The Dreams He Had During Her Absence

#1: Everyone was acting like a storm had just passed. Looking out windows, pulling aside curtains tentatively. On the lawn, a froth of white, like foam on the beach. He went outside. The froth was white paint, from his house (in reality, yellow). The paint on the front of the house was missing, in big ugly sections. Shingles lay on the lawn.
Probable significance: The house is the self. The self is crumbling. She left and took her charms with her, and curses rushed in.

#2: He's on the bus, at the bottom of a mountainous hill. A paved Everest. The bus is very cold. He can see his breath, and his bare legs are stinging. The bus begins to climb, throwing everyone's heads back. He gets distracted and looks at something inside the bus and when he looks out the window again, the bus is back at the foot of the mountain. This happens again and again, until the phone wakes him up.
Probable significance: Commonplace actions taken for granted are fraught with complexity. His life has become futile and boring.

#3: He's in a tunnel with soft walls. The walls are papered with pages from a manuscript and they’re breathing. He stops to try and read the text, but he hears someone behind him, footsteps booming wetly. This goes on until he comes out of the tunnel without having read anything. He's in a field in winter.
Probable significance: He’s lost inside his own mind, where he can't read the signs.

#4: He sits in a waiting room. A number of people sit on black, padded benches. Everyone's staring at a wall-mounted loudspeaker, the kind in cartoons, big flared bells like trumpets. Every so often, a voice comes over the loudspeaker and announces the number of the airplane that just crashed. Only they're not numbers, they're names, like grand ships. The Sebastian has gone down outside Ames, Iowa. The Glorious has gone down outside Stillwell, Oklahoma.
Probable significance: He feels the world is dangerous and stuffed full with chaos. All he can do is wait for the chaos to find him.

Check Jacket

Chas had a good feeling about Chance Encounter. A great feeling. Chas had such a good feeling about him that he walked up to the window smiling. He was smiling and he told the white raisin hunched over the counter Good Morning. He never did that shit. He had a system, and that system was called All Business and its subtitle was known as In and Out in a Hurry. But this was how good a feeling he had about Chance Enounter.

Number 1, he overheard Check Jacket saying something about him. Chas had seen Check Jacket here twenty times at least. And he was almost always winning big. Had a blonde on one arm, and a check jacket folded over the other. Not an hour ago, Chas heard Check Jacket talking about the contenders for the one o'clock. Said, "That bitch can run!" So that was the number 1 reason for deviating from the plan.

The Number 2 reason was that Chas had recently had a chance encounter himself. Old friend from high school in town just for the afternoon, and for some ungodly reason, she wanted to rekindle something from the past. Chas didn't have the heart to tell her they had never even kindled. Why ruin the mood? They finished up their chance encounter, she called Chas "Mikey," and that was that. And finally, reason Number 3 was that his normal technique had dug a whole for him five thousand dollars deep. And that was just in the last couple months, last time he'd won anything.

Change was good for the soul. So Good Morning, smile, five hundred on Chance Encounter to win. Chas sat near Check Jacket and visualized himself counting out his thirty-six hundred dollars in dog track bills. The bell rang. Chance Encounter promptly tanked. Chas yelled over to Check Jacket. "Hey! Dipshit with the coat on his arm! What the fuck is your problem!" The day only got a lot worse after that for Chas.

Administrative Isolation

Everyone in Deare always talked about what it must be like, locked up all day. Well, where did they think he was all day? Locked up, on the catwalk overlooking B block, or walking the floor outside AI, or making the rounds in General. Locked up. When was the last time he even got to take an Outside Supervision?

With the way this place was managed, he was locked up at least two nights a week also. So don't come crying to him about how bad these inmates have it. Because Officer Reese S. Feurlin has it just as bad. And no visiting hours.

He was on the floor outside Administrative Isolation, marking time with his footfalls. AI was the worst. Square-foot glimpses into hell. Two rows of them, one on either side of you as you made your way to the sergeant's desk at the end of the corridor. He tried to be decent and professional. He didn't curse at the inmates. If they looked at him—really looked at him, made some genuine eye contact—he tried to give a quick nod. Just something to say, "You are still a person, even though we got you in a box." The chicken-wired, inch-thick windows were usually smeared with, well... with substances. Being sent to hell for a week at a time (but some of these men had been in AI for coming up on two months after the riot last March) will shoot holes in your mind.

"987701 Lyddle, H." was shouting on his side of hell. Reese couldn't hear what he was saying. The doors down here translated everything to the same furious mumble. Lyddle pounded on the glass. A wild animal was trapped in his eyes.

Lovers' Lips

As near as they could tell, and they had some pretty sophisticated modeling to back them up, the whole thing started with a flower. A little red flower from Ecuador. They call it chaqua-tika. Lovers' Lips. Pretty thing. Bright red and glossy, like a lipsticked kisser all puckered up. Thing is, chaqua-tika's not just pretty to us. There's a flea that's just mad for it. And this love-struck flea has a nasty habit of carrying with it a bacterium that, well, let's just say it damages people's nervous systems.

There's whole books about Recticulum hayesii, and in between the deserts populated by nothing but long words and statistical analyses, there's some rough going. Some passages will keep you up at night, and that's a fact. No need to get into all that here. R. hayesii has some evil intentions, we'll say, and leave it at that. And R. hayesii seems to have caused this whole deal.

It spread out like blossoms from a small but cheerful apartment in the Bronx. Clara Ramirez had had a visitor—her uncle Manuel. Tio Manuel is from Ecuador, and he was visiting his neice on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the big Northern City. Clara had written a hundred letters if she'd written one, and the family had crowded into Señor Marti's front room. Señor Marti was an educated man. He had lived in Mexico City for twenty years and had a degree in engineering. He was happy to read the letters out loud to Clara's humble relations. But I'm losing the thread here, aren't I?

The point is, Tio Manuel brought with him a gift from Clara's old sweetheart. One perfect chaqua-tika, and he planted it right on her cheek, the second he met her at the airport. That's where it began, or so the hunched-over fellas think. Something about DNA recombination and comparison. No need to get into that. All I'm saying is within one month, some eight thousand citizens of the concrete town of Bronx had trouble walking. And within three months, there were no less than twenty thousand feisty New Yorkers who couldn't figure out how to light a cigarette. All because Clara had pretty brown eyes and a nice young man in Ecuador couldn't get them out of his mind.

New Year

We didn't make many arrangements for Y2K. Bought a generator and backup. Excavated another room in the basement and filled it with cans and bottled water. Installed a kitchen and a bathroom down there. With a new septic tank. We could feed the whole neighborhood for a month, but it won't come to that. This is just preparation. Good citizenship.

Put in sensors around the perimeter of the property and wired them to a central panel. Cameras. Remote-activated explosives for use in EMERGENCIES ONLY. The cars are gassed up and ready. With an additional 500 gallons buried in drums in the backyard. A little razor wire, nothing tacky. It's woven in the vines over the fence, so it's practically like decoration. Filters on the windows and vents for a full spectrum of chemical agents. Bio suits in the basement locker. Just in case. (A little preparation never hurt anyone.)

Guns. Rifles, shotguns, handguns. Some automatic. Some just semi. Enough ammo to blast the moon in half. Nozzles built into all upstairs rooms, for dispersing poison or dispensing flame, depending on the home-invasion threat. The potential home invasion threat.

We don't believe, necessarily, that anything bad will happen. This is just the overgrown Boy Scout in me, being prepared, like any reasonable person. I'm not going to let a little computer bug and the insecurities of my fellow man ruin my day. I worked hard to afford my radio-controlled death robot. It can even walk on walls. Or roll on walls, on quad polyurethane treads with polyethylene cores, for silent operation. Eighty-eight micro ampules of sodium cyanide, accurate injection from up to thirty feet. Laser guided trajectory, of course. Infrared opticals. Echolocation. So I'm not worried about what the New Year could bring. I'm not worried at all. In fact, I'm almost looking forward to it.

The Night After a Full Moon

The night after a full moon is evil. That’s what the grandmothers say. The moon sees his kingdom fading—just that one side starting to smudge, just a shadow!—and he becomes crazy with rage and horror. It’s like an x-ray with a spot on the lung. People leave themselves and panic rushes in. Same with the moon, the grandmothers say.

When walking outside the night after the full moon, you are encouraged to look at your feet, the ground. Don’t watch the moon or the clouds it draws around itself for warmth. (And do not, above all, look at the stars! If the moon thinks you are in league with the stars—whose light is permanent and therefore despised—you are in trouble.) The moon is dangerous and is just looking for someone to strike.

People cursed by the moon start to worry about strange things: becoming lost in forests, eyes turning milky and dead, the directions of the compass actually switching places. And these people never find love. This is what the grandmothers say. Don't whistle or sing. Don't call out. If you pass someone (even a friend) your greeting should be polite, of course, but not overly familiar. A plain greeting, in other words. Do not linger.

The owls will tempt you to look up. The grandmothers say that owls are the moon’s birds. His lieutenants (but they don’t use that word). They will call you as sirens called to Odysseus, to lure him onto the rocks. Resist them! Go about your business. Don’t go near trees you don’t know well or eat strange foods or wear new shoes. Be small. Become a mouse hidden by fallen leaves. The grandmothers say the moon acts like us when he’s afraid.

Gauze

Was there a sentence that sounded less like a lullaby in the whole English language? "Pack it in gauze and let's get out of here" didn't soothe and didn't create a peaceful mood the way, say, candles on the patio might. But that's all I got.

My leg hurt like hell. My jeans were getting heavy with blood, and the whole back seat was sticky with it. From my hand on the door handle and me trying to tear my jeans with my fingers, just rip them apart to get a better look. And Phelan throwing a thing of gauze that unraveled as it fell through the air and the sounds outside getting denser somehow, like everything was underwater. An underwater storm, with lights playing on the roof of Phalen's car like dreams. Dreams. Dreams of...

Was someone lighting candles back there? "Dexter! Pack it in gauze and let's get out of here!" Dexter slapping my face with his smooth hands. Hands like he'd never held anything that wasn't upholstered. "What are you doing back there? Jesus, don't beat him up, he's already hurt bad enough!" and Phalen storming down the street, the engine wide open. Nothing fazed him. Nothing slowed him down. And he drove like he'd just pass through a brick wall and come out the other side. He had gauze with him in the car. I think he liked finally being able to put it to good use. He didn't prepare to avoid accidents. He prepared so he'd come out looking good. Looking slick. "So then I threw Dex the gauze and we booked!" That's how it would come out.

Dexter slapping my face. My leg felt like someone was giving me a tattoo with a machete. Phalen: "Hang on, man!" Dexter stuffing something in my shirt pocket, concentrating to get it in there around my bucking ribcage. He looked me in the eye, steadily. Was he going to kiss me? A fond farewell as I passed into the world of candles and warm evening rain? "That's your finger. I wrapped it up good. Don't forget it's in there, okay?"

Little Criminals

Little criminals. Walking past my property, they're not fooling anyone. Their mamas, maybe. Their mamas are little criminals themselves. Little harlots. What are they? Sixteen years old, walking past my property with their little criminal children?

I saw one of those little criminals take a bunch of grapes, plain as church on Sunday. He just grabbed 'em right from the bin at Daly's. Picked 'em up and do you think his crazy-eyed mama said anything? Anything like, "What are you doin', stealing?" or "You put those back right this instant or it's to the police station with you"? No, she didn't say anything. She looked at me and smiled! Can you imagine?

And how many times have I seen those little criminals marching across my lawn? Slow marching. Chain-gang marching. Think they own everything they touch. This lawn? Own it. The street? Own it. Grapes at Daly's? Own 'em. Like everything's here just for those little criminals to walk on or pick up and grab or put dirty hands on. I know what they are. I know what they're thinking. I call out to them, strong and clear like daybreak, "You just keep moving. I got my eye on you."

I see it all from my porch. I see it all from my wicker chair. I put a new cushion on it, it's good as new. I can sit up there all day if I need to, watching out for the little criminals. Walking on my property. Putting their greasy hands on cars parked on the street. Raising their voices with no regard for the time of day. Sun can be down and gone, they don't care. Calling out with little criminal voices, talking how "I'm gonna get you" and "Connie say this" and "Connie say that." Connie the biggest little criminal of the bunch. The biggest rottenest apple in the barrel.

Sheep Meat

Look at them all. Dummies. That guy, waving the gun around. He doesn't know. None of them do. The people diving for cover, fear infecting them.

Where I am now, it's like dreaming. I don't have to walk anyplace. Or hop a bus. Or bum a ride. I just go. And I'm there. I think, like, space doesn't exist anymore or something. Actually, I think it never did. The whole thing down there is fake. None of it's real. But they don't know it.

Those dummies are running around. Sheep. That's what they are: bags of sheep meat. Things have been like this forever, I think. Time's another one. Time doesn't mean anything either, and I think now that it was always a little hinky.

The one with the gun, the one with the eyes lit up with anger. (Anger—another one.) That one looks familiar. Names are gone now. Identity stopped making sense when I left. Clouds don't have identity. Water doesn't. Same thing. So The Gun down there, he's chasing all the other sheep away into the corner, yelling at them for their stuff. (Oh, man, that's the biggest bullshit of all.)

Those people are bargaining. You can see it on their faces. You could hear them thinking about hiding some of their stuff, offering one thing to satisfy The Gun. "Anything but my wedding ring," one of them's thinking. The fat lady in the ugly red dress. She looked like an apple. "Don't look in my sock—I keep all my bills in my sock," a young guy's thinking.

A kid is looking away from The Gun, looking over by the door. What the hell, I shift over that way. Two more of them, crumpled like trash in ponds of blood. One of them was a cop. All that shiny hardware on him, the badge, the buttons, the gun, the smooth leather holster. The other one, I guess, was me.

David, Martin, and Her

She watched David lift little Martin into the air, and the simple gesture swept thirty years away. So when she looked at David, she saw him as her little son, perfect and precious, the way he was when she was a young mother. Before either of them had been wounded by life's stray artillery. Before the war inside them, sustained by their own unruly forces. Before her anger had driven a wedge between her and David's father. Before Alice died, bequeathing David a furious rage that had nearly consumed his heart before he was able to fight it off.

No, when David lifted a laughing Martin in the air, a plump and silly bird, the ravages of all those years melted. Martin laughed, a crazy giggle that took joy down from its hook. That giggle unhinged sorrow's door. She clapped and ran to them and joined the fun.

Martin had David's ears. What a funny thing to say, but it was true. The same peculiar crescent fold near the back. And his laugh caught in his throat and repeated the same way David's had when he laughed. When he was a little boy. What a little boy he had been. Curious and frivolous and profound all at once. He had produced a butterfly from his pocket once, and set it free in the kitchen.

"I think it's hungry, mama." That's what he said. So safe, so secure, so cared for. He never behaved entitled to comfort and security, but still he had the expectation that everyone, every thing, even butterflies, could have as much. And that was all she and William had ever wanted. To raise up in the child the belief that life passed smoothly, that it was good. They had done a marvelous job of it, until life grew too large, and showed them all whose schedule they were on.

The Hat

The hat had first belonged to a Mr. Edward Happer, a crisp gentleman of means and an amply moneyed Philadelphia family. There was nothing remarkable about the hat. It was the type of hat they all wore, all the erect, sharply glancing young gentleman of late 19th century society. A deep, rich brown felt, soft and yielding. Its presence announced that its wearer could afford to appear soft and yielding, because everyone knew he was not.

When Edward Happer died of influenza in 1890, his hat stayed behind. It was eventually worn by the son of Mrs. Gladiola Berletti, a widow who pieced together a living working for the church. She had received Mr. Happer's things for the funeral, but his mother couldn't bear to look at the hat, that symbol of the station her son would never be able to assume.

And so Mrs. Berletti kept it. When Anthony Berletti—Tony—left to go live with relatives in New York, he took the hat with him. Not understanding that anyone who knew what the hat implied would know he wore it fraudulently—not being born under the hat, as it were—he wore it everywhere he went. His swagger was natural though, inborn, and the hat amplified it little. Still, Tony liked the way it looked. He turned to admire himself in windows often.

When he died, drowned on a scow in the East River, his uncle couldn't stand the sight of it, sitting on the sill where Tony had left it that morning, smug and soft and never needing to lift a finger. Uncle Paolo threw it out the window—his first official act of mourning: he opened the sill and flicked the hat onto 124th Street below. To be trampled by draft mules, for all he cared.

From there, the hat found its way into a general store on the corner of 127th and Harrison. And from there, from head to head, to the Mississippi River and the groves of California.

The Great Leonard Pelly

Leonard looked to the ceiling like a thoughtful goat, chewing its cud. But, do goats chew cud? No matter—if Leonard were a goat, he would, just to throw the whole affair into disarray. Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Naturalist, this old goat just won't play by your rules.

His gray hair overlapped his collar and that preposterous brooch winked like an impudent little boy. Leonard tilted his spectacled eyes back to the rest of us, granting us the unasked-for privilege of his attention once more. His eyeglasses like filled bowls of thick soup, he opened his mouth. His tongue, a congealed pudding, explored a molar, while Leonard fished for the right words. Although, in his case, who knew what "right" would presume to mean? "Better than last year," he said quietly. He hoped someone would ask him to repeat himself. That was one trap I wouldn't set foot in. I heard perfectly well the first time, thank you all the same. My good sense was gone—why was I even here, with this bejeweled loaf?—but my hearing was intact.

Mrs. Finn lifted her dime eyes to Leonard, an expression of confusion loosening the lines around her mouth. "What did you say, young man?"

“I said, my fine and delicate woman, that the wine is marginally better than the fancy tap water we had to contend with at last year's reunion." And he tossed that marginally better wine into the toothy canyon that doubled as his mouth.

My fingers twitched. How they tingled for their opportunity to twine themselves in that oversized napkin collar of the Great Leonard Pelly, and twist and pull, wringing the bad manners, the petulant ways, right out of him. He speared a butter pat and laid it carefully—oh, he's a bricklayer now!—onto his one hundredth roll of the evening, and worked it whole into his mouth, which required the assistance of his right hand.

The Snakes and All

And now Fellows is telling him that to tear down the trees—his trees—would be catastrophic! He actually said "catastrophic." Not a subtle bone in the man's body. His thin body bent like a wire, his hat battered between two porcelain paws. His lower lip wriggling in dismay. This trembling leaf of a man is telling him what he can and cannot do! Catastrophic! If it's a catastrophe, then it's his catastrophe. His stars to throw out of alignment. His money to spend mobilizing the troops.

And so he does. With a phone call, the river's course is changed. Fellows now, pirouetting in pain. The birds! Isn't he worried about the birds? The only birds he's ever worried about are the Thanksgiving turkey and the Christmas goose, and actually, now that he thinks of it, he always had maid to do that sort of worrying. So, no, he can answer, he's not worried about the birds.

Then what about the snakes? The snakes? (So it's a farce Fellows has in mind!) He goes on; several species of snake make their home in that stretch of forest. Rare species. What better kind of snake species, is what he'd like to know. But Fellows won't give it up. He's working up to a swoon now, really throwing himself into the performance. But what he doesn't understand, what his sniffing and scolding are drowning out: those are his trees, and so, by extension, his snakes. And his birds. And his speckled snails. And whatever else is damned to live in those trees. They live their at his leave. And now he wishes to remove them, trees and all. So be it.

The land is worth far more to him that way, and what business is it of Fellows's? None. He's actually on his knees now, pleading. Such whimpering. It disgusts one.

Diamond

I got smaller and smaller, and as I did, I made a wonderful discovery. When I had just crossed over the line I would come to call VNE, or Visible to the Naked Eye, the world slowed down. Finally, time was no longer my enemy. I was free to frolic.

A stubborn weight was driven from my back. The donkey that had lived there for years grew earnest wings and lifted itself off and away and into the blue, which had now, after VNE, become even bluer, but I don't think that was really possible. I was light as air, which had now become my only food, my only need. When the world had finally become clear to me, beautifully seen, that's when I was truly invisible. By humans, the only seers that had ever seemed to matter. In the slowed-down world in which I could sleep between heartbeats, everything was clear, refracted and polished to diamonds. That's even what the air looked like.

The gleam meant I couldn't see much else, so I was, it's true, deprived of that pleasure that everyone who's ever flown in an airplane has known: the pleasure of finding your street, your house, from an utterly foreign vantage point. I had so wanted to see my street and my house—my life—from my new position, but I couldn't. Everything was too bright, and my little eyes weren't up to it.

I quickly reached the point where movement itself was impossible. This happened a few hours after VNE. Hours which would have been like years, perhaps, decades maybe, before. I couldn't move and I couldn't see, but the stillness pounded in me like a heart, my own heart having stopped beating almost completely by then. I had never been happier. I realized that I had never been happy. I was a diamond.

The Champ

Champ! The Champ is here! Over here, Champ! Can we get a shot of you against the window, Champ? That's great, Champ! Champ, how 'bout a few words with the American people, via KBIG?

The Champ shoulders aside Mr. Feeney, his personal assistant, leaving the man-in-brown with nothing to do with his hands but limply hold the wilted brim of his hat. The Champ parts the sea of reporters and photographers, celebrity-lovers and cops, and strides larger than life, from the pages of history, the ink still wet, to the steps, where Gil Gilbert, KBIG's "man about town" waits, his microphone a monstrous metal daisy.

Gil reaches a polished hand out to the Champ, who shakes it carnivorously. "Champ! Good to see you! Do you have any words for America on this glorious day? Tell us, what's on your mind?"

The Champ isn't used to thinking. He's used to doing. Gil's simple, and absolutely predictable, question throws the works inside the Champ's head into reverse. He stands there, his not-smile stuck on Grimace, for three, four seconds. Then he snaps out of it, his eyebrows popping higher up on his flat, bare forehead. "I tell ya, Gil—I went in there and showed 'em why I'm the Champ!"

Gil's eyes beckon the Champ further down the path, further toward that mythical land called Scoop. Gil's eyes can't go it alone. Mr. Feeney assaults the brim of his hat as Gil steps closer to the Champ for his next, harder-hitting question. "That's swell, Champ, but tell us, how does it feel?"

The Champ looks to Feeney. Feeney pretends to be interested in a passing cloud. The Champ picks out Gil again, beneath him on the steps. "Why don't I show you how I feel?" Cheers all around from the assembly on the steps as the Champ marches down the steps, finds a fist-sized stone by the curb, and throws it as hard as he can toward the Pavilion. As though guided by every instinct known to man and beast—hunger, thirst, and love—the stone finds a window and punches through it.

Gil turns back to his polished microphone. "Can you hear that, ladies and gentleman? Can you hear that window breaking? That right there, America, is why the Champ is, as many have said, the greatest living window-smasher in history! That is why the Champ is the Champ!"

Bamboo

Anyone looking at her would have called her beautiful. God knows many had. And not just men, either. Women, old people, everyone said it. To her face. An old woman on the bus just the other day said it. She was shuffling down the aisle, and she passed Virginia and bent down, and, not even looking at her, said in a reedy, insubstantial voice, "Beautiful child." She must have seen her as she was climbing onto the bus, just a glance, but that was enough.

Virginia looked at herself in the mirror. She didn't think of herself as beautiful. Well, not any more beautiful than her sister Georgia. Or Ms. Phalen, who worked with her at the museum. But Virginia was the one everyone noticed. But that's only because, Virginia thought, tweezers poised, they don't look too closely. Don't know what the sun looks like either. It's bright and it's orange, but that's about it. You look up, there it is, your eyes start to tear, you look away, assuming you've got the whole picture. But you don't.

And they didn't have the whole picture of Virginia, either. The tweezers hovered for a moment, then descended on the freakishly long hair in Virginia's left eyebrow. Virginia had to pull it every week or so. It kept coming back. It grew as long as three quarters of an inch, curled slightly, to hide, to camouflage itself. It was Virginia's dark secret. She already had the "imperfection that made her beauty more striking." A tiny scar beside one eye (bicycle accident) and an even tinier brown birthmark below the corner of her mouth, on the right.

She knew, from people's comments and questions and glances, that these flaws were intriguing. They set her apart. But so would a third arm, or a tail. Or hairs that forced themselves to the surface with the speed of bamboo. Out of control. Malignant. Hideous.

After the Accident

After his accident nothing was the same. He sputtered through the rest of his life on a potent mixture of fear and painkillers. He wasn't the same anymore. He wasn't the same as anybody. His face was lopsided now, a rotten piece of fruit, and he'd stare at people through it. One eye drooped, and that whole side of his face was unnaturally smooth, polished almost. The result of numerous skin grafts. And he walked like he was held together with staples, which he was. His insides, at any rate.

The accident had taken him apart piece by piece and he'd had to be put back together. The surgeons threw out the manual and just winged it. Leftover pieces? Are you sure they're important? Just stomp on him to get every last thing in there, every last loop of intestine and so on. And after that, he was a different person.

On the outside, he was slow. Walked slow. Talked slow. Couldn't run or jump anymore, not that adults have much call. On the inside, he rocketed from one thought to the next, and cursed his body for not being able to keep up. He trusted no one. His accident didn't mellow him. His accident hammered him flat. Sharpened him. Dunked his boiling bones in a bucket of water and hardened him. He scared babies and small animals, but his old friends didn't want to be around him either. It was the way he stared, probably. And the way it took him so long to get the words out, like he had to take them apart with his tongue first. He didn't care. He didn't need them. He didn't need anyone. He had too many things going on in his head now to waste time with people.

A week after getting out of the hospital, he had shuffled into Art's Cuts and tilted his head back and called everyone in there a son of a bitch. Then he left on busted legs and the guys in the chairs, and Art, didn't say anything for a good five minutes.

Gravel Grinder

One summer during college, my friend Tenny and I got jobs with the city (Springfield, Mass). When we were filling out the applications, we didn't think we'd get hired. (And we didn't even really want the jobs. $5.50 an hour? To stand outside under a broiler, our skin reddening, our brains liquefying?) We looked at the whole thing like a joke, but how we saw any humor in it, I can't remember.

We thought we'd be working together, I guess, holding signs that said "SLOW" and rolling our eyes at the locals with no better prospects. But the first morning we showed up, we got different assignments. Tenny went to a "trim crew," the poor, benighted souls who cut the grass on median strips, traffic islands, and embankments.

I got sent to Maintenance as a Maintenance-3. My partner was a squat machine shaped like a giant coffee cup. Officially, it was the "surfacing refiner," but what it really was was Gravel Grinder, and this was a machine. No, this was a force of nature. Someone else on the crew would load the hopper that sat above the Grinder's gaping mouth—imagine an insatiable, hellish baby bird, all open beak and waiting gullet—and then trip the hopper lever.

"Number Four Raw" (rocks about as big as pumpkins) would cascade into the Grinder, and for a moment, the Grinder would choke on them. And then, as the blades got purchase, the cavities in my teeth would rattle as the Grinder screamed back to life. A noise like garbage trucks exploding sizzled through my bones, turning them inside-out. (I had city-issued earphones at least.) A fog of furious dust boiled from its mouth. The world was cracked in half. My blood lapped inside my heart. My fingers knotted into fists.

After about a minute, the chaos was over. Grinder had spoken. I remembered to breathe again and tilted the newborn gravel into a trough. Then I waited for Miguel to haul it away and John to load the hopper again.

It's hard for me to believe now, but I loved that thing. It had the power of a black hole. It was a Zeus flinging thunderbolts at its enemies. It was retribution and vengeance and biblical truth. And I always stayed on its good side. I never once rolled my eyes.

Ketchup in a Can

It all started at the Used Food store in Ledward, Massachusetts. It wasn't really called "Used Food." It was the Community Foodshare Program or something, and it served a few down-and-out-and-never-coming-back mill towns. But this was used food. Opened bags of cereal stapled shut. Boxes of crackers missing half the contents. Soup in mason jars. But the prices!

I bought badly dented cans of vegetable broth at five for a dollar. My friend Tenny bought a nearly-full 2-liter bottle of soda ("It's still got fizz!") for 15 cents. Tenny loved Used Food. He made special trips there. It wasn't the food, of course. And it sure wasn't the dim fluorescent atmosphere, either. What he loved were the finds.

Buried on the shelves among the cookie crumbs and stale snacks, sometimes, if you were lucky, were treasures. Tenny fell hard for the Empress Vegetable Sandwich, the Fruit Flavor soup, and the sealed packets of chocolate sauce.

These things never did it for me. They were strange, sure, and sometimes absurd in the way that college students find appealing. But I wasn't in love. Tenny would go on and on all the way back to campus, making up jingles and alternating between shaking stuff into his mouth and practically gagging when he tasted it. Used Food can be a cruel mistress.

One day when Tenny was browsing the pantry, I saw something stacked in the corner. Three cans, a little silver pyramid. An old man, nearly bald, wearing thick glasses and a drooping bowtie, smiled on the labels. I investigated and discovered Grandfather's Ketchup. Ketchup in a can, no less.

I had to have them all. $2.55 (plus tax) later and I had cornered the market on Grandfather's Ketchup.

What was it about this stuff? Ketchup? In a can? It made me think of backyard mavericks and basement inventors. No bottles for Grandfather, the sly old visionary! This was bucking the tide! Fighting upstream! Battling the odds! Standing on the mountaintop, proclaiming the power of One Man, of Truth! Of America!

I was hooked.