Ketchup in a Can

Little Camp

2007-08-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

The wind screamed at them, balled up its fists and battered them for hours. Their little camp was under attack and couldn't take another night of this. The canvas that Cready had nailed over the entryway was torn and streaming and Sullivan was trying to keep his blackening fingertips from the doc. Frostbite was feeling into every crack and Sullivan was its favored target.

Having the dogs inside with them was a help—to man and dog—but then there was the food problem. Rations for one more month, if all went well. And that meant cutting everything very close. The weather didn't look kindly on men with rigid schedules. The weather delighted in taking men like that down a peg or two. Calling forth an avalanche, turning up the volume on a gale. But proper organization was the only thing that would get them out of here and back home.

The entire expedition was in disarray. Two dead (James and Fitch), two wounded, not including Sullivan's frostbite, the extent of which was not yet known, and several on the precipice of apathetic rebellion. Everyone needed to be sharp, each man a harpoon, direct and sure. The weather, the relentless wind, the driving snow, and above all the hellish cold, honed some men's spirits and blunted others. If only there were a way to tell one from the other, before inserting them into the jaws of a place like this.

The dogs slept so placidly Markham thought once or twice they had all frozen solid during the night. They came alive in conditions like this, each one keen for the challenge, each one full of hope and the prospect of pleasing its driver. Those sterling dogs. The canvas covering tore down the middle and Cready was up with a curse, orders all around. He hammered it back down and added extra rope on the posts. Then he deliberately cut three inch slits along the face of it. A sailor's the man for any tight spot. Cready knew their home would come apart if they tried to stand pat against this wind. Yield the battle to win the fight.

Bad Luck

2007-06-04T23:47:00.000-07:00

With all the doors and windows gone, the house looked toothless. The house was an old man. No one knew why I did it. They said that day and night as they walked and drove past. They didn't use words to say it, but it was plain as day that's what they were thinking. How they'd grab little looks at the house before they turned the corner.

I can't explain it, really. The house was plugged up. Do you know how many bad things happened in that house? Not just regular bad, like arguments and broken dishes. Bad things. Sickness. Sadness. Some people think it was Lana passing that did it to me. I don't know. Could be right. She was not even three years old. How can anyone "come to terms," as they say? That's a puzzle. She was fine one day and two weeks later, gone. She'd stopped crying out. Her mother was, of course, gone. She passed a year before from fever.

Once I was all alone in there, I got to thinking. No time to think before that. I started to wonder if maybe the bad luck inside was swirling around and around, like paint going down a drain. And maybe that bad luck had no place to go. Seemed reasonable. Still does, if you want to know. So I took all the windows out, first thing. Started with the second story. I didn't break them or anything. I'm not crazy. I'm not a mountain man dazed by solitude. I was just working out a theory. I kept having bad dreams, so the doors went, too. The bad luck needed a little help to get on and find someplace else to be. I'd have knocked over a wall if I'd thought that would help.

With the doors and windows out, things cooled off a bit. The house breathed a little. My dreams cleared up. I don't have to worry about burglars. You'd be surprised how few people want to come inside a house with no doors. Makes them uneasy. Nervous. Not me.

Hands

2007-02-18T10:30:00.000-08:00

Every time he went back to the doctor's he got worse. The doctor would ask him into the little dark room with the light-up panels, x-rays of his bones on display, and show him important details with the tip of a pencil. This darkening here, this lightening here. What this indicates, my diagnosis, it appears from this.

The bones in his hands were getting old. Refusing to work properly. The doctor couldn't do anything except tell him how bad it had gotten. And that wasn't something he wanted done anymore. So he stopped seeing the doctor. It had been once a month, and then once every two weeks. Before the doctor asked him to rent a cot in the hospital, he stopped going.

The doctor called once or twice. He sounded unhappy to lose his audience. Or maybe it was more like a sculptor losing his model. Because without his hands and his bones that thinned and thickened improperly—every time the doctor said "improperly," he thought of small children—the doctor was helpless. The doctors want you only to think of the transaction working in the other direction. Yes, yes, without doctors, where would we all be then, and so on. But without patients, without sick people, without people whose bones are improper, where would the doctors be?

He stopped going. He went to the park on Monday afternoons instead. He went to the park and watched children and birds. They were innocence and laughter. Even the birds laughed. He tried not to think about his bones. He tried not to think about his doctor. He tried not to think about anything. One morning, he couldn't hold his coffee cup. His fingers wouldn't close the way he told them to. They misbehaved. They had minds of their own now, and couldn't believe that the old people knew more than they did.

The Boar

2006-12-11T23:36:00.000-08:00

If they had only known how unhappy he'd been for the last dozen years, none of this would have been necessary. The vigils every night, and the young people wriggling over the gates like seals, only to be dragged onto the grounds and beaten.

He had tried to put an end to that, at least, but the Minsiter of Internal Affairs had said that would be the gravest mistake of all. Any softening, any loosening of the hold on power, would be taken for weakness. And when your enemy found a weakness in you, he feasted on it and became stronger. He talked like he was Minister of War, always drunk with metaphor.

It bothered him no end. He was weak. And tired. This was wrong. This. Everything. The young men at the gates. What they said about him in the dissident newspapers that grew like mushrooms. His aide-de-camp brought them home after his clandestine trips through the darkened streets. "The Boar" they called him, and savaged him with caricatures. Always, tusks curved from his jaw. He looked at himself in the mirror every time to try and find it. Hoping to find why they hated him so much.

His father had dismantled much of the previous century's oppressive apparatus. And hadn't he undone most of the rest? He would be remembered as the weakest of them all, but it wasn't enough. It was never enough. They hated him with their blood, with centuries of grievances pushing them on, choking them full of bitter wind. When the crowds had first gathered outside the palace three months ago, he had tried talking to them, from the balconies. They jeered and spat. They didn't care what he had to say. Internal Affairs wouldn't let him say anything now. "Strength is your ally." More ancient wisdom. Fire couldn't help a drowning man.

The Therapist

2006-12-11T23:30:00.000-08:00

She wanted him to talk about his childhood again. It wasn't that she thought childhood was especially meaningful. She wasn't that kind of therapist. It's just that after all the testing, she knew that his peritemporal region was hot when he talked about his childhood. Perhaps because of the memories he reassembled. Didn't matter. She didn't care why. All she needed to know was that the region was hot, densely active. And that meant it was a gateway.

While he leaned back on the couch, his head almost lost in the cheerful pillows, she asked him about elementary school. The PET-cap was feeding his brain's innermost responses to the computer mounted on the arm of her chair. The process was seamless and simple. She could have told him the close-fitting cap was designed to enhance relaxation. And the three-inch square monitor in front of her? An appointment planner. "It's not even on."

He started to talk about some school play, and being chosen for a smaller part than his better-dressed, more well-liked rival. The activity on the monitor was ferocious. She had tapped a rich vein. The Neural Index was already up to 6.5, and he'd only been talking for a couple minutes. The oranges and yellows on the monitor painted a picture of intense involvement with the memory. As soon as the first reds appeared and the NI topped 8.0, she'd have him. And then administering the drug was all that remained. The PET-cap contained three microscopic PTUs—particle transfer units. The drug would be forced through the scalp without him even knowing it.

His voice became thick and slow. He was crying. Should she have been listening? The night of the play. He forgot his lines, froze in front of parents and teachers. Oranges crowded out yellows. Neural Index, 7.9. He was almost ready. She found the button on the underside of the armrest and rested her finger on it.

The Kolo

2006-11-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

He knew how he was supposed to feel about the Kolo tribesmen. He was supposed to think they were savages, but a step up from the savages of the plains. Savages with potential. This sentiment was practically an official chapter of the officer's manual. He had heard the expression so many times from his superiors—our kind of savage—that it had come to sound like law.

He didn't dare—yet—tell anyone, but he was coming to see that the conventional wisdom re: the Kolo was quite incorrect. Not the part about their potential, but the part about their savagery. These were the same men who designated one among each party to club the timi fish they caught, so only one man would need to seek atonement. The same men who offered up a tenth of their omotu harvest to avoid war with neighboring tribes. Yes, when war came anyway, they were ruthless. But these were not savages. These were citizens, as god-fearing and law-abiding, in their way, as any Englishman.

Conley knew this now, and the knowledge was interfering with his duties. Unclear to begin with, his duties—it had been suggested by his ever-helpful superiors—involved drawing the Kolo into line. Seducing them, as it were, with a vision of British salvation. Cooking pots, machetes, metal arrowheads, mass-produced sandals: the Kolo would have a near-endless supply of these and other things, if they would only act as the King's emissaries and help the King claim the outlying regions. Everyone would win. A true bargain. No rape of the savage here.

Conley knew he wasn't the man for the job, his knack for the language notwithstanding. He knew the Kolo deserved every bit as much sovereignty as the British. They were not a people specially made for colonization. They were proud and upright. Allies, perhaps. Subjects, doubtful. Conley could not betray them.

The Waiting Room

2006-10-17T21:28:00.000-07:00

Waiting was the worst part. The chairs had crooked legs. You wouldn't know it but someone checked them every night. Made sure they were sufficiently uneven, unthreading one a few turns. That was a whole job. So was Doorknob Greaser. The staff all wore gloves for a reason.

The waiting room was as inhospitable as the Sahara. The waiting room was a masterpiece. An hour in the waiting room felt like five. Five crooked hours with nothing to do but watch the clock that hadn't worked in years. Truthfully, it hadn't ever worked. Before they installed it, they deactivated it. Then there was the plant. Clients—as they were patronizingly called, officially-speaking—could content themselves with watching the leaves cling to life. Crisp, withered casualties speckled the floor around the pot. It leaked water. A pale brown stain spread out from the pot and left a loathsome flim, a scum the color of dried blood. The stronger-willed in the waiting room could use the stain as a springboard: How long had it been there, Who would clean it up, Didn't that look a little like Florida? But even the strong-willed didn't last long. A few hours, maybe.

Legend has it that one tenacious old crone stayed all day once, then went home and died in her sleep. No one was surprised to hear that. They didn't care one way or the other. The waiting room ground on, flattening everything in its path. Just the way the waiting room was. You couldn't fault it for that. No one faults the shark for its appetites. No one worth taking seriously.

Last year, someone introduced a buzzing hum into the waiting room. The staff thought it was working out well. It kept clients uneasy. They looked around, shifted on their sticky chairs. They tried to zero in on the sound. But it moved. That was the brilliant part. A computer turned micro-speakers off and on randomly.

So Jealous

2006-10-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

She couldn't say it out loud or even quietly in her mind's corridors and sealed rooms. She was so jealous of Caitlyn she sometimes couldn't be in the same small space with her. A car. The kitchen. The porch. No one knew she felt that way. She hoped no one knew she felt that way. She had told herself when she was a girl that it would be different one day when she had a daughter of her own.

Her mother hadn't understood anything. He mother had sailed through her own life six inches above the ground. She left no tracks. When her mother had landed in adulthood, she was unscathed. She knew nothing of her blindfolded journey. She was an incompetent mother. Childhood was lost in the fog of her near-perfect amnesia. She never said, "When I was a girl" or "Oh, I remember what that was like," some hurt, some pang of regret. Because her mother didn’t remember.

So she had told herself many times how things would be different. She imagined long talks about the things that can flatten a child's outlook and weigh on her shoulders. The low, muttering magic that can unlock unwelcome places inside. The quicksand. She saw herself in the future as a wise mother, of infinite patience and empathy. She would learn from her own mistakes and her mother's. But almost as soon as Caitlyn was born, she felt things whose shape she didn't like. Caitlyn had a sunny hand at her back. She was born with it.

Caitlyn didn't suffer. Caitlyn had a reflex for landing on her feet. Caitlyn didn't need help from anyone. Caitlyn loved learning, on her own. Setbacks thrilled her, because she felt this was life talking back. Occasionally she would ask her mother for her opinion, or some token of her girlhood. But she didn't need it. She would never say it out loud, but Caitlyn almost pitied her own mother.

Murmuring

2006-10-04T00:42:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd heard it several times before, only at night, and last night, I heard it for sure. Not whispering, really, but murmuring. Low, wordless, and—from my vantage point—unbroken. A steady stream of distinctly human sounds.

The thing that makes the hairs on my arms stand erect is that I heard it coming from my basement. I was in the bathroom. My aging bladder had gotten me up at four o'clock again—its latest trick—and when I turned the tap off after washing my hands, I heard it. There was no mistaking it this time. Those were human voices, heard through the bones and skin of the house. I couldn't make out any words, and as I walked slowly around the room, to find a spot where I could hear better, my heartbeat filling my ears, something in the floor creaked and the murmuring stopped. I stood, hands dripping like water clocks, and a few minutes later the sound returned. Someone was in the basement. Someone was living there, murmuring. I was afraid to move. I was afraid to leave the bathroom. I was afraid to leave Mary alone in bed, soft and sleeping and helpless. I was trapped. My feet were lead weights.

Finally, after two or three hour-long minutes, my hands still wet, my heart still jumping up and down in my chest, I left the bathroom noisily. The murmuring people already knew I was up here. There was no reason they had to know I knew they were down there.

I went into the bedroom and shut and locked the door behind me quickly. I had to grab Kong roughly by the scruff and drag her back inside with us. And then I fell into bed and strained for the murmuring until I drifted into a murky sleep a couple hours later.

Dandy

2006-10-02T21:08:00.000-07:00

Place is falling hard, falling apart. The kids, they come up to the front door, want to know can they play with Dandy? Dandy all supersonic tail making a blur of the air. Stirring it up like a pot of honey. They stroll right up on that busted-up brick walkway, none of them offered to fix it ever. They could have, too. Would have taken them a couple hours, they all worked on it together. They don’t have bad backs. But they don't care about any of that.

Place needs paint, too. I get up on a ladder, I'm liable to fall and break my head open. Be a paint can spilling out Royal Sky and my head spilling out my brains. Do the kids care about that? They do not. Not one lick. And what about the window I know they broke with their football or soccer ball or frisbee plate or what have you? They never said nothing about it. None of them did.

And still they want to borrow my dog for a run in the park. Old pig in dog's clothing needs it, I can't deny that. I say okay, let me get the leash 'cause you got to have the leash. But it's only for the old fat dog's sake. Dandy needs it, I know that. He's hanging low. He's scraping by, just. Got to get some air into his lungs. Got to let him stretch his legs. All he's doing in here is eating my house down to the pit. Breathing on me.

This one little kid, he's down with his hands on his knees, looking in at Dandy through the screen. This one can't wait to take that one out for a run. Would it kill them to help out around the place once in a while? I bend down and hear it in my back and hook the leash onto Dandy's collar. And open up the screen and give the kid the leash. Take him. And don't you forget to bring him back.

Carlos

2006-10-02T00:14:00.000-07:00

The whole place stank, to hear Carlos tell it. Roaches as big as your thumb. They'll fight you for the last chicken leg. He thought he was being funny. Which was better than him trying to be tough. Every time I went over there I wound up thinking if the place is awful why does he still live here?

This had been going on for over three years, him complaining about the apartment and the neighborhood he was forced by God to live in. Or else, why else would he be living there? He talked like this was his cross to bear. Like he was putting in the time. The penance. Paying a debt. But he loved it. Made him sag with real style. Place wasn't clean, that was true. And at least part of that was Carlos, and not God. I mean, was God supposed to wash the dishes instead of piling them in showy stacks on the arm of the sofa? So I'm not saying it was a bed of roses and hundred dollar bills, because it wasn't, but he could have moved out.

Connie had offered to give him a room, pretty reasonable, for as long as he liked. Connie was lonely and had not one but two extra rooms he was always trying to rent out. Not a bad place. Had a good-size tree in back, which he claimed produced edible fruit. But Carlos would have to leave his personal hell with the dirty dishes balanced on the arm of the sofa, so try competing with that. Plus there was Connie's sister living there. Unmarried, nothing too rough to look at, so I didn't understand where Carlos was coming from at all.

Still, every time, it was Do you believe this place? and See what I have to put up with? He was in his element, battling it out with the roaches for control of the remote every night. Maybe he thought it excused the shitty way he treated everyone.

The Pitchman

2006-10-01T00:09:00.000-07:00

This invention was supposed to change everything. Whatever you wanted changed, it would change it. You didn't want something changed, it wouldn't even touch it. This is what The Pitchman said. He called himself The Pitchman. Always put his hands around what he said, like he was framing it for your memory. Like it deserved its own box in your head. So when (hands up, framing it for eternity) The Pitchman told you about (hands) The Product, you listened. This was important. This was worth remembering. And it was going to change everything.

Someone raised a hand in the back row. Guy in a turtleneck. Sandy brown hair coming over his bulging collar. The Pitchman points to him and click-clicks with his fingers in the shape of a friendly gun. Everything about The Pitchman is friendly. He drives friendly. He sleeps friendly. Takes a leak friendly, is a good bet. The guy in the turtleneck says, from right where he's sitting, doesn't stand so everyone up front—who got to the auditorium on time—“How will this address matters of our worsening environment?”

The Pitchman smiled. He loved that question. He loved the guy who asked it. And he loved the turtleneck he was wearing. The Pitchman loved everything. "I am so tickled you asked that!" And, you know, he looked like something, like, maybe an elf or a little penguin, was tickling him right there. He wanted to laugh, but it was all too serious for that. But he looked happy.

Folding chairs squeaked against the linoleum. The Pitchman was working up to the something and people were shifting around to see it. “The Product” (make a snapshot of that for your mind to enjoy for years to come) “was inspired by that very” (hands) “predicament!” His voice rose up to “predicament” and took everyone's spirits with it. The guy in the turtleneck felt like he was a key player in a very important moment.

The Shop Window

2006-08-13T00:54:00.000-07:00

Their shop window. All washed like that, every damn day. With the ladder. It made me sick. It wasn't good enough to hire the kid to come by on Fridays with his bucket. No, they had to wash that window every single damn day. God forbid someone should come to stare at all that crap and find a smudge on the window.

I hated him and his little round glasses so much. I'd go out there after closing—I mean, after I closed, late, nine o'clock, not after he closed—and smudge his damn window up myself. Drag my hand across it. Once, after I watched him drive his little sedan away, I reached up and patted the window with a banana peel I found in the gutter. Oh, he must have wondered about that the next day, up on his ladder, making everything just-so and perfect. Every day. He should thank me. Giving him something to do up there.

I thought the kid was fine. What's the big deal. Spread it around, that's what I say. Ten bucks a month doesn't sound like too much to me. Kid's got initiative, but Mr. Morton's Fine Jewelry wouldn't know anything about that. All he knows is wash-the-window, wash-the-window. I can see him from behind the counter, every day, noon.

I'm ready to grab a bite at noon. That's what people do at noon, or hadn't you noticed, Mr. Up-on-a-ladder? I have to wait 'til he's done. His window's right between me and Oscar's, where I go, so I have to wait. I'm not walking past him when he's up there. Him and his little lift-his-cap-up when you pass by. The kid always did right by me. And my window's bigger. But every night, I showed him. He wants to climb that ladder every day, and look down on all of us, that's fine by me. I'll give him something to clean up.

Hummingbird

2006-08-13T00:02:00.000-07:00

She didn't move. She didn't talk. She didn't do anything. Just sat there. All the parents said things about psychiatric malfunctions, or something. They said Don't tease her, and Leave her alone, and If I ever catch you... But they did tease her.

She never knew it, even though they did it right in front of her face, but they did it just in case. Just in case she really could hear them saying Retard and Crazy Girl and Lump. She didn't go to school anymore, of course. She hadn't gone since the second grade, and that was eight years ago. She just sat on the porch, or on her bed, or at the table, wearing whatever her mother dressed her in that day. Whenever the neighborhood boys would walk by, they were sure to say something mean. If it wasn't about her clothes, it was her hair. Or her eyes, which they always found something wrong with.

They knew someone was inside. They didn't think of her as, say, furniture, like the porch swing she sat on when the weather was fair. She never moved on it, though the temptation to swing back and forth should be a natural and unavoidable thing, but they still knew someone was inside. Maybe they just hoped, because it gave their words a sting. Otherwise, it was just them and the whole big world they didn't understand, the world they were told every day they weren't ready for. More ready than the Lump, they could say. More ready than her. She doesn't even move.

But that's the thing. On the outside she didn't move, but inside, where no one saw, she was a hummingbird. She was flying rings around the world. Not ready for the world—she had already seen every secret the world held dear, and she was ready for more.

The Well

2006-08-12T23:49:00.000-07:00

We found it when we were digging a well for the Briers. We weren't more than three feet down when my shovel hit something hard and brittle. We heard a snap. JP dropped to his knees and reached in like he was hauling up crab pots. He opened his hand and there was a human rib in it. He held it like you’d hold a robin’s egg. We looked at each other with eyes like cups. Down in the hole was a man. He'd been in there a long time, by the looks.

He was all bones. I said something about the police, and JP said this wasn’t exactly what you'd call an emergency situation. Man must have been dead twenty years. Mouth open to the world. All his spaces filled up with dirt. I could see all the bones of his wrist. Everything was still there. Except a couple ribs, courtesy of us.

We didn't know what to do. The Briers would be furious. Anything that slowed down work made them furious. A three-day rain last year had Mr. Brier yelling and cursing and calling us cowards. You can't explain that painting fences in the rain is a poor idea. So we made a big show, loading up cans of paint and brushes. We ended up sleeping in the truck, under the trees.

So this. This would send Brier over the edge. But how could we keep quiet about it? I thought maybe we could phone it in anonymously, but JP pointed out that no one but us would have been up there to find him. He was right. Brier be damned, we had to tell someone. He could still have his people waiting on him, watching windows and trying to hold back the clock.

What Still Works

2006-06-18T14:01:00.000-07:00

The list is bigger than all my midnight pains suggest. My inventory of efficiency—of success!—is extensive. My other leg is fine. No tenderness, full range of motion: a shining example of the body’s golden design. My temples do not ache. All but three of my teeth are sound. My hearing—not counting the higher frequencies—is excellent. My sense of smell has dulled recently, but my sense of touch has never been keener. Even grit in my shoe triggers temblors of irritation.

The catalog of working parts is not limited to my person, either. Every light bulb in the house still works. Three fourths of all chairs in the house have even legs and do not rock. The front door does not squeak. (The back door, just a little.) Faucet drips are minimal. The roof does not leak. My paranoia, my suspicions, my superstitions (notably problems associated with being able to see inside the house from the street) are all functional. The many fears, of headlights, searchlights, the blinking lights of planes—the many fears are robust.

Words still work. Numbers still work. Pictures… Well, can anything kill a picture? The Image stands atop the mountain peaks, all its flags fluttering. Emotions work. Ever since they first blossomed inside lizard brains, emotions have churned and spoken with many voices, rude and gentle, conniving and cajoling. (Those puppetmasters!)

Still, let us not forget the many—shall we say—issues facing us. Apart from the rib, the wrist, the demonic finger, and the toe, the headache and the nausea: cowlicks, warts, pimples, cricks, cramps, blisters, and rashes. An eyelid that twitches. A sore ankle (and even sorer shin). A touch of tinnitus. A hangnail. One abscess (underneath the tongue). Foul dreams (note: no insomnia). Assorted twinges and pangs. The eternal questions: Is it a stabbing pain? A dull throb? Yes and yes.

James R. Terry's Cameras

2006-05-15T22:08:00.000-07:00

They were all there, in the "furnace of the world," as the papers had started calling it, and they were getting annoyed with James R. Terry's cameras. First, this was supposed to be a scientific trip, not a photo shoot. Everywhere you turned, there was Terry with his cameras, and his direction. "Can you just walk up that ridge again?" and "Can I get you to sort of crouch right there, with the smoke coming up behind you?"

It was easy to be annoyed with him. Him and his thin mustache. No one had caught him at it, but he had to spend some time every couple days in front of a mirror with tweezers, or whatever. He was underfoot. And he wouldn't carry any supplies. Any trip supplies. He always his hands full with camera stuff in bags.

But the thing that got to everyone, even if they weren't totally aware of it, was what the cameras implied: someone would be seeing these pictures. Sometime. Later. When they wouldn't be able to explain for themselves what they had seen. He was writing their epitaph, one click and flash at a time. That was unsettling.

All around them, volcanoes stirred. The air was filled with plumes. They had meters to tell them when the concentration of poison in the air was too much. In other words, they were all walking through poison every day. The question was, Is there too much poison today? This was the kind of thing that each man needed his mind on. It was unpleasant, but distraction could kill faster than sulfur in the air. And James Terry's cameras were a distraction, a reminder that someone might need to tell their story for them, that they would unable to. And he wouldn't let anyone forget that.

Underground

2006-05-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

He couldn't lay any lower. He couldn't go any deeper underground without being dead and buried. He didn't even remember everything he had done. Telling lies was so natural now he didn't even know he was doing it. He didn't talk to people very much anymore, but when he did he was always Cal, never Peter. The first month he'd felt self-conscious every time he introduced himself. He thought he was giving himself away with a look or a twitch. But no one thought twice. Not too many people moved from Chicago (where he said he was from) to Deer Tree, Idaho, but this Cal was a nice enough sort, they thought.

The Sixties had pushed him here, and he tunneled all the way from the University of Texas. It started out exciting. Pickets and protests and occupations. They all had bandanas over their faces and he thought he was a hero. He ate brown rice for dinner.

He had a college student's mental flexibility, so when Janice (was that even her name?) had suggested that they free the animals in the bio building, he thought that was a fine idea. It didn't hurt Janice's case that she wore tight sweaters, and had fine, long legs. Peter was in. And the next night, four of them went to Borden Hall, smashed their way in, and Peter put a bullet through a security guard's forehead.

He left that night, for Oklahoma first. Buddy from high school went there. And then it was one friend-of-a-friend's floor after another until the wind blew him to Deer Tree. At first he thought they'd be after him. He'd read the papers. Nothing in the Upper County Reader, so he'd drive into Coeur d'Alene to read the New York Times. He didn't exist. No one was looking for him. His face had been covered the whole time, and no one knew his name. Then paranoia settled over his mind like insecticide.

Big Bear

2006-04-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

The headphones made Michael's head feel funny. Lopsided. Like he didn't know how to sit still anymore. But he did. He wasn't a baby. He was a big boy. Almost six and a half and getting bigger every day. His mom said he was her "big bear." But then how come this man in the long white coat kept calling him "little man"? Didn't he know?

On the other side of the glass, the man worked some machine and then looked in at Michael. The man's face had reflections on it. His face was lit up by the lights on his side of the glass. His face looked like a TV almost, with all the lights moving across it. Michael heard a "pip" in his headphones. Then nothing, then another pip, a higher one. That time he remembered to raise his hand. The man on the other side of the glass made a face like Michael had done something wrong. Another pip, hand goes up. Then nothing, then another pip, and the hand in the air.

The man leaned forward so his head almost bumped the glass. His voice was in the headphones. "Okay, little man, that's great! But remember what we said before? Only raise your hand when you hear a beep, right?" Michael nodded. "But I did hear beeps." The man leaned forward again. "Super. Okay, Michael, that's super. Just a little more to go."

The man looked mad. But Michael had done everything just like he said. Big Bear wasn't a bad bear. He didn't hit, and when you said he had to go to bed, he did. Every time. Another beep, higher. Michael didn't raise his hand because he thought he wasn't supposed to. Then another beep, higher, quieter, and Michael didn't raise his hand again, but he wanted to. When he heard another beep, quieter and higher than any of them so far, the faraway squeaks of faraway mice, he raised his hand. Halfway. The man's voice was in the headphones again. "Thank you. We're done. Please wait until we get you." He was mad.

Devil

2006-03-26T19:53:00.000-08:00

Was this the same cat? The same cat who'd hiss and show its teeth every time Beth went near it, or even held one finger out for inspection and detente? It was hard to believe. But there was the copper burst around the right eye, and the mustache. This was Devil.

Only now, Beth had Devil in her arms, and the cat wasn't fighting for its life. She was lying there, actually folding herself into Beth's arms. A drowsy infant. An angel. Beth sat on the green painted steps out front. I peeked past the curtains and just watched them, Beth rocking Devil, and I know you can't see into an animal's mind, but it sure as hell looked like Devil was enjoying the attention. Like she was drinking it in and would let herself be lullabied out there on the steps. For the world to see. For the other cats to see.

And it was great. But it was also… I don't know. Not wrong, really. But like some part of the world had been squeezed down and molded to fit into our convenience. I'll bet she was purring. She looks so peaceful. Isn't that what new parents say about their sleeping babies?

Beth had a way of going a little overboard at times, treating our dog Rudolph and our cat Moonie like children. Cooing to them. Talking to them in baby-talk. Making sure the blankets they liked to sleep on were straight and smoothed and just right. And if they slept together, which they did so rarely it was remarkable, Beth would flush with pride. "Look at my babies" she'd say barely above a whisper. "Quiet—don't wake them." The first few times, she took their picture, and she would actually show people that picture.

The Tourist

2006-03-25T22:36:00.000-08:00

I stood on the corner and my hat really did fly off my head. No one told me the bus drivers would drive like that here. The guide books said nothing on that subject. "Tipping is not mandatory," they counseled. "Spitting in public is highly inappropriate," they scolded. But when it came to the bus drivers: silence. I thought about getting on the next one just so I could be on the other side of the onslaught for once. Maybe that could have given me a chance to catch my breath.

Since the plane had landed, I had been in the middle of a tornado. The chattering I couldn't crack was a ceaseless gust. My practice with the tapes wasn't going to get me very far. The first person I talked to, a kindly grandmother-type with a face like a big pink sofa cushion, had hurried away, shooing her grandchildren ahead of her. Not a good sign. By studying my traveler's phrasebook, I was able to decipher the bigger, more imposing signs inside the terminal. "Exit" and "Taxis."

I guessed that the one ubiquitous sign—a blue rectangle with white script—said "Please smoke cigarettes freely." A haze inside the airport softened and coated everything with an invisible film. Maybe the grandmother had been offended that I hadn't offered her wee ones cigarettes.

My map was wilting like a leaf, and I was hardly holding up any better. I had worried the poor thing ever since the plane took off eleven hours ago. I was going to find my way through force of will, if not knowledge and organization. If I stared hard enough, arrows would light up and point the way. My eyes felt like they were shrinking in my head, compressed into little blue pearls. I kept up my tourist's jog along the street, watching out for buses—I could identify them by the gathering roar that preceded them. My traveler's checks were weighing me down. I was hungry. I could not have been more lost. A big cheery sign looked like it might be saying, "Come in here and have a bite," so I did. The menu was a tossed salad of mysteries and secrets and I pointed to a few things when the waiter came to me and I hoped for the very, very best they had.

Drum and Bass

2006-03-25T22:23:00.000-08:00

He blew down Litzer with those Carters blazing. They were pumping out bass by the pound. He was an aircraft carrier he was so heavy. He was the center of the world, man, and the sound flowed from him like lava. He was hot. He was on fire. He was heavy. He felt it boom through the steering wheel. You're not careful, the sound would buck you right out the sunroof. Buck you out like a bull with a migraine.

Hang on tight, we're taking a left onto Fearing, and he was sailing. The steering wheel glided through his fingers like wind through a screen door. This was the best part, when the bass drum and the bass duked it out, and he felt it through the soles of the Hollies he was wearing tonight. The baby blues with the white trim. Hot. And cold, both. He was a nuclear ice cube. He could have a body in the trunk, and they would have been dancing back there. He was the party. And the party was rolling on, spilling like love from a volcano up and down Fearing.

He passed little people in front of Racquel's, and they looked up at him with love in their eyes and they felt the vibration in his wake. Their clothes and their hair drawn to him in the vacuum he made. He was so fast he sucked the air out and then he sucked out what was left. He wanted it all. It was all his.

Everything was brown with his Larsens. They mellowed everything out to a golden glow. The streetlights, tail-lights, traffic lights, all quietly mellowly goldenly brown and smooth. Coca-cola. Sweet honey. The world parted when it saw him coming and closed up behind, folding him in its honeyed embrace. He rolled on. And he was the party.

Train Coming

2006-03-03T22:56:00.000-08:00

Train coming. That's what they said, those guys who pedaled around selling secrets. It was like the guys selling pills. What would you get? A good night's sleep with sepia dreams, or a crushing headache? You'd never know until you forked over the trade. Up to you. Same with the news boys, those dirty gossips. Train coming. One guy from Ill—what the ghosts used to call Philadelphia—bought the word and spread it out, like tossing seeds from a bag. Some people want to believe so much, it pushes their eyes wide open.

Train coming. Coming from where? Going to where? No point in asking. No one knew. The news boys could have heard from someone farther out, just trading down the chain. They were right about the guys from the lab. Trucks showed up just when they said they would. Maybe this train business was for real. Still, the details were a little bare. "Train coming. Day after tomorrow." That was it. No times or anything. Not that you'd expect more.

There were still a few clocks here and there, but most people I knew looked funny at guys who kept them. You know those eccentrics? People who collect whatever? Birdbaths or umbrellas? You know what those things are? These guys and their clocks, same thing. No one talked about time anymore. Numbers weren’t the currency in those days. Everything moved slow. The air was fragile and resisted all attempts at order. Clocks, calendars. No one cared about things like that anymore.

Train coming. I didn’t want to get sucked into that whole mess, that quicksand. People learned to live right here right now. It took practice. Even after it was automatic, you could still feel tomorrows tugging at you. And what did that get you? But the hell else am I going to do? Watch the flies blurring the air outside my window? I went to the station. Tracks were still there. Had never seen a train come by. Thought I heard one once.

The Mine

2006-02-02T22:47:00.000-08:00

They all used to look at the mountain and the mine carved into its belly as if it were a fat old man with money stashed all over the place. A greedy captain of industry who couldn't understand the value of sharing, of charity, of a helping hand. That was a long time ago. Before Linder and Hare and Bingham died. They went in, winking sunshine at their backs, and they never returned.

After four days, their absence had decayed, in everyone's mind, to death. Someone, probably Chasen, tied a black rag to the crossbeam at the gently sloping entrance. No one said a word. No one had to. And no one looked at the mountain the same way. This was no overstuffed baron of wealth, silver ballooning his pockets like sacks of apples. This mountain had to work for every penny, and so did they.

They stopped singing, when they went in and came out, also. Kirby stopped making up filthy words to go with the high-spirited songs of the day. With no "One-Way Mirror" or "The Lady in the Missing Dress" to shout into the darkness, the mine became smaller and pressing, a smothering blanket.

Mr. Field entertained absurd ideas that he couldn't reveal to anyone about Linder, Hare, and Bingham still alive. Maybe they swam in underground pools. Maybe they developed a keen sense of touch. Maybe they would live down there to the age of one hundred. He knew those things weren't true. He just feared the day one of the men came across them and had to drag them up. He didn't want to see their black faces and black mouths and imagine their gaping eyes, imagine their last furious breaths, their hands whittled into claws. So he tried harder to imagine them in their pools, feasting on fish, and making up songs that kept them laughing through their eternal night.

Dog in a Cage

2006-01-29T22:12:00.000-08:00

They called him dangerous. And wild. And said watch out, you don't know when he's liable to turn on you. He wasn't wild. Or dangerous. And he only ever turned on anyone that one time, and he paid for it, and he learned his lesson. He had been like a dog in a cage poked with sticks until he exploded. Poke anyone with sticks long enough, and they'll blow up. Turn into something else. Just a matter of how long you poked, and did you use the right sticks?

For Jimmy it was his big brother Will. That was the only stick his stepdad had needed. Will ran away five years ago, and all they'd heard from him since was one phone call to his old girlfriend. He called her on Christmas the year after he left. Said Merry Christmas and he still loved her. Jimmy's stepdad hated Will. For leaving. For being unbendable. For working out from under his thumb. Will was an iron bar Mr. Stepdad couldn't break, bend, or budge. He drove him away. Everyone knew it. But he kept at Jimmy about it. Your brother this. Your brother that. Your brother, probably queer. Your brother, couldn't take living with you. This is all your fault. Day and night. He never let up with that stuff. When he drank, which was most of the time, it was worse. His eyes would light up like tail lights, red and brittle.

Jimmy's mom was no help to anyone. She was gone to two different jobs, and probably two different men, too. If she knew what was happening at home, she didn't say anything about it. So it was Jimmy and the stepdad. Jimmy more alone than if he'd been by himself. Always thinking about Will. Worrying about him too. Will was a good kid, but not the toughest nut on the tree. Jimmy neither.

He cracked, his shell split down the middle, and he attacked old stepdad with a chair. Bought himself three years in juvie, and when he came out just last month, everyone started up with the dangerous and wild talk. History's written by the survivor. And Mr. Stepdad had survived the chair with nothing more than two teeth out and a scar on his forehead in the shape of a fish hook.

Biography

2006-01-18T00:08:00.000-08:00

He knew nothing. About everything. Too lazy to lie, he didn’t bother making excuses. There was no misunderstanding to blame. No bad reception, crossed wires, or background noise. No dozing middleman. There was only him. Him and the vast, sterile canyon where his knowledge should have been.

His biography would have read like a pamphlet on how not to live to be 39 years old. The graphic design would have been minimal, drawn from presets and templates mostly. School, school, another school, a larger school. He read the books he was told to read, grasping only the most superficial elements. His sense of literature was like that of someone who had never been above the second floor of any structure. How things fit together, how one thing informed something else with which it enjoyed no apparent connection. These things were beyond him. That this river wound, eventually, around a mountain, and emptied into an ocean. No. Too far removed. Too big. Too…

Names, he remembered. Situations in which he encountered names, he could also remember. But the important things—why he should care, the webs of people he encountered. The important things dripped away, down the many drains his ignorance bore around him. He understood the rules, or thought he did. He understood money intimately. Or thought he did. Money’s role in acquiring this or that. Yes, of course. Money’s role in shaping and guiding and manifesting people’s beliefs and actions. No, not at all.

He had friends. Or recurring acquaintances, more like. Small talk. Going for drinks. Hanging out. Everything fit into one of these small bottles arranged by someone else on shelves constructed by someone else. He was not unintelligent. Just spectacularly uneducated. Uneducable. He had tastes, favored this style over that one. He commanded opinions on many, hundreds, of topics. He knew nothing about them all.

Prison Junk

2006-01-17T23:21:00.000-08:00

When Fairley told me what he had done, I got sick. With the phone falling from my ear, I gagged and bucked and thought I'd puke right on the dining room floor. It took me a few seconds to get myself together. Get the acid out of my mouth. Get the phone back to my ear. The wave rolled over me and I started putting two and two together. It wasn't Saturday morning, between ten and ten-thirty, Fairley's usual time calling collect from prison.

I should have known something was up as soon as the phone rang. Sunday at nine. At night. He was way off. He was out. Way out. As in Out. As in Broke Out. I didn't even want him calling me when he was holed up. I didn't even want to be connected to him by a phone call. And now. Now they'd trace him through me. I was the weak link here, not including the big rotting weak link inside Fairley's moth-eaten brain. Breaking out, from Durand? With two months left on your state nickel? That homemade prison junk had finally chewed away the wrong part of his brain. Rat poison will do that.

My mind was drowning in possibilities, and I swear I saw myself in leg irons, which they do still use up at Durand. I saw them, on one of the rare occasions I visited Fairley there. A guy was being forced down the hall, hobbled by ancient, historical metal cuffs around his ankles. I looked back around to the glass, the glass with the machined perforations, and waited for Fairley to make his grand entrance. A door slammed somewhere at the end of a nameless corridor and I felt it in my spine. It rippled through me like a shockwave, and I knew this was definitely the last time I was ever visiting Fairley again. Last time I was visiting anyone on the inside.

I didn't want to be talking to him right then. I thought about just hanging up. But who knew what he'd do to me then? He knew where I was. And he knew people who could find me no matter where I went or how I changed. All I knew was he was somewhere between Durand and here, and he said he wasn't alone.

The Pusher

2006-01-16T22:15:00.000-08:00

Menlo was having trouble breathing. A large man with big arms was leaning on his chest. Leaning hard, putting everything he had into it. His shoulders rippled and the tension stood out along his jawline in wriggling tremors. The man wore a patterned vest over a broad expanse of bare chest. An earring winked from one ear. He was bald. Completely bald—shiningly so—as though he was inhospitable to hair and all the happier for it.

He had been there since the night before, pushing on Menlo's chest so hard it was all Menlo could do to gasp pitifully. He thought about calling an ambulance. Or at least calling in to work. But what would he say? "A large man is pushing on my chest really, really hard." He knew how that would sound. Menlo wasn't a drinker, but did anyone at Deerwald, Rimmy, and Traff know that? When they heard about the man, they'd sigh and put the phone back down and put an indelible black mark next to Menlo's name in the company register.

So it was just Menlo and the chest-pusher. He shifted his position to work some different pushing muscles and Menlo started seeing spots. The pressing was pressing the oxygen right out of him. Quick sips of air—that's all he could manage with this man leaning against him this way. The man didn't talk. He kept up a steady grunt of exertion, but no conversation. No explanation. No "I'm sorry about this." Nothing. Just the pressure and the grunting like a whining motor as he pressed against Menlo's chest, his knuckles whitening and his wrists stiffening up. He lifted one hand and cranked it around in a circle to wring out the cramp. Then he got back to work.

Menlo craned his neck, to see around the bulk of the man and into the kitchen, to the happy, round clock on the wall. He was very late.

Now is the Time

2005-12-17T14:06:00.000-08:00

The stars were tugging at him. They had lined themselves up just so while he slept and today was the day. For once, life was going to work properly for him today. Things were going to happen today. Big things. Auspicious things. Things he'd remember forever. His spine lay straighter. His blood flowed with purpose. All he felt was exhausted. He still had no idea what the universe had paved the way for.

He dragged himself into the bathroom as though this was any other morning. Any other morning! Vast scattered galaxies had made provisions for him, for this day. Sun spots, volcanoes on Jupiter, and the rings around Saturn had all adjusted accordingly. This was the most unordinary Monday in the history of time. He found his teeth with his toothbrush and scraped and ground the long hot night from his mouth. His head was in the clouds. His body was...

He looked at himself in the mirror. He didn't think he looked too good. A crease ran from one eye to the corner of his mouth. His left eye. No, his right eye. On his right as he looked in the mirror. So that would make it his... He almost fell asleep standing in front of the mirror. He remembered to spit out the toothpaste. The universe couldn't hold this position for long. Couldn't hold open this window of opportunity for more than a few minutes. Wonderful things were ready to happen, but he'd have to wake up first.

He orbited from the bathroom and on into the kitchen. A star faded and fell, a million million miles away. The heavens rotated and clicked back into their normal position. The moment was gone. He realized he'd been staring at the coffee machine for a solid minute.

The Last Days of GumCo

2005-12-17T14:02:00.000-08:00

It took him about a week to figure out that, if he stuck his arm all the way through the space where the tall, skinny window used to be, and flicked his wrist just right, he could make an orange on the end of a string land on what used to be Miss Tinley's buzzer, and let himself in the building.

That whole week while he tried to buzz himself in—Ms. Tinley having vanished along with everyone else—he drew no salary. It wouldn't have been right, getting paid for loafing all day, one arm jammed into the place where those tall, skinny windows used to be outside the entrance to GumCo. When he finally coaxed the orange onto the buzzer—he had really gotten quite good at it, rather like throwing a football or pitching a baseball, only it was an orange far past eating—the latch on the main door clicked open, and he laughed.

He hadn't felt that much relief since closing the Sweet Mart account. (No one—not even he—believed a retail chain stocking nothing but candies and gums would succeed, but until it folded, it would be stocking GumCo gums exclusively! He had whooped with joy, right there on the fourth floor!) And this, this modest little click, was just as powerful.

He didn't dare rig the buzzer (what if trespassers discovered they had free access, night or day to the GumCo building?), but he had acquired a real knack for the somewhat athletic technique of long-distance buzzer buzzing. He tried to carry on, amid the quiet and the emptiness. Day after day, he was the only person there. And that's no exaggeration. A few years ago, when an outbreak of flu and a four-day holiday weekend conspired to thin out the ranks of GumCo employees on the premises, he had called Muriel and told her—morbidly, she said when he got home that night—that it had been a graveyard in there. That was nothing. Now, from 8:50 until 5:00, he was the only person at GumCo. Phones rang and appointments came and went, unacknowledged. He tried to carry on.

On the Other Side

2005-10-23T20:28:00.000-07:00

Car after car. Window after window. It’s raining. My sign is soggy. I borrowed the marker from Lenny. His kind of marker doesn’t run in the rain. Tricks of the trade. “Please HELP,” my sign says. “no amount too small.” I shaved today. I combed my hair today. I’m standing straight today. People give more when they think you need it less. They’re afraid of people who need too much. They think people who need are wild. Think they’re exiles. Me, I wasn’t expelled. I ran. Steps ahead of the wave that rose above me.

When the light changes to red, I scan the line for drivers’ eyes. Most drivers stare straight ahead, pretend to be preoccupied. Some guys, they’ll pace around, approach passenger-side windows, even knock them with a knuckle. Make rolling-down-the-window motions. I don’t do that. I used to tell myself I was too polite for that. Too dignified for confrontation. I know the truth now and it’s all I can do to tamp it down, squeeze it into a pellet that settles next to my hunger, my thirst, and my fears about where I’ll sleep tonight. The truth is I’m ashamed. Ashamed to ask. To be hungry. To need.

A driver leans over to roll down the passenger-side window. He flips a bill back and forth to attract my attention. I walk over. “Here you go,” he says. A man about my age. But on the other side. I take the money. “Thanks a lot,” I say. I don’t like belaboring it, doing some kind of master-slave routine. I asked. He answered.

I’ve been offered coins, bills, food, and work. And insults. And sneers. And middle fingers. And garbage in a bag. And coffee splashed from a paper cup. And money held out like bait and taken away. And drivers leaning on the horn to scold me or frighten me. When I wake up in the morning and pull on my coat, I’m already beat. I grab my sign and hike to my spot and try not to look like I need too much. Tricks of the trade.

Goggles

2005-10-21T13:22:00.000-07:00

The goggles weren't working. He didn't feel more energized or more alive. His outlook had not “brightened to an almost unbelievable degree.” The tiny instruction manual, which had initially inspired confidence by its very slimness, was now dog-eared after vain attempts to find some information in it. The straps were adjusted properly. He cleaned the faces of the goggles with a mild solution of dishwashing soap and water. He discontinued use for twenty-four hours.

He had them on again, and he only felt underwater. The goggles created pressure around his eyes and he felt like he was submerged in liquid. This was not satisfactory. Four easy payments of $29.99 down the drain.

The sales contract specified that he could return his Bio-Enhanced Goggles for a refund only in the event of material defect. And they looked to be sound. No cracks in the plastic casing. No splits in the webbing. They were sound; they just didn't work. Feeling underwater, he sorted some mail, tidied up a bit. He saw himself in the round base of a lamp and did look... different. Distinguished. The goggles were smart, with their pattern of raised "Energy Collector" dots around the faceplate, and the molded nose armature. He had no complaints on that score. And for a while, a few minutes, the light chores were even lighter. He felt more fluid, as though he were gliding through space with water-borne grace. A sinuous, tendrilled thing, at home in a vast mystery. Maybe they were working after all.

He ran to the bedroom and fumbled through the packing materials. Through the cardboard box emblazoned with the legend "Feel more alive! Feel more energized! Feel more relaxed!" He did feel more relaxed. He was more at home in himself than he had been for years. Was it the patented refraction lenses? Or was it the space-age aura magnifiers? He didn't know and he didn't care! Leave that to the bookish scientists! He was free! He was alive!

The Wrong Party

2005-09-23T23:14:00.000-07:00

“Sign it,” he said. That was the first he had said to me since the beating. The beating from him. The others kept beating me. I had ceased to be human by this point. I was treated as an animal, a creature, a living machine. My bones were theirs to break, my skin theirs to defile. I had no native authority left, not even over my own person. My human inheritance was spent, my history annulled. The story of my whens and whos was unwritten. How did this thing that used to be me come to be? I was forgetting.

The food, when it came, was a kind of porridge. Rice, wheat, I don’t know. At first, every third day or so, a piece of fish or prawn or fowl. And at first, I ate eagerly. Would you believe I felt gratitude? Gratitude to be treated as someone deserving. Then after the beatings began, and they still gave me meat, I was sickened by it. For I had become that meat. I was the beast of burden, the yoked and lashed, the chained and whipped. I was in ruins.

I became a brother to them all, to all those who must—what choice is given them?—submit. The beetles who traced the cracks in the walls, my brothers. The spider in her web that daily grew like ripening fruit, my sister. The mourning doves were my only confessors. And my crimes? What of my crimes?

My membership in the wrong party burned brightly in their books. They fed themselves on my many imagined infractions. “Sign it,” he said. Sign this statement I didn’t write. I couldn’t read it. (My eyeglasses were long ago ground into the floor. The lenses were still there, a sick flour.) Still, I knew what the statement said. It said I was wrong. But I was wrong about one thing only: I was still a person. I had one power left to me. I could refuse.

Suitcase

2005-09-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

Everything—all of it—everything fits in here. In this one suitcase that's not even mine. Guy in the building said, "If you ever come back, I'll take it." This thing has been around. It's beat up, bruised by the blows of a hundred curbs. I packed it so full the clasps are straining. It's bulging like a belly after a last big meal. But this is it. I got no car. No tickets. No nothing. Just this one suitcase I'm banging down the street.

Couple shirts, another pair of pants, socks, drawers. My comb. Everything Manny gave me when he joined up—his books and that trophy. Believe it, I'm hauling trophies out of town, my arm yanking out of the socket. Got my work boots, too. They're no good for walking, and you know there's gonna be work. Sooner or later. Also the framed picture of Mama from that time at the beach. Look at her there, that smile shining like the sun. She didn't see this coming, the whole city on the road. Everyone's feeling the storm on their heels.

I could slide right in the back seat, wouldn’t take up but a little room. Stick the suitcase under my knees, fold myself on top, and we’re out of here. But no one stops. Just one suitcase and I look like a fugitive. A proper citizen has more to his name. Anyone with so little must want some of theirs.

I just want to get out, get gone, stay dry, be safe. This is no score. This is me—this is all of us—moving on. Am I coming back? To what, I’m wondering. A place that doesn’t exist anymore? Will the building still be there? And if it is, then what? Who’s living there, whole place soaked with stink, and maybe no roof to hold the sky off you? I’m not coming back. It’s just me, slugging myself down the street, someone else’s suitcase knocking my legs out from under me.

Paper

2005-09-08T22:30:00.000-07:00

Forms permits applications certificates. Exams receipts statements bills. Tickets licenses deeds diplomas. Registrations schedules maps. Cards instructions lists. I can remember the crisp creases of meaningful paper. The civilized and civilizing corners. The way, once folded, the unfolded pages fall into their folds again. A memory of purpose. I have memories like that. Memories of my purpose.

Slips chits stubs. Reminders bulletins birthday greetings. Nothing is folded inside my pockets. I have no paper to name me, guide me, or sustain me. Instead, I hoard food, in whatever state I can find it. And string. And rubber bands. But when. And where and how far, how much, and what then? The day is a vacant expanse. Nothing stands out. Nothing marks off the time. There is no grid with stations to occupy. I am nowhere.

Magazines messages books letters. Newspapers tabloids catalogs notes. Do things still happen? Do things still change? I can’t tell. If people still communicate and mean things to each other, I don’t hear about it. The commerce of humanity, even the way faces can talk—it’s all so far away from me now. I see graffiti, the same unreadable words measling the city. No one’s saying anything. Traveling light? I’m not lighter for it. I’m sagging with nothing to prop me up. Dragged down by empty pockets.

Ones, fives, tens, twenties. Only hard goods—I own no paper.

Flood

2005-09-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe, but ten years ago, this was underwater. Everywhere, from here to the overpass, underwater. You can’t see it easy, but look at this wall right here. See that black mark? Lot of the bricks are down, but that black line, that was the water line. It was that high. Imagine that, water up over your head. I still remember the water. Cold water. Brown water. Had a skin on it, a sheen. That was the oil from the refineries and the failed tanks. It moved in new currents. It spread like smoke. The water was sick with the oil’s green and pink.

And the bodies floating in the water. Birds, so many birds, of all things. You’d think they could fly away, get out. The water came too quick. Back then, levees held back a wall of water, the ocean pounding on our door. And when those levees fell, birds couldn’t fly fast enough. They bobbed on the surface. You’d see them collect in pockets around chimneys.

It was days like that. And then the bodies—people. People from the neighborhood. I knew these people. They got pushed around under the water until a leg uncrooked, whatever it was, and they floated free. Bare backs on the surface, like fat alligators. People did what they had to do. People had their sense—how things are meant to be—washed away. People did things they would never tell you about now. I did those things too.

Hard to believe now, with all these houses and buildings like bad teeth, all these bricks crumbling. Everything here was underwater. Up over your head. After the first couple weeks, with the bodies, and after the police just dripped away, and the flood gangs, as we called them, and the bullets falling like more rain, we heard the pumps day and night. Months of it. Nobody sleeping anyway, but that sound kept you awake, you know? A grind that sent ripples through the water. Hard to believe now, this was once a grand place. People lived here.

The Statue of Liberty

2005-08-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

Shoha wasn't doing well. They called him "Shawn" now, but his new name was an affliction, not a medicine. They could call him by an American name and dress him in American clothes, but he wasn't an American. Gau (father), Eza (mother), and Tedzi (older sister)—they wore their differentness like honor, but Shawn was embarrassed. His name and his face and his mother meeting him at the bus stop and chattering in Gozasu, these were keeping him out.

He, more than the rest of his family, felt trapped in a cage suspended above both worlds. Neither American nor Gozash. What was he? He was a hybrid, a specimen, a case study. And study him they did, his classmates. A distant study, a wary study. They wouldn’t risk getting too close. His teachers didn't help. Always accentuating the difference. Saying, "your people," and "where you’re from,” and “could you tell us, please.”

He had wanted to come ever since he heard the word. Amberega. America. He had seen some pictures. Statue of Liberty. A city at night. America was a place of height. And expanse. Spreading out in every direction, unstoppable. He liked this. As soon as they landed, and he saw the highways, endless cement, he wondered if this was really a good thing and a good place. They rode in a bus for three hours to reach their new home.

He knew now America wasn't built on magic. But he wanted to be a part of it, because what choice did he have? Clinging to Goza was impossible. It was becoming further away every day. And every day when he woke up under sheets printed with football players, it receded another day into mists. He'd get up and get dressed and try to be like everyone else now.

Flip

2005-08-27T16:47:00.000-07:00

It was only seven ten, but Flip would be by in ten minutes. Dom hadn't slept. He hardly slept these days. He slept maybe three or four hours, drifted off around two, somewhere around there, and he was up by six. He was afraid to look at the clock. He thought about running. As in leaving. But he knew that would only make it ten times worse when Flip caught up with him, which he would. He caught up with everybody. That's what Flip did. He used to say he was in Funds Apprehension. Whatever that meant.

Dom looked at his toast. He had nibbled off the points, and they almost made him throw up. He hadn't been able to eat lately either. He had lunch yesterday. A small lunch. Flip was going to be angry. That's also what he did.

He'd offer Flip whatever he had. He didn't have anything. The television. Worth, he didn't know, maybe fifty dollars. Didn't even make a dent in the five thousand he owed. It was nothing. Flip wouldn't even laugh. Dom didn't think Flip laughed. He had never seen him laugh. Not that they hung around a lot together. Ever. At one time, Flip was friends—actual friends—with Gilbert. But that was a long time ago. Before Gilbert went delinquent on Flip.

Dom looked at his hands, still holding the piece of toast. The toast trembled. The toast couldn't take this, and neither could he. Flip was going to be here any minute, and Dom's only hope was that his cooperation, his just sitting and waiting, and not even trying to run, would have some effect on Flip's demeanor. Might as well hope for a helicopter to land on the roof and whisk him away. A helicopter with a stocked fridge for when his appetite returned. And a beautiful little female with red hair who had a soft spot for balding types on the large side. Flip knocked on the window. Dom saw him standing outside, looking in, past the sink. Dom's heart leapt into the garbage disposal.

Wild Horses

2005-08-27T13:04:00.000-07:00

The shoes were the shoes of invisible soldiers. His father had been a Navy man, eighteen years. After that, a retired Navy man for twenty-two. Wherever he went after that, whatever the universe's plan for him, he was some kind of Navy man still. And, like a good Navy man, he knew the importance of order. And discipline. And he taught their importance to his son. And his son learned the lessons.

And that's why the son's shoes, eight pair, were lined up like he'd used a ruler. He did, sometimes. It wasn't just the shoes, either. His clothes. The dishes in the cupboards. Didn't matter if company was coming. Didn't matter if company wasn't. Company usually wasn't, as a matter of fact. Dorothy wouldn't be coming by anymore. She was a first-grade teacher. A messy occupation. She'd come over for dinner with bright dabs of tempera on the hem of her skirt. Other stains. Children make stains. Leave children alone: they'll break things, dirty them up. They're wild. No, you don't punish wildness, but you do train it into straight rows. Nature is curved. It's man's job to straighten it. Right angles inspire orderly thoughts and an orderly attitude and an orderly respect and outlook.

When he called her first-graders "feral," she got angry. "Not feral," she said, eyes jumping. "Free. Full of life. Life hasn't been squeezed out of them yet, or forced into line." And that was the problem, he knew. That was why she could come to his apartment with paint on her skirt.

He broke the cookie jar once. Pieces of ceramic and cookie crumbs, all over the kitchen. It hit the floor and exploded, fragments everywhere. Months later, he was still finding pieces. His father would occasionally step on one and flash over into readiness. He learned. No, it's not easy. Children are strong-willed. Like wild horses. Dorothy was right. Wild horses are free. And they're beautiful. But they have to learn to accept the bit.

Birch Trees

2005-08-23T22:47:00.001-07:00

The birch trees crowded around her like well-wishers. The birch trees of her mother's Russia. She had never seen the birch trees, except through her mother's words, and her mother had spoken of them often. Of their fair complexion and stately processional through the woods. Their dolorous eyes. The way they comforted and surrounded her and held her together during whole years she thought her heart had withered. And now, she could see them so clearly. Now that the end was near for her, there was nothing to do but wander the woods, while her own daughter talked in muffled urgency with a voice she could only assume was the doctor's.

She thought they talked away, in the hall, to prevent bad news from filtering through to her. But this time, she heard the doctor say, as plain as sunlight, "... not out of the woods yet." He was right. There she was, amid the birch trees of her mother's Russia. She was hidden away there, not out of the woods yet. No hint of the world beyond. She was enfolded in a world of trees. Songbirds sang almost out of earshot, like her daughter and the doctor.

A kindly old Grandmother leaned down, her silver trunk gray-haired and creaky, and said to her, "You're not out of the woods yet, my dear. Everything is fine. Rest a while." So she rested. Rested in the arms of the birch trees of her mother's Russia. From somewhere—she thought it was the west, but the forest confounded all her senses (was there a west anymore?)—her daughter's voice came to her in the form of a songbird.

"Is there anything I can get you, Mama?" Her daughter's voice here, in the forest. No, nothing. A blanket maybe. And with that, she slipped deeper into the birch forest, borne on the wind, a glossy birch leaf. Her daughter stood with the doctor and put her hand on her mother's cheek. The doctor said, "Would you like a few minutes alone with her?"

What If Everything Stopped Working?

2005-08-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

He used to worry about stuff like that. About what would happen if this stuff stopped working? The medicine. Insulin. It couldn't stop working, but what if it did? Gravity can't stop working either, but what if it did? What if you injected the insulin and nothing happened? And what if your blood sugar was really low, the tide was just out, you were a desert, and you drank all the sugar you could get your hands on, and it just didn't work? A car can stop working. Turn the key and it just grinds and wheezes. Computers stop working. They freeze, they crash. They go insane.

So what if he entered a time and place where it made sense for insulin and sugar to stop working? And when he'd be reading on the bus, his stomach and his head reminding him that this wasn't the best idea, the thought would come to him. It would start with some imagined blurriness, and then he'd be thinking What if my eyes stopped working? What if light passed through the lenses, but the retinas stopped tingling. Or firing. Or whatever they do.

What if everything stopped working? Not just the fragile miracles of his body, held together one pulse to the next, but everything everywhere. Nature. What if trees stopped working? Or the ocean? Or all water everywhere? What if it didn't flow anymore or seek its own level? It rose. Flowed upstream. Froze solid right before it boiled. Life couldn't happen if everything stopped working, because life grew that way. With the assumption inbred, the assumption that things work.

But what about the seconds before it all ended? We'd all feel betrayed. We'd be furious. But revenge wouldn't work either. It would all melt into a solid, a plastic lump molded to the shape of everything that wasn't there anymore.

Shingles

2005-08-16T22:37:00.001-07:00

Past the apple trees, where the gravel path ran out, they came to the little markers. The first time, they thought they’d make simple crosses. But then crosses didn’t seem right. So they just used big, smooth, wide shingles. They rose from the dirt, pale and soft. First blooms. Crocuses.

Ella had painted the names on with a stencil and Wynn had driven the shingles in with a mallet. Working together. In death as in life. A joke. They came out here often. It was a part of their weekend walk, most weeks. Past the apple trees, the house hidden by the low hill, here they were. It wasn’t painful anymore, but it wasn’t unpainful either. “Firefly,” “April" (short for April Fool), “Onion.”

Cats. Cats who sure didn’t deserve to be forgotten. So they didn’t forget them. They came out here and remembered. They had been blessed with so many companions over the years. And they never thought of them as property, or even workers. When people would ask Ella if So-and-so was a good mouser, she’d wrinkle her nose like the air suddenly went bad. “She likes to catch mice, yes,” she’d say, unless it was Gent or Playo she was talking about. With the dogs it was a little different. Dogs liked to work. Even after they turned gray, like leaves turning on the tree, they liked to work. Still, they only had their dogs do the work they chose for themselves, if they were of the working inclination.

Bullmoose, whose marker they set beneath the giant oak, loved pulling roots of all things. When Wynn cleared the land east of the house, Bullmoose helped. Real help, not a child’s impeding help that makes a parent proud and exasperated all at once, but real help. He had a passion for pulling. Milady put herself on guard duty after Ella had Beth Anne. She’d patrol the house and watch out the front windows for hours on end. Beth Anne lived a thousand miles from here now. And Milady died a good five years ago.

Charlie Brown

2005-08-16T22:37:00.000-07:00

It was nothing. When he grabbed the glass Billy set down in front of him, his elbow poked the guy next to him. No, not poked, even. Touched. Barely. He barely even touched this guy, with his thousand dollar suit and his salon haircut, and he thought he even had cufflinks. Here, at Mike's. Cufflinks.

So anyway, Cufflinks is up like lunch, talking about how Now you've done it, and You don’t wanna start something. No, I don't wanna start something, he said, and got back to his beer. I wanna start this beer, that's what I wanna start, he said. Someone had Charlie Brown on the jukebox. Had to be one of those new guys, the guys with brand-new ball caps on. Trying to create the picture-perfect barroom scene. Why didn't Cufflinks go fight them? Or buy them a round or something? Anyway, so the guy's in his face now. The guy puts his hand up, like he's supposed to inspect it or something and tremble at how mighty it is. Yeah, nice hand.

This hand, he goes, is gonna take your head off, you don't get the hell out of this bar. Get out of the bar? Yeah, right. He's gonna get out of his regular Friday night bar he's been coming to every Friday night for maybe, what? A year and a half. No matter what. Snow, he'll walk. Rain, who cares? Donna talking about If you go out that door, don't expect to see me when you come back. Who cares, and Hello, Billy, how about a big beer for Yours Drunkly?

So Cufflinks wasn't chasing him off. Not with that big, soft hand held out like a flabby napkin. Would take a hell of a lot more than that. I just started my beer, okay? I'm real sorry I bruised your delicate arm and all. Cufflinks whispered something to the whore on his right and turned back to him. You and me, he goes, we're having a talk. Outside. So he hopped off his stool and went around back, Charlie Brown still going strong.

Lost

2005-08-07T22:43:00.000-07:00

He didn't dare tell the men. Not yet. What could he tell them? The weather had been beastly, but he had failed to obtain adequate readings while the skies were clear. So the fault was his and his alone. And telling the men now, no matter whose fault it was, would only weigh them down, and he needed them light and strong and supple, in mind as well as body.

Holland was still upright, as it were. Still squeezing a laugh out of tight places, as they say. The worse the spot, the louder Holland's laugh. He wasn't the strongest of the bunch, or the smartest. He was fair on ski and passing good with the dogs, but it was his iron spirit that had secured his spot on the team. The rain, the wind, the sleet. Where they ground some men down, flecking them into unusability, they polished Holland to a shine. And Holland could prop up two or three others, as sure as walking sticks. Manly was holding, as were Dell and James. The others, he wasn't confident of.

If he couldn't find their course or at least find a suitable place for camp in the next few hours, the festering mood would spread like gangrene. He had seen it happen before. The more important provision wasn't the food, he knew, or the ski or the fuel or the dogs. It was mood. The right mood could power men over the worst terrain and pick them up again and again when they fell. The mood of this party was acceptable, but falling with the mercury.

It's not honesty that powers men on, it's the right lies. And the lie he told, with Holland's booming laugh, was that everything was rolling on the tracks he's laid six months ago. When asked about direction or course, he didn't hesitate one second. The sure readiness of his answer meant more than the words. He knew he might be taking them all farther and farther from where they should be. Better to freeze later than burn now.

Burning Like Ice

2005-07-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

His brain lit up with the smell of chalk. School chalk. Blackboard chalk in Mrs. Dell's class. Mrs. Dell was standing by the board. It was covered with neat columns of numbers to add up. "They won't add themselves up, Mister." Her voice was like geese. Lost and lonely geese far away, just overhead. He was looking right at them. Their wings flapped, silent as snow.

He was cold. On his back. In snow. Mrs. Dell got mad that day. The chalk squeaked on the blackboard. He cried, but his body was winding down and would sacrifice only one tear. The tear burned like ice. He smelled a blanket. What did a blanket smell like? This one smelled like a fire. Smoky perfume. Sitting under a blanket with Ellen, invisible smoke from the fireplace touching the air around them, communicating with every hidden place.

He couldn't feel his toes. His fingers still burned. Burned like ice. His whole body was crying. A line of geese or airplanes tore through the milky sky. Unzipped it down the middle. A sound like fabric tearing. His head was heavy, but it felt like smoke. He was on his back. He had always been on his back. In the snow. The frozen pond was nearby. He could smell it. He could feel its vibration, the pain of the hole’s raw edges. Or was that his heart? He was being eaten by fire.

A sound like buzzing made him move his eyes. He tried to lick his lips. His tongue was heavy, like some newly dead thing. Mrs. Dell in her blue dress with the white flowers. She told him to sit down and stop wasting the class's time. He got confused, that's all. When the numbers added up to more than ten, he got confused, that's all. Here, in the snow, every time his heart beat, he thought, “And that’s that.”

Our Kind of Savage

2005-07-23T20:03:00.000-07:00

He knew how he was supposed to feel about the Kolo tribesmen. He was supposed to think they were savages, but a step up from the savages of the plains. Savages with potential. This sentiment was practically an official chapter of the officer's manual.

He had heard the expression so many times from his superiors—Our Kind of Savage—that it had come to sound like law. He didn't dare—yet—tell anyone, but he was coming to see that the conventional wisdom re: the Kolo was quite incorrect. Not the part about their potential, but the part about their savagery. These were the same men who designated one among each party to club the timi fish they caught, so only one man would need to seek atonement. The same men who offered up a tenth of their omotu harvest to avoid war with neighboring tribes. Yes, when war came anyway, they were ruthless. But these were not savages. (His school mates had been ruthless too. How many bloody brawls had he witnessed as a lad?) These Kolo were citizens, as god-fearing and law-abiding, in their way, as any Englishman.

Conley knew this now, and the knowledge was interfering with his duties. Unclear to begin with, his duties—it had been suggested by his ever-helpful superiors—involved drawing the Kolo into line. Seducing them, as it were, with a vision of British salvation. Cooking pots, machetes, metal arrowheads, mass-produced sandals: the Kolo would have a near-endless supply of these and other goods, if only they would act as the King's emissaries and help the King claim the outlying regions. Everyone would win. A true bargain. No rape of the savage here.

Conley knew he wasn't the man for the job, his knack for the language notwithstanding. He knew the Kolo deserved every bit as much sovereignty as the British. They were not a people specially made for colonization. They were proud and upright. Allies, perhaps. Subjects, doubtful. Conley could not betray them.

Harlow Said

2005-07-15T15:46:00.000-07:00

When Harlow said this stuff would unscrew your brain, he wasn't kidding. My brain was unscrewed. The skylight in my head was blown away—bang!—and the world streamed in screaming. I understood it all. The stars I couldn't see I could feel. I could feel all their orbits and apogees and zeniths. They were distant friends connected to me through prayer.

Perihelion. That's what I was experiencing. I had never been closer to the sun. Emotionally. Physically. My feet and legs were a memory that belonged to someone else. They kept going on their own. I emancipated them about an hour after swallowing my small, white disc, a galaxy you could balance on its edge. The world was packed into its machine-milled shell. Harlow said just let it go and I was just letting it go. All of it.

Driving was so subterranean. Dark and close. I bore through the air and left behind a curving, undulating tunnel shaped like my three-dimensional shadow. It was so clear now. I left traces everywhere, spawning miniature versions of myself. Geometrical clones. Fractals that kept growing as I sped by, fanned to glowing embers. They evolved and became a million future selves, each one bound to me and free to wander. Mother and child. The car stopped and parked and I seeped through the crack in the windshield. It pinched me as I was halfway through and shattered. There was a beer bottle involved.

The house was glowing with music. I had trouble walking, so I swam to the door. The music was a heavy buoying current. Each note was a distinct flavor. I bobbed outside in the current for a year or two and drank. I was so thirsty, and I drank the velvet night into me. The air was draped loosely over the world, and I held it in my lungs like a precious metal. Harlow was a magician. He was right about everything. He could predict the past. I didn't know how the blood got on my arm.

The Dogwood

2005-07-12T00:31:00.000-07:00

The kitchen was quiet. Except for the crackly hum of the refrigerator. And the intermittent drip from the faucet. How many times had she asked Art to fix that? That, and the table leg. It still wobbled. Sure, they all got used to it, like you get used to living on a rocking ship, but it was still something she had asked Art to fix maybe a hundred times. Every weekend for a while. She folded up a page torn from a magazine and shimmed it under. Then she forgot about it.

The cheerful green walls felt faraway and cool now. The clock was still slow. Another thing they just learned to live around. You adjusted. They could set it with the right time, but it was a lazy clock. It would lose time fast. It was careless with it.

Look through the yellow check curtains into the backyard. That dogwood tree was trying to squeeze out a blossom or two. Like someone squeezing out tears. They had planted that tree on Michael's first birthday. She could still see Art with a smile that was going to carry him away, up and over all the houses on Ballard Street. Art tore into the ground shoveling, getting carried away. How fast could someone shovel? Could you really shovel happily? She wouldn’t have thought so. But there he was. Couldn't wait to get Michael growing in the backyard, same as he was growing inside with them.

That tree hadn't grown an inch since they got the news about Michael. From that cop standing on the steps in the rain. His hat wrapped in plastic snapped over the top. Funny what you remember. The tree gave out. Same as Art. Art went away that night. Oh, he was still there in his corduroy chair every night for the news. He still took the car in every three thousand miles. But he was only waiting. Until he could leave too. Finally fall into whatever hole was waiting for him out there. People didn't believe her about the tree. Thought it was just psychological, what grief will do. But you could go out and measure. It hadn't budged since.

Unregulated Throughway 20-31

2005-07-09T22:18:00.000-07:00

The road cut through the jungle like a smoking, black wound. Everyone thought so. In fact, the natives called the road officially known as Unregulated Throughway 20-31 "the scar." At first, the workers had followed their own handbook and ribboned the road around trees and hillocks. But as they looked at the maps and the surveyors' notes, and plotted the course of the road in their heads, they abandoned the handbook. They wanted to be off this detail as quickly as possible.

The jungle was hot and peppered with unnamed insects, and the men believed that each bite and sting could mean death. They had also heard about the natives' resentments for this project. The natives were widely regarded among the men as witches, or worse. Demons maybe. And more than one of the crew was kept awake by nightmares or insomnia, or wracked with intestinal distress. So they started taking shortcuts. When they discovered that following the original course plotted by men in air conditioned rooms would require them to backtrack to the tune of two weeks' labor, they improvised.

The foreman resisted. He thought of himself as a lieutenant, his general's representative, but faced with eleven men with machetes and fear in their eyes, what could he do? He agreed, and put off telling his boss about the decision. After that, carving up the jungle became easier. Even the foreman came to think of this as “adapting to on-site conditions.”

They no longer had any pretense of respect. If anything was in the way, blast it. The natives started coming around to watch the day's progress. They were silent, generally, and never hostile. That wasn't their way. But if they had had any magic, they surely would have used it. The workmen still worried about curses aimed at them as they tore at tree roots and laid down explosive charges, but they kept a revised calendar in their heads at all times. Only nineteen days left. Only eighteen days left.

The Pigeon Man

2005-07-04T00:15:00.000-07:00

You could tell that sitting was painful. He was so old, so fragile, delicate like thin glass, sleeping was probably painful. And it wasn’t a nice day. The prickly rain, and the wind throwing tantrums. And still, there he was, sitting on that bench with his bag of seed. Reaching in every few minutes and pulling out another measured handful. Scattering it for the birds.

You looked at those pigeons—that invisible, ghostly murmur—and it was almost sickening. Unclean hands rubbing, rubbing together. A colony of rats running around might leave similar footprints in your mind. Or insects. Maybe it’s that they were like insects, of one confused group mind. But he kept tossing out the seed, and the pigeons filled the cement walkway in front his bench, and spilled onto the grass all around him, and sucked it up. He didn’t smile. (No one could smile against that wind. Saint Francis would be down here, with alms for the pigeons, trying to deflate that wind with curses and thoughts of getting the hell out of there now.) He didn’t smile, but he didn’t stop.

Joggers would jog right into the cloud of shouldering birds and send them flying, but he didn’t stop. He knew they’d be back. And they were, like the wind. They’d reconvene at his bench, the swarm reconstituting itself, and wait for the seed. The birdfeeder people you might have known—it’s like they’re performing a service. Looking out for the poor unfortunates during the lean times. And they get something out of the arrangement, too. It’s a partnership. The birds make it through the winter, and the feeder-tenders get to watch the spirited little songbirds scrapping over seeds. Their homes a beacon in the wilderness. And that makes them feel good. It makes sense. You look at a nice feeder, with beautiful, compact birds enjoying it and you think, “You know, I should get one of those.”

You didn’t think about buying a bench when you watched the old man with the bag of seed. You thought, “What does he see in those birds?” He must have thought those damn birds were beautiful.

Labyrinth

2005-06-29T07:59:00.000-07:00

Why him? Why here? Why this? How had any of it happened? He had always said he wanted to be a doctor. Once, a lifetime ago, he had a toy doctor’s bag, a glossy black affair with a clasp. Inside, vials of candy pills, a different color for every disease, and a reflex hammer, and a stethoscope that didn’t work. He wanted to know the names of the bones and was fascinated and horrified to learn that a skeleton walked where he walked.

That was when life was a road, with milestones. Everything clearly marked. Crawling at around eight months, walking by twelve. Complex grammar by three years. Stages and syndromes and clusters of cognitive leaps. It was a sensible, well-mapped world. Smart landmarks marched to the horizon and beyond, stars for pilgrims.

Now, life was a labyrinth you didn’t even know you were lost in. He spent all his time squinting to see clues that weren’t there. The walls all looked the same. From visions of doctor, with a fistful of candy-colored pills, to this. Odd jobber. Freelancer. Pleasant, almost exotic names for what he was: someone always between places he had never visited and would never arrive at. His dreams at night found him stymied by white walls. On waking, he realized he had left all the lights on. He had to remember to breathe.

Life was a desert, and he had surrendered in the face of it. He would wait at the edge, wait for a sign. His friends had drifted upward, away, snapping their tethers to him. Life was a jungle, thick with things hunting him. No, an ocean. A trackless void. Endless and endlessly swallowing him. He was lost in the gape of the world. He was sleeping more and more and his dreams beat down on him like a naked sun.

Everything Isn't There Anymore

2005-06-25T20:17:00.000-07:00

Everything isn’t there anymore. It’s been going on for a long time now, but I’ve only started noticing it recently. Driving up Hanlon on my way to pick up PJ, I saw the white gravel pit that used to be Forlynn’s. Used to be, as in used to be last week. No lingering sickness of desperate gimmicks leading to the humiliation of Going Out Of Business as all hope for dignity withers away. With the obscene pennants and their forced, flapping smiles and Isn't it a pity? and I only hope the end comes quick. None of that. Just a sudden, senseless no more.

And then I started seeing all kinds of buildings that weren’t there anymore. That one-story apartment block with the florid graffiti. And the house next to the house next to that guy Alan’s. It was a nice house. Big windows filled with sunshine in the afternoons, but for some reason that didn't matter. Not enough. Now it’s just the absence of a house. The streets are filled with gaps. 901 Western, 903 Western, nothing, nothing, 909 Western, nothing.

How can these things just vanish like this? Did anyone see them dismantled? Did anyone hear the walls come down? One day, there’s a living thing there, with skin, veins, muscles, a heart, an electrical spark and pulse. The next, not even a hollow body to bury. Nothing but a vacant lot bulldozed flat. Somebody loved that house. Somebody feels its loss as a blow. An amputation. A death in the family or the failure of an organ. Something that means life will Never Be The Same Again. “The place I used to live.” “The house where I grew up.” “The restaurant where we first met.” Gone now.

And in their places, perfect new structures. No blemishes. They're waterproof. Sunproof. Windproof. Memories will slide right off them. They will have the smells of new chemicals, fresh from the factories. I’m watching now. I’m waiting to see it happen.

The Bishop

2005-06-23T10:45:00.000-07:00

The bishop disguised himself as frogs, but his eyes gave him away. It’s always the eyes. They are thresholds. A frog’s eyes have nictitating membranes, filters, fine skins that give them away. The bishop has endless corridors of thoughts. That’s how he is detectable. Whether he enters on white clouds, whether he has his unheavenly host with him—Arms and Legs—whether he smiles or talks like a cat. His thoughts have the sound of footsteps. They boom, self-contained bombs that ping like pianos.

Arms and Legs—one is made of wire and muscle, the other of blood and dogspeed—have no minds. They have been hollowed out. When the bishop pays their salaries, they can do nothing but eat the money. The pills they fed me were self-contained bombs that rang like bells. Who gave them the power? Was it the chemical structuralists, who constructed the pills through formulation?

I’ve been gone for many winters. Their grip on me has faded. The punctures have closed like irises. Sealed doors that keep out the light that flows from their nostrils. In that way, now that the punctures have closed, I am safe from the bishop. The chemical structuralists can’t find me in their notebooks or computers. I have become invisible to them. Radar drips from me like smoke. I leave no trail. I leave no scent.

The bishop is always luring me, but his eyes give him away. He can take the form of frogs and crows. I can see they are him. He sleeps in meters on the side of streets, on top of buildings, within wires. When the bishop lived inside the hospital, when Arms and Legs tried to convert me, tried to turn me to a gas they could bottle and bag, I knew I was a different species. I’ve become three different species, each more alive than the last.

Twenty Bucks a Pop

2005-06-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

I felt worse about every step we took. I wasn't some crybaby animal person, worrying about the poor little baby deers and all. Truth is, I didn't think about animals too much at all. I ate meat. Still do. Never saw anything wrong with that. And I'm convinced that Maureen's turkey casserole could bring anyone to his knees and make them beg for a fork. So, okay, that's where I was coming from. Sensible man, but not too sensitive, if you see what I'm saying. Medium. Even keel. Still, the further we got into the trees, Wes, Dean, and me, the worse I felt.

The ground was hard frozen—it was the dead-end ass of December—and my ankles and shins were starting to gripe. My feet were blistering. New boots. Maureen said I should wear them in some, but that would have just made this whole thing feel like it was starting a week early.

Let's just say Wes didn't have the right way of thinking about this, for my money. He was too excited, like a kid opening Christmas stuff, and it was because some fella at Ruby's said something about a man he knew wanted to buy fox pelts. Fox pelts. Fella said this dealer would pay twenty bucks a pop. Wes got charged up over that, started adding up numbers so hard he forgot to finish his beer. That's the way Dean tells it. I wasn't there. I hadn't gone drinking with them two for I don't know how long. Better things to do with my time. Game on, or a project down in my shop. Wes got it in his head that I needed to go out with them, for fox. I started to say no, Wes standing on the woven rug in the living room, dripping snow all over, but watching his fist clench and unclench, I said yes. Just like that.

Didn't want to be there. I didn't even believe the part about the dealer. Twenty bucks for a fox? Who's going to pay that? So I'm wondering, the whole time we're banging into the woods, what the hell we're doing there. Then one of their guns goes off, maybe thirty, forty yards up. I run up, slapping my feet on the ground like flippers and there's Dean, down on the ground. He's bleeding from the chest. He's on his back trying to find the sun with his eyes. And Wes is looking at me like I'm next.

The Hunter

2005-06-16T19:49:00.000-07:00

Drawer on top of drawer of specimens. These over here are all indigenous. That other stack, and the drawers in the hallway, those are exotics. And he collected them all himself. Although "collected" sounds so dry. As though he simply called on a shop and turned in his ticket and they passed a package wrapped in brown paper across the counter!

No, he was a hunter. Still was. Until the season returned, he had his trophies. He didn't even know how many, exactly. Something he learned from Professor Pines, not counting them. Oh, he knew that he had approximately eight hundred different species, affixed in their "sets," as they were called, "pinned and pegged," as they say.

As he walked past them, on his way to the living room, or out the front door to gather the morning paper, he still felt a charge. Even after all these years. Just knowing that so much color—colors like most people never see, not the watercolorists, not the botanists, not the birders—was stashed away in his stacks. It was still a thrill.

He was solving mysteries he couldn't even name. Amassing evidence. Taking one chaotic corner of Gaia's domain, and with a sweep of his hand, and a swish of his net (yes, don't laugh, he still used a net) he imposed order upon it. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but man abhorred a secret. So he collected the Iris Fringe, the Maubry's Fruitillary, the so-called "Lavender Hover," and the rest of their kind, these magnificent peoples of sunlit places. To know. To understand. To have. To travel into her secrets and find a prize and return with it aloft, a flutter still in its wings.

Warm Water

2005-06-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

The celibacy wasn’t the hard part. The big things are easier to accommodate. Close the door and lock it, stash the key on a high hook, and it’s done. But the trivial things nagged like itches. Mattresses made sleep a grave indulgence, instead of a practical necessity, and were therefore forbidden. Likewise, socks underneath shoes. And only the drinking of warm water was allowed, cold water having been declared a luxury "intended for kings and noble savages." They were neither; they were members of the Order of Saint Anselm, and so cold water, mattresses, socks, and a host of other comforts were banished.

Cooped up in gray brick dormitories, shuffled to Reflection or Meal (silent, always silent, except for the scrape of insolent silverware), carted off to Devotion (five miles away in equally isolated Calley). Life in the Order was stiff as the starched choir robes.

There were few opportunities to be tempted away from celibacy, but the warm water! The furtive comedians of the dorms knew that warm water was only meant for "bathing and baptizing" and that "where warm is the norm, ice is the vice." It was surprising how stubbornly warm water and sockless feet could wear away at a person. This was a slow, pricking torture, all the more frustrating for the small footprints of its agony. No one ever died of flies, either, but waving an arm again and again and again to clear the air around a face led to its own kind of illness. A wasting of the spirit. A feeling that if God intends life to be this routine of tedium and discomfort, then maybe Someone has the wrong idea.

Some members took the strictures as evidence for their own weakness. If defiance weren’t so deeply rooted within them, if such minor inconvenience didn’t gnaw at their souls, they wouldn’t be at Saint Anselm’s in the first place.

Danny Conway Street

2005-06-11T00:02:00.000-07:00

I walked down the street like I owned it. My street, got it? Danny Conway’s street. I was stepping over cars in my way, kicking them out of the gutter. I’m walking here. I’m out. Served my time. Repaid my debt to society. Which means you, you umbrella fuck. You don’t like my rain? This is my rain. I brought this rain with me. The outside gate at Morrel opened up, I walked through, and the rain fell down. It’s been raining ever since. It’s okay, I’ll let you use some of my rain.

Don’t worry. I’m rehabilitated. A new man. Impulse control is tight as tits. Cashed in all my PX tickets for these shoes. Clean and white. New. Like me. Had the same eighty bucks in my pocket I had when I walked in 72 months ago, and I was looking to make something happen with it. So I was just walking down Danny Conway Street, my new white shoes eating up the sidewalk, when I walked into Buster Holmes. I mean, I walked into him and almost knocked him down.

Buster had been out for almost two years and he looked soft. And it made me mad. Buster’s hair wasn’t coming back in yet. Morrel had thinned him out up there, which you see a lot of. Comes from having to keep one eye open all the time and never knowing where to put your back.

So Buster at first acts like he doesn’t even know who I am. Or maybe he really doesn’t. Being out and soft, maybe all that is so far in the past he can’t even remember it. I said, “Buster, you asshole, it’s Danny!” And he stood there looking at me for a while. And then you could see it: he remembered. And he got even softer. Like a loaf of bread. “Buy me a drink, asshole. I’m out, and I got something I want to talk to you about.”

The Big Q

2005-06-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

Quigley was everywhere. From the giant golden Q atop the Quigley Building in downtown Chicago, to the golden scoreboards generously donated by a certain loving Father Corporation and dotting ball fields all over the South, to skywriting competition that wafted its one-letter nom de mercantile across the skies of San Diego, Quigley stood tall.

In Japan, people now used ku-wi-guri to mean "certainly" and "of course," as well as a flashy approximation of "right on!" Quigley was engineering a standardization of habit, of taste, of life. Their confidential executive manuals—which they probably could have sold in bookstores for unexpected profit—spoke of Quiglification. And they weren't kidding around. Already, three full-length Hollywood features had been created around Quigley products. They had plots and characters, naturally, but Quigley was center stage, and no one missed the point. The Big Q had won the Oscar in the newly formed Best Corporate category, and two or three more by the end of the decade was predicted by all.

Everywhere, even where Quigley products happened not to be in use, people talked about Quigley. "Was it bigger than a Quigley 301?" people asked, routinely, when trying to picture the one that got away on the latest fishing trip. Textbooks and scientific journals commonly used the ubiquitous Quigley CMI—the first in Quigley's "revolutionarily beloved" integrated trisister modules—as a size comparison. It used to be dimes, or pennies, or pedantically, rulers. Now the CMI lent a sense of scale to everything from dinosaur teeth to micrometeorites. The Q had found its way into everyday speech, too. "That dress is Golden Q on you!" "He's the Q of the defensive line."

There was talk of Quigley forming its own colony in the Lesser Antilles. Already, unofficial reservation lists were up in every major city. At least four hundred and fifty thousand people clamored for a space on the Quigley island, where they hoped to loll the days away under a grandly rising, golden Q.

The Raft

2005-06-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

The raft was a bucking mule and he had to hang onto the burls in the logs. His hands were raw from hanging on. Every time the raft lurched, he pressed himself to the logs, but his feet would swing way out over the water, and the waves would roll over. He was breathing hard. Water was in his eyes and ears and mouth. It was taking over.

The smell of the raft made him think of his grandfather's cabin, and while he felt images of hot fireplaces and full tables with white tablecloths and white bowls with steam miraging the air above them, thunder cracked the sky. The raft dipped. He lost his grip. His left hand dragged over the logs. The skin tore. The box of supplies was tied to the raft more securely than he was, but the ropes were making noise. He heard the stutter and creak, even over the wind and water. And the thunder boomed again.

His left hand was bleeding and his right hand was going numb from the cold. Choppy waves circled him like sharks. He squinted. Nothing to see ahead, to the left. He couldn’t turn his head enough to see behind him, and he didn't dare change his grip. His grip was keeping him alive. He was staining the raft red. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear except the wind, shouting into his ear. The raft tipped, his legs swung around.

It was becoming almost routine. And then the ropes holding the box of supplies just fizzled. They unwound like smoke from a snuffed candle. Flapping snake tongues, they uncoiled and the box slid down the raft. He reached out for it with his left hand, but his left hand was useless now. He sat up and lunged for the box, but the slippery raft was speeding it along, toward the edge, and the hungry ocean that waited for everything. His canteen, some matches, his wallet in a plastic bag with a seal, some hard candy. The box hesitated at the lip of the raft. A wave reared up and plucked it over the side. He couldn't tell the splash it made from the war of noise that surrounded him. His left hand was still staining the raft red.

The Voice

2005-06-03T22:40:00.000-07:00

When it was windy, the house rattled. The windows in the library (we called it the library). Where the big bookcase was. The kitchen rattled, too. Wind in the vents above the stove. I didn't like the sound. It reminded me of a busy signal, a message not getting through. A lonely sound.

I remember being in the kitchen, getting something. Peeling an orange, I think, standing in front of the sink. The Davises' clothesline next door was humming. The wind got trapped in the stove vent, and then the sound went hollow, like it was squeezing itself through. And it said, "Do you?" I heard those two words, in the wind in the house. "Do you?"

Did I what? It said it again. A woman's voice, or maybe a child's. It was almost formless, a faint whistle at the beginning. "Do you?"

I dropped the orange on the counter and backed away from the stove. When I was a kid, my fears were a frayed screen. Anything could get through to me. I hadn't lost all of that (I guess you could call it) openness. My mind was flexible, and if it had to fold to fit some new fear, it would. I kept my eyes on the stove. I heard the blood racing through my ears. The clothesline buzzed.

The wind talked again: “Do you?” The voice was getting clearer. The voice knew I was there. My heart bounced up and down, jumping with the startled branches outside. I took a step toward the stove. Do I what? I was maybe a foot away. The trees were waterfalls.

The wind said, "You will." The clothesline sang Amen and the wind died, and it wasn't long enough before I heard the voice again.

Winters

2005-06-01T23:08:00.000-07:00

Everything was shutting down for winter. The clouds had been getting pretty sparse. They hadn't seen a big cottony cumulus for months as it was, and probably wouldn't again until spring. What was up there now was mostly streaky little things. Leftovers. Remnants. Probably couldn't even make one good cumulus out of what was left. Same with the rain. Summer had seen rain like buckets overturned. Big, thick drops that slapped you on the back of the head, drummed on windshields like fat fingers. The stars, too. So bright and piercing a month ago, but now, power was down by half and the stars were too dim to resolve. They were one milky smear far, far away.

All this was enough to make anyone lose faith in winter. It didn't used to be like this. Winter used to have its own supplies. Winter was okay back then. You could say winter was your favorite season back then and no one would look at your funny. The fluffy snowflakes and clear skies were tops on a lot of people's lists.

That was when the whole thing was managed better. Used to be, twelve months meant twelve months. They worked it. Now, somehow, they can't stretch twelve months worth of stuff for the whole year. You'll even see shortages in fall every once in a while. Leaves stopped changing in fall a couple years ago. Just for a few days and to be honest, not too many people even noticed. But still. It's who they have running things now.

They don't really understand what they're doing. It's just a job to them. They move some air masses around, look at a few temperature and pressure areas, collect a paycheck, and go home. Whole thing's a joke now. Winter used to be a lot of people's honest-to-god legitimate favorite season. Now you'd have to have a hole in your head.

Melissa

2005-06-01T23:06:00.000-07:00

All he knew at first was that the thing wasn't connected to the crook of his arm anymore. And he didn't feel the plastic things in his nostrils. And everything was quieter, at first. All he heard was a far-off whoosh of air, no more of the electronic beeps and tones that had filled the room for over three months. And, he didn't know how to say it, but the white had changed. It was moon-white now, not plastic-white, all the color bleached out. Now it was a gentle, warm white, a luminous white that glowed behind his eyes.

And he felt good. He wasn't sure exactly what he felt, actually, but he knew what he didn't feel. He knew it keenly. He didn't feel pain. And he didn't feel fear. For the last few months, fear pricked at him every time someone in a uniform came into the room, which was every five minutes, it seemed. Nurses, doctors, orderlies, assorted technicians, the people who wheeled around the magazines and books. And the pain that came on its own schedule. In the beginning, it came exactly when they said it would. "You'll feel a twinge." "Okay, now—this might hurt a little." "You'll be sore for the next few days."

The morphine wasn't able to keep it at bay by the end. It had grown, gathered its strength and regrouped. When it came back, it came back glorious. And every day, even when he was asleep—he could see this now—Melissa had come. To hold his hand, he thought, or sit by his side. Her eyes would be red from crying. And now, a sound did find him, over the rush of wind. It was Melissa, crying. Melissa, who was left behind. Melissa, who was too alive to be sucked into the vacuum.

He didn't feel fear anymore, or pain, but he did feel sadness. A pure sadness. He had no more self-interest to fray the edges of sadness. This was a sadness that was clean and sharp and the sound of Melissa crying made it grow until the clouds rang with it.

UAVI

2005-06-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

The doorbell rings and he's up like that, pressed to the wall of the living room. Quick door-check: gauzy shadow through the curtain. Subject no more than five five. He runs through the day's itinerary. He's not expecting anyone. He doesn't know anyone five five. Time: eleven oh five.

He pads to the door ISF (In Stocking Feet). Stays in the shade. Sunlight outlining pillars of dust in the air. Steps over floorboard that has PTS (Propensity To Squeak) and stands beside door. Listens. Birds (two, maybe three—a jay, sparrows) and a lawnmower (push-type) halfway up the block. Subject not moving. Subject making no sound. He puts his hand on knob. Still has full-on EOS (Element Of Surprise). Grips the knob. Quarter turn CW (clockwise). Subject immobile. A second quarter turn CW. Subject inattentive. Bolt is fully withdrawn. Subject turns to street and back to house. Knob turned to completion, throws door open approximately halfway.

Subject appears startled. Subject attempts to look past him into the house. He moves to block UAVI (Unauthorized Visual Inspection). Subject dressed as follows: loose, "baggy" trousers, blue; green "T-shirt;" light blue sweatshirt. Subject exhibits NFSH (No Fixed Style of Hair), overlong (half-inch over top of ear covered). He looked at Subject, a boy.

"State your business."

Subject shifts uncomfortably in loosely laced, rubber-soled shoes. "Yeah, is Jennifer home?"

He narrows his eyes at subject. Quick estimate of weight, reach, speed. "She's home, but unavailable."

Subject looks hurt. (Subject will be hurt if he doesn't vacate in ten seconds.) "She said to meet her here at eleven."

He looks at watch. Eleven oh seven. "You're late. She's unavailable." Subject looks inside house again. Starts to speak. Stops. "I suggest you leave before there's any more trouble." Subject has head down, sloppy turn, slow retreat. Door is shut. Position on couch assumed.

Jennifer walks into living room WFIH (With Food In Hand). "Was that
Randy?"

The Dreams He Had During Her Absence

2005-05-31T22:47:00.000-07:00

#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

2005-05-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-27T13:51:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-26T22:25:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-26T16:21:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-25T14:21:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-24T22:20:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-23T22:16:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-22T14:50:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-22T14:47:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-20T23:13:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-20T23:09:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-19T22:57:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-19T16:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-10T13:00:00.000-07:00

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.