FWRICTION : REVIEW

Alec tears the first packet he tries clean in half, coffee-flavored flakes sprinkling the sand. He stuffs the pieces into his pocket and taps a second packet against the table to settle it. For a number of reasons that he does not have time to pick at today—including Matt’s resistance to him casting Anna as Jane—the project never quite came together with university support, which meant the university never quite came together to support Matt and Alec graduating. Alec proved how much it didn’t matter by marrying Anna and starting steady work answering phones at a pharmacy customer service center, before realizing that the only way to shake the ghost of failure, of poetic injustice, was for the three of them to actually make Z-4000 as it was supposed to be. Matt and Anna had agreed—still do, Alec repeats like a mantra, wrestling a disposable coffee cup from its plastic sleeve. But despite everything the project has ridden off the rails of its schedule—now two months in—and is well over its initial Kickstarter budget, donations mostly from Facebook friends and sci-fi message board frequenters. They’ve been supplementing funds by borrowing heavily from Anna’s stepfather.

Alec anchors the Styrofoam cup by resting two fingers on the rim and pours straight from the bottle, the water glugging out sun-warmed a step beyond tepid. He sloshes the cup in a loose circle to stir it, then walks the coffee back to his wife. “For the lady.”

Anna offers a tight smile, but loosens as she takes her first sip. Even artificial swill will do, as long as it’s caffeinated. Alec has learned this.

“What’s today?” she asks, reaching for his wrist. He takes her hand, and she rubs her thumb against his knuckle.

“Love scene with you and Matt,” Alec says.

Anna rolls her eyes over the rim of her cup. “Duh. Besides that?”

A muscle in Alec’s chest contracts, a recent tic. He drops the clipboard and massages it. “The big charge shots.”

“All that? Just today?”

The schedule is tight. There were conflicts with an unforeseen all-terrain vehicle convention that tore through these dunes earlier in the month. They’ve had to wait until this week to film the desert battle scenes against the lizard men of Z-4000. Drinking vending-machine espressos and drafting the screenplay in their dorm last year, Alec and Matt had agreed with enthusiasm bordering on belligerence that these desert scenes are the fucking soul of the film. And now it is their third precious day in the Valley, and again the sun has beaten them to location—because it actually knows what it’s doing—and the desert is humming again, bubbling with this mocking geological laughter that ruins each take, a background chuckle that Alec cannot afford to dub over.

“I think, yeah, we need to finish the sand stuff today,” he says. “Don’t we? Unless…” He adjusts his hat over a bottle-red shag that has faded with neglect and sun to the color of an old strawberry.  “Unless you think David and your mom could—”

Anna shakes her head, grimacing as she downs the last half of her drink in one swallow. “I can’t ask for more,” she says. “Last desert day, yeah? Let’s do this right. Get Matt; I’m ready whenever.”

She kisses him, mouth acrid with coffee, and climbs the stairs back into the camper in one leggy stride. “Yeah, definitely,” Alec says. He takes a shuddering, sun-seared breath.

In the back of his mind, he knows that he will be atoning for these two months of insanity for the rest of his marriage. Whatever honeymoon blush colored him eccentric and creative and passionate, whatever aw-shucks accident-prone charm he wielded against Anna in college, is all evaporating in the desert. Everything has happened too fast, and too big—seventy-odd people have followed him into Death Valley, old classmates running equipment and weird acquaintances acting, almost all of them expecting to be paid eventually. These months haunted by college and increasingly buried in debt have smudged his life with Anna—that also too big, too fast—into vagueness. The thought of her, even the sight of her, a cramp lodged low and deep between his ribs. He is doing marriage wrong, he can tell. And Matt, Matt is—

“Clark!” Alec shouts at his feet, pinching the bridge of his nose. His bottom lip splits.

“Yeah!” The passenger’s door of a weather-beaten Silverado squeaks open. Alec’s assistant director half-jumps, half-stumbles from the truck, double-fistfuls of scribbled rewrites. Clark is interning to fulfill the practicum requirement for a degree in new media arts. He is a still-valid connection to the university, enabling them to rent near professional-quality cameras at a significant discount.

“We’re, uh, gonna go for it,” Alec says. “I’ll get the love scene while you’re setting up the charge, and then…”

“We’ll be ready,” Clark says, pushing linen sleeves past his elbows. He cups his hands in a stuttering three-part gesture, left-center-right. This has become a shoot-wide symbol for the camera effect they’ll use to make their fifty extras—a combination of friends, classmates, and listless Dumont Dunes visitors hired for their common lack of anything else to do—look like an army: stitching together shots of them running to the left, center, and right of frame. The process needs to happen twice over—the lizard warriors remove their masks to become the ragtag human resistance, led by Matt and Anna. Hampton and Solomon. Alec has begun nursing a quiet fear that he doesn’t actually know how to edit the triple-shot together.

“Okay, okay,” Alec tugs at a gauged earlobe. “What about the sand noise?” He circles his hand above his head, a gesture meant to encompass all of the Valley and its humming dunes. He does not even think to be embarrassed by having to ask an undergrad for help.

“It’ll work for us, yeah?” Clark says, with an enthusiasm that shows he is earning course credit. “Like, you know, background hum. Whole army of lizard dudes, like, talking.”

For a terrible moment, Alec thinks that this of all sentences might be the first of this whole miserable experience to make him cry. But Clark is eager-eyed and the extras are waiting in painted rubber masks that could probably cause heatstroke and there is nobody else to handle this, because Matt is probably already drunk.

“Okay,” he says, something manic building in him. “Okay, yeah, let’s get this thing. Can you round up someone to sweep?”

“Awesome,” Clark offers as a confirmation. Climbing onto the Chevy’s tire, he leans into its bed and emerges with an assortment of janitor’s brooms, bristles thick with sand. These are for resetting the desert. The dunes have to be swept flat again after every take. “Where are you going?”

Alec shivers in the mounting heat, as though his blood itself is flinching the question. “To get Matt,” he says. “Call if you need me. We’ll be done soon.”

Clark nods as if he believes this and jogs away, broomsticks swinging awkwardly.

Alec has struggled lately to remember why Z-4000 is important, why he has overdrawn everything there is for a movie for which he no longer has any ambitions beyond failing to sell digital copies for perhaps five dollars on the internet. At this point it is simply that this is happening: the desert is real; he has said out loud to Matt, to Anna, to everyone that this is important; there is no way out but down. He has to make this movie, and it has to be good.

The men’s trailer is the least pathetic of the three RVs. Alec raps on the door and waits. Shuffling inside, and then the door opens. It’s David, a gangly acting student from the university with an unlucky face for his profession—too much eyelid, somehow, and permanently slack with boredom. David only has two appearances in Z-4000, both soliloquies. They shot his death scene on the first day in the Valley—Alec was left panting, heart racing, at the sound of his own overwritten dialogue in David’s reedy voice—and have been working backwards.

“I need Matt,” Alec says.

David breaks his mask with a grimace. “Okay, yeah,” he says, looking over his shoulder. “Hang on.”

Matt’s appearance is something between a swagger and lurch. He is drunk, and leaning in the trailer doorway as if expecting to be congratulated on it. Matt’s habit is a new one, a surprise he’d picked up sometime in the months between graduation and Alec’s pitch for the shoot. So far the real world has been horribly cliché in its unkindness to Matt, who refused to give up on acting. Alec had torn him away from leading a night school improv workshop.

Before they started filming Alec had only seen Matt drink once: last October, after Alec had started dating Anna and before everything else unraveled. A night of celebration after finishing lizard-man concept sketches. Glass after glass of something gin-based Alec had invented using their coffee pot as a pitcher. Four drinks in, Matt was weepy about something and then initiated a—well—a hookup. Which, frankly, may have been a long time coming.

“You rang?” Matt asks, and his voice is angry despite his grin. He is thick-tongued and looking almost paunchy in the white V-neck wrap he assigned himself in pre-production. He looks Alec over, from his sneakers up, as if committing him to memory—and then deciding somewhere around his shoulders that it isn’t worth the effort.

“Hey, man,” Alec says, speaking softly and casting his eyes to the side as if they are being watched. “Are you okay to shoot right now? I mean, are you okay to shoot right now?”

“Solomon, whatever happens; whatever scatters to the wind tomorrow,” Matt recites, Shakespearean diction mocking his own writing. “I want you to know…” He threads his fingers through his hair, which he dyed peroxide-blond “for the role” without telling anyone, and teases it into a leading-man forelock. He has caked himself in foundation and bronzer, the makeup already texturing with windblown grit. His eyes are rheumy and bloodshot, either from his coffin-varnish liquor or from sand in his contacts. The contacts are new, too—a striking blue color Alec has never seen in a human eye.

Matt jostles himself down from the trailer. In passing, he rests a long-fingered hand on Alec’s waist to steady himself. Alec jumps—not fear but more than surprise, a catching and tearing like a shirt on a nail. Matt’s guffaw unravels into a wet cough.

“Are you okay?” Alex steps forward, palms extended.

Matt presses three fingertips in a Boy Scout salute against Alec’s chest, holding him back. Alec stares down his nose. Matt’s nails are trimmed short and even. “Listen dude,” he says, voice and eyebrows earnest. His grin spreads slowly. “I’m gonna go make out with your wife.”

Matt rolls his shoulders and moos a set of vocal warmups as they walk, loosening his jaw and flexing limp wrists. Alec concentrates on the thumping rhythm of his ratty sneakers and decides that no matter what happens to the invading force from Z-4000, this is the last day he will make this man spend in the desert.

A few minutes trudging through the soft sand and Alec has both his leads “on set”: out of sight of the trailers. One of Clark’s classmates rolls a boom pole between nervous fingers. Atop its tripod, the nicer of their two cameras is taped into a voluminous garbage bag to keep out the sand. Anna huffs a greeting to Matt, who is humming against the rumble of the dunes.

Alec untapes the garbage bag’s opening and wriggles inside until he finds the camera’s viewfinder. The bag drapes him like an antique photographer. The air inside is close, almost solid, and superheated. Alec has to remind himself to breathe. He focuses and frames Matt and Anna, sitting shoulder to shoulder in the sand. “Go!” he shouts, a little panicked as he disentangles himself from the bag. He clears his throat. “Action!”

It’s a wonder to see Matt flip his switch. He shrugs out of himself—even the booze, it seems, somehow—and settles into Rex Hampton, straight-shouldered, sharp-eyed. He puts on his Douglas Fairbanks eyebrows, inner corners raised like everything is just a tiny bit funny but he’s too jaded to laugh. Anna hates those eyebrows.

“Rex,” she says. A spasm of something crosses her face as Matt’s eyebrows shoot even higher in response. Anna brushes her hair behind her ear. “Do you think…do you think there’s any chance for us?” She looks down and digs her hand into the sand. “The defense, I mean.” Her hair falls back in a curtain across her face. Alec has always wondered how she controls that.

“You kidding?” Matt says, leaning back to study her. “You’re forgetting we have home-planet advantage.” He’s going for sort of a young Harrison Ford vibe now, a cocky curl to his lip. Matt’s acting has always been a collage of leading man impressions.

Anna’s face crumples into a sob, and Matt swoops his arm around her shoulder. “Hey, hey now,” he says. The eyebrows are back. “Solomon,” he says. She looks up at him, scrubbing under her eye. “Look, Solomon. Whatever happens…” He rests a hand on her knee. “Whatever scatters to the wind tomorrow...” he traces the back of his knuckle down her cheek. “I just—”  

Anna’s face, now inches from Matt’s, is twisted in a grimace that makes her look like Robert De Niro about to snap.  “Cut,” Alec mutters, then gives it breath: “Cut!”

Matt peels away and leans back, resting his weight on his hands. His sloppy smile is back. “Yeah?”

Anna flings a handful of sand in frustration. “Seriously?” she says. “What?”

“Um,” Alec swallows. “Some of your expressions aren’t…reading at a distance. Could you,” he gestures, “project a little more? Like, lust?”

“Can’t you get that in close-ups?” Anna asks.

“Well,” Alec says. “I mean, yeah, but your faces are still—”

“Fine!” Anna says. “Yes! Definitely!” She turns back to Matt.

“If you could just—”

“Alec!” Anna snaps. “Can we just get this, okay?”

“Whoa,” Matt says. “What’s your problem today?”

“Nothing,” Anna says. “I’m just dehydrated, because,” she sweeps her arms wide, indicating the Valley. “And it’s just a little overkill on the ‘filmmaking’ here.” Her air quotes are subtle but undeniable. “Here we go,” she sniffs. “From the top.”

“Excuse me?” Matt is spirited but useless, his voice childish as it rises. “You’re damn right this is filmmaking.”

“Dude, it’s okay,” Alec rushes to interrupt, but he feels a twitch of gratitude at being defended.

Anna only has time to scoff before Clark appears at a plodding jog. “Alec,” he wheezes, blinking sweat from his eyes. “Are you all—” his eyes flick to Matt and Anna—“how much more do you have to shoot?”

“A lot,” Alec says, scrubbing at his forehead. “A lot, man.”

Anna rises and stalks towards them, her face dark. Matt flops backwards onto the dune as if deflating. The thought of sand peppering Matt’s scalp makes Alec wince.

“So, listen,” Clark is saying. “We’ve shot the stock for the running scenes. The lizard half, I mean.”

Alec flicks at his watch. “Really?” he says. “Jesus, Clark.” His throat tightens. “You’re really good at this.”

“Nah,” Clark says, tamping a bashful smile. “It’s not that good.”

Anna laughs once, arms akimbo at Alec’s side. Up close, maybe she can sense the fear swimming in his blood; she bumps her shoulder against him. “Sorry,” she mutters. “I just—” she jerks her head at Matt’s motionless sand angel. “He’s worse than usual. And I know it’s not easy for either of us when you have to watch me, you know, do scenes like this.”

“Yeah,” Alec says. “No, it’s okay.” He squints. “Do you have sunscreen on?” he calls to Matt. Matt snakes an arm into the air and waves dismissively.

“Um, so,” Clark says. “Since we’re ready for the human battle shots, and these two are in costume, I was thinking we could do those now and then send the extras home?”

“Yes,” Alec says, almost stepping on the end of Clark’s sentence. “Let’s get them wrapped. We’ll finish this later.”

“Seriously?” Anna asks, anger creeping back into her voice. “What is this schedule?” Alex wishes, genuinely, that he’d had the presence of mind to ask Anna to schedule the shoot. Back when she would have said yes. She might have known how to make it make sense.

“Matt!” he shouts, his vision tunneling for a moment to the body on the sand. “Scene change!” He begins to shoulder the camera, steadying himself against it. “Give me a hand with this?”

 Alec is actually laughing, hands clamped onto the mesh of his hat as though to steady his head on his shoulders. Somewhere in front of him, Clark is shuffling his broom through the sand like a coked-up janitor, resetting for the human half of the charge sequence. But Alec’s world is in the camera’s playback monitor, in some of the worst footage he’s ever seen. Extras in rubber masks looking like extras in rubber masks careen in a ragged pack toward the camera, stumbling in sand that still shows odd footprints from the previous take. The dust cloud meant to suggest an obscured massive crowd behind these frontrunners utterly fails to do so. One overweight lizard-man trips on nothing and takes a knee briefly, wheezing.

This is bad. It is too bad to even be funny. And it is costing him… the math comes too easily. Next to him, he thinks he can hear Anna ticking like a heating burner. She is going to boil over, he knows it; it is overdue. He deserves it. His temples pulse with panic and heat. He splays a hand on his chest. He feels like a car with sugar in its gas tank.

Matt is struggling too, the booze catching up with him. He is out of focus and listing to the left as Clark passes the broom to a sullen extra and preps him for the scene: smoothing bronzer onto Matt’s cheek with the side of his thumb; running lines. Alec hears him feed Matt his first cue: “this planet has teetered too long on the brink of oblivion.”

“We’ll see who’s teetering,” Matt says, slurring his blinks.

Who wrote this?

It occurs to Alec, the thought cracking open cold and unbidden, that Clark is good at this; he is doing the best he can with the wreck Alec is feeding him. And when it implodes—any minute now—the blame will not be shared.

“Alec?” Anna says. Her voice is careful, as though she is about to ask him to put down a gun. He waits as long as he can stand it before turning to face her. “This isn’t okay,” she says softly, stepping close. “It’s a million degrees out here. Someone is going to get hurt.”

“Yeah,” Alec grunts to fill her pause, and immediately regrets it.

“Yeah,” she repeats, speaking louder, almost smiling. “I mean, we can come back later in the year and finish.” Her glance shifts sideways. Alec knows that if she gets him out of this desert they will never come back; they will never finish the movie. It’s a way out.

“What did she say?” Matt calls raggedly, tousling his hair faster than Clark can smooth it. “What is she saying?”

Alec looks at his wife, uneasy. She rolls her eyes. “That it might be time to—”

“Fuck that!” Matt says, shaking his head as though to buck Clark off. Clark makes nervous eye contact with Alec and backs away. “This is awesome,” Matt says. “It’s an awesome movie.”

“Oh,” the syllable escapes Alec, and his eyes burn. “It’s not, though, man.”

“Yes, it is!” Matt slaps his thigh. “You have got a vision for this! I mean, you have got a vision for this! And if she doesn’t know—doesn’t remember—” Matt trails into a frustrated, unfocused sigh. “This is us,” he says.

“Ha!” Anna barks. “This is you, maybe. Look at you; you’ve dyed yourself impossible. Who do you think is that Aryan?”

“Peter O’Toole,” Matt spits. Alec winces.

“Well, if that’s what you were shooting for, congratulations, you look like a knockoff Ken doll,” Anna says. “You’re a human joke.” She presses her hands to her temples, shakes her head. “I can’t deal with this,” she says. “I can’t deal with this for one more second.”

Alec feels a sickening swoop of vertigo and wonders if he is going to faint, if that’s what’s going to happen now—fade to black, then INT. HOSPITAL ROOM – DAY, Matt sits at Alec’s bedside, MATT: It’s okay; it was a dream.

Alec’s eyes are closed when it happens—a yelp of Whoa! from Clark and suddenly Matt is slumped over him, splattering the desert and one of Clark’s linen sleeves with an acrid slurry of gin and bile.

“Oh, my god,” Alec says. “Somebody, get—get some water!”

Extras stare like schoolyard bystanders; most pull at their masks, pug-nosed lizard faces elongating grotesquely and coming free with soft pops and rimes of talcum powder.

“Is he okay?” Someone hands Alec a sweating bottle; melted cooler ice a shock running down his forearm. “Yeah,” Alec breathes to himself. He has Matt cradled in his arms like a child; like the heroine in a bodice-ripper; like a failed actor with a beer gut and a blistering despair that, if Alec’s honest, he can match.

Alec shrugs himself under Matt’s arm. “Lunch!” he says, struggling to stand. “Everybody have lunch! Get hydrated! The light will be better in a few hours. I—” he staggers and falls back to his knees. Matt groans and spits delicately, just north of Alec’s shoes.

When Alec looks up for help he sees Anna: flint-eyed, boiling. Silent. She positions herself on Matt’s other side and heaves up. “Solomon!” Matt says wetly. Together, Alec and Anna begin to half-lead, half-drag him back toward the trailers.

Alec cranes to look behind them at the set. Clark is back to erasing their presence, making wide, shuffling passes with the broom. He pauses at the evaporating patch of Matt’s vomit, considering the challenge. Then he drops his broom and starts kicking at the wet sand, tilling it new. With nothing but dunes for scale he could be an angry toddler, or else Z-4000’s most colossal lizard-man laying waste to a desert city.

“Hey, Solomon,” Matt mumbles, and snakes his fingers around Alec’s shoulder. He squeezes once. His words are jounced and interrupted by his staggering steps.  “Whatever scatters—what—whatever—”

IV.

A billion neurons are transmitted in a three-pound brain. For Renee, anesthesia reduced those chemical signals from the brainstem and thalamus to the cerebrum, freezing her consciousness. The world was a distant whoosh, a deep-sea darkness with electric sparkles drifting by, sometimes singular and sometimes in schools. Bubbles of memory burst at random and an image of her brother’s homemade circuit board outfitted with Christmas lightbulbs flashed repeatedly. Renee felt like a buoy most of the time but sometimes she felt like a sack of potatoes being transported. There was a silence broken up by a timer, a ticking, a poking, a stampede of invasions, worried handling, the smell of smoke and metal, and then back to the timer, the ticking, the soft sounds of a whispered language, and ultimately a plotless sleep of infinite time. This was not the place she imagined she could go.

 V.

Renee awoke. Above her stood familiar faces haloed by fluorescents. A relief clouded out the worry in their expressions. Renee wanted to tell them she was thirsty but then realization tumbled through her like dominos: she wanted water, she was in the hospital, there was something down her throat, her mother wasn’t wearing any makeup, her older brother was sitting to her left in a chair and looked like he was cowering from a bully. Emmit was six four and three hundred pounds but seemed so small. A pain shot through her left arm. “Don’t try to talk, honey. We’ll get the nurses,” her mother said. Her father was there too, and his glasses fogged from tears or sweat, and he diligently and methodically wiped the lenses. Now strangers were surrounding her again, extracting tubes from holes in her body like plumbers. The doctor explained the car accident and that she had been unconscious for three days. An infection in her left arm had led to its amputation. “But it hurts,” Renee said. She looked to her left. Her arm was missing but she felt her left hand pound a wall and the pain vibrated to her shoulder. Her neuromatrix had been shaken like a bag of Scrabble tiles and settled into a new arrangement. Her memories of the accident were gone. The memory of her arm was a punishing haunting.  

 VI.

The doctors predicted a full recovery, which Renee’s parents insisted she embark upon with them. She was back in her childhood bedroom, which had been repainted from a moody purple to a cheery green. The carpet had been torn up and the wood floors glistened from being newly mopped. Lysol filled the air and a white embroidered bed cover felt stiff on top of her like packing paper. Renee liked what her mom did with the place even though it made Renee feel like she was staying in a Vermont bed and breakfast. Emmit hovered in the doorway, wearing his flannel shirt and sweat shorts. As Renee processed this vision, the sensory information fell off track and was rerouted to long-term memory storage. Renee felt it had all happened before, being laid up in bed and her head at that particular angle with the sunlight low and honey and the mourning dove sulking below the window and the green walls and her brother in the doorway with a look of concern for her that she had never seen. It’s a trick of the brain to experience the sensation of an impossibility. Emmit could show interest, mostly about science and circuits, about experiments and batteries, about energy and electricity, but he hadn’t ever shown concern. “Hey, Emmit, could you get me some water?” Her mother came to the doorway and said, “Emmit, Renee needs her rest, come with me.” And she led Emmit away, which he resisted, but her mother demanded, which turned into a tantrum on Emmit’s part as her mother continued to drag him farther. Renee called out but no one responded. She called out again. She went to the kitchen and poured water from the tap and heard her parents in the basement coaxing Emmit into a calm with love and will. Renee walked back to her bedroom as her family continued their negotiations below. This feeling she knew. This feeling she could place.

 VII.

A subtle euphoria hugged Renee at 9:00 a.m. She had doubled her pain medication under the logic of deserving it. Her mother came in with instructions on what to do with Emmit, to make sure he ate, to make sure when she made the peanut butter and jelly sandwich to give it to him jelly side up. Her mother and father were going to run errands, maybe stop by the Thompsons’ for a coffee. It would be good practice for taking care of herself, her mother said, taking care of someone else. Also it had been so great to have her home, despite the arm situation and the drunk driving that got her there and the overall failure at her life path. But she would find a new path, her mother was sure. Renee decided to make the sandwich now while the morphine embrace was strong. She took the jar of peanut butter to Emmit in the basement for him to open. She brought it back up and took the jelly jar out of the cabinet and brought that down for Emmit to open. She brought it back up. She made the sandwich, spent time spreading the peanut butter, then the jelly. She swirled it on the bread gently like she was washing a newborn’s hair. The morphine impersonated endorphins, reducing the excitability of neurons. She smiled as she made the sandwich as if she was remembering something sweet a lover did. In truth she wasn’t thinking about anything. She brought the sandwich down to Emmit who stared at where the arm should have been. He said thanks, didn’t check to see that the sandwich was presented properly. Renee looked around the basement. It had been years since she’d been down there, not since the time she knocked over a science project and Emmit body-slammed himself against the wall and her mother looked both exasperated and satisfied. Her father had lost his temper too then, a rarity. He yelled at Renee that weren’t things hard enough without her making it worse. And now she was back, back upstairs in the kitchen warming up some tomato sauce in a pot and watching it bubble and feeling a little dizzy. She sat down on the couch and took a little nap. She woke up in one of those heart-beating heavy-breathing startles and her brother shook her arm saying, “You burned the pot.” She said shit. She ran the pot under water and her brother held it as she scrubbed the bottom but it was too far gone. When she told her parents they said, “Not again,” or maybe they said “Not you, too.” She couldn’t remember.

 VIII.

Renee’s mother washed Emmit’s hair in the kitchen sink. Her father criticized her mother’s method, telling her to be more gentle. Renee had learned to wash herself with one arm by the third day home. Emmit looked at her as her mother wrapped a towel turban around his head. He looked at her like a puppy in a neglected pet store window. Renee’s chest ballooned with empathy and she nearly cried, until Emmit disappeared from her vision, replaced by swirls of clear nothing. Renee went to lie down in the dark to succumb to the migraine, to the swelling of brain tissues and blood vessels. Later her mother came in and pressed a cold washcloth to her head and said, “Poor baby. Poor baby.” Renee swatted her away, said she’d hold the washcloth herself.

 IX.

 “You look like shit.”

“Thanks, Laurel.”

“I have something for you. Open it.”

“How about you open it.”

“Oh yeah, right. Sorry. I have to get used to it.”

“Me too.”

“Tada!”

“A mirror. Thanks.”

“You’re a terrible actress. I heard you were having phantom pains and I thought this might help.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Let’s go to the table. How it works is we’re going to place the mirror to reflect your right arm so it looks like your left arm to your brain.”

“Seems cruel.”

“You’re doing your brain a favor. It needs to see that your arm is fine and moving, then it will stop alerting you that your arm is in pain.”

“So I will be lying to my own brain.”

“Yes! Exactly. Sometimes you have to lie to protect yourself.”

“I think that’s the family philosophy.”

“Focus on your right arm reflection in the mirror. Now move your right arm side to side so it looks like your left arm is moving. Keep going for a few minutes.”

“I feel silly.”

“Good. Silly is good.”

“Holy shit.”

“Something happening?”

“Yeah, I can’t explain it. It feels like my brain is a GPS system and rerouting. Did you just cure me?”

“Just use the mirror when you’re hurting.”

“You’re a witch.”

“I wanted to help.”

“My brain. There’s so much air in it now. So much more room to ponder the bad luck of having something so minuscule as a bacteria ruin my entire life. Like how a paint chip floating in outer-space can collide with the windshield on a space ship and just shatter it, killing everyone on board and setting back space exploration by decades.”

“Glad to see you’re back to your old self so quick. Now you can plan your escape.”

“We’re looking at prosthetics. I think I want a monkey arm. Become some sort of animal hybrid and be the star of my own myth. Fool everyone into worshiping me as ruler of both the city and the jungle.”

“What would be the moral of the myth?”

“Don’t drive drunk.”

X.

“Come downstairs.”

“Emmit, are you going to miss me?”

“I can help you. Come downstairs.”

“The mirror helped me. How’s that for irony. Not a lot of women can say that. Usually mirrors are our worst enemy, reflecting every detail that doesn’t live up to society’s standards and making us believe we are incapable of being loved.”

“Come downstairs.”

“Okay, but I can’t promise I won’t light anything on fire or break anything. I’m treating my arm, but I haven’t cured myself. I’m still as ignorant and clueless as ever.”

“I made electrodes. It was easy.”

“You don’t want to put those on my head, do you?”

“I’m putting them on the right side of your head. I’m going to jolt your brain into forgetting about your arm.”

“Can I reset other parts of my brain while we’re at it? Maybe you can have me forget how good it feels to hug someone completely. Or that time I saw Mom and Dad naked in a hot tub once.”

“That’s not what I’ve been studying.”

“Okay. Just don’t kill me. Or lobotomize me. Okay, maybe you can lobotomize me.”

“I don’t have enough power for that. Hold still.”

“Have you ever thought about wearing pants? Or a skirt?”

“Men don’t wear skirts.”

“Don’t be so close-minded, Emmit. Anyone can wear skirts.”

“Feel anything?”

Renee closed her eyes. She felt her skull vibrate. She felt the loss of her arm, of a piece of her self, of the years wasted ignoring a hurt. And then…

*

“Not a ratking,” he said to me after dinner. “A ratking is a group of rats whose tails get intertwined and matted together with blood. They feed off each other and can attack other creatures in one mass. They’re usually associated with Germany, for unknown reasons.”

“Gross,” I said, impressed, scrubbing his dishes clean one by one, scraping dried tomato sauce from between fork prongs with the back of a sponge. “How do you know so much?”  

“I’ve picked up some things.”

“Would you classify this as an obsession?”

He shook his head.

“What, then?” “I just don’t run away from them.”

“Could you? Would they chase you if you did?”

“I’ve never tried.”

I nodded, my arms soapy up to the elbows. “Dry,” I said.

He plucked the dish towel from its hook, pulling a plate from the rack with sure hands. I scooped bloated strands of spaghetti from the drain and flicked them off my fingers into the trash can. The water ebbed down, leaving milky pink streaks down the side of the sink.

He stowed the bowls in the cabinet over my head, standing on tiptoes, grinning down at me. He scooped me up with one arm around the waist, grabbed my hand and squeezed my puckered, slimy fingers tight. He pulled me away from the sink and its gargling drain, waltzed me across the room to the bony sofa and laid me gently down before climbing over me, his long hair brushing my neck. He held himself over me, ducked to press his nose against my forehead, then climbed off. My whole body buzzed.

“Really?”

He smiled, easy, languorous. “There’s time,” he said. He sauntered into his room and closed the door.

Because of her, I double-checked the dishes after they had dried—examining for the fissures and chips that had accumulated with our every meal. His were pristine, devoid of cracks.

If anything in particular was inexplicably drawn to her, it was probably sunshine, or flowers. Or cleansing rain, mystical mist that cast a shimmering gleam over everything it touched. She existed effortlessly in these things, the iridescences of the world, as if they had been fashioned just for her--and they obliged, wrapping her in light. She immersed herself in the parts of our world that have always been easy to love, and they loved her back.

I tiptoed into the rat king’s room, where he slept on his side, his hair sleek and flat as a shadow against the pillow. I knelt by the bed and watched him sleep. His nose was long and knobbed at the end, his lips wide. I’d noticed that when he really grinned, the top pulled up far above his gums, his mouth like a wound across his face, but now they fell together, barely parted. He slept with one hand under his head, the other holding the comforter up at his throat. I slipped my hand into the space there, between the sheet and his skin. I was cold and shaky but he didn’t stir.

I pulled my hand away and plodded back to the sofa. It was a comfortable sofa with the perfect amount of stuffing; perhaps even softer than the bed would have been. Still, I lay awake until dawn began to stain the morning.

*

I met her for coffee. She brought the things I’d missed in my packing rampage: a shirt, three unmatched socks, a few particular shells I’d found and given her, two books, and a hairdryer that I’ve never used. She’d placed them with economy in a pristine Whole Foods bag.

“Can we talk about this?” she asked.

I peered in the bag, rummaging. “What about the guitar?” I said, looking up.

“I bought the guitar.”

“I paid half. It was my idea.”

“I never liked how bossy you were. ‘You should learn to play guitar.’ As if it would have changed anything.”  

“I want it.”

“I don’t have it.”

“Where is it?”

She blanched; stumbled. “It’s broken. I broke it.”

“How did it break?”

“It fell.”

“What, off a cliff?”

She looked down at her hands, clasped and gripping. “Out the window.”

I stared. “I didn’t peg you for that type.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t peg people for types so quickly.”

I nodded. “You’re not wrong.”

“Oh, my god,” she said, “There’s no getting through to you, is there?”

Before I could answer, she shook her head. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot,” she said, pulling a napkin out of the dispenser with purpose, as if she was about to draw a diagram of my soul on it, to show me something awful in it that I might want to change.

“And the truth is,” she said, “Humans will love what they’re given. No matter how ugly, how disgusting or broken. And then, when we have worn our ugly thing out with love, ground it down so thin and so transparent that we can see our own ugly selves shining through, then and only then will we find that our life has become unbearable. Then and only then will we move on. And then, because we still have to live with ourselves, we blame it on them. That’s what you’re doing right now, Lore.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Monologue time.”

“So then, we find some equally vile--but newer—thing,” she finger-quoted “to love. A thing that, for now, reminds us nothing of ourselves. Until it does, and then we leave again. So we keep on escaping.”

“Hear, hear.” I raised my coffee mug in the air.

She had been folding the napkin in flat, nail-edged creases and then unfolding it, spreading it flat against the table. Now, she wadded it up in a ball. The store smelled like burnt coffee and syrup, like old buttery pastry and faintly underneath everything, disinfectant; puro-caf that wormed into my cuts while I cleaned the espresso machine, rubbed my blisters raw.

Since last night on the rat king’s couch, I didn’t have to look to know that they were here too, visible or not. They were tucked in the walls, scurrying in quick wisps of curious gray across the door, always gnawing their way out and in.

“So you’re playing the bitter game,” I said. “Cool. Jaded--very original.”

“Is there someone else?” she asked. “Is that why? Were you sneaking around with some other girl?”

“No,” I said. The way I said it snagged her, though. She stared.

“There wasn’t anyone else. I didn’t leave you for anybody else.”

“But you have someone else now. Twenty-four fucking hours later.”

I shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Who?”

“No one.”

“Do I know her?”

I froze. A giggle burst up, carbonated, exploded at my surface.

“Oh, no. No,” she said, shaking her head, pushing her chair away from the table with both hands. “You’re joking. Lore.”

“I never said—“

“Bullshit you never said. What did you never say? How you had never felt this way before?” She used a simpering voice that didn’t sound like me at all. “’This is what kissing is supposed to be, this is what love is supposed to be, what have I been missing out on all this time’--Did you never say any of that? Because I have some really clear memories, actually, of you saying exactly those things.”

For just a second, I want to hug her and hold her together, but I think she’d pluck my esophagus out of my throat  without regret, so I stay where I am. Anyway, I don’t want to sink into her anymore. I don’t want to take her hand and find it bruised, bones loose and floating in a bag of skin, to take her heart and squeeze it so tightly that it oozes out both sides of my clenched fist.

“I was breaking you.”

“No. You don’t,” she says, pointing ludicrously, stabbing at the air in front of my face, “You don’t get to decide what you were doing to me.”

She scrapes her chair out, turns and flounces toward the door. She whirls back for the punch, the closing jab.

“I just hope,” she says, “That you haven’t already decided what you are to him already.” She smiles and there is no joy in it. “Protector, refuge, curiosity, whatever it may be. Whatever you’ve decided he needs, you’re not it,” she says. “I just want to let you know, you know, to save you time.”

The wind chime clanks against the closing door.

*

“Are you Willard?” I asked. “Or the Pied Piper?”

“The Piper stole children, not rats,” he said. “And I’m not Willard. I don’t feed them.”

“What about that guy in the Disney movie with the rat enemy?”

“Basil of Baker Street? He was a mouse. The rat was twice his size. It was a different dynamic.”

I licked jam from the edge of the knife, tasting metal. “Have you ever gone to see someone about this? A specialist?”

He turned to me, incredulous, then broke into laughter, his teeth white as snow in the afternoon sun. “Or a princess, maybe?” he asks. “Or the pure-hearted third daughter of a noble merchant? Someone who could kiss me,” he met my eyes, then looked away, “and change everything?”

I shrugged, pressing the flat of the knife against the pad of my thumb, then putting it down. “Princess.”

He nodded. “Princess of filth,” he said, rubbing a smudge of jam from the corner of my mouth, licking his thumb.

“Prince of vermin. We could reign together.”

Today, only a few of them scurried around the room, not many more than you’d see on an average midnight stroll. They ducked under the sofa, peered out of the bathroom garbage can, their little hands clutching the mesh, their tails swishing around after them like capes.

“Who could I go see?” he asked. “What could anybody possibly do?

I yawned hugely, stretching up, letting my loose t-shirt ride up above the tops of my hips. His gaze slid slowly over me, then yanked away.

“How did it begin?”

He sighed, stuck a finger in the collar of his t-shirt, stretched it.

“I was out,” he said, “Watching the sunrise with some new friends, you know, drinking, wandering. It was the night I first moved here; the night I moved out of my father’s house for good. And we were coming home, to my new home. There was this wall of garbage bags.

“As we walked by, hundreds of rats just poured out from them. Everybody else ran, but I stood. They were crawling all over my feet, around my ankles. And I just raised my arms, like this,” he said, raising his arms, palms out, looking at me as if daring me to laugh “and watched them.”

“Did you get bitten?” His arms dropped. “No.”

“What happened?”

“Eventually they ran away and I walked home.”

“That’s it? That’s the story?”

He sighed again, a full-shouldered affair.  

“And they’ve followed you ever since?”

He picked up his mug of iced tea and sipped, his eyes on me. He put it down in exactly the spot he’d lifted it from, matching the edge around the wet ring on the table. “And they’ve followed me,” he said, “Ever since.”

I watched him for a while. The ceiling fan swung lazily around. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay. It’s unbelievable. But anything would have been.”

“Nothing satisfies you,” he said, with a tugging smile. I snaked my arm around his waist, pulled myself onto his lap. His feet were in thick white socks, ribbed around the ankles, and I imagined the little paws pattering over his shoes, threading between his legs.

“I’m insatiable,” I agreed, twisting over, straddling him.

“We’ll see,” he murmured along my neck. His hands were in my hair, catching at the knots, digging in quick sharp tugs at my skull. I knelt, bending low, bringing my face toward his. He stopped me, though.

“Can we wait?”

“For what?”

“Can we just take our time?”

I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “I’m gonna take a quick shower,”

He let me go, and I turned the water on scalding hot. It seared my skin red and raw, but even as the steam billowed against me so that I couldn’t tell the hot mist from the sweat, I thought of nothing but his mouth pushing against mine, flattening my lips against my teeth, crushing me down to bone.

*

I sat on the edge of the stair outside, blowing smoke to the moon while he slept. I tied my hair back and pulled it loose again and tied it back. Trash was piled in mounds six bags high on the edge of the sidewalk. I watched the silver creases in the bags gleam in the moonlight. Puddles flattened and glazed the street, transforming the alley into a palace, magnificent and dark.

The air smelled like fallen rain. Gold light gleamed through windows above me, but did not spill down far enough to touch. Heat leached out of the air, and gooseflesh pricked my arms.

“Waiting?” she asked striding up to me with purpose. Her hair was a sheet across her back, slick and long, and she held all the light the windows gave captured in her walk, her smile.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Poetic, lately.”

“Of course you are.” She laughed, crossed her arms. I blew smoke in her general direction, hoping it would cling and dim her a little.

“You didn’t used to smoke.”

“People change.”

She bit her lip, crossed her arms, brimmed with tears.

“Okay,” I said. “What can I do?” I asked, unhurried. “If I wanted to make it better between us, what could I do?”

She took her time, watching me. I dragged in, blew out slow and long. Without the rat king, the streets were eerily silent, but she didn’t know to notice.

“You could do one thing,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“It wouldn’t be easy.”

I looked at her evenly. She crossed her arms. “You can go back in time. On the day, you remember the day, when you ran into me on the street with your bag of apples—“

“When we met.”

“When we met, yes—you can walk just a little bit faster. You don’t have to sprint, you don’t even have to jog; just pick up your pace; put a little spring in your step. So that when I come around that corner, you have already passed, and I never see you, never knock the bag out of your hand, never notice the way the light falls and is trapped in your eyes, never speak to you at all. That is what you can do. That is really all you can do.”

She was shaking, crying, her mouth slick. I dropped my cigarette and the lit end shattered in sparks.

The window above me scraped open and the rat king leaned out. “Lore?” he asked, and I said nothing, just waved my hand over my head to let him know I was fine. She sobbed, clapping a hand over her heart and he ducked inside. A rat scurried in over the lip of the windowsill, and I stood.

“Wait,” she said. “You can’t just leave now.” There were tears gleaming in streaks down her cheeks. Her face was mottled, “I don’t understand. I don’t understand why any of this happened, or why you suddenly hate me.”

I looked away. “You know,” I said, “Sometimes I think I can see everything. I see things happen before they happen and then they happen anyway. When people change, I already know what they’ll change into. It’s not satisfying, though; it’s horrible.”

“Okay. Thanks for that. Really helpful.” She turned to go.

“No, not okay; you listen. You’re boring,” I said, “because you’re predictable. Everything you do is something I could have guessed already. You’re just a person, like any other person.”

“First off, I never said I wasn’t.” She didn’t look like crying anymore.

“And what; so you’re supposed to be more than that, then? Fuck you, Loretta,” she said. “If you spend your whole life being angry at people for being people, you’re going to be really lonely. For your whole life.”

I let myself in the rat king’s house; let the screen door slam shut.

Later, I watched the rat king sit on his steps, a hunched silhouette in the streetlight’s cold glare. I pressed my forehead against the bathroom window above as he threw crumbs. They swarmed at his feet for a while and then gradually disappeared. Soon, only one was left, with a kink in its tail. It inched closer.

The rat king made a trail with the crumbs, baiting the rat to him. When it crept up on his knee, he picked it up by the base of its crooked, whipping tail. He raised it up and held it at eye level. It squirmed and then stopped. The wind was fast, and a cloud crossed the moon and carried onward, the sudden light throwing the rat king’s face in sharp relief. He looked thin to me then, wan and bony. I wanted to feed him. I couldn’t read his expression.

--Okay, so I called, and it went straight to voicemail. I called back, and it rang and rang before it went to voicemail. When I called back a third time -- just to be sure – it went straight to voicemail again. You are clearly in a place that gets cell reception, and you're either on the phone or screening calls so ... why don't you want to talk to me? I have no idea what I did that was so wrong, so clueless. Is this about the cab thing? Because I explained that. This makes total sense. You know? Things were weird from the cab to the place -- even before the cab. When we talked about going to the place. And yes, maybe it was presumption, on my part. But maybe there were mixed signals on yours. You know? There's "single," there's "in a relationship," there's "it's complicated." Ours should be "it's complicated (see copious footnote)." You know? The wheels within wheels with you, the fences, the boundaries, the linguistic no-go zones -- I need a road map to talk to you over dinner. Do you know that? If you would just be honest about your feelings for one second, maybe you would be able to square your shoulders, throw your head back and confront head-on the simply fact that -- wait; I've got another call, maybe that's you. Call me back.

--Uh, okay, Houston? Problemo. Just got your voicemail. Wow. Weird. Me? At the place? Listen, this chick has been called many things by many people, all of them untrue and all of them perfectly refutable; I've gotten some practice at it. But I need the chance to refute. This one time, in fourth grade, I got a note in my locker that said I smelled like cheese, which was pretty freaking mean, because I did, but the point is if you've got something to say, say it to my face, so get on the phone. Oh - oh - oh - oh: right. I'll bet your phone's on mute; outgoing messages only, no incoming calls please. You're probably hunched over your laptop, writing me another epic email. That's always your answer: write it down! Say it instead. Say it out loud. To your audience. You'd be amazed. And when you get my voicemail, and you hear what I was talking to what's-his-name about, you're going to feel mighty foolish. So. All I'm saying.

--Hey. Must have missed you. Again. Calling me, as it turns out. Paint me embarrassed, huh? That's great -- or not great, but interesting -- that you were talking to good ol' what's-his-name about me. I had no idea. I had no idea what you guys were talking about -- not that it's any of my business. I don't want your conversations with other men at social events to be my business. Unless you want them to be my business. He said in a completely nonthreatening and respectful manner. I was raised by feminists. I couldn't tell from your message if you wanted to revisit the agreement we've made about you and I, or if you're really fine with it, or if you're doing that thing where you say you're fine but you're really not, and you're just saying the opposite -- kind of like what you said you weren't doing with saying you weren't mad. Whew. I think I just gave myself a nosebleed. Anyway. I'm open to re-opening the topic of you and I. Or not. Whichever you want. I should probably start a telegram while I wait for you to call back. Not going to start writing an 'epic' email, though. I know you hate those. I think you called them epic once. Anyway. Call me back.

--You know what I did when I got that note in fourth grade? One by one, I forced every single person to write a sample note so I could compare it to the first one. I tested pens, paper, ink smudges ... I was my own fucking CSI. So don't think I wont track you down. I know where you live, buddy. Would you accuse me of cheating on you if you had to say it to my face? Not that it would be cheating because we're not dating. But you get my point. And where do you get off talking about my "boundaries"? At least I talk about them! At least I talk about anything! For you a thought isn't a thought until it's emailed, blogged, twittered, or texted. If the thing tonight had been a chat room instead of a dining room, you would have stayed on until the break of dawn, but since it's actual people, you have to grunt and roll your eyes, and look for the nearest exit. You write the most amazing letters. You've written things to me too beautiful to say. I just wish you could be as bold, as honest with your own mouth to my face, you SAD, PATHETIC, LITTLE MAN. Call me.

--Shit, I'm running out of battery. I want to make sure we talk before my phone dies. I didn't mean that...

--Okay, I didn't mean that...

--I'm just a coward. If I said how I feel, I'd be terrified.

--I can be pretty ... brash, I know. To be honest, I'm terrified.

--You're probably trying to call, so I'll wait for the phone to ring.

He envied the waitress, who only needed to know Lisa long enough to collect the tip. There was a time when her eccentricities were adorable, her spontaneity sexy, her bohemian clothing refreshing and bold. He liked the way her ragged t-shirts fell off her shoulders, or the way she ripped the labels off beer bottles and flicked the sweating paper at the clueless people that walked by. She had dedicated herself to him at one point, and he did the same to her, but there came a time in which the only thing holding them together was Genghis Kahn. His uncle once told him about relationships: you either grow together or you grow apart. He didn’t believe the cliché until he saw himself living it out, until he saw how he had changed over the two years of their relationship and how, despite her constant dedication to get her art accepted into galleries, she remained the childish nymph he met in college who got up on tables and did headstands, her bra-less chest exposed to anyone who bothered to look. She threw fits every Christmas when her wealthy father sent her not money but cheap jewelry from around the world, which she wore with a sense of irony and subtle gratitude. She lived off of Ramen noodles and hot dogs but in restaurants ordered the respectable vegetarian option. At the liquor store she paid for wine with the change in her purse, eventually relying on a Good Samaritan that liked the momentary thrill of helping damaged pretty girls. Of course, the Good Samaritan had no idea that Lisa had a credit card with an 8,000-dollar limit that her father always paid off for her. Lisa was a walking conundrum, and hard to pin down.

The single constant fundamental truth that clung to Lisa like the earthy smell of her own flesh, was that she lived for being saved. It was Sal who saved her at the party in which they met. She stood on her hands, her legs straight in the air, her small breasts disappearing into nothing but nipples, her blonde hair tickling the beer-splattered tabletop. She fell like a tower, straight and rigid. He saw it happening before anyone else did and jumped in, catching her before she landed flat on her back. He remembered the look on her face when he caught her, that “I knew it would be you” look. The thing that Sal figured out eventually, however, was that it would have been somebody one of these days. He just happened to be the sucker of the moment – a moment that dragged on to two harrowing, electric years.

“What do you mean by everything?”

“Huh? Oh, like the couch. I think you should have it. And the television stand. And the rugs. And the blender. You can have the kitchen stuff. You know I don’t cook.”

“I don’t either.”

“We’re such consumers. We have all this crap that we don’t use. I should have ordered a chardonnay.”

“Those were all gifts. Expensive gifts that you could get money for.” She just shook her head. Sal frowned and wrote his initials near the objects that he would be keeping. Five minutes in and already it wasn’t going well. She cared for none of it, which, he thought, could possibly mean that she was getting ready to drop the real bomb on him: she wanted Genghis.

“Holy shit.”

“What?”

“Look behind you.”

Sal turned to see two EMS workers wheeling in a hospital bed. The waitresses silently moved chairs away from the bed as it rolled through the restaurant like a boat slowly cutting its way through lily pads. It went like a coordinated dance: the EMS team moving in, the wait staff moving away. Lisa glanced around the restaurant for anyone who might be in peril, but Sal could see, by the searching look on her face, that there was no one. People talked normally, trying not to openly stare at the empty bed, trying not to look like they wanted to know every single aspect of what was going on. Sal went back to his eggs.

“No one is sick,” she said, baffled.

“Someone might be.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on.”

“Do you want the TV?”

“No,” Lisa said, her eyes still scanning the room. The EMS team gathered behind Sal, and Lisa looked over his shoulder with great concentration, her lips parted and incredibly dry.

“If you don’t want anything, then just tell me.”

“Oh okay. So they stopped at one of the tables. This woman, she’s just sitting there like nothing is going on, dude. Holy shit. She’s just sitting there like normal. They’re putting a thing around her neck. A clear plastic thing. And oxygen. She’s our age. She’s pretty.”

“Thanks for the play-by-play.”

“No one is looking but me.”

“So maybe you shouldn’t either.”

“They’re lowering the bed for her and lifting her up onto it. There were no sirens, did you hear sirens?”

“No.”

“I can hear everything now that I quit smoking. Everything is clear as a bell. Everything is turned up.”

“What about that old record player we bought together?”

“Isn’t the needle broken?”

“I can get it fixed.”

“They’re taking her out. Jesus Christ, they’re taking her out and no one is looking. The waitresses are moving the chairs back. Wow, she’s still holding her purse. She doesn’t look sick. She’s fine.”

“You don’t know that. Anything could have happened to her.”

“Maybe she just gave up.”

“Maybe someone abandoned her.” It was a stupid thing to say but it registered with Lisa, and she got it. She went into her purse and began rooting through it. She did this sometimes when there was nothing to be said.

“Maybe she’s bored to death. This place is so boring.” Lipsticks rattling against a compact, bumping into a cell phone, plastic on glass on crumpled paper.

“I thought everything was elevated.”

“Louder and more boring than ever. It’s like I live in a very loud library. Even the silence is loud.” Sal laughed. She unscrewed her lip balm and shoved the stick against her thin lips, missing them in some places so her mouth glowed with an animalistic sheen. She released her purse so it swung from the back of her chair, and looked around for her food.

“That was so perfectly coordinated. I hate that. We are so scared of mayhem in this stupid country. So afraid to feel anything.”

“I don’t know; if Genghis could talk he might disagree.”

“I messed up. Fine. What do you want from me? I’m not perfect, Sal.”

“I’m not asking you to be perfect. In fact, I think we’re pretty far past the idea of changing each other at this point, do you agree?” “I had a lot on my mind that day.”

“What could you possibly have on your mind, Lisa?”

“The problem with you is that you think I don’t have problems. You think you’re the only one with any stake in anything.”

“I don’t think that.”

“My art is going up tonight, okay? Tonight. And I don’t have anything to wear and what if no one buys any of it? And the owner is a jerk.”

“Yeah, that justifies leaving a dog tied up in a hundred degree heat for three hours. It’s all about you, all the time. The problem is that it’s all about you.”

Lisa sat back in her chair and watched as the waitress brought over her spinach wrap and set it down before her.  Before she could walk away, Lisa stopped her.

“Excuse me? What happened to that woman?”

“Can’t say.”

“He’s leaving me and taking my dog.”

“Okay, Lisa – “

“Can you call the EMS for me, too? I think I’m going to have a heart attack. I can tell it’s coming. I’ll sit perfectly still, I’ll be very behaved until they get here to take me away.”

The waitress raised her eyebrows. “Besides the emergency squad, can I get you anything else?”

Lisa frowned and the waitress walked off. Sal put his face in his hands.

“I’m going to finish this awful wrap and then I’m leaving first. If you walk out I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“I’m taking Genghis,” he said. “End of story.”

Lisa looked at him for some time, the thin, cheap metal fork clutched in her hand.

He said, “It’s not negotiable. You lost that privilege.”

“Who do you think you are? Telling me what is and isn’t my privilege. I love that dog more than you ever could. I’m the one that took him for walks. I paid for most of his food. I’m the one that picked him out, Sal. I named him.”

“And how, after all that, do you manage to forget you’ve left him outside the grocery store?”

“Let me have him,” she said. Sal poked his cold eggs with his fork and the way they moved made his stomach turn. They looked like dried up jaundiced organs. “You think this is a joke? You think bringing me here and hashing it out in public is going force me to comply? You think I’ll actually be nice about this?”

“Yeah, that’s the idea.”

Lisa turned the fork to her neck. “Let me have him.” Sal laughed at the utter absurdity of it, but she didn’t flinch. She pressed the fork in, the flesh of her thin, pale neck giving under the pressure of the tiny blunt teeth. “You think this is funny? This is how much I love him. This is how much.” She kept pressing. Sal frowned and watched her eyes get bigger and bigger. She was frightening herself. Sal had never seen her scared of herself before, had never seen her bear witness to that which she might be capable. He sat back and watched the show, and didn’t stop her when small parallel lines of blood began to run down her neck. Sal let himself imagine for a moment that she was actually doing this for him, to show him how much he meant to her, how much Genghis had meant and how seriously she saw the situation, but he knew better than that. This was for her.

“I’m not going to beg you. I’m not going to ask you to stop.”

She only stared at him, her blue eyes gone watery.

“I’m taking him,” he said, standing up. “You can sit there and stab yourself all day if it makes you feel better.”

He took out his wallet and threw his money on the table. By now the waitress had noticed the blood and was on the phone with someone – probably 911. She was getting her wish.

“You know, if you had said that you were sorry just once, we might have made this work.”

She just looked up at him, her eyes dark with anger. She looked like a cat, cornered by a large animal: all fight. The fork remained at her neck. He spotted tiny flecks of spinach caked on the teeth and his stomach turned. He went to the door. By now everyone in the restaurant was watching, unabashedly so. Her audience clung to her unlike anyone had and ever would look upon her or her art. She sat stoically, a macabre art installation. He felt a twinge of love for her then, but it faded with the sobering cry of the sirens, come to save the day.

It’s mostly the road, now. Brandon has an apartment back in Raleigh, but hell if I’m staying there alone while they’re off playing shows. Six months into this thing for real, still partners in crime, boozing nights and days, sleeping naked, sometimes alone, sometimes in a room full of people, I don’t do mirrors much anymore. I’ve lost cheekbones. But I’m free. I’m free. These boys don’t expect me to take care of them. I fell into their fold and I’ll be tucked in deep until we reach our caustic end. God knows it’ll be bitter. Anything but would be a shining miracle.

I saw Jay’s legs before the rest of him. “You know, I love that you only ever wear black jeans.”

“Well, I’m not wearing that acid washed shit,” he said, wiping red dust off his knees.

“Like mine?”

“That’s different. You’re a woman.”

“Oh, right.” I pulled my hair up into a high ponytail. “I forgot.”

“You up for it?”

“Yeah, why not? Though if I’d known there’d be hiking on this trip, I’d have brought tennis shoes.”

“We could go up barefoot.”

“We’d probably get better traction,” I said, pointing at the slick bottom of my boots.

“We must be out of our gourds.”

“No arguments there, brother.”

When we threw our boots behind us, I shook off that inward way, that way that gets my back all knotted up and has me reaching for the bottle when there’s still hours of sunlight left. Our feet got air and dirt. As we approached the bottom of the tallest peak, we smiled at each other. He ran until the grade became too steep. Neither of us could get enough momentum in tight pants.

“Maybe we should take our pants off,” he said.

“Wouldn’t that be a picture?”

“Come on, girl. You can do it.”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Looking down, he had a double chin. “But the pants are staying on.” When I was close enough, he reached for me.

“Shame we aren’t pants less. How are the feet?”

“Dirty and cold.”

“Like my ex.”

“You are full of yourself today.”

We continued on. He was first over every outcrop, pushing himself up with small grunts. Pebbles fell into my hair and on my shoulders and it wasn’t long before my mouth tasted like iron and clay.

“You okay?” Jay asked at the base of the summit. “One more push.”

“Not sure I have anything left.”

“One more push, doll, then we’re there. I got you.”

“If you say so.”

“Bravo. You made it.”

With raised eyebrows, Jay crouched down, turned his hand up, and motioned wide. From the flat top, we could see oil rigs in the distance. A pair of buzzards looped in a slow figure eight. I wondered what kind of body lay out there on that red expanse, just out of my eye line, drying out under the sun into those bleached desert bones people put on fireplaces. They disgusted me, sure, but something about them called for touch, to feel those natural cracks in skulls, how similar we are to porcelain on the inside. Once we lose our connective tissue, we can show softer to those that put their hands on us.

Jay was there, but I lost track of him.

Walking the perimeter, I soaked up arid dusk. I had loved a good man and I had left him and before I knew it, my leg slipped out from under me.

“You okay?”

“Still here.”

“Not for lack of trying. Of all places to zone out. Can you stand?”

“Not sure. Something cracked in my ankle.”

“Well, come on, let’s try to get you up.” He put his shoulder under my arm, anchored himself and stuck a finger in my belt loop. “You in or out, girl?”

“Count me out,” I said leaning away.

“I’m not sure what to do here.”

Patting the ground, I said, “Sit with me. We’ll figure it out in a minute.”

All my blood seemed to gather in my foot and multiply. I pulled my leg out from under me with both hands. With our legs draped over the edge of the butte, his swinging like a kid’s off the back of a truck, he asked me what no one else had the nerve to.

“Have you talked to your daughter yet?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not ready.”

“Fair enough, but…”

“I don’t want to talk about it, Jay.”

“It gets better.”

“Does it?”

“Well, you get to the point where you don’t think about them all the time.”

“I don’t think about her as much as you’d think.”

“But she creeps in, doesn’t she? She was on your mind when you fell. Some kind of self-punishment. Like those self-lashing priests.”

“It’s not like that at all.”

“What then?”

“I was thinking about bones. What difference does it make? I’m not going back. Not for a long time.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“No.”

He moved his leg so it touched mine. Pain seared its way from foot to waist.

“Why’d you leave? It can’t just have been Brandon.”

“Jesus.” He leaned his head against mine. “How many ways can I say to leave it alone?”

“You just don’t seem the type. Brandon goes for ones like last night.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s just –you’re substantial. His girls usually aren’t. That’s all.”

“Did you know porcelain’s actually pretty tough?”

“I’ve heard.”

“What do you suppose the white is in the mountains? Looks like the same crystals hippies wear. Maybe we can align our chakras by default.”

“My money’s on gypsum. The stuff of plaster. You can build with it,” Jay said.

“Substantial.”

“Yes.”

“The truth is, I don’t even remember meeting Brandon. Had to be at one of your shows –me in all my substance and leather, latched onto him. If I try hard enough, I can envision you guys on stage, the light behind his hair, his hands on that guitar, but that could be recent shit I’m projecting on what I can’t remember.”

“When was the exact moment you decided?”

“There was this morning,” I said, pressing my shin where it had started to swell.

“Wait,” Jay said. “Let’s try to head down. We won’t have any light left before long. The guys are bound to be awake soon if they aren’t already.”

We repeated the earlier maneuver, shoulders and a barefoot man trying to get leverage enough to lift me. When I was finally up, we both looked out toward the birds. One had landed.

“Wonder what he’s got?”

“Wonder if he’ll share? A part of me wants my body lain out in the open when I die.”

“Not me,” he said, shifting his weight. “I want a funeral pyre. On a boat. A beautiful woman to shoot a flaming arrow at my carcass.”

“Well, shit, Jay. You don’t want much, do you?”

“Let’s get back to the van.”

We half slid down the trail and by the time we got back, he’d scraped his hand. Rory and Brandon had climbed up on top of the van.

“What happened to you two?” Brandon asked.

“Just unprepared hiking. She needs a doctor.”

“But we got that show in Amarillo,” Rory said as he slid down the windshield to tap on the hood. Drummers always had their sticks and without fail, tested damn near every surface. The only drummer I didn’t want to smack was one on stage. 

“That ain’t til 10. Nothing but time, brother.”

“I’ll be okay. I can get some ice when we eat.”

“Right. Let’s get some food,” Brandon said. “I’ll drive. You’re up front with me.”

“I need to stretch this leg. I’ll sit in the back with Steve.”

“Shotgun,” Rory said.

Miles and meals passed. There was always some girl and always would be. I never answered Jay’s question--not even once I’d started sleeping with him. One night he stood next to me for the opening band. Quiet for a few songs, he finally said, his voice fighting the drum solo, “I should’ve let you tell me when I had the chance.”

In this changed winter the temperatures are a little cooler but the sun is still barbaric and there is no snow, much less clouds. My mother doesn’t sleep, and her shimmering keeps me awake.

When I was out there in the sand, I prayed that your father would come back to save me, my mother scintillates. That he had found some new source that wouldn’t ever dry up.

“If it was just you and him, without me, you’d still be here,” I say.

I am still here.

Into the tub I offer a few of my own tears that make her body quiver as if signaling life beneath the refraction, a trace I can both see and not see, in a language I can’t quite interpret.

“The well is drying up, Mom. I don’t know what to do any more.”

We’ll figure out a way, she eddies. This is the way things have to be, now.

“I miss him. Do you miss him?” I want to tell her I miss her, too, but I can’t.

My mother shimmers: Remember when we promised each other we would never give in and flee to the ocean like everyone else in the world? Promises help us remember the way things used to be. They help us remember what’s still right. We said we would never want to be there when someone could hold the Pacific in the palm of their hand.

Before my father left for the Pacific, he held a chunk of fractured and burnt-out tree in his hand and said, “A tree’s only about thirty percent water. It can only take so much. That’s why they’ve all died, even though their roots go places we can’t see. But a body is a half to two-thirds water. That has to mean something, you know?” He pointed to his chest and then my own. I still don’t know what he was trying to say, but I think he was afraid—as if I wasn’t afraid, and still am. He tried to smile. He opened his mouth and then closed it and kissed me on the head and was gone in the blink of a week.

Spring is emerging—days and months pass without feature, but I sense the lengthening days.

I wander the desertscape with my ears trained on the voices of ghosts—voices mean water, untapped wells, reservoirs hidden in the shade. I wander an entire day until my legs spasm, sand enveloping the stillness of my collapsed body. Atrophy already.

This is how my mother died. While I slept, she searched the night for new sources of water, forgoing drink herself so that she might keep me from following the trees. I woke from a nightmare and called out her name and followed her footsteps in the sand until I found her by moonlight. I put my canteen to her lips and she said, “No, hurry, take me home. Just take me home. We promised we wouldn’t run.” Her words formed dust in the air.

My vision opens to a silhouetted figure kneeling, and I sense water falling into all of me, and I want to ask if I have died, if my ghost has found a terminus in water, but I can’t find the means to ask the question in any language, spoken or shimmered.

Cramps in my legs jolt me awake. Sunrise looks like a comet that has orbited itself for a million years, nucleus of agony. I message my legs and work my way home.

A raven stands on the rim of the bathtub and drinks of my mother’s terminus. It turns its head to parse me with a sickly black eye and I wait in the threshold for it take its fill and fly. I mark its path: north. My mother always did say that animals seemed to know—I just never thought I’d see another animal still living.

You’re home. If you hadn’t come back just now that bird would have drank all the rest of me, she gleams, and I can almost make out a bend in the water, arc of reflected light, that one might think of as a smile.

I whisper an apology as I pour the contents of the girl’s canteen into the bathtub, as I watch my mother dissipate into the newfound ripples and then reform.

“What should I do next?” I ask. “The well isn’t going to last.”

Stay strong, babygirl. We’ve found a way before.

I reach in and collect two palms of water—I can feel my mother’s weight there—and I imagine the future weight of the Pacific and those who migrated toward the oceans and if they weren’t ghosts all along, marching. And whether I might have the strength necessary to lift an entire ocean, to bring that last palmful of our source and our terminus to my lips and drink.

I step out into the sun and my heart palpates—summer has arrived, the longer days still. I haven’t seen a cloud in months. I stumble over to the backyard fence and see the girl standing on the dune that use to be a neighbor’s house. She does not so much wave as raise her arm to shoulder-height and let it fall.

She asks, “Are you alone?”

“Alone enough,” I say. “You’re the one, aren’t you?”

She says nothing as she approaches on a hobble I recognize as a cramp in the leg. She is gaunt and her hands shake. I let her fall against me and lead her inside, upstairs. At the bathtub she pauses for only a moment before diving her head into that terminus and drinking. I watch her until I’m afraid I’ve watched the last drowning in the world.

I pull her out and she says a prayer or an apology to my mother in a whisper so quiet I can’t hear. And then the looks up to me with eyes rich as rainforests and says, “My group is leaving tomorrow. We found a cave where water still leaks out of the rocks. You can hold your mouth to stone and drink forever. We’re leaving at full sunrise whether you’re there or not.” She points north.

She starts to leave and even though I don’t, I want to stop her, to know her, to trust her word, to ask if she worries about the weight of water, to ask if she’s ever drank a ghost, to ask if she’ll someday seek out the Pacific’s last palmful, to ask why she saved my life, to ask if she has ever carried the desiccated barely-living structure of someone she once loved, to ask if she weighed the options of giving water or giving a terminus for haunting, to ask if she heard that loved one’s bones creak like the gears of a bicycle left out in the rain.

In the dim-lit night, endless twilight, I follow the girl’s footsteps in the sand. I crawl across a dune and see at its base a house much like my mother’s, but there is light coming from within, the sound of a guitar being strummed. I think about how long it’s been since I’ve heard sounds other than ghosts or wind. The music stops, and the new desert is filled with laughter that sounds strange, it’s been so long, as if laughter can voiced in another language.

By the time I come home the first of the sun’s long parabola makes itself known. The group will leave at full sunrise, when the last of that arc steps over the horizon.

I hear my mother’s eddying: I thought you left me here.

“I was trying to find water,” I say.

The bathtub is mostly empty and I can feel her presence weaker than ever before. I collapse at the tub and try to cry into it, but nothing comes. My lips crack from being parted into a sob and I expect there to be blood, too, but when I touch my lips they only feel like they’re covered in rust-colored soot.

I wonder if your father and I will find each other again, my mother coruscates.

“You think you’ll move on, after—” I trail off flat, afraid to end with a question.

Maybe I’ll live on inside of you.

I can’t tell if that would be a haunting or a blessing but nonetheless I reach my head into the water and drink as did the girl and when I bring my head back up I see my reflection projected across my mother’s phantom. I drag my hands into what little is left—between my two palms, a pool of water, a terminus. It contains the weight of my mother, the consistency of her desiccated life and memory. Not so heavy that I can’t lift it out from the tub and down the stairs and outside.

Remember that you’re stronger than the water that keeps you.

“I’m sorry, Ma.”

My mother shimmers no more, does not complain as I bring her to my lips, as I say my sorry, as I drink, as I swallow.

I wonder now much further the sun can melt, how much deeper this new season. I wonder what percentage of water I am, and if it will be enough, and if it carries meaning, as my father once thought. I wonder if in the absence of a terminus the ghosts find new homes, if my mother and father will reunite somewhere in a cold dark, and if that is the only heaven one can ask for any more.

I wonder if this has happened before in this world, and if it will happen again, and for how many years we drank the shimmers of our ancestors who could not speak to us in their old-world tongues. I wonder if I will drink my mother and father again and again for the rest of my days.

    3

  Something was happening. In the three years he had been with the team, Mr. Crutchfield hadn’t said ten words to Dancer. And Doc never wanted to talk to anyone before a game. 

The Joplin Miners were taking batting practice and Billy Pardue, the Rebels’ veteran catcher, was on the top step of the dugout studying them. The Rebels were either young hotshots on their way up, or old-timers on their way down. Billy was an old-timer, but he had had his day. Three years in the big leagues. He knew his baseball, and he shared everything with Dancer—even  showed him how to throw a tobbacy-spit pitch. When thrown properly, the ball would squirt out of the pitcher’s hand and waggle its way to the plate like a leaf in a windstorm. It was, in Billy’s words, “a fucking unhittable pitch.” But Dancer couldn’t stomach tobacco-chewing, and he figured with his fastball, he didn’t need to cheat. Not too much anyway.

Billy spit his tobacco juice in the direction of Dancer’s feet. “Get your ass out here as soon as you change. We got work to do.”

“Doc wants to see me first.”

Billy grinned. “That ain’t going to take long. Get a move on.”

The locker room was a concrete bunker that even on the hottest days was cool and damp. It smelled of liniment, sweat, mildew, and Doc’s cigars. The only player who had arrived before Dancer was Ron Bilko, who sat on the bench next to the row of banged-up metal lock­ers that lined the front wall. Bilko was in his underwear, eating a hot dog, and studying a crumpled issue of The Sporting News as if it were a foreclosure notice. Next to him on the bench was a cardboard tray with a half-dozen more hot dogs.

“What’s the problem? Someone take away your homerun title?” Dancer asked as he opened the locker next to Bilko.

Bilko smacked the paper down on the bench. “Goddamn Enos Slaughter.” He grabbed another hot dog.

Enos Slaughter was the right fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. The one man standing between Bilko and the major leagues. The last few months a man couldn’t have a conversation with Bilko without Goddamn Enos Slaughter joining them.

“Slaughter’s still playing?” Dancer said, grinning. Dancer and Bilko were the top minor league prospects in the Cardinals organ­iza­tion. At the end of the season, most of the major league clubs brought up their promising young players to give the veterans a rest and check out the prospects. But the Cardinals’ skipper, Eddy Stanky, didn’t want a player if he didn’t have a spot for him. The Cardinals had an all-star outfield led by Stan Musial, Slaughter, and a solid corps of pitchers that never seemed to get injured. There was no place for Dancer or Bilko.

Bilko showed Dancer the stat box for the Cardinals. “Look at that. Slaughter’s batting .294. Thirty-seven goddamn years old. That son of a bitch ain’t ever going to retire.”

Dancer flipped the paper over to the minor league stats. “Siebern’s got twenty-seven homeruns – only three behind you. He could hit that many today.”

 Norm Siebern was a power-hitting lefty for the Joplin Miners. Twice this year, Siebern had smashed Dancer’s fastball out of the park.

Bilko picked up another hot dog. “I ain’t worried. Norm Siebern’s not going to hit three homeruns off Dancer Stonemason, because after the second homerun, I expect you to plant your fastball right between his numbers. Give that son of a bitch a decimal point.”

“That’s not a bad idea.”

Bilko winked. “Have a hot dog, Dancer. Put some meat on those bones.” Bilko pushed the tray toward Dancer.

Dancer shook his head and grabbed the uniform hanging from the door of his locker. “No thanks.” He was always too nervous to eat before he pitched. 

The rest of the team had arrived. Bilko set the hot dog tray on a table in the middle of the locker room floor and yelled, “Any of you yahoos want a dog?”  A minute later the tray was empty.

Dancer tugged on the grey pullover jersey with the two rows of decorative buttons running down the front. It was supposed to look like a Confederate officer’s longcoat.  He sniffed the armpit. “Shit, these still haven’t been washed.”

Bilko grinned. “Season’s almost over. Crutchfield probably fig­ures he can hold out until we’re done. Save a few bucks. Is Dede coming today?”

“Already here. We brought Clayton. He’s never seen me pitch.”

“You’re a lucky man, Dancer. Got a good woman and a boy who looks up to you. Ain’t nothing better than that.”

“Dede says we’re going to have another one.” 

“Holy shit, Dancer!” Bilko jumped up and thumped Dancer on the back. “That’s great. When’s she due?”

“March or April. Probably right in the middle of spring training.” Dancer pulled on his gray Rebel cap. Ever since he’d got that GI-style crewcut last month, his hat didn’t sit right.  “Can’t afford another kid right now. Hard to get by on meal-money and a hundred bucks a week.”

Bilko put his hand on Dancer’s shoulder. “I hear the Cardinals get ten dollars a day just for meals. When I play for the Cards, I’m going to have a T-bone every night.”

Dancer readjusted his cap and checked himself in Bilko’s mirror. The sun had turned his light brown hair almost blond. 

“You making yourself look pretty for old Billy?”

“Doc wants to see me.” 

Bilko smiled.

“What’s going on, Bilko?”

Bilko shook his head, but kept grinning. “Maybe he’s tired of you always bitching about the laundry service.”

    4

  Doc was in his office, feet propped on his desk, reading the New York Times. Before every game he studied that Yankee paper like it was the Bible or The Sporting News. Doc was from someplace back east. He knew his baseball, but he was skipper because he’d married Mr. Seymour Crutchfield’s daughter, Melissa. He wasn’t really a Doc either, but he wore wire-rim glasses, and his gray hair was always Brylcreemed. What with the glasses, the gray hair, the newspaper-reading, and the rich wife, he seemed a whole lot smarter than the rest of the boys, so they all called him Doc.

Doc had been a pretty fair shortstop before the war. He had an invitation to spring training with the Tigers back in ‘42, but enlisted instead. He was part of the 45th Infantry Division that landed in Sicily in July ‘43. Got his right arm shot to hell just outside Salerno. That was it for his baseball career. There wasn’t much demand for left-handed shortstops.

Doc motioned for Dancer to take a seat and then kept reading the paper as though he’d forgotten about him. Dancer tried not to fidget. Billy would be pissed if he didn’t get out there while the Miners were taking batting practice. Finally, Doc folded up the paper and placed it on his desk.

“I don’t know what this world’s coming to, son.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Eisenhower’s a damn fool to settle for a tie in Korea. Truman would have never let that happen.”

“No, sir.”

“And look at this. Russians just exploded an H-bomb.” He poked his finger at the headline.

“Yes, sir.” 

“That’s serious business.” He shook his head. “Do you have children, son?”

“Yes, sir. My boy Clayton just turned four, and we got another one on the way.”

Doc took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You aren’t Catholic, are you?”

“No, sir. My mama was a Baptist. Dad wasn’t much of anything. They both passed, sir.”

Doc gave a sympathy nod. “How you going to feed a family of four on what we’re paying you?”

“Well, I was kind of hoping…” Dancer caught himself. Doc wouldn’t think hoping was any kind of plan.

“You’re planning to make it to the big leagues, right? Get that major league paycheck. That boy Mickey Mantle just signed a new contract – seventeen thousand five hundred dollars. That’s a lot of beans.”

“Goddamn Yankees.”

“I had a call from Mr. Stanky this morning.”  Doc pulled out a cigar and sniffed it up and down. He acted as if the Cardinals manager called him every day. “Haddix has a sore arm. They’re thinking about shutting him down. Cards ain’t going nowhere.” 

Doc bit off the end of the cigar. Dancer crept to the edge of his chair. Doc could spend ten minutes farting around with his goddamn cigars. 

“So?” Dancer asked, his voice breaking.

“So they might need you for the Labor Day doubleheader Monday.”

Dancer jumped up. “Holy shit! The Cardinals!” His spikes al­most slipped out from under him, and he had to grab Doc’s desk to keep from falling.

 “Try not to kill yourself before you get there, son.”

Dancer sat back in his seat. “But I’m still pitching today, right? My boy’s out there. He’s counting on me.”

Doc cocked his head to one side. “I can’t send you up to St. Louis with your arm dragging around your ankles. Mr. Stanky would rip me a new asshole.” He puffed harder on the cigar. “Tell you what. You can go three innings. That’ll keep you fresh enough so you can still pitch in two days if Stanky needs you.”

As Dancer ran back through the locker room, he almost collided with Bilko. “Doc like the way you looked?” Bilko asked, grinning.

“You asshole. You knew?” 

“Eh, I hear things.” He smiled. “Congratulations, Dancer. Make us hillbillies proud.”  He clasped Dancer on the shoulder. “But don’t keep Billy waiting.”

The Joplin Miners were still taking batting practice when Dancer joined Billy in the dugout.

Billy pointed to the umpire out by home plate. “That’s Lester Froehlich. He’s got a low strike zone. Froehlich will give you a pitch down by the ankles, but anything above the waist he’s calling a ball. So keep the goddamn ball low.”

After he finished on Froehlich, Billy ran through the lineup, re­minding Dancer where he wanted him to pitch each batter. Dancer wasn’t paying attention – he was far away, trying on his new uniform with those two red Cardinals perched on the baseball bat. The same uniform Dizzy Dean had worn.

Billy backhanded Dancer’s hat off his head.

“Listen, boy. I know you got the call. You earned it, and you’re going to be aces. But right now we got a game to play. You want to stay up in the Bigs, remember this – respect the goddamn game. Play every game like it’s your last.”

 “I’ll always respect the game, Billy.”

Billy picked up Dancer’s hat and put it back on his head. “I know you will, kid.”

       5

  While they sang the national anthem, Dancer scanned the crowd and found Dede and Clayton in the third row behind first base. He got a warm feeling thinking about Dede’s morning shower. He was half-sorry he’d passed up the opportunity. But tonight they’d have a good time, especially after he gave her the news. The St. Louis Cardinals. Next year he’d make eight grand, maybe more. Next year they could afford all those kids.

As Dancer trotted to the pitcher’s mound, there was an easy buzz to the crowd, as though the fresh-scrubbed families from Maple Springs, the gang from Paddy’s Lounge, the hillbillies from Cabool, and the Klansmen from Mountain View had all set aside their differences and were out to enjoy the last weekend of the summer. The afternoon sky was a great-to-be-alive blue, and the air had a trace of autumn crispness. It was warm enough to work up a sweat, but not so hot Dancer would be worn out after three innings.

Dancer nestled the baseball in his glove as Billy signaled for a fastball. He gripped the ball across the seams, torqued his body so he was almost facing second base, and  whip-cracked his right arm toward the plate. The ball exploded into Billy’s glove for a called strike.

Dancer walked off the mound to catch Billy’s return toss. As he headed back to the mound, he rubbed the ball down and stole a glance over to the stands. Clayton waved at him, and Dancer could see him yelling something to his mother.

He struck out the first two batters on six pitches. The third batter was Norm Siebern. Billy made a target wide off the plate and gave him a thumbs up, meaning he wanted the ball high. The pitch was chin-level, and Siebern swung and missed. The next two pitches were even higher, and he missed those too. Nine pitches – three strikeouts.

In the bottom of the first, with two men on, Bilko hit his thirty-first homerun of the year giving Dancer and the Rebels a three run lead.

 Dancer cruised through the second and third innings without a ball hit out of the infield. He was in a groove – his fastball overpowering, his curveball buckling the batters’ knees. As he jogged toward the dugout at the end of the third inning, he spotted Clayton jumping up and down on his seat waving his cap. Dancer had thrown only forty pitches. A couple more innings wouldn’t tire him out.

Doc greeted him as he returned to the dugout. “Nice work, son. Bullpen can take it from here.”

“Don’t take me out. I haven’t even broke a sweat. I got plenty left.”

Doc sighed. “What do you think, Billy?”

Billy was taking off his shin guards. Dancer sat down next to him. “Can’t stop with a perfect game going. That’s not respecting the game.”

Billy wrinkled his nose. “You are a long fucking way from a perfect game.”

“Still,” Dancer said.

Billy shrugged and glanced over at Doc. “Not my call, Skip. That’s why you get the captain’s pay.” He went back to unhitching his shin guards.

Doc stood up and pointed his finger at Dancer. “As soon as they get a hit, I’m pulling you out.”

Bilko hit another homerun in the third to give the Rebels a five run lead. When Siebern came up again in the fourth inning, Dancer waved off Billy’s sign for a curveball and Siebern smashed it over the right field fence, inches wide of the foul pole. Billy raced to the mound and told Dancer if he had any fondness for his teeth, he best not shake off any more signs. Dancer didn’t think he was joking about the teeth. Billy called for a curveball, and Siebern popped it up for the third out.

 By the fifth inning, his fastball had lost its pop, and there was a hot spot on his index finger that burned whenever he threw the breaking ball. But somehow Dancer kept getting them out. When he took a seat on the bench after the sixth inning, he was all alone. Nobody dared talk to him. Doc just stared at his feet, shaking his head and mumbling. Didn’t even smoke his cigar. Doc couldn’t take him out with a perfect game on the line. And Dancer would still be able to pitch on Monday. He was young and strong. Three days rest was for old men. 

As he walked out to the mound for the seventh inning the crowd was eerily quiet, as if they were afraid that cheering might upset the baseball gods. The first two batters in the seventh worked full counts – Froehlich wasn’t calling anything above the belt a strike – but Dancer got them both to fly out.

Norm Siebern was up again.

Billy Pardue called for a curveball, and Siebern hit it over the right field fence, but again, just to the right of the foul pole. There was a collective gasp of relief from the crowd as they settled back into their seats. Billy called for a changeup, and Siebern hit a bullet over the first basemen’s head. Dancer scuffed the mound in disgust, but Froehlich signaled foul. Billy called time.

“You ain’t fooling him, kid. Throw this the way I taught you, and let’s go sit down.” He handed Dancer the ball, a glob of tobacco spit nestled between the seams. Dancer wiped the sweat off his brow and gripped the ball with his fingers between the seams like Billy had shown him. The ball floated toward home, and Siebern smiled as he stepped into the pitch, but as it reached the plate, it dive-bombed into the turf. Siebern missed it by two feet. 

In the eighth, the Miners batted as though they had somewhere else they wanted to be.  Seven pitches and Dancer was out of the inning. Bilko walked over and sat down next to him on the bench. The first player in the last three innings, other than Billy, to even acknowledge his existence. “No one’s going to think less of you if you stop right now.  Shit man, it’s the Cardinals. I’d give my left nut to get that call.”

“This game is mine. I ain’t quitting now.”

Bilko squeezed Dancer’s neck. “That’s all I wanted to hear.  Take ’em down, buddy.”

Dancer massaged his arm as he walked to the mound for the ninth inning. It was sore, but it was a good sore. Froehlich stood at home plate, hands on hips, staring at him. Dancer offered a nod, sort of humble-like, as he reached the pitcher’s mound. If Froehlich noticed, he didn’t show it.

First batter, Wagner, had struck out twice on curveballs. Billy called for another curve. Dancer’s pitch missed the plate by five feet. The hot spot on his finger had become a blister, and the blister had popped. Billy called time and walked slowly to the mound.

“I can’t throw my curve,” Dancer said, his voice tight.

Billy laughed and thumped Dancer on the back like he’d just told him a dirty joke. “Don’t look at your hand. Smile. Work the corners – in out, high, low. It’s the bottom of the lineup. Just three more outs. This is the game that counts, Dancer.”

Billy walked back to the plate like he was on a Sunday stroll. Laughing and joking with Froehlich and Wagner about Dancer’s wild pitch. He called for a fast ball inside and Wagner smashed it deep to right, but the wind kept it in the park and Bilko caught it at the wall.

Heinz, the Miners slick fielding shortstop, was the eighth batter. Heinz couldn’t hit his weight, and he didn’t weigh much. Billy signaled fastball and Heinz squared around and bunted the ball to the right of Dancer, toward the shortstop. Dancer dove headlong and speared the ball before it could get by him. He pivoted on his knees and flung the ball sidearm to first base. Heinz was out by a step.

Billy had run down the first base line to back up the play. As he trotted back to home, he glared at the Miners. “You’re down five runs – swing the goddamn bats.” 

Dancer rubbed down the baseball and waited as the field announcer introduced the pinch hitter. “Now batting for the pitcher, number thirty-three, former slugger with the Cincinnati Redlegs, Mister Connie Ryan!” 

Billy called time and sprinted to the mound. “I’ve played against Ryan. He’s a dead pull hitter. Likes the low ball, so try to keep it up out of his wheelhouse.”  He pounded the ball into Dancer’s glove.  “This is the game, Dancer.”

Billy gave him a target off the outside corner, and Dancer’s pitch was knee-high, three inches wide of the plate. Ryan took the pitch for a ball. He stepped closer to the plate. Dancer’s next pitch was in the same location, and Ryan drove it out of the park, foul by ten feet. He stood at home plate admiring the flight of the ball. Froehlich threw Dancer a new ball, and Ryan stepped back into the batter’s box. He took a slow, deliberate swing and pointed his bat at Dancer’s head. Ryan didn’t respect him. Dizzy Dean would have never let a batter get away with that.

Dancer nodded at Billy and unleashed a fastball right at Ryan’s chin. He hit the turf like he’d been shot, but as he was going down, the ball hit his bat and bounced harmlessly foul down the first base line.

Billy cackled, “Hey, Connie! I think the kid wants your ugly mug off the plate.”

Ryan dug in, but this time a respectful six inches farther back. Dancer caught the outside corner with a waist-high fast ball, but Froehlich called it a ball.

Two balls, two strikes.

Dancer came back with a change-up, and Ryan started to swing, but at the last moment held up. Froehlich called the pitch high.

Full count.

Dancer stared in at the plate. Ryan wasn’t smiling anymore. The crowd was so loud he couldn’t hear himself breathe. Billy signaled for a fastball, Doc perched on the top of the dugout steps, unlit cigar clenched in his teeth, Dede stood with her hands in front of her face, and Clayton jumped up and down on his seat waving his cotton candy like it was a flag.

Dancer exhaled through his teeth and threw with everything he had left.

As soon as he released the ball, he knew it was a bad pitch.  Right down the middle, but chest high. Billy came half out of his crouch to catch the ball, then pulled it down ever so slightly and held it there. Ryan dropped his bat and headed for first.

“Strike threeee!” Froehlich croaked as he punched the air with his left fist.

The next thing Dancer knew, Billy had him in a bear-hug and all the guys were grabbing him, pounding him on the back. A swarm of teammates carried him toward the first base seats. Dede was in the aisle with Clayton and he lifted them both over the rail. Dancer’s throat ached as he kissed away Dede’s tears. Her tousled hair tickled his face as she wrapped her arms around him. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her and how things were going to get better and better, but he could hardly breathe.

Together they hoisted Clayton on to Dancer’s shoulders. Clayton clung to his dad’s neck with cotton-candy sticky hands as the three of them paraded along the fence from first base to third base while the crowd chanted, “Dancer! Dancer! Dancer!”

    6

  The next day, Dancer was on his back porch soaking his hand in ice water when Doc pulled into the driveway in his navy blue Mercury cruiser. Doc smiled, an unnatural look for him, as he walked over to Dancer. “How’s the hand?”

Dancer jumped up from his chair and wiped his hand dry with Dede’s dishtowel. “It’s great. Just soaking out some of the soreness.”

Doc stepped on to the porch. “Let me see.”

Dancer held out his hand. There was a nickel-sized open sore on the pitching side of his index finger. Doc frowned. “You pitched a great game, Dancer.  You’re going to remember that game for the rest of your life. Hell. We all are.”

“What about the Cardinals?”

Doc shook his head. “You can’t pitch with your hand like that.” 

“I can still throw my fastball.”

“Son, it’s the big leagues. You got a good fastball, but you ain’t no goddamn Bob Feller. Without a curve they’ll kill you. I can’t do that to you.”

Dancer hung his head and stared at his wounded finger. Doc patted him on the shoulder. “I’m telling the Cardinals you can’t pitch on Labor Day. They’ll probably bring up that kid from Columbus.” 

“Then what?”

“You’ll get your shot. Next year. Take care of that hand.”

I would bring up the knife, perhaps, if my wife gave me the opportunity. But she knows the few consternations I have, as sparse as English snow. My beloved takes a well-used doily and swathes it around the blade in place of a holster, so as not to accidentally slice the pillowcase, or worse. She forbids me to make the bed. If I reach for her at night, if only to hold her, or stroke her once-smooth hair, now coarsening with aging worry, I cannot cradle her head with my arm or let the imprint of her ear nestle into the soft, eager patches of my skin, the cilia of her nape. Here is the war that she survived from, but only survived, and the knife that she thinks will protect her, more than twenty years later. Who am I to say what: I do not know how to cast away ghosts.

Of course Linda has no idea what actually goes on while she’s away. He imagines that in her mind the phrase “Tim time” conjures images of her pudgy husband in his slippers, reclined upon the sofa with television news on or flipping through his news magazines. There's virtually no way for her to know that by the time she arrives home tonight he will have enjoyed an intense session of voyeuristic stimulation, auto-erotic arousal and masturbatory self-love. Over the course of a twenty-two year marriage Tim Thomas has discovered a few things that he takes great pride in, such as his physical fidelity to his wife, or the myriad ways he has discovered to relieve himself of his “vapors” which are those primal sexual urges that cause agitation and hostility. The thing that really sets him apart, however, is his discretion. It’s appalling to look around and see the carelessness of politicians caught wearing diapers in Louisiana brothels, caught placing cigars in their interns’ vaginas, caught flagrante delicto with their housekeepers, caught with secret children from their mistresses, caught soliciting sex in the men’s room of Minneapolis airports, caught sexting and using nom de plums like Carlos Danger. Those people make Tim Thomas sick with their hubris and lack of self-control, with their fetishes worn on their sleeves and their public recklessness.

Tim Thomas exercises a far more disciplined and subtle art form: voyeurism. From Romeo to Cyrano de Bergerac, the classics are filled with famous voyeurs, and now, using a pair of high-end Swarovski Optik binoculars, Tim Thomas can join that auspicious fraternity by peering into dozens of homes in the high rise condominium property across the street from his own building. From his perch on the seventh floor, Tim Thomas can spy on the married couple who never have sex but always walk around naked and grow a cactus garden in their kitchen window. He can hone in on the young brunette who comes home at seven fifteen every evening and strips out of her business suit and into her gym clothes. He can admire the retired colonel’s choice in leather furniture or the endless parade of middle-aged socialites that he brings home to bed after they share a glass of brandy. Today is Thursday, so he knows that the Tanners, who live on the ninth floor, will be gone for the evening to one of their operas or wherever they go, and their maid will linger longer than usual so she can rifle through their medicine cabinet, liberate a couple of their Xanax and then lie in their bed and watch TV.

He also knows that not everyone shares his appreciation for the art of surveillance, but there's something delicious about wrapping his hands around the twin shafts his 8.5x42mm binoculars and penetrating the tender defenses of those private spaces to watch people in their own homes – or watch their Xanax-addled maids who have gorgeous little feet and occasionally masturbate on their employers silk sheets.

And really, is anyone being harmed? The act of watching is an almost-entirely innocuous activity, yet the erotic charge is incredible. Tim Thomas’s body transforms from that of a middle-aged-but-ambitious public servant to a seething cauldron of primal urges building to a boil. And once he has achieved this roiling level of arousal, this expansion of his “vapors,” Tim Thomas can then turn his attentions to curing himself. To that end, he has developed an expansive list of remedies over the years, including but not limited to:

1)         At least two dozen common household products that can be used as sexual lubricants during his solo expeditions, many of which leave his skin supple and pleasant-smelling;

2)         No fewer than four items from the produce department of any typical grocery store that he can fuck beautifully and discard with very little mess;

3)         Numerous kitchen utensils that assist with prostate stimulation and then slip discreetly into the dishwasher;

4)         Multiple pairs of his wife’s silken panties that feel absolutely luxurious as he creams into them and then hides them like bodies in the bottom of the laundry hamper;

5)         Several Kama Sutra-like positions that allow him to fuck various combinations of his own body parts, including but not limited to his hands, ankles, and elbow pits; and

6)         Elements of bondage whereby he takes the electric back massager he bought for Linda three years ago at Christmas and straps it to the underside of his own erection so that the pulsing end of the massager is pressed tightly to the place where the hood of his penis joins the shaft while he waits with his hands clenched behind his back until the vibrating stimulation causes an intense and bullet-like eruption that leaves him gasping and spent and ready to curl up on the sofa with the National Review where he might doze off amid the latest political trends and poll analyses.

  “Are you all right, honey?" Linda asks him as she walks up to him and plants the palms of her hands on his chest. It’s an intimate gesture, one that he appreciates.

"Yes, of course," he replies.

"Your vein is twitching," she says. "Are you thinking of Jaime Lesseps again?"

Tim Thomas smiles and raises his hands, as if he's been caught red-handed thinking about his opponent in the upcoming City Council election.

"You relax tonight," she encourages him. "Even the president takes a couple hours off every now and then."

He kisses his wife goodbye and watches her tread over the blue carpet and past the floral print wallpaper to the front door. She checks her purse to make sure she has keys, phone, wallet. “Check. Check. Check,” she says, as she always does. Then she waves at him. “Enjoy your Tim time."

“Seriously, my dear Watson, this will make the smartest opening chapter since The Hound of the Baskervilles. I honestly mean it. There may be occasions when I wind you up like your unfortunate brother’s gold watch. But you are positively on fire today.”

I have to confess that these last compliments really did succeed in moving me. “Why thank you, Holmes,” I said. “I am touched. I do rather have a soft spot for The Hound.” It was such a rare event for Holmes to mention any of my books, apart from A Study in Scarlet, the very first of them, that I had come to suspect that he had not bothered to read any of the subsequent volumes. To receive such praise for my own favourite work gave me a genuine thrill. I handed back the visitor’s stick and told him he was free to do with my deductions as he wished. He ran his eye over the object keenly before applying his magnifying glass.

 “Of course,” he remarked slyly, “you realise that when I said this was the smartest opening since The Hound of the Baskervilles I had in mind the masterly manner in which I humiliate you in those pages.”

“Holmes!” I objected, feeling suddenly betrayed. “This is not worthy of you!”

“Tut, tut, Watson. The public demands it. You are my sidekick. Your role is clear. We must play it out. Now let me begin your humiliation by saying that I accept your insight that this is a stick.”

“Then I got something right at least.”

“‘Then I got something right at least.’ Oh, I do love your indignation, Watson. You manage it so well. But let me provoke you further by saying that the owner of this stick was undoubtedly someone short.”

“Short!” I exclaimed in disbelief.

“Yes, yes. Quite short. Barely above five foot four in height, I should say. And not merely short of stature either. Short in another vital respect. You get my drift, Watson? No? Well, then, let me tell you that I am quite certain the owner of this grand stick was also the possessor of a very diminutive generative organ.”

“In heaven’s name, Holmes,” I exclaimed, “how can you possibly know that?”

“By the knob, my dear doctor, by the knob. Clearly the stick’s possessor was of below average height because a man of appropriate height for such a stick would press down upon the knob with the palm of his hand as he strode, and so polish completely the upper hemisphere. Would you call this a polished knob? Would you, my learned fellow?”

“Well, probably not,” said I.

“Indeed. And yet, as you so correctly but ignorantly point out, here on the shaft, a hand’s breadth below the knob, it has had the bejesus polished out of it. Clearly the owner was forced by his shortness to grasp the stick below its top. The real question, my dear Watson, is why a short man would choose a stick so inappropriately large? Why would he put himself to such deliberate discomfort simply to display to the world something overly sized? Think, Watson, think! It could only be because he was compensating for smallness elsewhere. A big stick would never bamboozle the world into thinking he was tall of stature. Therefore the smallness was in an area not available to public view. Where else could that be but in his trousers? Bitter about his height, this gentleman wishes others to believe that his privy member is proportioned as grandly as his stick.”

“Why, that is incredible, Holmes. I never imagined such a thing,” said I.

“As for your rhapsody about him being a military officer, I would suggest it is much more likely he were a policeman. You, as an old soldier, would be well aware that a military barracks is a place of very scant privacy, rendering attempts at such deception largely futile.”

“Too true,” said I. “Precious little was secret in the old barracks in Afghanistan.”

“Exactly. A police officer, by contrast, disrobes in the security of his own house. And now let me attend to the marks on the shaft, which you attribute to the man’s bravery. You will notice how they correspond to dents in the knob. This fact is most salient, my dear Watson. For it indicates that rather than having been struck by the chosen weapon of an intoxicated Gaelic assailant this stick has been dropped repeatedly from a horizontal position, colliding with the ground along its full length. The question is, who would drop their stick in this manner? I venture to assert that it would not be an Englishman. An Englishmen might drop his stick once or twice in that manner but never so many times as this. No, Watson, the owner of this stick has habitually let it fall from under his arm, something that could only happen if he was in the habit of waving his hands about, shrugging and otherwise gesticulating. Who would behave in such a manner?”

“Why, a Frenchman, I suppose.”

“Precisely, Watson. A little, frog consuming Frenchman. Or, conceivably, a citizen of some other Francophone nation since, according to my observations, it is the language, rather than the geography that compels them to gesticulate. The complete absence of garlic odours,” Holmes added, sniffing the shaft, “would tend to indicate the latter.”

“I confess I can smell little of garlic myself,” I said.

“So, what do we have then? Where now is your tall, English military officer noted for his personal bravery? I call out to him, Watson, and yet I hear no reply. What has become of him? Eh? I fear he is nothing but a character of fiction. In his place I see instead a little foreigner, neurotic about his physical shortcomings, excitable, blathering, theatrical, and seeking to disguise this with an oversized stick.”

Sherlock Holmes leaned back triumphantly in his settee, picked his nose and skilfully flicked the extractions at the wall where they stuck forming the tip of the letter V in the inscription VR.

“Certainly,” said I, “your theory has an appeal to my British prejudices, but is it not too politically incorrect?” From the bookcase I took down an handy copy of The Chambers Dictionary of National Stereotypes and turned to Francophones.

“Does it state they are tall, brave and well endowed?” Holmes enquired.

“‘Odorous, loquacious, craven, prone to amusing petty rages…’ I fear it says nothing about their endowment.”

“Well, never mind. We shall find out directly. This must be the owner at the door come to retrieve his compensatory stick.”

After a loud knocking a man was brought to us by Mrs. Hudson. For an instant she stood on the threshold shaking her fist at the mucous VR inscription before Holmes imperiously waved her away. Our visitor was wearing a neat, grey double-breasted suit and holding a matching fedora. He was long faced with keen slate coloured eyes, two in number, unadorned with any gold-rimmed spectacles. His age was difficult to judge. He was like one of those well preserved English actors who might have appeared in a Peter Greenaway film several decades earlier but who could still play the part of a man in his thirties. He was tall, military in bearing and spoke with an educated English accent, just as I’d described. As he entered the room his eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes’s hand.

“Thank goodness it’s here,” he said. “We just wasted an hour searching for it in the brothel.”

Holmes stared at him. “I take it you are retrieving this stick for its owner.”

“Its owner?” the man replied, puzzled. “No. I am its owner. See. Here’s my name on the silver band. Captain Arthur Hastings. The chaps at Lloyds gave it to me when I signed on with the 3rd Buffs. This little dedication is from them. To a Well Endowed Englishman of Above Average Height. That’s me.”

“But this is impossible!” Holmes spluttered.

Captain Hastings gave him the puzzled look again. “No, I assure you. I can take down my trousers if you wish.”

“But this stick can’t possibly belong to you. It belongs to a midget. Someone who speaks French. I’ve just demonstrated it.”

“What? French? Oh, you must be thinking of Poirot.”

“Poirot?” said Holmes. “Who is Poirot?”

“You know. Poirot. The detective,” Captain Hastings added. “I thought everyone knew who Poirot was. He’s the biggest consulting detective in the business.”

For once Holmes seemed staggered. “The biggest consulting detective in the business,” he spluttered.

“Far and away,” said Hastings.

“But he can’t be. I’m…I’m…the only one there is,” Holmes continued to splutter. He was near to apoplectic. “I’m unique.”

“Good lord,” said Captain Hastings. “I haven’t offended you, have I? Nothing could have been further from my mind. I’m your greatest fan, Mr. Holmes. All I meant was that Poirot’s the biggest seller. I wasn’t making any reflection on you. Clearly you’re the original, old bean. Nothing beats that. Poirot’s just you with an accent. He merely happens to have sold more books.”

“That’s all very well,” said Holmes. “But you’ve gone and made a monkey out of me in front of Watson.”

“You mean over the stick? Oh, not at all, my dear fellow. It was Poirot who left it here. Ever since I lent it to him he’s carried it about as if he paid for it. He’s practically worn the thing out.”

“There. You see,” I said in Holmes’s direction. “We were both right.”

Holmes snorted derisively, “I was more right than you.”

“Well, I’m just relieved it’s not lost,” Captain Hastings continued. “Poirot’s been telling me it was burglars who took it. The old fellow does get a bit hysterical.” He shook his head. “Burglars. Honestly. Well, now that’s out of the way, I can get to the real issue, the reason we came to you in the first place.”

“And what is that?” said I.

“Well, it’s this dashed mystery.”

“Mystery?” said Holmes. “Is the word ‘adventure’ not good enough for Monsieur Poirot?”

“Holmes,” I interjected.

“Call it what you like,” said Hastings. “The thing is Poirot and I were approached about a very queer business recently down in Kent. The locals were all up in arms about it. Didn’t know what to do. In the end they came to Poirot because, as I say, he’s the biggest in the business.”

“The biggest,” Holmes snorted again.

“In sales, old sport,” Captain Hastings responded.

“And what does that mean,” Holmes grumbled.

“Well, I dare say it means something, Holmes,” said I, trying not to offend our guest. “It would certainly pay the back rent.”

“Has this Poirot ever had a piece of software named after him?” Holmes retorted.

“Well, no, I don’t believe he has” Captain Hastings conceded. “Although I’m told there’s a Belgian beer called Hercule. At any rate, it really doesn’t matter because the thing is Poirot knocked the case back.”

“Good heavens,” I exclaimed. “Why did he do that?”

“Well, I’ll explain it all later. But first I have to fill you in on the background or none of this will make terribly much sense. Let me just say to begin with that the interested parties were at a bit of a loss after Poirot gave them the brush off. Quite stymied. It was then that I thought of you two. Why not flick it across to Watson and Holmes, I said to myself. They’re always on the prowl for queer things.”

“That was jolly decent of you,” said I. “Wasn’t it, Holmes.”

Holmes sniffed. “And what is this mystery that defies Monsieur Hercule Poirot?”