When I was four, my father was in a car accident that left him in a coma. My mother would later say it happened before lunch, but it took her the afternoon to figure out how to tell me. I found out after dinner he probably wouldn’t be home that night, or the next. I was four and dumb, so I made very little of it.

The next day, the doctors declared him brain dead. My mother packed me a peanut butter banana sandwich and we drove to the hospital. For the next five hours, the two of us waited for him to die.

My mother didn’t cry. She set out my favorite coloring book and sat at my father’s bedside. I couldn’t find any crayons so I folded boats and airplanes out of paper towels and the nurse on call brought me a juice box. Before we left, my mother unclasped the turquoise necklace my father had given her on their wedding day and tucked it into her pocket. I hugged my father’s sleeping body, and we slipped out the door.

On the way home, my mother told me that my father was going somewhere, and I shouldn’t be scared, or sad, because it was a place that we all ended up going to someday. It was just something everyone and everything did eventually, sometimes without even really realizing it at all.

Like the bathroom? I said.

My mother looked at me in the rearview mirror. Her gray eyes fogged like storm clouds. Yes, in a way.

I pictured my father perched on top of a giant toilet, waving down at me from the rim of the seat. I knew he was dead. I thought I understood. He had been in a car accident, he hadn’t made it.

And what was more, his exit strategy wasn’t interesting, wasn’t unique. My four-year-old brain was full of battling knights and race cars and dragons and Krakens of the sea, and my father the hero had died in the same beige sedan that drove me to and from school five days a week.

I stopped crying after a few weeks. It was hard to know what I was crying for, anyway—missing him was missing runny strawberry ice cream days in the summer, missing having someone to vault me up to catch snowflakes on my tongue on Christmas morning. Isolated events. Piecing the rest of him together was difficult, and so hard to separate from my mother, who was now suddenly her own person. It wasn’t long before my memories of him frayed at the edges, became weightless, lost in the shuffle of everything else. And before I knew it, my father was a brief appearance—a guest speaker in my childhood schooling. He’d come and gone painlessly, and here I was on the other side.

It was basic arithmetic. My father was a subtraction, one less, and that was the end of it. Death, his death, it wasn’t fair. Just final.

*

It’s 10 p.m. on a Friday evening and my suitemates are in the third hour of a marathon round of video games. I’m sitting on my bed waiting for the phone to ring.

My phone’s had poor reception all night, which gives me hope. There’s a chance Sarah has called, and I didn’t pick up, which breeds hope that she’ll have found me less desperate. The downside is, there’s a chance Sarah has called and I didn’t pick up.

“Okay, okay—I’m winning this time, twentieth time’s the charm,” Christian says with finality. From his other side, Blake passes me a beer. It’s room temperature, and flat. “Dude, she’s not going to call.”

I scowl. “She might.”

Gavin laughs. “Ten bucks says she won’t.”

I don’t take the bet. I’ll lose. “Fuck you.” On cue, my phone rings. I scramble for it, upsetting my beer onto the couch. It seeps into the cushions and the seat of Christian’s pants, but everyone is too absorbed in the game to notice.

But it’s not Sarah. It’s my cousin Juliet, whose number I have only by the sheer coercion of family obligation. I let the phone ring a few times, then answer cautiously. “Hello?”

“Tom!” Her voice is chipper and grating. “Long time, no talk.”

I get off the couch and cross the room, eliciting loud protests from the guys when I walk in front of the TV. Juliet squeaks. “What’s going on?”

“Hang on for a second,” I snap, shutting the door behind me as a muffled roar rises from the group.

Now that I’m in the hall, I don’t actually know where I’m going. So I walk into the bathroom.  It’s a mistake. Half the urinals are already housing the remains of several condoms, floating on the brackish yellow surface like pale dead codfish. It smells like piss and vomit. I head for the sinks, turning the tap on and off as Juliet clears her throat. “You good?” She sounds irritated.

“Yeah, sure, what’s up? I’m kind of busy, I’m waiting for another call…” I’m being an ass, but the remnant probability of Sarah, and sex, is enough to trump Juliet, who I’ve spoken to maybe twice since we were nine. She’s simple. She likes Dawson’s Creek. Poor thing never stood a chance, landed with a dipshit name like Juliet.

“Tom, your mom passed away.”

The faucet is leaky. I wriggle the taps on both sides, hot and cold, but the water continues to run in frantic little dribbles down the drain.

“Tom, did you hear me? Your mom… she’s dead.” Juliet repeats it slowly, carefully, enunciating her vowels.

“I heard you. Yeah.” It makes sense. She hasn’t emailed in a few days. A couple weeks, maybe.

“I’m sorry, Tom,” Juliet says. She keeps saying my name, like some kind of rote incantation. “We were… Dad and I were visiting, you know, since it’s near the holidays and we figured she should be with family…” She stops abruptly and clears her throat.  “Not—not that I mean you had to have been there, ‘cause like, you’re in college and that’s important and stuff…”

I look at myself in the mirror, expecting to see something different than I normally do. Death—the death of a parent—it’s supposed to change you. Be shocking, numbing, life-changing. But in the mirror, it’s just me. Same reflection as always. I need a haircut.

“… She had a seizure this morning and just didn’t wake up.  I know this is really hard to hear.”

“It’s okay, Juliet,” I say. “She was sick. It was… coming.”

“I guess,” she concedes, not bothering to conceal her relief at not having to console me. “Yeah. You’re right.” She pauses. “Still, sorry,” she adds as an afterthought.

Thanking her for her condolences feels silly, so I say nothing. My hands aren’t wet, but I dry them anyway. I scrub the mirror with my paper towel. Still, nothing’s changed.

Juliet’s voice crackles through once more. “So… what are you going to do now? With the cabin, I mean.”

“The cabin.” Our old summer home, where my mother moved six years ago after she stopped being able to walk on her own. It was bad timing; I was feeling temperamental and maladjusted, so I decided to go to boarding school in Massachusetts. To compensate, my mother hired a full time nurse to help her around the house.

“Are you going to sell it? Because we, the family I mean, could really get a lot for it.” Juliet clears her throat for emphasis. “You know?”

I stayed away most summers, finding excuses in flashy internships and pre-college programs. When I did go back, it was hard to make it seem like home. And every time I did, my mother was weaker. I’d boil her tea, help her bathe, bring her the morning paper. She started weeping for no reason, getting anxious over small things. Last Christmas morning she was afraid of me: she’d forgotten who I was. But most days she would just stare out the window, folding little doves out of napkins and pushing them over the sill.

“Or you could keep it, I guess,” Juliet says, taking my silence for disapproval. “It’d be cool. You know. Tom’s Cabin. Ha, ha.”

“What?”

“You know—like the famous book, or movie, whatever… about the slave…”

“You mean Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

“Right, yeah, that. Whatever.”

There’s a pause. I hear Juliet suck in her breath. “So are you going to sell it?”

I hang up.

Same grimy floor, same desecrated urinals. There’s loud music churning in the hallways, screams and drunken karaoke from the floor below. I head back to my room. The door opens with an arthritic creak that I don’t remember being there the last time I used it. Christian, Gavin, and Dan are eating tortilla chips, apparently on a well-deserved break from the battlefield.

Christian fishes his game controller out of the salsa and mutes the game, which is back on the welcome screen. “Well? Are you getting laid?”

I hesitate. Blake has taken the controller from Christian and is scraping salsa off the buttons with a tortilla chip; Gavin is picking his nose. I think, they’re not mature enough for this. “It wasn’t Sarah.”

“Ten bucks!” Gavin crows, reaching up for a high five that no one reciprocates.

I don’t have to tell them. I do anyway. “My mom… she’s not doing too well.” They look at me, unsure. Gavin’s hand sinks downwards. “What I mean is she’s dead. So, I’m probably going home.”

There’s a sharp silence. Then,

“Fuck, man.”

“Dude, you okay?”

“I’m so sorry, man.  That’s really… awful.”

Christian claps me on the shoulder, awkwardly, delicately, like I might shatter.

I sit back down. The room is much quieter now; the chip bowl is empty but no one’s calling for a refill. Gavin hands me another beer without meeting my eye. This time, it’s freezing.

*

I decide to take the rest of the semester off and book a flight home. In a duffel, I pack three boxers, two shirts, a toothbrush, a razor, my phone. Enough for a weekend trip; it’s how long I’ve convinced myself I’ll stay.

It’s a two-hour train ride to the shore, then forty minutes on a bus to reach the cabin, which sits at the edge of a national woodland preserve. Prime real estate that was a stretch to rent as a summer home and a near fortune to purchase. But my mother had wanted to die here. She at least saw that far.

Through the tinted windows of the train, everything looks sharp and bleak. It’s been nearly a year since I’ve come back, but with the seasons moving fast this year, it looks like no time has passed at all. Outside, the grass has already turned its flaming November golden, tousled like the hair of a child by the thick, rattling wind.

The bus leaves me at the edge of the preserve, and I walk the final quarter mile to my mother’s home. The cabin sits on a little cliff, tucked behind a grove of old pine. It’s a beautiful spot, really. You can see the sea, the forest, the speckled white beaches shedding coats of sand into the foaming surf. I pause for a moment to look at the ocean. Its surface is shimmering, motionless, thin and taut like the skin of a drum. Above it, the air smells like salt and sand and seals. Home. Kind of.

I know when I open the door, Addy will be there. I’ve been waiting for myself to be nervous about this fact, but it hasn’t yet hit me. It’s been years since I’ve really let myself think about her.

She was twenty, four years my elder, when we hired her sister as my mother’s full-time nurse. When her sister decided to get her M.D., Addy, who’d gotten her own nursing degree by then, took over. During the day, she cooked, cleaned, changed my mother’s bedpans, wheeled her from room to room. She was efficient and cheery, which was enough for my mother. What’s more, she expected only minimal contributions—boiling water, loading the dishwasher, reading the paper to my mother—from me. I skittered around my mother’s illness while Addy cleaned up after the both of us.

We became friends, at first only out of convenience. The age difference was a little crippling; the matter of her employment made things worse. But we somehow managed to push it aside. Looking back on those years, I can barely comprehend how Addy pulled it off—how she made me laugh, how she made me forget I was an angsty kid with a sick mom and a crappy attitude. She was, in a way, a blessing.

She also had fantastic tits.

There’s a key we always keep under the mat. For emergency purposes. It’s a stupid place to keep it—the first place anyone trying to break in would look—but it’s there all the same. It’s cold and grimy on one side from the hard earth, clean and neat on the other, which faced the nylon doormat. I open the door hesitatingly, like a stranger. Addy’s at the sink. She watches me shut the latch behind me; she heard me coming.

I take a breath. “Addy.”

She smiles, sadly, as she must. “Tom.”

*

That night, we make soup. Or rather, Addy makes soup while I stand uncomfortably behind the stove and tell her stop, you really don’t uh have to you know, cook for me, because. She’s wearing jeans and a green blouse just tight enough to reveal the slight outline of her bra beneath the cotton. I am incredibly—uncomfortably—aware that I am still attracted to her.

She ladles out a bowl for me, nervously. It’s an old recipe of my mom’s—a fish stew she made for me a lot when I was little. You could say it was a comfort food—something I’d always have after a rainy day at soccer practice, on snow days when we’d snooze in front of the television. It’s been years, but the minute I see it, I know it hasn’t come out right. The smell’s off, the color’s too light. I don’t tell her this. I hardly care.

“I know it’s not as good as your mom’s, but… I figured you might be missing it. I remember you loved this stuff.” She smiles, a careful quarter of a smile that casts a fleeting shadow on her jaw. She’s unsure. Not embarrassed; she won’t be, even if it’s inedible. Addy doesn’t really do embarrassed.

I laugh, a little more dryly than I might have intended. “Thanks, but I think I’ve been over it for a while. She hasn’t made it since I was twelve.”

Addy shrugs and dips a spoon into the pot. “All the better for me, then. Maybe you won’t notice the difference.” She sips at the spoon, cautiously, puckering her bottom lip, and gives me a reassuring smile. “God, I always tried to cook like your mom, but I could never pull it off.  Anyway, like I said… I just wanted this place to feel like home for you again.”

We eat in silence. The soup isn’t my mother’s, really, but it’s not bad—in fact, it’s pretty good. Just different. I watch Addy, sneaking glances as she studies her bowl. I haven’t seen her in almost three years, the summer before I left for college. She hasn’t changed; even her hair is the same dark auburn, parted on the left, always worn down. I remember wanting to sleep with her, badly. That feeling isn’t gone, but it’s lighter now, a little more inconsequential. We’ve barely spoken since I walked in the door three hours ago. I didn’t let her hug me, and I don’t think she was expecting me to.

“Tom—how are you doing?” She asks it abruptly; I can tell she’s been waiting for the right moment. This still isn’t it. She glances at me cautiously, then tries to make amends. “I—it’s a dumb question. Obviously, shitty.” She hesitates. “Your mom was fine, I mean, she’d been doing really well… there was this one week last month where she was lucid almost the entire time. She talked about you a lot. And you know, she was always so happy when you called, or when you emailed.”

I frown, scrape my spoon over the little gritty puddles at the bottom of my bowl. “I should’ve more. Emailed, I mean.” My mother had written me at least twice a week, every week I was away from home. Every time she was lucid she would want to call or write. They were long, heartfelt emails about the cabin, the beautiful sea, how she wished I were here with her to enjoy life. I wrote three line responses, always the same thing with mildly different wording: hi, I am good/healthy/fine/happy, glad things are fine back home, miss you write again soon, love tom. College, books, girls—they seemed out of place in that conversation. Not because they were trivial, though they were. Just distant. My mother had always been a completely separate sphere of my life, and it seemed perverse to violate those boundaries, even for the sake of typed intimacy.

“No—I mean, she knew you were busy.” Addy looks prepared to mop up a torrent of gushing tears, and I feel suddenly bare. It’s a tight, ugly sensation in my chest that I immediately despise.

“I’m fine, Addy, really. You don’t need to do this.”

“Talk to you?”

“No. You don’t have to give me unnecessary compassion. It is what it is. I’m sorry she’s gone. But I’m okay.”

She looks at me, waiting for me to recant my words. A flicker of something—relief, maybe—passes over her face when I don’t. Her eyes meander over to my mouth.

“Oh—Tom, you’ve got some soup on your—” She reaches over, almost instinctively, and dabs my chin with her napkin. And it’s this—the physical contact, the maternal gesture—that makes something in me snap. I flinch away from her, pushing off from the table so sharply that I send my silverware clattering to the floor. Flecks of soup spatter the rug, seeping like brilliant crimson blood into the little fibers wound tight beneath my feet.

I look at Addy and feel a powerful, insatiable need for her. To lay my head on her chest, let her run her fingers through my hair. I want to fuck her, but even more so, I want to watch her pleasure herself, run her hands down her stomach, between her legs—her perfect body, unblemished by disease or death or sorrow.

I shut my eyes and take a breath. Addy’s staring at me like a cornered cat, eyes wide and cautious. I stand, and a shudder runs through my body like a sip of something unexpectedly frozen. “Sorry,” I say. I walk out of the kitchen, down the hall, into my old bedroom.

*

My mother is undressing herself in front of the mirror. I watch her from the doorway, timidly, as she unbuttons her blouse. I am seven years old.

Her face is slate; nothing moves but her eyes, quick and flashing like the scales of a fish. She examines her breasts as they appear over the descending collar of her shirt, touches the outline of her bra. Her collarbone is prominent, highlighted in the light. I have pictured my mother naked, innocently—simply as a comparison to my own nakedness in the tub or between changes of clothing. Girls and boys are different. But I do not expect the wrinkles, the pale white skin beneath the brilliant blue of her blouse.

I came looking for her when I woke up and found her bed empty. But this creature I have discovered is not my mother: everything I see before me is foreign, pale pink and soft like a molting creature from the sea. I am petrified and enraptured all at once. Do not move, my feet say. I cannot move myself.

She finishes unbuttoning, but does not remove, her blouse. Next, she slips quietly out of her loose tan slacks and sits, legs tucked beneath her, on the floor. She looks small: in this position, she is nearly my height. And though she thinks she is alone, her arms still twitch forward subconsciously to shield her body.

She continues to examine herself, shyly. Her hands touch each part of her body at least once, a soft, lingering brush of the fingertips, as if making contact with tabooed artifacts. Her eyes rage, and I am afraid she will cry, as she has not dared to do since the funeral.

For a moment, she pauses, hands pasted to her stomach. I feel myself unfreeze a little; I picture her getting dressed, coming to find me spying at the door. But as I watch, she unfreezes as well. With her eyes trained onto the ground—as if she is scared to look—she extends her right hand in front of her, as if reaching out to someone in the mirror I cannot see. She stares at her fingers, at this mysterious person on the other side of the glass, watching, waiting.

It’s slight at first. I don’t even notice until she inhales sharply. A mild quake in her fingertips, juddering up through her wrists. She snaps her hand back into a fist as if burned, clutching her hand to her bare chest. The folds of her blouse cave in around her like a shielding cloak.

With a gasp of defeat, my mother buries her face in her hands, not crying, not even making a sound—just shielding her eyes. Almost immediately, I feel my own discomfort, seeing my mother sick, seeing my mother vulnerable without her permission. I think of my mother laughing, of my mother holding hands with my father. Mother brave, Mother strong, Mother whole. The scared woman in the room, huddled before the mirror, violates any notion of have yet formed of parenthood. And I realize for the first time what it’s like to feel a little older.

The heat burns back into my legs; I scuffle out of the doorway and slip away before she can notice I’ve even snuck in at all.

*

I decide not to hold a service. My mother’s only living family other than me is Juliet and her drunk father, and it hardly seems worth it to bring them out here just to haggle over a selling price for the cabin.

Addy and I bury her in a cemetery that overlooks the sea, just as she wanted. I see my mother’s face once before it disappears beneath the coffin lid, gray and set like a photograph. I cry for the first time since her death, but they feel like an involuntary front. I am disembodied, watching some disheveled doppelganger of myself weep in an ugly suit I fished out of a closet at the last minute. I wonder when the tears will end, how they even began. As an incentive for sorrow, I try to think back to some happy memory of my mother and me, but all there I get is a whining tightness in my chest that squeezes once, twice, and leaves me just as I was. By the end, all I’ve managed to come up with is relief that it’s finally over for the both of us.

As her coffin descends into the earth, I feel there’s something else too, a weighty soreness at the back of my head that I suspect is the beginning of grief. But I don’t know grief. And because I can’t quite place it, the emotion doesn’t bother to linger.

On the way home from the cemetery, I ask Addy to stay for a few days, to help me sort out my mother’s affairs, what’s left of them. I offer to pay her, but she scowls in disgust and I don’t push the matter.

“Let’s just start with her bedroom,” I suggest the minute we’re back. I feel hollow and I don’t like it. If I come across a picture of my mother and cry, I might get to feel a little more human again.

Addy stares at me. “Are you sure you’re ready? We just buried your mom like, half an hour ago.”

“Yeah, no, I’m fine,” I say, nodding vigorously. I feel cartoonish. “Let’s just start, get this over with.”

We begin with the bedrooms. When she moved here permanently, my mother quietly claimed the guest bedroom that overlooked the far side of a little ocean cliff. The master bedroom, where my parents used to sleep when we spent summers here, hasn’t been lived in for nearly two decades. Now it’s a storage space, jammed to the corners with boxes and rolled up rugs and odd ugly furniture that didn’t belong.

“Jesus,” Addy whistles. “What are you going to do with all of this?”

I laugh bitterly. “What else? Get rid of it. I mean, what would I do with it? I don’t want it.”

“Okay,” she says carefully. She picks her way through the room as if wading through a reef and pulls a large box off the shelf. “But this stuff… it was your parents’ life. You should at least take a look at the family stuff before you sell it all.” She peels the yellowed tape off the flaps and peers inside. “I mean, god. Look at this stuff—this is old. It’s valuable.” She sets the first box down on the floor and reaches for the one next to it.

“Addy,” I say helplessly, “It’s all useless stuff, don’t…” But it’s too late. Out comes a set of beautiful long-stemmed candles, a set of first edition books that look like they could be from the 1800s, some willow-patterned china, a beautiful set of silver spoons that I recognize from my grandparents’ old home, and my mother’s turquoise necklace. Addy immediately takes the necklace out of its casing and runs her fingers over the turquoise, eyes sparkling. “Wow, Tom. Was this your mom’s? It’s so beautiful. I don’t know why she didn’t wear it more often.”

I scuff my heels crankily against a small box at my feet. “My dad gave it to her,” I mumble. “She stopped wearing it after he died.”

Addy’s face crumples. “Oh, that’s so sad. It must have hurt so much, seeing it just sitting there in its box…”

“Yeah, I bet,” I cut in. I crouch down to open the box I’ve been kicking as noisily as I possibly can, peeling the tape off in a loud, slow screech. I just want her to stop talking. I don’t know why my mother stopped wearing the necklace. For all I know, she didn’t even like it. Maybe she only wore it to please my father, and then after he croaked, it was goodbye to marital obligation.

“Oh, wow, Tom—this box.” Addy hops over the wall of cardboard between us and reaches into the box I’ve opened. In my surly tantrum I haven’t even bothered to look inside; it’s filled with notebooks and yearbooks and photos of my parents from when they were young. There’s even one of me as an infant. I look like a slimy, pink little alien shaking its fists at the camera.

Addy grabs my baby picture and bursts out laughing. “My god. This is great. I want this one—I’ll keep it and tell people this was my boss taking a shit.” I can’t help but smile too as I try to pry the photo out of her fingers. Addy rolls away from me, holding it out of reach, and grins back at me victoriously. Her eyes are a late autumn green. My heart pounds a little. I want to pull her face closer and kiss her, but I don’t, I won’t, not over a box full of dead mommy and dead daddy. I drag my eyes away from her, down to my nails, which I start to pick at guiltily.

“Whatever, screw you,” I say, forcing a laugh. “What else is in here?”

With my photo safely stashed in her bag, Addy dives back into the box and pulls out a photo of my mother and father. They look to be about in their early twenties, maybe a few years before they got married. With his arms around my mother’s waist, my father looks confident and happy; he hasn’t shaved in days.

Addy reaches back to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear, like my mother is doing in the photo. Other than that, they look nothing alike. Addy’s hair is a straight caramel brown, my mother’s still rich and yellow, whipping around her head as she laughs. She seems mildly embarrassed by the photograph: her other hand is waving the camera away. My mother used to always laugh like that—like she was surprised at her own joy. It only made her laugh harder.

When Addy laughs, she is always sure.

“God, they look so young,” Addy murmurs, running her fingers along the frame of the photograph. “Your mom’s gorgeous, Tom. You should keep this.” She slips the photo out of its frame. Someone, probably my father, has scrawled on the back: “Pearl Beach Aug 83.” They were twenty-five. Addy’s age. I don’t recognize my parents like this, and the thought of keeping the photo seems disruptive to memory. I take it anyway, just to make Addy smile.

We spend the next three days straight moving boxes, clearing a path to the older stuff in the back. Piles appear in the living room, organized by year and utility. Most of what we find is typical: old plates and silverware, photos and textbooks, cassettes and a radio, boxes and boxes of eighties clothing. But we also come across a box of funny hats and waste an afternoon in front of the bathroom mirror, only making things worse when Addy drags over what looks like the costume set from Grease.

Being with Addy makes things bearable. The heaviness and confusion of everything seems so much more distant when I talk to her. Because in spite of everything, she’s still a tourist here. She cared for my mother, but her affection was necessarily muted by hierarchy. For Addy, this death and this house are all just a part of passing through this shit town. Being with her makes it easier to take everything less seriously. The lighter perspective is foreign, almost abrasively so, and it’s refreshing.

If I’m brave enough to consider my mother—consider her absence—all I come up with is shallow, frustrated confusion. My mind has emptied all but two of its beakers, and someone keeps siphoning water out of the Addy beaker and dribbling it into my mother’s. A careful, steady dilution: my feelings, whatever they are, towards my mother diminish as those for Addy—platonic, romantic, whatever—grow more and more concentrated by the minute.

It’s easy to settle back into the old familiar of our friendship. It’s not sex, or any kind of intimacy. But it’s a relief to not feel like I need it.

*

The night we finally finish, Addy and I get drunk. We unload a box of fluffy pillows with artsy fruit patterns on them and sprawl out on the porch with an assortment of alcoholic beverages we unearthed from the corners of the cabin: red wine, a few beers, and, unfathomably, an ancient bottle of rum.

We talk for a while, mostly about nothing. Addy puts her head on my shoulder. “What are you thinking about?”

I stare at the lights from the next city over flickering across the ocean water. “I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. All that shit, in those boxes. I can’t tell what year I’m in anymore.”

Addy laughs thickly. She’s a messy drunk. “You need to get out of this house.”

“Uh huh. And go where? The post office? Or the movie theater in, in, fuck, it’s like three towns away.” I feel wonderfully foggy. It’s amazing, not having to think about what I’m saying.

“No, no, let’s go… out there.” She points to the darkness before us, stretching into the glinting woods.

“There?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Okay.” I get up and follow her, stumbling down the porch steps. She waits for me at the bottom, grinning. Then, almost gracefully, she peels off her jeans and her top and sprints down the path.

“Hey!” I call after her. My voice echoes off the trees, and I run after her, tripping over myself until I’ve caught her around the waist.

We strip off the rest of our clothes and streak into the woods, howling like animals. The dirt is sharp with pine needles and rocks beneath my feet, but soon we’re running fast enough that it hardly matters.

We are insane, inhuman. The shame I should feel dies in some fiery hole in my chest, replaced by the thrill of abandoning civilization, of letting loose every ugly dark confused emotion I’ve had in the past week. Fuck death, fuck misery. Fuck everything.

We reach a ledge, barely catching ourselves in time. The surf rages below us, spraying the rocks with brilliant, heady white foam. We heave in gulps of air, collecting salt on our tongues. I grab Addy’s hand and drag us to the very edge. My toes grip the rock; it’s sharp, a true edge that cuts into my joints. I can see all my knuckles going white.

“Do it,” I say.

“What—”

“Do it, jump!”

“No!”

“Together, on three, we’re jumping, one.”

“You’re crazy—”

“Two.”

“Tom.”

“Three!”

“Fuck!”

“Fuck!”

We scream together as we launch over the edge. “FUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKKK!”

The water slams us unforgivingly, smacking our flailing limbs. I go under, far deeper than I’d been sober enough to expect. When I break the surface, a wave smashes against the side of my head and I gulp in mouthfuls of freezing, powerfully briny water. To my left, Addy resurfaces, shrieking and laughing. “Oh my god, oh my god!”

We throw our heads back and wail into the night, screaming until we’re hoarse—because it’s freezing, because we’ve each swallowed a pint of filthy ocean water, because my mother’s dead and we’re fucking alive and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

I catch my breath, abruptly sobered, and swim clumsily in Addy’s direction. She waits for me, treading water evenly beneath the inky waves. My arms snake around her—she’s naked, we both are—I’ve barely understood this properly. We’re human again, sentient, but it’s too late and too useless to be self-conscious.

I stare unabashedly at her, the curve of her waist, the space between her legs. Her body is every bit as beautiful as I could have imagined.

Addy wriggles out of my grasp, splashing me. She curls her legs back into her body and dives forward. I catch her by the shoulders and she wraps her arms around my neck, laughing and spraying my face with water. I pull her in closer and kiss her hard. She melts into me, pressing herself up against my chest, legs kicking fast in the churning water. I run my fingers up between her breasts, skimming her collarbone, feeling the faint beating of her heart chiming dissonantly against the sound of the surf.

My hands are inept in the water. Somehow I muster up the courage to trail my fingers down her back. Heat churns through my blood and I tread water more confidently, making the two of us more easily buoyant. Addy sighs into my mouth, and I’m braver, brave enough to run my hands forward, over her hip, down a little trail to rest on her thigh. But as if on a trigger, she gasps and pulls away sharply, sending a rush of salty water into my eyes and mouth.

“Oh god, no.” She shakes her head, swimming away from me in fast, pumping strokes. “No, no. Bad idea.”

“Addy, wait,” I say helplessly. I don’t follow her, but she’s stopped only a few feet away.

“Tom, we can’t.” She’s catching her breath and her sentences are clipped and rushed. “We’re drunk, and we’re out in the middle of the ocean… your mom just died, you just left school, you’re not thinking clearly…” She trails off.

I stare at her dumbly. Her hair, stained black by the water, fans around us, a shimmering vacuum. We’re both breathing hard. We’d forgotten to fight the current and drifted closer to shore. I can see the edge of the cliff we jumped off of, a triangular point cutting into the sky above us.

I want to say, I’m fine. I want to say, you’re making a mistake. But instead, I just keep looking at her, and she gazes back at me with pitying eyes.

Finally, she says, “I’m sorry, Tom.” And that’s it.

She swims away from me in a contained breaststroke, her bottom bobbing in and out of the water. I want to scream after her, tell her she’s a bitch, tell her I’m furious about being left buck-naked in the ocean with my last set of clean clothes strewn god knows where in the forest. It’s my own damn fault. I feel stupid, sick, guilty, like a kid caught crapping in the pool at grandma’s birthday party. The humiliation is crippling. It’s all I can do to keep treading water in the thrashing waves, keep myself afloat against the current. Give myself a moment to catch my breath.

*

After my father died, I spent nearly every night of the next year in my mother’s bed. I lay awake beside her, listening to her snore lightly under the covers. I wondered if she noticed the difference, now that it was her son next to her and not her husband. A lighter weight, less contact. There was simply less of me; it made it easy, to forget.

Sometimes she would have nightmares, ones that would make her seize and writhe. It terrified me to see fear in my mother. I would shake her until she woke, tell her she’d been dreaming again. Each time she would emerge as if breaching the surface of a pool, breathing in thick gulps of air. She would stare at me as if for the first time. I was foreign to her in those moments; I would wonder if she dreamt of my father, of his death, of hers or mine.

But then, as if I had been the frightened one, she would spend the next half hour stroking my hair and singing me back to what I convinced her was sleep. Most of the time she’d simply doze off, fingers still entwined in the soft hairs at the nape of my neck. I would lie there for hours, bathing in the static of her touch, staring into the darkness of our broken home.

*

I wake up the next morning with cottonmouth and the ghost of a hangover. The night before comes crashing down on me and I curse under the covers. I figure I’ll have to face her sooner than later, and drag myself into the hallway with the resignation that I’ll act as normal as possible and hope she catches on quick.

Addy is reading Rebecca on the couch with her bare feet propped up on the coffee table.

“Good book?” I say.

She starts, banging her heel against the table. “Oh—uh, yeah, yeah it is.” She smiles cautiously. “Your mom gave it to me. It was her favorite.”

“I know,” I say, annoyed that she assumes I don’t. My mother’s favorite book. It belongs on her nightstand, where it’s been ever since I can remember—or with me. Not with Addy, never with Addy.

Addy gives me a reproachful glance, then looks me over and raises an eyebrow. I’ve forgotten to put on pants.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watch Addy. Part of me is still angry, but I’m not sure at what anymore. I try and place the feeling. It’s not the sex, or lack thereof, that much I know. But beyond that, all I have is a displaced anger rocketing around inside my head. Addy has barely looked up from my mother’s book. Until now I haven’t realized how much I expected her to apologize, at least be as wretched and uncomfortable as me. The casual interaction I’d pictured before now seems silly and naïve; her indifference rakes at me. I snatch at a few of the boxes in the living room, going for a particularly heavy one that I half hope will fall and make a lot of noise.

“I was thinking I’d make French toast when you woke up,” she says cheerily. “I forget, do you hate French toast? You hate something. Belgian waffles?”

I shove my hand in the box and rattle it around. It’s the expensive heirloom box with the books and the spoons and the candles. But it’s not really clunking in the way I want.

“I’m hungry, though. What do you think? I can just make pancakes. Everyone likes pancakes, right?” Addy shuts her book at looks up at me. “What are you doing?”

I pull the box off its pile and begin to sort through its contents. The books. The candles. The willow-patterned china. My mother’s necklace, in its velvet case. The spoons are missing.

“Addy, where are the spoons?”

Something flickers across her face. “What?”

“The spoons, Addy. The silver spoons that were in this box yesterday.” I dig through the box more vigorously, now just for the hell of it; I know they’re not going to appear. And I’m starting to have a sneaking idea of where I’ll find them. “I put them in here myself, next to these books, and my mom’s necklace, and these candles. Where are they?”

“I don’t—I don’t know, Tom—”

“You took them.” I say it simply. She doesn’t meet my eye. “So.” My voice gets louder, angrier, and I let it. I storm over to where she sits, still holding my mother’s copy of Rebecca. “Where the fuck—” I grab the book out of her hands and hurl it across the room. It lands with a wet smack in the sink, catapulting a dirty spatula onto the dining table. “Are they?”

I storm into the kitchen and start to tear drawers open. I’m hardly looking where my hands go, and it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Whatever I touch I fling aside. Things break and it feels incredibly empowering. I go to the door and fling Addy’s coats aside, kicking them away from me with my feet. I am insane, running around the room throwing things in the air screaming about spoons. Addy has followed me, and stands behind me with a sad little pitying look in her eyes.

And I know. I go to the couch, grab her bag, tear it open. The spoons, still in their worn wooden case, are inside. I wrench them out and fling her bag into the fireplace, where it lands in a smothering puff of ash.

I turn on her. The anger has built on itself productively within me, multiplying, dividing, running its spawn to my hands. I undo the clasp of the box and the spoons spill onto the floor. “Why did you take them?” I ask her, evenly. My voice wavers. I want so badly to scream again.

“Tom, calm down,” she says.

I laugh crazily. “Calm down. Calm down—you stole from me. To, what, make some extra cash? What were you going to do, run out of here and never come back? Make a fortune off some ancient dessert spoons that my grandma ate pudding with?”

She doesn’t look afraid of me. I hadn’t expected her to. She says, “Come on, Tom.”

I shake my head. “No. Why did you take them?”

She just looks at me, her green eyes glinting. They don’t look so charming now, pained and pitying like this; they look false, bland.

I pick up the case and hurl it against the wall next to me; it splinters and cracks down the middle. Addy winces. “Are you that pathetic—you’re stealing from a dead woman now?” I snarl. The words echo painfully in the room. It’s the first time I’ve said it to her face—dead, dead, deaddeaddead.

“Tom,” she says evenly. “Don’t overreact, okay? It’s not like you would’ve done anything with them, or…” She hesitates before continuing.  “She’s gone, Tom, and none of that stuff in attic—none of it—seemed like anything you cared about.”

I stare at her, trying to decipher what she means.  She’d always idolized my mother in a strange way; she was both a caretaker and a daughter, both sides of the relationship my mother had failed to forget with me.  It’s as if she was peeling me open and picking out the parts of me that still tie me to my mother, as if they never belonged at all.

“Besides,” she says, more coldly this time. “This isn’t just about the spoons, and you know it.”

She catches me so off guard I almost forget to be angry. “What?”

“I didn’t sleep with you. I’m sorry. You were hurting, and I left you vulnerable, but—”

“Christ, Addy, you can be so self-centered! This has nothing to do with that!”

She gives me a look. “Come on, Tom,” she says again, coaxingly. I feel like an insolent child, being scolded gently for asking for an unreasonable amount of ice cream after dinner.

I look at the spoons, languishing between us. They’re tiny and fragile, hardly even appropriate for stirring sugar into tea. The stem of one is already chipped and bent. Pretty, worthless things.

I grab the broken case and clench it hard in my hands. Little flecks of wood embed themselves in my skin like little teeth; I squeeze harder, force them into my blood. I want to hurl the case at Addy, smash her skull in, watch her scream—anything to wipe that look off her face. I’m in control. She doesn’t get to pity me—fuck her, the spoons.

I hurl the case, banking it left. Its trajectory is headed far from her, but Addy squeals and ducks all the same. The case smashes against a decorative urn over the mantel and it shatters across the floor, pinging against the hardwood like the plucked keys of an untuned piano. Dust settles across the floor, eerily ashen; the urn was empty, but I can’t help but feel as though I’ve actually tarnished the remains of the deceased. Addy eyes are fixed, unblinking, on the fragments of ceramic scattered at her feet. For the first time, she looks afraid.

And I can’t help it. I laugh. I laugh at Addy and her fear, at the ruined kitchen and the things I’ve strewn across the floor, broken against the wall. I laugh at my own cowardice, at my mother’s death and how little it really changed things at all, at how I can’t even accept my own morality and how it clashes with bravery and sorrow. I stumble over to the box of precious things, still gasping with laughter, and pull out my mother’s necklace.

Now Addy looks completely petrified. As I approach her, she takes a few lurching steps backwards, as if afraid I’ll attack. I give her a twisted smile and hold out the necklace, free from its case. “Take it.”

“What?” Her voice is small. I’ve never seen her unsure before—meek, cowering. But I no longer feel empowered. Just tired. And I realize I don’t care.

“Look, I broke your prize.” I laugh again, haltingly this time. “Go ahead. Take this. Wear it, sell it, I couldn’t care less.”

She continues to stare at me, worried I’m baiting her.

“Honestly. Take it.” I shake the necklace, and the turquoise clinks plaintively at her.

“I, I couldn’t,” she says uncertainly. But her hand is already inching unconsciously towards mine. I see her fingers flex with yearning.

I shake my head in frustration. “Yes, you can. I’m entirely sure that you can.” I toss the necklace onto the table. It hits the wood with a clack and slides to the opposite site, dangling innocently over the edge. The stones waver back and forth, as if it’s considering whether or not to take a plunge. “Just take it,” I say wearily. “And leave. Please.” I put my hands up. I concede. “I really, really don’t care.”

She does the easy thing. Slips the necklace into her pocket, takes her things, walks out the door. She leaves the spoons, broken and sullied amidst the fractured remains of the urn.

She shuts the door quietly. And I know she won’t think of me again.

*

I wake up in my mother’s bed at five in the morning. It’s freezing, and the room is wonderfully warm, but I pull on a coat and head outside. The ocean is like glass in the early light, almost fiery in the way it shines. From the porch, I exhale, watching my breath fog, then dissipate over the lawn.

I walk to my mother’s bedroom window. From the outside, the room still looks well lived in—as if my mother will come take her place at the window any moment. At my feet, there’s still a small pile of seven paper doves, cracked and yellow from the dew. They never made it past the crabgrass, beaks tipped down into the dirt in a display of defeat.

As the wind picks up, three of the doves tumble forward, haphazardly, onto the toes of my boots. Their little wings beat against my laces, crinkling from the force. I pick them up. The first two are larger and more impressive than the third, their wings more carefully constructed, their tails and beaks folded meticulously to perfect points. They looks a couple weeks older—more grayed, more chapped from the wind and rain—than their partner, which more resembles the confused first product of a child.

These two I release first. The wind whips them up and they part from each other almost immediately. The doves careen upwards, bucking back and forth in the currents, billowing over the steely water. It’s only a few seconds before I lose sight of them, drawn into the thick creamy white of the rising sun.

From between my fingers, the third dove rattles thinly in the wind, as if desperate to join them. I press it flat and slip it into my coat pocket, exchanging it for the cabin key. Addy still has hers, but she won’t be back. This one was my mother’s. I walk back around the house, slowly, careful to tread on the same path I took before, until I reach the front door. The key is still warm from my palms as I slip it under the mat, leaving everything just as it was before.

by Frank Rodriguez
Illustration by Alberto Hernandez 

The four of us— I, Edward Carlson, Captain Jack, and Major McKenny—and some engineers boarded the small starship, the interior of which I hadn’t seen till then. The main cabin looked like something outside time, a shock of white all over and no sharp angles—the beds, the desk, the table were all continuous, it was hard to tell when one stopped and the next started. The air was dry and sterile; I felt the sweat on the small of my back and the miasma of Los Angeles smog I carried in with me infecting it.

Captain Jack and Major McKenny went giddily to the cockpit, leaving Edward Carlson and me alone with the engineers. There were two seats on either side of the cockpit entrance and the engineers waited for us to get in. “Get in there and they’ll strap you up, Ray,” Edward Carlson said, as if it were his idea. “I’ll just go check on the astronauts.” But when he turned towards the cockpit, it shut with an exclusive hiss of the airlock.

I surveyed the cabin. At the ends of the beds, knees drawn up, huddled humanoid robots. “What are those, Carlson?”

“Those, Bradbury, are super audio-animatronic sexual girl dolls, courtesy of Texas Instruments.”

“I thought you guys were just saying that to promote the damn things, not that we were really having them up here in the shuttle.”

“We were very serious, Ray,” answered Edward Carlson. “I’m a serious businessman and this is serious business. This isn’t a military mission; we can have some luxuries. However… we won’t have one for you. Weight requirements, you see.” He gestured toward the space in front of the fourth bunk, which was filled with stacks of blank paper wrapped in clear plastic, thousands of sheets. “And with the typewriter… we just couldn’t have all that stuff for one man. Energy, you know; efficiency.”

The engineers put on our fishbowls and inside those we heard Captain Jack’s voice. “Launching: T minus two minutes, you pussies.”

*

Soon, we left orbit and were cruising toward the infinite, everything gone according to plan and the mission underway. One last time we looked out the ports at an Earth left behind and then we settled into what would become our routines: Captain Jack and Major McKenny played gin and Edward Carlson read a book, the cover of which he’d painted black.

I asked him what he was reading.

“It’s Clerical Errors: Their Cost and Cure by William Exton. An excellent book. I usually mar the covers of the books I read so people don’t know what I’m reading. But on this trip who would care?”

“Have you got anything else?” I hadn’t been allowed any books. I couldn’t even bring a volume of Shakespeare.

He pulled another marred book from a cabinet. Motivational Leverage: A New Approach to Managing People, by the same author. I refused it and lay down.

Something slapped my shoulder. It was Edward Carlson’s book. He stood over my bed with a soft grin. “No time to get mopey, sport. I chose to bring you on this mission because you’re such a good writer. Write your own goddamned book!”

*

I fed a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter. In space paper seemed whiter and blanker. To warm up and assuage my nerves by filling the page, I typed some Shakespeare, a speech from King Lear. If I were bored enough I could end up with my own custom volumes of Shakespeare.

As for my own writings, I began by describing the interior of the starship. Everything was white, so the description should, I decided, parse the white into more concrete objects. I began with the people. Captain Jack was easy because of his orange-colored, weathered skin. Major McKenny’s corn-bred cheeks were swathed with a permanent rouge.

The pages piled up beside me. I wrote slowly but steadily, deliberately. I was delineating the darkness that lay partly hidden in a crack between the doors of a cabinet when my ink ribbon ran out. There were forty pages beside me on the bed.

I asked Captain Jack for the time.

He said, “Listen to your body, that’s all that matters in space,” and continued to play gin.

I tried to sleep. I lay in the bed and closed my eyes, but sleep would not come. I paced about the quarters and then sat at the bed again and I knew I had slept. Nothing looked different and I could not observe any passage of time but I remembered a dream: I was in the vacuum of space trying to read the forty pages I wrote but it was too dark to read. If I went toward the sun my momentum might force me into it and I would be incinerated but otherwise I’d be stuck floating alone in space with no light to read by.

*

One day Captain Jack was fed up with gin. “Fuck it,” he said, and his friend Major McKenny, without so much as a look up, set up a solitaire tableau.

“Hold on a minute, Captain,” said Edward Carlson. “Maybe we can get some sort of four-man card game going; of course you’re going to get frustrated playing with just one colleague this whole time…”

“Fuck it,” he said. “Fuck cards.” And to me, “Bradbury, you write any stories about us yet?” I hadn’t. “You ever write about astronauts?” I had. I told him about a couple of stories in my last collection, but failed to capture his imagination.

He slid over to the doll, stroked her hair. “Horse hair.” The skin was realistic enough, but had a rubbery finish. The face had no expression generally. Only the mouth slightly ajar gave it a look of mild surprise. Its eyes were filled by black marbles, so that they seemed to contain the dark universe between the stars.

As Captain Jack stroked her hair the robot stood quite awkwardly and placed a rubbery hand on his chest. A staticky moaning sound came out of the thing, and Captain Jack led it to the cockpit. He closed and locked the door behind him.

A moment later days had elapsed, with no sign of Captain Jack. Major McKenny still played Solitaire but Edward Carlson sulked more and more.

“He’s been in the goddamned cockpit with that thing for days now! This is not how a team operates. Who decided we would use those… things? The boss of the whole enterprise? No! Not me—not me! Not the man paying your salaries!”

Major McKenny spoke up. “This is Captain Jack’s ship, sir.”

“Oh, great.” He continued to pound on the door of the cockpit.

*

Major McKenny conceded the cockpit to Captain Jack but did use his robot girl whenever he wanted right at his bunk. He always took his red spacesuit off very slowly, giving me and Edward Carlson ample warning. He was animalistic in bed: purring to indicate pleasure and barking out his orders to the robot in terse whispers. At these times, Edward Carlson would tell me to write something; inevitably I couldn’t think of anything and typed more of King Lear. “I can keep honest counsel, ride, run, mar a curious tale in telling it, and deliver a plain message bluntly.” Tip-tap-tap the typewriter went, and the sounds died on the walls.

Eventually Carlson got Captain Jack to come out of the cockpit, saying it was bad for one of ‘the team’ to be isolated from the lot of us. They negotiated a schedule for personal use of the cockpit: Edward Carlson on Tuesdays and Thursdays, Captain Jack on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays; three hours at a time. I didn’t even know what Wednesdays were—Thursdays!? The negotiations seemed silly to me. I couldn’t detect any pattern in the hours. Captain Jack would go in for five minutes and Edward Carlson would disappear for days at a time, if you could call them days.

*

The next thing I knew, Captain Jack was telling me about his doll. “It’s broken, Ray. It’s gotta be a gear inside, near the hips. There’s no animation in the middle.”

“Hey, shut it,” I said. “I’m not here as a mechanic. I don’t need to hear about this.”

“Listen, I’m no John Holmes like Major McKenny out here, performing and whatnot, so you don’t know my style. But I need to fix this thing, I need the hips in this thing working.” He handed me some keys. “Go to that hatch in the back, climb down and bring up the black toolbox.”

The hatch split open with a hiss. I descended down a ladder I judged to be about 10 feet long into the viscera of the ship. I walked in a dark corridor until, leaning against the wall like a broken fixture, I saw the robot of an old man.

I spoke to him: “Mr. Shaw. George Bernard Shaw.”

He sat upright, and he blinked and answered me: “By God, sir, I do accept it!”

“What?”

“The universe: it thinks, therefore I am!”

Now I took a seat, leaning against the long wall at a right angle to the robot Shaw. A faint red light blinked somewhere in his white hair, which, along with his beard and the whites of his eyes, were dyed green in the light.

“Mr. Shaw,” I said, “I hate it here and I want to go home. This is—this is a science-fiction nightmare. I’m here with the worst of humanity. How am I supposed to write if I’m here with perverts and some deranged CEO who only wants me to glorify his space mission to find a better form of goddamned dishwashing soap.”

“Nightmares are the stuff of your own stories.”

“Yes, Mr. Shaw, but being in the middle of it doesn’t help. For example, I never learned to drive because that’s a nightmare. Automobiles kill and maim one hundred thousand people a year and any society in which natural man, the pedestrian, becomes the intruder and unnatural man, encased in a mechanical shell, becomes his molester is a science-fiction nightmare. But I didn’t go around in cabs writing my stories, I just stayed in my room and made up my own nightmares. I just want to be alone.”

“Alone and yet not alone.”

“Yes, that’s how I feel now with you, Mr. Shaw, alone and yet not alone.”

I felt, by the end of the night, a fantastic love for this man, my good friend, from many years back—and, by God, the night. As we finished talking, I felt the night descend upon me and I felt that I had to go to bed.

“Good night, Mr. Shaw.”

I found Captain Jack’s toolbox in a nook and returned above deck.

*

Every night I snuck down to talk to Mr. Shaw. We talked about women, how I missed Marguerite. “The women I met in America,” he said, “always seemed small potatoes to me.”

One day I asked him if he had ever read any science fiction. “Ah, yes, yes,” he said. “It was very entertaining folly. H.G. Welles and such. Welles came to his senses later in his career when he wrote some more realistic fiction. The man who writes about himself and his own time,” he said, “is the only man who writes about all people and all time.”

“I wish I could read you the science fiction of today, Mr. Shaw!” I said. “It’s the literature that holds all the modern anxiety of the future with the fervent ambition of the present. It’s history backwards if you do it right. A man is always writing about himself, no matter what he writes about.”

Then one night he said, “Show me the stars.” I helped him to his feet, hearing all the machinery grinding inside.

“Mr. Shaw, I don’t think you’re in shape to climb the ladder—to walk even!”

“It’s better to wear out than to rust.”

I dragged him to the ladder, and he gripped it weakly with his metal robot fingers. I held him like an injured man before one of the large windows into space and we looked at all the stars in the universe, out toward Andromeda and Alpha Centauri. After a moment I said, “Go on, say it.”

“Say what?”

“Go on, say it. You know what I want to hear.”

He seemed, in my arms to straighten up a bit. He said, “What is mankind in the universe? What is this mysterious thing that we are? This flesh and blood that dreams itself human? What are we? We are energy and matter transmuting itself into imagination and will, energy and matter changing itself over into imagination and will. We are the thing that knows itself in the universe; we waken in the universe; we examine ourselves; we are curious at the miracle; and this is what we are.”

I sat—Mr. Shaw could now stand on his own power, somehow—enchanted. I said, “Say it again.”

He repeated it and repeated it. The others ignored us.

*

The next night I couldn’t sleep. And there, in the bunk across from me, was Major McKenny’s sexual girl doll. I leaned forward out of my bunk and put my hand on the inside of her left knee. This is how it worked: you touched it and it started up, started to pay attention. Then, through the motion of your own body and gentle nudges, you coerced it into following you or doing whatever you wanted to do. But the doll was still and the room was silent.

“It’s not programmed to respond to you.” It was Major McKenny, who was up leaning on his elbow now. “Captain Jack tried to borrow mine to try a threesome kinda thing some time ago.”

“Alright,” I said, I was hot and I felt like my cheeks were lighting up the room. I wanted to get under the sheets. “Sorry about that, Major McKenny.”

“Listen…” Major McKenny sat up on the bed now and rubbed the far side of the robot’s neck, massaging it. When she responded, he gently pulled her head down into his chest. “Listen, you can have her. I’ll lead her to the cockpit, get her in position—any position you want—and you can have your way. I don’t mind at all as long as you clean up afterwards.”

“No….”

“What?”

“I said, No, Major McKenny. I’m not going to have my way with your robot.”

Edward Carlson sat up in his bed now. “Bradbury, I think you should take up Major McKenny’s offer. It’s no good when one of our team begins to feel frustration, which only leads to festering resentment.” He stood up now and came to my bed. “You know why I was angry that Captain Jack locked himself up in there that first time? It’s solipsism, sexual solipsism. I don’t like you spending all that time down there by yourself either. Partake in Major McKenny’s offer and I think we’ll be closer for sharing this.”

At the last bunk, Captain Jack was now standing, hands on his hips. “You’re not better than us, Bradbury, and you can’t ignore us ‘cause—” he spread his arms “—well, here we are. You need people, Bradbury.”

I darted toward the hatch but Captain Jack came up from behind and turned me around with his huge right hand as he passed me. He went into the hatch and I followed. Once we were in the dark space I wasn’t strong enough to get past him and he stalked deliberately towards the robot Shaw. “Is this what you’ve been messing with this whole time?” said Captain Jack. I caught a look at Shaw’s bright, green eyes just before Captain Jack kicked him in the neck. “Bradbury, you stupid bastard,” he said, stomping a mudhole in Mr. Shaw’s chest. “You stupid, stupid bastard.” I gathered the strength, all of my strength, to push past Captain Jack into the arms of the robot Shaw. His eyes were dull, he was silent, wires stuck out of his neck. He was dead. Attacked by sobs, I tried to push the wires back inside him, to fix him.

Just then all the lights on the ship began to blink red. Major McKenny’s voice came down to us from the hatch: “METEOR SHOWER ALL HANDS ON DECK!” Captain Jack gathered himself and dragged me toward the ladder, pushing me in front of him and forcing me up. On deck, Major McKenny hurried me into my space suit and handed me an oxygen and nutrition tank.

*

The ship breaks and it’s like I’m floating on my back and seeing everything fly away from me, all of the ship and all of the people. I’m falling down through space and I realize I only have 180 days to survive with my food and my oxygen, and I keep saying to myself: “Oh Mr. Shaw, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Shaw…”

And then like a gift from God this figure tumbles down from space and here comes the robot Shaw end over end, and he speaks to me as he arrives. “No sooner asked for than I am here.”

I say, “Mr. Shaw! You’re alive!”

He says, “Yes, the accident jiggled everything back together again.”

So I hold on to him and we fall down through space together, and I realize I have 180 days of life and he has 10,000 years but what a way to fall through the universe.

Never a fan of waiting, she was already thinking about the seats at ten minutes past. Thinking about how sixteen hours before, her fiancé had spooned her on a 200-count sheet and reached between her legs, and she had asked instead, “The seats at breakfast places. You think they’re brown?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“The seats. Like at Denny’s…maybe I-Hop,” she tried to clarify.

The room had seemed too big for her question; even in the darkness she could tell how high the ceilings were, the edges trimmed with gold leaf. Don had touched her hair to fill up the silence.

“They’re brown or orange, usually.”

“That sounds about right,” she’d said.

Now, a flight to Phoenix and two hundred miles north, Suki noted that the seats in the K. were teal. Reupholstering, the waiter told her when she asked, faintly puzzled that such a question should even arise. Suki thought, Greenie. What a greenie. A decade ago, nowhere in these parts would have warranted such care. Now everything was newer, the tables cleaner, the waiters in uniforms and not the pell-mell outfits of a morning dash. Only one had stayed on, as far as Suki could remember, his hair rolled into dreads, a boulder of a man. Suki couldn’t for the life of her remember his name, only the way he would smile, sometimes, his canines showing, one yellower than the other. He came to her table, dawdling as he wiped down the surface, spreading the grease around on the plastic.

“Check, ma’am?” he said.

“No,” Suki said, because she wasn’t ready to go.

Because nine years ago she had been told, “Girl you gotta let go someday. You gotta let go.” She had learned this for nine years but now she was back, holding on again. Nine years late coming home, Baby had chosen to be later. So Suki ordered another coffee, then doodled on a napkin, a picture of a girl with a large head and a small body, stretched to breaking point. Her silhouette: a lollipop. Baby.

But Don held on too. Two weeks ago she had been making their Friday pancakes, the sun low and creeping in, brushing the feet of the furniture. Suki had stripped the box of its plastic Safeway bag, poured, measured, cracked an egg. The shell broke clean, the whites strangely glutinous, clinging to her fingers. She had been stirring the batter, thinking about nothing, when Don appeared in the doorway.

“Let’s go out,” he said, reaching out as if to take her hand. “My treat.”

“The pancakes.”

“I’ll take you anywhere you want to go,” Don said. He smiled at her, and his teeth were small as a child’s. “I want to talk,” he said, and Suki knew she couldn’t refuse him.

They had lived together for five years now in an apartment designed for artsy types. Old tenants, come and gone, had left their mark. Paintings cluttered the walls, an imitation Rothko, some abstract collage, a mash-up of colours and textures they had never bothered to sort. Leaving their place that night was a breath of fresh air, and on a Friday it was easy to be romantic. Chinatown was dimming the way sections of the city do at their bed hours, the shop houses winking dark, the sounds of shutters echoing as shopkeepers pulled them shut. The symphony of a ten o’clock Chinatown felt familiar to Suki, who had, at some point before Don, frequently haunted the area at this hour.

From the streets of Chinatown she had pulled him into Sam Wo’s, two buses and a five minute walk from home. They crept up the stairs past a crowded, steaming kitchen, its wet floors gleaming. They sat on small chairs, pressed close together. Don hadn’t said much, maybe wondered at Suki’s choice, what with a waitress screaming behind them in a garbled tongue. They could barely hear one another over the grating of chairs, the sound of plate to table like teeth grinding.

“I’m sorry,” Suki said about the noise.

“Don’t be,” Don replied, his face narrowing to the point of his chin where a shadow fuzzed. Suki felt a pang at his shyness. She wanted to put an arm around him, hold him somehow.

“So what do you want to talk about?” she said, and Don put his chopsticks down.

He said, “The engagement.”

“Oh,” said Suki.

“I mean, we’ve been engaged for a while.”

“I know,” Suki said.

“So,” Don said.

“So,” Suki replied.

It had been two years since Don had asked her casually over Friday pancakes. She had thought for a bit, said yes, but weeks had turned into months and the wedding seemed more like a far off dream, something to be saved up for and to require too much permanence for either of them to think about seriously. Still, the ring he had given her had signified something a little more committed, putting quick breaks and adultery out of the question. It had calmed Suki, although the reality of marriage had not.

Now Don was looking at her expectantly, his left eyebrow raised in the way he had, poking up from behind his glasses frames. Two years.

“It’s your turn not to look at me like that,” Suki said, reaching for the water the old lady had poured into small paper dinosaur cups.

They sat together in silence for a while, the topic descending upon them. The tiny restaurant was a rectangular little room, wood-panelled and dirty. Tables of four crammed themselves into the space. Suki shifted her weight and her chair lulled forward.

They were waiting for the chow mein. Beef, one dish, chicken the other. The old lady clattered around on the landing where the cutlery was kept, the generic beige chopsticks and the white porcelain spoons. She banged them together as she picked them up, banged them again when she put them down. Suki could hear impatience in the air.

Because Don had been waiting. Whether or not he expected her to be able to say something in such a short span of a few minutes was not yet certain to Suki. As she took a sip from the dinosaur paper cup, a group of rowdy high school students came up, sweatshirts emblazoned and jeans skinny, their boots thumping on the stairs. They were chattering about food, about chow fun and chow mein. Suki’s stomach rumbled.

She wished she had had a place like this to go to when she was younger. They had certainly been broke as teenagers, Suki and her friends. At most they had visited one another, sometimes in big groups, sometimes in small ones, jumping into the cars of their uncles, fathers, brothers, and seeing where they would end up. Sometimes in the big groups there would be Baby, sometimes not – most of the time not, Baby preferring just the two of them; she didn’t like the noise, or talking to people she didn’t care about.

But when she appeared she was the life of the party, people wanting to sit by her, ask her questions, hear her laugh. She made dining rooms they’d grown up in feel like something new, turned squat brown houses into vacation homes. Conversations grew beautiful: they would be circled around tables with their elbows knocking, talking about their day. Baby in a place like Sam Wo’s would make the place less cramped and more cosy, the fluorescent bulbs less stark. Suki took Don’s hand, wishing she could do the same.

When the chow mein came, their brief connection, skin to skin, broke like a fast. Don took the beef and she the chicken, though occasionally they swapped food, their meal punctuated by a “here,” or “try this.” Suki would try to grasp a piece of meat between her teeth from Don’s poorly held chopsticks. Sometimes she would miss and have to laugh.

At the end of the meal, the grease growing cold on the plate, Don mentioned the lamp that did not work, the paint in the bathroom that had slowly begun to peel, an entire sheet bubbling from the wall.

“So many repairs,” he said.

“I’ll call Rory soon,” Suki said of their landlord, knowing as she said it that it’d take him weeks anyway to get anything fixed.

But Don did not leave it at that, instead leaned toward her, his mouth straightening into a line.

“I mean our house,” he said, his voice oddly tender. “Sure, call Rory, but our house. This place we have right now. It’s a piece of shit.”

“It’s not that bad,” Suki began, but Don said, “It is,” putting his dry palms over hers.

“What do you mean?” Suki said.

“I’m saying,” Don said, then paused. “There are other places. Better places. I’ve saved enough, you probably have too, and if we get married. We’ll find a district where we can get a bigger house too, in case our family, you know, expands. We’ll plan it well, make sure you like the place.” He glanced at her, self-conscious again. “How about that?”

Suki’s mind had stopped at if. If we get married, Don had said. The word hung everything else in balance, and her hand felt cold in his. Don, she knew, was the man she had loved the most, someone she had met out of college who had been different from her college flings. He was serious, he was calm. He did things with his life.

Suki, all of twenty-seven, stared at Don, his pale, skinny face and harmless eyes, his chin edged with scruff where the razor had missed that morning. She was acutely aware of the texture of his skin, a little dry against her fingertips; the texture of his pants, a buttery corduroy, against her bare knee. People she could love, she knew, were hard to come by.

“What?” Suki said eventually.

“We can move out together. No rush,” Don said, putting his other hand on top of hers. “But I’d like to know whether we’re going to move out together, move into another place together.” Together, he underscored, looking at her. “I’d like to know.”

“I’d like to tell you,” Suki said.

“Soon?” Don said.

“I’ll tell you soon,” Suki said, heart racing.

Don seemed satisfied with that. As he turned to ask for the bill, Suki closed her eyes briefly, her mind jumbled. Marriage, she thought to herself. She’d give herself a week to answer him, by the Saturday of next. She was sure – almost sure what the answer would be, the answer that would change her life forever. She imagined Don’s smile and looked forward to it. She was excited.

Yet a sudden turn of events forced her to miss that deadline, for a letter from a girl named Baby arrived the following Monday, written on brown paper in a scrawling, child-like hand. It had been delivered on overnight mail, sealed with a stamp, the red ink bleeding urgent. Baby. Baby a girl to whom Suki had once been everything; life itself. Baby with her soft skin and small stride and shoulders slumping when she sighed, Baby asking Suki to meet her in Flagstaff, Arizona for her mother’s funeral. My mom, Baby had written, is dead.

Baby wasn’t late, Baby didn’t show. It was four thirty when Suki signed the cheque for her $1.75 coffee, leaving a dollar in tip and dark brown slush at the bottom of her cup. Suki was glad to leave the K. the way she had never felt glad before, as though she had grown out of time-wasting and cheap drinks. At five o’clock, she was the only customer in the diner.

And perhaps it served her right that Baby wasn’t there. Come to the funeral, Baby had written, but Suki’s plane came in too late to make it proper, for the burial, for the rituals.

“I still want to see you,” Suki wrote. “I’ll see you at the K.” She had been very sorry.

Now the light was angled near parallel to the ground, blinding through the windshield. Out along the road the ground was patchy with old ice, threatening skidding as the air bit, teeth ragged. Armed with Baby’s number in her pocket, Suki drove, the number simply insurance; she didn’t intend to call. She remembered how they used to drop by, no appointments, no politeness, with the freedom reserved for people who were close. Baby, reaching up to her window and rapping, the sound clean enough to jerk Suki awake. The window ajar, Baby crawling in, upsetting a class of water, rumpling textbooks.

“It’s goddamn bright out there,” Baby would say, rolling onto Suki’s bed, sweat and all. “I want sunglasses like in the movies, you know? Like a superstar.” And her face, leaning forward, nose scrunched up, a laugh exploding from her chest, meant that she was absolutely serious.

Driving on, Suki didn’t know what she would do this time if they disappeared, these privileges with Baby. If she would be hurt because Baby had forgotten her, or if she would be hurt because out here, in the barren red land she still thought of as home, Suki would have nowhere to go.

The sky eventually seduced in a sultry dimness, and so far out from Tuba Suki couldn’t hope for a streetlight. The ranch was still stout, its walls off-white against the sunset, but dusk had begun to reach along one face, shrouding it in its shadow. Here Suki pulled up on the precipice of some rock structure, the dust a weak red, the slopes covered in grimy vegetation. Here she was, stepping out of her rented Toyota, its wheels caked from travel. For a moment there was nothing, only the wind, a naked, savage whistling.

“Baby,” Suki called, “Baby.”

The wind came again, whirling. Suki felt suddenly like a child left in an open space, as though she were flying a white kite, small in the distance. She imagined herself watching the fabric tossed in the air between large, invisible hands. She imagined herself believing, just for an instant, in something godly. A kite, that was all it took, and the door opened, and Baby was there.

“I knew you’d remember,” Baby said. “I mean, how to get here.”

And without talking about waiting, her hatred of waiting, or the hour she spent waiting, without mentioning the teal, the cold teal plastic moulding itself to her buttocks, the small of her back, and her isolation, Suki went forward, grabbing Baby across her torso, trapping Baby’s arms. Baby’s surprised intake of breath in her ear, like she was breathless from a climb. It was like listening to an ocean miles away from their parched desert plateau.

Baby looked the same: dark, sinewy, tough as leather. She still had those full cheeks that dimpled when she smiled, she had spider lashes, a little nose. And though age had fattened her up, her hips filling out beneath the apron, she was still a stick of a girl, still a baby.

“Drive all right?”

“Wasn’t bad. Not too long.”

“Liar,” Baby said, cracking a smile. “You must be tired.”

Suki was, just a little, though not from the drive. She was tired of looking at Baby, knowing that with Baby’s face came all the apprehension of coming back, of finally being home.

“You’re the tired one, I bet.”

“I’m not too bad.”

“Baby,” Suki warned.

“I swear,” Baby said. “I’m doing okay. I’ve got my pizza, my Coke. I got you. I’m okay.”

“But today – ”

“Today was pretty hot out for winter.”

“Yeah,” Suki said, as Baby let her hand go. “Yeah it was.”

The kitchen around them lay lit and untouched. Suki felt like their bodies had been suspended in the pale yellow glow, the colour of paperflowers, of fresh oil for fry bread. Reaching back, Baby pulled her hair over her left shoulder, tilting her head so all of it hung down her chest, heavy as a curtain. The lamp above hung low-bellied and golden.

“Too much sunshine,” Baby said absently. “Today.”

“Wish we had that problem back there.”

“Where?”

“San Francisco,” Suki said. “It’s been a couple of cloudy weeks. Wo-oh, let the sun shine, that’s what my neighbour keeps singing. We don’t have enough.”

“Wo-oh,” Baby said. “Wo-oh, wo-oh. Wo-ohhhhh.”

“Like that.”

“Wo-oh,” Baby sang now, then louder, “Wo-ohhhhh!”

She stopped and the room grew very quiet.

“Don’t do that,” Suki said, not finding something solid to pinpoint her accusation against, only trying to persuade Baby to relax, to open up, to tell her. “Baby, just, come on. Tell me.”

“What?” said Baby.

“How was it?”

“What?”

“The ceremony,” Suki said, then, “The funeral.”

Baby puckered her lips, then relaxed them.

“I didn’t go,” she said.

“Oh,” Suki said at last.

“But I said I’m fine,” Baby said. She paused, then took her hand away. “I finally got my quiet and I’m giving it up for no one.”

She stood up, taking the dirty dishes with her and putting them on top of a stack, a tower of similarly dirty ones. Suki looked at her, her argyle apron in red and yellow, the colours fading. She noticed the bare feet, Baby’s yin-yang tattoo fading to green, her toes gripping the linoleum as she scrubbed. The linoleum, the black and white checks still dazing Suki after all these years. Even where Suki sat, the same table mats stuck to the pine surface, crusting over from years of meals, spilled sauces and syrups, rubbed at with a towel, leaving stains. Suki’s forearms stuck to the mats when she leaned, and pulling them off made a loud, sucking sound.

“Hey,” she said, then said, hesitating, “You’re not okay.”

Baby didn’t answer. Baby was still washing the dishes, and Suki didn’t want to repeat her question. The water was going full blast now, splashing on the plates and spraying out onto the counter. Baby stacked the clean ones to her left, making a pile, some still gleaming with suds. A week’s worth of dishes. Baby was going at them with vigour, the stained yellow sponge oozing dirty water, her hands moving rashly, violent.

“Baby,” Suki said. “Baby girl.”

She walked up to Baby, put her chin on Baby’s shoulder from the back, stooping a little to reach Baby’s height, as she rubbed at another plate, this one encrusted. Lasagne, some kind of pasta, probably. Cheese over a few days hardens.

“I didn’t even have time to take care of her,” Baby said. “Those bitches at the restaurant sure make sure I don’t.”

Suki was soothing her now, the blunt bottom of her palm rocking on Baby’s hipbone, her fingers tapping a rhythm on the side of Baby’s apron, ba-dump ba-dump. She liked this familiar smell, remembered how they had hugged the day Suki left for California. Now Baby, arms wet to the elbow, put down her sponge, turned around.

“Let me help,” Suki said, loosening her hug.

“What do you wanna do?”

“I don’t know,” Suki said.

Baby took her in, her small round lips sticking out, as though thinking.

“You’ve been gone too long,” Baby said. “Why don’t you stay?”

Suki called Don the next morning. He mentioned some nice houses, said he would send her pictures, then mentioned a dinner. Suki said, “OK,” and when Don asked her where she was now, she said, “Phoenix, with Mom and Daddy,” not sure he would understand the concept of her, Baby.

“Drink water,” Don said.

“Water the plants,” Suki said.

“I will,” Don said, not hanging up, and Suki could tell that he didn’t want to, could feel the question in his voice, the question he had asked two weeks before. But she hung up as Baby came throttling out of the den, white dress, sweater and high-top sneakers, an old Pentax in hand.

“I called in sick,” Baby said. “Those bitches weren’t too happy.”

“Oh yeah?” Suki said, turning to face her.

“But let’s go,” Baby said. “I brought the chips.”

The drive to Tuba was an even road out, the grey today fitting the season. Clouds, mounting in curlicues, seemed to have squashed down the low ridges in the distance, flattening the landscape. Suki drove, distracted by the smallness of herself in the car, crushed in by the great space, forgetting Don.

They swung by the village, the brick walls rising out of the dirt, their roofs slanted only slightly, as if hoping for a baby snow. Through the rearview Suki noticed wires criss-crossing overhead, segmenting the sky above somebody’s roof – green, Suki noticed further, surprised. A shanty, four pick-ups. An abandoned tricycle in a yard. Baby cracked open a window and Suki breathed, cold and free, the air a dusty that lasted through Tuba proper where the markets and the chain-link fences corralled people into a crowd. They looped past the hospital, zoomed down an avenue with scared dogs and low brown houses, and finally, at the post office where a man wearing low jeans came out with a parcel, Suki nearly ran him over, saying “Fuck, fuck,” as they screeched to a stop.

“You didn’t get any better at this driving business,” Baby said. “But at least you stopped in a good place.”

She pointed in the distance. Pizza Edge, Suki read.

“My favourite place,” Baby said. “A regular joint but I know the guy. He’s sweet, he’s cool.”

“Sweet to you?”

“Likes me, probably,” Baby said. “Whad’ya think, like any other guy.”

“Likes women?”

“Likes sex. I’ll bet you he’s a horndog but you want pizza?” Baby said, pushing open the door.

In the plasticky takeaway joint Baby leaned over the counter, pressing her breasts together and saying the word “Juan” like a catcall. Suki knew she’d slept with him, had him over in her little ranch, fucked over the sticky placemats and on the couch with the old knit throw. Suki could hear it in her voice, the flirt like a hook, but it had always been that way since they had met as the smallest kids at six. Baby with the boys in the playground, Baby with her newest squeezes, the gossip and the rumours, Baby with her bookbag carried by another boy. Then in high school Baby wasn’t baby for her smallness but because they had said, “She’d be a baby mama all right,” but she hadn’t been, and the people wondering how she did it, why there weren’t no babies, how many she’d got rid of.

“How many did you get rid of?” Suki had asked once, Baby curled up against Suki, her body round and warm. Baby had said, “You just curious?” kissing her cheek and falling asleep, arm around Suki’s waist.

Now they sat on a curb in the parking lot pulling at the pizza with their teeth, the cheese pendant from their chins, the bag of chips between them. Too many unanswered questions, yet everything seemed normal.

“You come here often?” Suki said.

“Couple times a week.”

“To see Juan?”

“To eat pizza,” Baby said, picking at a piece of pepperoni stuck between her two front teeth. “Whad’ya think, that I’m a horndog too?”

“Yeah,” Suki said, Baby grinning.

“It’s been a long time and nothing’s changed,” Baby said. “What years now, seven? Eight? Since you left.”

“Nine.”

“Well I say,” Baby said. “Feels like forever.”

And Suki wanted to say, not forever, nine years was hardly forever. She didn’t want to be the person leaving, didn’t want to be the deserter, but Suki remembered now that time crawls. Especially here, out where little tracks change but the sun and the moon and it’d been nine years since.

“You know I’m sorry,” Suki said, and this was true now.

“So why don’t you stay?” Baby said.

“But I am, girl. Staying. I’ll be here til the weekend.”

“No,” Baby said, and the inflection of her voice sprung like metal. “You know what I mean by stay.” She paused. “I mean, move.”

“Don’s in SF,” Suki said, the words an instinct.

“Move,” Baby said.

“Baby,” Suki said, despairing, then, “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Suki.”

“No,” Suki said, “Don’t,” she said, and Baby looking at her carefully, screwed her mouth sideways.

“Okay,” Baby said.

They ate together in silence, swallow after swallow, Suki’s mind racing until she finally said, “And you said you wouldn’t. You said you wouldn’t anyway.”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Give up your quiet,” Suki said, looking at her, reaching out to wipe Baby’s chin, which had a blob of tomato sauce. “You said you wouldn’t give up nothing for your quiet. She’s gone now, your Ma’s gone. You’ve had to deal with it for years now, you’re finally alone. You’ve time now, for you.”

“You’re different,” Baby said, looking right back at Suki. “And besides, you got it down, babe,” putting down her pizza. “I’m alone,” she said, wiping her hands off with a napkin. “I’m really alone,” she said, a nonchalance steeling her words.

Living in Tuba meant both chaos and silence, the latter deeper, could fill a valley. But chaos was frequent, found in the small masses of people in schools and in markets, jammed in cars finding a place to go. Suki and Baby had met in a chaotic sandbox one day after school, in play grounds clogged with children.

“Hi,” Suki had said, her legs scorching from a late spring sun, and Baby had said hello.

From that afternoon on they had played after school, making up their own world, stepping over sandcastles for princesses and pillow mountains, playing spies or detectives. It had come to a point where they had been clubbed together as sisters though they hardly looked alike, Suki much larger then and Baby just a pinprick in the sand. Suki’s face had been plain and flat, her nose slightly upturned, her teeth scattered when she grinned, holes from when the front ones been tugged out; they had stuck into the flesh of an apple when she bit. The new teeth growing out were uneven, a little gap between the front two that her mother would get fixed a good number of years later, when Suki was thirteen, brown hair stringy, her freckles merging into a tan.

Baby, on the other hand, had seemed nothing extraordinary, a brown little nut of a girl with two long braids, draped over her back when she hunched over sand buildings and people. Only a certain way with people made her somehow uncanny, a sudden brilliant smile when she looked up, bright as sun. Even children felt like they had been touched, that they had been liked by someone different. And Suki, that one afternoon at the age of six, had picked the right person, straight from the gut.

“Strange we got to be such good friends,” Suki said now, watching Baby drive, and Baby turning between rock outcrops said nothing, looking out the window instead to the orange-red stones craggy and gleaming, the distant town on one horizon, nothingness on the other.

“Guess where we’re going?” she said finally.

“Castle Rock,” Suki said, her throat going dry.

“Where the high school drop outs go nowadays,” Baby said. “Wasn’t sure if you qualified.”

“High school or college or whatever don’t make me that different,” Suki said, and as Baby pulled up, she cracked open the door.

Castle Rock was a deep outcrop of stone that grew redder with the sunset. At the bottom they picked their way between abandoned appliances and car parts, scanning the rocks for a good way up. Clambering up a rock face, Suki felt the familiar roughness under her palms that left white dry marks on her skin. It was a workout, her thighs flexing hard from too many years of unuse. It took them a good twenty minutes to get to the top, but there the wind was mild and they sat, Baby her legs sticking out, Suki pulling hers to her chest, curled into a ball.

“Three days together,” Baby said. That’s what they had left. “Not too bad.”

But it was only three days. Suki wondered when it had started, her habit of being the one to leave. If she had learned from a childhood of working parents and lonesome days to remain far removed, always, from excitement. Because it had been nine years since coming home and Suki had been okay with that. Tuba had rarely crossed her mind, at least not in concrete detail. There was, after all, no legitimate reason to visit; Mom and Daddy had moved back to Phoenix, retiring and ageing on the western reach, and while she called them frequently, she loved them better from a distance. There was no other reason to visit than Baby, and Suki could not bring herself to go.

“I’m scared going back,” she had told Don before she left. “There’s a knot in my stomach and everything.”

“The visit will be over real quick,” he had said, and now sitting on the top of Castle Rock, knot in her stomach and all, Suki knew two things: that she didn’t want this visit to end, and that she would be relieved when it did.

“We’re here again,” she said.

“Back here, looking at nothing.”

“Talking.”

“Talking ‘bout nothing.”

“That doesn’t make it any worse,” Suki said, and Baby hummed as if to agree.

“Castle Rock’s still special,” Suki said.

“Yeah.”

“It’s been a long time for me.”

“For me too,” Baby said.

“How long?”

“Nine years since I’ve been back. Strange, isn’t it, since I live right by.”

“Not since nine years?” Suki said.

“Not since you left,” Baby said, squinting out at the landscape. “No.” And Suki, who thought she might reach across to touch Baby, did not. She looked down at her hands, listening to scattered and unidentifiable noises around her, neither knowing what to do or say.

“I don’t want to be here,” she said, wondering if she sounded whiny, and if the static made her sound whinier.

“It’s boring?”

“It’s taxing,” she said. She had forgotten that Don thought it was a ritual funeral, something she couldn’t give two hoots about. He thought she was there out of obligation, but Baby’s mother was different from a cousin or aunt twice removed. Don’s frivolity made her angry.

“You’ll be home in no time,” he said. “Tomorrow,” which was true. Nine years had passed quickly, and two days had been a blink. “What time are you getting in?”

“Afternoon sometime,” Suki said. “You’ve got the details.”

“Confirmed?”

“I’ll be there,” Suki said shortly, frustrated somehow. She imagined Don’s confusion, his mild look of worry, his own annoyance at being miles away, unable to understand the terseness in her voice. “I’m serious, don’t overanalyse.”

“Okay,” said Don, and Suki wasn’t sure if that was more concern that she heard, because she wanted him to stop.

“Someone just died,” she said. “Nobody likes death. It’s awkward.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I really don’t mean to be that,” Suki said. “Aggressive, I mean.” She paused. “You know I love you,” she said.

When she hung up, the cracked egg of sun was gathering back into the horizon, preparing for sunset. The light, pale and thin, covered the low mounds of sand in the distance. Suki was still in her pyjamas, the fleece sagging over her toes, covering her red-painted nails, chipped at the corners. By the window she could feel the cold winter air, brisk enough to cut through glass, sharp enough to make the weak light somehow brighter, such that everything in the den took on a shade of colour. She could appreciate it, these sunsets on the high plateau. Though sunsets meant the day’s end, they also meant watching TV with Baby or looking at her face lit by a flickering desk lamp, talking, Baby’s arm casually draped over her shoulder. It soon meant no more of that.

For it was the last night. Just after dinner Baby disappeared, reappearing only after ninety minutes with two six-packs and a glow on her face.

“All the way from Gray Mountain,” she said.

“That’s far.”

“Don’t whine,” Baby said. “Can’t let you go without a party night.”

“Two six-packs though?”

“Being small doesn’t mean you can’t conquer the world,” Baby said, a grin on her face.

Two hours later, Suki thought she was going to hurl it up, all seventy-two ounces of the stuff. They had drunk it like they were in their teens again, wiping beer on the back of their hands, swearing loudly. Their swearing had gotten progressively louder too, Baby half-curled on her chair like a shrimp, shouting “fucks” and “bastards” defiantly, waving her arms and story-telling, just like in the old days.

“So that’s pizza guy for you,” Baby said. “That’s pizza guy.”

“Juan.”

“Yeah, those dates we had. A good number, huh.”

“How many months it been?”

“I don’t count.”

“Well I think he likes you.”

“Men,” Baby said.

“He out of the picture then?”

“I don’t know,” Baby said, and thinking about him, her face softened. “He’ll find someone else soon enough.”

“You mean you’ll find someone else soon enough.”

“You don’t think pizza guy will?”

“I think he’ll be hung up for a while,” Suki said.

“So I guess maybe he’ll be around,” Baby said.

“Good,” Suki said, relieved, glad that Baby wasn’t, at least for the next few weeks or months, going to be alone.

In the silence that followed Baby flicked on a TV show, blasting the sounds as loud as she could. For a moment they sat there, watching the sitcom, Baby laughing absently, holding onto Suki’s right hand with her left, loosely, her thumb trailing over the lines of Suki’s palm. But by the end Suki was the only one with her eyes to the TV and even then she wasn’t watching, Baby stroking her fingernails, stinging where the cuticles had peeled from the cold so she was stroking raw skin.

At the credits, Baby asked, “What’s Don like?” and muted the sound so that lights flashed on their faces like a silent disco. Baby looked at her, absurdly secretive, head cocked to one side. Suki shrugged.

“Nice,” Suki said. “Nerdy,” not really wanting Baby to know, not finding the words.

“Yeah?” Baby said. “You always went for the nerdy ones. Quiet, I bet. Short, maybe? Wears glasses. Skinny? Yeah, skinny.”

“Yeah.”

“Smart?”

“He’s okay.”

“I bet he’s smart.”

“He’s okay, I told you.”

“He call?”

“I called him a couple days ago, emailed him too, down in Hogan.”

“Good,” Baby said.

Baby paused, her face no longer psychedelic, pausing at blue, a reflection of a mineral water ad, water tapped straight from the source.

“You staying in America right?” she said carefully. “After you guys you know, get married and stuff.”

“Don’t be crazy. Why wouldn’t we?”

“Just don’t get farther,” Baby said, intertwining their fingers. “What’d I do?” she said, “I don’t know what I’d do.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow,” Baby said.

“Yes,” Suki said, and Baby looked at her, so matter-of-factly, like everything from the beginning had been set in stone.

Suki watched Baby’s face blanken. She was paying attention now to the TV, the ends of her brows pulled downward as she tried to make sense of what was happening. Someone on the TV was laughing, and in the next scene a boy was kicking a football up in the air, then catching it, looking at it with a contemplative expression on his face. Around him the city blocks towered, glinting, in each building hundreds of lives operating simultaneously.

“I don’t know,” the TV said. The boy turned around. The camera panned across his face, his freckles, his strawberry blonde locks, ruffling in the wind. Everything in that instant was romantic, the boy’s uncertainty, his angst. Nothing in real life was like that, Suki thought, and she was bitter. There were lines of corny dialogue. Someone in the corner, crying and yet smiling. There was a good five minutes of sporting victory, and by that time Suki had had enough, she was tired of it, so tired as she reached over, grabbed the remote in her fist, and turned the machine off, triumphant. The sound blinked to a stop.

“Whatcha do that for?” Baby demanded.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” Suki said. “Why aren’t we talking?”

“We were.”

“I wanna talk,” Suki said, and her voice was strained, the noise coming up around the rough ball in her throat that didn’t budge when she swallowed.

Baby said, “So do it. Talk. Go.”

The room once again drew into a silence ringing in Suki’s ears, and looking at the even surface of Baby’s jawline Suki ran her fingernails over the sofa.

“I’m sorry,” she said plainly, and against the sound of nothing her voice was too loud for her to bear. She wanted to stop the silence, she wanted to turn the lights brighter, get rid of the dimness, to see things, finally clearly, knowing. Knowing why she had stayed away for nine years, knowing everything that had transpired, those nine years, in Baby’s life, knowing why she had not been there, or could not. She wanted to know why Baby could somehow say now, so gently, “I’m not angry,” and Suki trying to find the anger and not finding it felt that she had failed somehow.

“Don’t be sorry,” Baby said. “My life’s my life. The pain’s gonna end sometime.”

Suki picked Baby’s hand up from where it lay, relaxed on the blanket. She picked it up and looked at it, lifting it up before squeezing it gently. Butt of the wrist to butt of the wrist, finger to finger, their hands still matched, were still the same size.

“Heart line,” she said thickly. “Love line, life line.”

“Life line,” Baby said. “You can’t predict nothing.”

“We thought we’d know exactly where we’d be right now, back when we were kids.”

“Hell, I was just pretending,” Baby said.

“I thought I was sure,” Suki said.

“That’s ‘cause you had real goals. I thought I’d be a princess, but nobody’s a damn princess anymore. Smart, with a job, married, stuff like that, you had it right.”

“I’m not married yet,” Suki said.

“About to be,” Baby said, and Suki paused, said, “Yeah.”

“You predicted right,” Baby said.

They sank further into the couch, the loose stuffing swallowing them whole, two small girls, wrapped in their blankets.

“I’m scared,” Suki said.

“I’d be fucking terrified.”

“Well maybe I’m more than scared.”

“It’ll be fun with Don,” Baby said. “A long ride. But fun. Make it fun. What colour’s your dress?”

“Now?”

“You’re stupid. I meant for the wedding.”

“I never thought about it,” Suki said. She had assumed it would be white, and so she said, shrugging, “I guess white.”

“I expected better,” Baby said. “Considering what we dressed up as.”

They laughed over themselves as kids and Suki felt a small twitch, like she was about to lose something completely. Then, Don. Baby telling her not to be scared, her small hand over hers, warming Suki’s knuckles.

“If you love him,” she said, “That’s all that matters.” And on her face was that small and childish expression, a relaxation and a deep and profound knowledge that what she said was true. And Suki knew that she could. She could love Don for the rest of her life if she wanted to.

By midnight Suki was sleeping, her head lolling on Baby’s shoulder, and in her dream she was looking at her wedding dress, picking from rows of silk dresses, the different styles, off-shoulder, halter, long-sleeved, with the cuffs pointed and slender at the wrist. She wanted navy, then she wanted red, and then she wanted green, a bright stunning colour like grass in nursery pictures, bright like a dream. She picked up a yellow, felt the fabric between her fingers, the silk transitioning briefly into lace. Suki in her dream was very much like Suki in real life. Here, dream Suki wanted a red one that lit up the hazels in her eyes, but knew that she would end up with white, probably end up with white. It would only be right. And as Suki slept, Baby moved her head slowly onto a pillow, tucking the blankets around her. Baby made a little cove where Suki’s body would rest, bobbing in her sea of loosely formed dreams and fantasies. Then Baby headed back to her room, the place where she had grown up all her life. She thought of them at Castle Rock, that last day so many years ago. And what it had been was them, sitting there together, the sunlight in Suki’s hair, lighting up the browner streaks to a fire red.

“It’s so hot in the summer,” Baby had said. “You think it’s nicer where you’re gonna be?”

“Sure,” said Suki. “California there’s water.”

But Suki’s expression had been strange, the word nicer too bland for even her, the unexciting Suki. Baby had wanted to put her arm around her, tell her how the sun here burned like hell here but you’d be better off staying with me. But as they sat on the jutty outty cone of Castle Rock, the desert stretched out so vast and empty, a sandbox too big to hold them.

“All this sand,” Baby said. “We’re going to lose each other.” And if they were going to anyway maybe Suki would be better off leaving. Here, there wasn’t anything else, just minimum wage and long dry days, nothing for Suki, who could have so much more. Leaving for cawwww-llege, as Baby liked to say, was painful for everyone. But pain had to end sometime, so Baby said, “You gotta let go someday, girl.” She said to no one in particular, “You gotta let go someday,” and Suki, not looking at her, but looking down at her own hands instead, had softly cried.

These are the things that Suki remembers and will for a while: Baby’s last grip on her hand, Suki drowsy at six in the morning, Baby already dressed for her work shift in a red polo and jeans. Baby had jumped under the covers just the two of them, kissed Suki straight on the mouth, simply.

“Lock the front door when you head out,” Baby said, and left, a Baby goodbye.

The plane ride was a bad one, bumpy and turbulent, which was strange because nothing linked Arizona and California but dry, cloudless air. Suki pressed her forehead to the cold of the airplane window, conscious of how many people had done that before her. The ground below looked frighteningly close, the tan arcs of mountains chewed into by past rains, see-sawing into one another. Sometimes there would be flatter farmland, cut into darker green squares, though that was rare flying out into drier land.

And Suki thought about what would be waiting for her. Don would be waiting for her. Maybe he would have expectant look in his eyes, leaning across their room’s threshold to where the corridor arched, where Suki would be standing, her small suitcase in hand.

Maybe she would burst into the house into Don’s presence, his steady presence, the one that would rush home to hear her answer. Her voice would be understated, but filled with happiness, the way she knew they did it in movies.

“I do.”

Or maybe he would ask her a question first.

“Will you marry me?”

Or maybe he would trail off, because the two of them would share a mind.

“Will you…?”

And to that she would say, “Yes.” Or more excitedly, “Yes!” Or perhaps she would say nothing at all, but jump into his arms and kiss him all over his face, her mouth scratched by his furry stubble of a beard.

The air now was chugging, the plane drawing closer. Clicks resounded as stewardesses pushed the window shades up, and everything was illuminated. The faces by her washed out in white, their eyes squinting nearly shut, trying to capture a bird’s eye view. Down below the city bawled its sounds, pulling them slowly down.

At the airport, the cars veered into the pick-up lane, full of smiling faces, and baggage thumped into trunks as irregular as heartbeats. Someone by Suki finished his cigarette, grinding it into the ground with the heel of his foot, his jeans leg cuffed with a hole worn through. Suki felt her heart leap into her chest as she tried to catch a cab. She was sure now.

The cab started and stopped in the city, swerving at amber lights and curving around hurrying pedestrians. Cars honked and inched up inclines, crawling themselves onto ridges, sighting views of the city down below. Suki’s cab was wedged in between. Finally, they pulled down the hill, right to the end, where an incline paused, licking flat onto the Panhandle. Safe now, safe. Suki fumbled with her purse, her hands shaking, pulling out a fifty and trying to calculate tip. She was aching to burst through the doors, to announce her arrival.

But the door swung open to silence.

“Don?” she said.

It took her a few minutes to realise that he was still at work, that this, for Don, was just any other day, Suki coming home, Suki telling him, eventually, her answer. She pulled her luggage through the corridor, the wheels catching on the carpet and dragging up the corners. Her heart was still thudding as she struggled with the bag, pulling it up and over the fabric, trundling it into the room. There, the walls, red paint splashed from corner to corner, shadowed the bed upon which they had lain together, bodies intertwined. There was the large closet in the corner, its dark oak casting a fat shadow on the floor. Right across stood the mantle with the fake fireplace, the tiles cool to the touch, juxtaposed in black and white, above which the mirror hung. Her face looked back at her, narrow and pale.

As if moving through water Suki went to the window, the big bay window that overlooked the street where the cars swung onto Oak St. Noise filtered through the double-glaze, wheezing through the open crack that Don had left, a window cracked open. Suki turned around, for some reason breathing hard. There was too much light, too much, darting off the pale parquet and biting into the walls, into her skin. She could barely stand, but meandered over to the closet, hands shaking, reaching in. She pulled out her favourite dress, then held it up to the light, a pale curtain shrouding her in a temporary shade. Suki chucked that dress on her bed, then her second favourite. She pulled out a shirt, a folded skirt, another shirt, then a whole stack of them, manically, throwing everything onto the bed one by one by one until clothes stacked up in haphazard piles. Suki’s heart was throbbing in her chest, a pained nerve, moving erratically as she moved, hands like clockwork, her things spilling onto the floor.

Don was not home. He was not home, and Suki was. In the big empty room, the high ceilings, the cold air whistling through the cracks, Suki closed her eyes. She leaned back against the oak, facing the window where the entire beauty of San Francisco tilted into her vision. The oak was cool against her scalp, the polish against her skin. Marry Don, she said, wanting to scream it aloud to herself, but standing there, the flat in which she had lived for so many years, she could not. She could not, because here, the wind, Suki thought, the howling wind, the sound it made, it wasn’t right. And sitting on the bed, the sheets soft against her fingers, her body arched out, squeezing down a sob, Suki said, “No.” She thought, Baby.

This is my grandma: she lies on the bed in a nightgown too big for her, arms poking out, curled as a shrimp. I’m looking at my grandma through my computer, my Dad holding up the screen to her on the other side of the world. Grandma looks at me. She’s waving, Dad tells me, though I see that she still can’t move: she’s really just lying there and I can hear her noisy breathing. She’s happy, Dad tells me again but it’s hard to believe him. I want to know for myself. I want to touch my grandma. I want to tell her about the cow I saw today, but I’m thousands of miles away.

Annie and I were hiking the Dish today, I want to say. Annie and I were pausing on the path so narrow her pants brushed against my hand. Annie said, Look at the cows and there were two, close as we were, a little white one resting its head on a brown one, the grass this holy green around them. There was sun and the little white cow moved its head up and down, nuzzling into its brown companion. Annie took my hand into her small ones. Annie asked if she could kiss me. I said, I’m looking at the cows. The white one, head bobbing up and down, loving, its eyes loving, it was so alive. Annie said, Don’t be silly. I said, I’m not joking. Let me look. I looked at the cows for a long time. Annie let go of my hand.

My grandma told me about cows once. She said, I had a little white cow. Her family was rich, owning acres kind of rich, though our family is middle class now. I’m sorry, she said. I wish we were still rich. I wish we still had that little white cow. She blinked and I could see her remembering. I loved that cow, she said, and it loved me back. She would sit by the cow, it would eat from her hand. She pet it. We were friends, she said.

Then they took the cow. They took the cow for meat. They took the cow for what it had be raised to do. They took the cow with its hair so soft you wanted to rub your face into its back and kiss it, nuzzle it, nose deep. Grandma watched them take it away, load it on a truck to the far slaughterhouse, her rich father’s hand on her shoulder as she shook like a leaf. But Grandma said, I looked at it and I thought it was crying. I was crying but it didn’t shed a tear. She said, my little cow didn’t know death though it was coming.

I want to tell Grandma, I saw a white cow today and it didn’t know death. I saw it nuzzle and this time my cow is going to stay alive, out by the Dish where nobody is going to come get it. Here, I want to say, the sun comes down from between clouds and you can hear birds, the sound lighting up the rolling hills. I want to say, I’m so close to paradise, my cow doesn’t know death.

I’m far away from my grandma. I watch my grandma on the camera, wanting to tell her about my cow. I look at her, half-closed eyes, small bones, meat sagging into old lady skin. Dad says it’s hard for her to hear now. Dad turns the camera away. Dad moves into another room. Dad looks at me. He says, Don’t cry, be a man, but I don’t care. I want to say, I should be crying. I want to say I should cry, because I know it, I know it’s coming.

A little girl found herself awake at the hour of siesta. She stumbled out of her family’s shack in an abandoned corner of their Quiapo slum, and found her mother laughing among the women on the street. They were sitting on little stools around a water-pump that rusted in the sun, with half-drunk bottles of orange soda around their ankles, and knees bent in such a way that made their skirts smile a lopsided V.

Her mother, Aling Juanita, was laughing at a friend’s impersonation of the old fish vendor known for his lusty grin. Mang Oskar owned the largest stall in the market and sold the most expensive fish. Yet all the women knew that all you had to do—if you were hungry enough—was swing your hips a certain way, and you could find yourself the lucky owner of several pieces of unwanted fish. Juanita felt triumphant when she could come home with a bag of stale galunggong tucked safely in the crook of her arm. In days like these, with the kitchen sounding the delicious crackle of hot-oil fish, the sun seemed brighter, her husband’s footsteps more eager, the clasp of his arm around her waist more sincere. Sometimes, she would become so happy watching her family eat, she would insist on having only the usual supper of rice and broth, trying to convince them that she was having a bad stomach. Ricky would then break the last piece of mackerel in his hands, keeping the head for himself, while giving their daughter, Tala, the tail.

Neither Ricky nor Tala knew about Mang Oskar; he belonged to another world that didn’t need sharing. A world Juanita, alone, had to revisit after all the pots had been washed, and the last grains were picked out of the cracks on the table. Washing herself in the lavatory next to their kitchen, she would rub her cheeks with coarse soap till all memory of his fingers was chafed out of her skin, and watch in breathless silence as the lather disappeared down the slimy navel of the sink.

Aling Juanita was laughing so hard, she had to clutch at her sides to keep them from hurting. Her friend, Teresa, tweaked just the right features to transform her face into the perfect caricature. No woman looking at her could avoid recalling the exact droop of Mang Oskar’s lips as he ogled a woman’s rump. Juanita, too, owned a stall at the market, though it wasn’t so much a stall as a patch of ground on which to squat and lay down a basket of plantains. These she peeled and skewered on a stick, padded with brown sugar, and offered to every passing customer—conscious, all the while, of the pair of eyes staring at her from across the dirt aisle.

As a child, Juanita discovered that this word, “pretty,” that people kept throwing around was something of a curse. On Easter Sundays of her childhood, the benevolent nuns of the Immaculate Virgin would get the most charming girls in town to lead the procession of the risen Christ. “Head Angel,” they would call her—the pretty pendant to their celestial chain. Always the one leading without a partner flanking her side, she was first to encounter the stares of leering men. Laughing like this now, at thirty-five, in the company of other women who knew Mang Oskar the way she did, laughing so hard tears were streaming from her eyes, so loud she was almost bent over on the ground—laughing like this was the only way to purge the repulsion. It was her one victory, and she relished it with noise, with vengeance, and with gusto.

Amidst this revelry, she suddenly saw the figure of a young girl coming towards her from one of the shacks. For a second she thought she was seeing a phantom of her own imagination—the girl Juanita stepping out of the blurry haze of her childhood, still clad in white, still leaving the scent of rose petals wherever she placed her foot on the ground. Only after squinting did she realize this youthful apparition was her own daughter.

“Tala! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be asleep.” Tala put her arms around her mother’s neck and leaned a tired head against her shoulders. Juanita began rubbing the child’s back, feeling suddenly the sharp protrusion of a wasted spine and the hollow of an emaciated shoulder. She furrowed her brows, overwhelmed by a tight knotting of guilt. But the child’s grasp was becoming unbearable. Juanita tried to pry off the bony fingers that were tugging at her throat.

Tala buried her face in her mother’s neck and caught a whiff of Juanita’s skin. This fishy fragrance seemed to linger on everything Mama touched. It was on the clothes she wore, the pins that kept her hair from falling across her forehead, the cream-colored comb she used to untangle her knots. Sometimes, when Mama was at the market, she would go to her parent’s room and try to find traces of her scent in the housedress she kept hanging on the wall. Her nose would furrow through creases of cloth and find the ocean hiding behind an unassuming wrinkle, engulfing her in its waves, shocking her with the warmth of a tight embrace. There was something in the smell that spoke of another world—until one night, she came across the answer in the tattered pages of an old storybook. There, staring at her from the yellow surface of the page, was a woman whose skin was covered by a smattering of scales—a shiny, fishy kind of skin that blurred the edges of her fingertips, and concealed the parting of her hips. She was seated on a rock holding a conch shell to her ear, and as she smiled, Tala could tell that she possessed all the secrets to its deepest, most unfathomable music.

It was then that Tala began to understand her mother. Being a mermaid would explain everything peculiar about her, from the fishiness of her scent, to the irresistible charm of her singing. She started to think about all the times she had caught Mama singing, how it seemed to be a part of her everyday bustle, as casual as it was for her to wave an arm or furrow her brows. Mama would sing to everything—to the droplets that fell when she squeezed her hair after rinsing, to the bubbles gurgling on her soup, to the languid rhythm of the last flickering candle in the nights she had to stay up sewing, pausing only to bite off the extra bit of thread. Throughout these recollections, Tala would be reminded of tales about mermaids beguiling fishermen through song, how they captured their hearts with a sweet, silvery kind of sorrow that made them row closer and closer to the whirlpool that engulfed them in one quick swallow.

There was only one thing that bothered Tala about Mama’s singing, and that was that Aling Juanita sang in her native Cebuano, a dialect Tala was never taught. She mistook it for a mysterious oceanic tongue, and spent nights trying to decipher its code, thinking it had something to do with the secret to her mother’s past—why it was that she chose to live on land. The storybooks said it was as simple as falling in love, but Tala wasn’t sure she understood their answer. She would try to picture Mama spiraling into a man’s gaping heart, losing the protection of her scales in exchange for a pair of legs that became sturdier the longer she walked on ground. After all, Tala thought, not all mermaids were successful in beguiling fishermen from the shore. Sometimes, it was they who had to succumb. And when they did, instead of capsizing boats, they lost their fins.

Clinging onto Mama’s neck now, Tala got an overwhelming urge to scratch the surface of her skin; maybe—just maybe—she could scrape away enough of the dust to uncover the scales glistening from within.

“Tala why are you acting this way?” Her mother’s growing irritation caught the attention of the other women. All chatter ceased, and everyone turned to see what Tala was doing—this girl with the pointed chin and the curtain of bangs cutting straight across her forehead. “What do you want, anak?” The child murmured something unintelligible, something she expected her mother to understand. “Speak up!”

“I said I’m hot and I can’t fall asleep. Come sleep next to me.”

“But Papa’s already lying on the cot. Why don’t you sleep next to him?”

“Because I can’t fall asleep. Not when you’re not there.”

“Stop it, Tala. Look, Tita Teresa is staring at you. Do you want her thinking you’re a little baby who can’t sleep without her mama?”

The girl gave her mother’s friend a long, defeated stare. “Come now, Tala,” cooed Aling Teresa. “Be a good girl and sleep next to your Papa. You need to take your siesta, otherwise you’ll be too tired later when all your friends come out to play.”

But she didn’t want to play outside. “I can’t sleep without Mama there to fan me.”

So all she wants is a little breeze, Aling Juanita thought, and breathed a sigh of relief. “Papa has the fan on. If you sleep next to him, you won’t be so hot. Come on, child, stop being so difficult.” And with that, she gave the girl a parting kiss on the forehead.

But Tala wouldn’t bulge. “No. Not without you,” she said through clenched teeth. What Mama did not know, and what she didn’t want to tell her, was that she had had a dream. It was the same dream she had been having for several days now—Enrique standing there, next to the water-pump, waiting for her to come outside with the red plastic bucket she used to gather water. She would see him from afar, dark and solid against the blazing sky, and her feet would start to betray her, one defiant step after another.

Juanita noticed her daughter sweating profusely. “Sus, Tala, is it really that hot inside? Why don’t you change your shirt and wear something a little more airy? Wear that dress Ernesta gave you.” Tala shuddered; the first time she noticed Enrique staring, she was playing tag with her friends outside. They were chasing each other over the makeshift ramps that hung precipitously above the sewage canals snaking beneath the slums. Tala was wearing the summer dress Tita Ernesa gave her for Christmas, the one she liked so much because it reminded her of the trumpet flowers growing in the gardens of the rich. She had the bloom of the skirt tucked safely between her legs and above her knees so she wouldn’t have to worry about slipping. They were running everywhere, these children of potholed streets. The wooden boards were creaking, bouncing at the thump of their nimble feet. Benji was “it,” chasing after her with a boyish grin—watch out, watch out! Belinda screamed, her tongue a lollipop-red in the bright sunlight. Tala quickened her pace, and started running in another direction, when she came across a pair of eyes that shot cold electricity down her spine. Tag—you’re it! Benji was triumphant. The thudding in Tala’s chest beat even louder, though her heart was already out of the game. You’re it, Tala! You’re it!

“Change into that dress, Tala. Everyone’s staring at you. Come now, don’t embarrass Mama like that.”

The day Enrique approached her, she was squatting next to the water-pump, looking for broken bits of clay. Colored chalk was getting too expensive to buy, and they needed to make the lines for hopscotch. Enrique was the lanky orphan who moved into the Manzanilla’s shack when he was nineteen. Some say Mrs. Manzanilla took pity on him, took him under her wing after his mother died and his father lost his wages to drinking. Others say she just wanted his company, her husband having been dead for five years and she, left alone and childless. Spending her afternoons smoking on an upturned bin, she would smile when she saw him turning around the corner, and thrust the burning end of her cigarette in one of the potted plants withering on her doorstep. She would take him by the crook of his arm. Enrique would answer with a curt nod, and let himself be led into the darkness beneath her roof. Tala used to watch the two of them disappear behind the rusty swinging of the screen, and wonder what it must be like to have her as a mother.

Tala was prodding the soil with the fat end of a stick when she found herself suddenly encapsulated by Enrique’s shadow. She looked up. He was asking for her name. She pretended not to hear and called out to her friends—Anita! Isabel! Maria! Susanna! They had already left the water-pump and were running through the streets. She threw her stick in a calm, unhurried manner, not wanting to let him know that she was afraid. From a distance, the many voices sounded the familiar tinkling of a chime, promising nothing, yet warning the onset of wind. Rubbing her dirty fingers on her skirt, she started to make her way towards her friends. Relax, beautiful. I’m only asking for a name, boomed the voice above her shoulder. There was something about it that reverberated like an echo, as if it didn’t belong to him, but from something else not familiar with its sound. Tala continued to walk towards the girls. When she was close enough, Maria spotted her and held up a nice big piece of clay. “Tala, look! I found a good one!” The moment Maria shouted her name, she sensed Enrique’s mouth widening into a victorious grin. Ah, so it’s Tala—Tala as in star. The brightest star in this godforsaken slum. She felt his hand brush up against her wrist, and she started running.

Come back with me now. Aling Juanita did not want to leave the circle of women who had sacrificed their siestas for an afternoon of laughter. But Tala had already begun crying. Juanita stared at the black hole her daughter’s mouth and felt paralyzed by anger. She began hitting the child—first, slightly, on the rump, then with increasing vehemence as the girl began to kick and punch and throw a tantrum on the floor. She hated the sight of Tala there, her face about to burst from the noise of her crying, salivating all over her dirt-stained shirt. Her buttocks were flattened by gravel, and out of a red, wrinkled skirt stuck two ungainly legs, skinny as sticks. How many more nights in front of Mang Oskar’s stall, Juanita thought, how many more catcalls, disapproving faces—the shaking heads that send her feeling small, so small. And still, skinny as sticks! Too bad a young woman like you is already married, Mang Oskar’s smile would show nothing but a pair of rotten molars. And to a poor man, nonetheless. She hit the child harder, this time lashing at her thighs, as if doing so will miraculously force the skin to swell and the muscle to round up. Tala shrieked. Juanita yelled even louder: get up! She tried to haul the child by the crook of her armpits, but the girl refused to let her mother make a crutch out of her arms. “Why are you doing this to me?” She could feel the veins straining on her neck, the pulsating rivers, green and gushing, ready to explode. Come on, baby. Don’t do this to me.

By this time the other women had been sitting in a silent ring. They looked out of solemn, rock-hard faces, the wrinkle of laughter gone from their cheeks. They knew Juanita would eventually exhaust her strength, would sit with collapsed shoulders and notice, for the first time, the throbbing in her fingertips. They knew that somewhere in her chest, she would discover a more painful aching, and pitied her for it. Tala’s cries had softened to a toneless whimper punctured by quick spasms of breath. Her black eyes looked suddenly old under the creases of her brow. Juanita peered into them; she saw herself glistening on their surface. The child was tired, there was no question about it. She was crying because she needed sleep. Juanita took the edge of her blouse and began wiping her daughter’s tear-stained cheeks. She brushed the hair away from her forehead, and tucked them neatly behind her ears. Using both arms for support, she draped Tala’s frame over one shoulder.

Tala held on, looking like a rag doll, arms wrapped tightly around her mother’s neck. She was relieved that she got her mother to come—this half-fish beauty who could sing Enrique away, whose voice had the power to fling him into the most treacherous part of the ocean. Mama may have fallen once, like the storybooks say, somewhere a long, long time ago. But something in the way she held Tala now made the girl believe she had long been immune to falling. Now, Tala felt the strength of a mermaid’s grasp, felt that in this simple enfolding of arms, all of Enrique’s plans to touch her, to invade the serenity of her dreams, would be cast away. And as she drew herself closer to Juanita’s body, watching her mother’s slippers tread on dusty ground, she thought she could see a procession of scales following them, winking and exultant, in the light of the sun.

I finally read that book you gave me.  The one you handed me that afternoon, in the park, the one I dropped and got dirt in the pages.  I’m sorry I dropped it, that was a stupid thing to do, and I didn’t mean to and I wish I could undo it but I can’t.  And I’m sorry I didn’t read it sooner, I don’t know why I didn’t, I meant to, but you know, things got in the way, I was really busy at work, it’s not an excuse, I know, but there it is.  I meant to read the book sooner, I really did, so that we could talk about it, about the plot, the language, the metaphors— but now I can only talk about endings.  I liked the ending by the way, of the book, that is, and I feel like you probably knew I would, that’s why you gave it to me, because the writing was beautiful and the ending was happy or at least not sad and you knew I liked happy endings and you knew how if I could I’d make everyone live their lives backwards so that endings were beginnings and so that everyone’s grandparents and their parents and their friends are all born into the world out of little pine boxes to tears of joy and grow younger and happier and healthier and there’d be no disease, only cures, and no death, only a last hello.  There’d especially be no car accidents, only cars driving away from each other, big sheets of aluminum unfolding like backwards origami, airbags being sucked in, glass flying up from the ground into a mosaic and then fusing together again.  But that’s not in the book, I know, and I really came here to talk about the book, because you gave it to me and you obviously wanted me to read it and talk about it with you and instead I dropped it.  I thought I’d have all the time in the world to read it, all the time in my life, in your life, in our lives, to read it, I thought I’d have time to put it aside and put it off, but I was wrong and I’m sorry.  I’ve read the book now, I know I’ve said that, but I want to say it again, I’ve read the book now, and it was really good, really good, and I wish, well, I wish for a lot of things.  I really liked the ending, by the way, did I say that?  I really liked the ending, finally, like you knew I would, and now, more than anything, I just want you to say you liked the ending too, I want you to hear me say that I read that book you gave me, I want you to be happy, to smile, to share that book with me, to share something with me again, one more time, and I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry but I finally read that book you gave me.

I’m not sure, I said, and, Could you describe him please?

The man blew a big honking note into his bagpipes and smacked his moistened lips. “Well,” he said, “sometimes he has a big white beard, kind of like mine—“ The man stroked his beardless chin, “—and sometimes he wears sandals and usually a robe, or else he’s naked as before you were born. He also has a bellybutton. Fishbowl eyes. No glasses. No bunions or rugburns. He has blood, kinda… kinda not like mine—” He bit down on his thumb and then showed me the red curling out of it. I peered down with interest, our two foreheads close. He smelled like old rain and stale beehives. “—but white; smooth marble. And his ears are sorta funny.” The man pointed to his ears and wiggled them, grinning as if he wasn’t telling me a joke.

I thought about all of this. The man gnawed a circle around the rim of the pipe’s mouthpiece and stepped on a fly with his shoe. It crunched hungrily on the ground.

I shook my head. Nope, don’t believe I have, I said.

He nodded gravely, as if he’d expected this. The bagpipe let out a low belch.

I jerked my head back at the musty pawnshop door, said You might want to check in there, though. Maybe someone picked him up and returned him. You can find all types of things in there, I told him. Anything, fur coats to cowbells.

The man gazed into the dark door, looked pleased. “Oh, but I’ve already been. Where do you think I got these?” And he fell into a deep, slow, melodic wail on the bagpipes as I walked off the gum-spotted sidewalk and, holding close what I’d taken from the pawnshop, up a cloudy staircase to the sky.

The Cathedral Basilica of the National Shrine of St. John of Chutreaux, (commonly known as the Glass Cathedral), a massive non-denominational cathedral located in Chutreaux, is considered the finest example of postmodern-Gothic fusion in architecture. Its unconventional style, heavily influenced by Notre Dame de Chartres and Notre Dame de Reims and composed entirely of glass and steel, has been the source of controversy among prominent architects. Privately funded by billionaire Samuel Fields of Fields Corp, it is considered to be one of the greatest manmade works in existence, drawing more tourists annually than the Great Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and the Great Wall of China combined.[1]

The town of Chutreaux, self-proclaimed cultural capital of humanity, has several notable attractions aside from the stunning Glass Cathedral, such as the Papier-Mâché Menagerie[2] and the Children’s House>[3], all of which were the brainchildren of eccentric billionaire Samuel Fields.

No matter who tells it, the story of the Glass Cathedral is invariably eclipsed by that of the man behind it. Volumes have been written about the fabulous wealth and extravagance of Samuel Fields, yet the source of his income remains a murky subject. Suffice it to say that Samuel Fields was the first to prove the disaster relief industry a highly lucrative business. As Fields himself put it, “God created everything on this blessed earth so that man could make money off of it. Even hurricanes.” Where others saw a chance to show their concern with five-dollar donations, Fields saw a five-billion-dollar business opportunity. So at the young age of 25, he withdrew his life savings and a sizable loan, recruited a team of disaster relief specialists from the military, the Red Cross, and the music industry, and started peddling his services to the nearest disaster-stricken country. Governments were initially skeptical of the ragtag group demanding compensation for rescuing people from collapsed buildings, distributing rations in refugee camps, and providing medical services to those in need. But within a few earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, coupled with the multiple sex and human rights abuse scandals that struck other nongovernmental organizations working pro bono, Fields Corp established itself as the go-to company when hit by an act of God. There was some initial outrage towards this “privatization of human compassion” when the UN designated Fields Corp as the UN’s preferred operator in disaster situations, but these detractors were silenced. Soon Fields Corp’s insignia became as common as the blue helmet in lands of trouble.

Samuel Fields singlehandedly created the disaster-industrial complex called Fields Corp. Fields Corp’s army of highly trained disaster relief professionals have become essential to any government’s disaster response. For his accomplishments, Samuel Fields was bestowed several honors of the highest degree, few of which he accepted.[4] An economist who occasionally wrote a column for the New York Times once favorably compared his single-minded zeal in expanding Fields Corp’s reach to the religious fervor of the Crusades. Fields cultivated this crusader image further, deliberately, by decorating his office with various chivalric artifacts. [5] Yet for all his riches, Fields was unlike many of his contemporaries, who spent time in luxury spas comparing the sizes of each other’s yachts. He wasn’t interested with being near the top of Forbes’ Richest People list[6] or creating a lasting legacy in the form of an endowment for generations to come. Fields didn’t see himself as the next Carnegie or Rockefeller or Nobel. He declined to leave an award for humanitarian achievements as his legacy.[7]

Instead, Fields spent many years visiting UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites in an attempt to see how he could “beat ‘em.” [8] Fields was unable to find a clear answer to his problem until he ventured into Europe, a region of the world that had “too many pompous jackasses and not enough earthquakes to humble them.” [9] At the time, he had never actually set foot in Europe. This was partly because some European officials refused to grant him a visa because of some comments that he made prior. They finally relented after a particularly grateful Pope George I invited Fields to the Vatican to induct him into the Order of Christ—an honor previously bestowed only to rulers of now-defunct monarchies and explorers of now-discovered lands—after hearing that he had personally insisted on securing and reinforcing several sites of religious and historical significance in northern Italy after a particularly difficult earthquake. Samuel Fields, a man not known his piety, [10] was pleased to hear that he was to become peers with Magellan and other names that he had never heard of. [11]

Fields took it upon himself to learn more about Europe before his visit, reportedly ordering a library’s worth of book summaries on European history during his preparations. Before he started to read any of his prepared material, however, he picked up by chance a book by children’s non-fiction author David Macaulay: “Cathedral: The Story of its Construction.” An aide had bought the book for the youngest child of King William V of England, but Fields intercepted it. The work, which described the construction of a cathedral in a medieval French town called Chutreaux, was filled with illustrations of flying buttresses, vaulted ceilings that seemed to defy the laws of gravity, intricate masonry, and enormous stained-glass windows far more impressive than any of the tapestries and reliquaries that Fields had collected in his Fields Corp office.

Fields, a man of little reading and great vision, found himself much more interested in this book than in any of the summaries that his interns had spent their sleepless nights writing. The discovery of the book heralded the premature end of any plans he had for reading anything else, and visiting the Vatican, for that matter. He devoured the 80 pages of illustrations and descriptions in a few hours, and decided that Chutreaux would be his first destination. The medieval beauty of Chutreaux was far more appealing to Fields than the “Italianness” of the Vatican, and therefore, he was going to delay his Vatican visit. In Samuel Fields’ words, “if [the pope]’s been waiting for the second coming of Christ for ever, he can wait a couple days for Samuel Fields.”[12]

What Fields hadn’t realized was that David Macaulay’s book was written for the purpose of instructing children on how cathedrals are built, not as a subtle advertisement for some actual cathedral in rural France. When one of his aides informed him of the nonexistence of Chutreaux (except in some online communities of cathedral enthusiasts), Fields reportedly brought his senior advisor to tears and sent his aides flying from his office. He was conspicuously absent from board meetings and other public events for the next six months. The Vatican never received an explanation for his snub.

Little is known about what Samuel Fields did during the months he was absent from the public eye. Despite increasingly indignant statements from the Vatican, the Holy See found itself facing the same stony silence that reporters, politicians, and the occasional telemarketer encountered when contacting the Fields estate. The world had absolutely no idea what Samuel Fields was up to until the Fields Corp public relations office issued a brief statement inviting journalists to a press conference regarding Samuel Fields’ next move. Amidst a frenzy of media speculation–that placed Fields Corp on the cusp of entering the telecommunications sector, nominated Samuel Fields to run for national office, or assumed that Samuel Fields had engaged in a string of perfectly legal but frowned upon amorous flings with minor celebrities–no one expected that Fields would take the stage that fateful morning and announce the “greatest manmade achievement ever” [13]: the Chutreaux Cultural Township.

Samuel Fields’ plan was simple: he would build a medieval European town called Chutreaux, just like in the book. Or as Fields himself put it, better than the book. During his days away from the media spotlight, Fields had read about contemporary buildings that borrowed from classical styles, using modern materials. He remembered that he had liked those designs. So Fields decided that real people would live in buildings just like they did in the old days, except instead of being built with wood and plaster, they would be built with steel frames and concrete walls. And in the city center there would be a grand cathedral towering over the rest of the two to three-story structures, just like in Macaulay’s illustrations. To Fields, it seemed straightforward enough. He sent out the orders and his aides filed the appropriate paperwork.

Soon an army of bulldozers and construction workers descended upon the cornfields of Fields Corp’s Iowa training complex and tore it down. It was not missed. [14] A charmingly rustic and clearly medieval influenced village sprung up in its place, each of the buildings lovingly crammed together between narrow alleys and cobblestone streets shooting off haphazardly in directions that made no sense in terms of modern urban planning. A team of the world’s finest architects designed the village itself with the input of a team of medieval specialists flown in from Europe. The village was methodically planned to look as if it had sprung up spontaneously. The houses were meticulously designed to look stylishly rickety and their historically accurate layouts enlarged in accordance with international humane living standards. Each house was built to host a family of four, complete with modern amenities.

There was no official report on the costs of the construction of Chutreaux, but conservative estimates by informed experts placed the value of the entire area somewhere between Citizen Kane’s Xanadu and Ludwig the Second’s Neuschwanstein Castle.[15] Everything was imported. Samuel Fields made sure that the cobblestones were stripped from rustic villages in Germany, the marble fountains hand carved by classically trained Italian artisans, and the canals dug by family-owned Dutch construction firms. Even the residents of Chutreaux were imported from the finest European countrysides, handpicked by a team of aestheticians and physicians and assigned to a variety of visually pleasing medieval occupations such as glassblower, minstrel, and bar wench. By the time Chutreaux’s Teutonic, Latin, and Nordic occupants to-be were ready to move into their humble quakeproofed abodes, tourist agencies were touting Chutreaux as the 1001^st place to visit before you die, the greatest historic village experience money could buy.

But this was only the first step of Samuel Fields’ grand project. To him, the village itself was merely a frame to display his crowning glory: the Cathedral. Cathedrals were palaces of God, designed to instill awe among the faithful who visited them with their impossibly high ceilings that seemed to reach for the heavens themselves. Samuel Fields saw no better structure to pay tribute to his accomplishments. The cathedral would be built in the classical Gothic style, an architectural splendor above and beyond anything by “all those cheese-eating surrender-monkey cathedrals” combined. It would be the finest building in all of Christendom, “and then some.” Fields had received the final plans and an order for genuine Lutecian limestone when it suddenly occurred to him: what if the church were made entirely of glass? [16] A Glass Cathedral, a truly shining beacon of humanity’s capabilities, the capstone to Samuel Fields’ international legacy.

The chief architect of the project, a man with many architectural awards to his name, laughed when Samuel Fields proposed this slight modification to the design. He assumed that Fields was joking. It was only a few weeks before the groundbreaking ceremony, and Samuel Fields had already carved the date into a commemorative marble fountain in the town square. The next day, the new chief architect, an equally accomplished expert, was given the same suggestion. He said he’d need more time and that there would still need to be some sort of steel framework. Fields relented to the second request, but said that he’d be breaking ground as planned, with or without a completed plan. During the next couple of weeks, the architect proposed a series of blueprints he deemed structurally sound. Each time Samuel Fields vetoed the plan, as he saw “too many steel beams and not enough glass.” As the design progressed, the steel framework became dangerously simple, but not simple enough for Samuel Fields. The architect suggested glass bricks to offer more support, but Samuel Fields wanted complete transparency, like an aquarium. So the architect suggested switching from glass to the lighter acrylic, but Fields insisted that he wanted a glass cathedral, or he would’ve sent out invitations to the groundbreaking ceremony for the Acrylic Cathedral. By the day of the groundbreaking ceremony, the architect had nothing. So Samuel Fields cut him loose, traced the outline of the original design with a sharpie, and told the head foreman to place the steel framework along the thick lines.[17]

A typical cathedral in the Middle Ages took decades, if not centuries, to build. With Samuel Fields’ limitless funding and the marvels of modern technology, it would only be a matter of months before his was completed. Over the next couple of weeks the steel framework quickly rose over the town of Chutreaux. As the townspeople went about their daily lives, accomplishing modern tasks as medievally as possible, they were blinded by the massive glass panels toted by Fields helicopters. Soon the panels of the first level were set, then the second level, then the third level clad in shining glass walls. It seemed that Samuel Fields’ ambitions would yet again be fulfilled.

To pass the time, Fields experimented with art, first drawing sketches of houses, then crafting animals out of papier-mâché. He wasn’t very good.

Suddenly, one windy day, two months after the construction crews set about laying the foundation for the cathedral, disaster struck. The walls, which were far too thin, came crashing down. Naturally, Fields Corp came to the rescue. Some several hundred workers were saved, but dozens of others died.[18] Fields ordered thicker panes of glass and bigger steel beams. The walls went up again. There were no further mishaps, except for the collapse of a sizeable portion of the ceiling, some sixteen weeks after the first accident. Again, some workers were hurt. Many more were traumatized. Samuel Fields didn’t care. Law firms did. Crews were replaced.

Conventional glass-cathedral-construction practice suggested rebuilding the entire area damaged by the collapsed roof. But Fields was never one to abide by conventional practice. He told the foremen to simply work around the damaged areas, patching up the twisted beams and broken glass as best they could. No one would be able to see them anyway, he said.[19] Makeshift repairs were made, and the roof rebuilt. The bell towers went up, and plastic model bells with built-in speakers were installed. (The bronze bells originally cast for the cathedral can now be visited at the Smithsonian American History Museum.) Stained glass windows were set into the glass walls, and soon after, the glass gates were opened to the public. It took fifteen years and seventy-eight lives, but the Glass Cathedral of Chutreaux was finished.

Salmon are known to swim thousands of miles, up waterfalls and past countless dangers in order to return to their place of birth, just to lay their eggs. Once their mission is complete, they waste away and die. Samuel Fields was not a salmon. Even after boasting that the Glass Cathedral would be the single greatest thing a human being could achieve five years into construction, he kept on looking for ways he could outdo himself, establishing a petting zoo inhabited entirely by animals constructed with papier-mâché[20] and building a mansion for children. His later plans, which are currently on display at the National Archives’ exhibit, “Samuel Fields: Visionary, Leader, American,” show a pattern of increasingly erratic and desperate projects that border on the avant-garde, including a light installation to replicate the Aurora Borealis over Salt Lake City.

As the cathedral neared completion, Fields became increasingly reclusive, shutting himself up in his Chutreaux estate, sometimes for weeks upon end. Though he was seldom found near the construction site, workers continued to slave away on the cathedral out of fear of their mercurial employer who they believed could and would show up at any moment. But he didn’t. He was seen only occasionally at shareholder meetings, usually sending a surrogate instead. When the cathedral was finally completed, one of Fields’ aides went to the manor to inform him of the news, only to find that Fields was nowhere to be seen. An ultimately unsuccessful nation-wide manhunt for the five-time Time Magazine Person of the Year ensued, but somehow the most recognizable businessman in the world had vanished into thin air.

Without the sheer will of Samuel Fields to push it onward, the fortunes of Chutreaux plummeted. The villagers found that it was much more profitable to move on to modeling and acting jobs, as Americans were drawn to their looks and their accents. Fields Corps sold the abandoned housing to American entrepreneurs looking to turn the place into a tourist attraction. Entire neighborhoods of beautiful medieval houses were demolished in favor of fancy high-rise apartments that dwarfed the Glass Cathedral. One ambitious developer purchased the petting zoo that Samuel Fields had built, renaming it the Chutreaux Papier-Mâché Menagerie and expanding it to include an entire zoo’s worth of papier-mâché animals, complete now with a safari and giant panda exhibit. [21] None of their ventures succeeded, and in some cases, like the Papier-Mâché Menagerie, things quite literally went up in flames. The high-rises failed to attract tenants and several construction companies had to file for bankruptcy as a result, playing a part in the nation’s recent financial crisis.

And the Glass Cathedral? Admittedly, it’s an impressive building to look at, as long as the reflective glare doesn’t become too blinding. Unfortunately, the mass of high-rises that sprung up around it after the untimely disappearance of Samuel Fields has diminished this effect, as the cathedral can no longer be seen from afar. Those who visited the cathedral in recent years have been sorely disappointed, as they found that the interior was not only a web of mangled steel beams but also just as hot as a solar-powered oven.[22] No one wanted to be boiled alive in what Time Magazine called “the closest thing to hell you can experience in the continental United States,” and soon the trickle of visitors stopped completely. And so, the derelict cathedral, where God probably never presided, now rests among the empty high-rises and the remnants of the medieval village of Chutreaux, which is now number two on the list of Lonely Planet’s must-see ghost towns, right after Petra, just before Dubai.

[1] Wikipedia, accessed two weeks after the completion of the Glass Cathedral.

[2] Closed indefinitely after some of the animals were burnt down during an anti-papier-mâché animal protest. Some thought the concept was against the laws of nature.

[3] Built in the style of a child’s drawing of a house. Closed for safety reasons.

[4] Estimates suggest that the number of honorary degrees Samuel Fields turned down translate into enough manpower to run a small Latin American country.

[5] When asked about the historical significance of the decorations by a reporter from Rolling Stones, he mentioned they were “stuff [that] knights used to use for stuff.”

[6] Disaster relief, though lucrative and recession-proof, isn’t quite as hot a commodity as software.

[7] Much to his disappointment, he had found that there was already a Fields Medal.

[8] To this day, no one knows exactly how one beats a World Heritage Site. Except by setting it on fire.

[9] From a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations on sustainable agriculture in Africa.

[10] On paper he was as Roman Catholic as any. Sources suggest he may have converted to Catholicism to become a ‘godfather,’ like Vito Corleone.

[11] Fields once remarked that “the only good European is a dead European.” This was not well received in Europe.

[12] A Vatican spokesman noted that, to Fields’ credit, he had never claimed to be bigger than Jesus.

[13] Fields Corp representatives requested that news outlets use that exact language.

[14] Samuel Fields had declared it his least favorite training complex at a party. Feelings were hurt.

[15] Popular opinion maintained that the actual cost was probably greater than the sum of the two.

[16] There is something fascinating about being able to look at the insides of things from the outside. Hence mankind’s unending obsession with reality shows and jellyfish.

[17] The architectural firms involved with the project distanced themselves from the final design.

[18] Such incidents are expected when large shards of glass fall from very high heights.

[19] Why Fields believed that no one could see the inside of a cathedral made almost entirely of glass, no one could say.

[20] The predecessor of the Chutreaux Papier-Mâché Menagerie.

[21] Plans to add a Papier-Mâché aquarium were scrapped after the project was deemed unviable.

[22] Which scientists determined that it was. The half-melted bells might have tipped them off.

“It will give you skin cancer,” said Doctor Blank.

“I don’t want skin cancer,” said Albert Samson.

“So don’t go in the sun,” said Doctor Blank.

“I like the sun,” Said Albert Samson.

“Do you like cancer?  Do you like chemotherapy?  Do you like death?  Stay out of the sun.”

“What if I sit in the sun for an hour a day?”

“Well, there’s no specific amount of time, you know, that determines whether or not you actually get the disease…”

“What about two hours?”

Dr. Blank’s tongue flailed about in his mouth as he ransacked his mind searching for a simple way to explain the unpredictability of cancer to Albert.

“What if I go in the sun for three hours?”

“Don’t go in the sun.”

Thus, Albert Samson only sat in the sun for two hours and fifty-seven minutes each day.

Albert Samson’s house had been infested with spiders for a while now.  He had always thought them a disgusting nuisance, but they usually kept to themselves so it was relatively easy for him to ignore them.  He was pretty sure that the majority of them hid in the attic, where he disliked going anyway.  Because of this, Albert Samson was easily able to live his life separately from the spiders.  Today, however, one of these spiders had crawled down from its attic haunt and invaded Albert Samson’s sacred space.  Rather than bat it away with the swift flick of his finger, though, Albert Samson did something that he hadn’t done in a long time.

He watched the spider.  It fiddled about trying to construct its web, secreting the silk as carefully as possible to build a network so intricate and so perfect that it could sit contented in its center for the rest of its life, growing fat on flies and sunlight and not worrying about the cancerous effects of ultraviolet radiation.

When Albert Samson sat on his porch he read sometimes.  Usually it was the newspaper, but sometimes he would bring out a play to read.  In the previous April he had read The Death of a Salesman, and the January before that he read A Doll’s House.  He never had the patience to read an entire book.  Three years ago he attempted to read Walden, but after reading the first five chapters he had to put it down.  He felt that novels, especially ones with literary merit, weighed him down.

When he wasn’t reading he would watch the landscape of the desert.  He would watch the lizards scuttle across the road.  He would watch the rattlesnakes slither towards the sun, which straddled the horizon line.  The rattlesnakes would always go towards that horizon, but Albert Samson never knew if they reached it or not.  They never came back to tell him.

He watched the spider.  The light easterly wind detached one of the web’s strands.  The spider, sensing a threat to the web, rushed to the spot of detachment and patched up the wound.  Albert Samson thought that the patch was not as pretty as the original strand had been, but it served its duty and kept the web aloft.  The spider returned to where it had been previously working.

It is Saturday, and Albert is invincible.  He is still lying in the endzone, clutching the football, soaking in the stadium lights and the babble of the exiting crowd, when his coach tells him that he is unstoppable, his parents tell him that he is their life’s pride, and his friends tell him that it is time to get drunk.  That night he conquers the castles of Ashley, Laura, and Evangeline, three fair maidens who are all thankful to have surrendered to the most heroic of the West Desert High Rattlesnakes. It happens the next Saturday too.  Each Saturday, he is presented with the charms of three lovely maidens.  This season, Albert is sitting contented upon his throne carved from pigskin.

One time he conquers the castle of a maiden who does not want to be conquered.  She surrenders begrudgingly.  He apologizes afterwards, handing her a box of chocolates and kissing her on the cheek.

He watched the spider.  A fly flew into its net.  For a moment the spider quit its work to tightly wrap the fly in a silk prison.  After the final strand was tied around the fly, the spider returned to the part of the web that it had been working on before the interruption.  When that section of the web was finished, the spider crawled back to the encapsulated fly and ate it.

Albert sits cross-legged against the tall oak in the middle of the field next to the university quad.  Delia lays out the red-checkered blanket and unloads the sandwiches that she has made.  Albert picks one up and engulfs it in so few bites that it is as if he has unhinged his jaw and swallowed the sandwich whole.

“You really weren’t that hungry, were you?” she asks with mock sarcasm, smiling at the way that Albert rubs his stomach with his head tilted back and his eyes closed, allowing the rays of the noontime sun fall onto his face.

“Nope,” Albert says, “But if there’s one deli whose cooking I can’t resist, it’s you.”  Albert still has his eyes closed.  Delia reaches over and runs her hand like the legs of a spider through his long, thick hair.  She kisses him lightly on the lips.  They lie together in silence for a few moments, absorbing one another.  They listen to chirps and rustles and breezes and heartbeats.  They listen to the erratic thumping of footsteps, and can no longer hear the heartbeats.

“Samson!” says a deep, rumbling voice. Albert and Delia open their eyes to see offensive tackle Ernie “Cruncher” Potter and tight end James Butcher looming above them, blocking out the sun.

“Let’s go man.  We’ve got practice in an hour and we’ve got to buzz our heads for the big game.”

Delia looks with concern at Albert, and at his long locks.

“Don’t cut your hair.  Plenty of people play football with long hair.”

Albert looks at the guys and back at her.  He says nothing at first, unsure of what words will leave his mouth.

“Don’t worry baby.  It’ll grow back soon.”  Albert kisses Delia on the lips again and walks off with Cruncher and Butcher.  Delia sits for a moment alone in the sunlight.  She slowly puts all of the picnic items in the basket and walks silently back to her dorm.

He watched the spider.  Albert is six.  His father shows him a football and tells him that he is going to be a West Desert rattlesnake.  Albert Samson is excited.

“Is Allan going to be a rattlesnake too? And Agnes? And Marie? And Davy?”

“Yes, yes, they’ll all be rattlesnakes too.  But they won’t be the type of rattlesnake that you will be.  You will be the most powerful rattlesnake in all of West Desert.  Your rattle will be heard above all others.  You will be more known than the rest.”

His dad throws the football at him.  It is as if Albert’s hands had been perfectly molded to hold the football, as if the football has always belonged in that space between his palm and his curled fingers. Albert feels that this first touch of the football has filled the empty spaces in his psyche, completing that which is naturally “Albert”.  He grips the ball, and feels its smoothness.  Albert throws the ball back to his father, and admires the upward motion of the spiral that he has thrown.

Albert Samson removed his hand from his bald head.  Yes, it was smooth, but he felt nothing.  The spider didn’t say anything.  It no longer remembered where the web had started.

Albert Samson had just turned fifty when he went to the West Desert Pet Shop and purchased Companie.  Companie was a grey mutt with mottled hair, and she walked with an obvious limp.  On top of this, she was blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and had lost nearly all of her sense of smell.  His main reason for purchasing Companie was her name; he thought it comforting to have Companie around.  The second reason was that Dave Daniels, the owner of the pet shop, had told Albert Samson that Companie was useless as a rattlesnake hunter.  Dave had disclosed this fact in an attempt to get Albert Samson to purchase one of the more expensive dogs, so it was not surprising that Dave was perplexed by Albert Samson’s decision.  When the two men were standing in aisle three picking from many different types of bags containing the same type of dog food, Albert Samson noticed the downturned corners of Dave’s lips and Dave’s loss of salesman’s enthusiasm.

“I don’t want dead rattlesnakes around my house,” Albert explained.

Albert hesitates.  He does not understand why football and Delia are mutually exclusive.  He races through potential futures: himself waking up in a mansion with the Vince Lombardi trophy next to him in his bed, himself waking up next to Delia in the house he grew up in,  himself waking up in a mansion next to both Delia and the Lombardi trophy.

He does not see the distinct pasts that have brought up the question: the way he missed her birthday party because Coach held an emergency team meeting, the way he arrived at her sorority’s formal with his sweaty and muddy cut-off shirt beneath his suit, the silent stares of her parents when he showed up at dinner thirty minutes late, rambled the entire time about his up-and-coming football career, and ordered the most expensive thing on the menu.

“I want you,” he says.  She smiles.  She enjoys him all night.  In the morning, he gets up and goes to practice.

He watched the spider.  Companie stumbled out onto the porch like a drunkard and limped over to Albert Samson.  Albert Samson made no motion towards the mutt as she staggered around on the porch, as Albert was too enveloped in the spider’s story to think about Companie.

Albert struts into her room grinning like a used car salesman, holding some flowers in his outstretched arm that he had plucked from the rose garden behind the dorm. Delia is lying on her side, her head propped up on an unorganized mountain of white satin pillows.

“You picked my flowers, you son of a bitch,” she says.

“What use are flowers if you can’t pick them?” he asks her sweetly.

“That’s always your damn philosophy.”

Only the humming of her refrigerator fills the room.  He has no idea what she means, but he stops smiling so that he can pretend that he understands perfectly.

She does not say a word.  She just stares and waits.  He can tell that his lack of a smile is transparent.

Albert sighs.  He knows that this is going to take a whole lot of effort on his part.

“Look babe…I know that you don’t like that I spend my days practicing and my nights hanging out with the guys.  I know you don’t like that I play a sport where I could hurt myself any day and never be the same again.  I know that you don’t like that I spend more of my time with football than I spend with you.”

She continues glaring at him.  Albert can faintly detect that she is trying hard to hide her hopeful playbook from his prying television cameras.  Regret begins to seep slowly into the forefront of his thoughts as his mouth begins to move, but he is unable to stop the motion.  Albert’s voice and his mind have lost their connection to one another.

“But football is where my life is heading.  Coach says that I’m going to be the face of the NFL some day.  Hell, you know that without football they’d kick me out of this school based on grades alone.  I don’t even have to get into the fact that I wouldn’t even be able to afford this school without my talent.  I can’t give it up.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” she says in monotone.

He watched the spider.  It was almost done with its web.  He thought that if spiders had human mouths instead of those pincers, whose technical name he had long forgotten, that the spider would be grinning with excitement.

Albert is pulled aside by Coach Comett after practice.  He can tell that Coach is eager to say something by the way that the usually stiff, disciplined, ex-marine is shifting from foot to foot.  Coach Comett’s poor attempt to maintain his usual behavior mannerisms makes him look like an elephant trying to hide in a picnic basket.

“You played excellently today Al.  That catch you had by the twenty yard line was exactly the kind of catch we need in order to win games.  You show up like that tomorrow and Northern University will be waving the white flag after your first touchdown.”

Albert nods through the small talk so that he can find out the more important news.  Coach Comett realizes that Albert knows that something is up, gives one more nod of approval, and begins to speak.

“Al, I’ve been notified that there will be some NFL scouts at the game tomorrow.  Rumor has it that they want you in the combine next year, and that after the game they’re going to try to persuade you to join the draft class.  Their coming to the game is just a matter of ceremony.  Just show ‘em the shit you always show and you’ll be gone in the first round before you know it.  Congratulations!”

Al’s smile stretches into a wild grin.  He had known that this would happen sooner or later, and feels content that it finally had.  When Comett finishes speaking, he stretches his arms to the side for a hug. Al ignores the gesture and reaches out his hand for a handshake.  Coach Comett awkwardly switches positions and grabs the strong hand. Albert pulls away and struts to the locker room.  With his peripheral vision, Albert sees Coach Comett look down at his hand, his smile faltering for just a moment.  For that moment he looks rejected, but before this look registers in Albert’s consciousness Albert is in the locker room, thinking only about his glorious future.

Albert Samson watched the spider.  It was inches away from completing its web.  Only a minute more and it would finally be able to bathe in the glory of its hard work and achievement.  Then Companie stumbled into the hammock that was the anchor for the spider web.  The hammock swung wildly with this sudden addition of weight, and the web was ripped to shreds.  The spider was thrown off, and Albert Samson did not see where it went.

The next three weeks are a blur to Albert.  He vaguely remembers meeting the NFL scout before the game, and telling him to “get into your bunker ‘cause Samson’s coming to blow you away.”  He remembers the stadium lights, the first touchdown, the second touchdown, the ball in the air, the diving catch…the hit he doesn’t even remember.  Waking up in a hospital bed with pain everywhere, but especially in his head, thigh, and shoulder.  The doctor telling him that he can’t ever play again.  The scout walking out of the stadium and into the oblivion of could-have-beens.  The financial aid office revoking his scholarship money.  The registrar telling him that he has one semester to pull up his grades or he is out.  The sinking feeling.  The sinking feeling.  The sinking feeling.

Thanking the Lord that he isn’t paralyzed.

Cursing the Lord that he is.

At three twenty-seven Albert Samson got up out of his chair. He knew that the spider, if it survived the fall, would not ever try to rebuild its web.

Albert Samson sits in the lecture hall, fiddling with his pencil and staring up at the ceiling with bleary, bloodshot eyes.  He has to pass this class to stay in school, work hard, graduate, and get a monotonous desk job that won’t pay a quarter of the salary he would have made in the NFL.  He stares back at Professor McCloud, but does not listen.  Who the fuck needs philosophy anyway?  Waste of fucking time.  Philosophy is bullshit.  He can bullshit his way through philosophy.  Then he will get a fucking A+ for his bullshit, and the registrar will let him stay in school, work hard, graduate, and get that desk job that won’t give him the immortality that NFL stars get.  Fuck that boring life.  Fuck the fact that his parents offered to pay the rest of the way through school.  Albert Samson doesn’t give a flying fuck.

“That Thoreau had to eventually give in and return from his trip to Walden seems to support the old adage that claims that no man is an island.  However, if you look at contemporary society, there is a lot of evidence that suggests most men are peninsulas.” says Professor McCloud with a glint in his eye, gesturing towards the audience of students.  Albert Samson thinks that Professor McCloud is pointing at him.  Albert Samson looks away.

Albert Samson watched the place where the spider had been the day before, hoping that his intuition was wrong and that he would find the web fully intact.  Deflated, he began to accept that nothing was there.

An unmarked van pulled up to Albert Samson’s house.  A young man with an oddly graying moustache got out of the van.  As he walked towards the porch, Albert Samson examined the young man.  He examined his work boots.  He examined his grass-stained jeans, his plaid logger’s sweater, and his hunting hat.  He examined the man’s skeletal appearance, and his mirror-like sunglasses.

Albert Samson stood up to greet the visitor.  Before reaching out his hand, Albert Samson brushed off his chair’s seat cushion, which was embroidered with the logo of the “West Desert High Rattlesnakes”.  The stitching had been slowly coming out over the past five decades, causing the image of what was once an intimidating, vicious, football-crunching snake to be barely discernable.

“I have heard that there is a pest problem in this house,” the man said.

Albert Samson vaguely remembered calling an exterminator, years ago, when the spiders first came to his attention.  He hadn’t thought that the exterminator would ever show.

Before Albert Samson could welcome the exterminator into the house, the exterminator was through the doorway.  Albert Samson didn’t even notice the exterminator pass by him on the porch.

Albert Samson walked up behind the exterminator, who was standing in the foyer staring at a black-and-white painting of the desert that hung on the wall.

“The spider infestation is mostly in the attic.  They don’t usually come down here.”

The exterminator nodded silently and continued to stare at the picture.

“The entrance to the attic is on the other side of the house,” said Albert Samson.

The exterminator nodded again.  After another moment examining the painting, he began to stroll down the hallway.  Midway down the hall, however, the exterminator veered off into the living room.  He began to examine Albert Samson’s couches, lifting each cushion into the air and peering into the spaces between them.

“The spiders are in the attic,” said Albert Samson, “not in the living room.”

Again, the exterminator nodded.  He put the seat cushions back into their proper places on the couch.  He then began to examine the living room’s fireplace.  After pulling his head out of the chimney, the exterminator walked out of the living room and into the kitchen without any show of emotion.  He opened all of Albert Samson’s kitchen drawers, scrutinized all of his rusted utensils, and then returned them to their drawers.  He opened the oven, stuck his head inside, and looked around.

Albert Samson wanted to shut the oven door on his head and turn up the heat.

“The spiders are in the attic.  They are not in the kitchen.”

The exterminator pulled his head out of the oven and nodded again.  The exterminator exited the kitchen.

For the next twenty minutes, the exterminator continued to walk slowly throughout the house, absorbing every detail of every room.  Albert Samson followed behind, impatiently waiting for the exterminator to do something besides treat his house as a museum.

Finally, they arrived at the door to Albert Samson’s bedroom.  Exasperated, Albert Samson grabbed the exterminator by the shoulder and spun him around.  The exterminator stopped moving.

“Sir,” said Albert Samson, “The spiders are—”

“Show me into your attic,” said the exterminator, cutting him off.  Albert Samson pointed at the ladder at the end of the hallway.  As the exterminator walked towards the attic, Albert Samson remained behind. The exterminator turned around and ruffled his mustache.

“Come with me.  I’ll need your help,” the exterminator said.

Albert Samson cringed.  He hadn’t been into the attic in many years.

“Please come with me,” the exterminator said again.

Albert Samson didn’t want to go, but he had a great difficulty saying no to the exterminator.  He obliged.

When they reached the attic, Albert Samson turned on the light.  He could hear a multitude of spiders scurry across the floor to escape the flood of luminosity, but his eyes only actually saw one of them.

As Albert Samson gazed around the attic, he tried not to look at all of the memorabilia from his football days: the high school jersey, the college helmet, his father’s football, and the newspaper clippings.  However, they were the first things that the exterminator placed his fingers on.

“You were some football player once, huh?” he asked, smacking his lips together.  Albert Samson noticed the cadaverous thinness of the lips of the exterminator.

“Yeah.” said Albert Samson, looking away.

“It seems you were a pretty damn good one.  These newspaper clippings show some incredible stats.  You scored forty-six touchdowns your freshman year.  That’s quite incredible.”

“Thanks.” Albert Samson said, barely audible.

“What happened?” pressed the exterminator.

“Injury.” Albert Samson was uncomfortable.

“You could have probably gone to the NFL with a record like this.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

The exterminator grinned, his gossamer lips extending an uncanny length and revealing a mangled set of gumless teeth.  He put down the newspaper clipping that he was gripping in his gnarled fingers and strutted with his chest in the air towards Albert Samson.  He moved so quickly that Albert Samson could have sworn that he was hovering.  They were touching chest to chest, and the exterminator was looking directly into Albert Samson’s eyes.  The exterminator was still wearing those reflective sunglasses, and as a result Albert Samson found himself staring into his own eyes as well.

“I know where the pest that plagues this house lies,” whispered the exterminator.  Albert Samson felt the exterminator’s cold breath as the wispy, invisible vapors wrapped themselves around Albert Samson’s head.

Albert Samson is finally done with his physical therapy.  After a year and a half, he finally feels well enough to function.  He struts with his chest in the air, waving adieu in his mind to the familiar sights of the hospital.  Goodbye ugly white walls.  Goodbye grumpy receptionist.  Goodbye maintenance closet with the busted doorknob.  As he waves goodbye to the list of recently admitted patients, he sees something that makes him feel disoriented, like a dancer pushed over in the middle of a pirouette by a mischievous child.  Albert Samson changes direction.  Hello maintenance closet…

When he walks in Delia is pretending to sleep, but as soon as she senses that he is about to touch her shoulder she bolts upright.  At first she says nothing.  She stares at him with exasperated, bloodshot eyes that remind Albert Samson of the cornerbacks in whose faces he used to gloat after breezing past them.

“I heard that you were hurt,” she says.  That is the only thing that she is going to say to start the conversation.  He looks into her eyes.  He has not seen them in a long time, since before his injury.  He regrets not speaking to her in all of this time.

“Yeah,” says Albert Samson, rubbing the back of his neck and looking past her at the whitewashed walls, “I have to talk to you about that.  Since I’m done with football now, I was -”

She interrupts him with a chuckle.

“You’ve missed your chance, but gave Derek Stephens his.” Delia coughs, rolls over, and falls back asleep.  Albert Samson, remembering the name, runs back into the hospital hallway and stops one of the nurses.

“Why was the girl in that room admitted to this hospital?”

The nurse answers him curtly and attempts to smile.

This retroviral reality is a crippling blow to Albert Samson, making his cheeks burn, his head smolder, and his heart freeze.  He wants to run back into her room immediately but his legs will not let him.  Albert Samson, stunned and slouching, staggers back to his car.

He followed the exterminator back down the ladder.

Albert Samson’s tests return negative.  Like a police dog following the scent of a criminal, the exterminator moved quickly and briskly through Albert Samson’s ramshackle house.  He did not stop to observe anything this time; rather, he simply drifted as if in a trance towards Albert Samson’s bedroom.  The exterminator pulled open the doorknob.  Albert Samson opens up the door to her hospital room.  Without faltering, the exterminator ripped the sheets off of Albert Samson’s empty bed.  Without faltering, with tears streaming down his cheeks, Albert Samson rips the curtain away to reveal her empty bed.

Albert Samson wails.  She is gone, and the exterminator stands above the bed pointing down.

“There’s your pest!” the exterminator exclaimed.  In the bed was a dead rattlesnake, its noisemaking tail severed from its body and nowhere to be found.  Albert Samson cries into her pillows, searching for her smell, for any hint of her still being alive.  Averting his eyes from the spectacle in his bed, Albert Samson turned to the window of his room and saw Companie running off like a cheetah through the monochromatic desert, her limp gone and her fur pristine.  As she disappeared on the horizon, Albert Samson looked back down gravely on the dead rattlesnake and began to breathe heavily.

He cries on her empty hospital bed, and the tectonic plates move, and he is no longer attached to any land mass.  Albert Samson’s tears stream down the bed, soak into the sheets, and surround him on all sides.  Albert Samson, now hyperventilating, stared at the rattlesnake, and stared into the reflective glasses of the exterminator.  Albert Samson rushes out of the hospital, feeling trampled by his guilt and suffocated by his isolation.  He feels a terrible pain in his heart.

“Let me remove this old, dead rattlesnake for you,” the exterminator cooed, putting his hand on Albert Samson’s shoulder.  Outside of the hospital, inside of his room, Albert Samson clutches at his chest and, curling up like a spider, falls at the bare, bony feet of the exterminator.

Dad sits in a beach chair under an umbrella, chain smoking, and John and I on a blanket a few feet away.  “Hopefully this time he won’t have an angry streak or be black,” Dad says, gesturing at the man who’s carrying my sister on his shoulders, throwing her into the waves.  He laughs, sputtering a bit on his beer.  I pick up handfuls of sand, let it sift back out between my fingers, forming little molehills.  I don’t, have never had, the energy to contest him.  I’m a marvel of apathy, a superhero for the modern age.

We’re all at the beach because my sister Angie is getting married again in two days. Her last marriage ended with her on our parents’ couch saying, “I’m starting a new fashion trend. Whaddya think?” her eyes droopy behind two Xanax and five beers.  In a fit of domestic fervor, bleach had been thrown on everything she owned.  She’s got the resilience that only slightly stupid people have, but me, I’ve got none of it.  Instead of throwing punches, I stare sort of dumbly into the sun, asking when, when?  When Angie speaks about this wedding, she says half-candidly, “Third time’s a charm.”  Resilience.  Me, I look away when she says these things.  I stare at the corner of the room where the wall meets the floor.

My brother Jay sits on the sand next to us, and he puts more sunscreen on his daughter Sofie.  “If she gets sunburned, her mom will never let me hear the end of it,” he says.

“When will the arrangements be finalized?” Grandma asks, as she turns a page.  She’s half-reclined reading People magazine, and doesn’t bother to look up.  Jay says he doesn’t know.  He’s got his face in his hands, he’s crying again.  It’s pathetic and we’re all mourning it and feeling sour about it except Grandma, who is an idiot and doesn’t know what she’s done.

“Hey Sof,” I say, “I’m kind of hungry,” and I pretend to gnaw on her little chicken wing of an arm.  She’s squealing at me, but she’s also in love with me.  She’s beautiful and perfect, and the only one of us who appreciates absurdity on a religious level.

“Will you watch Sofie?” Jay asks me, and I say, “Of course I will, of course.”   He goes to take a ride on Dad’s motorcycle so we don’t have to look at him and feel our insides seizing.  I imagine he rides with the wind in his face and thinks about how things were before he had to move back home, to live with Dad, all loud, stomping through the house on his bad leg, forgetting his naked pictures of Mom on the bathroom counter for everyone to stumble upon.  More likely he thinks about sweet nothing.

Sofie yells at me, “Auntie Grace, Auntie Grace, I’m a doggy! yip yip yip!”  I keep my eye on her as she runs out towards my other brother Tim, who’s fishing knee deep in the surf.  She’s obsessed with his black lab.  I can see Tim mouthing the familiar, “Pet him nice, Sof, you’ve got to be nice.”  She barely touches the dog, like she’s patting a ball of cotton candy.  Tim’s a year older than me, looks like me, but with a sharper jaw.  He teases Sofie, lifts her up and pretends to make her ride the dog like a horse.

All four of us haven’t been at the beach together in years.  I always come, because I’m the youngest and have no excuses.  Tim moved out of our house in the ninth grade to drink and live in a fishing town on a cape jutting out into the gulf.  He raises clams for a living and rarely comes inland.  Jay and Angie had been married, were busy.  When we get together like this, a festive wonderment hangs in the air between us.  We stand around, smiling at each other dazedly, amazed, as if we just crawled out of a mangled car on the side of the freeway.  We’re happy that we’ve survived.

I’m watching Sofie make pratfalls into the tiny waves lapping way up the shore when Dad turns to me and says, “You’ve got quite a little belly on you now, don’t you?”  He’s laughing again.  It erupts into a hacking cigarette cough, and for a brief moment I imagine him a desiccated old man, alone.  He’s drying up, shriveling, dryer and dryer.  Finally, without anyone to life-suck he’s turned into a handful of sand there on the seat of his wheelchair.  Because people expect you to respond when they talk to you, I say “Ha!” loudly and dryly.

John’s got his mouth near my ear, he whispers “You’re a beautiful person,” which brings an interesting mix of solace and humiliation.  I steel myself and focus my eyes over Grandma’s shoulder at her magazine of beautiful people doing mundane things.  I’m good at drumming up absurdity for consolation.  Stars, they’re just like us! They take shits!  I squint my eyes and light a cigarette.

Mom comes up from the ocean.  “Hey honey,” Dad says, giving her a kiss on the lips.  Mom’s stomach is flat from doing aerobics videos in our living room, and her hair is yellow, a stripe of grey roots crowning her.  Dad helps her color it, sitting at the dining room table, his fingers fumbling in plastic gloves.  “How’re the waves?” he asks.

“Oh they’re wonderful,” she says.  “Amazing.”  Dad makes a point of coming here every year, but hardly ever goes in the ocean.  He’s got this bad leg, but he seems to enjoy himself when he hears Mom using this voice.  She gets quiet and emphatic.  “Ahh-mazing,” she says.  Living with Dad and scrubbing shitters for a living must be a magical potion for self-actualizing, because Mom is more well adjusted than anyone I know.

She turns to John and me and tells us about the book she’s reading.  It’s about reincarnation and hypnotic regression.  “I must have been a water creature in a past life,” she says, “because of how much I love the ocean.”  It’s too heart-scraping, hearing her talk about this with her eyes wide and earnest.  I know I should be happy that she is happy.  But I don’t want her to have to use these stories to console herself, I don’t want her to have to clean up other people’s messes.  I want a big fat wad of money between her and the constant abrasion of life.

“I need to go cool off,” I say.  I jump into the waves like someone who’s been to the beach many times and knows the secret.  If you dive straight through you’ll come out on the other side, smooth and placid.

*

When we pack up our things and come up from the beach, the hotel manager is waiting outside Dad’s room.  He’s fat and bald, with a surly countenance.  I sense the disaster welling up behind us when I see him, like the chokingly sweet smell of ozone that rolls in before a hurricane.  I’ve always been a bad psychic, sensing everything but telling my family nothing, and escaping when I got the chance.

“I was getting complaints about one of your rooms,” the fat man says.  Mentally I try to will him to admit he’s a messenger from disaster, to come clean, but he keeps talking.  “Sir, your son has done extensive damage to the room.  There is dog shit and broken glass everywhere, and you will be held responsible as the room is in your name,” and then there is some more repetition of some more bad things.  I can’t blame the fat man, because this is his job, being a messenger from disaster and all.  But I am growing weary.

Dad’s arm shakes on his cane, and I think about his heart disease that requires blood pressure medication and a Zoloft, daily.

“Tim,” he says quietly to the carpet, though Tim is not here.  “Tim,” he says again, louder.  The prodigal son, he was always the favorite.  He looks just like Dad did in all those pictures from Vietnam, when dad’s face was small and square and clean shaven.  Dad’s arm won’t stop quaking on his cane.  It’s slipping off.  “Tim! Tim!” he screams.

*

“Nice outfit Grace,” Dad says. “Must be the Polish in you.” He’s snickering, rasping at me from the hospital bed, and I’m not listening to him.  I’m much too saturated to absorb anything more.  I stare at the painting above his bed, a painting that yells NICE at me in big block letters.  No, this is not nice, I repeat over and over in my head.  I realize there’s a beach scene on the painting.  It’s talking about Nice, France, and the painting above the other bed says MALIBU and presents a similar ugly pastel wave hitting an ugly pastel shore.

Dad motions to Mom, “Get me some water, Kris.”  Mom sits beside me reading a book with a poorly Photoshopped cover titled Lives Between Lives, by Rick Chorman, PhD.

“Here, drink this,” she says, handing him a can of Ensure, mother’s milk for the ancient and afflicted.

“I don’t want that shit,” he says.  Mom’s eyes are open, but they’re glassy and unaffected, and her brain is somewhere else.

“Can I smoke in here?” he continues.  “Where’s the ashtray?”

I look out the window.  We’re up high, and I see the line of the ocean a few blocks away, where it all ends.  The sky is dark now, plum-colored with afternoon rain.

“You’re going to kill yourself,” I say limply to the parking lot below.  Because I’ve inherited Dad’s weariness, I can’t hold it against him.  Smoking is a habit for people who have a realistic idea of the slim cushion between them and disaster.  Dad and I are linked arm in arm, we see it there, waiting in the wings for us, and together we say, so what, come and get me, I know you.

I wonder where Tim is.  No one could reach him.  Maybe he’s sitting on the beach with his dog, a beer in his hand.  Maybe he’s getting another tattoo. Dad and Tim love and infuriate each other so much because they’re the same.  They both believe their actions have no consequences for anyone else.

“Our family,” I want to say to Dad and Tim, “is fragile like an old woman’s bones.  There are no reinforcements of luck or money.  Any stupid thing you do breaks all of us.”

But I don’t say that.  I pick up the can of Ensure and slowly pour it out into the trash can, while looking at Dad.

“Now you don’t have to drink it,” I say.  He doesn’t speak.  When he’s quiet and still, Dad’s tooth and bald head make him look like an infant, tired and helpless, momentarily genuine.

He reaches for the remote, smashes the quiet.  “Video Vigilante!” the TV screams.  “Citizen uses personal camera to catch prostitutes in action!”

I put my forehead against the window, all thoughts shrinking away in the noise.  John stands beside me, rubbing my arm.  He’s the only one around making sure blood is still flowing to my extremities.  His eyes are an opaque brown, the light reflecting off them in big white squares.  I wanted to somehow tell Dad that John holds me up by the arms when I start folding into myself, but all Dad could say about him is “He’s vegan? He doesn’t drink milk?”

I’m listless and John looks down at me and asks, “How can I help?”  I look up at his glass spheres, his opaque reflectors.

“I’m fine,” I say.  “Did you know that you have marble eyes?”

Outside, the plum-colored clouds keep rolling in, and it’s just an afternoon thunderstorm.  I wish it were the tails of a hurricane whipping us. In Florida there’s weather, lots of it, and it makes you think about the body.  It reminds you that you are corporeal and small.

We were all here as kids once, at the beginning of a hurricane. The sky was bruised, and the waves swelled, three times their usual size.  Dad let us stay on the beach until the last possible moments, when the lightning started zipping down. Angie and Jay took their surfboards out, yelled excitedly over the rough water.  Tim and I swam further than we should’ve, let the waves pull us under, throw us against the sand.  It felt apocalyptic, but in an electrifying, almost funny way.  Tomorrow was going to be different, but we were going to survive it.  When we left the beach, the water kissed the grass at the top of the dunes, threatened to spill over its designated bounds.

The hurricane crashed down while we slept.

The next morning we hurried out to see the aftermath, the new world.  We found wildness flung all over the sand; trash, pieces of people’s yards, driftwood, palm seeds from Africa.  Tim and I decided to build a sandcastle, an indestructible one.  We filled the middle with storm loot, glass bottles and two-by-four’s, plastic bits.  We packed sand on the outside and picked sea oats to put on top, wheaty little flags blowing in the wind.  When we finished, I made triumphant declarations to everyone.

“If anyone kicks our sandcastle, they’ll kill themselves.  They’ll break their foot!”

“This will always be here,” said Tim.