A Visit From the Goon Squad

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1

Found Objects

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing womans blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that fat, tender wallet, offering itself to her handit seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (I get it, Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.

You mean steal it.

He was trying to get Sasha to use that word, which was harder to avoid in the case of a wallet than with a lot of the things shed lifted over the past year, when her condition (as Coz referred to it) had begun to accelerate: five sets of keys, fourteen pairs of sunglasses, a childs striped scarf, binoculars, a cheese grater, a pocketknife, twenty-eight bars of soap, and eighty-five pens, ranging from cheap ballpoints shed used to sign debit-card slips to the aubergine Visconti that cost two hundred sixty dollars online, which shed lifted from her former bosss lawyer during a contracts meeting. Sasha no longer took anything from storestheir cold, inert goods didnt tempt her. Only from people.

Okay, she said. Steal it.

Sasha and Coz had dubbed that feeling she got the personal challenge, as in: taking the wallet was a way for Sasha to assert her toughness, her individuality. What they needed to do was switch things around in her head so that the challenge became not taking the wallet but leaving it. That would be the cure, although Coz never used words like cure. He wore funky sweaters and let her call him Coz, but he was old school inscrutable, to the point where Sasha couldnt tell if he was gay or straight, if hed written famous books, or if (as she sometimes suspected) he was one of those escaped cons who impersonate surgeons and wind up leaving their operating tools inside peoples skulls. Of course, these questions could have been resolved on Google in less than a minute, but they were useful questions (according to Coz), and so far, Sasha had resisted.

The couch where she lay in his office was blue leather and very soft. Coz liked the couch, hed told her, because it relieved them both of the burden of eye contact. You dont like eye contact? Sasha had asked. It seemed like a weird thing for a therapist to admit.

I find it tiring, hed said. This way, we can both look where we want.

Where will you look?

He smiled. You can see my options.

Where do you usually look? When people are on the couch.

Around the room, Coz said. At the ceiling. Into space.

Do you ever sleep?

No.

Sasha usually looked at the window, which faced the street, and tonight, as she continued her story, was rippled with rain. Shed glimpsed the wallet, tender and overripe as a peach. Shed plucked it from the womans bag and slipped it into her own small handbag, which shed zipped shut before the sound of peeing had stopped. Shed flicked open the bathroom door and floated back through the lobby to the bar. She and the wallets owner had never seen each other.

Prewallet, Sasha had been in the grip of a dire evening: lame date (yet another) brooding behind dark bangs, sometimes glancing at the flat-screen TV, where a Jets game seemed to interest him more than Sashas admittedly overhandled tales of Bennie Salazar, her old boss, who was famous for founding the Sows Ear record label and who also (Sasha happened to know) sprinkled gold flakes into his coffeeas an aphrodisiac, she suspectedand sprayed pesticide in his armpits.

Postwallet, however, the scene tingled with mirthful possibility. Sasha felt the waiters eyeing her as she sidled back to the table holding her handbag with its secret weight. She sat down and took a sip of her Melon Madness Martini and cocked her head at Alex. She smiled her yes/no smile. Hello, she said.

The yes/no smile was amazingly effective.

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Im always happy, Sasha said. Sometimes I just forget.

Alex had paid the bill while she was in the bathroomclear proof that hed been on the verge of aborting their date. Now he studied her. You feel like going somewhere else?

They stood. Alex wore black cords and a white button-up shirt. He was a legal secretary. On e-mail hed been fanciful, almost goofy, but in person he seemed simultaneously anxious and bored. She could tell that he was in excellent shape, not from going to the gym but from being young enough that his body was still imprinted with whatever sports hed played in high school and college. Sasha, who was thirty-five, had passed that point. Still, not even Coz knew her real age. The closest anyone had come to guessing it was thirty-one, and most put her in her twenties. She worked out daily and avoided the sun. Her online profiles all listed her as twenty-eight.

As she followed Alex from the bar, she couldnt resist unzipping her purse and touching the fat green wallet just for a second, for the contraction it made her feel around her heart.

Youre aware of how the theft makes you feel, Coz said. To the point where you remind yourself of it to improve your mood. But do you think about how it makes the other person feel?

Sasha tipped back her head to look at him. She made a point of doing this now and then, just to remind Coz that she wasnt an idiotshe knew the question had a right answer. She and Coz were collaborators, writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well. She would stop stealing from people and start caring again about the things that had once guided her: music; the network of friends shed made when she first came to New York; a set of goals shed scrawled on a big sheet of newsprint and taped to the walls of her early apartments:

Find a band to manage Understand the news Study Japanese Practice the harp

I dont think about the people, Sasha said.

But it isnt that you lack empathy, Coz said. We know that, because of the plumber.

Sasha sighed. Shed told Coz the plumber story about a month ago, and hed found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The plumber was an old man, sent by Sashas landlord to investigate a leak in the apartment below hers. Hed appeared in Sashas doorway, tufts of gray on his head, and within a minuteboomhed hit the floor and crawled under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole. The fingers hed groped toward the bolts behind the tub were grimed to cigar stubs, and reaching made his sweatshirt hike up, exposing a soft white back. Sasha turned away, stricken by the old mans abasement, anxious to leave for her temp job, except that the plumber was talking to her, asking about the length and frequency of her showers. I never use it, she told him curtly. I shower at the gym. He nodded without acknowledging her rudeness, apparently used to it. Sashas nose began to prickle; she shut her eyes and pushed hard on both temples.

Opening her eyes, she saw the plumbers tool belt lying on the floor at her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling. Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute. She bent her knees and plucked it noiselessly from the belt. Not a bangle jangled; her bony hands were spastic at most things, but she was good at thismade for it, she often thought, in the first drifty moments after lifting something. And once the screwdriver was in her hand, she felt instant relief from the pain of having an old soft-backed man snuffling under her tub, and then something more than relief: a blessed indifference, as if the very idea of feeling pain over such a thing were baffling.

And what about after hed gone? Coz had asked when Sasha told him the story. How did the screwdriver look to you then?

There was a pause. Normal, she said.

Really. Not special anymore?

Like any screwdriver.

Sasha had heard Coz shift behind her and felt something happen in the room: the screwdriver, which shed placed on the table (recently supplemented with a second table) where she kept the things shed lifted, and which shed barely looked at since, seemed to hang in the air of Cozs office. It floated between them: a symbol.

And how did you feel? Coz asked quietly. About having taken it from the plumber you pitied?

How did she feel? How did she feel? There was a right answer, of course. At times Sasha had to fight the urge to lie simply as a way of depriving Coz of it.

Bad, she said. Okay? I felt bad. Shit, Im bankrupting myself to pay for youobviously I get that this isnt a great way to live.

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Sasha and Alex crossed the lobby of the Lassimo Hotel in the direction of the street. Sasha hugged her purse to her shoulder, the warm ball of wallet snuggled in her armpit. As they passed the angular budded branches by the big glass doors to the street, a woman zigzagged into their path. Wait, she said. You havent seenIm desperate.

Sasha felt a twang of terror. It was the woman whose wallet shed takenshe knew this instantly, although the person before her had nothing in common with the blithe, raven-haired wallet owner shed pictured. This woman had vulnerable brown eyes and flat pointy shoes that clicked too loudly on the marble floor. There was plenty of gray in her frizzy brown hair.

Sasha took Alexs arm, trying to steer him through the doors. She felt his pulse of surprise at her touch, but he stayed put. Have we seen what? he said.

Someone stole my wallet. My ID is gone, and I have to catch a plane tomorrow morning. Im just desperate! She stared beseechingly at both of them. It was the sort of frank need that New Yorkers quickly learn how to hide, and Sasha recoiled. It had never occurred to her that the woman was from out of town.

Have you called the police? Alex asked.

The concierge said he would call. But Im also wonderingcould it have fallen out somewhere? She looked helplessly at the marble floor around their feet. Sasha relaxed slightly. This woman was the type who annoyed people without meaning to; apology shadowed her movements even now, as she followed Alex to the concierge desk. Sasha trailed behind.

Is someone helping this person? she heard Alex ask.

The concierge was young and spiky haired. Weve called the police, he said defensively.

Alex turned to the woman. Where did this happen?

In the ladies room. I think.

Who else was there?

No one.

It was empty?

There might have been someone, but I didnt see her.

Alex swung around to Sasha. You were just in the bathroom, he said. Did you see anyone?

No, she managed to say. She had Xanax in her purse, but she couldnt open her purse. Even with it zipped, she feared that the wallet would blurt into view in some way that she couldnt control, unleashing a cascade of horrors: arrest, shame, poverty, death.

Alex turned to the concierge. How come Im asking these questions instead of you? he said. Someone just got robbed in your hotel. Dont you have, like, security?

The words robbed and security managed to pierce the soothing backbeat that pumped through not just the Lassimo but every hotel like it in New York City. There was a mild ripple of interest from the lobby.

Ive called security, the concierge said, adjusting his neck. Ill call them again.

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Two security guys showed up, the same on TV and in life: beefy guys whose scrupulous politeness was somehow linked to their willingness to crack skulls. They dispersed to search the bar. Sasha wished feverishly that shed left the wallet there, as if this were an impulse shed barely resisted.

Ill check the bathroom, she told Alex, and forced herself to walk slowly around the elevator bank. The bathroom was empty. Sasha opened her purse, took out the wallet, unearthed her vial of Xanax, and popped one between her teeth. They worked faster if you chewed them. As the caustic taste flooded her mouth, she scanned the room, trying to decide where to ditch the wallet: In the stall? Under the sink? The decision paralyzed her. She had to do this right, to emerge unscathed, and if she could, if she didshe had a frenzied sense of making a promise to Coz.

The bathroom door opened, and the woman walked in. Her frantic eyes met Sashas in the bathroom mirror: narrow, green, equally frantic. There was a pause, during which Sasha felt that she was being confronted; the woman knew, had known all along. Sasha handed her the wallet. She saw, from the womans stunned expression, that she was wrong.

Im sorry, Sasha said quickly. Its a problem I have.

The woman opened the wallet. Her physical relief at having it back coursed through Sasha in a warm rush, as if their bodies had fused. Everythings there, I swear, she said. I didnt even open it. Its this problem I have, but Im getting help. I justplease dont tell. Im hanging on by a thread.

The woman glanced up, her soft brown eyes moving over Sashas face. What did she see? Sasha wished that she could turn and peer in the mirror again, as if something about herself might at last be revealedsome lost thing. But she didnt turn. She held still and let the woman look. It struck her that the woman was close to her own ageher real age. She probably had children at home.

Okay, the woman said, looking down. Its between us.

Thank you, Sasha said. Thank you, thank you. Relief and the first gentle waves of Xanax made her feel faint, and she leaned against the wall. She sensed the womans eagerness to get away. She longed to slide to the floor.

There was a rap on the door, a mans voice: Any luck?

Sasha and Alex left the hotel and stepped into desolate, windy Tribeca. Shed suggested the Lassimo out of habit; it was near Sows Ear Records, where shed worked for twelve years as Bennie Salazars assistant. But she hated the neighborhood at night without the World Trade Center, whose blazing freeways of light had always filled her with hope. She was tired of Alex. In a mere twenty minutes, theyd blown past the desired point of meaningful-connection-through-shared-experience into the less appealing state of knowing-each-other-too-well. Alex wore a knit cap pulled over his forehead. His eyelashes were long and black. That was weird, he said finally.

Yeah, Sasha said. Then, after a pause, You mean, finding it?

The whole thing. But yeah. He turned to her. Was it, like, concealed from view?

It was lying on the floor. In the corner. Kind of behind a planter. The utterance of this lie caused pinpricks of sweat to emerge on Sashas Xanax-soothed skull. She considered saying, Actually, there was no planter, but managed not to.

Its almost like she did it on purpose, Alex said. For attention or something.

She didnt seem like that type.

You cant tell. Thats something Im learning, here in N.Y.C.: you have no fucking idea what people are really like. Theyre not even two-facedtheyre, like, multiple personalities.

She wasnt from New York, Sasha said, irked by his obliviousness even as she strove to preserve it. Remember? She was getting on a plane?

True, Alex said. He paused and cocked his head, regarding Sasha across the ill-lit sidewalk. But you know what Im talking about? That thing about people?

I do know, she said carefully. But I think you get used to it.

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It took Sasha a moment to understand. There is nowhere else, she said.

Alex turned to her, startled. Then he grinned. Sasha grinned backnot the yes/no smile, but related.

Thats ridiculous, Alex said.

They took a cab and climbed the four flights to Sashas Lower East Side walk-up. Shed lived there six years. The place smelled of scented candles, and there was a velvet throw cloth on her sofa bed and lots of pillows, and an old color TV with a very good picture, and an array of souvenirs from her travels lining the windowsills: a white seashell, a pair of red dice, a small canister of Tiger Balm from China, now dried to the texture of rubber, a tiny bonsai tree that she watered faithfully.

Look at this, Alex said. Youve got a tub in the kitchen! Ive heard of thatI mean Ive read about it, but I wasnt sure there were any left. The shower thing is new, right? This is a bathtub-in-the-kitchen apartment, right?

Yup, Sasha said. But I almost never use it. I shower at the gym.

The tub was covered with a fitted board where Sasha stacked her plates. Alex ran his hands under the rim of the bath and examined its clawed feet. Sasha lit her candles, took a bottle of grappa from the kitchen cupboard and filled two small glasses.

I love this place, Alex said. It feels like old New York. You know this stuff is around, but how do you find it?

Sasha leaned against the tub beside him and took a tiny sip of grappa. It tasted like Xanax. She was trying to remember Alexs age on his profile. Twenty-eight, she thought, but he seemed younger than that, maybe a lot younger. She saw her apartment as he must see ita bit of local color that would fade almost instantly into the tumble of adventures that everyone has on first coming to New York. It jarred Sasha to think of herself as a glint in the hazy memories that Alex would struggle to organize a year or two from now: Where was that place with the bathtub? Who was that girl?

He left the tub to explore the rest of the apartment. To one side of the kitchen was Sashas bedroom. On the other side, facing the street, was her living roomdenoffice, which contained two upholstered chairs and the desk she reserved for projects outside of workpublicity for bands she believed in, short reviews for Vibe and Spinalthough these had fallen off sharply in recent years. In fact the whole apartment, which six years ago had seemed like a way station to some better place, had ended up solidifying around Sasha, gathering mass and weight, until she felt both mired in it and lucky to have itas if she not only couldnt move on but didnt want to.

Alex leaned over to peer at the tiny collection on her windowsills. He paused at the picture of Rob, Sashas friend who had drowned in college, but made no comment. He hadnt noticed the tables where she kept the pile of things shed stolen: the pens, the binoculars, the keys, the childs scarf, which shed lifted simply by not returning it when it dropped from a little girls neck as her mother led her by the hand from a Starbucks. Sasha was already seeing Coz by then, so she recognized the litany of excuses even as they throbbed through her head: winter is almost over; children grow so fast; kids hate scarves; its too late, theyre out the door; Im embarrassed to return it; I could easily not have seen it fallin fact I didnt, Im just noticing it now: Look, a scarf! A kids bright yellow scarf with pink stripestoo bad, who could it belong to? Well, Ill just pick it up and hold it for a minute.At home shed washed the scarf by hand and folded it neatly. It was one of the things she liked best.

Whats all this? Alex asked.

Hed discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sashas eye, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in.

And how did you feel, standing with Alex in front of all those things youd stolen? Coz asked.

Sasha turned her face into the blue couch because her cheeks were heating up and she hated that. She didnt want to explain to Coz the mix of feelings shed had, standing there with Alex: the pride she took in these objects, a tenderness that was only heightened by the shame of their acquisition. Shed risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life. Watching Alex move his eyes over the pile of objects stirred something in Sasha. She put her arms around him from behind, and he turned, surprised, but willing. She kissed him full on the mouth, then undid his zipper and kicked off her boots. Alex tried to lead her toward the other room, where they could lie down on the sofa bed, but Sasha dropped to her knees beside the tables and pulled him down, the Persian carpet prickling her back, street light falling through the window onto his hungry, hopeful face, his bare white thighs.

Afterward, they lay on the rug for a long time. The candles started to sputter. Sasha saw the prickly shape of the bonsai silhouetted against the window near her head. All her excitement had seeped away, leaving behind a terrible sadness, an emptiness that felt violent, as if shed been gouged. She tottered to her feet, hoping Alex would leave soon. He still had his shirt on.

You know what I feel like doing? he said, standing up. Taking a bath in that tub.

You can, Sasha said dully. It works. The plumber was just here.

She pulled up her jeans and collapsed onto a chair. Alex went to the tub, carefully removed the plates from the wood cover, and lifted it off. Water gushed from the faucet. Its force had always startled Sasha, the few times shed used it.

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Can I put some of these in? He was holding up a packet of bath salts Sasha had taken from her best friend, Lizzie, a couple of years ago, before theyd stopped speaking. The salts were still in their polka-dot wrapping. Theyd been deep in the middle of the pile, which had collapsed a little from the extraction. How had Alex even seen them?

Sasha hesitated. She and Coz had talked at length about why she kept the stolen objects separate from the rest of her life: because using them would imply greed or self-interest; because leaving them untouched made it seem as if she might one day give them back; because piling them in a heap kept their power from leaking away.

I guess, she said. I guess you can. She was aware of having made a move in the story she and Coz were writing, taken a symbolic step. But toward the happy ending, or away from it?

She felt Alexs hand on the back of her head, stroking her hair. You like it hot? he asked. Or medium.

Hot, she said. Really, really hot.

Me too. He went back to the tub and fiddled with the knobs and shook in some of the salts, and the room instantly filled with a steamy plantlike odor that was deeply familiar to Sasha: the smell of Lizzies bathroom, from the days when Sasha used to shower there after she and Lizzie went running together in Central Park.

Where are your towels? Alex called.

She kept them folded in a basket in the bathroom. Alex went to get them, then shut the bathroom door. Sasha heard him starting to pee. She knelt on the floor and slipped his wallet from his pants pocket and opened it, her heart firing with a sudden pressure. It was a plain black wallet, worn to gray along the edges. Rapidly she flicked through its contents: a debit card, a work ID, a gym card. In a side pocket, a faded picture of two boys and a girl in braces, squinting on a beach. A sports team in yellow uniforms, heads so small she couldnt tell if one of them belonged to Alex. From among these dog-eared photos, a scrap of binder paper dropped into Sashas lap. It looked very old, the edges torn, the pale blue lines rubbed almost away. Sasha unfolded it and saw written, in blunt pencil, I BELIEVE IN YOU. She froze, staring at the words. They seemed to tunnel toward her from their meager scrap, bringing a flush of embarrassment for Alex, whod kept this disintegrating tribute in his disintegrating wallet, and then shame at herself for having looked at it. She was faintly aware of the sink taps being turned on, and of the need to move quickly. Hastily, mechanically, she reassembled the wallet, keeping the slip of paper in her hand. Im just going to hold this, she was aware of telling herself as she tucked the wallet back into Alexs pocket. Ill put it back later; he probably doesnt remember its in there; Ill actually be doing him a favor by getting it out of the way before someone finds it. Ill say, Hey, I noticed this on the rug, is it yours? And hell say, That? Ive never seen it beforeit must be yours, Sasha. And maybe thats true. Maybe someone gave it to me years ago, and I forgot.

And did you? Put it back? Coz asked.

I didnt have a chance. He came out of the bathroom.

And what about later? After the bath. Or the next time you saw him.

After the bath he put on his pants and left. I havent talked to him since.

There was a pause, during which Sasha was keenly aware of Coz behind her, waiting. She wanted badly to please him, to say something like It was a turning point; everything feels different now, or I called Lizzie and we made up finally, or Ive picked up the harp again, or just Im changing Im changing Im changing: Ive changed! Redemption, transformationGod how she wanted these things. Every day, every minute. Didnt everyone?

Please, she told Coz. Dont ask me how I feel.

All right, he said quietly.

They sat in silence, the longest silence that ever had passed between them. Sasha looked at the windowpane, rinsed continually with rain, smearing lights in the falling dark. She lay with her body tensed, claiming the couch, her spot in this room, her view of the window and the walls, the faint hum that was always there when she listened, and these minutes of Cozs time: another, then another, then one more.

2

The Gold Cure

The shame memories began early that day for Bennie, during the morning meeting, while he listened to one of his senior executives make a case for pulling the plug on Stop/Go, a sister band Bennie had signed to a three-record deal a couple of years back. Then, Stop/Go had seemed like an excellent bet; the sisters were young and adorable, their sound was gritty and simple and catchy (Cyndi Lauper meets Chrissie Hynde had been Bennies line early on), with a big gulping bass and some fun percussionhe recalled a cowbell. Plus theyd written decent songs; hell, theyd sold twelve thousand CDs off the stage before Bennie ever heard them play. A little time to develop potential singles, some clever marketing, and a decent video could put them over the top.

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Whos managing them? Bennie asked.

Their father. Ive got their new rough mix, Collette said. The vocals are buried under seven layers of guitar.

It was then that the memory overcame Bennie (had the word sisters brought it on?): himself, squatting behind a nunnery in Westchester at sunrise after a night of partyingtwenty years ago was it? More? Hearing waves of pure, ringing, spooky-sweet sound waft into the paling sky: cloistered nuns who saw no one but one another, whod taken vows of silence, singing the Mass. Wet grass under his knees, its iridescence pulsing against his exhausted eyeballs. Even now, Bennie could hear the unearthly sweetness of those nuns voices echoing deep in his ears.

Hed set up a meeting with their Mother Superiorthe only nun you could talk tobrought along a couple of girls from the office for camouflage, and waited in a kind of anteroom until the Mother Superior appeared behind a square opening in the wall like a window without glass. She wore all white, a cloth tightly encircling her face. Bennie remembered her laughing a lot, rosy cheeks lifting into swags, maybe from joy at the thought of bringing God into millions of homes, maybe at the novelty of an A and R guy in purple corduroy making his pitch. The deal was done in a matter of minutes.

Hed approached the cutout square to say good-bye (here Bennie thrashed in his conference room chair, anticipating the moment it was all leading up to). The Mother Superior leaned forward slightly, tilting her head in a way that must have triggered something in Bennie, because he lurched across the sill and kissed her on the mouth: velvety skin-fuzz, an intimate, baby powder smell in the half second before the nun cried out and jerked away. Then pulling back, grinning through his dread, seeing her appalled, injured face.

Bennie? Collette was standing in front of a console, holding the Stop/Go CD. Everyone seemed to be waiting. You want to hear this?

But Bennie was caught in a loop from twenty years ago: lunging over the sill toward the Mother Superior like some haywire figure on a clock, again. Again. Again.

No, he groaned. He turned his sweating face into the rivery breeze that gusted through the windows of the old Tribeca coffee factory where Sows Ear Records had moved six years ago and now occupied two floors. Hed never recorded the nuns. By the time hed returned from the convent, a message had been waiting.

I dont, he told Collette. I dont want to hear the mix. He felt shaken, soiled. Bennie dropped artists all the time, sometimes three in a week, but now his own shame tinged the Stop/Go sisters failure, as if he were to blame. And that feeling was followed by a restless, opposing need to recall what had first excited him about the sistersto feel that excitement again. Why dont I visit them? he said suddenly.

Collette looked startled, then suspicious, then worried, a succession that would have amused Bennie if he hadnt been so rattled. Really? she asked.

Sure. Ill do it today, after I see my kid.

Bennies assistant, Sasha, brought him coffee: cream and two sugars. He shimmied a tiny red enameled box from his pocket, popped the tricky latch, pinched a few gold flakes between his trembling fingers, and released them into his cup. Hed begun this regimen two months ago, after reading in a book on Aztec medicine that gold and coffee together were believed to ensure sexual potency. Bennies goal was more basic than potency: sex drive, his own having mysteriously expired. He wasnt sure quite when or quite why this had happened: The divorce from Stephanie? The battle over Christopher? Having recently turned forty-four? The tender, circular burns on his left forearm, sustained at The Party, a recent debacle engineered by none other than Stephanies former boss, who was now doing jail time?

The gold landed on the coffees milky surface and spun wildly. Bennie was mesmerized by this spinning, which he took as evidence of the explosive gold-coffee chemistry. A frenzy of activity that had mostly led him in circles: wasnt that a fairly accurate description of lust? At times Bennie didnt even mind its disappearance; it was sort of a relief not to be constantly wanting to fuck someone. The world was unquestionably a more peaceful place without the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of thirteen, but did Bennie want to live in such a world? He sipped his gold-inflected coffee and glanced at Sashas breasts, which had become the litmus test he used to gauge his improvement. Hed lusted after her for most of the years shed worked for him, first as an intern, then a receptionist, finally his assistant (where shed remained, oddly reluctant to become an executive in her own right)and shed somehow managed to elude that lust without ever saying no, or hurting Bennies feelings, or pissing him off. And now: Sashas breasts in a thin yellow sweater, and Bennie felt nothing. Not a shiver of harmless excitement. Could he even get it up if he wanted to?

Driving to pick up his son, Bennie alternated between the Sleepers and the Dead Kennedys, San Francisco bands hed grown up with. He listened for muddiness, the sense of actual musicians playing actual instruments in an actual room. Nowadays that quality (if it existed at all) was usually an effect of analogue signaling rather than bona fide tapeeverything was an effect in the bloodless constructions Bennie and his peers were churning out. He worked tirelessly, feverishly, to get things right, stay on top, make songs that people would love and buy and download as ring tones (and steal, of course)above all, to satisfy the multinational crude-oil extractors hed sold his label to five years ago. But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit. Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud.

But the deep thrill of these old songs lay, for Bennie, in the rapturous surges of sixteen-year-old-ness they induced; Bennie and his high school gangScotty and Alice, Jocelyn and Rheanone of whom hed seen in decades (except for a disturbing encounter with Scotty in his office years ago), yet still half believed hed find waiting in line outside the Mabuhay Gardens (long defunct), in San Francisco, green-haired and safety-pinned, if he happened to show up there one Saturday night.

And then, as Jello Biafra was thrashing his way through Too Drunk to Fuck, Bennies mind drifted to an awards ceremony a few years ago where hed tried to introduce a jazz pianist as incomparable and ended up calling her incompetent before an audience of twenty-five hundred. He should never have tried for incomparablewasnt his word, too fancy; it stuck in his mouth every time hed practiced his speech for Stephanie. But it suited the pianist, who had miles of shiny gold hair and had also (shed let slip) graduated from Harvard. Bennie had cherished a rash dream of getting her into bed, feeling that hair sliding over his shoulders and chest.

He idled now in front of Christophers school, waiting for the memory spasm to pass. Driving in, hed glimpsed his son crossing the athletic field with his friends. Chris had been skipping a littleactually skippingtossing a ball in the air, but by the time he slumped into Bennies yellow Porsche, any inkling of lightness was gone. Why? Did Chris somehow know about the botched awards ceremony? Bennie told himself this was nuts, yet was moved by an urge to confess the malapropism to his fourth grader. The Will to Divulge, Dr. Beet called this impulse, and had exhorted Bennie to write down the things he wanted to confide, rather than burden his son with them. Bennie did this now, scribbling incompetent on the back of a parking ticket hed received the day before. Then, recalling the earlier humiliation, he added to the list kissing Mother Superior.

So, boss, he said. Whatcha feel like doing?

Dont know.

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Not really.

Bennie looked helplessly out the window. A couple of months ago, Chris had asked if they could skip their weekly appointment with Dr. Beet and spend the afternoon doing whatever instead. They hadnt gone back, a decision that Bennie now regretted; doing whatever had led to desultory afternoons, often cut short by Chriss announcement that he had homework.

How about some coffee? Bennie suggested.

A spark of smile. Can I get a Frappuccino?

Dont tell your mother.

Stephanie didnt approve of Chris drinking coffeereasonable, given that the kid was ninebut Bennie couldnt resist the exquisite connection that came of defying his ex-wife in unison. Betrayal Bonding, Dr. Beet called this, and like the Will to Divulge, it was on the list of no-nos.

They got their coffees and returned to the Porsche to drink them. Chris sucked greedily at his Frappuccino. Bennie took out his red enameled box, pinched a few gold flakes, and slipped them under the plastic lid of his cup.

Whats that? Chris asked.

Bennie started. The gold was becoming so routine that hed stopped being clandestine about it. Medicine, he said, after a moment.

For what?

Some symptoms Ive been having. Or not having, he added mentally.

What symptoms?

Was this the Frappuccino kicking in? Chris had shifted out of his slump and now sat upright, regarding Bennie with his wide, dark, frankly beautiful eyes. Headaches, Bennie said.

Can I see it? Chris asked. The medicine? In that red thing?

Bennie handed over the tiny box. Within a couple of seconds, the kid had figured out the tricky latch and popped it open. Whoa, Dad, he said. What is this stuff?

I told you.

It looks like gold. Flakes of gold.

It has a flaky consistency.

Can I taste one?

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Just one?

Bennie sighed. One.

The boy carefully removed a gold flake and placed it on his tongue. What does it taste like? Bennie couldnt help asking. Hed only consumed the gold in his coffee, where it had no discernible flavor.

Like metal, Chris said. Its awesome. Can I have another one?

Bennie started the car. Was there something obviously sham about the medicine story? Clearly the kid wasnt buying it. One more, he said. And thats it.

His son took a fat pinch of gold flakes and put them on his tongue. Bennie tried not to think of the money. The truth was, hed spent eight thousand dollars on gold in the past two months. A coke habit would have cost him less.

Chris sucked on the gold and closed his eyes. Dad, he said. Its, like, waking me up from the inside.

Interesting, Bennie mused. Thats exactly what its supposed to do.

Is it working?

Sounds like it is.

But on you, Chris said.

Bennie was fairly certain his son had asked him more questions in the past ten minutes than in the prior year and a half since he and Stephanie had split. Could this be a side effect of the gold: curiosity?

Ive still got the headaches, he said.

He was driving aimlessly among the Crandale mansions (doing whatever involved a lot of aimless driving), every one of which seemed to have four or five blond children in Ralph Lauren playing out front. Seeing these kids, it was clearer than ever to Bennie that he hadnt had a chance of lasting in this place, swarthy and unkempt-looking as he was even when freshly showered and shaved. Stephanie, meanwhile, had ascended to the clubs number one doubles team.

Chris, Bennie said. Theres a musical group I need to visita pair of young sisters. Well, youngish sisters. I was planning to go later on, but if youre interested, we could

Sure.

Really?

Yeah.

Did sure and yeah mean that Chris was giving in to please Bennie, as Dr. Beet had noted he often did? Or had the gold-incited curiosity extended to a new interest in Bennies work? Chris had grown up around rock groups, of course, but he was part of the postpiracy generation, for whom things like copyright and creative ownership didnt exist. Bennie didnt blame Chris, of course; the dismantlers who had murdered the music business were a generation beyond his son, adults now. Still, hed heeded Dr. Beets advice to stop hectoring (Beets word) Chris about the industrys decline and focus instead on enjoying music they both likedPearl Jam, for example, which Bennie blasted all the way to Mount Vernon.

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He found Sasha waiting at the door; shed caught the train at Grand Central after Bennie called and had somehow beaten him here.

Hiya Crisco, Sasha said, mussing his sons hair. She had known Chris all his life; shed run out to Duane Reade to buy him pacifiers and diapers. Bennie glanced at her breasts; nothing. Or nothing sexualhe did feel a swell of gratitude and appreciation for his assistant, as opposed to the murderous rage he felt toward the rest of his staff.

There was a pause. Yellow light scissored through the leaves. Bennie lifted his gaze from Sashas breasts to her face. She had high cheekbones and narrow green eyes, wavy hair that ranged from reddish to purplish, depending on the month. Today it was red. She was smiling at Chris, but Bennie detected worry somewhere in the smile. He rarely thought of Sasha as an independent person, and beyond a vague awareness of boyfriends coming and going (vague first out of respect for her privacy, lately out of indifference), he knew few specifics of her life. But seeing her outside this family home, Bennie experienced a flare of curiosity: Sasha had still been at NYU when hed first met her at a Conduits gig at the Pyramid Club; that put her in her thirties now. Why hadnt she married? Did she want kids? She seemed suddenly older, or was it just that Bennie seldom looked directly at her face?

What, she said, feeling his stare.

Nothing.

You okay?

Better than okay, Bennie said, and gave the door a sharp knock.

The sisters looked fantasticif not right out of high school, then at least right out of college, especially if theyd taken a year or two off or maybe transferred a couple of times. They wore their dark hair pulled back from their faces, and their eyes were glittering, and they had a whole fucking book full of new materiallook at this! Bennies fury at his team intensified, but it was pleasurable, motivating fury. The sisters nervous excitement jittered up the house; they knew his visit was their last, best hope. Chandra was the older one, Louisa the younger. Louisas daughter, Olivia, had been riding a trike in the driveway on Bennies last visit, but now she wore skintight jeans and a jeweled tiara that seemed to be a fashion choice, not a costume. Bennie felt Chris snap to attention when Olivia entered the room, as if a charmed snake had risen from its basket inside him.

They went single file down a narrow flight of stairs to the sisters basement recording studio. Their father had built it for them years ago. It was tiny, with orange shag covering the floor, ceiling, and walls. Bennie took the only seat, noting with approval a cowbell by the keyboard.

Coffee? Sasha asked him. Chandra led her upstairs to make it. Louisa sat at the keyboard teasing out melodies. Olivia took up a set of bongo drums and began loosely accompanying her mother. She handed Chris a tambourine, and to Bennies astonishment, his son settled in beating the thing in perfect time. Nice, he thought. Very nice. The day had swerved unexpectedly into good. The almost-teenage daughter wasnt a problem, he decided; she could join the group as a younger sister or a cousin, strengthen the tween angle. Maybe Chris could be part of it, too, although he and Olivia would have to switch instruments. A boy on a tambourine

Sasha brought his coffee, and Bennie took out his red enameled box and dropped in a pinch of flakes. As he sipped, a sensation of pleasure filled his whole torso the way a snowfall fills up a sky. Jesus, he felt good. Hed been delegating too much. Hearing the music get made, that was the thing: people and instruments and beaten-looking equipment aligning abruptly into a single structure of sound, flexible and alive. The sisters were at the keyboard arranging their music, and Bennie experienced a bump of anticipation; something was going to happen here. He knew it. Felt it pricking his arms and chest.

Youve got Pro Tools on there, right? he asked, indicating the laptop on a table amid the instruments. Is everything miked? Can we lay down some tracks right now?

The sisters nodded and checked the laptop; they were ready to record. Vocals, too? Chandra asked.

Absolutely, Bennie said. Lets do it all at once. Lets blow the roof off your fucking house.

Sasha was standing to Bennies right. So many bodies had heated up the little room, lifting off her skin a perfume shed been wearing for yearsor was it a lotion?that smelled like apricots; not just the sweet part but that slight bitterness around the pit. And as Bennie breathed in Sashas lotion smell, his prick roused itself suddenly like an old hound getting a swift kick. He almost jumped out of his seat in startled amazement, but he kept his cool. Dont push things, just let it happen. Dont scare it away.

Then the sisters began to sing. Oh, the raw, almost-threadbare sound of their voices mixed with the clash of instrumentsthese sensations met with a faculty deeper in Bennie than judgment or even pleasure; they communed directly with his body, whose shivering, bursting reply made him dizzy. And here was his first erection in monthsprompted by Sasha, who had been too near Bennie all these years for him to really see her, like in those nineteenth-century novels hed read in secret because only girls were supposed to like them. He seized the cowbell and stick and began whacking at it with zealous blows. He felt the music in his mouth, his ears, his ribsor was that his own pulse? He was on fire!

And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an e-mail hed been inadvertently copied on between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a hairball. God, what a feeling of liquid shame had pooled in Bennie when hed read that word. He hadnt been sure what it meant: That he was hairy? (True.) Unclean? (False!) Or was it literal, as in: he clogged peoples throats and made them gag, the way Stephanies cat, Sylph, occasionally vomited hair onto the carpet? Bennie had gone for a haircut that very day and seriously considered having his back and upper arms waxed, until Stephanie talked him out of it, running her cool hands over his shoulders that night in bed, telling him she loved him hairythat the last thing the world needed was another waxed guy.

Music. Bennie was listening to music. The sisters were screaming, the tiny room imploding from their sound, and Bennie tried to find again the deep contentment hed felt just a minute ago. But hairball had unsettled him. The room felt uncomfortably small. Bennie set down his cowbell and slipped the parking ticket from his pocket. He scribbled hairball in hopes of exorcising the memory. He took a slow inhale and rested his eyes on Chris, who was flailing the tambourine trying to match the sisters erratic tempo, and right away it happened again: taking his son for a haircut a couple of years ago, having his longtime barber, Stu, put down his scissors and pull Bennie aside. Theres a problem with your sons hair, hed said.

A problem!

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But he goes to private school! Bennie had blurted. In Crandale, New York!

Chriss eyes had gone wide with fear: What is it, Daddy? Other people were staring, and Bennie had felt responsible, with his own riotous head of hair, to the point where he sprayed OFF! in his armpits every morning to this day, and kept an extra can at the officecrazy! He knew it! Getting their coats while everyone watched, Bennie with a burning face; God, it hurt him to think of this nowhurt him physically, as if the memory were raking over him and leaving gashes. He hid his face in his hands. He wanted to cover his ears, block out the cacophony of Stop/Go, but he concentrated on Sasha, just to his right, her sweet-bitter smell, and found himself remembering a girl hed chased at a party when he first came to New York and was selling vinyl on the Lower East Side a hundred years ago, some delicious blondeAbby, was it? In the course of keeping tabs on Abby, Bennie had done several lines of coke and been stricken with a severe instantaneous need to empty his bowels. Hed been relieving himself on the can in what must have been (although Bennies brain ached to recall this) a miasma of annihilating stink, when the unlockable bathroom door had jumped open, and there was Abby, staring down at him. Thered been a horrible, bottomless instant when their eyes met; then shed shut the door.

Bennie had left the party with someone elsethere was always someone elseand their night of fun, which he felt comfortable presuming, had erased the confrontation with Abby. But now it was backoh, it was back, bringing waves of shame so immense they seemed to engulf whole parts of Bennies life and drag them away: achievements, successes, moments of pride, all of it razed to the point where there was nothinghe was nothinga guy on a john looking up at the nauseated face of a woman hed wanted to impress.

Bennie leaped from his stool, squashing the cowbell under one foot. Sweat stung his eyes. His hair engaged palpably with the ceiling shag.

You okay? Sasha asked, alarmed.

Im sorry, Bennie panted, mopping his brow. Im sorry. Im sorry. Im sorry.

Back upstairs, he stood outside the front door, pulling fresh air into his lungs. The Stop/Go sisters and daughter clustered around him, apologizing for the airlessness of the recording studio, their fathers ongoing failure to vent it properly, reminding one another in spirited tones of the many times they themselves had grown faint, trying to work there.

We can hum the tunes, they said, and they did, in harmony, Olivia too, all of them standing not far from Bennies face, desperation quivering their smiles. A gray cat made a figure eight around Bennies shins, nudging him rapturously with its bony head. It was a relief to get back in the car.

He was driving Sasha to the city, but he had to get Chris home first. His son hunched in the backseat, facing the open window. It seemed to Bennie that his lark of an idea for the afternoon had gone awry. He fended off the longing to look at Sashas breasts, waiting to calm down, regain his equilibrium before putting himself to the test. Finally, at a red light, he glanced slowly, casually in her direction, not even focusing at first, then peering intently. Nothing. He was clobbered by loss so severe that it took physical effort not to howl. Hed had it, hed had it! But where had it gone?

Dad, green light, Chris said.

Driving again, Bennie forced himself to ask his son, So, boss. What did you think?

The kid didnt answer. Maybe he was pretending not to hear, or maybe the wind was too loud in his face. Bennie glanced at Sasha. What about you?

Oh, she said, theyre awful.

Bennie blinked, stung. He felt a gust of anger at Sasha that passed a few seconds later, leaving odd relief. Of course. They were awful. That was the problem.

Unlistenable, Sasha went on. No wonder you were having a heart attack.

I dont get it, Bennie said.

What?

Two years ago they soundeddifferent.

Sasha gave him a quizzical look. It wasnt two years, she said. It was five.

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Because last time, I came to their house after a meeting at Windows on the World.

It took Bennie a minute to comprehend this. Oh, he finally said. How close to

Four days.

Wow. I never knew that. He waited out a respectful pause, then continued, Still, two years, five years

Sasha turned and stared at him. She looked angry. Who am I talking to? she asked. Youre Bennie Salazar! This is the music business. Five years is five hundred yearsyour words.

Bennie didnt answer. They were approaching his former house, as he thought of it. He couldnt say old house, but he also couldnt say house anymore, although hed certainly paid for it. His former house was withdrawn from the street on a grassy slope, a gleaming white Colonial that had filled him with awe every time hed taken a key from his pocket to open the front door. Bennie stopped at the curb and killed the engine. He couldnt bring himself to drive up the driveway.

Chris was leaning forward from the backseat, his head between Bennie and Sasha. Bennie wasnt sure how long hed been there. I think you need some of your medicine, Dad, he said.

Good idea, Bennie said. He began tapping his pockets, but the little red box was nowhere to be found.

Here, Ive got it, Sasha said. You dropped it coming out of the recording room.

She was doing that more and more, finding things hed misplacedsometimes before Bennie even knew they were missing. It added to the almost trancelike dependence he felt on her. Thanks, Sash, he said.

He opened the box. God the flakes were shiny. Gold didnt tarnish, that was the thing. The flakes would look the same in five years as they did right now.

Should I put some on my tongue, like you did? he asked his son.

Yeah. But I get some too.

Sasha, you want to try a little medicine? Bennie asked.

Um, okay, she said. Whats it supposed to do?

Solve your problems, Bennie said. I mean, headaches. Not that you have any.

Never, Sasha said, with that same wary smile.

They each took a pinch of gold flakes and placed them on their tongues. Bennie tried not to calculate the dollar value of what was inside their mouths. He concentrated on the taste: Was it metallic, or was that just his expectation? Coffee, or was that what was left in his mouth? He tongued the gold in a tight knot and sucked the juice from within it; sour, he thought. Bitter. Sweet? Each one seemed true for a second, but in the end Bennie had an impression of something mineral, like stone. Even earth. And then the lump melted away.

I should go, Dad, Chris said. Bennie let him out of the car and hugged him hard. As always, Chris went still in his embrace, but whether he was savoring it or enduring it Bennie could never tell.

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He got back in the car, but didnt turn the key. He was watching Chris scale the undulating lawn toward his former house. The grass was fluorescently bright. His son seemed to buckle under his enormous backpack. What the hell was in it? Bennie had seen professional photographers carry less. As Chris neared the house he blurred a little, or maybe it was Bennies eyes watering. He found it excruciating, watching his sons long journey to the front door. He worried Sasha would speaksay something like Hes a great kid, or That was funsomething that would require Bennie to turn and look at her. But Sasha knew better; she knew everything. She sat with Bennie in silence, watching Chris climb the fat, bright grass to the front door, then open it without turning and go inside.

They didnt speak again until theyd passed from the Henry Hudson Parkway onto the West Side Highway, heading into Lower Manhattan. Bennie played some early Who, the Stooges, bands hed listened to before he was even old enough to go to a concert. Then he got into Flipper, the Mutants, Eye Protectionseventies Bay Area groups he and his gang had slam-danced to at the Mabuhay Gardens when they werent practicing with their own unlistenable band, the Flaming Dildos. He sensed Sasha paying attention and toyed with the idea that he was confessing to her his disillusionmenthis hatred for the industry hed given his life to. He began weighing each musical choice, drawing out his argument through the songs themselvesPatti Smiths ragged poetry (but why did she quit?), the jock hardcore of Black Flag and the Circle Jerks giving way to alternative, that great compromise, down, down, down to the singles hed just today been petitioning radio stations to add, husks of music, lifeless and cold as the squares of office neon cutting the blue twilight.

Its incredible, Sasha said, how theres just nothing there.

Astounded, Bennie turned to her. Was it possible that shed followed his musical rant to its grim conclusion? Sasha was looking downtown, and he followed her eyes to the empty space where the Twin Towers had been. There should be something, you know? she said, not looking at Bennie. Like an echo. Or an outline.

Bennie sighed. Theyll put something up, he said. When theyre finally done squabbling.

I know. But she kept looking south, as if it were a problem her mind couldnt solve. Bennie was relieved she hadnt understood. He remembered his mentor, Lou Kline, telling him in the nineties that rock and roll had peaked at Monterey Pop. Theyd been in Lous house in LA with its waterfalls, the pretty girls Lou always had, his car collection out front, and Bennie had looked into his idols famous face and thought, Youre finished. Nostalgia was the endeveryone knew that. Lou had died three months ago, after being paralyzed from a stroke.

At a stoplight, Bennie remembered his list. He took out the parking ticket and finished it off.

What do you keep scribbling on that ticket? Sasha asked. Bennie handed it to her, his reluctance to have the list seen by human eyes overwhelming him a half second late. To his horror, she began reading it aloud:

Kissing Mother Superior, incompetent, hairball, poppy seeds, on the can.

Bennie listened in agony, as if the words themselves might provoke a catastrophe. But they were neutralized the instant Sasha spoke them in her scratchy voice.

Not bad, she said. Theyre titles, right?

Sure, Bennie said. Can you read them one more time? She did, and now they sounded like titles to him, too. He felt peaceful, cleansed.

Kissing Mother Superior is my favorite, Sasha said. Weve gotta find a way to use that one.

Theyd pulled up outside her building on Forsyth. The street felt desolate and underlit. Bennie wished she could live in a better place. Sasha gathered up her ubiquitous black bag, a shapeless wishing well from which shed managed to wrest whatever file or number or slip of paper hed needed for the past twelve years. Bennie seized her thin white hand. Listen, he said. Listen, Sasha.

She looked up. Bennie felt no lust at allhe wasnt even hard. What he felt for Sasha was love, a safety and closeness like what hed had with Stephanie before hed let her down so many times that she couldnt stop being mad. Im crazy for you, Sasha, he said. Crazy.

Come on, Bennie, Sasha chided lightly. None of that.

He held her hand between both of his. Sashas fingers were trembly and cold. Her other hand was on the door.

Wait, Bennie said. Please.

She turned to him, somber now. Theres no way, Bennie, she said. We need each other.

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Sasha leaned over and kissed Bennies cheek: a chaste kiss, a kiss between brother and sister, mother and son, but Bennie felt the softness of her skin, the warm movement of her breath. Then she was out of the car. She waved to him through the window and said something he didnt catch. Bennie lunged across the empty seat, his face near the glass, staring fixedly as she said it again. Still, he missed it. As he struggled to open the door, Sasha said it once more, mouthing the words extra slowly:

See. You. Tomorrow.

3

Ask Me If I Care

Late at night, when theres nowhere left to go, we go to Alices house. Scotty drives his pickup, two of us squeezed in front with him, blasting bootleg tapes of the Stranglers, the Nuns, Negative Trend, the other two stuck in back where you freeze all year long, getting tossed in the actual air when Scotty tops the hills. Still, if its Bennie and me I hope for the back, so I can push against his shoulder in the cold, and hold him for a second when we hit a bump.

The first time we went to Sea Cliff, where Alice lives, she pointed up a hill at fog sneaking through the eucalyptus trees and said her old school was up there: an all-girls school where her little sisters go now. K through six you wear a green plaid jumper and brown shoes, after that a blue skirt and white sailor top, and you can pick your own shoes. Scotty goes, Can we see them? and Alice goes, My uniforms? but Scotty goes, No, your alleged sisters.

She leads the way upstairs, Scotty and Bennie right behind her. Theyre both fascinated by Alice, but its Bennie who entirely loves her. And Alice loves Scotty, of course.

Bennies shoes are off, and I watch his brown heels sink into the white cotton-candy carpet, so thick it muffles every trace of us. Jocelyn and I come last. She leans close to me, and inside her whisper I smell cherry gum covering up the five hundred cigarettes weve smoked. I cant smell the gin we drank from my dads hidden supply at the beginning of the night, pouring it into Coke cans so we can drink it on the street.

Jocelyn goes, Watch, Rhea. Theyll be blond, her sisters.

I go, According to?

Rich children are always blond, Jocelyn goes. It has to do with vitamins.

Believe me, I dont mistake that for information. I know everyone Jocelyn knows.

The room is dark except for a pink night-light. I stop in the doorway and Bennie hangs back too, but the other three go crowding into the space between the beds. Alices little sisters are sleeping on their sides, covers tucked around their shoulders. One looks like Alice, with pale wavy hair, the other is dark, like Jocelyn. Im afraid theyll wake up and be scared of us in our dog collars and safety pins and shredded T-shirts. I think: We shouldnt be here, Scotty shouldnt have asked to come in, Alice shouldnt have said yes, except she says yes to everything Scotty asks. I think: I want to lie down in one of those beds and go to sleep.

Ahem, I whisper to Jocelyn as were leaving the room. Dark hair.

She whispers back, Black sheep.

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. The hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now theyre begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. Were sick of them.

At school, we spend every free minute in the Pit. Its not a pit in the strictly speaking sense; its a strip of pavement above the playing fields. We inherited it from last years Pitters who graduated, but still we get nervous walking in if other Pitters are already there: Tatum, who wears a different color Danskin every day, or Wayne, who grows sinsemilla in his actual closet, or Boomer, whos always hugging everyone since his family did EST. Im nervous walking in unless Jocelyn is already there, or (for her) me. We stand in for each other.

On warm days, Scotty plays his guitar. Not the electric he uses for Flaming Dildos gigs, but a lap steel guitar that you hold a different way. Scotty actually built this instrument: bent the wood, glued it, painted on the shellac. Everyone gathers around, theres no way not to when Scotty plays. One time the entire J.V. soccer team climbed up from the athletic field to listen, looking around in their jerseys and long red socks like they didnt know how they got there. Scotty is magnetic. And I say this as someone who does not love him.

The Flaming Dildos have had a lot of names: the Crabs, the Croks, the Crimps, the Crunch, the Scrunch, the Gawks, the Gobs, the Flaming Spiders, the Black Widows. Every time Scotty and Bennie change the name, Scotty sprays black over his guitar case and Bennies bass case, and then he makes a stencil of the new name and sprays it on. We dont know how they decide if they should keep a name, because Bennie and Scotty dont actually talk. But they agree on everything, maybe through ESP. Jocelyn and I write all the lyrics and work out the tunes with Bennie and Scotty. We sing with them in rehearsal, but we dont like being onstage. Alice doesnt eitherthe only thing we have in common with her.

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Down the path from the Pit is where the cholos hang out, with their black leather coats and clicky shoes and dark hair in almost invisible nets. Sometimes they talk to Bennie in Spanish, and he smiles at them but never answers. Why do they keep speaking Spanish to him? I go to Jocelyn, and she looks at me and goes, Rhea, Bennies a cholo. Isnt that obvious?

Thats factually crazy, I go, and my face is getting hot. He has a Mohawk. And hes not even friends with them.

Jocelyn goes, Not all cholos are friends. Then she says, The good news is, rich girls wont go with cholos. So hell never get Alice, period-the-end.

Jocelyn knows Im waiting for Bennie. But Bennie is waiting for Alice, whos waiting for Scotty, whos waiting for Jocelyn, whos known Scotty the longest and makes him feel safe, I think, because even though Scotty is magnetic, with bleached hair and a studly chest that he likes to uncover when its sunny out, his mother died three years ago from sleeping pills. Scottys been quieter since then, and in cold weather he shivers like someone is shaking him.

Jocelyn loves Scotty back, but she isnt in love with him. Jocelyn is waiting for Lou, an adult man who picked her up hitchhiking. Lou lives in LA, but he said he would call the next time he comes to San Francisco. That was weeks ago.

No one is waiting for me. In this story, Im the girl no one is waiting for. Usually the girl is fat, but my problem is more rare, which is freckles: I look like someone threw handfuls of mud at my face. When I was little, my mom told me they were special. Thank God Ill be able to remove them, when Im old enough and can pay for it myself. Until that time I have my dog collar and green rinse, because how can anyone call me the girl with freckles when my hair is green?

Jocelyn has chopped black hair that looks permanently wet, and twelve ear piercings that I gave her with a pointed earring, not using ice. She has a beautiful half-Chinese face. It makes a difference.

Jocelyn and I have done everything together since fourth grade: hopscotch, jump rope, charm bracelets, buried treasure, Harriet the Spying, blood sisters, crank calls, pot, coke, quaaludes. Shes seen my dad puking into the hedge outside our building, and I was with her on Polk Street the night she recognized one of the leather boys hugging outside the White Swallow and it was her dad, who was on a business trip, before he moved away. So I still cant believe I missed the day she met the man, Lou. She was hitchhiking home from downtown and he pulled up in a red Mercedes and drove her to an apartment he uses on his trips to San Francisco. He unscrewed the bottom of a can of Right Guard, and a Baggie of cocaine dropped out. Lou did some lines off Jocelyns bare butt and they went all the way twice, not including when she went down on him. I made Jocelyn repeat each detail of this story until I knew everything she knew, so we could be equal again.

Lou is a music producer who knows Bill Graham personally. There were gold and silver record albums on his walls and a thousand electric guitars.

The Flaming Dildos rehearsal is on Saturday, in Scottys garage. When Jocelyn and I get there, Alice is setting up the new tape recorder her stepfather bought her, with a real microphone. Shes one of those girls that like machinesanother reason for Bennie to love her. Joel, the Dildos steady drummer, comes next, driven by his dad, who waits outside in his station wagon for the whole practice, reading World War II books. Joel is AP everything and hes applied to Harvard, so I guess his dad isnt taking any chances.

Where we live, in the Sunset, the ocean is always just over your shoulder and the houses have Easter-egg colors. But the second Scotty lets the garage door slam down, were suddenly enraged, all of us. Bennies bass snickers to life, and pretty soon were screaming out the songs, which have titles like Pet Rock, and Do the Math, and Pass Me the Kool-Aid, but when we holler them aloud in Scottys garage the lyrics might as well be: fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Every once in a while a kid from Band and Orchestra pounds on the garage door to try out (invited by Bennie), and every time Scotty ropes up the door we glare out at the bright day shaking its head at us.

Today we try a sax, a tuba, and a banjo, but sax and banjo keep hogging the stage, and tuba covers her ears as soon as we start to play. Practice is almost over when theres another banging on the garage door and Scotty pulls it up. An enormous pimpled kid in an AC/DC T-shirt is standing there, holding a violin case. He goes, Im looking for Bennie Salazar?

Jocelyn and Alice and I stare at one another in shock, which feels for a second like were all three friends, like Alice is part of us.

Hey guy, Bennie says. Good timing. Everybody, this is Marty.

Even smiling, theres no hope for Martys face. But Im worried he might think the same of me, so I dont smile back.

Marty plugs in his violin and we launch into our best song, What the Fuck?:

You said you were a fairy princess You said you were a shooting star You said wed go to Bora Bora Now look at where the fuck we are

Bora Bora was Alices ideawed never heard of it. While everyone howls out the chorus (What the fuck? / What the fuck? / What the fuck?), I watch Bennie listen, eyes closed, his Mohawk like a million antennas pricking up from his head. When the song ends, he opens his eyes and grins. I hope you got that, Al, he goes, and Alice rewinds the tape to make sure.

Alice takes all our tapes and turns them into one top tape, and Bennie and Scotty drive from club to club, trying to get people to book the Flaming Dildos for a gig. Our big hope is the Mab, of course: the Mabuhay Gardens, on Broadway, where all the punk bands play. Scotty waits in the truck while Bennie deals with the rude assholes inside the clubs. We have to be careful with Scotty. In fifth grade, the first time his mom went away, he sat all day on the patch of grass outside his house and stared at the sun. He refused to go to school or come in. His dad sat with him trying to cover his eyes, and after school, Jocelyn came and sat there, too. Now there are permanent gray smudges in Scottys vision. He says he likes themactually, what he says is: I consider them a visual enhancement. We think they remind him of his mom.

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In the Mabs graffiti-splattered bathroom we eavesdrop: Ricky Sleeper fell off the stage at a gig, Joe Rees of Target Video is making an entire movie of punk rock, two sisters we always see at the club have started turning tricks to pay for heroin. Knowing all this makes us one step closer to being real, but not completely. When does a fake Mohawk become a real Mohawk? Who decides? How do you know if its happened?

During the shows we slam-dance in front of the stage. We tussle and push and get knocked down and pulled back up until our sweat is mixed up with real punks sweat and our skin has touched their skin. Bennie does less of this. I think he actually listens to the music.

One thing Ive noticed: no punk rockers have freckles. They dont exist.

One night, Jocelyn answers her phone and its Lou going, Hello beautiful. Hes been calling for days and days, he goes, but the phone just rings. Why not try calling at night? I ask when Jocelyn repeats this.

That Saturday, after rehearsal, she goes out with Lou instead of us. We go to the Mab, then back to Alices house. By now we treat the place like we own it: we eat the yogurts her mom makes in glass cups on a warming machine, we lie on the living room couch with our sock feet on the armrests. One night her mom made us hot chocolate and brought it into the living room on a gold tray. She had big tired eyes and tendons moving in her neck. Jocelyn whispered in my ear, Rich people like to hostess, so they can show off their nice stuff.

Tonight, without Jocelyn here, I ask Alice if she still has those school uniforms she mentioned long ago. She looks surprised. Yeah, she goes. I do.

I follow her up the fluffy stairs to her actual room, which Ive never seen. Its smaller than her sisters room, with blue shag carpeting and crisscross wallpaper in blue and white. Her bed is under a mountain of stuffed animals, which all turn out to be frogs: bright green, light green, Day-Glo green, some with stuffed flies attached to their tongues. Her bedside lamp is shaped like a frog, plus her pillow.

I go, I didnt know you were into frogs, and Alice goes, How would you?

I havent really been alone with Alice before. She seems not as nice as when Jocelyn is around.

She opens her closet, stands on a chair, and pulls down a box with some uniforms inside: a green plaid one-piece from when she was little, a sailor suit two-piece from later on. I go, Which did you like better?

Neither, she goes. Who wants to wear a uniform?

I go, I would.

Is that a joke?

What kind of joke would it be?

The kind where you and Jocelyn laugh about how you made a joke and I didnt get it.

My throat turns very dry. I go, I wont. Laugh with Jocelyn.

Alice shrugs. Ask me if I care, she goes.

We sit on her rug, the uniforms across our knees. Alice wears ripped jeans and drippy black eye makeup, but her hair is long and gold. She isnt a real punk, either.

After a while I go, Why do your parents let us come here?

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Okay.

They want to keep an eye on you, I guess.

The foghorns are extra loud in Sea Cliff, like were alone on a ship sailing through the thickest fog. I hug my knees, wishing so much that Jocelyn was with us.

Are they right now? I go, softly. Keeping an eye?

Alice takes a huge breath and lets it back out. No, she goes. Theyre asleep.

Marty the violinist isnt even in high schoolhes a sophomore at SF State, where Jocelyn and I and Scotty (if he passes Algebra II) are headed next year. Jocelyn goes to Bennie, The shit will hit the fan if you put that dork onstage.

I guess well find out, Bennie goes, and he looks at his watch like hes thinking. In two weeks and four days and six hours and Im-not-sure-how-many-minutes.

We stare at him, not comprehending. Then he tells us: Dirk Dirksen from the Mab gave him a call. Jocelyn and I shriek and hug onto Bennie, which for me is like touching something electric, his actual body in my arms. I remember every hug Ive given him. I learn one thing each time: how warm his skin is, how he has muscles like Scotty even though he never takes his shirt off. This time I find his heartbeat, which pushes my hand through his back.

Jocelyn goes, Who else knows?

Scotty, of course. Alice, too, but its only later that this bothers us.

I have cousins in Los Angeles, so Jocelyn calls Lou from our apartment, where the charge wont stand out on the phone bill. Im two inches away on my parents flowered bedspread while she dials the phone with a long black fingernail. I hear a mans voice answer, and it shocks me that hes real, Jocelyn didnt make him up, even though I never supposed such a thing. He doesnt go, Hey beautiful, though. He goes, I told you to let me call you.

Jocelyn goes, Sorry, in an empty little voice. I grab the phone and go, What kind of hello is that? Lou goes, Who the Christ am I talking to? and I tell him Rhea. Then he goes in a calmer voice, Nice to meet you, Rhea. Now, would you hand the phone back to Jocelyn?

This time she pulls the cord away. Lou seems to be doing most of the talking. After a minute or two, Jocelyn hisses at me, You have to leave. Go!

I walk out of my parents bedroom into our kitchen. Theres a fern hanging from the ceiling by a chain, dropping little brown leaves in the sink. The curtains have a pineapple pattern. My two brothers are on the balcony, grafting bean plants for my little brothers science project. I go outside with them, the sun poking into my eyes. I try to force myself to look straight at it, like Scotty did.

After a while, Jocelyn comes out. Happiness is floating up from her hair and skin. Ask me if I care, I think.

Later she tells me Lou said yes: hell come to the Dildos gig at the Mab, and maybe hell give us a record contract. Its not a promise, he warned her, but well have a good time anyway, right, beautiful? Dont we always?

The night of the concert, I come with Jocelyn to meet Lou for dinner at Vanessis, a restaurant on Broadway next door to Enricos, where tourists and rich people sit outside drinking Irish coffees and gawking at us when we walk by. We could have invited Alice, but Jocelyn goes, Her parents probably take her to Vanessis all the time. I go, You mean her mother and stepfather.

A man is sitting in a round corner booth, smiling teeth at us, and that man is Lou. He looks as old as my dad, meaning forty-three. He has shaggy blond hair, and his face is handsome, I guess, the way dads can sometimes be.

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A week ago, I looked at the menu outside Vanessis and saw linguine with clams. All week long Ive been planning to order that dish. Jocelyn picks the same, and after we order, Lou hands her something under the table. We both slide out of the booth and go to the ladies room. Its a tiny brown bottle full of cocaine. Theres a miniature spoon attached to a chain, and Jocelyn heaps up the spoon two times for each nostril. She sniffs and makes a little sound and shuts her eyes. Then she fills the spoon again and holds it for me. By the time I walk back to the table Ive got eyes blinking all over my head, seeing everything in the restaurant at once. Maybe the coke we did before wasnt really coke. We sit down and tell Lou about a new band weve heard of called Flipper, and Lou tells us about being on a train in Africa that didnt completely stop at the stationsit just slowed down so people could jump off or on. I go, I want to see Africa! and Lou goes, Maybe well go together, the three of us, and it seems like this really might happen. He goes, The soil in the hills is so fertile its red, and I go, My brothers are grafting bean plants, but the soil is just regular brown soil, and Jocelyn goes, What about the mosquitoes? and Lou goes, Ive never seen a blacker sky or a brighter moon, and I realize that Im beginning my adult life right now, on this night.

When the waiter brings my linguine and clams I cant take one bite. Only Lou eats: an almost-raw steak, a Caesar salad, red wine. Hes one of those people who never stops moving. Three times strangers come to our table to say hello to Lou, but he doesnt introduce us. We talk and talk while our food gets cold, and when Lou finishes eating, we leave Vanessis.

On Broadway he keeps an arm around each of us. We pass the usual things: the scuzzy guy in a fez trying to lure people inside the Casbah, the strippers lounging in doorways of the Condor and Big Als. Punk rockers rove in laughing, shoving packs. Traffic pushes along Broadway, people honking and waving from their cars like were all at one gigantic party. With my thousand eyes it looks different, like Im a different person seeing it. I think, After my freckles are gone, my whole life will be like this.

The door guy at the Mab recognizes Lou and whisks us past the snaking line of people waiting for the Cramps and the Mutants, who are playing later on. Inside, Bennie and Scotty and Joel are onstage setting up with Alice. Jocelyn and I put on our dog collars and safety pins in the bathroom. When we come back out, Lous already introducing himself to the band. Bennie shakes Lous hand and goes, Its an honor, sir.

After the usual sarcastic introduction from Dirk Dirksen, the Flaming Dildos open with Snake in the Grass. No one is dancing or even really listening; theyre still coming into the club or killing time until the bands they came for start playing. Normally Jocelyn and I would be directly in front of the stage, but tonight we stand in back, leaning against a wall with Lou. Hes bought us both gin and tonics. I cant tell if the Dildos sound good or bad, I can barely hear them, my heart is beating too hard and my thousand eyes are peering all over the room. According to the muscles on the side of Lous face, hes grinding his teeth.

Marty comes on for the next number, but he spazzes out and drops his violin. The barely interested crowd gets just interested enough to yell some insults when he crouches to replug it with his plumbers crack displaying. I cant even look at Bennie, it matters so much.

When they start playing Do the Math, Lou yells in my ear, Whose idea was the violin?

I go, Bennies.

Kid on bass?

I nod, and Lou watches Bennie for a minute and I watch him too. Lou goes, Not much of a player.

But hes, I try to explain. The whole thing is his

Something gets tossed at the stage that looks like glass, but when it hits Scottys face thank God its only ice from a drink. Scotty flinches but keeps on playing, and then a Budweiser can flies up and clips Marty right in the forehead. Jocelyn and I look at each other panicked, but when we try to move, Lou anchors us. The Dildos start playing What the Fuck? but now garbage is spewing at the stage, chucked by four guys with safety-pin chains connecting their nostrils to their earlobes. Every few seconds another drink strikes Scottys face. Finally he just plays with his eyes shut, and I wonder if hes seeing the scar spots. Alice is trying to tackle the garbage throwers now, and suddenly people are slam-dancing hard, the kind of dancing thats basically fighting. Joel clobbers his drums as Scotty tears off his dripping T-shirt and snaps it at one of the garbage throwers, right in the guys face with a twangy crack, and then at another onesnracklike my brothers snapping bath towels, but sharper. The Scotty magnet is starting to workpeople watch his bare muscles shining with sweat and beer. Then one of the garbage throwers tries to storm the stage, but Scotty kicks him in the chest with the flat of his boottheres a kind of gasp from the crowd as the guy flies back. Scottys smiling now, grinning like I almost never see him grin, wolf teeth flashing, and I realize that, out of all of us, Scotty is the truly angry one.

I turn to Jocelyn, but shes gone. Maybe my thousand eyes are what tell me to look down. I see Lous fingers spread out over her black hair. Shes kneeling in front of him, giving him head, like the music is a disguise and no one can see them. Maybe no one does. Lous other arm is around me, which I guess is why I dont run, although I could, thats the thing. But I stand there while Lou mashes Jocelyns head against himself again and again so I dont know how she can breathe, until it starts to seem like shes not even Jocelyn, but some kind of animal or machine that cant be broken. I force myself to look at the band, Scotty snapping the wet shirt at peoples eyes and knocking them with his boot, Lou grasping my shoulder, squeezing it harder, turning his head to my neck and letting out a hot, stuttering groan I can hear even through the music. Hes that close. A sob cracks open in me. Tears leak out from my eyes, but only the two in my face. The other thousand eyes are closed.

The walls of Lous apartment are covered with electric guitars and gold and silver record albums, just like Jocelyn said. But she never mentioned that it was on the thirty-fifth floor, six blocks away from the Mab, or the green marble slabs in the elevator. I think that was a lot to leave out.

In the kitchen, Jocelyn pours Fritos into a dish and takes a glass bowl of green apples out of the refrigerator. Shes already passed around quaaludes, offering one to every person except me. I think shes afraid to look at me. Whos the hostess now? I want to ask.

In the living room, Alice is sitting with Scotty, who wears a Pendleton shirt from Lous closet and looks white and shaky, maybe from having stuff thrown at him, maybe because he understands for real that Jocelyn has a boyfriend and it isnt him, and never will be. Marty is there, too; hes got a cut on his cheek and an almost-black eye and he keeps going, That was intense, to no one in particular. Joel got driven straight home, of course. Everyone agrees the gig went well.

When Lou leads Bennie up a curling staircase to his recording studio, I tag along. He calls Bennie kiddo and explains each machine in the room, which is small and warm with black foam points all over the walls. Lous legs move restlessly and he eats a green apple with loud cracks, like hes gnawing rock. Bennie glances out the door toward the rail overlooking the living room, trying to get a glimpse of Alice. I keep being about to cry. Im worried that what happened in the club counts as having sex with Louthat I was part of it.

Finally I go back downstairs. Off the living room I notice a door partly open, a big bed just beyond it. I go in and lie facedown on a velvet bedspread. A peppery incense smell trickles up around me. The room is cool and dim, with pictures in frames on both sides of the bed. My whole body hurts. After a few minutes someone comes in and lies down next to me, and I know its Jocelyn. We dont say anything, we just lie there side by side in the dark. Finally I go, You shouldve told me.

Told you what? she goes, but I dont even know. Then she goes, Theres too much, and I feel like something is ending, right at that minute.

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I lean close to the picture. Lou looks so happy, surrounded by his kids like any normal dad, that I cant believe this Lou with us is the very same Lou. Then I notice his son Rolph. He has blue eyes and black hair and a bright, sweet smile. I get a crawling feeling in my stomach. I go, Rolph is decent, and Jocelyn laughs and goes, Really. Then she goes, Dont tell Lou I said that.

He comes into the bedroom a minute later, rock-crunching another apple. I realize the apples are completely for Lou, he eats them nonstop. I slide off the bed without looking at him, and he shuts the door behind me.

It takes me a second to get whats going on in the living room. Scotty is sitting cross-legged, picking at a gold guitar in the shape of a flame. Alice is behind him with her arms around his neck, her face next to his, her hair falling into his lap. Her eyes are closed with joy. I forget who I actually am for a secondall I can think is how Bennie will feel when he sees this. I look around for him, but theres just Marty peering at the albums on the wall, trying to be inconspicuous. And then I notice the music flooding out of every part of the apartment at oncethe couch, the walls, even the floorand I know Bennies alone in Lous studio, pouring music around us. A minute ago it was Dont Let Me Down. Then it was Blondies Heart of Glass. Now its Iggy Pops The Passenger:

I am the passenger And I ride and I ride I ride through the citys backside I see the stars come out of the sky

Listening, I think, You will never know how much I understand you.

I notice Marty looking over at me kind of hesitant, and I see how this is supposed to work: Im the dog, so I get Marty. I slide open a glass door and go onto Lous balcony. Ive never seen San Francisco from so high up: its a soft blue-black, with colored lights and fog like gray smoke. Long piers reach out into the flat dark bay. Theres a mean wind, so I run in for my jacket and then come back out and curl up tightly on a white plastic chair. I stare at that view until I start to get calm. I think, The world is actually huge. Thats the part no one can really explain.

After a while the door slides open. I dont look up, thinking its Marty, but it turns out to be Lou. Hes barefoot, wearing shorts. His legs are tan even in the dark. I go, Wheres Jocelyn?

Asleep, Lou goes. Hes standing at the railing, looking out. Its the first time Ive seen him be still.

I go, Do you even remember being our age?

Lou grins at me in my chair, but its a copy of the grin he had at dinner. I am your age, he goes.

Ahem, I go. You have six kids.

So I do, he goes. He turns his back, waiting for me to disappear. I think, I didnt have sex with this man. I dont even know him. Then he goes, Ill never get old.

Youre already old, I tell him.

He swivels around and peers at me huddled in my chair. Youre scary, he goes. You know that?

Its the freckles, I go.

Its not the freckles, its you. He keeps looking at me, and then something shifts in his face and he goes, I like it.

Do not.

I do. Youre gonna keep me honest, Rhea.

Im surprised he remembers my name. I go, Its too late for that, Lou.

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People will try to change you, Rhea, Lou goes. Dont let em.

But I want to change.

No, he goes, serious. Youre beautiful. Stay like this.

But the freckles, I go, and my throat gets that ache.

The freckles are the best part, Lou says. Some guy is going to go apeshit for those freckles. Hes going to kiss them one by one.

I start to cry, I dont even hide it.

Hey, Lou goes. He leans down so our faces are together, and stares straight into my eyes. He looks tired, like someone walked on his skin and left footprints. He goes, The world is full of shitheads, Rhea. Dont listen to themlisten to me.

And I know that Lou is one of those shitheads. But I listen.

Two weeks after that night, Jocelyn runs away. I find out with everyone else.

Her mother comes straight to our apartment. She and my parents and older brother sit me down: What do I know? Who is this new boyfriend? I tell them Lou. He lives in LA and has six children. He knows Bill Graham personally. I think Bennie might know who Lou actually is, so Jocelyns mom comes to our school to talk with Bennie Salazar. But hes hard to find. Now that Alice and Scotty are together, Bennie has stopped coming to the Pit. He and Scotty still dont talk, but before they were like one person. Now its like theyve never met.

I cant stop wondering: If Id pulled away from Lou and fought the garbage throwers, would Bennie have settled for me like Scotty settled for Alice? Could that one thing have made all the difference?

They track down Lou in a matter of days. He tells Jocelyns mom that she hitchhiked all the way to his house without even warning him. He says shes safe, hes taking care of her, its better than having her on the street. Lou promises to bring her back when he comes to the city next week. Why not this week? I wonder.

While Im waiting for Jocelyn, Alice invites me over. We take the bus from school, a long ride to Sea Cliff. Her house looks smaller in daylight. In the kitchen, we mix honey with her mothers homemade yogurts and eat two each. We go up to her room, where all the frogs are, and sit on her built-in window seat. Alice tells me shes planning to get real frogs and keep them in a terrarium. Shes calm and happy now that Scotty loves her. I cant tell if shes actually real, or if shes stopped caring if shes real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?

I wonder if Lous house is near the ocean. Does Jocelyn look at the waves? Do they ever leave Lous bedroom? Is Rolph there? I keep getting lost in these questions. Then I hear giggling, pounding from somewhere. I go, Whos that?

My sisters, Alice goes. Theyre playing tetherball.

We head downstairs and outside into Alices backyard, where Ive only been in the dark. Its sunny now, with flowers in patterns and a tree with lemons on it. At the edge of the yard, two little girls are slapping a bright yellow ball around a silver pole. They turn to us, laughing in their green uniforms.

4

Safari

I. Grass

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Rolph is talking to his older sister, Charlene, who despises her real name. But because theyre crouched around a bonfire with the other people on the safari, and because Rolph doesnt speak up all that often, and because their father, Lou, sitting behind them on a camp chair (as they draw in the dust with little sticks), is a record producer whose personal life is of general interest, those near enough to hear are listening closely.

Remember? How Mom and Dad stayed at the table for one more drink

Impossible, their father interjects, with a wink at the bird-watching ladies to his left. Both women wear binoculars even in the dark, as if hoping to spot birds in the firelit tree overhead.

Remember, Charlie? How the beach was still warm, and that crazy wind was blowing?

But Charlie is focused on her fathers legs, which have intertwined behind her with those of his girlfriend, Mindy. Soon they will bid the group good night and retreat to their tent, where theyll make love on one of the narrow rickety cots inside it, or possibly on the ground. From the adjacent tent she and Rolph share, Charlie can hear themnot sounds, exactly, but movement. Rolph is too young to notice.

Charlie throws back her head, startling her father. Lou is in his late thirties, square-jawed surfers face gone a little draggy under the eyes. You were married to Mom on that trip, she informs him, her voice distorted by the arching of her neck, which is encircled by a puka-shell choker.

Yes, Charlie, Lou says. Im aware of that.

The elderly bird-watching ladies trade a sad smile. Lou is one of those men whose restless charm has generated a contrail of personal upheaval that is practically visible behind him: two failed marriages and two more kids back home in LA, who were too young to bring on this three-week safari. The safari is a new business venture of Lous old army buddy, Ramsey, with whom he drank and misbehaved, having barely avoided Korea almost twenty years ago.

Rolph pulls at his sisters shoulder. He wants her to remember, to feel it all again: the wind, the endless black ocean, the two of them peering into the dark as if awaiting a signal from their distant, grown-up lives. Remember, Charlie?

Yeah, Charlie says, narrowing her eyes. I do remember that.

The Samburu warriors have arrivedfour of them, two holding drums, a child in the shadows minding a yellow longhorn cow. They came yesterday, too, after the morning game run, when Lou and Mindy were napping. Thats when Charlie exchanged shy glances with the most beautiful warrior, who has scar tissue designs coiled like railroad tracks over the rigorous architecture of his chest and shoulders and back.

Charlie stands up and moves closer to the warriors: a skinny girl in shorts and a raw cotton shirt with small round buttons made of wood. Her teeth are slightly crooked. When the drummers pat their drums, Charlies warrior and the other one begin to sing: guttural noises pried from their abdomens. She sways in front of them. During her ten days in Africa, she has begun to act like a different sort of girlthe sort that intimidates her back home. In a cinder-block town they visited a few days ago, she drank a muddy-looking concoction in a bar and wound up giving away her silver butterfly earrings (a birthday gift from her father) in a hut belonging to a very young woman whose breasts were leaking milk. She was late returning to the jeeps; Albert, who works for Ramsey, had to go and find her. Prepare yourself, he warned. Your dad is having kittens. Charlie didnt care and doesnt now; theres a charge for her in simply commanding the fickle beam of her fathers attention, feeling his disquiet as she dances, alone, by the fire.

Lou lets go of Mindys hand and sits up straight. He wants to grab his daughters skinny arm and yank her away from these black men, but does no such thing, of course. That would be letting her win.

The warrior smiles at Charlie. Hes nineteen, only five years older than she is, and has lived away from his village since he was ten. But hes sung for enough American tourists to recognize that in her world, Charlie is a child. Thirty-five years from now, in 2008, this warrior will be caught in the tribal violence between the Kikuyu and the Luo and will die in a fire. Hell have had four wives and sixty-three grandchildren by then, one of whom, a boy named Joe, will inherit his lalema: the iron hunting dagger in a leather scabbard now hanging at his side. Joe will go to college at Columbia and study engineering, becoming an expert in visual robotic technology that detects the slightest hint of irregular movement (the legacy of a childhood spent scanning the grass for lions). Hell marry an American named Lulu and remain in New York, where hell invent a scanning device that becomes standard issue for crowd security. He and Lulu will buy a loft in Tribeca, where his grandfathers hunting dagger will be displayed inside a cube of Plexiglas, directly under a skylight.

Son, Lou says, into Rolphs ear. Lets take a walk.

The boy rises from the dust and walks with his father away from the fire. Twelve tents, each sleeping two safari guests, make a circle around it, along with three outhouses and a shower stall, where water warmed on the fire is released from a sack with a rope pull. Out of view, near the kitchen, are some smaller tents for the staff, and then the black, muttering expanse of the bush, where theyve been cautioned never to go.

Your sisters acting nuts, Lou says, striding into the dark.

Why? Rolph asks. He hasnt noticed anything nutty in Charlies behavior. But his father hears the question differently.

Women are crazy, he says. You could spend a goddamn lifetime trying to figure out why.

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True, Lou reflects, calmer now. In fact, your mothers not crazy enough.

The singing and drumbeats fall suddenly away, leaving Lou and Rolph alone under a sharp moon.

What about Mindy? Rolph asks. Is she crazy?

Good question, Lou says. What do you think?

She likes to read. She brought a lot of books.

Did she.

I like her, Rolph says. But I dont know if shes crazy. Or what the right amount is.

Lou puts his arm around Rolph. If he were an introspective man, he would have understood years ago that his son is the one person in the world with the power to soothe him. And that, while he expects Rolph to be like him, what he most enjoys in his son are the many ways he is different: quiet, reflective, attuned to the natural world and the pain of others.

Who cares, Lou says. Right?

Right, Rolph agrees, and the women fall away like those drumbeats, leaving him and his father together, an invincible unit. At eleven years old, Rolph knows two clear things about himself: He belongs to his father. And his father belongs to him.

They stand still, surrounded by the whispering bush. The sky is crammed with stars. Rolph closes his eyes and opens them again. He thinks, Ill remember this night for the rest of my life. And hes right.

When they finally return to camp, the warriors have gone. Only a few die-hards from the Phoenix Faction (as Lou calls the safari members who hail from that dubious place) still sit by the fire, comparing the days animal sightings. Rolph creeps into his tent, pulls off his pants, and climbs onto his cot in a T-shirt and underwear. He assumes that Charlie is asleep. When she speaks, he can hear in her voice that shes been crying.

Where did you go? she says.

II. Hills

What on earth have you got in that backpack?

Its Cora, Lous travel agent. She hates Mindy, but Mindy doesnt take it personallyits Structural Hatred, a term she coined herself and is finding highly useful on this trip. A single woman in her forties who wears high-collared shirts to conceal the thready sinews of her neck will structurally despise the twenty-three-year-old girlfriend of a powerful male who not only employs said middle-aged female but is paying her way on this trip.

Anthropology books, she tells Cora. Im in the Ph.D. program at Berkeley.

Why dont you read them?

Carsick, Mindy says, which is plausible, God knows, in the shuddering jeeps, though untrue. She isnt sure why she hasnt cracked her Boas or Malinowski or Julian Jaynes, but assumes she must be learning in other ways that will prove equally fruitful. In bold moments, fueled by the boiled black coffee they serve each morning in the meal tent, Mindy has even wondered if her insights on the link between social structure and emotional response could amount to more than a rehash of Lvi-Straussa refinement; a contemporary application. Shes only in her second year of coursework.

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Structural Resentment: The adolescent daughter of a twice-divorced male will be unable to tolerate the presence of his new girlfriend, and will do everything in her limited power to distract him from said girlfriends presence, her own nascent sexuality being her chief weapon.

Structural Affection: A twice-divorced males preadolescent son (and favorite child) will embrace and accept his fathers new girlfriend because he hasnt yet learned to separate his fathers loves and desires from his own. In a sense, he, too, will love and desire her, and she will feel maternal toward him, though she isnt old enough to be his mother.

Lou opens the large aluminum case where his new camera is partitioned in its foam padding like a dismantled rifle. He uses the camera to stave off the boredom that afflicts him when he cant physically move around. Hes rigged a tiny cassette player with a small set of foam earphones to listen to demo tapes and rough mixes. Occasionally hell hand the device to Mindy, wanting her opinion, and each time, the experience of music pouring directly against her eardrumshers aloneis a shock that makes her eyes well up; the privacy of it, the way it transforms her surroundings into a golden montage, as if she were looking back on this lark in Africa with Lou from some distant future.

Structural Incompatibility: A powerful twice-divorced male will be unable to acknowledge, much less sanction, the ambitions of a much younger female mate. By definition, their relationship will be temporary.

Structural Desire: The much younger temporary female mate of a powerful male will be inexorably drawn to the single male within range who disdains her mates power.

Albert drives with one elbow out the window. Hes been a largely silent presence on this safari, eating quickly in the meal tent, providing terse answers to peoples questions. (Where do you live? Mombasa. How long have you been in Africa? Eight years. What brought you here? This and that.) He rarely joins the group around the fire after dinner. On a trip to the outhouse one night Mindy glimpsed Albert at the other fire near the staff tents, drinking a beer and laughing with the Kikuyu drivers. With the tour group, he rarely smiles. Whenever his eyes happen to graze Mindys, she senses shame on her behalf: because of her prettiness; because she sleeps with Lou; because she keeps telling herself this trip constitutes anthropological research into group dynamics and ethnographic enclaves, when really what shes after is luxury, adventure, and a break from her four insomniac roommates.

Next to Albert, in the shotgun seat, Chronos is ranting about animals. Hes the bassist for the Mad Hatters, one of Lous bands, and has come on the trip as Lous guest along with the Hatters guitarist and a girlfriend each. These four are locked in a visceral animal-sighting competition (Structural Fixation: A collective, contextually induced obsession that becomes a temporary locus of greed, competition, and envy). They challenge one another nightly over who saw more and at what range, invoking witnesses from their respective jeeps and promising definitive proof when they develop their film back home.

Behind Albert sits Cora, the travel agent, and beside her, gazing from his window, is Dean, a blond actor whose genius for stating the obviousIts hot, or The sun is setting, or There arent many treesis a staple source of amusement for Mindy. Dean is starring in a movie whose sound track Lou is helping to create; the presumption seems to be that its release will bring Dean immediate and stratospheric fame. In the seat behind him, Rolph and Charlie are showing their Mad magazine to Mildred, one of the bird-watching ladies. She or her companion, Fiona, can usually be found near Lou, who flirts with them tirelessly and needles them to take him bird-watching. His indulgence of these women in their seventies (strangers to him before this trip) intrigues Mindy; she can find no structural reason for it.

In the last row, beside Mindy, Lou thrusts his torso from the open roof and takes pictures, ignoring the rule to stay seated while the jeep is moving. Albert swerves suddenly, and Lou is knocked back into his seat, camera smacking his forehead. He swears at Albert, but the words are lost in the jeeps wobbly jostle through tall grass. Theyve left the road. Chronos leans out his open window, and Mindy realizes that Albert must be taking this detour for him, giving Chronos a chance to advance against his rivals. Or was the temptation to knock Lou down too sweet to resist?

After a minute or two of chaotic driving, the jeep emerges a few feet from a pride of lions. Everyone gawks in startled silenceits the closest theyve been to any animal on this trip. The motor is still running, Alberts hand tentatively on the wheel, but the lions appear so relaxed, so indifferent, that he kills the engine. In the ticking-motor silence they can hear the lions breathe: two females, one male, three cubs. The cubs and one of the females are gorging on a bloody zebra carcass. The others are dozing.

Theyre eating, says Dean.

Chronoss hands shake as he spools film into his camera. Fuck, he keeps muttering. Fuck.

Albert lights a cigaretteforbidden in the brushand waits, as indifferent to the scene as if hed paused outside a restroom.

Can we stand? the children ask. Is it safe?

Im sure as hell going to, Lou says.

Lou, Charlie, Rolph, Chronos, and Dean all climb on top of their seats and jam their upper halves through the open roof. Mindy is now effectively alone inside the jeep with Albert, Cora, and Mildred, who peers at the lions through her bird-watching binoculars.

How did you know? Mindy asks, after a silence.

Albert swivels around to look at her down the length of the jeep. He has unruly hair and a soft brown mustache. There is a suggestion of humor in his face. Just a guess.

From half a mile away?

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Albert turns back around and blows smoke through his open window.

Did you see something? Mindy persists.

She expects Albert not to turn again, but he does, leaning over the back of his seat, his eyes meeting hers between the childrens bare legs. Mindy feels a jolt of attraction roughly akin to having someone seize her intestines and twist. She understands now that its mutual; she sees this in Alberts face.

Broken bushes, he says, resting his eyes on her. Like something got chased. It could have been nothing.

Cora, sensing her exclusion, sighs wearily. Can someone come down so I can look too? she calls to those above the roof.

Coming, Lou says, but Chronos is faster, ducking back into the front seat and then leaning out his window. Cora rises in her big print skirt. Mindys face pounds with blood. Her own window, like Alberts, is on the jeeps left side, facing away from the lions. Mindy watches him wet his fingers and snuff out his cigarette. They sit in silence, hands dangling separately from their windows, a warm breeze stirring the hair on their arms, ignoring the most spectacular animal sighting of the safari.

Youre driving me crazy, Albert says, very softly. The sound seems to travel out his window and back in through Mindys, like one of those whispering tubes. You must know that.

I didnt, she murmurs back.

Well, you are.

My hands are tied.

Forever?

She smiles. Please. An interlude.

Then?

Grad school. Berkeley.

Albert chuckles. Mindy isnt sure what that chuckle meansis it funny that shes in graduate school, or that Berkeley and Mombasa, where he lives, are irreconcilable locations?

Chronos, you crazy fuck, get back in here.

Its Lous voice, from overhead. But Mindy feels sluggish, almost drugged, and reacts only when she hears the change in Alberts voice. No, he hisses. No! Back in the jeep.

Mindy swivels toward the window on her other side. Chronos is skulking among the lions, holding his camera close to the faces of the sleeping male and female, taking pictures.

Walk backward, Albert says, with hushed urgency. Backward, Chronos, gently.

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Albert, Lou, Dean, and Cora bolt from the jeep. Mindy starts to follow, but Lou pushes her back, and she realizes that he wants her to stay with his children. She leans over the back of their seat and puts an arm around each of them. As they stare through the open windows, a wave of nausea rolls through Mindy; she feels in danger of passing out. Mildred is still in her spot beside the children, and it occurs to Mindy, vaguely, that the elderly bird-watcher was inside the jeep the whole time that she and Albert were talking.

Is Chronos dead? Rolph asks flatly.

Im sure hes not, Mindy says.

Why isnt he moving?

The lion is on top of him. See, theyre trying to pull her off. Hes probably fine under there.

Theres blood on the lions mouth, Charlie says.

Thats from the zebra. Remember, she was eating a zebra? It takes enormous effort to keep her teeth from chattering, but Mindy knows that she must hide her terror from the childrenher belief that whatever turns out to have happened is her fault.

They wait in pulsing isolation, surrounded by the hot, blank day. Mildred rests a knobby hand on Mindys shoulder, and Mindy feels her eyes fill with tears.

Hell be fine, the old woman says gently. You watch.

By the time the group throngs the bar of the mountain hotel after dinner, everyone seems to have gained something. Chronos has gained a blistering victory over his bandmate and both girlfriends, at the cost of thirty-two stitches on his left cheek that you could argue are also a gain (hes a rock star, after all) and several huge antibiotic pills administered by an English surgeon with hooded eyes and beery breathan old friend of Alberts whom he unearthed in a cinder-block town about an hour away from the lions.

Albert has gained the status of a hero, but you wouldnt know it to look at him. He gulps a bourbon and mutters his responses to the giddy queries of the Phoenix Faction. No one has yet confronted him on the damning basics: Why were you in the bush? How did you get so close to the lions? Why didnt you stop Chronos from getting out of the jeep? But Albert knows that Ramsey, his boss, will ask these questions, and that they will likely lead to his being fired: the latest in a series of failures brought on by what his mother, back in Minehead, calls his self-destructive tendencies.

The members of Ramseys safari have gained a story theyll tell for the rest of their lives. It will prompt some of them, years from now, to search for each other on Google and Facebook, unable to resist the wish-fulfillment fantasy these portals offer: What ever happened to? In a few cases, theyll meet again to reminisce and marvel at one anothers physical transformations, which will seem to melt away with the minutes. Dean, whose success will elude him until middle age, when hell land the role of a paunchy, outspoken plumber in a popular sitcom, will meet for an espresso with Louise (now a chubby twelve-year-old from the Phoenix Faction), who will Google him after her divorce. Postcoffee, theyll repair to a Days Inn off San Vicente for some unexpectedly moving sex, then to Palm Springs for a golf weekend, and finally to the altar, accompanied by Deans four adult children and Louises three teenagers. But this outcome will be the stark exceptionmostly, the reunions will lead to a mutual discovery that having been on safari thirty-five years before doesnt qualify as having much in common, and theyll part ways wondering what, exactly, theyd hoped for.

The passengers in Alberts jeep have gained the status of witnesses, to be questioned endlessly about what they saw and heard and felt. A gang of children, including Rolph, Charlie, a set of eight-year-old twin boys from Phoenix, and Louise, the chubby twelve-year-old, stampede along a slatted path to a blind beside a watering hole: a wooden hut full of long benches with a slot they can peek through, invisible to the animals. Its dark inside. They rush to the slot, but no animals are drinking at the moment.

Did you actually see the lion? Louise asks, with wonder.

Lioness, Rolph says. There were two, plus a lion. And three cubs.

She means the one that got shot, Charlie says, impatient. Obviously we saw it. We were inches away!

Feet, Rolph corrects her.

Feet are made out of inches, Charlie says. We saw everything.

Rolph has already started to hate these conversationsthe panting excitement behind them, the way Charlie seems to revel in it. A thought has been troubling him. I wonder what will happen to the cubs, he says. The lioness who got shot must have been their momshe was eating with them.

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But if she was

Maybe the dad will take care of them, Charlie says, doubtfully. The other children are quiet, considering the question.

Lions tend to raise their cubs communallya voice comes from the far end of the blind. Mildred and Fiona were already there or have just slipped in; being old and female, theyre easily missed. The pride will likely take care of them, Fiona says, even if the one killed was their mother.

Which it might not have been, Charlie adds.

Which it might not have been, Mildred agrees.

It doesnt occur to the children to ask Mildred, who was also in the jeep, what she saw.

Im going back, Rolph tells his sister.

He follows the path back up to the hotel. His father and Mindy are still in the smoky bar; the strange, celebratory feeling unnerves Rolph. His mind bends again and again to the jeep, but his memories are a muddle: the lioness springing; a jerk of impact from the gun; Chronos moaning during the drive to the doctor, blood collecting in an actual puddle under his head on the floor of the jeep, like in a comic book. All of it is suffused with the feel of Mindy holding him from behind, her cheek against his head, her smell: not bready, like his moms, but salty, bitter almosta smell that seems akin to the lions themselves.

He stands by his father, who pauses in the middle of an army story hes telling with Ramsey. You tired, Son?

Want me to walk you upstairs? Mindy asks, and Rolph nods: he does want that.

The blue, mosquitoey night pushes in from the hotel windows. Outside the bar, Rolph is suddenly less tired. Mindy collects his key from the front desk, then says, Lets go out on the porch.

They step outside. Dark as it is, the silhouettes of mountains against the sky are even darker. Rolph can dimly hear the voices of the other children, down in the blind. Hes relieved to have escaped them. He stands with Mindy at the edge of the porch and looks at the mountains. Her salty, tangy smell surrounds him. Rolph senses her waiting for something and he waits, too, his heart stamping.

There is a cough farther down the porch. Rolph sees the orange tip of a cigarette move in the dark, and Albert comes toward them with a creak of boots. Hello there, he says to Rolph. He doesnt speak to Mindy, and Rolph decides the one hello must be for both of them.

Hello, he greets Albert.

What are you up to? Albert asks.

Rolph turns to Mindy. What are we up to?

Enjoying the night, she says, still facing the mountains, but her voice is tense. We should go up, she tells Rolph, and walks abruptly back inside the hotel. Rolph is troubled by her rudeness. Are you coming? he asks Albert.

Why not?

The three of them ascend the stairs, sounds of merriment jingling up from the bar. Rolph feels an odd pressure to make conversation. Is your room up here, too? he asks.

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Mindy unlocks the door to Rolphs room and steps inside, leaving Albert in the hall. Rolph is suddenly angry with her.

Want to see my room? he asks Albert. Mine and Charlies?

Mindy emits a single syllable of laughterthe way his mother laughs when things have annoyed her to a point of absurdity. Albert steps into his room. Its plain, with wood furniture and dusty flowered curtains, but after ten nights in tents it feels lavish.

Very nice, Albert says. With his longish brown hair and mustache, he looks like a real explorer, Rolph thinks. Mindy crosses her arms and stares out the window. There is a feeling in the room that Rolph cant identify. Hes angry with Mindy and thinks that Albert must be too. Women are crazy. Mindys body is slender and elastic; she could slip through a keyhole, or under a door. Her thin purple sweater rises and falls quickly as she breathes. Rolph is surprised by how angry he is.

Albert taps a cigarette from his pack, but doesnt light it. It is unfiltered, tobacco emerging at both ends. Well, he says, good night, you two.

Rolph had imagined Mindy tucking him into bed, her arm around him again as it was in the jeep. Now this seems out of the question. He cant change into his pajamas with Mindy there; he doesnt even want her to see his pajamas, which have small blue elves all over them. Im fine, he tells her, hearing the coldness in his voice. You can go back.

Okay, she says. She turns down his bed, plumps the pillow, adjusts the open window. Rolph senses her finding reasons not to leave the room.

Your dad and I will be just next door, Mindy says. You know that, right?

Duh, he mutters. Then, chastened, he says, I know.

III. Sand

Five days later, they take a long, very old train overnight to Mombasa. Every few minutes, it slows down just enough for people to leap from the doors, bundles clutched to their chests, and for others to scramble on. Lous group and the Phoenix Faction install themselves in the cramped bar car, which they share with African men in suits and bowler hats. Charlie is allowed to drink one beer, but she sneaks two more with the help of handsome Dean, who stands beside her narrow bar stool. Youre sunburned, he says, pressing a finger to Charlies cheek. The African sun is strong.

True, Charlie says, grinning as she swigs her beer. Now that Mindy has pointed out Deans platitudes, Charlie finds him hilarious.

You have to wear sunscreen, he says.

I knowI did.

Once isnt enough. You have to reapply.

Charlie catches Mindys eye and succumbs to giggles. Her father moves close. Whats so funny?

Life, Charlie says, leaning against him.

Life! Lou snorts. How old are you?

He hugs her to him. When Charlie was little he did this all the time, but as she grows older it happens less. Her father is warm, almost hot, his heartbeat like someone banging on a heavy door.

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I like this, Lou says, squinting at the quills translucent point. Its a dangerous weapon.

Weapons are necessary, Dean says.

By the next afternoon, the safarigoers have settled into a hotel a half hour up the coast from Mombasa. On a white beach traversed by knobby-chested men selling beads and gourds, Mildred and Fiona gamely appear in floral-print swimsuits, binoculars still at their necks. The livid Medusa tattoo on Chronoss chest is less startling than his small potbellya disillusioning trait he shares with a number of the men, the fathers especially. Not Lou; hes lean, a little ropy, tanned from occasional surfing. He walks toward the cream-colored sea with his arm around Mindy, who looks even better than expected (and expectations were high) in her sparkling blue bikini.

Charlie and Rolph lie together under a palm tree. Charlie disdains the red Danskin one-piece she chose with her mother for this trip and decides she will borrow a pair of sharp scissors from the front desk and cut it into a bikini.

I never want to go home, she says sleepily.

I miss Mom, Rolph says. His father and Mindy are swimming. He can see the glitter of her swimsuit through the pale water.

But if Mom could come.

Dad doesnt love her anymore, Rolph says. Shes not crazy enough.

Whats that supposed to mean?

Rolph shrugs. You think he loves Mindy?

No way. Hes tired of Mindy.

What if Mindy loves him?

Who cares? Charlie says. They all love him.

After his swim, Lou goes in search of spears and snorkeling gear, resisting the temptation to follow Mindy back to their room, though clearly shed like him to. Shes gone bananas in the sack since they left the tents (women can be funny about tents)hungry for it now, pawing off Lous clothes at odd moments, ready to start again when hes barely finished. He feels tenderly toward Mindy, now that the trip is winding down. Shes studying something at Berkeley, and Lou has never traveled for a woman. Its doubtful that hell lay eyes on her again.

Rolph is reading in the sand when Lou arrives with the snorkeling equipment, but he puts aside The Hobbit without protest and stands. Charlie ignores them, and Lou wonders fleetingly if he should have included her. He and Rolph walk to the edge of the sea and pull on their masks and flippers, hanging their spears from belts at their sides. Rolph looks thin; he needs more exercise. Hes timid in the water. His mother is a reader and a gardener, and Lou is constantly having to fight her influence. He wishes that Rolph could live with him, but the lawyers just shake their heads whenever he mentions it.

The fish are gaudy, easy targets, nibbling at coral. Lou has speared seven by the time he realizes Rolph hasnt killed a single one.

Whats the problem, Son? he asks, when they surface.

I just like watching them, Rolph says.

Theyve drifted toward a spit of rocks extending into the sea. Carefully they climb from the water. Tide pools throng with starfish and urchins and sea cucumbers; Rolph crouches, poring over them. Lous fish hang from a netted bag at his waist. From the beach, Mindy is watching them through Fionas binoculars. She waves, and Lou and Rolph wave back.

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Mindys great. Why?

The crab splays its little claws; Lou notes with approval that his son knows how to hold it safely. Rolph squints up at him. You know. Is she the right amount of crazy.

Lou gives a hoot of laughter. Hed forgotten the earlier conversation, but Rolph forgets nothinga quality that delights his father. Shes crazy enough. But crazy isnt everything.

I think shes rude, Rolph says.

Rude to you?

No. To Albert.

Lou turns to his son, cocking his head. Albert?

Rolph releases the crab and begins to tell the story. He remembers each thingthe porch, the stairs, Number threerealizing as he speaks how much hes wanted to tell his father this, as punishment to Mindy. His father listens keenly, without interrupting. But as Rolph goes on he senses the story landing heavily, in a way he doesnt understand.

When he finishes talking, his father takes a long breath and lets it out. He looks back at the beach. Its nearly sunset, and people are shaking fine white sand from their towels and packing up for the day. The hotel has a disco, and the group plans to go dancing there after dinner.

When exactly did this happen? Lou asks.

The same day as the lionsthat night. Rolph waits a moment, then asks, Why do you think she was rude like that?

Women are cunts, his father says. Thats why.

Rolph gapes at him. His father is angry, a muscle jumping in his jaw, and without warning Rolph is angry too: assailed by a deep, sickening rage that stirs in him very occasionallywhen he and Charlie come back from a riotous weekend around their fathers pool, rock stars jamming on the roof, guacamole and big pots of chili, to find their mother alone in her bungalow, drinking peppermint tea. Rage at this man who casts everyone aside.

They are not He cant make himself repeat the word.

They are, Lou says tightly. Pretty soon youll know it for sure.

Rolph turns away from his father. There is nowhere to go, so he jumps into the sea and begins slowly paddling back toward shore. The sun is low, the water choppy and full of shadows. Rolph imagines sharks just under his feet, but he doesnt turn or look back. He keeps swimming toward that white sand, knowing instinctively that his struggle to stay afloat is the most exquisite torture he can concoct for his fatheralso that, if he sinks, Lou will jump in instantly and save him.

That night, Rolph and Charlie are allowed to have wine at dinner. Rolph dislikes the sour taste, but enjoys the swimmy blur it makes of his surroundings: the giant beaklike flowers all over the dining room; his fathers speared fish cooked by the chef with olives and tomatoes; Mindy in a shimmery green dress. His fathers arm is around her. He isnt angry anymore, so neither is Rolph.

Lou has spent the past hour in bed, fucking Mindy senseless. Now he keeps one hand on her slim thigh, reaching under her hem, waiting for that cloudy look she gets. Lou is a man who cannot tolerate defeatcant perceive it as anything but a spur to his own inevitable victory. He has to win. He doesnt give a shit about AlbertAlbert is invisible, Albert is nothing (in fact, Albert has left the group and returned to his Mombasa apartment). What matters now is that Mindy understand this.

He refills Mildreds and Fionas wineglasses until their cheeks are patchy and flushed. You still havent taken me bird-watching, he chides them. I keep asking, but it never happens.

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Is that a promise?

A solemn promise.

Come on, Charlie whispers to Rolph. Lets go outside.

They slip from the crowded dining room and skitter onto the silvery beach. The palm trees make a slapping, rainy sound, but the air is dry.

Its like Hawaii, Rolph says, wanting it to be true. The ingredients are there: the dark, the beach, his sister. But it doesnt feel the same.

Without the rain, Charlie says.

Without Mom, Rolph says.

I think hes going to marry Mindy, Charlie says.

No way! You said he didnt love her.

So? He can still marry her.

They sink onto the sand, still faintly warm, radiating a lunar glow. The ghost sea tumbles against it.

Shes not so bad, Charlie says.

I dont like her. And why are you the worlds expert?

Charlie shrugs. I know Dad.

Charlie doesnt know herself. Four years from now, at eighteen, shell join a cult across the Mexican border whose charismatic leader promotes a diet of raw eggs; shell nearly die from salmonella poisoning before Lou rescues her. A cocaine habit will require partial reconstruction of her nose, changing her appearance, and a series of feckless, domineering men will leave her solitary in her late twenties, trying to broker peace between Rolph and Lou, who will have stopped speaking.

But Charlie does know her father. Hell marry Mindy because thats what winning means, and because Mindys eagerness to conclude this odd episode and return to her studies will last until precisely the moment she opens the door to her Berkeley apartment and walks into the smell of simmering lentils: one of the cheap stews she and her roommates survive on. Shell collapse on a swaybacked couch they found on the sidewalk and unpack her many books, realizing that in weeks of lugging them through Africa, shes read virtually nothing. And when the phone rings her heart will flip.

Structural Dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.

But were getting off the subject.

Rolph and Charlie are galloping up the beach, drawn by the pulse of light and music from the open-air disco. They run barefoot into the crowd, trailing powdery sand onto a translucent dance floor overlaid on lozenges of flashing color. The shuddering bass line seems to interfere with Rolphs heartbeat.

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She begins to undulate in front of himthe way the new Charlie is planning to dance when she gets home. But Rolph is embarrassed; he cant dance that way. The rest of the group surrounds them; chubby Louise, one year older than he, is dancing with Dean, the actor. Ramsey flings his arms around one of the Phoenix Faction moms. Lou and Mindy dance close together, their whole bodies touching, but Mindy is thinking of Albert, as she will periodically after marrying Lou and having two daughters, his fifth and sixth children, in quick succession, as if sprinting against the inevitable drift of his attention. On paper hell be penniless, and Mindy will end up working as a travel agent to support her little girls. For a time her life will be joyless; the girls will seem to cry too much, and shell think longingly of this trip to Africa as the last happy moment of her life, when she still had a choice, when she was free and unencumbered. Shell dream senselessly, futilely, of Albert, wondering what he might be doing at particular times, how her life would have turned out if shed run away with him as hed suggested, half joking, when she visited him in room number three. Later, of course, shell recognize Albert as nothing more than a focus of regret for her own immaturity and disastrous choices. When both her children are in high school, shell finally resume her studies, complete her Ph.D. at UCLA, and begin an academic career at forty-five, spending long periods of the next thirty years doing social structures fieldwork in the Brazilian rain forest. Her youngest daughter will go to work for Lou, become his protge, and inherit his business.

Look, Charlie tells Rolph, over the music. The bird-watchers are watching us.

Mildred and Fiona are sitting on chairs beside the dance floor, waving at Rolph and Charlie in their long print dresses. Its the first time the children have seen them without binoculars.

I guess theyre too old to dance, Rolph says.

Or maybe we remind them of birds, Charlie says.

Or maybe when there are no birds, they watch people, Rolph says.

Come on, Rolphus, Charlie says. Dance with me.

She takes hold of his hands. As they move together, Rolph feels his self-consciousness miraculously fade, as if he is growing up right there on the dance floor, becoming a boy who dances with girls like his sister. Charlie feels it, too. In fact, this particular memory is one shell return to again and again, for the rest of her life, long after Rolph has shot himself in the head in their fathers house at twenty-eight: her brother as a boy, hair slicked flat, eyes sparkling, shyly learning to dance. But the woman who remembers wont be Charlie; after Rolph dies, shell revert to her real nameCharleneunlatching herself forever from the girl who danced with her brother in Africa. Charlene will cut her hair short and go to law school. When she gives birth to a son shell want to name him Rolph, but her parents will still be too shattered. So shell call him that privately, just in her mind, and years later, shell stand with her mother among a crowd of cheering parents beside a field, watching him play, a dreamy look on his face as he glances at the sky.

Charlie! Rolph says. Guess what I just figured out.

Charlie leans toward her brother, who is grinning with his news. He cups both hands into her hair to be heard above the thudding beat. His warm, sweet breath fills her ear.

I dont think those ladies were ever watching birds, Rolph says.

5

You (Plural)

Its all still there: the pool with its blue and yellow tiles from Portugal, water laughing softly down a black stone wall. The house is the same, except quiet. The quiet makes no sense. Nerve gas? Overdoses? Mass arrests? I wonder as we follow a maid through a curve of carpeted rooms, the pool blinking at us past every window. What else could have stopped the unstoppable parties?

But its nothing like that. Twenty years have passed.

Hes in the bedroom, in a hospital bed, tubes up his nose. The second stroke really knocked him outthe first one wasnt so bad, just one of his legs was a little shaky. Thats what Bennie told me on the phone. Bennie from high school, our old friend. Lous protg. He tracked me down at my mothers, even though she left San Francisco years ago and followed me to LA. Bennie the organizer, rounding up people from the old days to say good-bye to Lou. It seems you can find almost anyone on a computer. He found Rhea all the way in Seattle, with a different last name.

Of our old gang, only Scotty has disappeared. No computer can find him.

Rhea and I stand by Lous bed, unsure what to do. We know him from a time when there was no such thing as normal people dying.

There were clues, hints about some bad alternative to being alive (we remembered them together over coffee, Rhea and I, before coming to see himstaring at each others new faces across the plastic table, our familiar features rinsed in weird adulthood). There was Scottys mom, of course, who died from pills when we were still in high school, but she wasnt normal. My father, from AIDS, but I hardly saw him by then. Anyway, those were catastrophes. Not like this: prescriptions by the bed, a leaden smell of medicine and vacuumed carpet. It reminds me of being in the hospital. Not the smell, exactly (the hospital doesnt have carpets), but the dead air, the feeling of being far away from everything.

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Instead I say, Hi Lou, and at the very same time, Rhea says, Wow, everything is just the same! and we both laugh.

Lou smiles, and the shape of that smile, even with the yellow shocked teeth inside it, is familiar, a warm finger poking at my gut. His smile, coming open in this strange place.

You girls. Still look gorgeous, he gasps.

Hes lying. Im forty-three and so is Rhea, married with three children in Seattle. I cant get over that: three. Im back at my mothers again, trying to finish my B.A. at UCLA Extension after some long, confusing detours. Your desultory twenties, my mother calls my lost time, trying to make it sound reasonable and fun, but it started before I was twenty and lasted much longer. Im praying its over. Some mornings, the sun looks wrong outside my window. I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: Its finished. Everything went past, without me. Those days I know not to close my eyes for too long, or the fun will really start.

Oh Lou, were two old bagsadmit it, Rhea says, swatting at his frail shoulder.

She shows him the pictures of her kids, holding them close to his face.

Shes cute, he says about the oldest, Nadine, who is sixteen. I think he winks, or maybe its his eye twitching.

Cut it out, you, Rhea says.

I dont say anything. I feel itthe fingeragain. In my stomach.

What about your kids? Rhea asks Lou. You see them much?

Some, he says, in his strangled new voice.

He had six, from three marriages he bored through and then kicked away. Rolph, the second oldest, was his favorite. Rolph lived here, in this house, a gentle boy with blue eyes that broke a little whenever he stared down his father. Rolph and I were the same age, exactly. Same birthday, same year. I used to imagine us, tiny babies in different hospitals, crying at the same time. We stood naked once, side by side in a full-length mirror, trying to see if being born the same day had left a clue on us. Some mark we could find.

By the end, Rolph wouldnt speak to me, would walk out of a room when I came in it.

Lous big bed with the crushed purple spread is gonethank God. The TV is new, flat and long, and its basketball game has a nervous sharpness that makes the room and even us look smudged. A guy comes in dressed in black, a diamond in his ear, and he fiddles with Lous tubes and takes his blood pressure. From under the covers, tubes twirl from other parts of Lou into clear plastic bags I try not to look at.

A dog barks. Lous eyes are shut, and he snores. The stylish nurse-butler checks his wristwatch and leaves.

So this is itwhat cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty. I cant help it, I start to cry. Rhea puts her arms around me. Even after all the years, she doesnt hesitate. Her skin hangs loosefreckled skin ages prematurely, Lou told me once, and Rhea is all freckles. Our friend Rhea, he said, shes doomed.

You have three children, I sob into her hair.

Shhh.

What do I have?

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Three children. The oldest, Nadine, is almost my age when I met Lou. Seventeen, hitchhiking. He was driving a red Mercedes. In 1979, that could be the beginning of an exciting story, a story where anything might happen. Now its a punch line. It was all for no reason, I say.

Thats never true, Rhea says. You just havent found the reason yet.

The whole time, Rhea knew what she was doing. Even dancing, even sobbing. Even with a needle in her vein, she was half pretending. Not me.

I got lost, I say.

Its turning out to be a bad day, a day when the sun feels like teeth. Tonight, when my mother comes home from work and sees me, shell say, Forget the Spanish, and fix us Virgin Marys with little umbrellas. With Dave Brubeck on the stereo, well play dominoes or gin rummy. When I look at my mother she gives me a smile, each time. But exhaustion has carved up her face.

The silence takes on a kind of intelligence, and we see Lou watching us. His eyes are so vacant, I think he might be dead. Havent been. Outside. In weeks, he says, coughing a little. Havent wanted to.

Rhea pushes the bed. I come a step behind, pulling the IV drip on its wheels. As we move him through the house, I feel dread, as if the combination of sunlight and hospital bed could cause an explosion. Im afraid the real Lou will be outside by the pool where he lived with a red phone on a long cord and a bowl of green apples, and the real Lou and this old Lou will have a fight. How dare you? Ive never had an old person in my house and Im not going to start now. Age, uglinessthey had no place. They would never get in from outside.

There, he says, meaning by the pool, like always.

Theres still a phone: a black remote on a small glass table, a fruit shake next to it. The nurse-butler or some other employee, spreading his wings on the empty grounds.

Or Rolph? Could Rolph still be here, taking care of his dad? Rolph in the house? And I feel him, then, exactly like before, when I could tell if hed walked in a room without having to look. Just by how the air moved. Once, we hid behind the pool house after a concert, Lou yelling for me, Joc-elyn! Joc-elyn! Rolph and I giggling while the generator droned in our chests. Later I thought: My first kiss. Which was crazy. Everything I would ever do, Id done by then.

In the mirror, Rolphs chest was smooth. There was no mark. The mark was everywhere. The mark was youth.

And when it happened, in Rolphs tiny bedroom, sun sneaking through the shades in stripes, I pretended it was new. He looked inside my eyes, and I felt how normal I could still be. We were smooth, both of us.

Wheres that. Thing, Lou asks, meaning the button pad to tilt the bed. He wants to sit up and look out like he used to, in his red bathing suit, tanned legs smelling of chlorine. The phone in his hand and me between his legs, his palm on my head. The birds must have chirped then, too, but we didnt hear them over the music. Or are there more birds now?

The bed whines as it hoists him up. He looks out, eyes reaching. I got old, he says.

The dog is barking again. The water sways in the pool, as if someone has just gotten in, or out.

What about Rolph? I ask, my first words since Hi.

Rolph, Lou says, and blinks.

Your son? Rolph?

Rhea shakes her head at memy voice is too loud. I feel a kind of anger that fills up my head sometimes and rubs out my thoughts like chalk. Who is this old man dying in front of me? I want the other one, the selfish, devouring man, the one who turned me around between his legs out here in the wide open, pushing the back of my head with his free hand while he laughed into the phone. Not caring that every room in the house faced this poolhis sons, for example. I have a thing or two to say to that one.

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Rolph didnt make it, he says.

What are you talking about? I say.

Now the old man is crying. Tears leak down his face.

Whats the point, Jocelyn? Rhea asks me, and in that second, different parts of my brain find each other, and I realize that I already knew about Rolph. And Rhea kneweveryone knew. An old tragedy.

He was. Twenty-eight, Lou says.

I shut my eyes.

Long time ago, he says, the words splitting in his wheezy chest. But.

Yes, it was. Twenty-eight was a long time ago. The sun hurts my eyes, so I keep them shut.

Losing a child, Rhea murmurs. I cant imagine it.

The anger squeezes, it mashes me from inside. My arms ache. I reach underneath Lous hospital bed, I heave it up and over so he slides into the turquoise pool and the IV needle tears out of his arm, blood spinning after it, feathering in the water and turning a kind of yellow. Im that strong, even after so much. I jump in after him, Rhea shrieking now, I jump in and I hold him down, lock his head between my kneecaps and hold him there until everything goes soft and were just waiting, Lou and I are waiting, and then he shakes, flailing between my legs, jerking as the life goes out of him. When hes absolutely still, I let him float to the top.

I open my eyes. No one has moved. Lou is still crying, searching the pool with his blank eyes. Through the sheet, Rhea is touching his chest.

Its a bad day. The sun hurts my head.

I should kill you, I say, looking at him straight. You deserve to die.

Enough, Rhea says, with her sharp mothers voice.

Suddenly, Lou looks in my eyes. It feels like the first time all day. Finally I can see him, that man who said, Youre the best thing that ever happened to me, and Well see the whole goddamn world, and How come I need you so much? And Looking for a ride, kiddo? Grinning in the hard sun, puddles of it on his bright red car. Just tell me where.

He looks scared, but he smiles. The old smile, back again. Too late, he says.

Too late. I tilt my head at the roof. Rolph and I sat up there a whole night once, spying down on a party Lou was having for one of his bands. Even after the noise stopped, we stayed, our backs on the cool tiles. We were waiting for the sun. It came up fast, small and bright and round. Like a baby, Rolph said, and I started to cry. This fragile new sun in our arms.

Every night, my mother ticks off another day Ive been clean. Its more than a year, my longest yet. Jocelyn, youve got so much life in front of you, she says. And when I believe her, for a minute, theres a lifting over my eyes. Like walking out of a dark room.

Lou is speaking again. Trying to speak. Stand on each side. Of me. Would you, girls?

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Hes stopped crying. Hes looking at his world. The pool, the tiles. We never did get to Africa, or anywhere. We barely left this house.

Nice to be. With you girls, he says, fighting to breathe.

Clutching our hands, as if we might flee. But we dont. We look at the pool and we listen to the birds.

Another minute, he says. Thank you, girls. One more. Like this.

6

Xs and Os

Heres how it started: I was sitting on a bench in Tompkins Square Park reading a copy of Spin Id swiped from Hudson News, observing East Village females crossing the park on their way home from work and wondering (as I often did) how my ex-wife had managed to populate New York with thousands of women who looked nothing like her but still brought her to mind, when I made a discovery: my old friend Bennie Salazar was a record producer! It was right in Spin magazine, a whole article about Bennie and how hed made his name on a group called the Conduits that went multiplatinum three or four years ago. There was a picture of Bennie receiving some kind of award, looking out of breath and a little cross-eyedone of those frozen, hectic instants you just know has a whole happy life attached. I looked at the picture for less than a second; then I closed the magazine. I decided not to think about Bennie. Theres a fine line between thinking about somebody and thinking about not thinking about somebody, but I have the patience and the self-control to walk that line for hoursdays, if I have to.

After one week of not thinking about Benniethinking so much about not thinking about Bennie that there was barely room left in my brain for thoughts of any other kindI decided to write him a letter. I addressed it to his record label, which turned out to be inside a green glass building on Park Avenue and Fifty-second Street. I took the subway up there and stood outside the building with my head back, looking up, up, wondering how high Bennies office might possibly be. I kept my eyes on the building as I dropped the letter into the mailbox directly in front of it. Hey Benjo, Id written (that was what I used to call him). Long time no see. I hear youre the man, now. Congrats. Couldnt have happened to a luckier guy. Best wishes, Scotty Hausmann.

He wrote back! His letter arrived in my dented East Sixth Street mailbox about five days later, typed, which I guess meant a secretary had done it, but I could tell it was Bennie all right:

Scotty babyHey thanks for the note. Where have you been hiding yourself? I still think of the Dildo days sometimes. Hope youre playing that slide guitar. Yours, Bennie, with his little wiggly signature above the typed name.

Bennies letter had quite an effect on me. Things had gottenwhats the word? Dry. Things had gotten sort of dry for me. I was working for the city as a janitor in a neighborhood elementary school and, in summers, collecting litter in the park alongside the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge. I felt no shame whatsoever in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.

I happened to have the next day offthe day after Bennies letter cameso I went to the East River early that morning and fished. I did this all the time, and I ate the fish, too. Pollution was present, yes, but the beauty of it was that you knew all about that pollution, unlike the many poisons you consumed each day in ignorance. I fished, and God mustve been on my side, or maybe it was Bennies good luck rubbing off on me, because I pulled from the river my best catch of all time: an enormous striped bass! My fishing pals, Sammy and Dave, were shocked to see me catch this superb fish. I stunned it, wrapped it in newspaper, bagged it, and carried it home under my arm. I put on the closest thing I had to a suit: khaki pants and a jacket that I dry-cleaned a lot. The week before, Id taken it to the cleaners still in its dry-cleaning bag, which caused a breakdown in the gal behind the counterWhy you clean? You already clean, bag not open, you waste your money. I know Im getting off the subject here, but let me just say that I whipped my jacket out of its plastic bag with such force that she went quiet, and I laid it carefully on the dry-cleaning counter. Merci por vous consideracin, madame, I said, and she accepted the garment without another word. Suffice it to say that the jacket I put on that morning to visit Bennie Salazar was one clean jacket.

Bennies building looked like a place where they could implement tough security checks if they needed to, but that day I guess they didnt need to. More of Bennies good luck flowing down on me like honey. Not that my luck was generally so badI would have called it neutral, occasionally edging toward bad. For example, I caught fewer fish than Sammy, though I fished more often and had the better rod. But if it was Bennies good luck I was getting that day, did that mean my good luck was also his good luck? That my visiting him unexpectedly was good luck for him? Or had I somehow managed to divert his luck and siphon it away for a time, leaving him without any luck that day? And, if I had managed to do the latter, how had I done it, and (most important) how could I do it forever?

I checked the directory, saw that Sows Ear Records was on forty-five, took the elevator up there, and breezed through a pair of beige glass doors into a waiting room, which was very swank. The decor reminded me of a seventies bachelor pad: black leather couches, thick shag rug, heavy glass-and-chrome tables covered with Vibe and Rolling Stone and the like. Carefully dim lighting. This last was a must, I knew, so musicians could wait there without putting their bloodshot eyes and track marks on display.

I slapped my fish on the marble reception desk. It made a good hard wet thwackI swear to God, it sounded like nothing so much as a fish. She (reddish hair, green eyes, flower petal mouth, the sort of chick who makes you want to lean over and say to her oh so sweetly, You must be really intelligent; how else would you have gotten this job?) looked up and said, Hi there.

Im here to see Bennie, I said. Bennie Salazar.

Is he expecting you?

Not at this moment.

Your name?

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She wore a headset that I realized, when she spoke into a tiny extension over her mouth, was actually a telephone. After she said my name, I caught a curl to her lips, like she was hiding a smile. Hes in a meeting, she told me. But I can take a mess

Ill wait.

I deposited my fish on the glass coffee table next to the magazines and settled into a black leather couch. Its cushions sighed out the most delicious smell of leather. A deep comfort seeped through me. I began to feel sleepy. I wanted to stay there forever, abandon my East Sixth Street apartment and live out the remainder of my life in Bennies waiting room.

True: it had been a while since Id spent much time in public. But was such a fact even relevant in our information age, when you could scour planet Earth and the universe without ever leaving the green velvet couch youd pulled from a garbage dump and made the focal point of your East Sixth Street apartment? I began each night by ordering Hunan string beans and washing them down with Jgermeister. It was amazing how many string beans I could eat: four orders, five orders, more sometimes. I could tell by the number of plastic packets of soy sauce and chopsticks included with my delivery that Fong Yu believed I was serving string beans to a party of eight or nine vegetarians. Does the chemical composition of Jgermeister cause a craving for string beans? Is there some property of string beans that becomes addictive on those rare occasions when theyre consumed with Jgermeister? I asked myself these questions as I shoveled string beans into my mouth, huge crunchy forkfuls, and watched TVweird cable shows, most of which I couldnt identify and didnt watch much of. You might say I created my own show out of all those other shows, which I suspected was actually better than the shows themselves. In fact, I was sure of it.

Here was the bottom line: if we human beings are information processing machines, reading Xs and Os and translating that information into what people oh so breathlessly call experience, and if I had access to all that same information via cable TV and any number of magazines that I browsed through at Hudson News for four-and five-hour stretches on my free days (my record was eight hours, including the half hour I spent manning the register during the lunch break of one of the younger employees, who thought I worked there)if I had not only the information but the artistry to shape that information using the computer inside my brain (real computers scared me; if you can find Them, then They can find you, and I didnt want to be found), then, technically speaking, was I not having all the same experiences those other people were having?

I tested my theory by standing outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street during a gala benefit for heart disease. I made this choice randomly: at closing time, as I was leaving the Periodicals Room, I noticed well-dressed individuals tossing white cloths over tables and carrying large orchid bouquets into the librarys grand entrance hall, and when I asked a blond gal with a notepad what was going on, she told me about the gala benefit for heart disease. I went home and ate my string beans, but instead of turning on the TV that night, I took the subway back to the library, where the heart disease gala was now in full swing. I heard Satin Doll playing inside, I heard giggles and yelps and big scoops of laughter, I saw approximately one hundred long black limousines and shorter black town cars idling alongside the curb, and I considered the fact that nothing more than a series of atoms and molecules combined in a particular way to form something known as a stone wall stood between me and those people inside the public library, dancing to a horn section that was awfully weak in the tenor sax department. But a strange thing happened as I listened: I felt pain. Not in my head, not in my arm, not in my leg; everywhere at once. I told myself there was no difference between being inside and being outside, that it all came down to Xs and Os that could be acquired in any number of different ways, but the pain increased to a point where I thought I might collapse, and I limped away.

Like all failed experiments, that one taught me something I didnt expect: one key ingredient of so-called experience is the delusional faith that it is unique and special, that those included in it are privileged and those excluded from it are missing out. And I, like a scientist unwittingly inhaling toxic fumes from the beaker I was boiling in my lab, had, through sheer physical proximity, been infected by that same delusion and in my drugged state had come to believe I was Excluded: condemned to stand shivering outside the public library at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street forever and always, imagining the splendors within.

I went to the russet-haired receptionists desk, balancing my fish on two hands. Juice was starting to leak through the paper. This is a fish, I told her.

She cocked her head, a look on her face like all of a sudden shed recognized me. Ah, she said.

Tell Bennie pretty soon its gonna stink.

I sat back down. My neighbors in the waiting room were a male and a female, both of the corporate persuasion. I sensed them edging away from me. Im a musician, I said, by way of introduction. Slide guitar.

They did not reply.

Finally Bennie came out. He looked trim. He looked fit. He wore black trousers and a white shirt buttoned at the neck but no tie. I understood something for the very first time when I looked at that shirt: I understood that expensive shirts looked better than cheap shirts. The fabric wasnt shiny, noshiny would be cheap. But it glowed, like there was light coming through from the inside. It was a fucking beautiful shirt, is what Im saying.

Scotty, man, how goes it? Bennie said, patting me warmly on the back as we shook hands. Sorry to keep you waiting. Hope Sasha took good care of you. He gestured at the girl Id been dealing with, whose carefree smile could be roughly translated as: Hes officially not my problem anymore. I gave her a wink whose exact translation was: Dont be so sure, darling.

Here, cmon back to my office, Bennie said. He had his arm around my shoulders and was steering me toward a hallway.

Hey waitI forgot! I cried, and ran back to get the fish. As I slung the bag from the coffee table into my hands a little fish juice flew from one corner, and the corporate types both jumped to their feet as if it were nuclear runoff. I looked over at Sasha, expecting to find her cowering, but she was watching it all with a look I would have to call amused.

Bennie waited for me by the hall. I noticed, with satisfaction, that his skin had gotten more brown since high school. Id read about this: your skin gradually darkens from all those cumulative years of sunlight, and Bennies had done so to a point where calling him Caucasian was a stretch.

Shopping? he asked, eyeing my bundle.

Fishing, I told him.

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Wait, I said. This is for you. I came forward and gently set the fish on his desk. I felt like I was leaving an offering at a Shinto shrine on top of the tallest mountain in Japan. The view was tripping me out.

Youre giving me a fish? Bennie said. Thats a fish?

Striped bass. I caught it in the East River this morning.

Bennie looked at me like he was waiting for a cue to laugh.

Its not as polluted as people think, I said, sitting down on a small black chair, one of two facing Bennies desk.

He stood, picked up the fish, came around his desk, and handed it back to me. Thanks, Scotty, he said. I appreciate the thought, I really do. But a fish is bound to go to waste, here at my office.

Take it home and eat it! I said.

Bennie smiled his peaceful smile, but he made no move to retrieve the fish. Fine, I thought, Ill eat it myself.

My black chair had looked uncomfortableId thought, lowering myself onto it, This is going to be one of those hellish chairs that makes your ass ache and then go numb. But it was without question the most comfortable chair I had ever sat in, even more comfortable than the leather couch in the waiting room. The couch had put me to sleepthis chair was making me levitate.

Talk to me, Scotty, Bennie said. You have a demo tape you want me to hear? Youve got an album, a band? Songs youre looking to have produced? Whats on your mind.

He was leaning against the front of the black lozenge, ankles crossedone of those poses that appears to be very relaxed but is actually very tense. As I looked up at him, I experienced several realizations, all in a sort of cascade: (1) Bennie and I werent friends anymore, and we never would be. (2) He was looking to get rid of me as quickly as possible with the least amount of hassle. (3) I already knew that would happen. Id known it before I arrived. (4) It was the reason I had come to see him.

Scotty? You still there?

So, I said. Youre a big shot now, and everyone wants something from you.

Bennie went back around to his desk chair and sat there facing me with arms folded in a pose that looked less relaxed than the first one, but was actually more so. Come on, Scotty, he said. You write me a letter out of nowhere, now you show up at my officeIm guessing you didnt come here just to bring me a fish.

No, that was a gift, I said. I came for this reason: I want to know what happened between A and B.

Bennie seemed to be waiting for more.

A is when we were both in the band, chasing the same girl. B is now.

I knew instantly that it had been the right move to bring up Alice. Id said something literally, yes, but underneath that Id said something else: we were both a couple of asswipes, and now only Im an asswipe; why? And underneath that, something else: once an asswipe, always an asswipe. And deepest of all: You were the one chasing. But she picked me.

Ive busted my balls, Bennie said. Thats what happened.

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We looked at each other across the black desk, the seat of Bennies power. There was a long, strange pause, and in that pause I felt myself pulling Bennie backor maybe it was him pulling meback to San Francisco, where we were two out of four Flaming Dildos, Bennie one of the lousier bass players you were likely to hear, a kid with brownish skin and hair on his hands, and my best friend. I felt a kick of anger so violent it made me dizzy. I closed my eyes and imagined coming at Bennie across that desk and ripping off his head, yanking it from the neck of that beautiful white shirt like a knobby weed with long tangled roots. I pictured carrying it into his swank waiting room by his bushy hair and dropping it on Sashas desk.

I rose from my chair, but at that same moment, Bennie got up, toosprang up, I should say, because when I looked at him, he was already standing.

Mind if I look out your window? I asked.

Not at all. He didnt sound afraid, but I smelled that he was. Vinegar: thats what fear smells like.

I went to the window. I pretended to look at the view, but my eyes were closed.

After a while, I sensed that Bennie had moved closer to me. You still doing any music, Scotty? he asked gently.

I try, I said. Mostly by myself, just to keep loose. I was able to open my eyes, but not to look at him.

You were amazing on that guitar, he said. Then he asked, Are you married?

Divorced. From Alice.

I know, he said. I meant remarried.

It lasted four years.

Im sorry, buddy.

All for the best, I said. Then I turned to look at Bennie. He was standing with his back to the window, and I wondered if he ever bothered to look out, if having so much beauty at close range meant anything at all to him. What about you? I asked.

Married. Three-month-old son. He smiled, thena waffly, embarrassed smile at the thought of his baby boy, like he knew he didnt deserve that much. And behind Bennies smile the fear was still there: that Id tracked him down to snatch away these gifts life had shoveled upon him, wipe them out in a few emphatic seconds. This made me want to scream with laughter: Hey buddy, dont you get it? Theres nothing you have that I dont have! Its all just Xs and Os, and you can come by those a million different ways. But two thoughts distracted me as I stood there, smelling Bennies fear: (1) I didnt have what Bennie had. (2) He was right.

Instead, I thought of Alice. This was something I almost never let myself dojust think of her, as opposed to think about not thinking about her, which I did almost constantly. The thought of Alice broke open in me, and I let it fan out until I saw her hair in the sungold, her hair was goldand I smelled those oils she used to dab on her wrists with a dropper. Patchouli? Musk? I couldnt remember the names. I saw her face with all the love still in it, no anger, no fearnone of the sorry things I learned to make her feel. Come inside, her face said, and I did. For a minute, I came inside.

I looked down at the city. Its extravagance felt wasteful, like gushing oil or some other precious thing Bennie was hoarding for himself, using it up so no one else could get any. I thought: If I had a view like this to look down on every day, I would have the energy and inspiration to conquer the world. The trouble is, when you most need such a view, no one gives it to you.

I took a long inhale and turned to Bennie. Health and happiness to you, brother, I said, and I smiled at him for the first and only time: I let my lips open and stretch back, something I very rarely do because Im missing most of my teeth on both sides. The teeth I have are big and white, so those black gaps come as a real surprise. I saw the shock in Bennies face when he saw. And all at once I felt strong, as if some balance had tipped in the room and all of Bennies powerthe desk, the view, the levitating chairsuddenly belonged to me. Bennie felt it too. Power is like that; everyone feels it at once.

I turned and walked toward the door, still grinning. I felt light, as if I were wearing Bennies white shirt and light was pouring out from inside it.

Hey, Scotty, hold on, Bennie said, sounding shaken. He veered back toward his desk, but I kept walking, my grin leading the way into the hall and back toward the reception area where Sasha sat, my shoes whispering on the carpet with each slow, dignified step. Bennie caught up with me and handed me a business card: sumptuous paper with embossed print. It felt precious. I held it very carefully. President, I read.

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I couldnt resist one last look at Sasha. Her eyes were serious, almost sad, but she was still flying the flag of her pretty smile. Take care, Scotty, she said.

Outside the building, I walked directly to the box where I had mailed my letter to Bennie a few days earlier. I bent my neck and squinted up at the tower of green glass, trying to count the floors to forty-five. And only then did I notice that my hands were emptyId left my fish in Bennies office! This struck me as hilarious, and I laughed out loud, imagining the corporate types seating themselves in the levitating chairs in front of Bennies desk, one of them lifting the wet, heavy bag from the floor and then recognizing itOh, Christ, its that guys fishdropping it, revolted. And what would Bennie do? I wondered, as I walked slowly toward the subway. Would he dispose of the fish forever then and there, or would he put it in the office refrigerator and take it home that night to his wife and baby son, and tell them about my visit? And if he got that far, was it possible that he might open up the bag and take a look, just for the hell of it?

I hoped so. I knew hed be amazed. It was a shiny, beautiful fish.

I wasnt good for much the rest of that day. I get a lot of headaches from eye damage I had as a kid, and the pain is so intense that it throws off bright, excruciating pictures. That afternoon, I lay on my bed and closed my eyes and saw a burning heart suspended in darkness, shooting off light in every direction. It wasnt a dream, because nothing happened. The heart just hung there.

Having gone to bed in the late afternoon, I was up and out of my apartment and under the Williamsburg Bridge with my line in the East River well before sunrise. Sammy and Dave showed up soon after. Dave didnt actually care about fishhe was there to watch the East Village females on their early morning jogs, before they went to school at NYU or to work at a boutique or whatever East Village girls do with their days. Dave complained about their jog bras, which didnt allow enough bounce for his satisfaction. Sammy and I barely listened.

That morning when Dave started up, I felt an inclination to speak. You know, Dave, I said, I think thats the point.

Whats the point?

That their breasts dont bounce, I said. It hurts them. Thats why they wear jog bras in the first place.

He gave me a wary look. Since when are you the expert?

My wife used to jog, I said.

Used to? You mean she quit?

She quit being my wife. She probably still jogs.

It was a quiet morning. I heard the slow pop, pop of tennis balls on the courts behind the Williamsburg Bridge. Aside from the joggers and tennis players, there were usually a few junkies out by the river in the early mornings. I always looked for one particular couple, a male and female in thigh-length leather jackets, with skinny legs and ruined faces. They had to be musicians. Id been out of the game a long time, but I could spot a musician anywhere.

The sun rose, big and shiny and round, like an angel lifting her head. Id never seen it so brilliant out there. Silver poured over the water. I wanted to jump in and swim. Pollution? I thought. Give me some more. And then I noticed the girl. I spotted her peripherally because she was small and ran with a high, leaping gait that was different from the others. She had light brown hair, and when the sunlight touched it, something happened that you couldnt miss. Rumpelstiltskin, I thought. Dave was gaping at her, and even Sammy turned to look, but I kept my eyes on the river, watching my line for a tug. I saw the girl without having to look.

Hey Scotty, Dave said, I think your wife just ran by.

Im divorced, I said.

Well, that was her.

No, I said. She lives in San Francisco.

Maybe shes your next wife, Sammy suggested.

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I looked at my line flicking in the sun. My luck was gone; I knew I wouldnt catch anything. Soon I had to be at work. I reeled in my line and began walking north along the river. The girl was already a long way ahead, her hair shaking with every step. I followed her, but at such a distance that I wasnt following her, really. I was just walking in the same direction. My eyes held her so tightly that I didnt even notice the junkie couple in my path until theyd almost passed me. They were huddled up against each other, looking haggard and sexy the way young people can for a little while, until they just look haggard. Hey, I said, stepping in their way.

We mustve seen each other twenty times on that river, but the guy aimed his sunglasses at me like hed never seen me before, and the girl didnt look at me at all. Are you musicians? I asked.

The guy turned away, shaking me off. But the girl looked up. Her eyes seemed raw, peeled away, and I wondered if the sun hurt them, and why her boyfriend or husband or whatever he was didnt give her his glasses. Hes awesome, she said, using the word in the male teenage skateboarding sense. Or maybe not, I thought. Maybe she meant it literally.

I believe you, I said. I believe hes an awesome musician.

I reached into my shirt pocket and took out Bennies card. Id used a piece of Kleenex to remove it from yesterdays jacket and place it in todays shirt, making sure not to bend or fold or smudge it. Its embossed letters reminded me of a Roman coin. Call this man, I said. He runs a record label. Tell him Scotty sent you.

They both looked at the card, squinting in the angled sunlight.

Call him, I said. Hes my buddy.

Sure, the guy said, without conviction.

I really hope you will, I said, but I felt helpless. I could do this only once; I would never have that card again.

While the guy studied the card, the girl looked at me. Hell call, she said, and then she smiled: small orderly teeth, the kind you only get from wearing braces. Ill make him.

I nodded and turned, leaving the junkies behind. I walked north, forcing my eyes to see as far as they could see. But the jogger had vanished while I looked away.

Hey, I heard behind me, two ragged voices. When I turned, they called out, Thanks, both at the same time.

It had been a long time since anyone had thanked me for something. Thanks, I said, to myself. I said it again and again, wanting to hold in my mind the exact sound of their voices, to feel again the kick of surprise in my chest.

Is there some quality of warm spring air that causes birds to sing more loudly? I asked myself that question as I took the overpass across the FDR onto East Sixth Street. Flowers were just coming open in the trees. I trotted underneath them, smelling their powdery pollen as I hurried toward my apartment. I wanted to drop off my jacket at the dry cleaner on my way to workId been looking forward to it since yesterday. Id left the jacket crumpled on the floor beside my bed, and I would bring it in like that, all used up. Id toss it on the counter oh so casually, daring the gal to challenge me. But how could she?

Ive been somewhere, and I need my jacket cleaned, I would say, like anyone else. And she would make it new again.

B

7

A to B

I

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During that first winter in town, the sister of one of Bennies artists sponsored them for membership to the Crandale Country Club. After a process only slightly more arduous than applying for citizenship, they were admitted in late June. They arrived at the club on their first day carrying bathing suits and towels, not realizing that the CCC (as it was known) provided its own monochromatic towels to reduce the cacophony of poolside color. In the ladies locker room, Stephanie passed one of the blondes whose children went to Chriss school, and for the first time she got an actual Hello, her own appearance in two separate locations having apparently fulfilled some triangulation Kathy required as proof of personhood. That was her name: Kathy. Stephanie had known it from the beginning.

Kathy was carrying a tennis racket. She wore a tiny white dress beneath which white tennis shorts, hardly more than underpants, were just visible. Her prodigious childbearing had left no mark on her narrow waist and well-tanned biceps. Her shining hair was in a tight ponytail, stray wisps secured with gold bobby pins.

Stephanie changed into her bathing suit and met Bennie and Chris near the snack bar. As they stood there uncertainly, holding their colorful towels, Stephanie recognized a distant thop, thop of tennis balls. The sound induced a swoon of nostalgia. Like Bennie, she came from nowhere, but a different type of nowherehis was the urban nowhere of Daly City, California, where his parents had worked to a point of total absence while a weary grandmother raised Bennie and his four sisters. But Stephanie hailed from suburban, midwestern nowhere, and there had been a club whose snack bar served thin, greasy burgers rather than salade nioise with fresh seared tuna, like this one, but where tennis had been played on sun-cracked courts, and where Stephanie had achieved a certain greatness at around age thirteen. She hadnt played since.

At the end of that first day, dopey from sun, theyd showered, changed back into their clothes, and sat on a flagstone terrace where a pianist rolled out harmless melodies on a shining upright. The sun was beginning to set. Chris tumbled on some nearby grass with two girls from his kindergarten class. Bennie and Stephanie sipped gin and tonics and watched the fireflies. So this is what its like, Bennie said.

A number of possible replies occurred to Stephanie: allusions to the fact that they still didnt know anyone; her suspicion that there wasnt anyone worth knowing. But she let them pass. It was Bennie who had chosen Crandale, and in some deep way Stephanie understood why: theyd flown in private jets to islands owned by rock stars, but this country club was the farthest distance Bennie had traveled from the dark-eyed grandmother in Daly City. Hed sold his record label last year; how better to mark success than by going to a place where you didnt belong?

Stephanie took Bennies hand and kissed a knuckle. Maybe Ill buy a tennis racket, she said.

The party invitation came three weeks later. The host, a hedge-fund manager known as Duck, had invited them after learning that Bennie had discovered the Conduits, Ducks favorite rock group, and released their albums. Stephanie had found the two deep in conversation by the pool when she returned from her first tennis lesson. I wish theyd get back together, Duck mused. What ever happened to that spastic guitarist?

Bosco? Hes still recording, Bennie said tactfully. His new album will be out in a couple of months: A to B. His solo work is more interior. He left out the part about Bosco being obese, alcoholic, and cancer-ridden. He was their oldest friend.

Stephanie had perched on the edge of Bennies deck chair, flushed because shed hit well, her topspin still intact, her serve slicingly clear. Shed noticed one or two blond heads pausing by the court to watch and had been proud of how different she looked from these women: her cropped dark hair and tattoo of a Minoan octopus encompassing one calf, her several chunky rings. Although it was also true that shed bought a tennis dress for the occasion, slim and white, tiny white shorts underneath: the first white garment Stephanie had owned in her adult life.

At the cocktail party, she spotted Kathywho else?across a crowded expanse of terrace. As Stephanie was wondering whether she would again merit an actual hello or be downgraded to a crabbed Who are you? smile, Kathy caught her eye and began moving toward her. Introductions were made. Kathys husband, Clay, wore seersucker shorts and a pink oxford shirt, an ensemble that might have seemed ironic on a different sort of person. Kathy wore classic navy, setting off the bright blue of her eyes. Stephanie sensed Bennies gaze lingering on Kathy and felt herself go tensea residual spasm of unease that passed as quickly as his attention (he was now talking to Clay). Kathys blond hair hung loose, still bobby-pinned at the sides. Stephanie wondered idly how many bobby pins the woman went through in a week.

Ive seen you on the court, Kathy said.

Its been a while, Stephanie said. Im just getting back into it.

We should rally sometime.

Sure, Stephanie said casually, but she felt her heartbeat in her cheeks, and when Clay and Kathy moved on she was beset by a giddiness that shamed her. It was the silliest victory of her life.

II

Within a few months, anyone would have said that Stephanie and Kathy were friends. They had a standing tennis date two mornings a week, and theyd become successful doubles partners in an interclub league, playing other blond women in small tennis dresses from nearby towns. There was an easy symmetry to their lives right down to their namesKath and Steph, Steph and Kathand their sons, who were in the same first-grade class. Chris and Colin, Colin and Chris; how was it that of all the names Stephanie and Bennie had considered when she was pregnantXanadou, Peek-a-boo, Renaldo, Crickettheyd ended up choosing the single one that melded flawlessly with the innocuous Crandale namescape?

Kathys elevated status in the pecking order of local blondes gave Stephanie an easy and neutral entre, a protected status that absorbed even her short dark hair and tattoos; she was different but okay, exempt from the feral scratching that went on among some others. Stephanie would never have said that she liked Kathy; Kathy was a Republican, one of those people who used the unforgivable phrase meant to beusually when describing her own good fortune or the disasters that had befallen other people. She knew little about Stephanies lifewould surely have been dumbstruck to learn, for example, that the celebrity reporter who had made headlines a few years back by assaulting Kitty Jackson, the young movie star, while interviewing her for Details magazine, was Stephanies older brother, Jules. Occasionally Stephanie wondered whether her friend might understand more than she gave her credit for; I know you hate us, she imagined Kathy thinking, and we hate you too, and now that weve resolved that, lets go rub out those bitches from Scarsdale. Stephanie loved the tennis with a ravenous aggression that half embarrassed her; she dreamed about line calls and backhands. Kathy was still the better player, but the margin was shrinking, a fact that seemed to pique and amuse them equally. As partners and opponents, mothers and neighbors, Steph and Kath were seamlessly matched. The only problem was Bennie.

Stephanie hadnt believed him at first when hed told her, the summer after the invasiontheir second in Crandalethat he felt people giving him odd looks by the pool. Shed assumed he meant women who were admiring the clutch of brown muscles above his swim trunks, his wide dark eyes, and shed snipped, Since when do you have a problem with being looked at?

But Bennie hadnt meant that, and soon Stephanie felt it too: some hesitation or question around her husband. It didnt seem to bother Bennie deeply; hed been asked, What kind of name is Salazar? enough times in his life to be fairly immune to skepticism about his origins and race, and hed perfected an arsenal of charms to obliterate that skepticism, especially in women.

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Bill paused midsentence, clearly baffled. Another couple broke in, and Bennie took Stephanies arm and moved away. His eyes looked placid, almost sleepy, but his grip hurt her wrist.

They left the party soon after. Bennie paid the babysitter, a sixteen-year-old nicknamed Scooter, and drove her home. He was back before Stephanie had even glanced at the clock and reflected on Scooters prettiness. She heard him setting the burglar alarm; then he thundered upstairs in a way that made Sylph, the cat, dive under the bed in terror. Stephanie ran from the bedroom and met Bennie at the top of the stairs. What the fuck am I doing here? he cried.

Shh. Youll wake up Chris.

Its a horror show!

That was ugly, she said, although Clays an extr

Youre defending them?

Of course not. But hes one guy.

You think everyone in that group didnt know what was going on?

Stephanie was afraid that it might be truehad they all known? She wanted Bennie not to think so. Thats totally paranoid. Even Kathy says

Again! Look at you!

He stood at the top of the stairs with fists clenched. Stephanie went to him and took him in her arms, and Bennie relaxed against her, almost knocking her over. They held each other until his breathing slowed. Stephanie said softly, Lets move.

Bennie pulled back, startled.

I mean it, she said. I dont give a shit about these people. It was an experiment, right? Moving to a place like this.

Bennie didnt answer. He looked around them at the floors, whose rose parquet designs hed sanded himself on hands and knees, not trusting whomever they might pay for such intricate work; at the windows in their bedroom door that hed spent weeks excavating with a razor from under layers of paint; at the stairwell nooks hed ruminated over, placing one objet after another inside and adjusting the lights. His father had been an electrician; Bennie could light anything.

Let them move, he said. This is my fucking house.

Fine. But if it comes to that, Im saying we can go. Tomorrow. In a month. In a year.

I want to die here, Bennie said.

Jesus, Stephanie said, at which point they were stung by sudden, itchy laughter that soon became hysterics, both of them doubled over on the parquet, shushing each other.

So theyd stayed. After that, when Bennie noticed Stephanie putting on her tennis whites in the morning, hed say, Going to play with the fascists? Stephanie knew he wanted her to quit, renounce her partnership with Kathy to protest Cardboards bigotry and idiocy. But Stephanie had no intention of quitting. If they were going to live in a place whose social life revolved around a country club, she sure as hell was going to stay on good terms with the woman who guaranteed her easy assimilation. She had no wish to be an outcast like Noreen, their neighbor to the right, who had clanging mannerisms and wore oversize sunglasses, whose hands shook violentlyfrom medication, Stephanie presumed. Noreen had three lovely, anxious children, but none of the women talked to her. She was a ghost. No thank you, Stephanie thought.

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III

The following spring, Stephanies older brother, Jules, was paroled from Attica Correctional Facility and came to live with them. Hed been gone five years, the first on Rikers Island awaiting trial for the attempted rape of Kitty Jackson, another four after the rape charge was dropped (at Kitty Jacksons request) and he was convicted of kidnapping and aggravated assaultoutrageous, given that the starlet had walked into Central Park with Jules of her own free will and sustained not a single injury. In fact, shed ended up testifying for the defense. But the DA had persuaded the jury that Kittys support for Jules was a version of Stockholm syndrome. The fact that she insists on protecting this man is further evidence of how deeply he has hurt her. Stephanie recalled him intoning at her brothers trial, which shed watched over ten agonizing days, trying to look upbeat.

In prison, Jules had seemed to regain the composure hed lost so spectacularly in the months before the assault. He went on medication for his bipolar disorder and made peace with the end of his marriage engagement. He edited a weekly prison newspaper, and his coverage of the impact of 9/11 on the lives of inmates won him a special citation from the PEN Prison Writing Program. Jules had been allowed to come to New York and receive the award, and Bennie, Stephanie, and her parents had all wept through his halting acceptance speech. Hed taken up basketball, shed his gut, and miraculously overcome his eczema. He seemed ready, finally, to resume the serious journalism career hed come to New York more than twenty years before to pursue. When the parole board granted his early release, Stephanie and Bennie had joyfully offered to house him while he got back on his feet.

But now, two months after Juless arrival, an ominous stasis had set in. Hed had a few interviews early on that hed approached in a state of sweaty terror, but nothing had come of them. Jules doted on Chris, spending hours while Chris was at school assembling vast cities out of microscopic Lego pieces to surprise him when he returned. But with Stephanie, her brother maintained a sardonic distance, seeming to regard her futile scurrying (this morning, for example, as the three of them rushed toward school and work) with wry bemusement. His hair was straggly and his face looked deflated, sapped in a way that pained Stephanie.

You driving into the city? Bennie asked, as she hustled breakfast plates into the sink.

She wasnt driving inyet. As the weather warmed, shed resumed her morning tennis games with Kathy. But shed found a clever new way to edit these games out of Bennies view; she kept her tennis whites at the club, dressed for work in the morning, kissed him good-bye, then proceeded to the club to change and play. Stephanie minimized the deception by making the lie purely chronological; if Bennie asked where she was going, she always cited an actual meeting that would take place later on that day, so if he inquired in the evening how it had gone, she could answer honestly.

Im meeting Bosco at ten, she said. Bosco was the only rocker whose PR she still handled. The meeting was actually at three.

Bosco, before noon? Bennie asked. Was that his idea?

Stephanie instantly saw her mistake; Bosco spent his nights in an alcoholic fog; the chances of his being conscious at 10:00 a.m. were nil. I think so, she said, the act of lying to her husbands face bringing on a tingly vertigo. Youre right, though. Its weird.

Its scary, Bennie said. He kissed Stephanie good-bye and headed for the door with Chris. Will you call me after you see him?

In that moment, Stephanie knew she would cancel her game with Kathystand Kathy up, in essenceand drive to Manhattan to meet Bosco at ten. There was no other way.

When theyd gone, Stephanie felt the tension that always seemed to arise when she was alone with Jules, her own unspoken questions about his plans and timetable clashing silently with his armature against them. Beyond Lego assembly, it was hard to know what Jules did all day. Twice Stephanie had come home to find the TV in her bedroom tuned to a porn channel, and this had so disturbed her that shed asked Bennie to bring the extra set to the guest room, where Jules was staying.

She went upstairs and left a voice mail on Kathys cell phone canceling their game. When she returned to the kitchen, Jules was peering out the window of the breakfast nook. Whats the deal with your neighbor? he asked.

Noreen? Stephanie said. We think shes nuts.

Shes doing something near your fence.

Stephanie went to the window. It was true; she glimpsed Noreens overbleached ponytaillike a caricature of everyone elses subtly natural highlightsmoving up and down beside the fence. Her giant black sunglasses gave her the cartoonish look of a fly, or a space alien. Stephanie shrugged, impatient with Jules for even having the time to fixate on Noreen. Ive got to run, she said.

Can I hitch a ride to the city?

Stephanie felt a little pop in her chest. Of course, she said. You have a meeting?

Not really. I just feel like getting out.

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Wouldnt surprise me.

You just let that go on?

What can we do? Shes not hurting us. Shes not even on our property.

She could be dangerous.

Takes one to know one, eh?

Not nice, Jules said.

In the Volvo, Stephanie slipped an advance copy of Boscos new album, A to B, into the CD player out of some sense that in doing so she was strengthening her alibi. Boscos recent albums consisted of gnarled little ditties accompanied by a ukulele. It was only out of friendship that Bennie still released them.

Can I please turn this off? Jules asked after two songs, then did so before Stephanie had answered. This is who were going to see?

We? I thought you were hitching a ride.

Can I come with you? Jules asked. Please?

He sounded humble and plaintive: a man with nowhere to go and nothing to do. Stephanie wanted to scream; was this some kind of punishment for lying to Bennie? In the past thirty minutes shed been forced to cancel a tennis game she was dying to play, piss Kathy off, embark on an invented errand to visit a person who was sure to be unconscious, and now bring her rudderless, hypercritical brother along to witness the demise of her alibi. Im not sure how much fun itll be, she said.

Thats okay, Jules said. Im used to not-fun.

He watched nervously as Stephanie maneuvered from the Hutch onto the Cross Bronx Expressway; being in the car seemed to worry him. When they had fully entered the flow of traffic, he asked, Are you having an affair?

Stephanie stared at him. Youre out of your mind.

Watch the road!

Why are you asking me that?

You seem jumpy. You and Bennie both. Not like I remember you guys.

Stephanie was stricken. Bennie seems jumpy? The old fear rose in her so quickly, like a hand at her throat, despite Bennies promise two years ago, when he turned forty, and the fact that she had no reason to doubt him.

You seem, I dont know. Polite.

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Jules smiled. Okay, he said. Maybe its just the place. Crandale, New York, he said, elongating the words. Ill bet its crawling with Republicans.

About half and half.

Jules turned to her, incredulous. Do you socialize with Republicans?

It happens, Jules.

You and Bennie? Hanging out with Republicans?

Are you aware that youre shouting?

Watch the road! Jules bellowed.

Stephanie did, her hands shaking on the wheel. She felt like turning around and taking her brother back home, but that would involve missing her nonexistent meeting.

I go away for a few years and the whole fucking world is upside down, Jules said angrily. Buildings are missing. You get strip-searched every time you go to someones office. Everybody sounds stoned, because theyre e-mailing people the whole time theyre talking to you. Tom and Nicole are with different people.And now my rock-and-roll sister and her husband are hanging around with Republicans. What the fuck!

Stephanie took a long, calming breath. What are your plans, Jules?

I told you. I want to come with you and meet this

I mean what are you going to do.

There was a long pause. Finally Jules said, I have no idea.

Stephanie glanced at him. Theyd turned onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, and Jules was looking at the river, his face devoid of energy or hope. She felt a contraction of fear around her heart. When you first came to New York, she said, all those years ago, you were full of ideas.

Jules snorted. Who isnt, at twenty-four?

I mean you had a direction.

Hed graduated from the University of Michigan a couple of years before. One of Stephanies freshman suitemates at NYU had left school for treatment of anorexia, and Jules had occupied the girls room for three months, wandering the city with a notebook, crashing parties at the Paris Review. By the time the anorexic returned, hed gotten himself a job at Harpers, an apartment on Eighty-first and York, and three roommatestwo of whom now edited magazines. The third had won a Pulitzer.

I dont get it, Jules, Stephanie said. I dont get what happened to you.

Jules stared at the glittering skyline of Lower Manhattan without recognition. Im like America, he said.

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Our hands are dirty, Jules said.

IV

Stephanie parked in a lot on Sixth Avenue, and she and Jules picked their way into Soho through crowds of shoppers holding room-sized bags from Crate and Barrel. So. Who the hell is this Bosco person? Jules asked.

Remember the Conduits? He was the guitarist.

Jules stopped walking. Thats who were going to see? Bosco from the Conduits? The skinny redhead?

Yeah, well. Hes changed a little.

They turned south on Wooster, heading for Canal. Sunlight skipped off the cobblestones, releasing in Stephanies mind a pale balloon of memory: shooting the Conduits first album cover on this very street, laughing, jittery, Bosco powdering his freckles while the photographer fiddled. The memory mooned her as she rang Boscos bell and waited, praying silently: Please dont be home please dont answer please. Then at least the charade part of the day would be over.

No voice on the intercom, just a buzz. Stephanie pushed open the door with a disoriented sense that maybe she had arranged to meet Bosco at ten. Or had she pressed the wrong bell?

They went in and called for the elevator. It took a long time to descend, grinding inside its tube. Is that thing healthy? Jules asked.

Youre welcome to wait down here.

Quit trying to get rid of me.

Bosco was unrecognizable as the scrawny, stovepipe-panted practitioner of a late-eighties sound somewhere between punk and ska, a hive of redheaded mania who had made Iggy Pop look indolent onstage. More than once, club owners had called 911 during Conduits shows, convinced that Bosco was having a seizure.

Nowadays he was hugefrom medications, he claimed, both post-cancer and antidepressantbut a glance into his trash can nearly always revealed an empty gallon box of Dreyers Rocky Road ice cream. His red hair had devolved into a stringy gray ponytail. An unsuccessful hip replacement had left him with the lurching, belly-hoisting walk of a refrigerator on a hand truck. Still, he was awake, dressedeven shaven. The blinds of his loft were up and a tinge of shower humidity hung in the air, pleasantly cut by the smell of brewing coffee.

I was expecting you at three, Bosco said.

I thought we said ten, Stephanie said, looking inside her purse to avoid his gaze. Did I get the time wrong?

Bosco was no fool; he knew she was lying. But he was curious, and his curiosity fell naturally on Jules. Stephanie introduced them.

Its an honor, Jules said gravely.

Bosco scrutinized him for signs of irony before shaking his hand.

Stephanie perched on a folding chair near the black leather recliner where Bosco spent the bulk of his time. It was positioned by a dusty window through which the Hudson River and even a bit of Hoboken were visible. Bosco brought Stephanie coffee and then began a juddering immersion into his chair, which suctioned around him in a gelatinous grip. They were meeting to discuss PR for A to B. Now that Bennie had corporate bosses to answer to, he couldnt spend a dime on Bosco beyond the cost of producing and shipping his CD. So Bosco paid Stephanie by the hour to act as his publicist and booking agent. These were mostly symbolic titles; hed been too sick to do much of anything for the last two albums, and his lassitude had been roughly matched by the worlds indifference toward him.

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Stephanie assumed he was joking. But he met her gaze evenly from within the folds of black leather.

Comeback? she asked.

Jules had been wandering the loft, eyeing the framed gold and platinum Conduit albums paving the walls, the few guitars Bosco hadnt sold off, and his collection of pre-Columbian artifacts, which he hoarded in pristine glass cases and refused to sell. At the word comeback, Stephanie felt her brothers attention suddenly engage.

The albums called A to B, right? Bosco said. And thats the question I want to hit straight on: how did I go from being a rock star to being a fat fuck no one cares about? Lets not pretend it didnt happen.

Stephanie was too startled to respond.

I want interviews, features, you name it, Bosco went on. Fill up my life with that shit. Lets document every fucking humiliation. This is reality, right? You dont look good anymore twenty years later, especially when youve had half your guts removed. Times a goon, right? Isnt that the expression?

Jules had drifted over from across the room. Ive never heard that, he said. Time is a goon?

Would you disagree? Bosco said, a little challengingly.

There was a pause. No, Jules said.

Look, Stephanie said, I love your honesty, Bosco

Dont give me I love your honesty, Bosco, he said. Dont get all PR-y on me.

Im your publicist, Stephanie reminded him.

Yeah, but dont start believing that shit, Bosco said. Youre too old.

I was trying to be tactful, Stephanie said. The bottom line is, no one cares that your life has gone to hell, Bosco. Its a joke that you think this is interesting. If you were still a rock star, it might be, but you arent a rock staryoure a relic.

That is harsh, Jules said.

Bosco laughed. Shes pissed that I called her old.

True, Stephanie admitted.

Jules looked from one to the other, uneasy. Any sort of conflict seemed to rattle him.

Look, Stephanie said, I can tell you this is a great, innovative idea and let it die on its own, or I can level with you: Its a ridiculous idea. Nobody cares.

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Jules carried over a folding chair and sat down. I want to tour, Bosco said. Like I used to, doing all the same stuff onstage. Im going to move like I moved before, only more so.

Stephanie put down her cup. She wished Bennie were here; only Bennie could appreciate the depth of self-delusion she was witnessing. Let me get this straight, she said. You want to do a lot of interviews and press around the fact that youre an ailing and decrepit shadow of your former self. And then you want to do a tour

A national tour.

A national tour, performing as if you were that former self.

Bingo.

Stephanie took a deep breath. I see a few problems, Bosco.

I thought you might, he said, winking at Jules. Shoot.

Well, number one, getting a writer interested in this is going to be tough.

Im interested, Jules said, and Im a writer.

God help me, Stephanie almost said, but restrained herself. She hadnt heard her brother call himself a writer in many years.

Okay, so youve got one writer interested

He gets everything, Bosco said. He turned to Jules. You get everything. Total access. You can watch me take a shit if you want to.

Jules swallowed. Ill think about it.

Im just saying, there are no limits.

Okay, Stephanie began again, so youve

You can film me, too, Bosco told Jules. You can make a documentary, if youre interested.

Jules was starting to look afraid.

Can I finish a fucking sentence, here? Stephanie asked. Youve got a writer for this story that will be of no interest to anyone

Can you believe this is my publicist? Bosco asked Jules. Should I fire her?

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Bosco was grinning, sealed inside his glutinous chair that for anyone else would have qualified as a couch. She felt sudden pity for him. Getting bookings isnt going to be easy, she said gently. I mean, you havent toured in a while, youre notYou say you want to perform like before, but Bosco was laughing in her face, but Stephanie soldiered on. Physically, you arentI mean, your health She was dancing around the fact that Bosco wasnt remotely capable of performing in his old manner, and that trying to do so would kill himprobably sooner rather than later.

Dont you get it, Steph? Bosco finally exploded. Thats the whole point. We know the outcome, but we dont know when, or where, or who will be there when it finally happens. Its a Suicide Tour.

Stephanie started to laugh. The idea struck her as inexplicably funny. But Bosco was abruptly serious. Im done, he said. Im old, Im sadthats on a good day. I want out of this mess. But I dont want to fade away, I want to flame awayI want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art. Now, Lady PR, he said, gathering up his drooping flesh and leaning toward her, eyes glittering in his overblown head, you try to tell me no ones going to be interested in that. Reality TV, hellit doesnt get any realer than this. Suicide is a weapon; that we all know. But what about an art?

He watched Stephanie anxiously: a big, ailing man with one bold idea left, ablaze with hope that she would like it. There was a long pause while Stephanie tried to assemble her thoughts.

Jules spoke first: Its genius.

Bosco eyed him tenderly, moved by his own speech and moved to find that Jules was also moved.

Look, guys, Stephanie said. She was aware of a perverse flicker of thought in herself: If this idea did, somehow, have legs (which it almost certainly did notit was crazy, maybe illegal, unsavory to the point of grotesqueness), then shed want to get a real writer on it.

Uh nuh nuh nuh, Bosco told her, wagging a finger as if shed spoken this rogue qualm aloud. With sighs and groans and refusals of their offers of help, he heaved himself from his chair, which made small whimpering noises of release, and staggered across the room. He reached a cluttered desk and leaned against it, panting audibly. Then he rummaged for paper and pen.

Whats your name again? he called.

Jules. Jules Jones.

Bosco wrote for several minutes.

Okay, he said, then made his laborious return and handed the paper to Jules. Jules read it aloud: I, Bosco, of sound mind and body, hereby grant to you, Jules Jones, sole and exclusive media rights to cover the story of my decline and Suicide Tour.

Boscos exertions had left him spent. He sagged against his chair, reeling in breath, his eyes closed. Bosco the demented scarecrow performer appeared spectrally, naughtily in Stephanies mind, disowning the morose behemoth before them. A wave of sadness felled her.

Bosco opened his eyes and looked at Jules. There, he said. Its yours.

At lunch in MoMAs sculpture garden, Jules was a man reborn: jazzed, juiced, riffing his thoughts on the newly renovated museum. Hed gone straight to the gift shop and bought a datebook and pen (both covered with Magritte clouds) to record his appointment with Bosco at ten the next morning.

Stephanie ate her turkey wrap and gazed at Picassos She-Goat, wishing she could share her brothers elation. It felt impossible, as if Juless excitement were being siphoned from inside her, leaving Stephanie drained to the exact degree that he was invigorated. She found herself wishing, inanely, that she hadnt missed her tennis game.

Whats the matter? Jules finally asked, chugging his third cranberry and soda. You seem down.

I dont know, Stephanie said.

He leaned toward her, her big brother, and Stephanie had a flash of how theyd been as kids, an almost-physical sense of Jules as her protector, her watchdog, coming to her tennis matches and massaging her calves when they cramped. That feeling had been buried under Juless chaotic intervening years, but now it pushed back up, warm and vital, sending tears into Stephanies eyes.

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I feel like everything is ending, she said.

She was thinking of the old days, as she and Bennie now called themnot just pre-Crandale but premarriage, preparenthood, pre-money, prehard drug renunciation, preresponsibility of any kind, when they were still kicking around the Lower East Side with Bosco, going to bed after sunrise, turning up at strangers apartments, having sex in quasi public, engaging in daring acts that had more than once included (for her) shooting heroin, because none of it was serious. They were young and lucky and strongwhat did they have to worry about? If they didnt like the result, they could go back and start again. And now Bosco was sick, hardly able to move, feverishly planning his death. Was this outcome a freak aberration from natural laws, or was it normala thing they should have seen coming? Had they somehow brought it on?

Jules put his arm around her. If youd asked me this morning, I would have said we were finished, he said. All of us, the whole countrythe fucking world. But now I feel the opposite.

Stephanie knew. She could practically hear the hope sluicing through her brother. So whats the answer? she asked.

Sure, everything is ending, Jules said, but not yet.

V

Stephanie got through her next meeting, with a designer of small patent-leather purses; then ignored a warning instinct and stopped by the office. Her boss, La Doll, was on the phone, as always, but she muted the call and yelled from her office, Whats wrong?

Nothing, Stephanie said, startled. She was still in the hall.

All good with Purse-Man? La Doll kept effortless track of her employees schedules, even freelancers like Stephanie.

Just fine.

La Doll finished her call, shot some espresso from the Krups machine on her desk into her bottomless thimble-sized cup, and called, Come, Steph.

Stephanie entered her bosss soaring corner office. La Doll was one of those people who seem, even to those who know them well, digitally enhanced: the bright blond bob cut; the predatory lipstick; the roving, algorithmic eyes. Next time, she said, tweezing Stephanie briefly with her gaze, cancel the meeting.

Im sorry?

I could feel your gloom from the hall, La Doll said. Its like having the flu. Dont expose the clients.

Stephanie laughed. She had known her boss foreverlong enough to know that she was absolutely serious. God, youre a bitch, she said.

La Doll chuckled, already dialing again. Its a burden, she said.

Stephanie drove back to Crandale (Jules had taken the train) to pick up Chris at soccer practice. At seven, her son was still willing to throw his arms around Stephanie after a day apart. She hugged him, breathing the wheaty smell of his hair. Is Uncle Jules home? Chris asked. Was he building anything?

Actually, Uncle Jules worked today, she said, feeling a prick of pride as she spoke the words. He was working in the city.

The days vicissitudes had resolved into a single droning wish to talk to Bennie. Stephanie had spoken with Sasha, his assistant, whom shed long distrusted as the gatekeeper of Bennies misbehavior but grown fond of in the years since his reform. Bennie had called on his way home, stuck in traffic, but by then Stephanie wanted to explain it in person. She pictured laughing with Bennie about Bosco and feeling her strange unhappiness lift. One thing she knew: she was finished with lying about the tennis.

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Bennie finally returned and went straight upstairs to shower. Stephanie put some frozen chicken thighs in warm water to thaw, then followed him up. Steam drifted from the open bathroom door into their bedroom, twirling in the last rays of sun. Stephanie felt like showering, toothey had a double shower with handmade fixtures whose exorbitant price theyd argued over. But Bennie had been adamant.

She kicked off her shoes and unbuttoned her blouse, tossing it on the bed with Bennies clothes. The contents of his pockets were scattered on the small antique table where he always left them. Stephanie glanced at what was there, an old habit left over from the days when shed lived in suspicion. Coins, gum wrappers, a parking garage ticket. As she moved away, something stuck to the bottom of her bare foot. She plucked it offa bobby pinand headed for the wastebasket. Before dropping it in, she glanced at the pin: generic light gold, identical to bobby pins youd find in the corners of nearly any Crandale womans house. Except her own.

Stephanie paused, holding the pin. There were a thousand reasons it could be herea party theyd had, friends who might have come up to use the bathroom, the cleaning womanbut Stephanie knew whose it was as if she had already known, as if she werent discovering the fact but remembering it. She sank onto the bed in her skirt and bra, hot and shivery, blinking from shock. Of course. It took no imagination at all to see how everything had converged: pain; revenge; power; desire. Hed slept with Kathy. Of course.

Stephanie pulled her shirt back on and buttoned it carefully, still holding the bobby pin. She went into the bathroom, searching out Bennies lean brown shape through the steam and running water. He hadnt seen her. And then she stopped, halted by a sense of dreadful familiarity, of knowing everything they would say: the jagged trek from denial to self-lacerating apology for Bennie; from rage to bruised acceptance for herself. She had thought they would never make that trek again. Had truly believed it.

She left the bathroom and tossed the pin in the trash. She slipped noiselessly down the front stairs in her bare feet. Jules and Chris were in the kitchen, glugging water from the Brita. Her only thought was of getting away, as if she were carrying a live grenade from inside the house, so that when it exploded, it would destroy just herself.

The sky was electric blue above the trees, but the yard felt dark. Stephanie went to the edge of the lawn and sat, her forehead on her knees. The grass and soil were still warm from the day. She wanted to cry but she couldnt. The feeling was too deep.

She lay down, curled on her side in the grass, as if she were shielding the damaged part of herself, or trying to contain the pain that issued from it. Every turn of her thoughts increased her sense of horror, her belief that she couldnt recover, had no more resources to draw on. Why was this worse than the other times? But it was.

She heard Bennies voice from the kitchen: Steph?

She got up and staggered into a flowerbed. She and Bennie had planted it together: gladioli, hosta, black-eyed Susans. She heard stems crunching under her feet, but she didnt look down. She went all the way to the fence and knelt in the dirt.

Mom? Chriss voice, from upstairs. Stephanie covered her ears.

Then came another voice, so close to Stephanie that she heard it even through her hands. It spoke in a whisper: Hello there.

It took her a moment to separate this new, nearby voice from the ones inside the house. She felt no fear, only a kind of numb curiosity. Whos that?

Its me.

Stephanie realized her eyes were shut. She opened them now and looked through the slats of fence. Amid the shadows she made out Noreens white face peeking through from the other side. Shed taken off her sunglasses; Stephanie vaguely noted a pair of skittish eyes. Hi Noreen, she said.

I like to sit in this spot, Noreen said.

I know.

Stephanie wanted to move away, but she couldnt seem to move. She closed her eyes again. Noreen didnt speak, and as the minutes passed she seemed to fade into the rummaging breeze and chatter of insects, as if the night itself were alive. Stephanie hunched in the dirt for a long time, or what felt like a long timemaybe it was only a minute. She knelt until the calling started up againJules too, his panicked voice careening through the dark. At last she tottered to her feet. In unfolding herself, she felt the painful thing settle inside her. Her knees shook from its new, awkward weight.

Good night, Noreen, she said as she began picking her way back through the flowers and bushes toward the house.

Good night, she faintly heard.

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Selling the General

Dollys first big idea was the hat. She picked teal blue, fuzzy, with flaps that came down over the generals large dried-apricot ears. The ears were unsightly, Dolly thought, and best covered up.

When she saw the generals picture in the Times a few days later, she almost choked on her poached egg: he looked like a baby, a big sick baby with a giant mustache and a double chin. The headline couldnt have been worse:

GENERAL B.s ODD HEADGEAR SPURS CANCER RUMORS LOCAL UNREST GROWS

Dolly bolted to her feet in her dingy kitchen and turned in a frantic circle, spilling tea on her bathrobe. She looked wildly at the generals picture. And then she realized: the ties. They hadnt cut off the ties under the hat as shed instructed, and a big fuzzy bow under the generals double chin was disastrous. Dolly ran barefoot into her office/bedroom and began plowing through fax pages, trying to unearth the most recent sequence of numbers she was supposed to call to reach Arc, the generals human relations captain. The general moved a lot to avoid assassination, but Arc was meticulous about faxing Dolly their updated contact information. These faxes usually came at around 3:00 a.m., waking Dolly and sometimes her daughter, Lulu. Dolly never mentioned the disruption; the general and his team were under the impression that she was the top publicist in New York, a woman whose fax machine would be in a corner office with a panoramic view of New York City (as indeed it had been for many years), not ten inches away from the foldout sofa where she slept. Dolly could only attribute their misapprehension to some dated article that had drifted their way from Vanity Fair or InStyle or People, where Dolly had been written about and profiled under her then moniker: La Doll.

The first call from the generals camp had come just in time; Dolly had hocked her last piece of jewelry. She was copyediting textbooks until 2:00 a.m., sleeping until five, and then providing polite phone chitchat to aspiring English speakers in Tokyo until it was time to wake Lulu and fix her breakfast. And all of that wasnt nearly enough to keep Lulu in Miss Rutgerss School for Girls. Often Dollys three allotted hours of sleep were spent in spasms of worry at the thought of the next monstrous tuition bill.

And then Arc had called. The general wanted an exclusive retainer. He wanted rehabilitation, American sympathy, an end to the CIAs assassination attempts. If Qaddafi could do it, why not he? Dolly wondered seriously if overwork and lack of sleep were making her hallucinate, but she named a price. Arc began taking down her banking information. The general presumed your fee would be higher, he said, and if Dolly had been able to speak at that moment she would have said, Thats my weekly retainer, hombre, not my monthly, or Hey, I havent given you the formula that lets you calculate the actual price, or Thats just for the two-week trial period when I decide whether I want to work with you. But Dolly couldnt speak. She was weeping.

When the first installment appeared in her bank account, Dollys relief was so immense that it almost obliterated the tiny anxious muttering voice inside her: Your client is a genocidal dictator. Dolly had worked with shitheads before, God knew; if she didnt take this job someone else would snap it up; being a publicist is about not judging your clientsthese excuses were lined up in formation, ready for deployment should that small dissident voice pluck up its courage to speak with any volume. But lately, Dolly couldnt even hear it.

Now, as she scuttled over her frayed Persian rug looking for the generals most recent numbers, the phone rang. It was 6:00 a.m. Dolly lunged, praying Lulus sleep wouldnt be disturbed.

Hello? But she knew who it was.

We are not happy, said Arc.

Me either, Dolly said. You didnt cut off the

The general is not happy.

Arc, listen to me. You need to cut off the

The general is not happy, Miss Peale.

Listen to me, Arc.

He is not happy.

Thats becauselook, take a scissors

He is not happy, Miss Peale.

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He will no longer wear this hat.

He has to wear the hat.

He will not wear it. He refuses.

Cut off the ties, Arc.

Rumors have reached us, Miss Peale.

Her stomach lurched. Rumors?

That you are not on top as you once were. And now the hat is unsuccessful.

Dolly felt the negative forces pulling in around her. Standing there with the traffic of Eighth Avenue grinding past beneath her window, fingering her frizzy hair that shed stopped coloring and allowed to grow in long and gray, she felt a jab of some deep urgency.

I have enemies, Arc, she said. Just like the general.

He was silent.

If you listen to my enemies, I cant do my job. Now take out that fancy pen I can see in your pocket every time you get your picture in the paper and write this down: Cut the strings off the hat. Lose the bow. Push the hat farther back on the generals head so some of his hair fluffs out in front. Do that, Arc, and lets see what happens.

Lulu had come into the room and was rubbing her eyes in her pink pajamas. Dolly looked at her watch, saw that her daughter had lost a half hour of sleep, and experienced a small inner collapse at the thought of Lulu feeling tired at school. She put her arms around her daughters shoulders. Lulu received this embrace with the regal bearing that was her trademark.

Dolly had forgotten Arc, but now he spoke from the phone at her neck: I will do this, Miss Peale.

It was several weeks before the generals picture appeared again. Now the hat was pushed back and the ties were gone. The headline read:

EXTENT OF BS WAR CRIMES MAY BE EXAGGERATED, NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

La Doll had met with ruin on New Years Eve two years ago, at a wildly anticipated party that was projected, by the cultural history-minded pundits shed considered worth inviting, to rival Truman Capotes Black and White Ball. The Party, it was called, or the List. As in: Is he on the list? A party to celebratewhat? In retrospect, Dolly wasnt sure; the fact that Americans had never been richer, despite the turmoil roiling the world? The Party had nominal hosts, all famous, but the real hostess, as everyone knew, was La Doll, who had more connections and access and juju than all of these people combined. And La Doll had made a very human mistakeor so she tried to soothe herself at night when memories of her demise plowed through her like a hot poker, causing her to writhe in her sofa bed and swill brandy from the bottleshed thought that because she could do something very, very well (namely, get the best people into one room at one time), she could do other things well, too. Like design. And La Doll had had a vision: broad, translucent trays of oil and water suspended beneath small brightly colored spotlights whose heat would make the opposing liquids twist and bubble and swirl. Shed imagined people craning their necks to look up, spellbound by the shifting liquid shapes. And they did look up. They marveled at the lit trays; La Doll saw them do it from a small booth shed had constructed high up and to one side so she could view the panorama of her achievement. From there, she was the first to notice, as midnight approached, that something was awry with the translucent trays that held the water and oil: they were sagging a littlewere they? They were slumping like sacks from their chains and melting, in other words. And then they began to collapse, flop and drape and fall away, sending scalding oil onto the heads of every glamorous person in the country and some other countries, too. They were burned, scarred, maimed in the sense that tear-shaped droplets of scar tissue on the fore head of a movie star or small bald patches on the head of an art dealer or a model or generally fabulous person constitute maiming. But something shut down in La Doll as she stood there, away from the burning oil: she didnt call 911. She gaped in frozen disbelief as her guests shrieked and staggered and covered their heads, tore hot, soaked garments from their flesh and crawled over the floor like people in medieval altar paintings whose earthly luxuries have consigned them to hell.

The accusations laterthat shed done it on purpose, was a sadist whod stood there delighting as people sufferedwere actually more terrible, for La Doll, than watching the oil pour mercilessly onto the heads of her five hundred guests. Then shed been protected by a cocoon of shock. But what followed she had to witness in a lucid state: They hated her. They were dying to get rid of her. It was as if she werent human, but a rat or a bug. And they succeeded. Even before shed served her six months for criminal negligence, before the class-action suit that resulted in her entire net worth (never nearly as large as it had seemed) being distributed in small parcels to her victims, La Doll was gone. Wiped out. She emerged from jail thirty pounds heavier and fifty years older, with wild gray hair. No one recognized her, and the world where shed thrived had shortly proceeded to vaporizenow even the rich believed they were poor. After a few gleeful headlines and photos of her new, ruined state, they forgot about her.

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When the headlines relating to General B. had definitively softened, when several witnesses against him were shown to have received money from the opposition, Arc called again. The general pays you each month a sum, he said. That is not for one idea only.

It was a good idea, Arc. You have to admit.

The general is impatient, Miss Peale, he said, and Dolly imagined him smiling. The hat is no longer new.

That night, the general came to Dolly in a dream. The hat was gone, and he was meeting a pretty blonde outside a revolving door. The blonde took his arm, and they spun back inside, pressed together. Then Dolly was aware of herself in the dream, sitting in a chair watching the general and his lover, thinking what a good job they were doing playing their roles. She jolted awake as if someone had shaken her. The dream nearly escaped, but Dolly caught it, pressed it to her chest. She understood: the general should be linked to a movie star.

Dolly scrambled off the sofa bed, waxy legs flashing in the street light that leaked in through a broken blind. A movie star. Someone recognizable, appealingwhat better way to humanize a man who seemed inhuman? If hes good enough for herthat was one line of thinking. And also: The general and I have similar tastes: her. Or else: She must find that triangular head of his sexy. Or even: I wonder how the general dances? And if Dolly could get people to ask that question, the generals image problems would be solved. It didnt matter how many thousands hed slaughteredif the collective vision of him could include a dance floor, all that would be behind him.

There were scores of washed-up female stars who might work, but Dolly had a particular one in mind: Kitty Jackson, who ten years ago had debuted as a scrappy, gymnastic crime stopper in Oh, Baby, Oh. Kittys real fame had come a year later, when Jules Jones, the older brother of one of Dollys protgs, had attacked her during an interview for Details magazine. The assault and trial had enshrined Kitty in a glowing mist of martyrdom. So people were all the more spooked, when the mist burned off, to find the actress sharply altered: gone was the guileless ingnue she had been, and in her place was one of those people who couldnt take the bullshit. Kittys ensuing bad behavior and fall from grace were relentlessly cataloged in the tabloids: on set for a Western, shed emptied a bag of horseshit onto an iconic actors head; shed set free several thousand lemurs on a Disney film. When an berpowerful producer tried to maneuver her into bed, shed called his wife. No one would hire Kitty anymore, but the public would remember herthat was what mattered to Dolly. And she was still only twenty-eight.

Kitty wasnt hard to find; no one was putting much energy into hiding her. By noon, Dolly had reached her: sleepy sounding, smoking audibly. Kitty heard Dolly out, asked her to repeat the generous fee shed quoted, then paused. In that pause, Dolly detected a mix of desperation and squeamishness that she recognized too well. She felt a queasy jab of pity for the actress, whose choices had boiled down to this one. Then Kitty said yes.

Singing to herself, wired on espresso made on her old Krups machine, Dolly called Arc and laid out her plan.

The general does not enjoy American movies, came Arcs response.

Who cares? Americans know who she is.

The general has very particular tastes, Arc said. He is not flexible.

He doesnt have to touch her, Arc. He doesnt have to speak to her. All he has to do is stand near her and get his picture taken. And he has to smile.

Smile?

He has to look happy.

The general rarely smiles, Miss Peale.

He wore the hat, didnt he?

There was a long pause. Finally Arc said, You must accompany this actress. Then we will see.

Accompany her where?

Here. To us.

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It is required, he said.

Entering Lulus bedroom, Dolly felt like Dorothy waking up in Oz: everything was in color. A pink shade encircled the overhead lamp. Pink gauzy fabric hung from the ceiling. Pink winged princesses were stenciled onto the walls: Dolly had learned how to make the stencils in a jailhouse art class and had spent days decorating the room while Lulu was at school. Long strings of pink beads hung from the ceiling. When she was home, Lulu emerged from her room only to eat.

She was part of a weave of girls at Miss Rutgerss School, a mesh so fine and scarily intimate that even her mothers flameout and jail sentence (during which Lulus grandmother had come from Minnesota to care for her) couldnt dissolve it. It wasnt thread holding these girls together; it was steel wire. And Lulu was the rod around which the wires were wrapped. Overhearing her daughter on the phone with her friends, Dolly was awed by her authority: she was stern when she needed to be, but also soft. Kind. Lulu was nine.

She sat in a pink beanbag chair, doing homework on her laptop and IMing her friends (since the general, Dolly had been paying for wireless). Hi Dolly, Lulu said, having stopped calling Dolly Mom when she got out of jail. She narrowed her eyes at her mother as if she had difficulty making her out. And Dolly did feel like a black-and-white incursion into this bower of color, a refugee from the dinginess surrounding it.

I have to take a business trip, she told Lulu. To visit a client. I thought you might want to stay with one of your friends so you wont miss school.

School was where Lulus life took place. Shed been adamant about not allowing her mother, who once had been a fixture at Miss Rutgerss, to jeopardize Lulus status with her new disgrace. Nowadays, Dolly dropped Lulu off around the corner, peering past dank Upper East Side stone to make sure she got safely in the door. At pickup time, Dolly waited in the same spot while Lulu dawdled with her friends outside school, toeing the manicured bushes and (in spring) tulip beds, completing whatever transactions were required to affirm and sustain her power. When Lulu had a play date, Dolly came no farther than the lobby to retrieve her. Lulu would emerge from an elevator flushed, smelling of perfume or freshly baked brownies, take her mothers hand, and walk with her past the doorman into the night. Not in apologyLulu had nothing to apologize forbut in sympathy that things had to be so hard for both of them.

Lulu cocked her head, curious. A business trip. Thats good, right?

It is good, absolutely, Dolly said a little nervously. Shed kept the general a secret from Lulu.

How long will you be gone?

A few days. Four, maybe.

There was a long pause. Finally Lulu said, Can I come?

With me? Dolly was taken aback. But youd have to miss school.

Another pause. Lulu was performing some mental calculation that might have involved measuring the peer impact of missing school versus being a guest in someones home, or the question of whether you could manage an extended stay at someones home without that someones parents having contact with your mother. Dolly couldnt tell. Maybe Lulu didnt know herself.

Where? Lulu asked.

Dolly was flustered; shed never been much good at saying no to Lulu. But the thought of her daughter and the general in one location made her throat clamp. II cant tell you that.

Lulu didnt protest. But Dolly?

Yes, sweetheart?

Can your hair be blond again?

They waited for Kitty Jackson in a lounge by a private runway at Kennedy Airport. When the actress finally arrived, dressed in jeans and a faded yellow sweatshirt, Dolly was smitten with regretsshe should have met Kitty first! The girl looked too far gone; people might not even recognize her! Her hair was still blond (defiantly uncombed and also, it appeared, unwashed), her eyes still wide and blue. But a sardonic expression had taken up residence in her face, as if those blue eyes were rolling heavenward even as they gazed right at you. That look, more than the first spidery lines under Kittys eyes and alongside her mouth, made her seem no longer young, or even close. She wasnt Kitty Jackson anymore.

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You brought your daughter? was her sole response. To meet the general?

Shes not going to meet the general, Dolly hissed, checking to make sure Lulu hadnt emerged from the bathroom. She doesnt know anything about the general! Please dont mention his name in front of her.

Kitty regarded Dolly skeptically. Lucky girl, she said.

They boarded the generals plane at dusk. After takeoff, Kitty ordered a martini from the generals airline hostess, sucked it down, reclined her seat to a horizontal position, pulled a sleep mask (the only thing on her that looked new) over her eyes, and commenced to snore. Lulu leaned over her, studying the actresss face, which looked young, untouched in repose.

Is she sick?

No. Dolly sighed. Maybe. I dont know.

I think she needs a vacation, Lulu said.

Twenty checkpoints presaged their arrival at the generals compound. At each, two soldiers with submachine guns peered into the black Mercedes, where Dolly and Lulu and Kitty sat in the backseat. Four times, they were forced outside into the scouring sunshine and patted down at gunpoint. Each time, Dolly scrutinized her daughters studied calm for signs of trauma. In the car Lulu sat very straight, pink Kate Spade bookbag nestled in her lap. She met the eyes of the machine-gun holders with the same even look she must have used to stare down the many girls who had tried in vain, over the years, to unseat her.

High white walls enclosed the road. They were lined with hundreds of plump shiny black birds whose long purple beaks curved like scythes. Dolly had never seen birds like these. They looked like birds that would screech, but each time a car window slid down to accommodate another squinting gunslinger, Dolly was unsettled by the silence.

Eventually a section of wall swung open and the car veered off the road and pulled to a stop in front of a massive compound: lush green gardens, a sparkle of water, a white mansion whose end was nowhere in sight. The birds squatted along its roof, looking down.

Their driver opened the car doors, and Dolly and Lulu and Kitty stepped out into the sun. Dolly felt it on her neck, newly exposed by a discount version of her trademark blond chin-length cut. The heat forced Kitty out of her sweatshirt; mercifully, she wore a clean white T-shirt underneath. Her arms had a lovely tan, although a scatter of raw pink patches marred the skin above one wrist. Scars. Dolly stared at them. Kitty, are those she faltered. On your arms, are they?

Burns, Kitty said. And she gave Dolly a look that made her stomach twist until she remembered very dimly, like something that had happened in a fog or when she was a small child, someone asking herbegging herto put Kitty Jackson on the list, and telling them no. Absolutely not, it was out of the questionKittys stock was too low.

I made them myself, Kitty said.

Dolly stared at her, uncomprehending. Kitty grinned, and for a second she looked sweetly mischievous, like the star of Oh, Baby, Oh. Lots of people have, she said. You didnt know?

Dolly wondered if this might be a joke. She didnt want to fall for it in front of Lulu.

You cant find a person who wasnt at that party, Kitty said. And theyve got proof. Weve all got proofwhos going to say were lying?

I know who was there, Dolly said. Ive still got the list in my head.

Butwho are you? Kitty said, still smiling.

Dolly was quiet. She felt Lulus gray eyes on her.

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To hell with them, right? Kitty said tenderly.

A trim, compact man in a beautifully cut suit emerged from the compound to greet them. Arc.

Miss Peale. We meet at last, he said with a smile. And Miss Jacksonhe turned to Kittyit is a great honor as well as a pleasure. He kissed Kittys hand with a slightly teasing look, Dolly thought. I have seen your movies. The general and I watched them together.

Dolly steeled herself for what Kitty might say, but her answer arrived in a ringing voice like a childs, except for the slight curve of flirtation. Oh, Im sure youve seen better movies.

The general was impressed.

Well, Im honored. Im honored that the general found them worth watching.

With trepidation, Dolly glanced at the actress, wishing only that the mockery she took for granted not be too scaldingly manifest. To her amazement, it wasnt there at allnot a trace. Kitty looked humble, absolutely sincere, as if ten years had dropped away and she were a grateful, eager starlet once more.

Alas, I have unfortunate news, Arc said. The general has had to make a sudden trip. They stared at him. It is very regrettable, he went on. The general sends his sincere apologies.

But wecan we go to where he is? Dolly asked.

Perhaps, Arc said. You will not mind some additional travels?

Well, Dolly said, glancing at Lulu. It depends how

Absolutely not, Kitty interrupted. Well go wherever the general wants us to go. Well do what it takes. Right, kiddo?

Lulu was slow to connect the diminutive kiddo to herself. It was the first time Kitty had spoken to her directly. Lulu glanced at the actress, then smiled. Right, she said.

They would leave for a new location the following morning. That evening, Arc offered to drive them into the city, but Kitty demurred. Ill pass on the grand tour, she said as they settled into their two-bedroom suite, which opened onto a private swimming pool. Id rather enjoy these digs. They used to put me up in places like this. She gave a bitter laugh.

Dont overdo it, Dolly said, noticing Kitty headed for the wet bar.

Kitty turned, narrowing her eyes. Hey. How was I out there? Any complaints so far?

You were perfect, Dolly said. Then, lowering her voice so Lulu wouldnt hear, she added, Just dont forget who were dealing with.

But I want to forget, Kitty said, pouring herself a gin and tonic. Im actively trying to forget. I want to be like Luluinnocent. She raised her glass to Dolly and took a sip.

Dolly and Lulu rode with Arc in his charcoal gray Jaguar, a driver peeling downhill along tiny streets, sending pedestrians lunging against walls and darting into doorways to avoid being crushed. The city shimmered below: millions of white slanted buildings steeping in a smoky haze. Soon they were surrounded by it. The citys chief source of color seemed to be the laundry flapping on every balcony.

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Is there anything you would like? Arc asked Lulu.

Yes, please, Lulu said, one of those. It was a star fruit; Dolly had seen them at Dean & DeLuca. Here they lay in obscene heaps, studded with flies. Arc took one, nodding curtly at the vendor, an older man with a skeletal chest and a kind, anxious face. The man smiled, nodding eagerly at Dolly and Lulu, but his eyes looked frightened.

Lulu took the dusty, unwashed fruit, wiped it carefully on her short-sleeved polo shirt, and sank her teeth into its bright green rind. Juice sprayed her collar. She laughed and wiped her mouth on her hand. Mom, you have to try this, she said, and Dolly took a bite. She and Lulu shared the star fruit, licking their fingers under Arcs watchful eyes. Dolly felt oddly buoyant. Then she realized why: Mom. It was the first time Lulu had spoken the word in nearly a year.

Arc led the way inside a crowded tea shop. A group of men scattered from a corner table to give them a place to sit, and a forced approximation of the shops former happy bustle resumed. A waiter poured sweet mint tea into their cups with a shaking hand. Dolly tried to give him a reassuring look, but his eyes fled hers.

Do you do this often? she asked Arc. Walk around the city?

The general makes a habit of moving among the people, Arc said. He wants them to feel his humanity, to witness it. Of course, he must do this very carefully.

Because of his enemies.

Arc nodded. The general unfortunately has many enemies. Today, for example, there were threats to his home, and it was necessary to relocate. He does this often, as you know.

Dolly nodded. Threats to his home?

Arc smiled. His enemies believe he is here, but he is far away.

Dolly glanced at Lulu. The star fruit had left a shiny ring around her mouth. Butwere here, she said.

Yes, Arc said. Only us.

Dolly lay awake most of that night, listening to coos and rustles and squawks that mimicked sounds of assassins prowling the grounds in search of the general and his cohort: herself, in other words. She had become the helpmate and fellow target of General B., a source of terror and anxiety to those he ruled.

How had it come to this? As usual, Dolly found herself revisiting the moment when the plastic trays first buckled and the life she had relished for so many years poured away. But tonight, unlike countless other nights when Dolly tipped down that memory chute, Lulu lay across from her in the king-sized bed, asleep in a frilly nightie, her does knees tucked under her. Dolly felt the warmth of her daughters body, this child of her middle age, of an accidental pregnancy resulting from a fling with a movie-star client. Lulu believed her father was dead; Dolly had shown her pictures of an old boyfriend.

She slid across the bed and kissed Lulus warm cheek. It had made no sense at all to have a childDolly was pro-choice, riveted to her career. Her decision had been clear, yet shed hesitated to make the appointmenthesitated through morning sickness, mood swings, exhaustion. Hesitated until she knew, with a shock of relief and petrified joy, that it was too late.

Lulu stirred and Dolly moved closer, gathering her daughter in her arms. Unlike when she was awake, Lulu relaxed into her mothers touch. Dolly felt a swell of irrational gratitude toward the general for providing this one bedit was such a rare luxury to hold her daughter, to feel the faint patter of her heartbeat.

Ill always protect you, sweetheart, Dolly whispered into Lulus ear. Nothing bad will ever happen to usyou know that, right?

Lulu slept on.

The next day they piled into two black armored cars that resembled jeeps, only heavier. Arc and some soldiers went in the first car, Dolly and Lulu and Kitty in the second. Sitting in the backseat, Dolly thought she could feel the weight of the car shoving them into the earth. She was exhausted, full of dread.

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They breezed through the checkpoints and soon were on the open road, circling the pale city from above. Dolly noticed vendors by the road. Often they were children, who held up handfuls of fruit or cardboard signs as the jeeps approached. When the vehicles flew past, the children fell back against the embankment, perhaps from the speed. Dolly let out a cry the first time she saw this and leaned forward, wanting to say something to the driver. But what exactly? She hesitated, then sat back and tried not to look at the windows. Lulu watched the children, her math book open in her lap.

It was a relief when they left the city behind and began driving through empty land that looked like desert, antelopes and cows nibbling the stingy plant life. Without asking permission, Kitty began to smoke, exhaling through a slice of open window. Dolly fought the impulse to scold her for affronting Lulus lungs with secondhand smoke.

So, Kitty said, turning to Lulu. What big plans are you hatching?

Lulu seemed to turn the question over. You meanfor my life?

Why not.

I havent decided yet, Lulu said, thoughtful. Im only nine.

Well, thats sensible.

Lulu is very sensible, Dolly said.

I mean what do you imagine, Kitty said. She was restless, fidgeting her dry, manicured fingers as if she wanted another cigarette but was making herself wait. Or do kids not do that anymore.

Lulu, in her wisdom, seemed to divine that what Kitty really wanted was to talk. What did you imagine, she asked, when you were nine?

Kitty considered this, then laughed and lit up. I wanted to be a jockey, she said. Or a movie star.

You got one of your wishes.

I did, Kitty said, closing her eyes as she exhaled smoke through the window. I did get my wish.

Lulu turned to her gravely. Was it not as fun as you thought?

Kitty opened her eyes. The acting? she said. Oh, I loved that, I still doI miss it. But the people were monsters.

What kind?

Liars, Kitty said. They seemed nice at first, but that was all an act. The outright horrible ones, the ones who basically wanted to kill youat least they were being honest.

Lulu nodded, as if this were a problem shed dealt with herself. Did you try lying too?

I did. I tried it a lot. But I couldnt forget I was lying, and when I told the truth I got punished. Its like finding out theres no Santa Clausyou wish you could go back and believe in all that again, but its too late.

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Lulu laughed. I never believed in Santa Claus, she said.

They drove and drove. Lulu did math. Then social studies. She wrote an essay on owls. After what felt like hundreds of miles of desert, punctuated by bathroom stops at outposts patrolled by soldiers, they tilted up into the hills. The foliage grew dense, filtering out the sunlight.

Without warning, the cars swung off the road and stopped. Dozens of soldiers in camouflage seemed to materialize from the trees. Dolly and Lulu and Kitty stepped out of the car into a jungle crazed with birdcalls.

Arc came over, stepping carefully in his fine leather shoes. The general is waiting, he said. He is eager to greet you.

Everyone moved as a group through the jungle. The earth under their feet was bright red and soft. Monkeys romped in the trees. Eventually they reached a set of crude concrete steps built into the side of a hill. More soldiers appeared, and there was a creak and grind of boots as all of them climbed. Dolly kept her hands on Lulus shoulders. She heard Kitty humming behind her: not a tune, just the same two notes, over and over.

The hidden camera was ready in Dollys purse. As they climbed the steps, she took out the activator and nestled it in her palm.

At the top of the stairs the jungle had been cleared away to accommodate a slab of concrete that might have been a landing pad. Sunlight pushed down through the humid jungle air, making wisps of steam at their feet. The general stood in the middle of the concrete, flanked by soldiers. He looked short, but that was always true of famous people. He wasnt wearing the blue hat, or any hat, and his thick hair stood up oddly around his grim triangular face. He wore his usual military regalia, but something about it all seemed slightly askew, or in need of cleaning. The general looked tiredthere were pouches under his eyes. He looked grumpy. He looked like someone had just hustled him out of bed and said, Theyre here, and hed had to be reminded of who the hell they were talking about.

There was a pause when no one seemed to know what to do.

Then Kitty reached the top of the stairs. Dolly heard the humming behind her, but she didnt turn to look; instead, she watched the general recognize Kitty, watched the power of that recognition move across his face in a look of appetite and uncertainty. Kitty came toward him slowlypoured toward him, really, that was how smoothly she moved in her sage green dress, as if the jerking awkwardness of walking were something shed never experienced. She poured toward the general and took his hand as if to shake it, smiling, circling him a little, seeming embarrassed to the point of laughter, like they knew each other too well to shake hands. Dolly was so taken by the strangeness of it all that at first she didnt even think to shoot; she missed the handshake completely. It was only when Kitty pressed her narrow green body to the generals uniformed chest and closed her eyes for a moment that Dolly came toclickand the general seemed disconcerted, unsure what to do, patting Kittys back out of politenessclickat which point Kitty took both his hands (heavy and warped, the hands of a bigger man) into her own slender hands and leaned back, smiling into his faceclicklaughing a little, shyly, her head back like it was all so silly, so self-conscious-making for them both. And then the general smiled. It happened without warning: his lips pulled away to reveal two rows of small yellow teethclickthat made him appear vulnerable, eager to please. Click, click, clickDolly was shooting as fast as she could without moving her hand, because that smile was it, the thing no one had seen, the hidden human side of the general that would dumbfound the world.

All this happened in the span of a minute. Not a word had been spoken. Kitty and the general stood hand in hand, both a little flushed, and it was all Dolly could do not to scream, because they were done! She had what she needed, without a word having been said. She felt a mix of awe and love for Kittythis miracle, this genius who had not merely posed with the general, but tamed him. That was how it felt to Dollylike there was a one-way door between the generals world and Kittys, and the actress had eased him across it without his even noticing. He couldnt go back! And Dolly had made this happenfor the first time in her life, she had done a helpful thing. And Lulu had seen it.

Kittys face still held the winsome smile shed been wearing for the general. Dolly watched the actress scan the crowd, taking in the dozens of soldiers with their automatic weapons, Arc and Lulu and Dolly with her ecstatic shining face, her brimming eyes. And Kitty must have known then that shed pulled it off, engineered her own salvation, clawed her way back from oblivion and cleared the way to resume the work she adored. All with a little help from the despot to her left.

So, Kitty said, is this where you bury the bodies?

The general glanced at her, not understanding. Arc stepped quickly forward, as did Dolly. Lulu came too.

Do you bury them here, in pits, Kitty asked the general in the most friendly, conversational voice, or do you burn them first?

Miss Jackson, Arc said, with a tense, meaningful look. The general cannot understand you.

The general wasnt smiling anymore. He was a man who couldnt abide not knowing what was going on. Hed let go of Kittys hand and was speaking sternly to Arc.

Lulu tugged Dollys hand. Mom, she hissed, make her stop!

Her daughters voice startled Dolly out of a momentary paralysis. Knock it off, Kitty, she said.

Do you eat them? Kitty asked the general. Or do you leave them out so the vultures can do it?

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The general spoke harshly to Arc, who turned to Dolly. His smooth forehead was visibly moist. The general is becoming angry, Miss Peale, he said. And there was the code; Dolly read it clearly. She went to Kitty and seized her tanned arm. She leaned close to Kittys face.

If you keep this up, Dolly said softly, we will all die.

But one glance into Kittys fervid, self-annihilating eyes told her it was hopeless; Kitty couldnt stop. Oops! she said loudly, in mock surprise. Was I not supposed to bring up the genocide?

Here was a word the general knew. He flung himself away from Kitty as if she were on fire, commanding his solders in a strangled voice. They shoved Dolly away, knocking her to the ground. When she looked back at Kitty, the soldiers had contracted around her, and the actress was obscured from view.

Lulu was shouting, trying to drag Dolly onto her feet. Mommy, do something, do something! Make them stop!

Arc, Dolly called, but Arc was lost to her now. Hed taken his place beside the general, who was screaming with rage. The soldiers were carrying Kitty; Dolly had an impression of kicking from within their midst. She could still hear Kittys high, reaching voice:

Do you drink their blood, or just use it to mop your floors?

Do you wear their teeth on a string?

There was the sound of a blow, then a scream. Dolly jumped to her feet. But Kitty was gone; the soldiers carried her inside a structure hidden in the trees beside the landing pad. The general and Arc followed them in and shut the door. The jungle was eerily silent: just parrot calls and Lulus sobs.

While the general raged, Arc had whispered orders to two soldiers, and as soon as the general was out of sight, they hustled Dolly and Lulu down the hill through the jungle and back to the cars. The drivers were waiting, smoking cigarettes. During the ride Lulu lay with her head in Dollys lap, crying as they sped back through the jungle and then the desert. Dolly rubbed her daughters soft hair, wondering numbly if they were being taken to prison. But eventually, as the sun leaked toward the horizon, they found themselves at the airport. The generals plane was waiting. By then, Lulu had sat up and moved across the seat.

Lulu slept hard during the flight, clutching her Kate Spade bookbag. Dolly didnt sleep. She stared straight ahead at Kittys empty seat.

In the dark of early morning, they took a taxi from Kennedy to Hells Kitchen. Neither of them spoke. Dolly was amazed to find their building intact, the apartment still at the top of the stairs, the keys in her purse.

Lulu went straight to her room and shut the door. Dolly sat in her office, addled from lack of sleep, and tried to organize her thoughts. Should she start with the embassy? Congress? How long would it take to get someone on the phone who could actually help her? And what exactly would she say?

Lulu emerged from her room in her school uniform, hair brushed. Dolly hadnt even noticed it was light out. Lulu looked askance at her mother, still in yesterdays clothes, and said, Its time to go.

Youre going to school?

Of course Im going to school. What else would I do?

They took the subway. The silence between them had become inviolable; Dolly feared it would never end. Watching Lulus wan, pinched face, she felt a cold wave of conviction: if Kitty Jackson died, her daughter would be lost to her.

At their corner, Lulu turned without saying good-bye.

Shopkeepers were lifting metal gates on Lexington Avenue. Dolly bought a cup of coffee and drank it. She wanted to be near Lulu. She decided to wait on that corner until her daughters school day had ended: five and a half more hours. Meanwhile, she would make calls on her cell phone. But Dolly was distracted by thoughts of Kitty in the green dress, oil burns winking on her arms, then her own obscene pride, thinking shed tamed the general and made the world a better place.

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When the gate behind her shuddered up, Dolly saw that it was a photo print shop. The hidden camera was still inside her purse. It was something to do; she went in, handed it over, and asked for prints and a CD of everything they could download.

She was still standing outside the shop an hour later when the guy came out with her pictures. By then shed made a few calls about Kitty, but no one seemed to take her seriously. Who could blame them? Dolly thought.

These shotsdid you use Photoshop, or what? the guy asked. They look, like, totally real.

They are real, she said. I took them myself.

The guy laughed. Come on, he said, and Dolly felt a shudder deep in her brain. As Lulu had said this morning: What else would I do?

She rushed back home and called her old contacts at the Enquirer and the Star, a few of whom were still there. Let the news trickle up. This had worked for Dolly before.

Minutes later, she was e-mailing images. Within a couple of hours, pictures of General B. nuzzling Kitty Jackson were being posted and traded on the Web. By nightfall, reporters from the major papers around the world had started calling. They called the general, too, whose human relations captain emphatically denied the rumors.

That night, while Lulu did homework in her room, Dolly ate cold sesame noodles and set out to reach Arc. It took fourteen tries.

We can no longer speak, Miss Peale, he said.

Arc.

We cannot speak. The general is angry.

Listen to me.

The general is angry, Miss Peale.

Is she alive, Arc? Thats all I need to know.

She is alive.

Thank you. Tears filled Dollys eyes. Is sheare theytreating her okay?

She is unharmed, Miss Peale, Arc said. We will not speak again.

They were silent, listening to the hum of the overseas connection. It is a pity, Arc said, and hung up.

But Dolly and Arc did speak again. Months latera year, almostwhen the general came to New York to speak at the UN about his countrys transition to democracy. Dolly and Lulu had moved away from the city by then, but one evening they drove into Manhattan to meet Arc at a restaurant. He wore a black suit and a wine-colored tie that matched the excellent cabernet he poured for himself and Dolly. He seemed to savor telling the story, as if hed memorized its details especially for her: how three or four days after she and Lulu had left the generals redoubt, the photographers began showing up, first one or two whom the soldiers ferreted out of the jungle and imprisoned, then more, too many to capture or even countthey were superb hiders, crouching like monkeys in the trees, burying themselves in shallow pits, camouflaging inside bunches of leaves. Assassins had never managed to locate the general with any precision, but the photographers made it look easy: scores of them surging across the borders without visas, curled in baskets and wine casks, rolled up in rugs, juddering over unpaved roads in the backs of trucks and eventually surrounding the generals enclave, which he didnt dare leave.

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Have you seen Miss Jacksons new movie? Arc asked. I thought it was her finest yet.

Dolly had seen it: a romantic comedy in which Kitty played a jockey, appearing effortless on horseback. Dolly had gone with Lulu at the local theater in the small upstate town where theyd moved shortly after the other generals began to call: first G., then A., then L. and P. and Y. Word had gotten out, and Dolly was deluged with offers of work from mass murderers hungry for a fresh start. Im out of the game, shed told them, and directed them to her former competitors.

Lulu had opposed the move at first, but Dolly was firm. And Lulu had settled in quickly at the local public school, where she took up soccer and found a new coterie of girls who seemed to follow her everywhere. No one in town had ever heard of La Doll, so Lulu had nothing to hide.

Dolly received a generous lump sum from the general shortly after his rendezvous with the photographers. A gift to express our immense gratitude for your invaluable guidance, Miss Peale, Arc had said over the telephone, but Dolly had heard his smile and understood: hush money. She used it to open a small gourmet shop on Main Street, where she sold fine produce and unusual cheeses, artfully displayed and lit by a system of small spotlights Dolly designed herself. This feels like Paris was a comment she often heard from New Yorkers who came on weekends to their country houses.

Now and then Dolly would get a shipment of star fruit, and she always made sure to put a few aside to eat with Lulu. She would bring them back to the small house they shared at the end of a quiet street. After supper, the radio on, windows open to the yawning night, she and Lulu would feast on the sweet, strange flesh.

9

Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!

JULES JONES reports

Movie stars always look small the first time you see them, and Kitty Jackson is no exception, exceptional though she may be in every other way.

Actually, small isnt the word; shes minutea human bonsai in a white sleeveless dress, seated at a back table of a Madison Avenue restaurant, talking on a cell phone. She smiles at me as I take my seat and rolls her eyes at the phone. Her hair is that blond you see everywhere, highlighted, my ex-fiance calls it, though on Kitty Jackson this tousled commingling of blond and brown appears both more natural and more costly than it did on Janet Green. Her face (Kittys) is one you can imagine looking merely pretty among the other faces in, say, a high school classroom: upturned nose, full mouth, big blue eyes. Yet on Kitty Jackson, for reasons I cant pinpoint exactlythe same reasons, I suppose, that her highlighted hair looks superior to ordinary (Janet Greens) highlighted hairthis unexceptional face registers as extraordinary.

Shes still on the phone, and five minutes have passed.

Finally she signs off, folds her phone into a disk the size of an after-dinner mint and stows it in a small white patent-leather purse. Then she starts to apologize. It is instantly clear that Kitty belongs in the category of nice stars (Matt Damon) rather than of difficult stars (Ralph Fiennes). Stars in the nice category act as if theyre just like you (i.e., me) so that you will like them and write flattering things about them, a strategy that is almost universally successful despite every writers belief that hes far too jaded to fantasize that the Vanity Fair cover is incidental to Brad Pitts desire to give him a tour of his house. Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops Ive had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals Ive sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. Shes sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subjects self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.

The waiter takes our order. And since the ten minutes of badinage I proceed to exchange with Kitty are simply not worth relating, Ill mention instead (in the footnote-ish fashion that injects a whiff of cracked leather bindings into pop-cultural observation) that when youre a young movie star with blondish hair and a highly recognizable face from that recent movie whose grosses can only be explained by the conjecture that every person in America saw it at least twice, people treat you in a manner that is somewhat differentin fact is entirely differentfrom the way they treat, say, a balding, stoop-shouldered, slightly eczematous guy approaching middle age. On the surface its the sameMay I take your order? etc.but throbbing just beneath that surface is the waiters hysterical recognition of my subjects fame. And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us. 1 Everywhere, people are swiveling, craning, straining and contorting, levitating inadvertently from chairs as they grapple with the urge to lunge at Kitty and pluck off tufts of her hair and clothing.

I ask Kitty how it feels to always be the center of attention.

Weird, she says. Its so all of a sudden. You feel like theres no way you deserve it.

See? Nice.

Oh, come now, I say, and lob her a compliment on her performance as the homeless junkie turned FBI gunslinger/acrobat in Oh, Baby, Ohthe sort of shameless bit of fawning that makes me wonder whether I might prefer death by lethal injection to my present vocation as a celebrity reporter. Wasnt she proud?

I was proud, she says. But in a way, I didnt even know what I was doing yet. With my new movie, I feel more

Hold that thought! I cry, though the waiter has not yet reached our table, and the tray he bears aloft is probably not even ours. Because I dont want to hear about Kittys new movie; I couldnt care less and neither could you, I know; her prattle about the challenging role and the trusting relationship she had with her director and what an honor it was to work opposite such a seasoned star as Tom Cruise is the bitter pill we both must swallow in exchange for the privilege of spending some collective time in Kittys company. But lets put it off as long as possible!

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A bit of theory as we settle down to lunch: the waiters treatment of Kitty is actually a kind of sandwich, with the bottom bread being the bored and slightly effete way he normally acts with customers, the middle being the crazed and abnormal way he feels around this famous nineteen-year-old girl, and the top bread being his attempt to contain and conceal this alien middle layer with some mode of behavior that at least approximates the bottom layer of boredom and effeteness that is his norm. In the same way, Kitty Jackson has some sort of bottom bread that is, presumably, her, or the way Kitty Jackson once behaved in suburban Des Moines where she grew up, rode a bike, attended proms, earned decent grades and, most intriguingly, jumped horses, thereby winning a substantial number of ribbons and trophies and, at least briefly, entertaining thoughts of becoming a jockey. On top of that is her extraordinary and possibly slightly psychotic reaction to her newfound famethe middle of the sandwichand on top of that is her own attempt to approximate layer number one with a simulation of her normal, or former, self.

Sixteen minutes have passed.

Rumor has it, I say, my mouth full of half-masticated hamburger in a calculated effort to disgust my subject, thus puncturing her prophylactic shield of niceness and commencing the painstaking attrition of her self-control, that youve become involved with your costar.

That gets her attention. Ive rather sprung this on her, having learned the hard way that sidling up to the personal questions gives difficult subjects too much time to get their hackles up, and nice ones too much time to gently and blushingly sidestep.

Thats absolutely not true! Kitty cries. Tom and I have a wonderful friendship. I love Nicole. Shes been a role model for me. Ive even babysat their children.

I unsheathe my Big Fat Grin, a meaningless tactic intended purely to unnerve and fluster my subject. If my methods seem unnecessarily harsh, I invite you to recall that I have been allotted forty minutes, nearly twenty of which have now elapsed, and let me add, on a personal note, that if the piece stinksi.e., if it fails to unveil some aspect of Kitty that you havent seen before (as have, Im told, my pieces on hunting elk with Leonardo DiCaprio, reading Homer with Sharon Stone and digging for clams with Jeremy Irons)it might very well be killed, thus further reducing my stock in New York and Los Angeles and prolonging the bizarre string of failures youve been having, buddy (Atticus Levi, my friend and editor, over lunch last month).

Why are you smiling like that? Kitty asks, with hostility.

See? No more nice.

Was I smiling?

She turns her attention to her Cobb salad. And so do I. Because I have so little to go on, so few ports of entry to the inner sanctum of Kitty Jackson, that Im reduced to observing and now relaying the fact that over the course of lunch, she eats all of her lettuce, approximately 2 bites of chicken and several tomato wedges. She ignores: olives, blue cheese, boiled eggs, bacon and avocadoin other words, all of the parts of the Cobb salad that, technically speaking, make it a Cobb salad. As for the dressing, which she has requested on the side, she doesnt touch it except to dip in the end of her index finger, once, and suck the dressing off. 2

Ill tell you what Im thinking, I finally say, relieving the vibrato of tension that has been building at our table. Im thinking, nineteen years old. Mega-grossing movie behind her, half the world doing a rain dance at her window, and where can she possibly go next? What can she possibly do?

In Kittys face I see a number of things: relief that I havent said something worse, something about Tom Cruise, and mingled with that relief (and partly because of it) a fleeting desire to see me as more than yet another crank with a tape recorderto see me as someone who understands the incredible strangeness of her world. How I wish it were true! I would like nothing more than to understand the strangeness of Kittys worldto burrow inside that strangeness never to emerge. But the best I can hope for is to conceal from Kitty Jackson the bald impossibility of any real communion between us, and the fact that Ive managed to do so for twenty-one minutes is a triumph.

Why do I keep mentioninginserting, as it may seemmyself into this story? Because Im trying to wrest readable material from a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very nice; Im trying to build a story that not only unlocks the velveteen secrets of her teenagers heart, but also contains action, development, along withGod help mesome intimation of meaning. But my problem is this: Kittys a snooze. The most interesting thing about her is the effect she has upon others, and since the other whose inner life is most readily available for our collective inspection happens to be myself, it is only naturalindeed, it is required (Im begging you; please make this work so I dont look like an asshole for assigning it to youAtticus Levi, during a recent phone conversation in which I expressed to him my despair of writing further celebrity profiles)that the alleged story of my lunch with Kitty Jackson actually be the story of the myriad effects Kitty Jackson has upon me during the course of said lunch. And for those effects to be remotely comprehensible, you must bear in mind that Janet Green, my girlfriend of three years and my fiance for one month and thirteen days, dumped me two weeks ago for a male memoirist whose recent book details his adolescent penchant for masturbating into the family fish tank (At least hes working on himself!Janet Green, during a recent phone conversation in which I tried to point out what a colossal error shed made).

I wonder that all the timewhat will happen next, Kitty says. Sometimes I imagine myself looking back on right now, and I think, like, where will I be standing when I look back? Will right now look like the beginning of a great life oror what?

And how exactly is a great life defined in Kitty Jacksons lexicon?

Oh, you know. Giggle. Blush. Were back to nice, but a different nice than before. Weve had a tiff, and now were making up.

Fame and fortune? I prod.

Somewhat. But also justhappiness. I want to find true love, I dont care how corny that sounds. I want children. Thats why, in this new movie, I bond so strongly with my surrogate mother

But my Pavlovian efforts to suppress the PR component of our lunch have succeeded, and Kitty falls silent. No sooner have I congratulated myself on this triumph, however, than I catch Kitty glancing, sidelong, at her watch (Herms). How does this gesture affect me? Well, I feel slopping within me a volatile stew of anger, fear, and lust: anger because this naf has, for reasons that are patently unjustifiable, far more power in the world than I will ever have, and once my forty minutes are up, nothing short of criminal stalking could force the intersection of my subterranean path with her lofty one; fear because, having glanced at my own watch (Timex), Ive discovered that thirty of those forty minutes have elapsed, and I have, as yet, no event to form the centerpiece of my profile; lust because her neck is very long, with a thin, nearly translucent gold necklace around it. Her shoulders, exposed by the white halter top of her sundress, are small and tan and very delicate, like two little squabs. But that makes them sound unappealing, and they were phenomenally appealing! By squabs I mean that they looked so good (her shoulders) that I could briefly imagine pulling apart all those little bones and sucking the meat off them one by one. 3

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It doesnt feel like anything, she says, bored and annoyed. Thats something other people feel.

Men, you mean.

I guess, she says, and a new expression flickers over her comely face and alights there, a look that I would have to designate as abrupt weariness.

I feel it too: abruptly weary. In fact, generally weary. Christ, its all such a farce, I say, in an unguarded moment of self-expression that has no strategic purpose and which, therefore, Ill doubtless regret within seconds. Why do we bother to participate?

Kitty tilts her head at me. I sense that she can detect my general weariness, possibly even guess at some of its causes. She is regarding me, in other words, with pity. I am now perilously close to succumbing to the single greatest hazard of celebrity reporting: permitting my subject to reverse the beam of scrutiny, at which point I will no longer be able to see her. With a sudden pressure heralded by pricks of sweat along my drastically receding hairline, I swab the bottom of my salad plate with a vast hunk of bread and jam it into my mouth like a dentist packing a tooth. And just thenah yesI feel the niggling onset of a sneeze; here it comes, Hail Mary, bread or no bread, nothing can halt the shouting simultaneous eruption of every cavity in my head. Kitty looks terrified; she shrinks from me while I sort out the mess.

Disaster averted. Or at least forestalled.

You know, I say, when finally Ive managed to swallow my bread and blow my nose at the cost of nearly three minutes, Id love to take a walk. What do you say?

Kitty springs from her chair at the prospect of escaping into the open air. Its a perfect day, after all, sunlight leaping through the restaurant windows. But her excitement is immediately tempered by an equal and opposite degree of caution. What about Jake? she asks, referring to her publicist, who will appear when our forty minutes are up and wave his wand to turn me back into a pumpkin.

Cant he just call and meet up with us? I ask.

Okay, she says, doing her best to simulate the first wave of genuine enthusiasm she felt, despite the middle layer of wariness that has intruded. Sure, lets go.

I hastily pay the bill. Now, Ive orchestrated our debouchment for several reasons: One, I want to filch a few extra minutes off Kitty in an attempt to salvage this assignment and, in a larger sense, my once-promising, now-dwindling literary reputation (I think she was maybe disappointed that you didnt try writing another novel after the first one didnt sellBeatrice Green, over hot tea, after I threw myself sobbing upon her Scarsdale doorstep, pleading for insights into her daughters defection). Two, I want to see Kitty Jackson erect and in motion. To this end, I follow behind as she leads the way out of the restaurant, weaving among tables with her head down in the manner of both exceptionally attractive women and also famous people (not to mention those like Kitty, who are both). Heres a translation of her posture and gait into English: I know Im famous and irresistiblea combination whose properties closely resemble radioactivityand I know that you in this room are helpless against me. Its embarrassing for both of us to look at each other and see our mutual knowledge of my radioactivity and your helplessness, so Ill keep my head down and let you watch me in peace. While all this is happening, Im taking in Kittys legs, which are long, considering her modest height, as well as brown, and not that orangey brown of tanning salons, but a rich, tawny chestnut that makes me think ofwell, of horses.

Central Park is one block away. The time elapsed is forty-one minutes and counting. We enter the park. It is green and splashy with light and shadow, giving the impression that weve dived together into a deep, still pond. I forget when we started, Kitty says, looking at her watch. How much more time do we have?

Oh, were okay, I mumble. Im feeling kind of dreamy. Im looking at Kittys legs as we walk (as much as I can without crawling beside her on the grounda thought that crosses my mind) and discovering that above the knee they are flecked with hairs of finest gold. Because Kitty is so young and well nourished, so sheltered from the gratuitous cruelty of others, so unaware as yet that she will reach middle age and eventually die (possibly alone), because she has not yet disappointed herself, merely startled herself and the world with her own premature accomplishments, Kittys skinthat smooth, plump, sweetly fragrant sac upon which life scrawls the record of our failures and exhaustionis perfect. And by perfect I mean that nothing hangs or sags or snaps or wrinkles or ripples or bunchesI mean that her skin is like the skin of a leaf, except its not green. I cant imagine such skin having an unpleasant odor or texture or tasteever being, for example (it is frankly inconceivable), even mildly eczematous.

We sit together on a grassy slope. Kitty has resumed talking dutifully about her new movie, the specter of her returning publicist doubtless having reminded her that the promotion of said movie is the sole reason she is in my company.

Oh, Kitty, I say. Forget the movie. Were out here in the park, its a gorgeous day. Lets leave those other two people behind us. Lets talk aboutabout horses.

What a look! What a gaze! Every cheesy metaphor you can fathom comes to mind: sun breaking through clouds, flowers yawning into bloom, the sudden and mystical appearance of a rainbow. Its done. Ive reached behind or around or withinIve touched the real Kitty. And for reasons I cannot understand, reasons that surely must rank among the most mysterious of quantum mechanical mysteries, I experience this contact as revelatory, urgent, as if, in bridging the crevasse between myself and this young actress, I am being lifted above an encroaching darkness.

Kitty opens her small white purse and takes out a picture. A picture of a horse! With a white starburst on its nose. His name is Nixon. Like the president? I ask, but Kitty looks disturbingly blank at this reference. I just liked the sound of that name, she says, and describes the sensation of feeding Nixon an applehow he takes it between his horsey jaws and smashes it all at once with a cascade of milky, steaming juice. I hardly ever get to see him, she says, with genuine sadness. I have to hire someone else to ride him because Im never home.

He must be lonely without you, I say.

Kitty turns to me. I believe shes forgotten who I am. I have an urge to push her backward onto the grass, and I do.

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Pretend youre riding Nixon, I say.

HEY! she yells, and I cover her mouth with my hand. Kitty is writhing beneath me, but her writhing is stymied by my heightsix foot threeand my weight, two hundred sixty pounds, approximately one-third of which is concentrated in my spare tire of a (Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) gut, which pinions her like a sandbag. I hold her mouth with one hand and worm the other hand between our two flailing bodies until finallyyes!I manage to seize hold of my zipper. How is all this affecting me? Well, were lying on a hill in Central Park, a somewhat secluded spot that is still, technically speaking, in plain sight. So I feel anxious, dully aware that Im placing my career and reputation at some risk with this caper. But more than that, I feel this crazywhat?rage, it must be; what else could account for my longing to slit Kitty open like a fish and let her guts slip out, or my separate, corollary desire to break her in half and plunge my arms into whatever pure, perfumed liquid swirls within her. I want to rub it onto my raw, scrofulous (ibid.), parched skin in hopes that it will finally be healed. I want to fuck her (obviously) and then kill her, or possibly kill her in the act of fucking her (fuck her to death and fuck her brains out being acceptable variations on this basic goal). What I have no interest in doing is killing her and then fucking her, because its her lifethe inner life of Kitty Jacksonthat I so desperately long to reach.

As it turns out, I do neither.

Let us return to the moment: one hand covering Kittys mouth and doing its best to anchor her rather spirited head, the other fumbling with my zipper, which Im having some trouble depressing, possibly because of the writhing motions of my subject beneath me. What I have no control over, unfortunately, are Kittys hands, one of which has found its way into her white purse, where a number of items are sequestered: a picture of a horse, a potato chipsized cell phone, which has been ringing nonstop for the past several minutes, and a canister of something that Id have to surmise is Mace, or perhaps some form of tear gas, judging by its impact when sprayed directly into my face: a hot, blinding sensation in my eye area accompanied by gushing tears, a strangling sensation in my throat, spastic choking and severe nausea, all of which prompt me to leap to my feet and double over in a swoon of agony (still pinning Kitty to the ground with one foot), at which point she avails herself of yet another item in said purse: a set of keys with a small Swiss Army knife attached, whose diminutive and rather dull blade she nevertheless manages to sink through my khakis and into my calf.

By now Im bellowing and honking like a besieged buffalo, and Kitty is running away, her tawny limbs no doubt dappled with light falling through the trees, though Im too distressed even to look.

I think Id have to call that the end of our lunch. I got twenty extra minutes, easy.

The end of lunch, yes, but the beginning of so much else: a presentation before the grand jury followed by my indictment for attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault; my present incarceration (despite the heroic efforts of Atticus Levi to raise my $500,000 bail) and impending trial, which is to begin this monthon the very day, as luck would have it, that Kittys new movie, Whip-poor-will Falls, opens nationally.

Kitty sent me a letter in jail. I apologize for whatever part I played in your emotional breakdown, she wrote, and also for stabing [sic] you. There was a circle over each i and a smiley face at the end.

What did I tell you? Nice.

Of course, our little contretemps has been enormously helpful to Kitty. Front-page headlines, followed by a flurry of hand-wringing follow-up articles, editorials and op-ed pieces addressing an array of related topics: the increasing vulnerability of celebrities (The New York Times); the violent inability of some men to cope with feelings of rejection (USA Today); the imperative that magazine editors vet their freelance writers more thoroughly (The New Republic), and the lack of adequate daytime security in Central Park. 4 Kitty, the martyrish figurehead of this juggernaut, is already being touted as the Marilyn Monroe of her generation, and she isnt even dead.

Her new movie looks to be a hit, whatever its about.

1. Ive engaged in a bit of sophistry, here, suggesting that entangled particles can explain anything when, to date, they themselves have not been satisfactorily explained. Entangled particles are subatomic twins: photons created by splitting a single photon in half with a crystal, which still react identically to stimuli applied to only one of them, even when separated from each other by many miles. How, puzzled physicists ask, can one particle possibly know what is happening to the other? How, when the people occupying tables nearest to Kitty Jackson inevitably recognize her, do people outside the line of vision of Kitty Jackson, who could not conceivably have had the experience of seeing Kitty Jackson, recognize her simultaneously? Theoretical explanations: (1) The particles are communicating. Impossible, because they would have to do so at a speed faster than the speed of light, thus violating relativity theory. In other words, in order for an awareness of Kittys presence to sweep the restaurant simultaneously, the diners at tables nearest to her would have to convey, through words or gestures, the fact of her presence to diners farther away who cannot see herall at a speed faster than the speed of light. And that is impossible. (2) The two photons are responding to local factors engendered by their former status as a single photon. (This was Einsteins explanation for the phenomenon of entangled particles, which he termed spooky action at a distance.) Nope. Because weve already established that theyre not responding to each other; theyre all responding simultaneously to Kitty Jackson, whom only a small fraction of them can actually see! (3) Its one of those quantum mechanical mysteries. Apparently so. All that can be said for sure is that in the presence of Kitty Jackson, the rest of us become entangled by our sheer awareness that we ourselves are not Kitty Jackson, a fact so brusquely unifying that it temporarily wipes out all distinctions between usour tendency to cry inexplicably during parades, or the fact that we never learned French, or have a fear of insects that we do our best to conceal from women, or liked to eat construction paper as a childin the presence of Kitty Jackson, we no longer are in possession of these traits; indeed, so indistinguishable are we from every other nonKitty Jackson in our vicinity that when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react.

2. Occasionally, life affords you the time, the repose, the dolce far niente to ask the sorts of questions that go largely unexamined in the brisk course of ordinary life: How well do you recall the mechanics of photosynthesis? Have you ever managed to use the word ontology in a conversational sentence? At what precise moment did you tip just slightly out of alignment with the relatively normal life you had been enjoying theretofore, cant infinitesimally to the left or the right and thus embark upon the trajectory that ultimately delivered you to your present whereaboutsin my case, Rikers Island Correctional Facility? After several months of subjecting each filament and nanosecond of my lunch with Kitty Jackson to a level of analysis that would make Talmudic scholars look hasty in their appraisal of the Sabbath, I have concluded that my own subtle yet decisive realignment occurred at precisely the moment when Kitty Jackson dipped her finger into the bowl of salad dressing on the side and sucked the dressing off. Here, carefully teased apart and restored to chronological order, is a reconstruction of the brew of thoughts and impulses that I now believe coursed through my mind at that time: Thought 1 (at the sight of Kitty dipping her finger and sucking it): Can it possibly be that this ravishing young girl is coming on to me? Thought 2: No, thats out of the question. Thought 3: But why is it out of the question? Thought 4: Because shes a famous nineteen-year-old movie star and youre heavier all of a suddenor am I just noticing it more? (Janet Green, during our last, failed sexual encounter) and have a skin problem and no worldly clout. Thought 5: But she just dipped her finger into a bowl of salad dressing and sucked it off in my presence! What else can that possibly mean? Thought 6: It means youre so far outside the field of Kittys sexual consideration that her internal sensors, which normally stifle behavior that might be construed as overly encouraging, or possibly incendiary, such as dipping a finger into salad dressing and sucking it off in the company of a man who might interpret it as a sign of sexual interest, are not operative. Thought 7: Why not? Thought 8: Because you do not register as a man to Kitty Jackson, and so being around you makes her no more self-conscious than would the presence of a dachshund.

3. For those who will inevitably interpret this caprice as further evidence that I am, indeed, a numb nuts, a creepazoid, or a sick puppy (excerpts from correspondence received from strangers while in jail), I can offer only the following: On a spring day almost four years ago, I noticed a girl with short thick legs and a long narrow torso, wearing a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, picking up dog poop with a Duane Reade bag. She was one of those muscley girls who turn out to have been a swimmer or a diver in high school (though I later learned shed been neither), and her dog was a mangy, wet-looking little terrier of the sort that would seem, even by the most neutral and objective standards, unlovable. But she loved it. Here, Whiskers, she cooed. Come on, girl. Watching her, I saw it all: the small, overheated apartment strewn with running shoes and leotards, the biweekly dinners at her parents, the soft dark fuzz on her upper lip that she bleached each week with a tart-smelling white cream. And the feeling I had was not of wanting her so much as being surrounded by her, blundering inside her life without having moved. May I help you with that? I asked, stepping into the sunlight where she and Whiskers stood and slipping the Duane Reade bag full of poop from her hand. Janet grinned. It was like someone waving a flag. Are you insane? she said.

4. To the Editor: In the earnest spirit of your recent editorial (Vulnerability in Our Public Spaces, Aug. 9), and as the embodiment, if you will, of the mentally unstable or otherwise threatening people you so yearn to eradicate from the public domain in the wake of my brutal attack on that too trusting young star, allow me to make a suggestion that is sure to appeal to Mayor Giuliani, at the very least: why not simply erect checkpoints at the entrances to Central Park and demand identification from those who wish to enter? Then you will be able to call up their records and evaluate the relative success or failure of their livesmarriage or lack thereof, children or lack thereof, professional success or lack thereof, healthy bank account or lack thereof, contact with childhood friends or lack thereof, ability to sleep peacefully at night or lack thereof, fulfillment of sprawling, loopy youthful ambitions or lack thereof, ability to fight off bouts of terror and despair or lack thereofand using these facts, you can assign each person a ranking based on the likelihood that their personal failures will occasion jealous explosions directed at those more accomplished. The rest is easy: simply encode each persons ranking into an electronic bracelet and affix it to their wrist as they enter the park, and then monitor those encoded points of light on a radar screen, with personnel at the ready to intervene, should the perambulations of low-ranking nonfamous people begin to encroach upon the safety and peace of mind that celebrities deserve, as much as anyone else. I ask only this: that in keeping with our hallowed cultural tradition, you rank infamy equally with fame, so that when my public excoriation is completewhen the Vanity Fair reporter I entertained in prison two days ago (following her interviews with my chiropractor and building superintendent) has done her worst, along with the TV news magazines; when my trial and sentence are concluded and Im allowed at last to return to the world, to stand beneath a public tree and touch its scraggly barkthen I, like Kitty, will be afforded some protection. Who knows? I might even glimpse her one day as we both promenade in Central Park. I doubt we would actually speak. Id prefer to stand at a distance next time, and wave. Respectfully, Jules Jones

10

Out of Body

Your friends are pretending to be all kinds of stuff, and your special job is to call them on it. Drew says hes going straight to law school. After practicing awhile, hell run for state senator. Then U.S. senator. Eventually, president. He lays all this out the way youd say, After Modern Chinese Painting Ill go the gym, then work in Bobst until dinner, if you even made plans anymore, which you dontif you were even in school anymore, which you arent, although thats supposedly temporary.

You look at Drew through layers of hash smoke floating in the sun. Hes leaning back on the futon couch, his arm around Sasha. Hes got a big, hey-come-on-in face and a head of dark hair, and hes builtnot with weight-room muscle like yours, but in a basic animal way that must come from all that swimming he does.

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Everyone laughs except Bix, whos at his computer, and you feel like a funny guy for maybe half a second, until it occurs to you that they probably only laughed because they could see you were trying to be funny, and theyre afraid youll jump out the window onto East Seventh Street if you fail, even at something so small.

Drew takes a long hit. You hear the smoke creak in his chest. He hands the pipe to Sasha, who passes it to Lizzie without smoking any.

I promise, Rob, Drew croaks at you, holding in smoke, if anyone asks, Ill tell them the hash I smoked with Robert Freeman Jr. was excellent.

Was that Jr. mocking? The hash is not working out as planned: youre just as paranoid as with pot. You decide, no, Drew doesnt mock. Drew is a believerlast fall, he was one of the diehards passing out leaflets in Washington Square and registering students to vote. After he and Sasha got together, you started helping himmostly with the jocks because you know how to talk to them. Coach Freeman, aka your pop, calls Drews type woodsy. Theyre loners, Pop saysskiers, wood-choppersnot team players. But you know all about teams; you can talk to people on teams (only Sasha knows you picked NYU because it hasnt had a football team in thirty years). On your best day you registered twelve team-playing Democrats, prompting Drew to exclaim, when you gave him the paperwork, Youve got the touch, Rob. But you never registered yourself, that was the thing, and the longer you waited, the more ashamed of this you got. Then it was too late. Even Sasha, who knows all your secrets, has no idea that you never cast a vote for Bill Clinton.

Drew leans over and gives Sasha a wet kiss, and you can tell the hash is getting him horny because you feel it tooit makes your teeth ache in a way that will only let up if you hit someone or get hit. In high school youd get in fights when you felt like this, but no one will fight with you nowthe fact that you hacked open your wrists with a box cutter three months ago and nearly bled to death seems to be a deterrent. It functions like a force field, paralyzing everyone in range with an encouraging smile on their lips. You want to hold up a mirror and ask: How exactly are those smiles supposed to help me?

No one smokes hash and becomes president, Drew, you say. Itll never happen.

This is my period of youthful experimentation, he says, with an earnestness that would be laughable in a person who wasnt from Wisconsin. Besides, he says, whos going to tell them?

I am, you say.

I love you too, Rob, Drew says, laughing.

Who said I loved you? you almost ask.

Drew lifts Sashas hair and twists it into a rope. He kisses the skin under her jaw. You stand up, seething. Bix and Lizzies apartment is tiny, like a dollhouse, full of plants and the smell of plants (wet and planty), because Lizzie loves plants. The walls are covered with Bixs collection of Last Judgment postersnaked babyish humans getting separated into good and bad, the good ones rising into green fields and golden light, the bad ones vanishing into mouths of monsters. The window is wide open, and you climb out onto the fire escape. The March cold crackles your sinuses.

Sasha joins you on the fire escape a second later. What are you doing? she asks.

Dont know, you say. Fresh air. You wonder how long you can go on speaking in two-word sentences. Nice day.

Across East Seventh Street, two old ladies have folded bath towels on their windowsills and are resting their elbows on them while they peer down at the street below. Look there, you say, pointing. Two spies.

It makes me nervous, Bobby, Sasha says. You out here. Shes the only one who gets to call you that; you were Bobby until you were ten, but according to your pop its a girls name after that.

How come? you say. Third floor. Broken arm. Or leg. Worst case.

Please come in.

Relax, Sash. You park yourself on the grille steps leading up to the fourth-floor windows.

Party migrate out here? Drew origamis himself through the living room window onto the fire escape and leans over the railing to look down at the street. From inside, you hear Lizzie answer the phoneHi, Mom!trying to fluff the hash out of her voice. Her parents are visiting from Texas, which means that Bix, whos black, is spending his nights in the electrical engineering lab where hes doing his Ph.D. research. Lizzies parents arent even staying with hertheyre at a hotel! But if Lizzie is sleeping with a black man in the same city where her parents are, they will just know.

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Hows the bigot? you ask, realizing with chagrin that the sentence has three words.

Lizzie turns to you, flushed. Are you referring to my mother?

Not me.

You cant talk that way in my apartment, Rob, she says, using the Calm Voice theyve all been using since you got back from Florida, a voice that leaves you no choice but to test how hard you have to push before it cracks.

Im not. You indicate the fire escape.

Or on my fire escape.

Not yours, you correct her. Bixs, too. Actually, no. The citys.

Fuck you, Rob, Lizzie says.

You too, you say, grinning with satisfaction at the sight of real anger on a human face. Its been a while.

Calm down, Sasha tells Lizzie.

Excuse me? I should calm down? Lizzie says. Hes being a total asshole. Ever since he got back.

Its only been two weeks, Sasha says.

I love how they talk about me like Im not here, you observe to Drew. Do they think Im dead?

They think youre stoned.

Theyre correct.

Me too. Drew climbs the fire escape until hes a few stairs above you and perches there. He takes a long breath, savoring it, and you take one too. In Wisconsin, Drew has shot an elk with a bow and arrow, skinned it, cut off the meat into sections, and carried it home in a backpack, wearing snowshoes. Or maybe he was kidding. He and his brothers built a log cabin with their bare hands. He grew up next to a lake, and every morning, even in winter, Drew swam there. Now he swims in the NYU pool, but the chlorine hurts his eyes and its not the same, he says, with a ceiling over you. Still, he swims there a lot, especially when hes bummed or tense or in a fight with Sasha. You mustve grown up swimming, he said when he first heard you were from Florida, and you said, Of course. But the truth is youve never liked the watersomething only Sasha knows about you.

You lurch from the steps to the other end of the fire escape platform, where a window looks into the little alcove where Bixs computer lives. Bix is in front of it, dreadlocks thick as cigars, typing messages to other graduate students that theyll read on their computers, and reading messages they send back. According to Bix, this computer-message-sending is going to be hugeway beyond the telephone. Hes big on predicting the future, and you havent really challenged himmaybe because hes older, maybe because hes black.

Bix jumps at the sight of you looming outside his window in your baggy jeans and football jersey, which youve taken to wearing again, for some reason. Shit, Rob, he says, What are you doing out there?

Watching you.

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Im sorry.

So come in here and tell her that.

You climb in through Bixs window. Theres a Last Judgment poster hanging right over his desk, from the Albi Cathedral. You remember it from your Intro to Art History class last year, a class you loved so much you added art history to your business major. You wonder if Bix is religious.

In the living room Sasha and Lizzie are sitting on the futon couch, looking grim. Drew is still out on the fire escape.

Im sorry, you tell Lizzie.

Its okay, she says, and you know you should leave it thereits fine, leave it alone, but some crazy engine inside you wont let you stop: Im sorry your mom is a bigot. Im sorry Bix has to have a girlfriend from Texas. Im sorry Im an asshole. Im sorry I make you nervous because I tried to kill myself. Im sorry to get in the way of your nice afternoon. Your throat tightens up and your eyes get wet as you watch their faces go from stony to sad, and its all kind of moving and sweet except that youre not completely therea part of you is a few feet away, or above, thinking, Good, theyll forgive you, they wont desert you, and the question is, which one is really you, the one saying and doing whatever it is, or the one watching?

You leave Bix and Lizzies with Sasha and Drew and head west, toward Washington Square. The cold spasms in the scars on your wrists. Sasha and Drew are a braid of elbows and shoulders and pockets, which presumably keeps them warmer than you. When you were back in Tampa, recovering, they took a Greyhound to Washington, D.C., for the inauguration and stayed up all night and watched the sun rise over the Mall, at which point (they both say) they felt the world start to change right under their feet. You snickered when Sasha told you this, but ever since, you find yourself watching strangers faces on the street and wondering if they feel it, too: a change having to do with Bill Clinton or something even bigger thats everywherein the air, undergroundobvious to everyone but you.

At Washington Square you and Sasha say good-bye to Drew, who peels off to take a swim and wash the hash from his head. Sashas wearing her backpack, heading for the library.

Thank God, you say. Hes gone. You cant seem to stop talking in two-word sentences now, even though youd like to.

Nice, Sasha remarks.

Im kidding. Hes great.

I know.

Your high is wearing off, leaving a box of lint where your head should be. Getting high is new for youyour not getting high was the whole reason Sasha picked you out the first day of Freshman Orientation last year, in Washington Square. Blocking your sun with her henna-red hair, her quick eyes looking at you from the side rather than head-on. Im in need of a fake boyfriend, she said. Are you up for it?

How about your real one? you said.

She sat down beside you and laid things out: in high school, back in LA, shed run away with the drummer for a band youd never heard of, left the country, and traveled alone in Europe and Asianever even graduated. Now, a freshman, she was almost twenty-one. Her stepfather had pulled every string to get her in here. Last week, hed told her he was hiring a detective to make sure she toed the line on her own in New York. Someone could be watching me right now, she said, looking across the square crowded with kids who all seemed to know one another. I feel like someone is.

Should I put my arm around you?

Please.

Youve heard somewhere that the act of smiling makes people feel happier; putting your arm around Sasha made you want to protect her. Why me? you asked. Out of curiosity.

Youre cute, she said. Plus, you dont look druggy.

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You and Sasha had books to buy; you bought them together. You visited her dorm, where you caught Lizzie, her roommate, miming approval when your back was turned. At five-thirty, you were both loading up your cafeteria trays, you going heavy on the spinach because everyone says football muscle turns to Jell-O when you stop playing. You both got your library cards, went back to your dorms, then met at the Apple for drinks at eight. It was packed with students. Sasha kept glancing around, and you figured she was thinking about the detective, so you put your arm around her and kissed the side of her face and her hair, which had a burned smell, the not-realness of it all relaxing you in a way youd never managed to be with girls at home. At which point Sasha explained step 2: each of you had to tell the other something that would make it impossible for you ever to really go out.

Have you done this before? you asked, incredulous.

Shed drunk two white wines (which youd matched two-to-one with beers) and was starting on her third. Of course not.

SoI tell you I used to torture kitty cats, and that stops you from wanting to jump my bones?

Did you?

Fuck, no.

Ill go first, Sasha said.

Shed started shoplifting at thirteen with her girlfriends, hiding beaded combs and sparkly earrings inside their sleeves, seeing who could get away with more, but it was different for Sashait made her whole body glow. Later, at school, shed replay each step of an escapade, counting the days until they could do it again. The other girls were nervous, competitive, and Sasha struggled to show only that much.

In Naples, when she ran out of money, she stole things from stores and sold them to Lars, the Swede, waiting her turn on his kitchen floor with other hungry kids holding tourists wallets, costume jewelry, American passports. They grumbled about Lars, who never gave them what they deserved. Hed played the flute in concerts back in Sweden, supposedly, but the source of that rumor might have been Lars himself. They werent allowed beyond his kitchen, but someone had glimpsed a piano through a closing door, and Sasha often heard a baby crying. Her first time, Lars made Sasha wait longer than anyone, holding a pair of spangly platform shoes shed swiped from a boutique. And when everyone else was paid and gone, he had squatted beside her on the kitchen floor and unbuttoned his pants.

For months shed done business with Lars, arriving sometimes without having managed to take anything, just needing money. I thought he was my boyfriend, she said. But I think I wasnt thinking anymore. She was better now, hadnt stolen anything in two years. That wasnt me, in Naples, she told you, looking out at the crowded bar. I dont know who it was. I feel sorry for her.

And maybe from a sense that shed dared you, or that anything at all could be said in the chamber of truth where you and Sasha now found yourselves, or that shed blown out a vacuum some law of physics required you to fill, you told her about James, your teammate: how one night, the two of you took out two girls in your pops car, and after youd brought them home (earlyit was a game night), you and James drove to a secluded place and spent maybe an hour alone in the car. It happened just that one time, without discussion or agreement; the two of you had barely spoken after that. At times youd wondered if youd made it up.

Im not a fag, you told Sasha.

It wasnt you in the car with James. You were somewhere else, looking down, thinking, That fag is fooling around with another guy. How can he do that? How can he want it? How can he live with himself?

In the library, Sasha spends two hours typing a paper on Mozarts early life and sneaking sips of a Diet Coke. Being older, she feels behindshes taking six courses a semester plus summer school so she can graduate in three years. Shes a business/arts double major, like you, but in music. You rest your head in your arms on the table and sleep until shes done. Then you walk together through the dark to your dorm, on Third Avenue. You smell popcorn from the elevatorsure enough, all three suitemates are home, along with Pilar, a girl you quasi-dated last fall to distract yourself after Sasha paired off with Drew. The minute you walk in, the Nirvana volume drops and the windows fly open. You now seem to be in the same category as a professor or a cop: you make people instantly nervous. Theres got to be a way to enjoy this.

You follow Sasha into her room. Most students rooms are like hamster burrows padded with scraps and tufts of homepillows and stuffed doggies and plug-in pots and furry slippersbut Sashas room is practically empty; she showed up last year with nothing but a suitcase. In one corner is a rented harp shes learning to play. You lie faceup on her bed while she gathers her shower bag and green kimono and goes out. She comes back quickly (not wanting to leave you alone, you have a feeling), wearing the kimono, her head in a towel. You watch from the bed as she shakes out her long hair and uses a wide-tooth comb to get the snarls out. Then she slips out of the kimono and starts getting dressed: lacy black bra and panties, torn jeans, a faded black T-shirt, Doc Martens. Last year, after Bix and Lizzie got together, you started spending nights in Sashas room, sleeping in Lizzies empty bed, three feet away from Sashas. You know the scar on her left ankle from a break that had to be operated on when it didnt heal right; you know the Big Dipper of reddish moles around her belly button and her mothball breath when she first wakes up. Everyone assumed you were a coupleit was that deep between you and Sasha. She would cry in her sleep, and youd climb into her bed and hold her until her breathing got regular and slow. She felt so light in your arms. Youd fall asleep holding Sasha and wake up with a hard-on and just lie there, feeling this body you knew so well, its skin and smells, alongside your own need to fuck someone, waiting for the two to merge into one impulse. Come on, pull this all together and act like someone normal for a change, but you were scared to put your lust to the test, not wanting to ruin it with Sasha if things went wrong. It was the biggest mistake of your life, not fucking Sashayou saw this with brutal clarity when she fell in love with Drew, and it clobbered you with remorse so extreme that you thought at first you couldnt survive it. You might have held on to Sasha and become normal at the same time, but you didnt even tryyou gave up the one chance God threw your way, and now its too late.

Out in the world, Sasha would grab your hand or throw her arms around you and kiss youthat was for the detective. He could be anywhere, watching you toss snowballs in Washington Square, Sasha jumping onto your back, her fluffy mittens leaving fibers on your tongue. He was the invisible companion you saluted over bowls of steamed vegetables at Dojo (I want him to see me eating healthy food, she said). Occasionally you raised practical questions about the detectiveHad her stepfather mentioned him again? Did she know for certain it was a man? How long did she think the surveillance would last?but this line of thinking seemed to irritate Sasha, so you let it go. I want him to know Im happy, she said. I want him to see me well againhow Im still normal, even after everything. And you wanted that too.

When she met Drew, Sasha forgot about the detective. Drew is detectiveproof. Even her stepfather likes him.

Its after ten by the time you and Sasha meet up with Drew on Third Avenue and Saint Marks. His eyes are bloodshot from swimming; his hair is wet. He kisses Sasha like theyve been apart for a week. My older woman, he calls her sometimes, and loves the fact that shes been on her own in the wider world. Of course, Drew knows nothing about how bad things were for Sasha in Naples, and lately you have the feeling shes starting to forget, begin over again as the person she is to Drew. This makes you sick with envy; why couldnt you do that for Sasha? Whos going to do it for you?

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On Avenue A, the three of you stand outside the Pyramid Club, listening. Still the second band, Sasha says, so you walk up the street for egg creams at the Russian newsstand and drink them on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, which just reopened last summer.

Look, you say, opening your hand. Three yellow pills. Sasha sighs; shes running out of patience.

What are they? Drew asks.

E.

He has an optimists attraction to everything newa faith that it will enrich him, not hurt him. Lately youve found yourself using this quality in Drew, scattering bread crumbs for him one by one. I want to do it with you, he tells Sasha, but she shakes her head. I missed your druggy moment, he says wistfully.

Thank God, Sasha says.

You pop one of the pills and put the other two back in your pocket. You start to feel the E as soon as you enter the club. The Pyramid is jammed. The Conduits have been big on college campuses for years, but Sasha is convinced their new album is pure genius and will go multiplatinum. She likes to get right up against the stage, the band in her face, but you need more distance. Drew stays close to Sasha, but when the Conduits nutcase of a lead guitarist, Bosco, starts flinging himself around like a berserk scarecrow, you notice him edging back.

Youve entered a state of tingling, stomachy happiness that feels the way you hoped adulthood would be as a kid: a blur of lost bearings, release from the drone of meals and homework and church and Thats not a nice way to talk to your sister, Robert Jr. You wanted a brother. You want Drew to be your brother. Then you could have built the log cabin together and slept inside it, snow piling up outside the windows. You could have slaughtered the elk and, afterward, slick with blood and fur, peeled off your clothes together beside a bonfire. If you could see Drew naked, even just once, it would ease a deep, awful pressure inside you.

Bosco is getting tossed over your head, his shirt gone, skinny torso slimed with beer and sweat. Your hands slip over the flinty muscles of his back. Hes still playing his guitar, hollering without a microphone. Drew spots you and moves closer, shaking his head. Hed never been to a concert before he met Sasha. You shimmy one of the remaining yellow pills from your pocket and push it into his hand.

Something was funny a while ago, but you cant remember what. Drew doesnt seem to know, either, although youre both convulsed with helpless hysterics.

Sasha thought you would wait for her inside after the show, so it takes her a while to find the two of you out on the pavement. Her eyes move between you in the acid streetlight. Ah, she says. I get it.

Dont be mad, Drew says. Hes trying not to look at youif you look at each other, youre gone. But you cant stop looking at Drew.

Im not mad, Sasha says. Im bored. She got introduced to the Conduits producer, Bennie Salazar, and hes invited her to a party. I thought we could all go, she tells Drew, but youre too high.

He doesnt want to go with you, you bellow, your nose running with laughter and snot. He wants to come with me.

Thats true, Drew says.

Fine, Sasha says angrily. Then everyones happy.

The two of you reel away from her. Hilarity keeps you busy for several blocks, but theres a sickness to it, like an itch that if you keep on scratching, will grind straight through skin and muscle and bone, shredding your heart. At one point you both have to stop walking and sit on a stoop, leaning against each other, almost sobbing. You buy a half gallon of orange juice and guzzle it on a corner, juice gushing over both your chins and soaking your puffy jackets. You hold the carton upside down above your mouth, catching the last drops in the back of your throat. When you toss it away, the city rises darkly around you. Youre on Second Street and Avenue B. People are exchanging little vials in their handshakes. But Drew stretches out his arms, feeling the E in his fingertips. Youve never seen him afraid; only curious.

I feel bad, you say, about Sasha.

Dont worry, Drew says. Shell forgive us.

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Bobby? she whispered. Her face was almost touching yours. She was breathing your breath, and you were breathing hers, malty from fear and lack of sleep. It was Sasha who found you. Ten more minutes, they said.

Bobby, listen to me.

Sashas green eyes were right up against yours, the lashes interlocking. In Naples, she said, there were kids who were just lost. You knew they were never going to get back to what theyd been, or have a normal life. And then there were other ones who you thought, maybe they will.

You tried to ask which kind Lars, the Swede, was, but it came out a mush.

Listen, she said. Bobby. In a minute, theyre going to kick me out.

You opened your eyes, which you hadnt realized were shut again. What Im saying is, Were the survivors, Sasha said.

She spoke in a way that briefly cleared your head of the cloudy things they were pumping inside you: like shed opened an envelope and read a result that you urgently needed to know. Like youd been caught offsides and had to be straightened out.

Not everyone is. But we are. Okay?

Okay.

She lay alongside you, every part of you touching, like youd done so many nights before she met Drew. You felt Sashas strength seeping into your skin. You tried to hold her, but your hands were stuffed-animal stumps, and you couldnt move them.

Which means you cant do that again, she said. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Do you promise me, Bobby?

I promise. And you meant it. You wouldnt break a promise to Sasha.

Bix! Drew shouts. He charges up Avenue B, boots clobbering the pavement. Bix is alone, hands in the pockets of his green army jacket.

Whoa, he says, laughing when he sees from Drews eyes how high he is. Your own high is just beginning to waver. Youd been planning to take that last pill, but you offer it to Bix instead.

I dont really do this anymore, Bix says, but rules are for bending, right? A custodian made him leave the lab; hes been walking around for two hours.

And Lizzies asleep, you say, in your apartment.

Bix gives you a cold look that empties your good mood. Lets not get started on that, he says.

You walk together, waiting for Bix to come onto the E. Its after 2:00 a.m., the hour when (it turns out) regular people go home to bed, and drunk, crazy, fucked-up people stay out. You dont want to be with those people. You want to go back to your suite and knock on Sashas door, which she leaves unlocked when Drew isnt spending the night.

Earth to Rob, Bix says. His face is soft and his eyes are shiny and bewitched.

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You cant! Bix cries. Love for his fellow creatures radiates from within him like an aura; you can feel its glow on your skin. Youre central to the action.

Right, you mutter.

Drew slings his arm around you. He smells like Wisconsinwoods, fires, pondsalthough youve never been near it. Truth, Rob, he says, serious. Youre our aching, pounding heart.

You wind up at an after-hours club Bix knows about on Ludlow, crowded with people too high to go home. You all dance together, subdividing the space between now and tomorrow until time seems to move backward. You share a strong joint with a girl whose bangs are very short, leaving her bright forehead exposed. She dances near you, her arms around your neck, and Drew shouts in your ear over the music, She wants to go home with you, Rob. But eventually the girl gives up, or forgetsor you forgetand she disappears.

The sky is just getting light when the three of you leave the club. You walk north together to Leshkos, on Avenue A, for scrambled eggs and piles of fried potatoes, then stagger, stuffed, back onto the groggy street. Bix is between you and Drew, one arm around each of you. Fire escapes dangle off the sides of buildings. A croupy church bell starts up and you remember: its Sunday.

Someone seems to be leading the way toward the Sixth Street overpass to the East River, but really youre all moving in tandem, like on a Ouija board. The sun blazes into view, spinning bright and metallic against your eyeballs, ionizing the waters surface so you cant see a bit of pollution or crud underneath. It looks mystical, biblical. It raises a lump in your throat.

Bix squeezes your shoulder. Gentlemen, he says, good morning.

You stand together at the rivers edge, looking out, the last patches of old snow piled at your feet. Look at that water, Drew says. I wish I could swim in it. After a minute he says, Lets remember this day, even when we dont know each other anymore.

You look over at Drew, squinting in the sun, and for a second the future tunnels out and away, some version of you at the end of it, looking back. And right then you feel itwhat youve seen in peoples faces on the streeta swell of movement, like an undertow, rushing you toward something you cant quite see.

Oh, well know each other forever, Bix says. The days of losing touch are almost gone.

What does that mean? Drew asks.

Were going to meet again in a different place, Bix says. Everyone weve lost, well find. Or theyll find us.

Where? How? Drew asks.

Bix hesitates, like hes held this secret so long hes afraid of what will happen when he releases it into the air. I picture it like Judgment Day, he says finally, his eyes on the water. Well rise up out of our bodies and find each other again in spirit form. Well meet in that new place, all of us together, and first itll seem strange, and pretty soon itll seem strange that you could ever lose someone, or get lost.

Bix knows, you thinkhes always known, in front of that computer, and now hes passing the knowledge on. But what you say is: Will you finally get to meet Lizzies parents?

The surprise lands cleanly in Bixs face, and he laughs, a big, billowing noise. I dont know, Rob, he says, shaking his head. Maybe notmaybe that part will never change. But I like to think so. He rubs his eyes, which look suddenly tired, and says, Speaking of which. Time to head back home.

He walks away, hands in the pockets of his army jacket, but its a while before it feels like hes really gone. You pull your last joint from your wallet and smoke it with Drew, walking south. The river is quiet, no boats in sight, a couple of toothless geezers fishing under the Williamsburg Bridge.

Drew, you say.

Hes looking at the water with that stoned distraction that makes anything seem worth studying. You laugh, nervous, and he turns. What?

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What cabin?

The one you built. In Wisconsin. You see confusion in Drews face, and you add, If there is a cabin.

Of course theres a cabin.

Your high granulates the air, then Drews face, which reconstitutes with a new wariness in it that frightens you. I would miss Sasha, he says slowly. Wouldnt you?

You dont really know her, you say, breathless, a little desperate. You dont know who youd be missing.

A massive storage hangar has intervened between the path and the river, and you walk alongside it. What dont I know about Sasha? Drew asks in his usual friendly tone, but its differentyou sense him already turning away, and you start to panic.

She was a hooker, you say. A hooker and a thiefthats how she survived in Naples.

As you speak these words, a howling starts up in your ears. Drew stops walking. Youre sure hes going to hit you, and you wait for it.

Thats insane, he says. And fuck you for saying it.

Ask her, you shout, to be heard above the howling. Ask about Lars the Swede who used to play the flute.

Drew starts walking again, his head down. You walk beside him, your steps narrating your panic: What have you done? What have you done? What have you done? What have you done? The FDR is over your heads, tires roaring, gasoline in your lungs.

Drew stops again. He looks at you through the dim, oily air like hes never seen you before. Wow, Rob, he says. You are really and truly an asshole.

Youre the last to know.

Not me. Sasha.

He turns and walks quickly away, leaving you alone. You charge after him, seized by a wild conviction that containing Drew will seal off the damage youve done. She doesnt know, you tell yourself, she still doesnt know. As long as Drew is in sight, she doesnt know.

You stalk him along the rivers edge, maybe twenty feet between you, half running to keep up. He turns once: Go away! I dont want to be near you! But you sense his confusion about where to go, what to do, and it reassures you. Nothing has happened yet.

Between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, Drew stops beside what might be called a beach. Its made entirely out of garbage: old tires, trash, splintered wood, and glass and filthy paper and old plastic bags tapering gradually into the East River. Drew stands on this rubble, looking out, and you wait a few feet behind him. Then he begins to undress. You dont believe its happening at first; off comes his jacket, his sweater, his two T-shirts and undershirt. And there is Drews bare torso, strong and tight as youd imagined, though thinner, the dark hair on his chest in the shape of a spade.

In jeans and boots, Drew picks his way to where garbage and water meet. An angular slab of concrete juts out, the failed foundation of something long forgotten, and he scrambles on top of it. He unlaces his boots and removes them, then kicks off his jeans and boxers. Even through your dread, you feel a faint appreciation for the beauty and inelegance of a man undressing.

He glances back at you, and you glimpse his naked front, the dark pubic hair and strong legs. Ive always wanted to do this, he says in a flat voice, and takes a long, leaping, shallow dive, slamming the East Rivers surface and letting out something between a scream and a gasp. He surfaces, and you hear him trying to catch his breath. It cant be more than forty-five degrees out.

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You make a clumsy leap, your body crashing onto the water, your knee hitting something hard under the surface. The cold locks in around you, knocking out your breath. You swim crazily to get away from the garbage, which you picture underneath, rusty hooks and claws reaching up to slash your genitals and feet. Your knee aches from whatever it hit.

You lift up your head and see Drew floating on his back. We can get back out of here, right? you yell.

Yes, Rob, he answers in that new, flat voice. Same way we got in.

You dont say anything else. It takes all your strength to tread water and yank in breath. Eventually the cold begins to feel almost tropically warm against your skin. The shrieking in your ears subsides, and you can breathe again. You look around, startled by the mythic beauty of what surrounds you: water encircling an island. A distant tugboat jutting out its rubbery lip. The Statue of Liberty. A thunder of wheels on the Brooklyn Bridge, which looks like the inside of a harp. Church bells, meandering and off-key, like the chimes your mother hangs on the porch. Youre moving fast, and when you look for Drew you cant find him. The shore is far away. A person is swimming near it, but at such a distance that when the swimmer pauses, waving frantic arms, you cant see who it is. You hear a faint shoutRob!and realize youve been hearing that voice for a while. Panic scissors through you, bringing crystalline engagement with physical facts: youre caught in a currentthere are currents in this riveryou knew thatheard it somewhere and forgotyou shout, but feel the smallness of your voice, the seismic indifference of the water around youall this in an instant.

Help! Drew!

As you flail, knowing youre not supposed to panicpanicking will drain your strengthyour mind pulls away as it does so easily, so often, without your even noticing sometimes, leaving Robert Freeman Jr. to manage the current alone while you withdraw to the broader landscape, the water and buildings and streets, the avenues like endless hallways, your dorm full of sleeping students, the air thick with their communal breath. You slip through Sashas open window, floating over the sill lined with artifacts from her travels: a white seashell, a small gold pagoda, a pair of red dice. Her harp in one corner with its small wood stool. Shes asleep in her narrow bed, her burned red hair dark against the sheets. You kneel beside her, breathing the familiar smell of Sashas sleep, whispering into her ear some mix of Im sorry and I believe in you and Ill always be near you, protecting you, and I will never leave you, Ill be curled around your heart for the rest of your life, until the water pressing my shoulders and chest crushes me awake and I hear Sasha screaming into my face: Fight! Fight! Fight!

11

Good-bye, My Love

When Ted Hollander first agreed to travel to Naples in search of his missing niece, he drew up for his brother-in-law, who was footing the bill, a plan for finding her that involved cruising the places where aimless, strung-out youths tended to congregatethe train station, for exampleand asking if they knew her. Sasha. American. Capelli rossired hairhed planned to say, had even practiced his pronunciation until he could roll the r in front of rossi to perfection. But since arriving in Naples a week ago, he hadnt said it once.

Today, he ignored his resolve to begin looking for Sasha and visited the ruins of Pompeii, observing early Roman wall paintings and small, prone bodies scattered like Easter eggs among the columned courtyards. He ate a can of tuna under an olive tree and listened to the crazy, empty silence. In the early evening he returned to his hotel room, heaved his aching body onto the king-sized bed, and phoned his sister, Beth, Sashas mother, to report that another days efforts had been unsuccessful.

Okay, Beth sighed from Los Angeles, as she did at the end of each day. The energy of her disappointment endowed it with something like consciousness; Ted experienced it as a third presence on the phone.

Im sorry, he said. A drop of poison filled his heart. He would look for Sasha tomorrow. Yet even as he made this vow, he was reaffirming a contradictory plan to visit the Museo Nazionale, home of an Orpheus and Eurydice hed admired for years: a Roman marble relief copied from a Greek original. He had always wanted to see it.

Mercifully, Hammer, Beths second husband, who normally had a volley of questions for Ted that boiled down to one very simple question, Am I getting my moneys worth? (thus filling Ted with truant anxiety), either wasnt around or chose not to weigh in. After hanging up, Ted went to the minibar and dumped a vodka over ice. He brought drink and phone to the balcony and sat in a white plastic chair, looking down at the Via Partenope and the Bay of Naples. The shore was craggy, the water of questionable purity (though arrestingly blue), and those game Neapolitans, most of whom seemed to be fat, were disrobing on the rocks and leaping into the bay in full view of pedestrians, tourist hotels, and traffic. He dialed his wife.

Oh, hi hon! Susan was startled to hear from him so early in the dayusually he called before he went to bed, which was closer to dinnertime on the East Coast. Is everything okay?

Everythings fine.

Already, her brisk, merry tone had disheartened him. Susan was often on Teds mind in Naples, but a slightly different version of Susan: a thoughtful, knowing woman with whom he could speak without speaking. It was this slightly different version of Susan who had listened with him to the quiet of Pompeii, alert to lingering reverberations of screams, of sliding ash. How could so much devastation have been silenced? This was the sort of question that had come to preoccupy Ted in his week of solitude, a week that felt like both a month and a minute.

Ive got a nibble on the Suskind house, Susan said, apparently hoping to cheer him with this dispatch from the realm of real estate.

Yet each disappointment Ted felt in his wife, each incremental deflation, was accompanied by a seizure of guilt; many years ago, he had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then hed folded it in half again, so when he felt desire for Susan, it no longer brought with it an edgy terror of never being satisfied. Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. Susan was baffled at first, then distraught; shed hit him twice across the face; shed run from the house in a thunderstorm and slept at a motel; shed wrestled Ted to the bedroom floor in a pair of black crotchless underpants. But eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken Susan; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, Ted supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. Hed presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that Susan had forgotten how things were between them before Ted began to fold up his desire; shed forgotten and was happyhad never not been happyand while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him.

Hon, Susan said. Alfred wants to talk to you.

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Dad, dont use that voice.

What voice?

That fake Dad voice.

What do you want from me, Alfred? Can we have a conversation?

We lost.

So youre what, five and eight?

Four and nine.

Well. Theres time.

Theres no time, said Alfred. Time is running out.

Is your mother still there? Ted asked, a bit desperately. Can you put her back on?

Miles wants to talk to you.

Ted spoke with his other two sons, who had further scores to report. He felt like a bookie. They played every sport imaginable and some that (to Ted) were not: soccer, hockey, baseball, lacrosse, basketball, football, fencing, wrestling, tennis, skateboarding (not a sport!), golf, Ping-Pong, Video Voodoo (absolutely not a sport, and Ted refused to sanction it), rock climbing, Rollerblading, bungee jumping (Miles, his oldest, in whom Ted sensed a joyous will to self-destruct), backgammon (not a sport!), volleyball, Wiffle ball, rugby, cricket (what country was this?), squash, water polo, ballet (Alfred, of course), and, most recently, Tae Kwon Do. At times it seemed to Ted that his sons took up sports merely to ensure his presence beside the greatest possible array of playing surfaces, and he duly appeared, hollering away his voice among piles of dead leaves and the tang of wood smoke in fall, among iridescent clover in spring, and through the soggy, mosquito-flecked summers of upstate New York.

After speaking to his wife and boys, Ted felt drunk, anxious to get out of the hotel. He seldom drank; booze flung a curtain of exhaustion over his head, robbing him of the two precious hours he had each nighttwo, maybe three, after dinner with Susan and the boysin which to think and write about art. Ideally, he should have been thinking and writing about art at all times, but a confluence of factors made such thinking and writing both unnecessary (he was tenured at a third-rate college with little pressure to publish) and impossible (he taught three art history courses a semester and had taken on vast administrative dutieshe needed money). The site of his thinking and writing was a small office wedged in one corner of his shaggy house, on whose door hed installed a lock to keep his sons out. They gathered wistfully outside it, his boys, with their chipped, heartbreaking faces. They were not permitted to so much as knock upon the door to the room in which he thought and wrote about art, but Ted hadnt found a way to keep them from prowling outside it, ghostly feral creatures drinking from a pond in moonlight, their bare feet digging at the carpet, their fingers sweating on the walls, leaving spoors of grease that Ted would point out each week to Elsa, the cleaning woman. He would sit in his office, listening to the movements of his boys, imagining that he felt their hot, curious breath. I will not let them in, he would tell himself. I will sit and think about art. But he found, to his despair, that often he couldnt think about art. He thought about nothing at all.

At dusk, Ted strolled up the Via Partenope to the Piazza Vittoria. It was teeming with families, kids punting the ubiquitous soccer balls, exchanging salvos of earsplitting Italian. But there was another presence, too, in the fading light: the aimless, unclean, vaguely threatening youths who trolled this city where unemployment was at 33 percent, members of a disenfranchised generation who slunk around the decrepit palazzi where their fifteenth-century forebears had lived in splendor, who shot dope on the steps of churches in whose crypts those same forebears now lay, their diminutive coffins stacked like cordwood. Ted shrank from these youths, though he was six foot four and weighed in at two hundred thirty, with a face that looked innocuous enough in the bathroom mirror but often prompted colleagues to ask him what was the matter. He was afraid Sasha would be among these kidsthat it was she, eyeing him through the jaundiced street light that permeated Naples after dark. Hed emptied his wallet of all but one credit card and minimal cash. He left the piazza quickly in search of a restaurant.

Sasha had disappeared two years ago, at seventeen. Disappeared like her father, Andy Grady, a berserk financier with violet eyes whod walked away from a bad business deal a year after his divorce from Beth and hadnt been heard from again. Sasha had resurfaced periodically, requesting money wires in several far-flung locales, and twice Beth and Hammer had flown wherever it was and tried in vain to intercept her. Sasha had fled an adolescence whose catalog of woes had included drug use, countless arrests for shoplifting, a fondness for keeping company with rock musicians (Beth had reported, helplessly), four shrinks, family therapy, group therapy, and three suicide attempts, all of which Ted had witnessed from afar with a horror that gradually affixed to Sasha herself. As a little girl, shed been lovelybewitching, evenhe remembered this from a summer hed spent with Beth and Andy in their house on Lake Michigan. But shed become a glowering presence at the occasional Christmas or Thanksgiving when Ted saw her, and hed steered his boys away, afraid her self-immolation would somehow taint them. He wanted nothing to do with Sasha. She was lost.

Ted rose early the next morning and took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale, cool, echoey, empty of tourists despite the fact that it was spring. He drifted among dusty busts of Hadrian and the various Caesars, experiencing a physical quickening in the presence of so much marble that verged on the erotic. He sensed the proximity of the Orpheus and Eurydice before he saw it, felt its cool weight across the room but prolonged the time before he faced it, reminding himself of the events leading up to the moment it described: Orpheus and Eurydice in love and newly married; Eurydice dying of a snakebite while fleeing the advances of a shepherd; Orpheus descending to the underworld, filling its dank corridors with music from his lyre as he sang of his longing for his wife; Pluto granting Eurydices release from death on the sole condition that Orpheus not look back at her during their ascent. And then the hapless instant when, out of fear for his bride as she stumbled in the passage, Orpheus forgot himself and turned.

Ted stepped toward the relief. He felt as if hed walked inside it, so completely did it enclose and affect him. It was the moment before Eurydice must descend to the underworld a second time, when she and Orpheus are saying good-bye. What moved Ted, mashed some delicate glassware in his chest, was the quiet of their interaction, the absence of drama or tears as they gazed at each other, touching gently. He sensed between them an understanding too deep to articulate: the unspeakable knowledge that everything is lost.

Ted stared at the relief, transfixed, for thirty minutes. He walked away and returned. He left the room and came back. Each time, the sensation awaited him: a fibrillating excitement such as he hadnt felt for years in response to a work of art, compounded by further excitement that such excitement was still possible.

He spent the rest of the day upstairs among the Pompeiian mosaics, but his mind never left the Orpheus and Eurydice. He visited it again before leaving the museum.

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As the Orpheus and Eurydice relaxed its hold, Ted became aware of a subterranean patter around him, an interplay of glances, whistles, and signals that seemed to include nearly everyone, from the crone draped in black outside the church to the kid in the green T-shirt who kept buzzing past Ted on his Vespa, grazingly close. Everyone but himself. From a window, an old woman was using a rope to lower a basket full of Marlboro packs to the street. Black market, Ted thought, watching uneasily as a girl with tangled hair and sunburned arms removed a packet of cigarettes and placed some coins in the basket. As it swung upward again, toward the window, Ted recognized the cigarette buyer as his niece.

So acutely had he been dreading this encounter that he felt no real surprise at the staggering coincidence of its actually taking place. Sasha lit one of the Marlboros, brow creased, and Ted slowed his pace, pretending to admire the greasy wall of a palazzo. When she began walking again, he followed. She wore faded black jeans and a dishwater gray T-shirt. She walked erratically and with a slight limp, slowly, then briskly, so that Ted had to concentrate in order not to overtake her or fall behind.

He was sliding into the citys knotty entrails, a poor, untouristed area where the sound of flapping laundry mingled with the bristly chatter of pigeons wings. Without warning, Sasha pivoted around to face him. She stared, bewildered, into his face. Is that? she stammered. Uncle

My God! Sasha! Ted cried, wildly mugging surprise. He was a lousy fake.

You scared me, Sasha said, still disbelieving. I felt someone

You scared me, too, Ted rejoined, and they laughed, nervous. He should have hugged her right away. Now it felt too late.

To fend off the obvious question (What was he doing in Naples?), Ted kept talking: Where was she going?

Toto visit friends, Sasha said. What about you?

Justwalking! he said, too loudly. They had fallen into step. Is that a limp?

I broke my ankle in Tangiers, she said. I fell down a long flight of steps.

I hope you saw a doctor.

Sasha gave him a pitying look. I wore a cast for three and a half months.

Then why the limp?

Im not sure.

She had grown up. And so uncompromising was this adulthood, so unstinting its inventory of breasts and hips and gently indented waist, the expert flicking away of her cigarette, that Ted experienced the change as instantaneous. A miracle. Her hair was not nearly as red as it had been. Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around herpurple, green, pinklike a face painted by Lucian Freud. She looked like a girl who a century ago would not have lived long, would have died in childbirth. A girl whose feathery bones did not quite heal.

You live here? he asked. Naples?

A nicer part, Sasha said, with a tinge of snobbery. What about you, Uncle Teddy? Do you still live in Mount Gray, New York?

I do, he said, startled by her recall.

Is your house very big? Are there lots of trees? Do you have a tire swing?

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Sasha paused, closing her eyes as if to imagine it. You have three sons, she said. Miles, Ames, and Alfred.

She was right; even the order was right. Im amazed you remember, Ted said.

I remember everything, Sasha said.

She had stopped before one of the seedy palazzi, its coat of arms painted over with a yellow smiley face that Ted found macabre. This is where my friends live, she said. Good-bye, Uncle Teddy. It was so nice running into you. She shook his hand with damp, spidery fingers.

Ted, unprepared for this abrupt parting, stammered a little. Wait, butcant I take you to dinner?

Sasha tilted her head, searching his eyes. Im awfully busy, she said, with apology. And then, as if softened by some deep, unfailing will to politeness, But yes. Im free tonight.

It was only as Ted pushed open the door to his hotel room, the medley of 1950s beige tones greeting him after each day hed spent not looking for Sasha, that he was rocked by the sheer outlandishness of what had just happened. It was time to make his daily call to Beth, and he imagined his sisters dumbstruck jubilation at the landslide of good news since yesterday: not only had he located her daughter, but Sasha had seemed clean, reasonably healthy, mentally coherent, and in possession of friends; in short, better than theyd had any right to expect. And yet Ted felt no such joy. Why? he wondered, lying flat on the bed with arms crossed, shutting his eyes. Why this longing for yesterday, even this morningfor the relative peace of knowing he should look for Sasha but failing to do so? He didnt know. He didnt know.

Beth and Andys marriage had died spectacularly the summer Ted lived with them on Lake Michigan while managing a construction site two miles farther up the lake. Apart from the marriage itself, the casualties by summers end included the majolica plate Ted had given Beth for her birthday; sundry items of damaged furniture; Beths left shoulder, which Andy dislocated twice; and her collarbone, which he broke. When they fought, Ted would take Sasha outside, through the razor-edged grass, to the beach. She had long red hair and blue-white skin that Beth was always trying to keep from burning. Ted took his sisters worries seriously and always brought the sunscreen with him when they went out to the sandsand that was too hot in the late afternoons for Sasha to walk on without screaming. He would carry her in his arms, light as a cat in her red-and-white two-piece, set her on a towel, and rub cream onto her shoulders and back and face, her tiny noseshe must have been fiveand wonder what would become of her, growing up amid so much violence. He insisted she wear her white sailor hat in the sun, though she didnt want to. He was a graduate student in art history, working as a contractor to pay his tuition.

A con-trac-tor, Sasha repeated, fastidiously. Whats that?

Well, he organizes different workmen to build a house.

Are there floor sanders?

Sure. You know any floor sanders?

One, she said. He sanded floors in our house. His name is Mark Avery.

Ted was instantly suspicious of this Mark Avery.

He gave me a fish, Sasha offered.

A goldfish?

No, she said, laughing, swatting his arm. A bathtub fish.

Does it squeak?

Yes, but I dont like the sound.

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Will you take me swimming?

Of course, he always said.

Only then would he allow her to doff her protective cap. Her hair was long and silken; it blew in his face when he carried her (as she always wished) into Lake Michigan. She would gird him with her thin legs and arms, warm from the sun, and rest her head on his shoulder. Ted sensed her mounting dread as they approached the water, but she refused to let him turn back. No. Its okay. Go, she would mutter grimly into his neck, as if her submersion in Lake Michigan were an ordeal she was required to endure for some greater good. Ted tried different ways of making it easier for hergoing in little by little, or plunging straight inbut always Sasha would gasp in pain and tighten the grip of her legs and arms around him. When it was over, when she was in, she was herself again, dog-paddling despite his efforts to teach her the crawl. (I know how to swim! she would say, impatiently. I just dont like to.) Splashing him, teeth chattering gamely. But the entire process unsettled Ted, as if he were hurting her, forcing this immersion upon his niece when what he longed to dofantasized about doingwas rescue her: wrap her in a blanket and secrete her from the house before dawn; paddle away in an old rowboat hed found; carry her down the beach and not turn around. He was twenty-five. He trusted no one else. But he could do nothing, really, to protect his niece, and as the weeks eked away, he began to anticipate summers end as a black, ominous presence. Yet when the time came it was strangely easy. Sasha clung to her mother, barely glancing at Ted as he loaded up his car and said good-bye, and he set off feeling angry at her, wounded in a way he knew was childish but couldnt seem to help, and when that feeling passed it left him exhausted, too tired even to drive. He parked outside a Dairy Queen and slept.

How do I know you know how to swim, if you wont show me? he asked Sasha once, as they sat on the sand.

I took lessons with Rachel Costanza.

Youre not answering my question.

She smiled at him a little helplessly, as if she longed to hide behind her childishness but sensed that, somehow, it was already too late for that. She has a Siamese cat named Feather.

Why wont you swim?

Oh, Uncle Teddy, she said, in one of her eerie imitations of her mother. You wear me out.

Sasha arrived at his hotel at eight oclock wearing a short red dress, black patent-leather boots, and a regalia of cosmetics that sharpened her face into a small, shrill mask. Her narrow eyes curved like hooks. Ted glimpsed her across the lobby and felt reluctance verging on paralysis. He had hoped, cruelly, that she wouldnt show up.

Still, he made himself cross the lobby and take her arm. Theres a good restaurant up the street, he said, unless you have other ideas.

She did. Blowing smoke from the window of a taxi, Sasha harangued the driver in halting Italian as the car shrieked down alleys and the wrong way up one-way streets to the Vomero, an affluent neighborhood Ted had not seen. It was high on a hill. Reeling, he paid the driver and stood with Sasha in a gap between two buildings. The flat, sparkling city arrayed itself before them, lazily toeing the sea. Hockney, Ted thought. Diebenkorn. John Moore. In the distance, Mount Vesuvius reposed benignly. Ted pictured the slightly different version of Susan standing near him, taking it in.

This is the best view in Naples, Sasha said challengingly, but Ted sensed her waiting, gauging his approval.

Its a wonderful view, he assured her, and added, as they ambled among the leafy residential streets, This is the prettiest neighborhood Ive seen in Naples.

I live here, Sasha said. A few streets over.

Ted was skeptical. I shouldve met you up here, then. Saved you the trip.

I doubt you would have found it, Sasha said. Foreigners are helpless in Naples. Most of them get robbed.

Arent you a foreigner?

Technically, Sasha said. But I know my way around.

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In a restaurant on the square, she asked for a window table and ordered their meal: fried zucchini flowers followed by pizza. Again and again she peeked outside at the youths on their Vespas. It was poignantly clear that she longed to be among them. Do you know any of those kids? Ted asked.

Theyre students, she said dismissively, as if the word were a synonym for nothing.

They look about your age.

Sasha shrugged. Most of them still live at home, she said. I want to hear about you, Uncle Teddy. Are you still an art history professor? By now you must be an expert.

Jarred once again by her memory, Ted felt the pressure that arose in him when he tried to talk about his worka confusion about what had originally driven him to disappoint his parents and rack up mountainous debt so he could write a dissertation claiming (in breathless tones that embarrassed him now) that Czannes distinctive brushstrokes were an effort to represent soundnamely, in his summer landscapes, the hypnotic chant of locusts.

Im writing about the impact of Greek sculpture on the French Impressionists, he said, attempting liveliness, but it landed like a brick.

Your wife, Susan, Sasha said. Her hair is blond, right?

Yes, Susan is blond.

My hair used to be red.

Its still red, he said. Reddish.

But not like it was. She watched him, awaiting confirmation.

No.

There was a pause. Do you love her? Susan?

This cool inquiry landed somewhere near Teds solar plexus. Aunt Susan, he corrected her.

Sasha looked chastened. Aunt.

Of course I love her, Ted said quietly.

Dinner arrived: pizza draped in buffalo mozzarella, buttery and warm in Teds throat. After a second glass of red wine, Sasha began to talk. She had run away from home with Wade, the drummer for the Pinheads (a band that seemed to require no introduction), who were playing in Tokyo. We stayed at the Okura Hotel, meaning fancy, she said. It was April, thats cherry blossom season in Japan, and every tree was covered with all these pink flowers, and businessmen sang and danced underneath them in paper hats! Ted, who had never been to the Far East or even the Near East, felt a twist of envy.

After Tokyo, the band had gone to Hong Kong. We stayed in a white high-rise on a hill, with the most incredible view, she said. Islands and water and boats and planes

So, is Wade with you now? In Naples?

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Hed left her there, in Hong Kong, in the tall white building; shed lingered in the apartment until its owner had asked her to leave. Then shed moved to a youth hostel inside a building full of sweatshops, people asleep under their sewing machines on piles of fabric scraps. Sasha relayed these details lightheartedly, as if it had all been a romp. Then I made some friends, she said, and we crossed into China.

Are those the friends you were meeting yesterday?

Sasha laughed. I meet new people everywhere I go, she said. Thats how it is when you travel, Uncle Teddy.

She was flushedfrom the wine or maybe the pleasure of remembering. Ted waved for the bill and paid it. He felt leaden, depressed.

The teenagers had dispersed into the chilly night. Sasha didnt have a coat. Please wear my jacket, Ted said, removing the worn, heavy tweed, but she wouldnt hear of it. He sensed that she wanted to remain fully visible in her red dress. The tall boots exaggerated her limp.

After a walk of many blocks, they reached a generic-looking nightclub whose doorman waved them listlessly inside. By now it was midnight. Friends of mine own this place, Sasha said, leading the way into a tumult of bodies, fluorescent purple light, and a beat with all the variety of a jackhammer. Even Ted, no connoisseur of nightclubs, felt the tired familiarity of the scene, yet Sasha seemed enthralled. Buy me a drink, Uncle Teddy, would you? she said, pointing at a ghastly concoction at a nearby table. Like that, with a little umbrella.

Ted shoved his way toward the bar. Being away from his niece felt like opening a window, loosening an airless oppression. But what was the problem, exactly? Sasha had been having a ball, seeing the world; hell, shed done more in two years than Ted had done in twenty. So why was he so eager to escape her?

Sasha had commandeered two seats at a low table, a setup that made Ted feel like an ape, knees jammed under his chin. As she hoisted the umbrella drink to her lips, the purple light leached into slivers of pale scar tissue on the inside of her wrist. When she set down the drink, Ted took her arm in his hands and turned it over; Sasha allowed this until she saw what he was looking at, then yanked her arm away. Thats from before, she said. In Los Angeles.

Let me see.

She wouldnt. And to his own surprise, Ted reached across the table and grasped her wrists in his hands, taking a certain angry pleasure in hurting his niece as he wrested them over by force. He noticed that her nails were red; shed painted them this afternoon. Sasha relented, averting her eyes as he studied her forearms in the cold, weird light. They were scarred and scuffed like furniture.

A lot are by accident, Sasha said. My balance was really off.

Youve had a bad time. He wanted her to admit it.

There was a silence. Finally Sasha said, I kept thinking I saw my father. Isnt that crazy?

I dont know.

In China, Morocco. Id look across a roombamI saw his hair. Or his legs, I still remember the exact shape of his legs. Or how he threw back his head when he laughedremember, Uncle Teddy? How his laugh was kind of a yell?

I do, now that you say it.

I thought he might be following me, Sasha said, making sure I was okay. And then, when it seemed like he wasnt, I got really scared.

Ted let go of her arms, and she folded them in her lap. I thought he could keep track of me because of my hair. But now it isnt even red.

I recognized you.

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It was the question hed been dreading, yet the answer slid from Ted like meat falling off a bone. Im here to look at art, he said. To look at art and think about art.

There: a sudden, lifting sensation of peace. Relief. He hadnt come for Sasha, it was true.

Art?

Thats what I like to do, he said, and smiled, remembering the Orpheus and Eurydice this afternoon. Thats what Im always trying to do. Thats what I care about.

In Sashas face there was a slackening, as if some weight shed been bracing herself against had been removed. I thought you came to look for me, she said.

Ted watched her from a distance. A peaceful distance.

Sasha lit one of her Marlboros. After two drags, she squashed it out. Lets dance, she said, a heaviness about her as she rose from her seat. Come on, Uncle Teddy, taking his hand, herding him toward the dance floor, a liquid mass of bodies that provoked in Ted a frightened sensation of shyness. He hesitated, resisting, but Sasha hauled him in among the other dancers and instantly he felt buoyed, suspended. How long had it been since hed danced in a nightclub? Fifteen years? More? Hesitantly, Ted began to move, feeling hulking, bearish in his professors tweed, moving his feet in some approximation of dance steps until he noticed that Sasha wasnt moving at all. She stood still, watching him. And then she reached for him, encircled Ted with her long arms and clung to him so that he felt her modest bulk, the height and weight of this new Sasha, his grown-up niece who had once been so small, and the irrevocability of that transformation released in Ted a ragged sorrow, so his throat seized up and a painful tingling fizzed in his nostrils. He cleaved to Sasha. But she was gone, that little girl. Gone with the passionate boy who had loved her.

Finally she pulled away. Wait here, she said, not meeting his eyes. Ill be right back. Disoriented, Ted hovered among the dancing Italians until a mounting sense of awkwardness drove him from the floor. He lingered near it. Eventually, he circled the club. Shed mentioned having friends therecould she be talking to them somewhere? Had she gone outside? Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached for his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that shed robbed him.

Sunlight pried open his sticky eyelids, forcing him awake. Hed forgotten to close the blinds. It had been five oclock by the time hed finally gone to bed, after hours of helpless wandering and a series of lousy directions to the police station; after locating it finally and relaying his sad tale (minus the pickpockets identity) to an officer with oiled hair and an attitude of pristine indifference; after the offer of a ride to his hotel (which was all hed really been after) from an elderly couple hed met at the station, whose passports had been stolen on the Amalfi ferryboat.

Now Ted rose from bed with a throbbing head and rampaging heart. Phone messages littered the table: five from Beth, three from Susan, and two from Alfred (I lose, read one, in the broken English of the hotel clerk). Ted left them where hed thrown them. He showered, dressed without shaving, drained a vodka at the minibar, and removed cash and another credit card from his room safe. He had to find Sasha nowtodayand this imperative, which had seized him at no specific moment, assumed an immediacy that was the perfect inverse of his prior shirking. There were other things he needed to docall Beth, call Susan, eatbut doing them now was out of the question. He had to find her.

But where? Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish. Where to look for Sasha in this sprawling, malodorous city? He reviewed the strategies hed already failed to execute: approaching dissolute kids at the train station and youth hostels, but no, no. Hed waited too long for any of that.

Without a clear plan, he took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale and set off in what seemed the direction hed walked yesterday, after viewing the Orpheus and Eurydice. Nothing looked the same, but surely his state of mind could account for the difference, the tiny metronome of panic now ticking within him. Nothing looked the same, yet everything looked familiar: the stained churches and slanting crusty walls, the hangnail-shaped bars. After following a narrow street to its wriggling conclusion, he emerged onto a thoroughfare lined with a gauntlet of weary palazzi, their bottom floors gouged open to accommodate cheap clothing and shoe stores. A breeze of recognition fluttered over Ted. He followed the avenue slowly, looking right and left, until he caught sight of the yellow smiley face overlaying a palimpsest of swords and crosses.

He pushed open the small rectangular door cut into a broad, curved entrance originally built to receive horse-drawn coaches, then followed a passageway into a cobbled courtyard still warm from recent sunlight. It smelled of rotting melons. A bandy-legged old woman wearing blue kneesocks under her dress bobbled toward him, her hair in a scarf.

Sasha, Ted said into her faded wet eyes. American. Capelli rossi. He tripped on the r and tried again. Rossi, he said, rolling it this time. Capelli rossi. Realizing as he spoke that the description was no longer quite accurate.

No, no, the woman muttered. As she began to lurch away, Ted followed, slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her soft hand and inquired again, rolling the r this time without a hitch. The woman made a clicking noise, jerked her chin, and then, looking almost sad, gestured for Ted to follow her. He did, filled with disdain at how easily shed been bought, how little her protection was worth. To one side of the front door was a broad flight of stairs, splotches of rich, Neapolitan marble still winking up through the grime. The woman began climbing slowly, clutching the rail. Ted followed.

The second floor, as hed been lecturing his undergraduates for years, was the piano nobile, where palace owners brandished their wealth before guests. Even now, lousy with molting pigeons and stuccoed with piles of their refuse, its vaulted arches overlooking the courtyard were splendid. Seeing him notice, the woman said, Bellissima, eh? Ecco, guardate! and with a pride Ted found touching, she threw open the door to a big dim room whose walls were stained with what looked like patches of mold. The woman pulled a switch, and a lightbulb dangling from a wire transfigured the moldy shapes into painted murals in the style of Titian and Giorgione: robust naked women clutching fruit; clumps of dark leaves. A whisper of silvery birds. This must have been the ballroom.

On the third floor Ted noticed two boys sharing a cigarette in a doorway. Another lay asleep under a straggling assortment of laundry: wet socks and underwear pinned carefully to a wire. Ted smelled dope and stale olive oil, heard a mutter of invisible activity, and realized that this palazzo had become a rooming house. The irony of finding himself smack in the midst of the demimonde hed tried to avoid amused Ted. So here we are, he thought. At last.

On the fifth and top floor, where servants once had lived, the doors were smaller, set along a narrow hallway. Teds elderly guide stopped to rest against a wall. His contempt for her yielded to gratitude: what effort that twenty dollars had cost her! How badly she must need it. Im sorry, he said, Im sorry you had to walk so far. But the woman shook her head, not understanding. She tottered partway down the hall and rapped sharply on one of the narrow doors. It opened and Ted saw Sasha, half asleep, dressed in a pair of mens pajamas. At the sight of Ted her eyes widened, but her face remained impassive. Hi, Uncle Teddy, she said mildly.

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The womans gaze jumped between them; then she turned and walked away. The moment she rounded a corner, Sasha shut the door in his face. Go away, she said. Im busy.

Ted moved nearer the door, flattening his palm against the splintery wood. Across it, he felt the spooked, angry presence of his niece. So this is where you live, he said.

Im moving someplace better.

When youve picked enough pockets?

There was a pause. That wasnt me, she said. That was a friend of mine.

Youve got friends all over the place, but I never actually see them.

Go! Leave, Uncle Teddy.

Id like to, Ted said. Believe me.

But he couldnt bring himself to leave, or even really move. He stood until his legs began to ache, then bent his knees and slid to the floor. It was already afternoon, and an aureole of musty light issued from a window at one end of the hall. Ted rubbed his eyes, feeling as if he might sleep.

Are you still there? Sasha barked through the door.

Still here.

The door opened a crack, and Teds wallet bounced on his head and dropped to the floor.

Go to hell, Sasha said, and shut the door again.

Ted opened the wallet, found its contents untouched, and replaced it in his pocket. Then he sat. For a long timehours, it seemed (hed forgotten his watch)there was silence. Occasionally Ted heard other, disembodied tenants moving inside their rooms. He imagined he was an element of the palace itself, a sensate molding or step whose fate it was to witness the ebb and flow of generations, to feel the place relax its medieval bulk more deeply into the earth. Another year, another fifty. Twice he stood up to let tenants pass, girls with jumpy hands and cracked leather purses. They hardly glanced at him.

Are you still there? Sasha asked, from behind the door.

Still here.

She emerged from the room and locked the door quickly behind her. She wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, and plastic flip-flops, and carried a faded pink towel and a small bag. Where are you going? he asked, but she stalked down the hall without comment. Twenty minutes later she was back, hair hanging wet, trailing a floral smell of soap. She opened her door with the key, then hesitated. I mop the halls to pay for this room, okay? I sweep the fucking courtyard. Does that make you happy?

Does it make you happy? he countered.

The door shook on its hinges.

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Recently, hed mentioned that trip in some other context, and Susan had looked him full in the face and chimed, in her sunny new voice, Are you sure that was me? I dont remember a thing about it! and administered a springy little kiss to the top of Teds head. Amnesia, hed thought. Brainwashing. But it came to him now that Susan had simply been lying. Hed let her go, conserving himself forwhat? It frightened Ted that he had no idea. But hed let her go, and she was gone.

Are you there? Sasha called, but he didnt answer.

She threw open the door and peered out. You are, she said, with relief. Ted looked up at her from the floor and said nothing. You can come inside, I guess, she said.

He hauled himself to his feet and stepped into her room. It was tiny: a narow bed, a desk, a sprig of mint in a plastic cup filling the room with its scent. The red dress, hanging from a hook. The sun was just beginning to set, skidding over rooftops and church steeples and landing in the room through a single window by the bed. Its sill was crowded with what appeared to be souvenirs of Sashas travels: a tiny gold pagoda, a guitar pick, a long white seashell. In the middle of the window, dangling from a string, hung a crude circle made from a bent coat hanger. Sasha sat on her bed, watching Ted take in her meager possessions. He recognized, with merciless clarity, what hed somehow failed to grasp yesterday: how alone his niece was in this foreign place. How empty-handed.

As if sensing the movement of his thoughts, Sasha said, I get to know a lot of people. But it never really lasts.

On the desk lay a small stack of books in English: The History of the World in 24 Lessons. The Sumptuous Treasures of Naples. At the top, a worn volume entitled Learning to Type.

Ted sat on the bed beside his niece and put his arm around her shoulders. They felt like birds nests under his coat. The prickling sensation ached in his nostrils.

Listen to me, Sasha, he said. You can do it alone. But its going to be so much harder.

She didnt answer. She was looking at the sun. Ted looked, too, staring through the window at the riot of dusty color. Turner, he thought. OKeeffe. Paul Klee.

On another day more than twenty years after this one, after Sasha had gone to college and settled in New York; after shed reconnected on Facebook with her college boyfriend and married late (when Beth had nearly given up hope) and had two children, one of whom was slightly autistic; when she was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her, Ted, long divorceda grandfatherwould visit Sasha at home in the California desert. He would step through a living room strewn with the flotsam of her young kids and watch the western sun blaze through a sliding glass door. And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight hed felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire.

Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light.

See, Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. Its mine.

13

Pure Language

You dont want to do this, Bennie murmured. Am I right?

Absolutely, Alex said.

You think its selling out. Compromising the ideals that make you, you.

Alex laughed. I know thats what it is.

See, youre a purist, Bennie said. Thats why youre perfect for this.

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If I wont do it, Alex said, then I cant really be perfect.

I think you will.

Alex was annoyed, intrigued. How come?

A feeling, Bennie said, rousing himself slightly from his deep recline. That we have some history together that hasnt happened yet.

Alex had first heard Bennie Salazars name from a girl hed dated once, when he was new to New York and Bennie was still famous. The girl had worked for himAlex remembered this clearlybut it was practically all he could remember; her name, what shed looked like, what exactly theyd done togetherthose details had been erased. The only impressions Alex retained of their date involved winter, darkness, and something about a wallet, of all things, but had it been lost? Found? Stolen? The girls wallet, or his own? The answers were maddeningly absentit was like trying to remember a song that you knew made you feel a certain way, without a title, artist, or even a few bars to bring it back. The girl hovered just beyond reach, having left the wallet in Alexs brain as a kind of calling card, to tease him. In the days leading up to this brunch with Bennie, Alex had found himself oddly fixated on her.

Das mine! protested Ava, Bennies daughter, affirming Alexs recent theory that language acquisition involved a phase of speaking German. She snatched a plastic skillet away from his own daughter, Cara-Ann, who lurched after it, roaring, Mine pot! Mine pot! Alex jumped to his feet, then noticed that Bennie hadnt stirred. He forced himself to sit back down.

I know youd rather mix, Bennie said, somehow audible over the caterwauling without seeming to raise his voice. You love music. You want to work with sound. You think I dont know what that feels like?

The girls fell on each other in a gladiatorial frenzy of yowling, scratching, and yanking wisps of fledgling hair. Everything okay in there? Alexs wife, Rebecca, called from the kitchen.

Were good, Alex called back. He marveled at Bennies calm; was this how it was when you started the kid thing all over again after a second marriage?

The problem is, Bennie went on, its not about sound anymore. Its not about music. Its about reach. Thats the bitter fucking pill I had to swallow.

I know.

Meaning: he knew (as did everyone in the industry) how Bennie had gotten canned from his own label, Sows Ear Records, many years ago, after serving his corporate controllers a boardroom lunch of cow pies (and were talking in the steam trays, wrote a secretary whod narrated the melee in real time on Gawker). Youre asking me to feed the people shit? Bennie had allegedly roared at the appalled executives. Try eating some yourselves and see how it tastes! After that, Bennie had returned to producing music with a raspy, analog sound, none of which had really sold. Now, pushing sixty, he was seen as irrelevant; Alex usually heard him referred to in the past tense.

When Cara-Ann sank her freshly minted incisors into Avas shoulder, it was Rebecca who rushed in from the kitchen and pried her off, casting a mystified look at Alex, now suspended in Zen-like serenity upon the couch. Lupa came with her: the dark-eyed mother Alex had avoided in playgroup at first because she was beautiful, until hed learned she was married to Bennie Salazar.

When wounds had been bandaged and order restored, Lupa kissed Bennies head (his trademark bushy hair now silver), and said, I keep waiting for you to play Scotty.

Bennie smiled up at his much younger wife. Ive been saving him, he said. Then he worked his handset, untapping from the staggering sound system (which seemed to route the music straight through Alexs pores) a baleful male vocalist accompanied by torqued, boinging slide guitar. We released this a couple of months ago, Bennie said. Youve heard of him, Scotty Hausmann? Hes doing well with the pointers.

Alex glanced over at Rebecca, who scorned the term pointer and would politely but firmly correct anyone who used it to describe Cara-Ann. Luckily, his wife hadnt heard. Now that Starfish, or kiddie handsets, were ubiquitous, any child who could point was able to download musicthe youngest buyer on record being a three-month-old in Atlanta, whod purchased a song by Nine Inch Nails called Ga-ga. Fifteen years of war had ended with a baby boom, and these babies had not only revived a dead industry but become the arbiters of musical success. Bands had no choice but to reinvent themselves for the preverbal; even Biggie had released yet another posthumous album whose title song was a remix of a Biggie standard, Fuck You, Bitch, to sound like Youre Big, Chief! with an accompanying picture of Biggie dandling a toddler in Native American headdress. Starfish had other featuresfinger drawing, GPS systems for babies just learning to walk, PicMailbut Cara-Ann had never touched one, and Rebecca and Alex had agreed that she would not until age five. They used their own handsets sparingly in front of her.

Listen to this guy, Bennie said. Just listen.

The mournful vibrato; the jangly quaver of slide guitarto Alex it sounded dire. But this was Bennie Salazar, whod discovered the Conduits all those years ago. What do you hear? Alex asked him.

Bennie shut his eyes, every part of him alive with the palpable act of listening. Hes absolutely pure, he said. Untouched.

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He opened his eyes. Bennies were already open, his brown, tranquil gaze fixed on Alexs face. I think you hear what I hear, Alex, he said. Am I right?

That night, when Rebecca and Cara-Ann were firmly asleep, Alex extracted himself from the porridgy warmth of their shared bed in its foam of mosquito netting and went to the living room/playroom/guest room/office. When he stood close to the middle window and looked straight up, he could see the top of the Empire State Building, lit tonight in red and gold. This wedge of view had been a selling point back when Rebeccas parents had bought her the Garment District one-bedroom many years ago, right after the crash. Alex and Rebecca had planned to sell the apartment when she got pregnant, then learned that the squat building their own overlooked had been bought by a developer who planned to raze it and build a skyscraper that would seal off their air and light. The apartment became impossible to sell. And now, two years later, the skyscraper had at last begun to rise, a fact that filled Alex with dread and doom but also a vertiginous sweetnessevery instant of warm sunlight through their three east-facing windows felt delicious, and this sliver of sparkling night, which for years hed watched from a cushion propped against the sill, often while smoking a joint, now appeared agonizingly beautiful, a mirage.

Alex loved the dead of night. Without the rant of construction and omnipresent choppers, hidden portals of sound opened themselves to his ears: the teakettle whistle and sock-footed thump of Sandra, the single mother who lived in the apartment overhead; a hummingbird thrum that Alex presumed was her teenage son masturbating to his handset in the adjacent room. From the street, a single cough, errant conversational strands: youre asking me to be a different person and Believe it or not, drinking keeps me clean.

Alex leaned against his cushion and lit up a joint. Hed spent the afternoon tryingand failingto tell Rebecca what hed agreed to do for Bennie Salazar. Bennie had never used the word parrot; since the Bloggescandals, the term had become an obscenity. Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadnt stemmed the suspicion that peoples opinions werent really their own. Whos paying you? was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughterwho would let themselves be bought? But Alex had promised Bennie fifty parrots to create authentic word of mouth for Scotty Hausmanns first live concert, to be held in Lower Manhattan next month.

Using his handset, he began devising a system for selecting potential parrots from among his 15,896 friends. He used three variables: how much they needed money (Need), how connected and respected they were (Reach), and how open they might be to selling that influence (Corruptibility). He chose a few people at random and ranked them in each category on a scale from 10 to 0, then graphed the results on his handset in three dimensions, looking for a cluster of dots where the three lines intersected. But in every case, scoring well in two categories meant a terrible score in the third: poor and highly corruptible peoplehis friend Finn, for example, a failed actor and quasidrug addict whod posted a recipe for speedballs on his page and lived mostly off the goodwill of his former Wesleyan classmates (Need: 9; Corruptibility: 10) had no reach (1). Poor, influential people like Rose, a stripper/cellist whose hairstyle changes were instantly copied in certain parts of the East Village (Need: 9; Reach: 10) were incorruptible (0)in fact, Rose kept a rumor sheet on her page that functioned as an informal police blotter, recording which friends boyfriend had given her a black eye, who had borrowed and trashed a drum set, whose dog had been left tied to a parking meter for hours in the rain. There were influential and corruptible people like his friend Max, onetime singer for the Pink Buttons, now a wind-power potentate who owned a Soho triplex and threw a caviar-strewn Christmas party each year that had people kissing his ass from August onward in hopes of being invited (Reach: 10; Corruptibility: 8). But Max was popular because he was rich (Need: 0) and had no incentive to sell.

Alex stared goggle-eyed at his handset screen. Would anyone agree to do this? And then it came to him that someone already had: himself. Alex graphed himself as he might appear to Rebecca: Need: 9; Reach: 6; Corruptibility: 0. Alex was a purist, like Bennie had said; hed walked away from sleazy bosses (in the music business) just as he now routinely walked away from women who were drawn to the sight of a man caring for his baby daughter during business hours. Hell, hed met Rebecca after trying to chase down a guy in a wolf mask whod snatched her purse the day before Halloween. But Alex had caved to Bennie Salazar without a fight. Why? Because his apartment would soon be dark and airless? Because being with Cara-Ann while Rebecca worked full-time teaching and writing had made him restless? Because he never could quite forget that every byte of information hed posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use itthat he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when hed felt most subversive? Or was it the odd symmetry of having first heard Bennie Salazars name from that lost girl hed dated once, at the very beginning, and now meeting Bennie at last, a decade and a half later, through playgroup?

Alex didnt know. He didnt need to know. What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it.

Physics is required. Three semesters. If you fail, youre out of the program.

For a marketing degree? Alex was dumbfounded.

It used to be epidemiology, Lulu said. You know, when the viral model was still current.

Dont people still say viral? Alex was wishing hed had a real cup of coffee, not the swill they were pouring at this Greek diner. Bennies assistant, Lulu, appeared to have had fifteen or twentyunless this was her personality.

No one says viral anymore, Lulu said. I mean, maybe thoughtlessly, the way we still say connect or transmitthose old mechanical metaphors that have nothing to do with how information travels. See, reach isnt describable in terms of cause and effect anymore: its simultaneous. Its faster than the speed of light, thats actually been measured. So now we study particle physics.

What next? String theory?

Thats an elective.

Lulu was in her early twenties, a graduate student at Barnard and Bennies full-time assistant: a living embodiment of the new handset employee: paperless, deskless, commuteless, and theoretically omnipresent, though Lulu appeared to be ignoring a constant chatter of handset beeps and burps. The photos on her page had not done justice to the arresting, wide-eyed symmetry of her face, the radiant shine of her hair. She was clean: no piercings, tattoos, or scarifications. All the kids were now. And who could blame them, Alex thought, after watching three generations of flaccid tattoos droop like moth-eaten upholstery over poorly stuffed biceps and saggy asses?

Cara-Ann was asleep in her sling, her face wedged in the slot between Alexs jaw and collarbone, her fruity, biscuity breath filling his nostrils. He had thirty minutes, maybe forty-five, before she would wake up wanting lunch. Yet Alex felt a perverse need to go backward, to understand Lulu, to pinpoint why exactly she disconcerted him.

How did you find your way to Bennie? he asked.

His ex-wife used to work for my mom, Lulu said, years ago, when I was a little girl. Ive known Bennie foreverand his son, Chris. Hes two years older than me.

Huh, Alex said. And what does your mom do?

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Whats her name?

Dolly.

Alex was inclined to pursue this line of questioning back to the moment of Lulus conception, but stopped himself. A silence fell, punctuated by the arrival of their food. Alex had meant to order soup, but that had seemed spineless, so at the last minute hed gone for a Reuben sandwich, forgetting that he couldnt chew without waking Cara-Ann. Lulu had ordered lemon meringue pie; she ate the meringue in tiny flecks off the prongs of her fork.

So, she said, when Alex failed to speak up. Bennie says were going to make a blind team, with you as the anonymous captain.

He used those terms?

Lulu laughed. No, those are marketing terms. From school.

Actually, theyre sports terms. Fromsports, Alex said. Hed been a team captain many times, though in the presence of someone so young it felt too long ago to really count.

Sports metaphors still work, Lulu reflected.

So this is a known thing? he asked. The blind team? Alex had thought it was his own brain wave: reduce the shame and guilt of parrothood by assembling a team that doesnt know its a teamor that it has a captain. Each team member would deal individually with Lulu, with Alex orchestrating in secret from above.

Oh, sure, Lulu said. BTsblind teamswork especially well with older people. I meanshe smiledpeople over thirty.

And why is that?

Older people are more resistant to She seemed to falter.

Being bought?

Lulu smiled. See, thats what we call a disingenuous metaphor, she said. DMs look like descriptions, but theyre really judgments. I mean, is a person who sells oranges being bought? Is the person who repairs appliances selling out?

No, because what they do is up front, Alex said, aware that he was condescending. Its out in the open.

And, see, those metaphorsup front and out in the openare part of a system we call atavistic purism. AP implies the existence of an ethically perfect state, which not only doesnt exist and never existed, but its usually used to shore up the prejudices of whoevers making the judgments.

Alex felt Cara-Ann stir against his neck, and let a long fatty piece of pastrami slide down his throat unchewed. How long had they been sitting here? Longer than hed meant to, that was for sure, and yet Alex couldnt resist the urge to brace himself against this girl and push. Her confidence seemed more drastic than the outcome of a happy childhood; it was cellular confidence, as if Lulu were a queen in disguise, without need or wish to be recognized.

So, he said. You think theres nothing inherently wrong with believing in somethingor saying you dofor money?

Inherently wrong, she said. Gosh, thats a great example of calcified morality. I have to remember that for my old modern ethics teacher, Mr. Bastie; he collects them. Look, she said, straightening her spine and flicking her rather grave (despite the friendly antics of her face) gray eyes at Alex, if I believe, I believe. Who are you to judge my reasons?

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Lulu grimaced. Another thing about her generation: no one swore. Alex had actually heard teenagers say things like shucks and golly, without apparent irony. This is something we see a lot, Lulu mused, studying Alex. Ethical ambivalencewe call it EAin the face of a strong marketing action.

Dont tell me: SMA.

Yes, she said. Which for you means picking the blind team. On the surface it looks like you might not even do it, youre so ambivalent, but I think its the opposite: I think the EA is a kind of inoculation, a way of excusing yourself in advance for something you actually want to do. No offense, she added.

Kind of like saying no offense when youve just said something offensive?

Lulu underwent the most extreme blush Alex had ever witnessed: a vermilion heat encompassed her face so abruptly that the effect was of something violent taking place, as if she were choking or about to hemorrhage. Alex sat up reflexively and checked on Cara-Ann. He found her eyes wide open.

Youre right, Lulu said, taking a rickety breath. I apologize.

No sweat, Alex said. The blush had unsettled him more than Lulus confidence. He watched it drain from her face, leaving her skin a jarring white. You okay? he asked.

Im fine. I just get tired of talking.

Ditto, Alex said. He felt exhausted.

There are so many ways to go wrong, Lulu said. All weve got are metaphors, and theyre never exactly right. You cant ever just Say. The. Thing.

Hoo dat? Cara-Ann asked, her gaze fixed on Lulu.

Thats Lulu.

Can I just T you? Lulu asked.

You mean

Now. Can I T you now. The question was a formality; she was already working her handset. An instant later Alexs own vibrated in his pants pocket; he had to jostle Cara-Ann to remove it.

U hav sum nAms 4 me? he read on the screen.

hEr thA r, Alex typed, and flushed the list of fifty contacts, along with notes, tips on angles of approach, and individual no-nos, into Lulus handset.

GrAt. Il gt 2 wrk.

They looked up at each other. That was easy, Alex said.

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Unt dat, Cara-Ann said. She was pointing at Alexs handset, which hed been using, unthinkingly, mere inches from her face.

No, he said, suddenly anxious. Wewe have to go.

Wait, Lulu said, seeming for the first time to notice Cara-Ann. Ill T her.

Uh, we dont but Alex felt unable to explain to Lulu the beliefs he shared with Rebecca about children and handsets. And now his own was vibrating again; Cara-Ann shrieked with delight and speared the screen with her chubby pointer. I do dat, she informed him.

Litl grl, U hav a nyc dad, Alex dutifully read aloud, a blush promptly staking a claim on his own face. Cara-Ann pounded keys with the hectic fervor of a starving dog unleashed in a meat locker. Now a blooper appeared, one of the stock images people sent to kids: a lion under a sparkling sun. Cara-Ann zoomed in on different parts of the lion as if shed been doing this since birth. Lulu Td: Nvr met my dad. Dyd b4 I ws brn. Alex read this one in silence.

Wow. Im sorry, he said, looking up at Lulu, but his voice seemed too louda coarse intrusion. He dropped his eyes, and through the blender whir of Cara-Anns pointing fingers, he managed to T: Sad.

Ancnt hstry, Lulu Td back.

Das mine! Cara-Ann proclaimed with guttural indignation, stretching from her sling and stabbing her pointer at Alexs pocket. Inside it, the handset was vibratinghad been almost constantly since he and Cara-Ann had left the diner hours before. Was it possible that his daughter could feel the vibrations through his body?

Mine lolli-pop! Alex wasnt sure how shed arrived at this name for the handset, but he certainly wasnt correcting her.

What do you want, honeybunch? Rebecca asked in the oversolicitous (Alex thought) way she often spoke to their daughter when shed spent the day at work.

Daddy lolli-pop.

Rebecca looked quizzically at Alex. Do you have a lollipop?

Of course not.

They were hurrying west, trying to reach the river before sunset. The warming-related adjustments to Earths orbit had shortened the winter days, so that now, in January, sunset was taking place at 4:23.

Can I take her? Rebecca asked.

She lifted Cara-Ann out of the sling and placed her on the sooty sidewalk. The girl took a few of her stuttering, scarecrow steps. Well miss it if she walks, Alex said, and Rebecca picked her up and walked more quickly. Alex had surprised his wife outside the library, something hed begun doing often to avoid the construction noise from their apartment. But today he had an extra reason: he needed to tell her about his arrangement with Bennie. Now, without further delays.

The sun had dropped behind the water wall by the time they reached the Hudson, but when they climbed the steps to the WATERWALK! as the walls boarded rampart was exuberantly branded, they found the sun still poised, ruby-orange and yolklike, just above Hoboken. Down, Cara-Ann commanded, and Rebecca released her. She ran toward the iron fence along the walls outer edge, always jammed at this hour with people who probably (like Alex) had barely noticed sunset before the wall went up. Now they craved it. As he followed Cara-Ann into the crowd, Alex took Rebeccas hand. For as long as hed known her, his wife had offset her sexy beauty with a pair of dorky glasses, sometimes leaning toward Dick Smart, other times Catwoman. Alex had loved the glasses for their inability to suppress Rebeccas sexy beauty, but lately he wasnt so sure; the glasses, along with Rebeccas prematurely graying hair and the fact that she was often short on sleep, threatened to reify her disguise into an identity: a fragile, harried academic slaving to finish a book while teaching two courses and chairing several committees. It was Alexs own role in this tableau that most depressed him: the aging music freak who couldnt earn his keep, sapping the life (or at least the sexy beauty) from his wife.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term shed invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty wordsfriend and real and story and changewords that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like identity, search, and cloud, had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had American become an ironic term? How had democracy come to be used in an arch, mocking way?

As usual, a hush enclosed the crowd in the last few seconds before the sun slipped away. Even Cara-Ann, in Rebeccas arms, went still. Alex felt the lees of sunlight on his face and closed his eyes, savoring its faint warmth, his ears full of the slosh of a passing ferry. The moment the sun had gone, everyone moved suddenly, as if a spell had broken. Down, said Cara-Ann, and took off along the Waterwalk. Rebecca ran after her, laughing. Alex swiftly checked his handset.

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Yep frm Sancho

Cal: no f-way

At each response, he experienced an alloy of emotions that had become familiar in the course of one afternoon: triumph marbled with scorn at the yeses, disappointment with an updraft of admiration at the nos. He was just beginning to type a response when he heard stamping feet, then his daughters longing cry: Lolllllllli-POP! Alex flicked the handset away, but it was too late: Cara-Ann was tugging at his jeans. Mine dat, she said.

Rebecca sidled over. So. Thats the lollipop.

Apparently.

You let her use it?

One time, okay? But his heart was racing.

You just changed the rules, all by yourself?

I didnt change them, I slipped. Okay? Am I allowed to have one goddamn slip?

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. Alex felt her studying him. Why now? she asked. Today, after all this timeI dont get it.

Theres nothing to get! Alex barked, but he was thinking: How does she know? And then: What does she know?

They stood, eyeing each other in the expiring light. Cara-Ann waited quietly, the lollipop apparently forgotten. The Waterwalk was nearly empty. It was time to tell Rebecca about the deal with Bennienow, now!but Alex felt paralyzed, as if the disclosure had already been poisoned. He had a crazy wish to T Rebecca, even found himself mentally composing the message: Nu job in th wrksbig $ pos. pls kEp opn mind.

Lets go, Rebecca said.

Alex lifted Cara-Ann back into the sling, and they descended the water wall into darkness. As they made their way through the gloomy streets, Alex found himself thinking of the day he and Rebecca had met. After trying and failing to run down the wolf-headed purse snatcher, Alex had coaxed her out for beers and burritos, then had sex with her on the roof of her building on Avenue D, to escape her three roommates. He hadnt known Rebeccas last name. And in that moment, without warning, Alex abruptly recalled the name of the girl who had worked for Bennie Salazar: Sasha. It came to him effortlessly, like a door falling open. Sasha. Alex held the name carefully in his mind, and sure enough, the first intimations of memory followed it skittishly into the light: a hotel lobby; a small, overwarm apartment. It was like trying to remember a dream. Had he fucked her? Alex figured he must havenearly all those early dates had concluded with sex, hard as this was to fathom from his communal bed awash in the smell of baby flesh and a chemical tinge of biodegradable diaper. But Sasha refused to give ground on the question of sex; she seemed to wink at him (green eyes?) and slip away. u herd th nUs? Alex read on his handset late one night, as he sat in his usual spot by the window.

yup i herd

The news was that Bennie had moved the Scotty Hausmann concert outdoors, to the Footprint, a change that would require more outreach from Alexs blind parrots (for no additional pay) so that any potential concertgoers would know where to go.

Bennie had told Alex about the venue change earlier, on the phone: Scottys not wild about enclosed spaces. Im thinking he might be happier out in the open. It was the most recent in an onslaught of escalating demands and special needs. Hes a solitary person (Bennie, explaining Scottys need for a trailer). He has a hard time with conversation (why Scotty refused to do interviews). He hasnt spent much time with children (why Scotty might be troubled by pointer noise). Hes wary of technology (why Scotty refused to narrate a stream or answer Ts sent to him by fans via the page Bennie had created for him). The guy pictured on that pagelong-haired, jaunty, grinning a mouthful of porcelain and surrounded by a lot of big colorful ballscaused an itch of aggravation in Alex every time he looked at him.

wat nxt? he Td Lulu back. oystrs?

only Ets chInEs

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tel me hEs betr in prsn

nevr met

4 rEl??

shy

#@&*

They could meander indefinitely, these conversations, and in the pauses Alex monitored his blind parrots: checking their pages and streams for raving endorsements of Scotty Hausmann, adding truants to a violators list. He hadnt seen or even spoken to Lulu since their meeting three weeks ago; she was a person who lived in his pocket, whom hed ascribed her own special vibration.

Alex looked up. The construction now covered the bottom halves of his windows, its shafts and beams a craggy silhouette beyond which the prong of the Empire State Building was still just visible. In a few days, it would be gone. Cara-Ann had been frightened when the structure crawling with men had first made its jagged appearance outside their windows, and Alex had tried desperately to make a game of it. Up goes the building! he would say each day, as if this progress were exciting, hopeful, and Cara-Ann had taken his cue, clapping her hands and exhorting, Up! Up!

up gOs th bldg, he Td Lulu now, remarking on how easily baby talk fitted itself into the crawl space of a T.

bldg? came Lulus response.

nxt 2 myn. no mOr Ar/lyt

cn u stp it?

tryd

cn u move?

stuk

nyc, Lulu wrote, which confused Alex at first; the sarcasm seemed unlike her. Then he realized that she wasnt saying nice. She was saying New York City.

The concert day was unseasonably warm: eighty-nine degrees and dry, with angled golden light that stabbed their eyes at intersections and stretched their shadows to absurd lengths. The trees, which had bloomed in January, were now in tentative leaf. Rebecca had stuffed Cara-Ann into a dress from last summer with a duck across the front, and with Alex, theyd joined a mass of other young families on the skyscraper corridor of Sixth Avenue, Cara-Ann riding on Alexs back in a titanium pack theyd recently bought to replace the sling. Strollers were prohibited at public gatheringsthey hampered evacuation.

Alex had been debating how to propose this concert to Rebecca, but in the end he hadnt needed to; checking her handset one night after Cara-Ann was asleep, his wife had said, Scotty Hausmannthats the guy Bennie Salazar played for us, right?

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I keep hearing about this free concert hes giving on Saturday in the Footprint, for kids and adults.

Huh.

Might give you a way to reconnect with Bennie. She was still smarting, on Alexs behalf, over the fact that Bennie hadnt hired him. This made Alex writhe with guilt whenever the subject came up.

True, hed said.

So lets go, shed said. Why not, if its free?

Past Fourteenth Street, the skyscrapers fell away, and the slanted sun was upon them, still too low in the February sky to be shielded by any visor. In the glare Alex almost failed to spot his old friend Zeus, then tried to avoid himZeus was one of his blind parrots. Too late; Rebecca had already called his name. Zeuss Russian girlfriend, Natasha, was with him, each of them carrying one of their six-month-old twins in a pouch.

You going to hear Scotty? Zeus asked, as if Scotty Hausmann were someone they both knew.

We are, Alex said carefully. You?

Hell yeah, Zeus said. A lap steel guitar with a slideyou ever heard one live? And were not even talking rockabilly. Zeus worked for a blood bank and, in his spare time, helped Down syndrome kids make and sell printed sweatshirts. Alex found himself searching Zeuss face for some visible sign of parrothood, but his friend seemed the same right down to his soul patch, which hed kept all these years since theyd gone out of fashion.

Hes supposed to be really good live, said Natasha, in her strong accent.

I heard that, too, Rebecca said. From, like, eight different people. Its almost strange.

Not strange, Natasha said, with a harsh laugh. People are getting paid. Alex felt a blaze of heat in his face and found it hard to look at Natasha. Still, it was clear that she spoke without knowledge; Zeus had kept his role a secret.

But these are people I know, Rebecca said.

It was one of those days when every intersection brings up another familiar face, old friends and friends of friends, acquaintances, and people who just look familiar. Alex had been in the city too long to know how he knew them all: clubs where hed deejayed? The law office where hed worked as a secretary? The pickup basketball game hed played for years in Tompkins Square Park? Hed felt on the verge of leaving New York since the day hed arrived, at twenty-foureven now, he and Rebecca were poised to spring at any time, should a better job come along in a cheaper placebut somehow, enough years had managed to pass that he felt like hed seen every person in Manhattan at least once. He wondered if Sasha was somewhere in this crowd. Alex found himself searching the vaguely familiar faces for hers without knowing what she looked like, as if his reward for recognizing Sasha, all these years later, would be finding out the answer to that question.

You going south?we heard about thisnot just for pointerslive hes supposed to be

After the ninth or tenth exchange of this kind, which happened somewhere around Washington Square, it became suddenly clear to Alex that all of these people, the parents and the kidless, the single and the coupled, gay and straight, clean and pierced, were on their way to hear Scotty Hausmann. Every single one. The discovery swept over him in a surge of disbelief, followed by a rush of ownership and powerhed done it, Christ he was a genius at itfollowed by queasiness (it was a triumph he wasnt proud of), followed by fear: What if Scotty Hausmann was not a great performer? What if he was mediocre, or worse? Followed by a self-administered poultice that arrived in the form of a brain-T: no 1 nOs abt me. Im invysbl.

You okay? Rebecca asked.

Yeah. Why.

You seem nervous.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

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Youre squeezing my hand, she said. Then added, smiling under her buttonhole glasses, Its nice.

By the time they crossed Canal and entered Lower Manhattan (where the density of children was now the highest in the nation), Alex and Rebecca and Cara-Ann were part of a throng of people that overwhelmed the sidewalk and filled the streets. Traffic had stopped, and choppers were converging overhead, flogging the air with a sound Alex hadnt been able to bear in the early yearstoo loud, too loudbut over time hed gotten used to it: the price of safety. Today their military cackle felt weirdly appropriate, Alex thought, glancing around him at the sea of slings and sacs and baby backpacks, older children carrying younger ones, because wasnt this a kind of army? An army of children: the incarnation of faith in those who werent aware of having any left.

if thr r childrn, thr mst b a fUtr, rt?

Before them, the new buildings spiraled gorgeously against the sky, so much nicer than the old ones (which Alex had only seen in pictures), more like sculptures than buildings, because they were empty. Approaching them, the crowd began to slow, backing up as those in front entered the space around the reflecting pools, the density of police and security agents (identifiable by their government handsets) suddenly palpable, along with visual scanning devices affixed to cornices, lampposts, and trees. The weight of what had happened here more than twenty years ago was still faintly present for Alex, as it always was when he came to the Footprint. He perceived it as a sound just out of earshot, the vibration of an old disturbance. Now it seemed more insistent than ever: a low, deep thrum that felt primally familiar, as if it had been whirring inside all the sounds that Alex had made and collected over the years: their hidden pulse.

Rebecca clutched his hand, her slim fingers moist. I love you, Alex, she said.

Dont say it like that. Like something bad is about to happen.

Im nervous, she said. Now Im nervous, too.

Its the choppers, Alex said.

Excellent, Bennie murmured. Wait right there, Alex, if you wouldnt mind. Right by that door.

Alex had left Rebecca and Cara-Ann and their friends in a multitude that had swelled into the many thousands, everyone waiting patientlythen less patientlyas the starting time of the concert came and went, watching four jumpy roadies guard the raised platform where Scotty Hausmann was supposed to play. After a T from Lulu that Bennie needed help, Alex had snaked his way through a gauntlet of security checks to Scotty Hausmanns trailer.

Inside, Bennie and an old roadie were slumped on black folding chairs. There was no sign of Scotty Hausmann. Alexs throat felt very dry. Im invsbl, he thought.

Bennie, listen to me, said the roadie. His hands shook beneath the cuffs of his plaid flannel shirt.

You can do this, Bennie said. Im telling you.

Listen to me, Bennie.

Stay by the door, Alex, Bennie said again, and he was rightAlex had been about to move closer, to ask what the fuck Bennie thought he was trying to do: put this decrepit roadie on in Scotty Hausmanns place? To impersonate him? A guy with gutted cheeks and hands so red and gnarled he looked like hed have trouble playing a hand of poker, much less the strange, sensuous instrument clutched between his knees? But when Alexs eyes fell on the instrument, he suddenly knew, with an awful spasm in his gut: the decrepit roadie was Scotty Hausmann.

The people are here, Bennie said. The thing is in motion. I cant stop it.

Its too late. Im too old. I justI cant.

Scotty Hausmann sounded like hed recently wept or was on the verge of weepingpossibly both. He had shoulder-length hair slicked away from his face and empty, blasted eyes, all of it amounting to a derelict impression despite his clean shave. All Alex recognized were his teeth: white and sparklingembarrassed-looking, as if they knew there was only so much you could do with this wreck of a face. And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.

You can, Scottyyou have to, Bennie said, with his usual calm, but through his thinning silver hair Alex caught a shimmer of sweat on his crown. Times a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?

A Visit From the Goon Squad

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Benny took a long breath, a flick of eyes at his watch the only sign of his impatience. You came to me, Scotty, remember that? he said. Twenty-some-odd years agoyou believe it was that long? You brought me a fish.

Yeah.

I thought you were going to kill me.

I shouldve, Scotty said. A single hack of laughter. I wanted to.

And when I hit bottomwhen Steph threw me out and I got fired from Sows EarI tracked you down. And what did I say? You remember, when I found you fishing in the East River? Out of the blue? What did I say?

Scotty mumbled something.

I said, Its time you became a star. And what did you say to me? Bennie leaned close to Scotty, took the mans trembling wrists in his own, rather elegant hands, and peered into his face. You said, I dare you.

There was a long pause. Then, without warning, Scotty leaped to his feet, upending his chair as he lunged for the trailer door. Alex was fully prepared to step aside and let him pass, but Scotty got there first and began trying to muscle him out of the way, at which point Alex realized that his jobthe sole reason Bennie had placed him therewas to block the door and keep the singer from escaping. They grappled in huffing silence, Scottys desiccated face so close to Alexs that he was inhaling the guys breath, which smelled of beer, or the aftermath of beer. Then he refined his opinion: Jgermeister.

Bennie seized Scotty from behind, but it wasnt much of a holdAlex made this discovery when Scotty managed to rear back and head-butt him in the solar plexus. Alex gasped and doubled over. He heard Bennie murmuring to Scotty as if trying to calm a horse.

When he could breathe again, Alex made an effort to consult with his boss. Bennie, if he doesnt want to

Scotty swung at Alexs face, but Alex darted aside and the musicians fist smashed the flimsy door. There was a tannic smell of blood.

Alex tried again: Bennie, this seems kind of

Scotty wrenched free of Bennie and kneed Alex in the balls, which made him crumple to the floor in fetal agony. Scotty kicked him aside and threw open the door.

Hello, came a voice from outside. A high, clear voice, distantly familiar. Im Lulu.

Through his roiling pain, Alex managed to turn his head and look at what was happening outside the trailer. Scotty was still in the doorway, looking down. The slanted winter sun ignited Lulus hair, making a nimbus around her face. She was blocking Scottys path, one arm on each of the flimsy metal railings. Scotty could easily have knocked her over, but he didnt. And in hesitating, looking down for an extra second at this lovely girl blocking his way, Scotty lost.

Can I walk with you? Lulu asked.

Bennie had scrambled to retrieve the guitar, which he handed to Scotty over Alexs prone form. Scotty took the instrument, held it to his chest, and inhaled a long, shaky breath. Only if youll take my arm, darling, he replied, and a ghost version of Scotty Hausmann flickered at Alex from the dregs that were left, sexy and rakish.

Lulu twined her arm through Scottys, and they moved straight into the crowd: the addled geezer carrying the long, strange instrument, and the young woman who might have been his daughter. Bennie hauled Alex onto his feet, and they followed, Alexs legs watery and spastic. The oceanic sprawl of people shifted spontaneously, clearing a path to the platform where a stool and twelve enormous microphones had been positioned.

Lulu, Alex said to Bennie, and shook his head.

A Visit From the Goon Squad

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Scotty climbed onto the platform and sat on the stool. Without a glance at the audience or a word of introduction, he began to play I Am a Little Lamb, a tune whose childishness was belied by the twanging filigree of his slide guitar, its gushy metallic complexity. He followed that with Goats Like Oats and A Little Tree Is Just Like Me. The amplification was fine and powerful enough to eclipse the chopper throb and deliver the sound even to the distant reaches of the crowd, where it disappeared between buildings. Alex listened in a sort of cringe, expecting a roar of rejection from these thousands hed managed secretly to assemble, whose goodwill had already been taxed by the long wait. But it didnt happen; the pointers, who already knew these songs, clapped and screeched their approval, and the adults seemed intrigued, attuned to double meanings and hidden layers, which were easy to find. And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar. Whatever the reason, a swell of approval palpable as rain lifted from the center of the crowd and rolled out toward its edges, where it crashed against buildings and water wall and rolled back at Scotty with redoubled force, lifting him off his stool, onto his feet (the roadies quickly adjusting the microphones), exploding the quavering husk Scotty had appeared to be just moments before and unleashing something strong, charismatic, and fierce. Anyone who was there that day will tell you the concert really started when Scotty stood up. Thats when he began singing the songs hed been writing for years underground, songs no one had ever heard, or anything like themEyes in My Head, Xs and Os, Whos Watching Hardestballads of paranoia and disconnection ripped from the chest of a man you knew just by looking had never had a page or a profile or a handle or a handset, who was part of no ones data, a guy who had lived in the cracks all these years, forgotten and full of rage, in a way that now registered as pure. Untouched. But of course, its hard to know anymore who was really at that first Scotty Hausmann concertmore people claim it than could possibly have fit into the space, capacious and mobbed though it was. Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesnt a myth belong to everyone?

Standing next to Bennie, who watched Scotty while frenetically working his handset, Alex felt what was happening around him as if it had already happened and he were looking back. He wished he could be with Rebecca and Cara-Ann, first dully, then acutelywith pain. His handset had no trouble locating his wifes handset, but it took many minutes of scanning that section of the crowd with his zoom to actually spot her. In the process, he panned the rapt, sometimes tearstained faces of adults, the elated, scant-toothed grins of toddlers, and young people like Lulu, who was now holding hands with a statuesque black man, both of them gazing at Scotty Hausmann with the rhapsodic joy of a generation finally descrying someone worthy of its veneration.

At last he found Rebecca, smiling, holding Cara-Ann in her arms. She was dancing. They were too far away for Alex to reach them, and the distance felt irrevocable, a chasm that would keep him from ever again touching the delicate silk of Rebeccas eyelids, or feeling, through his daughters ribs, the scramble of her heartbeat. Without the zoom, he couldnt even see them. In desperation, he Td Rebecca, pls wAt 4 me, my bUtiful wyf, then kept his zoom trained on her face until he saw her register the vibration, pause in her dancing, and reach for it.

It happens once in your life, if youre the luckiest man on earth, Bennie said, an event like that.

Youve had your share, Alex said.

I havent, Bennie said. No, Alex, nothats what Im saying! Not even close! He was in a prolonged state of euphoria, collar loose, arms swinging. The celebration had already happened; champagne had been poured (Jgermeister for Scotty), dumplings eaten in Chinatown, a thousand calls from the press fielded and deferred, the little girls ferried home in cabs by the joyful, exultant wives (Did you hear him? Rebecca kept asking Alex. Have you ever heard anything like him? Then whispering, close to his ear, Ask Bennie again about a job!), closure achieved with Lulu at the introduction of her fianc, Joe, who hailed from Kenya and was getting his Ph.D. in robotics at Columbia. Now it was well after midnight, and Bennie and Alex were walking together on the Lower East Side because Bennie wanted to walk. Alex felt weirdly depressedand oppressed by the need to hide his depression from Bennie.

You were fantastic, Alex, Bennie said, mussing Alexs hair. Youre a natural, Im telling you.

A natural what? Alex almost said, but stopped himself. Instead he asked, after a pause, Did you ever have an employeenamed Sasha?

Bennie stood still. The name seemed to float in the air between them, incandescent. Sasha. Yes, I did, Bennie said. She was my assistant. Did you know her?

I met her once, a long time ago.

She lived right around here, Bennie said, beginning to walk again. Sasha. I havent thought about her in a long time.

What was she like?

She was great, Bennie said. I was crazy about her. But it turned out she had sticky fingers. He glanced at Alex. She stole things.

Youre kidding.

Bennie shook his head. It was kind of a sickness, I think.

A connection was trying to form in Alexs mind, but he couldnt complete it. Had he known that Sasha was a thief? Discovered it in the course of that night? Soyou fired her?

Had to, Bennie said. After twelve years. She was like the other half of my brain. Three-quarters, really.

You have any idea what shes doing now?

None. I think Id know if she were still in the business. Although maybe nothe laughedIve been pretty out of it myself.

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Alex looked up at the building, sooty against the lavender sky, and experienced a hot-cold flash of recognition, a shiver of dj vu, as if he were returning to a place that no longer existed.

You remember which apartment? he asked.

4F, I think, Bennie said. And then, after a moment, Want to see if shes home?

He was grinning, and the grin made him look young; they were coconspirators, Alex thought, prowling outside a girls apartment, he and Bennie Salazar.

Is her last name Taylor? Alex asked, looking at the handwritten tab beside the buzzer. He was grinning, too.

No, but it could be a roommate.

Ill ring, Alex said.

He leaned in to the buzzer, every electron in his body yearning up those ill-lit angular stairs he now remembered as clearly as if hed left Sashas apartment just this morning. He followed them in his mind until he saw himself arriving at a small, cloistered apartmentpurples, greenshumid with a smell of steam heat and scented candles. A radiator hiss. Little things on the windowsills. A bathtub in the kitchenyes, shed had one of those! It was the only one hed ever seen.

Bennie stood close to Alex, and they waited together, suspended in the same precarious excitement. Alex found he was holding his breath. Would Sasha buzz them in, and would he and Bennie climb those stairs together to her door? Would Alex recognize her, and would she recognize him? And in that moment, the longing hed felt for Sasha at last assumed a clear shape: Alex imagined walking into her apartment and finding himself still therehis young self, full of schemes and high standards, with nothing decided yet. The fantasy imbued him with careening hope. He pushed the buzzer again, and as more seconds passed, Alex felt a gradual draining loss. The whole crazy pantomime collapsed and blew away.

Shes not here, Bennie said. Im betting shes far away. He tipped his gaze at the sky. I hope she found a good life, he said at last. She deserves it.

They resumed walking. Alex felt an ache in his eyes and throat. I dont know what happened to me, he said, shaking his head. I honestly dont.

Bennie glanced at him, a middle-aged man with chaotic silver hair and thoughtful eyes. You grew up, Alex, he said, just like the rest of us.

Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasnt an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.

th blu nyt

th stRs u cant c

th hum tht nevr gOs awy

A sound of clicking heels on the pavement punctured the quiet. Alex snapped open his eyes, and he and Bennie both turnedwhirled, really, peering for Sasha in the ashy dark. But it was another girl, young and new to the city, fiddling with her keys.

Acknowledgments

For their inspiration, motivation, and superb guidance, Im indebted to Jordan Pavlin, Deborah Treisman, and Amanda Urban.

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Page: 97

For their patient attention to getting the book made, thanks to Lydia Buechler, Leslie Levine, and Marci Lewis.

For their expertise in fields of which I knew little or less, thanks to Alex Busansky, Alexandra Egan, Ken Goldberg, Jacob Slichter (for his book, So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star), and Chuck Zwicky.

For their fine reading company over many years, thanks to Erika Belsey, David Herskovits (again and always), Alice Naude, Jamie Wolf, and Alexi Worth.

Finally, Im grateful to a group of peers whose exceptional talents and generosity Ive leaned on heavily, and without whom there would be no Goon Squad (as they know better than anyone): Ruth Danon, Lisa Fugard, Melissa Maxwell, David Rosenstock, and Elizabeth Tippens.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares, and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2010 by Jennifer Egan

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Egan, Jennifer. A visit from the Goon Squad / Jennifer Egan.1st ed. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-307-59362-7 1. Punk rock musiciansFiction. 2. Sound recording executives and producersFiction. 3. Older menFiction. 4. Young womenFiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title. PS3555.G292V57 2010 813.54dc22 2009046496

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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