him in the bowl. The dog sat and they did a funny negotiation over the water with their eyes. I saw the feelings move across her features in shades of light like fast weather. Used to be, as I understand it, people thought of feelings not so much as things that come from people as things that circulate the earth, and people get caught in them, pass them along, or travel along within them. I watched Angela’s face for a while, all these feelings that could have come from anywhere and there they were, on her face. I listened to my wife’s noises a little more and then, finally, I heaved myself to a squat, and I don’t know why . . . well I do . . . but I coiled myself up and I sprang into the air and spread my body as wide as possible and yelled, “Surprise!” My wife dropped a grocery bag and laughed while a dozen rosy fruits slid around her feet. “You monster!” she said, and because I left my arms open she strolled into the kitchen and then into them. She put her hands on the back of my head and lay her eyes on mine. I said, “It’s just that I caught you being happy.”

She grinned and winked at me.

“Let me show you something,” she said. She scooted back to the dining room and returned with a damp flyer. It had a drawing of a bloody fist on it. “These people,” she said, beaming, “are not sissies. I went to my first meeting today. I’m in a swoon.” Then she whispered, “We’re underground,” and almost trembled.

“What do these people do?” I said. “March?”

“We’re huge,” she said. “And yet invisible!” She scooped up Angela, carried her to the sink, and began to wipe her hands and face with a sponge. “We’re one made of many.”

“Like what, a march?” I said.

“You just murder your mousies, mister,” she said with a wiggle.

Oh, honey, I thought. “Like what?” I said. “A cult?”

She put Angela back on the floor and came over. She hopped up into my arms and I held her with her legs around my waist. Angela came over and put her arms around my leg. I could hear her sucking on her pacifier.The dog came over. He sat at my other leg and dripped water onto my foot.We stayed there for a while in a clump.

I thought I heard a trap spring in the night. I moved through the house in the dark. I felt so hungry. In the kitchen, in the stove light, I went through the cabinets checking the traps, but part of me was scanning for food. I know it’s not so much that I’m hungry when I do this as that I want something and I know there’s food in the house. I could see well enough to see that none of the traps were sprung, or maybe I just knew by my sense of the shadows as my eyes processed them. I did not want to turn on more light and blind myself. I was, in fact, a little afraid to turn on the lights because of having seen, when I was a child, a mouse with his head crushed in a trap, a mouse spotted brown and white like my long-escaped hamster. My father had placed the body on the kitchen table and explained several things to me about nature while we sat across from each other and looked at it.Weather cycles, he explained. Food chains. He loomed there like the future, like me, projected on a large screen. My father, speaking the truth he believed, as if translucent.

I opened the refrigerator and stood spotlit in the cool light, filling the frame with my silhouette. One thing I know from the past: if the blood and guts are from someone you love, there is nothing disgusting about them. I know this from a car wreck. I know that if a person’s insides are hanging from her body and you love her, you just want to lift them and nestle them back where they belong. Say she’s your sister, as she was my sister. If her blood is everywhere you just want to gather the blood into your arms and keep it from leaving.You love the blood because it is her, and you cannot bear that the blood is merging with dirt and grass. When I look at images of people from war with their bodies scattered I can’t tell you what is going on.

I don’t know what it means or doesn’t mean if I don’t look.

I don’t care if we are all connected. I want what’s mine.

I didn’t have to worry. In the morning the food from the traps was gone. I replaced the food, reset the traps. A week later, one and then its twin mouse skittered, furniture to furniture, sleek and fat. I began to despair. The kitchen was as if I’d never cleaned it, the air heavy with mouse. I went to work with my teeth gritted and a throat of lumps, knowing the mess I’d find on my return. At work, the office hall stretched and I felt lost even though there were no turns. Meanwhile, my wife became happier and happier. Her grin grew sly. Time slipped. She wore tighter jeans and clingy undershirts. She looked lean and more muscular, and this I did find sexy, yet entirely unapproachable, like a movie star, like she was teasing me. The dog was mostly asleep from so much action in my absence. He’d sometimes come to me with a look like, “Save me.”

Time, time, time.

“I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” I’d shake my head.

“You will, you will . . .” she’d singsong back.

I refused to picture what she might mean.

What is it exactly that you do all day, I phrased to myself and did not ask aloud, now that you are not depressed? Most wives with little kids, they’re running around with laundry and toys and to-do lists dangling from their pockets, their hair all over the place, the dog dragging dirty diapers around the house—who wants a wife like this? not me!—the baby sticking its fingers in the sockets, the phone ringing, the garbage disposal shooting sludge, the tub overflowing, the baby tumbling down the stairs or getting peas stuck up its nose, the dog hauling in a dead rabbit and digging up the rosebushes, the TV loud with the picture flipping in ribbons, electronic robots muttering the alphabet, the baby slipping on magazines . . . But they’d become so happy—angry sometimes, usually at this one guy in the group who my wife thought was a pussy, and when she’d say his name and look at Angela the two of them wrinkled their noses and stuck out their tongues—but happy. They had in-jokes, the two of them. And they were developing a language. Not English. It was part baby talk and part something else that sounded sophisticated and ancient. They were always home when I came in, and the house looked just as it used to—messy—but now they spoke in their secret language until Angela fell asleep with a great collapse from a busy and important day.

Once, I cornered Angela by the dog’s water bowl, squatted as close to her level as possible, and looked at her, searching for our connection. Had there ever been a connection? I tried to remember. “Come on, give your old dad a try!” I said. “Come on, I’m a clever bastard!” But she’d look at me as if she actually understood my words and I was weird for even asking. Honestly, though, I could’ve been projecting refusal onto a face more blank than I knew how to recognize. She zipped her lips and she issued no peep. She tugged at the hem of her jumper. She moved her head a little, as if she were testing her neck out. She laughed and sunk her fist into the water bowl.

The dog licked drops from the linoleum.

Something secret happens between blood and grass, something underground.

Once, after dinner, my wife looked up from their syllabic exchange and caught me staring at them from the kitchen.

“Tell me,” she said, half shadowed, lording over the table with a pair of wooden salad spoons, wearing a bandana like a TV gangster, “what exactly is it that you do all day?”

Even at eight in the morning artificial light bulged from the open offices and darkness pooled in the recesses made by the closed ones, the offices like nubs on an ancient insect that can glow or not glow. I walked as if on a conveyor belt and nodded as I passed Jeff, then Benny, then Elsabeth, at their desks. The hall was so long. Mike’s office, staggered across from mine, remained dark. I unlocked my door and looked at the window. The building was situated such that even on a clear bright day, as this day was humming up to be, the windows remained a weakly illuminated and purblind gray. Outside were walls from the building next door, but something about the angles made this impossible to see from inside. Our windows teetered as if between elemental phases, like clouds pressed into shape. We were alchemists, like everyone in the whole economy.We were trying to turn our spittle into gold. Every day I looked at my hand and dared it to move over the phone to call the hotline about my ethical concerns. I pretended to dare myself because I thought it’d be funny. I didn’t call because by then I knew it was not funny. It was not spittle. It was not ours. I knew better than that. I knew what it was we made gold from.

I heard Mike coming down the hall. I could tell by the way he scurried. He said, “Hi Jeff! Hi Benny! Oh, Elsabeth, I like the hat!” and bounced along the walls with his briefcase, which I knew very well enough to imagine. His keys jangled against his door as he unlocked it and then I could hear him pouring himself tea from his thermos, which made an empty metal sound. He said, from behind the walls,“Good morning!” to me. I wanted to call him over and run the home situation by him, but I worried that I had the power to get my wife in trouble, which made me feel powerless; it was humiliating to have a secret and not to know what the secret was, to be forced into complicity because she knows I have always pictured myself doing anything for my family. She seemed to taunt me with her understanding, and then I said, in my mind, to soldiers chest-deep in tanks like bathtubs: “Look at my wife and I’ll blow your fucking heads off.” I thought about searching the computer for some ideas, but then I thought about being surveilled.

This got me pretty deep into midmorning and on my way toward lunch. I sat at my desk. I looked at the window. I tap-tapped along, as if my fingers were not mine and my mind floated about the room like a piece of weather. I considered Mike. I tried to think of something about Mike that would explain my consistent desire for his counsel. I didn’t know much about him, but the thought of him cheered me. He drove a tin can of a Honda hatchback. He lived by himself in an apartment. I realized I was afraid to tell him how I was beginning to feel about the mice, how I wanted them dead, dead, dead. I thought this might be why I wanted, rather, to tell him about how much I wanted to fuck my wife. I thought about his homosexuality and imagined I could get really graphic and specific about my desires and he’d just understand in this way that someone else would jump in with what he wanted to do to my wife. I could picture Mike nodding more and more kindly the more I let loose with my ideas. I looked at the window and my mind hovered in the spaces between the series of walls surrounding me and Mike. I shifted the focus of my eyes and saw the whole hulk of me in the window, dense in the glazed-over glass, craggy as a bare mountain, my mouth limp and bulbous, my eyes drooping and protruding, my teeth pressing against my jowls. No one this ugly should get to do anything.

Through the day the gray of the window darkened and my image within it evolved and devolved, by which I mean shifted. By the time the office closed it was dark outside. I stopped at the bank and took out some money. I think I thought,What if my wife is running low on cash and I can just supply it, snap-of-the-fingers? At home they were watching the television in the bedroom, all three of them, all shadowy on the coverlet of blue roses. The dog lifted his head and thumped his tail when I looked in. My wife lay on her stomach, propped on her elbows, her hands full of colorful wrappers and her mouth full of something sticky and sweet. She looked over at me and said, “Mmm?”

Angela sat nestled in the curve of her mother’s waist, sucking on a carrot, and light changed her skin in flashes and waves. The light moving across my baby’s face . . . what can I say? It horrified me. I thought I could see a talking head superimposed on hers. I wanted to pull her from it as from polluted waters. I resisted and resisted abducting my daughter from my bedroom. I could see the light turning her into someone, ruining her. My body filled the doorway with fat, and hair, and muscles. My wife looked at me, still chewing, and her face and eyes said, “What? Bug off.” So I shoved myself from the doorway and went to take out the garbage. I took the canister out from under the kitchen sink, thinking how kitchen sink means more than everything, i.e., something impossible, and then, when I lifted the bag, this is what I found amid the commentary and explosions: the sudden stench of a mouse that had died under the liner, and stuck to the mouse a maggot so white and fleshy I could see within it the black seed of a developing fly.

The next day I bought a cardboard wedge of poison granules and placed it near the sink pipes so they’d land beside it upon entry. I put a safety lock on the cabinet and within two days the house was littered with radioactive-looking mouse pellets. Two weeks later saw an influx of large slow-moving flies that I knew came from inside the walls and inside the bodies of the mice that had died, growling flies that I thought could rupture and a squirming new mouse would leap out. One by one I swatted them with a newspaper. By afternoon the president’s pixilated face was obliterated by the deaths of insects. How dare you, I thought to the president, come into my house and make my wife crazy. Indeed, how efficiently I am able to swat flies. How within my nature it has always been.The paint on the kitchen walls was slightly discolored in spots from where I’d sprayed disinfectant. Angela followed me around as I completed all this. She was intrigued, or she was oblivious. I swept the bodies into the dustpan and flung them into the garden. I sang, “Fly, fly away!” but Angela didn’t crack a smile. I said something about fertilizer, about natural cycles of life, and she remained unamused. She was wearing a tee-shirt that said, Let Freedom Rain, with a picture of a gingham puppy, leash dangling, peeing on a fire hydrant and holding an umbrella. I stared at the tee-shirt but it remained both silly and incoherent. I began, again, to clean the house.

And my wife was—what? Brimming, as if I could unzip her and it would all spill out. What would it be? Cells in the shape of her, the many from the one. Now as she read books of histories and revolutionaries, and moved through the dark house and the internet with a swooping grace I knew only from certain shots in movies, she did so with a large spiral-bound notebook that I never saw unless she was writing in it. She remained not unfriendly and she remained remote. She offered little jokes about mice, my desire to “get them” and my recent success, having “got them good.” One night, while Angela and the dog were sleeping, I stood at the counter polishing silverware and looking out the window over the sink to the moon. She came in and took a glass from the cabinet. When I saw what she was after I rinsed my hands and took the water pitcher from the fridge. I met her in the center of the room and poured it for her. I stood with the pitcher and watched the water move in waves as she drank it. I admired the perfect communion of the water, the glass, and the force of her mouth. The kitchen smelled of faraway spaghetti. Under that, the only animal scent came from the dog’s bowls.The romance of domesticity swept into me, I put my arm around her waist, and we embraced with our symbolic vessels hovering in the air behind our heads. We moved a little. My wife has sleek reddish hair and I put my nose into it. I thought about cells multiplying, and my body filling with myself. I thought about men who go to Alaska and shoot sheep—sheep that are so wild they’re as dangerous as bears. Those people think they’re facing themselves but I think they’re not, they’re just being assholes. I’ve seen a photo of a man with a gleaming white ram sunk into his arms and reclined like a woman on a fainting couch, eyes open and behaving in death as it never, in any possible contortion, would have behaved in life, which is precisely what makes the man feel what he is feeling, which is satisfied, and right, perhaps even with God. It’s so ugly. I know it’s natural, but still. “I just really want to fuck my wife,” I said into her ear as sweetly as any words can come from a mouth like this.

“I know you do, honey,” she said. I backed her toward the counter for a step before what she meant sunk in and we released our embrace. I put the pitcher in the refrigerator and paused to let its air push into me. Then I closed the door, leaned on the hulking white thing, and listened to the scraps of paper struggling under their magnets in the breeze that came from the window and the ceiling fan.

I would never get anything right.

I could feel my teeth in my mouth. “I think you should tell me what you do all day with my daughter and my dog,” I said.

She crossed her arms over her chest and let her head fall to the side, thinking.

“Balance,” she said.

She extracted a rubber band from the pocket of her jeans and worked to pull her hair back with it. Don’t touch that hair, I thought. It flowed from her. I wanted to say, mine.

I said, “You need to be more specific.”

“Entropy,” she said with the band in her teeth. “The opposite of you.” Heat expanded in my body, idiotically, like a campfire marshmallow. She looked at me in a way that you could say she considered me from afar. With her head tilted, her eyes precise, the tone of her gaze forthright, I watched her take in all my available dimension.

She said, “You big, sweet, hairy baby.”

I moved toward her knowing that my face was shifting, in the static half-light, from moonlit to monstrous. “I deserve to know—” I said. She rolled her eyes, let the band snap into place, and disappeared into the darkness of the house. “What are you going to do?” I called after her. “Are you going to blow something up? What? Are you going to blow yourself up?” When I heard nothing back, I called: “You know what? I dare you! You know what? You should just come on over to my office.You should just come on in and blow us both up!” Then I plunged in after her.

Moving through the house, quickly, quickly, I brushed against wallpaper and caught my robe on a sconce, glided down a hall and then scraped my feet on something like legos. At first I tried to listen for where she could be, but the rush of organic heat in my head was so loud that I couldn’t hear past myself. My flesh thumped furniture and I kept my elbow trailing along chair rails until they ended and I flailed in a chasm. I swiped walls for switches and gave up. I moved in gushes and spasms. I heaved along and I heaved inside. I felt the press of my toenails. I gushed forward and forward—as if I were moving down one long passageway, scaling boulders and leaping craters, as if I had traveled for miles, for days. When I stopped to listen to my breath in the dark, the carpet hummed under my feet—I could feel its wormy shapes on my soles—and my arms reached like zombie arms, and my face, it seemed to me, in the darkness, had let itself loose; I couldn’t imagine what I could be wearing, only my lumpen body like a formation of lava left to millennia of stasis: crude, elemental, both alien and utterly of my core. I waited, panting, listening to the muscles in my face come into focus, and by the time I spied what looked like a light in the distance I knew tears were forming in my dumb eyes and traveling along my slack cheeks. I pushed one foot forward and then another, moving myself like a dead bear or an armoire, and finally I stood again in the kitchen with the disappointing moon tippy behind the perforated skin of our window screen. I looked blankly at the screen, at a loss as to what could possibly be out there.

I’d run and run, but I couldn’t catch her.

I could feel her, though, filling the walls of the house.

In the dark, in the kitchen, I breathed for an amount of suspended time.

After a while, my wife hovered in my mind, illuminated in darkness like a dessert in the dramatic display cabinet of a very self-important restaurant where I remember being taken, as a child, to eat.

What would she say if she said something?

She said, “I’m trying to protect you.” I suspected she was full of shit, but I couldn’t tell. I said she could not possibly be doing any such thing because what she was doing was killing me. She said,“I am protecting you in a small way, because, trust me, you don’t want to know. And I’m protecting you in a big way too, because I am doing the right thing, and you are part of the world.”

I wanted to shake her, to move her physically, as if that would move her mind. I tried to remember what she had been before she allowed the world to take over our house and I wanted to strangle her, as if I could squeeze something real from her throat and her lips, because even in my mind she continued to give me nothing. But then all I did, even in my mind, was put on an insolent voice and say, “Angela’s part of the world!” and then Angela appeared, so that my wife could pick her up, spin with her in the spotlight, cuddle her, and say, “She is!”

Angela, imaginary, opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out except bubbles. I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I didn’t say anything.

In madness there is conviction, a direct and mechanical thing that comes from visions. I had witnessed this in literature even if, as yet, I had not been acquainted with the phenomenon in my literal life. It hurt a lot to picture all this, and I was so confused, but then I pushed it to a considered distance. From this distance I thought about it—my wife, her perspective, the life in her arms, the certainty of madness, the impossible things she might actually do—turning it into a cookie and then into a flat stone in my mind, then turning the stone over as if in my hand, looking at it with eyes of glass. I thought, Dear God, the problem is I think she’s right.

When the room ticked into dawn I rinsed my face in the sink, dried it with a dish towel, and pulled my shoes onto my feet. Something had happened between night and daylight, something physical, from science, the way that at the far edge of the big bang theory the universe returns. In this way, microcosmically, I’d changed direction. I’d sucked every aspect of myself from the rooms of the house I lived in and back into the cave of my body. This allowed me to do what I did next, which is that I took my wallet and my phone and I left.

I did the very thing I would never think possible.

It’s just what I did. I went out there. To look. As a camera would look.

Out there, morning air glittered with sprinkler water. I squinted at my neighbor’s basketball net, a giant insect with one compound eye. Mailbox after mailbox wasn’t breathing. Then I watched my feet walk. I filled my frame of vision with my shoes and the slope of the curb. I followed the curb, which could have been moving in any direction but as usual was moving forward, as I was moving forward through the world, not flinching when a car passed blowing tingly particles. I followed the curb forward through morning.

When I reached the burned field at the edge of town, I lifted my eyes and moved them across its speckled pattern of golds, taupes, grays, blacks. With a tilt of my head I could shift the whole acreage from two to three dimensions and then back. The act relaxed me. I entered the stubby field with easy strides. Grasshoppers leaped in an automatic rhythm. I saw hares, and I saw mice. Mice smell of old straw, and old straw smells of mice, and the field smelled of burned straw, burned mice, fire and mice, I was able to think without laughing. That day, though, no crows; someone must have lifted the negative spaces they’d made and tossed them away, so that I walked through the simple space of the air that had been behind them.

In the center of the field I turned myself around. All directions appeared equal. Then I took out my phone and called Mike. Nothing happened on the phone except it was as if he already knew what I was doing, which is a lot to happen, because it’s inexplicable. I think I thought something like, Oh, this must be what they mean by magic. But I was a camera, so I let it go. “You bet,” he said. “I’m on my way.” I continued across the field. My shoes crunched and animals sprung around me in arcs. I fell into a rhythm that included all my senses and then, as I approached the cement on the other side, Mike’s triangular silver car pulled up.

Take me home, Mike, I could say. Take me home because this is not within my nature. But I got into the car. Even though it was so small, I slipped right in.

In the car Mike wore a sympathetic frowny face that I believed entirely. He was all surface, honest through and through. I got in and he handed me a styrofoam cup of high-quality coffee. “I thought you might need this,” he said. “And this!”Then he handed me my passport, also magic, and I slipped it into my back pocket. I watched the field in the rearview mirror and for some time it filled my vision and didn’t move, until slowly the road appeared above it and then filled the screen. Soon the view in the mirror and the view through the windshield were very much the same. Mike started humming, trying, I realized, to soothe me. I thought of the burned field back when it was just a field, and then I thought of the woods the fields were before they were fields. I thought of the woods Mike grew up in, where, as a child, with an arrow, he’d shot his brother. I noticed that I didn’t know if the brother had lived.

“Mike, am I ugly?” I asked. “And if so, what kind?”

“No kind of ugly I know,” said Mike, which I believed, and which changed nothing.

At the airport we were surrounded by buses, an off-duty ambulance, a limousine, and when we stopped, I tried the door but the handle didn’t work, so Mike got out and went around. I almost panicked, as if he might just abandon me in that crappy car, but then his gentle face appeared in the center of my window, he popped the door open, and out I sprung. It’s true that I’d always held Mike in a mysteriously high esteem, but only then did I notice exactly how much tinier he is than me. I felt an urge to stroke his head, but instead I hugged him and felt his tiny arms around me. I felt him for a bit, something like an animal, something like a man, something like a spirit, and then he zoomed away.

I traveled along the airport hallways, riding the conveyor belt, watching the travel posters go by: Wyoming, New Orleans, Hawaii,Alaska. I hopped off and let the Alaska poster mesmerize me a little with its blue and white on white on white, its cute and brutal polar bear. Then I joined a heap of people waiting for sliding doors to open and took the tram to international. I did all this mindlessly. I bought my ticket, which had me fly to Los Angeles, where I ate some airport food, and from Los Angeles I flew direct to Moscow.

From within the pointy airplane I pushed through the world. I had my own row, but people swelled around their seats and surrounded me with a blur of uncountable languages. Below, continents approached, and with my mind I zoomed in on them, and could see people galloping, frantic, driven from the house, and among them, the bodies of those who’d been poisoned. I knew what would happen if I were down there with them in their markets brimming with souvenirs. I’d kick them away from myself. I’d drop radioactive pellets into their cups of tin. Look at those people at the bottom of that barrel, snuggled in the dirt of the earth.

The plane was dark, Moscow was invisible, and then it appeared, grew bigger, and filled the screen. Over the years, my images of Russia had failed to remove the big heads of men from everywhere. I was a little surprised I didn’t see them, great banners puffed with wind. I saw a river, a lot of buildings with shiny blue roofs, and I saw the airport. I continued to banish myself. I ate airport food, bought more tickets, exchanged my money. Then I flew to Khabarovsk. I waited three days for weather, then flew to Yakutsk. I waited for a helicopter and then took the helicopter to a group of brown wooden shacks that made up a town with a name I have forgotten. There I bought boots, a hat, and a huge coat of reindeer fur.There was nothing in the wooden shack for me to look into at myself. Didn’t matter. I know what I looked like.

I hired a guy to drive me on his reindeer sled into the wilderness of ice, of mountains, of sky, and a refracting sun of white. I sat behind his furry brown head, and he sat behind a furry white tail.This, I thought, is where lost explorers are lost. This is where men freeze timelessly.

After a day we came across a Yukat longrider on a white pony. My reindeer man talked to the longrider.They laughed, perhaps at me. They knew I was a fool, but they might not have known my cruelty. I gave the two of them the rest of my money, as well as my wallet, my passport, and my phone. The reindeer man drove away, and the longrider let me ride behind him on his fluffy white pony. I loved the reindeer, and I loved the pony. When I saw my first mirage, I poked the longrider and he stopped the pony so I could get off. The snow came around my knees, like Angela. I watched the man and the animal fade into the snow, and even as they retreated I felt I was traveling, moving closer and deeper into the world made up of all its eyes and minds, to a place from which I might be able to see something, and then I watched the trails fill until all directions unified.

This happened some time ago.

The land was like the moon—not the dull and cratered gray moon, but the glowing glazed one we see from our perspective. I remember thinking I had come to face myself, and this is what I faced, this image created by distance. I tried to look around, turning, facing myself in the snow.

I no longer felt like a monster. I felt a little inorganic, and a little divine. I felt the way I’d tried to imagine such unfeeling things might feel.

What I felt like was a lens.

What I am, I thought, is a point of view.

I felt lighter and lighter, and more and more like snow. Here, the world was so close to me that it had become entirely particulate, nothing but white. For a while I got colder and colder in the diffused light, then less and less cold. I could not resist. But after a time, there I remained, the sun forever visible, its broad disk skirting the horizon, in this land of perpetual light. And what is not possible in a place of perpetual light, blinding and infinite? In the seat of frost and desolation the future roils with possibility, and in a land of possibility nothing is irrevocable. The enormity of landscape can elevate a tiny human from all littleness of feeling, and it can make insignificance feel beautiful, like a freedom.

When I got back to my home, like magic, and gazed up at my front door, wondering if it would explode, picturing my dog’s funny nose, my baby’s sweet freckles, the rusted color of my wife’s immaculate eyelashes, I tried to remember:

What goes here in this lit land, in this space of white?

Some form of enormity that is open to beauty.

If only I can remember. If only I can fill my body with it always. The whiteness of the whale and the mind of winter, madness, blindness, silence, and invisibility, all here, and glowing adoration, omniscience, the intricacy of attachment, the welling of love—everything—and shining castles that repeat above themselves . . .

I know what I am. Before the lusty glimmers of the eyes of lovers and rapists we might be anything, but quicker than a quark we turn out to be filled with nothing but ourselves. I know what I’m made of. Here, within the history of the banished and the searching, I could think of our family of cells—my cells, her cells, the baby’s cells, the cells of the dog, the cells of mice, and then of anyone—all round, bouncy, blank, and identical, just as they ought to appear in a person’s imagination. If only I could keep this space of white I would know what to do, because I could do anything. If only I can keep this space of white while I move through the world, then everything will be good, and true, and right.

Simpler Components

I: BLOOD AND GUTS

Inside, my mother made a series of autumnal blunders, frying the pies, pouring boiled milk on the frozen pipes. I emptied my thoughts into a bucket a mile away, and scrambled around in the woods for tinder.

I blew on my supper and ate it while she mopped the kitchen with glue. I coaxed her into her snowsuit for the showdown. She was not normally so nervous, nor I so attentive. It was a bitch being quiet people. It doesn’t matter what you do.

We trudged to our nearest neighbors, balancing on the crusty snow or falling through. We bruised our shins and our noses ran. We were having problems with the neighbor. We wanted to fix it over hot toddies. Go away, we’d say, it’s too hard, messy, eventually unkind. He wasn’t home.

We took the tractor route back, animals crouched in the trees, and I thought I saw a piece of fire in a tree but it was a star. My mother’s flashlight bounded ahead. Soon it found a carcass, the neighbor’s old dog Muff, split down his belly from an impact, his ribs open like double doors. I knelt, wallowed, tried to replace the spilled innards. My mother put some in her jacket pockets.

This is why we stay in the woods. We suffer our respective natures with gumption. My mother concocts theatricality. Occurrences reply to my tidy life.

II: A REPRIMAND FOR AFFECTION

Old milk-jug hands is trying to lace her boots again. I let her work at it because I know she will grow tired and I know she will let me help her at the moment she finds it frustrating. Then she will go outside and feed animals all day.

“A barnacle has the largest penis-to-body ratio of any documented life-form,” I tell her, because I like to keep her informed. It is difficult to do anything with milk jugs for hands. I cannot think what other point there might be to this experiment.

My mother says someone is going to slice the skin between her fingers. She says her brother did that to a frog and someone is going to do it to her, sooner or later.

She says my father lived first by the alphabet, announcing, berating, cajoling, and so on, then by numbers, one foot out of bed and then two, three minutes with the brushing of teeth, four items of clothing (socks, shirt, undies, slacks,) then, as he grew older, according to one body part at a time.

“Finally one day I found he’d been trying to hang himself. I could tell by the rope around his neck, and there he was, feet in the air, humping nothing, as usual.” She is not cruel and not crazy. In fact, I am sure it is all metaphorically speaking.

III: LIFE IN A BOX

Convinced as I am of her ineptitude, I sit my mother on a kitchen chair and make her watch television while I soak and scrub her feet. First I have the water cold in case she’s been courting hypothermia. Then I add boiling water from the kettle and Epsom salts to draw swelling.

I scrub her feet with a straw-bristled horse brush and then pumice. I think she’s been climbing the chimney again. I think the aged color her skin has taken is from soot, and I clean a whole layer away.

Onion and more onion beneath, seven layers of it are there; fat and springy at her heel and the undersides of her big coarse toes, and transparent toward her arch and ankle.

She says, “My family was so full of money they could turn entire seasons into verbs.”

“What do you want?” I say, defensive. “A cloned experience ? This is okay,” I say. “What we are. Everyone wants this. A good kitchen.”

She decides she must get her feet out of the tub and make prints on the floor, and she does. She walks out a garden of footprints, even dunks her feet in the tub as they dry. She makes the garden with flowers, vegetables, and insects, and then she stamps out a box frame around it, complete with wood grain and diagonal joints at the corners.

Exasperated, I fix my eyes on a puddle and watch it disappear. Down it goes, into the plank floor, and up into the air. By the time it is gone, she has opened the oven door and is curled in front of it, sleeping.

The television hums and drums. I look at it in order to catch up with people and the way lives go. I look at the lives, other people’s obsessions, their fruit-canning companies and sexual fetishes, the consistencies or accumulating idiosyncrasies that define their characters, and I know what will happen in my life. I will fixate on a desire for my own box as I clean my mother’s, and then I will receive a reprimand for my affection. Everyone will bump along our property lines and we will continue to be the everyone of whom I speak.

IV: OTHER PEOPLE’S OBSESSIONS

Having decided her personality, I turned my mother’s routine actions into something I could understand. If she put down her fork and reached across the table for salt, I forgot the fork and the salt, and saw only the area of space cut by her motion. If she buttoned her shirt, I saw only her hands like dying spiders in the air.

In this way, my mother could seem to operate in pantomime, moving her hands and exaggerating her facial expressions as if searching for a right word that never surfaced. I took each silent gesture she made and isolated it.Then, I took each conjured notion to be a microcosm of a great profundity.

After all, some people collect pig icons, go bargain hunting, search for long lost brothers, study obscure bugs, or bury money.

We strapped ourselves into the truck and bumped toward the feed store. Here, on the edge of the state, people in trucks wave to other trucks.When cows get out, we know whose they are. The neighbors get together because the Wilsons are out of town. We push the cows back off the road and seal the fence.

My mother was one of the children who rode luxury ocean liners from California to Hawaii to mark off the seasons, bunny-hopping around the deck with libertines.

Years ago, I knew a skinhead named Uncle. This is where I’m coming from.

The older she grows, the more her body sneers at her. Moment to moment she must behave spinelessly, blindly, or spleenlessly, and many of her gestures are instigated by a desire to avoid pain.

“Go ahead and hate it, but don’t let it stop you from doing what you love,” I say, which is what Uncle said about heroin.

The feed store is an attachment to a convenience store. Besides feed, you can buy rawhide for your boots, beer and cigarettes, screwdrivers and crowbars, wire fencing, fluorescent ribbon, baseball caps and down vests, and chewing gum, canned beans, and fresh onions.

My mother has taken to waving indiscriminately—at dogs, fences, trees, and the spaces between. “Everything has led to the place where you are,” I say to make sense of it, which is a fact, and specifically not an affirmation of destiny.

V: THE EVERYONE OF WHOM WE SPEAK

Summer, and the squash is over our heads as it was when I was a child. The older we get, the higher the squash. We are fine gardeners. We eat and throw the scrapings in a heap outside and the next year . . . it goes to show.

We actually hold pieces of manure to the sun, imagining the lives represented there. It’s all terribly warm, the huge leaves like stained glass, the yellow tiger spiders.

This is death: a cessation of spontaneous function, unresponsiveness to an isoelectronic electroencephalogram in the absence of hypothermia or intoxication by central nervous system depressants, recognition and deletion of T lymphocytes that have been induced to proliferate by receptor-mediated activation preventing their overgrowth, or there’s somatic death, which is basically death, or neocortical death, which is death, or there’s a persistent vegetative state. I record none of this in protest. It’s simply that everyone wants to know.

At night, we collect cabbage worms and put them in our jacket pockets, these little gray toes. Each clumsy attribute we employ while doing so should be recorded, but here, our knees, our bumpy backs, the cricks in our necks and hips, these should be enough for everyone.

Underground, eubacteria, prosthecate bacteria, budding bacteria, gliding bacteria, filamentous bacteria, spirochetes, rickettsiae, chlamydiae, mycoplasma, and blue-green algae float around in the dirt with everything, breaking it into simpler components.

VI: A GOOD DAY

My mother is washing the dishes, and handily. She has let the horses out of their paddocks and they are grazing on the lawn, feeling this moment as hard as they can, because they are not often allowed to graze the yard.

My mother has also done the bills, found the misplaced two in her checkbook, and written a letter to the governor. All around, a smooth five-dollar wine, a well-risen cake, no lines at the grocery, a rare day, one so unrumpled it is a wonder there is time to notice how easy it has been to travel from one end of it to the other.

The sound of the water and the dishes, the way I have a cup of tea and am watching her wash without guilt that I’m not drying, the way I notice the silence more each time I hear a sound, all of this is a fine, fine state.

My mother is not herself after all, I think, and the thought lands immediately in the past, a car in the lane next to me, slamming its brakes. For the moment, I think I have ceased to summarize her.

I tell her how my day has been, now that I know hers.

I say, “Mother, I think I have ceased to summarize you,” and knowing the correct responses—“Have you, now?” “Really?” and “Good”—she says, instead,“Your day was fine, now, wasn’t it?”

I tell her how lovely the horses look in the yard, how their lips are frothy and green, how the old gelding is teaching the filly to scratch his withers for him, how I long to break through the wall in front of the sink and give her the window she’s always wanted there.

The silence is fine—the lack of my voice or the voice of another—and I know that if I continue to speak, some recognition of difficulty will materialize, as if difficulty is produced from the interaction of my voice with the air it encounters.

It comes back to this condition. Sometimes I want to speak, and so I continue.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my family, my writer friends, my colleagues at UC-Davis the folks at Tin House, the editors who published the first versions of these stories, copy editors of the world, and Carol. Some of you belong in multiple categories and don’t think I don’t know it.

Copyright © 2007 Lucy Corin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2601 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.

Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York

www.tinhouse.com

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St.

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.pgw.com

First U.S. edition 2007

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Corin, Lucy.

The entire predicament : stories / by Lucy Corin.—1st U.S. ed. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-982-50302-7

These stories have appeared, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “My Favorite Dentist” and “Airplane” in the Southern Review, “Wizened” and “Who Buried the Baby” in Ploughshares; “Rich People” in Shenandoah; “Midgets Often Marry Each Other” in Double Room; “A Woman with a Gardener” in Fairy Tale Review; “The Way She Loved Cats” in Strictly Casual: Women on Love; “Some Machines” in Notre Dame Review; “Baby in a Body Cast” in Other Voices; “Incognito” in the Cincinnati Review; “The Entire Predicament” in Fiction International; “Mice” in Tin House; “Simpler Components” in Mid-American Review (under the name Lucy Hochman).

“Mice” contains phrases from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.