The bed was for some in town a playground, as it was for newcomers Rex and Nevada when not a platform for their business ventures; it was a platform of sorts for Gordon the photographer as well, an artistic prop like a chair, a bathtub, the street, while for his friend Ellsworth it was more like a patch of meadow in the tangled forest of his creative imagination (the Artist had his hand on the Model’s thigh again, lecturing the sardonic Stalker, hovering, unseen, nearby, on the higher morality of aesthetic truth); for many, like oldtimers Marge or Otis, the bed was simply a place to get some shut-eye; but for some it was nothing short of the rack, sheer hell on sheets. Try telling Veronica, for example, that sex was fun. It had a certain tickle, all right, but it was more like terminal athlete’s foot. Or hemorrhoids, more aptly, given her dearly beloved’s brutish fancies. For whom, the middle Maynard, no joy either. More like prosecuting a tough case, proving he could still do it, even if he hated it. Contrarily, Gretchen and Columbia, who were otherwise finding the town a bit shaky for them of late, were having a grand time there, playing with vibrators, ointments, penis extenders, and condoms, ribbed or pimpled, some even with ears and noses and little Martian antennae on them, which Gretchen had ordered through catalogues that arrived at the pharmacy and which kept them giggling throughout their evening recreation time, which was strictly limited, since they were both working women. Not that it was all just idle frolic, it was also quite educational, Columbia learning at last how men really worked when she took her turn strapping on a clear plastic penis with its inner anatomy showing through in bright colors and had a go for herself. For Alf, nurse Lumby’s dyspeptic boss and deliverer of Gretchen’s brood (an unusual case: he had to break her hymen to get the first ones out), a bed was where most people went to die, he attended them there and watched them go, his own true heart among them, and living alone now, he often avoided his own, wandering the streets at night or dropping off on the living room couch during consolingly banal TV reruns, pap against the dread. Even when Harriet was alive and they were still copulating (it was fun, they’d got a kick out of it for a while, in spite of their overawareness of its mechanics, but came quickly to think of it as kid stuff, and after the babies were born, turned to it only when in goofier moods, most often drunk or with others), they preferred any private place, in or out of the house, to the dreary bed, Harriet even more blunt than Alf about “crawling into the coffin” at night. “I’m pooped, I’m dead,” she’d say, leaving a party. “I’m going to go put the meat in the cooler before it goes off.” At a foreign-made piece of erotic fluff in the old Palace Theater one night, during a soft-focus view from the ceiling of lovers on a bed, the old army nurse had provoked an auditoriumful of irritable shushing by remarking, too loudly, that whenever she looked down on a bed like that, all she could think about was torn limbs, Alf adding laconically to turn the shushes to self-conscious laughter that he couldn’t be sure because of the fuzzy camera work, but he thought the actress (fuzzy camera work was his problem now: hard as he stared at his finger—there was a message on its tip, he knew, something about a patient: what was it?—he couldn’t bring it into focus) had a thyroid problem and recommended she get a checkup. Kate, who was there that night with Oxford, sitting beside them, and who in general had a benign view of beds (though, in the end, when it came, she refused to retire to one), pointed out that the white-sheeted bed viewed at that angle was a kind of screen-within-a-screen and that consequently the coupled lovers were not merely actors in a movie and thus nothing more than the ghostly illusions of a flickering light, but they were actors playing actors, and so had doubly lost their substance, as though to say that love itself was such an emptying out of emptiness, Oxford replying: “Or such a luminous density of layered sensations,” all of which was making the younger crowd in the theater wish these old farts, long past a good time, would shut up and stop spoiling it for others. Dutch had booked that film, the bed as theater being his own preferred use of that ubiquitous piece of furniture: gave him his jollies without aggravation or anxieties and no strings after. He missed the old Palace with its big screen and high ceilings, appreciating in his own way the remark Waldo had made recently during one of his motel junkie-fucks that the beds he kept crawling into seemed to be drifting farther and farther away from the center as though that center were somehow getting lost, fading from view, the emaciated kid with him replying that she didn’t know there ever was a center. “Sounds like you’re on some kinda guilt trip, man.” “Naw … haw!” For Floyd the hardware man, the bed was also a theater of sorts. He liked to take John’s wife there, grab her by the hair, tie her to the bedposts, and whip her with his red suspenders, which he called his “cat.” Then she’d moan and toss her head about and beg him to make love to her or kill her, she couldn’t stand the passion welling up in her. He’d let her kiss and suck at his johnnie, chastising her all the while with his whistling cat. Then she’d belch, and he’d do what he could to have some kind of orgasm, and get off. He tried to imagine whipping Edna with his suspenders, but it seemed incredibly silly.

Why did Edna belch whenever she engaged in what a boy once called, inviting her to one, a mattress dance? She couldn’t rightly say, it just came like that when she did, if coming was what she truly did (for Edna, it was more like being very nervous about something, and then suddenly, blissfully, not being nervous anymore: she always popped straight off afterwards without so much as a blink), but it probably had something to do with her stepmother’s stern admonition that burping was the most wicked thing a body could do: just letting go like that, they lord, not giving a care. Maybe she was really talking about letting go out the other end, not being able to bring herself to say the word for that, but ever since, whenever Edna felt crazily reckless, like when a person had his thing in her, for example, up came the burps. Her stepmother also told her, on her wedding day, “I don’t know how you’re gonna cotton to what comes next, Edna, but wither you love it nor hate it, it won’t last long. When the lollygagging’s over, then love—if there sincerely be any—will come at you looking like something else again. If you recognize it and show you’re grateful for it, however contrary it is from what you’re customed to, then you’ll have love in all ways passable in this world of the mortal body, but if you get bitter about what you’ve lost, and losing is mostly what you’ll know, then, sure as you’re born to die, Edna, love’ll just dry up, and you’ll be left standing nekkid in the cold without nothing to keep your heart from freezing up and cracking on the spot.” Her stepmom did have a way with words. That “cracked heart” notion, which was associated in her mind with one winter so fearsome cold the windowpanes splintered, still caused Edna shortness of breath and made her press her hand to her breast to cozy it whenever she recalled it to mind. As to Edna’s views on beds, they were of a strictly practical sort, having to do with price and sturdiness of construction, the firmness of the innersprings, and how easy it was to keep the headboards clean and change the linens, which on Edna’s bed were mostly plain cotton (one color percale set for holidays), neatly covered with washable spreads and blankets, and always made up, first thing after breakfast. Fixing the bed up proper every morning was not just a housewifely habit. It was what most helped Edna to get on with each day, what with all the troubles Floyd got into through the years, the peculiar ways he had sometimes, not always nice, the loneliness she felt in this town, and the strange things happening in it of late. Strange things? Well, for example, there was the night their old friend Stu called, must have been about two in the morning, hadn’t heard from him in a month of Sundays, and he was blubbering something about seeing Winnie’s ghost. Of course, he was so besotted you couldn’t hardly understand him, maybe he was just trying to tell one of his jokes, and he surely didn’t remember it next day when Floyd took the car in to have the brakes relined, probably just an old drunk’s nightmare, Floyd said, but it was mighty peculiar all the same. And then they say that little boy who’s missing ran away, afraid of something terrible, but his parents won’t even admit he’s gone, like they know more than they can tell, or done something wrong they can’t admit to, she heard folks gabbing about it at the checkout line in the supermarket. And had anyone seen the photographer’s wife lately? someone asked. Edna hadn’t and so did not know what that was about, though the expression on people’s faces suggested that this was probably a story which went back aways, before hers and Floyd’s time here, and so rightly belonged to them but not to her, and so she wouldn’t know what to ask. Anyways, she was no gossip, though whether because of principles or shyness, she could not directly say, but if she were, she would have asked them, well, and what about John’s wife? Since that vexing night at the bridge table, Edna had seen her only once, setting with her children at church, wearing a red hat. But then she wasn’t setting with her children. She was singing in the choir. And no hat on neither. Edna thought she must have winked off for a moment without taking notice. She recognized that she was staring and from the choir John’s wife was staring back. Right smack into her eyes. First time she’d ever done that when she wasn’t just doling charity. Edna ducked her head and prayed for guidance, too flustered to look again. After the service, she stood around outside until Floyd got too antsy, but she never saw her come out and she hadn’t seen her since. Was she gone out of town? Or …or something else? It perplexed her deeply, like all the rest happening here of late, but Edna reckoned there were some things in this world she wasn’t meant to understand; she made the bed. She tucked the corners of the sheets and blankets neatly, fluffed the pillows, laid the pretty chenille spread with its pale blue tassels, and placed embroidered pillows on top of the sleeping ones, and when she was done, it was like a pretty little box with the lid on, her answer to her stepmother’s worries about “letting go.” Edna never burped in public.

That was one of Beans’s famous numbers. Good old Beans! Haw! Especially at the dinner table. You could count on him ripping one on nights (strange things going on in town? Waldo hadn’t noticed; strangest thing he’d seen was a greasy lug wrench tangled in black silk panties at the foot of the motel bed he used sometimes; he had passed it on to old Stu a night or so ago at the country club, asking if he could use it, and Stu said, sure he could, it was his, and they both elbowed each other and had a big laugh: you dirty dog!) when the fraternity had special guests like a rich alumnus or the dean of women, most often just when someone was about to make a speech, Waldo himself a frequent victim: “Now, brothers, we should all feel free to say exactly what we think.” Wurrrr-RRP! It was that or else honking his nose in a filthy rag if not the tablecloth itself or letting a thunderous fart, Beans won all the farting contests, too. The Wind Machine. Foghorn. Beans hated all ceremony—“People not acting like people,” he’d say, eructating consummately for emphasis—and his vulgar gestures, which he called “elocutionary,” were all meant, quite simply, to let the hot air out. Waldo sometimes imitated him, even to this day, much to the annoyance of Lorraine, who now crawled into bed beside him, and often as not to that purpose. Beans was a funny guy. He was adept at falling down stairs or off chairs, often grabbing, as though desperately, at some girl’s skirt as he fell, and he carried stickers around with him saying things like EAT ME and BACK OFF! I JUST CUT THE CHEESE! to slap on the backs of professors, BMOCs, and housemothers. He always kept a shirt at the bottom of the laundry basket for anyone who came in asking to borrow one for a big date, and he sometimes wore it himself to crowded classes or sorority parties, you couldn’t get within a mile of him. At an all-university symposium, hosted by the dean of students, on the topic of what his fraternity brothers knew as tomcatting and the rest of the world called rape, Beans turned up with a couple of old prosthetic limbs (or maybe they came off an amputeed mannequin) tucked into a sleeve and a pantleg, his limbs doubled away inside his clothes, and when some gangly man-eater started railing madly against what she called geeks and frat-brats, Beans leaned toward the audience and made an impassioned confession, colorfully detailed, of all his sins against womankind (back at the house, it became known as “Brother Beans’s Hymenbuster Address”), concluding with a promise to clap his offending organ in red-hot irons if it did not mind its p’s, q’s, and arse when appearing in public. “Just the same, hot stuff,” he added, turning to the rabid fraternophobe (could this have been Marge? Waldo wasn’t sure, but she was up there at State at the same time, politically gadflying as usual, though he didn’t know her then, not his field; which was, in a word, partying; in turn, not Marge’s), “I’d give an arm and a leg to get into your pants!” Whereupon, he ripped his leg out from his trousers, his arm from his shirt, and tossed them across the stage at the woman who looked like she was about to shit a brick from purple rage and terror. Applause, laughter, boos, and for beamish Beans another semester on probation, which he understood as his natural lot, prospering therein. At the reception party before John’s wedding, Beans got up and proposed a toast to the families of the bride and groom with his fly gaping, one of his favorite gags and always good for laughs, because even if you were in on it, the fun then was watching the others trying to decide where to look or how to get him to sit down. “Now, I want to be completely open about my true feelings here,” he would slur drunkenly, bending forward so as to spread the zippered doors more widely agape. “We are always so buttoned up about how we feel about one another. What’s there to hide? Nothing! Or almost nothing. So tonight, and especially for all you ladies, I’m going to reveal something I’ve never revealed before …” He was a riot out at the stag party, too, a one-man band, using all his appendages, even his prick and his nose and not excluding his butt, for percussion, himself as a wind instrument, or, rather, a whole wind section. Waldo could hardly wait to see what stunt he’d pull at the wedding itself, but, best he could remember, he never showed up. Too hungover maybe, or maybe John, for his own sake, or his bride’s, had him stowed away somewhere. Dear old Brother Beans. Hadn’t seen him since. Loved that sucker once. Now it was like he never was. Feeling sentimental, Waldo rolled over on his side and, nighty-nighting Lollie, popped a three-stage cracker in memory of his long-lost fraternity brother and of bygone days. Life, my love: funniest, saddest circus in town.

Funny maybe. Sad certainly. But off the wall sometimes as well, her own freak show exhibit one. What more Lorraine knew about strange goings-on than did her corkhead hubby was that people were having trouble these days keeping John’s bride, so long in the middle of things here, within their field of vision. She sort of was there, like always, and she sort of wasn’t. At least that was what Lollie was picking up around town—picking up, that is, as in picking up a radio station when spinning the dial or punching the scan button. No one was talking about John’s wife’s tendency these days to come and go without actually coming or going, almost as though to mention it might bring bad luck, some sort of taboo or something, but they were thinking a lot about her and it, and of late, ever since that weird night at the club when Maynard had barked out his love inside her head, Lorraine had found herself, though she didn’t know why and on the whole didn’t like it, increasingly privy to their unspoken speculations. Which at first she’d thought were being spoken, making the mistake of asking, “What? Beg your pardon?” and getting sharp squinty gazes in return, irritable thought-motes sifting through that were anything but generous toward her person. Not that she was served much better when she kept her mouth shut. Some things you just didn’t want to know. That line about wishing to see ourselves as others see us was a crock of shit. So fearful was Lorraine of what her last best friend Marge might really think of her, in fact, she’d been avoiding her recently, even though Marge had called her twice now to tell her she was making a very big decision and she needed—please!—Lorraine’s help, but she did run into her milquetoast husband out at the country club one afternoon when Marge was out on the course, and learned, tuning in while he stared absently out at the practice green, that, one, watching John’s wife walk her clubs to the first tee a while ago, Trevor had been able to see only isolated bodily parts shifting along, never the whole person, and, two, her point on his “action aerialgraphs” (had Lorraine heard him right?) had vanished altogether, whatever that meant. Stopping in at the little downtown drugstore for her summer supply of antifungal cream and foot powder, Band-Aids, calamine and sunburn lotion, antibiotic ointment, bug spray, antacids, moisturizing cream, and an over-the-counter hemorrhoid treatment that Lorraine hoped the crippled pharmacist in there with the Coke-bottle lenses who always looked like she had a cob up her ass would think was for Waldo (she did), she overheard, so to speak, an account of how someone (had to be John’s wife from what she could “see” of her) came in earlier, stepped up onto the old penny weighing machine Oxford had installed in there half a century ago, and then, more or less abruptly, wasn’t there anymore—but the machine still registered her weight as though she were. This was supposedly similar to something that had happened when she “lumbered into the doctor’s office”(?) a few days ago. Certainly old Alf seemed worried about her (there was a squishy tactile image that meant nothing to Lollie, though it made her shudder when she flashed on it, or it on her, a night ago out at the club), the police chief did, the woman’s hairdresser, her odd son’s teacher likewise. Beatrice had a story about her from church choir practice (Lorraine could hear her thin and thinning voice, but could not see her, not quite aware that this was also Beatrice’s own sensation), though it only leaked in fragments through Trixie’s overwhelming preoccupation these days with the unfathomable mystery of her pregnancy, which Lorraine gathered was more than mere uncertainty about who the father might be. And so on around town, Veronica, Daphne, even John’s mother, a pattern emerging, fading, reassembling itself, much like the subject of that pattern herself. But what to make of it? Lollie didn’t know, knew even less what to make of this newfound gift of hers, call it that, more like a collapse of some part of her immune system, in truth, and capable, she knew, of driving her batty. Did she truly want to know about Brother Beans’s obnoxious performance at a stag party eighteen years ago? No, she did not. Her boys had got into a fight at bedtime and, breaking it up, she’d discovered she knew everything that was boiling up in their hateful little minds, including their intimate loathing of her just at that moment, thanks a lot, guys. Too much. Peace, please. And, so beseeching, Lollie had quietly slipped into bed beside her dreamless spouse, who, having saluted her fulsomely from beneath his big tent, now snored peacefully beside her (nothing but utter darkness there when she turned in—damn him for his unearned peace of mind!), wishing she’d brought some matches to bed with her so that she might light up one of his salutes and give his butt something to think about even if he remained impenetrable between the eats.

Fire! The forest is on fire! Oh my God! All is lost! Where’s my—? No, no, the Artist (author) was just dreaming, it’s all right, calm down, get a drink of water. Ellsworth staggered from cot to sink and ran the cold tap full blast as though to douse the still vivid flames, his heart pounding. It was so real! The Artist, too, terrified, his heart pounding, lying there on the riverbank where he’s thrown himself: he plunges his head in the water (the whole damned forest was ablaze!), thinking: The Stalker’s not the truly dangerous one. I am. He stroked his face. In the dull silvered mirror over the sink, Ellsworth saw the suffering writer, eyes hollow and cheeks unshaven, thready hair unwashed and tangled, and he was reassured. What day was it? Night, rather. He didn’t know. Next issue of the Crier probably due. Or overdue. He’d rerun an old one. Remember when. What did it matter, always the same news anyway, they’d probably not even notice. Well, the new brides would. The newly promoted and the newly bereaved, damn their black relentless souls, their pride of names. And there was the one-man mayoral race, heading into its silly season now with Pioneers Day just around the corner, and pool hours to be announced, Little League box scores, the repaving of Sixth Street to report. Now Ellsworth saw the abused writer above his sink, the unappreciated one, the one forced to hack out his miserable worldly pittance at the expense of his art, a more tragic character than the suffering one, though not as appealing. He gave the abused writer a sympathetic nod, the suffering one an ironic smile, turned to his old painted kitchen table whereon his gathering opus lay, and saw in an instant that the Model had vanished. This was the meaning of the dream of raging fire, and the panic it had stirred in the Artist’s heart. Had he really wished to destroy it all? Just because she’d—because she wasn’t—because he can’t find her? But she might still be here, after all, just hiding, playing a game, as in the old days. There were old days? He hadn’t thought about them, but probably there were. Now the Artist rolls over on his back, there at the bank of the dark glittering river where he’s flung himself, and he sweeps the wet hair out of his face, gazes up through the branches of his forest at the vast and vaulted sky above, where all is nameless and nothing is. His fate without her. Perhaps she’s vanished to remind him that there were old days, that there is an ancient bond between them that he, in his intransigent pursuit of beauty, has tended to forget, or ignore, and that he must recover these lost connections, these buried feelings, if he is to plumb his true creative depths. That’s assuming the child left freely, of course, and on her own. He holds his breath and listens for the Stalker’s vile laughter. His insinuating wheeze, his sinister steps, any sign would do. Silence. A terrible emptiness all around. He seems to remember now her desperate cries, muffled by a ruthless hand clapped to her tender mouth, her bare limbs flailing through the undergrowth. What then? Well, he must rescue her! His art depends on it! The Artist lies sprawled on his back by the rippling stream under the scattered stars, considering the heroics that face him on the morrow and contemplating meanwhile, as he prepares to drift off for a bit so as to refresh himself for the coming ordeal, the unspeakable things the blackhearted Stalker is no doubt doing now with and to the captured child. Ah! No! The villain …!

Who, in this town and on this night, might by most be held to be Maynard II, alias the Nerd, he whose unremitting acrimony concealed a single kernel of burning love like a kidney stone that would not pass, and who, presently, found himself reliving old days and bitter bonds, unearthing rages best left buried. He was back in law school terrified again by exams he could never pass, his head thick with torts and writs and penal codes, which, as he did, suffered from cruel aliases and so were better known as tarts and half-writs and penile codes. Beyond the open bathroom door of their barren student rooms, his wife of the moment was in the red tub on her knees, sucking off some guy whose face was hidden by a flounce of shower curtain. Even with her mouth full, she was telling the asshole (who was it? the jock she was jazzing across the hall? big bad John? his law professor? the cunt-crazy kid out at the country club? the anonymous buttocks she clutched told him nothing) all about Maynard’s failings as a lover: “His sperm tastes like toe-cheese,” she said. The words in the law book he was studying kept blurring and changing before his eyes, but he did make out “jus naturale,” which (the guy in the tub was either coming or vilely laughing) he suddenly understood clearly for the first time. Right! So when Daphne started to reveal his secret love—“You know who the Mange’s really got the hots for? You’ll never believe this!”—he rose up and turned on the heat, he really let the bitch have it, with pleasure watched her sizzle and pop (the guy was gone like he was never there), bouncing about in the charred tub (scorched the red paint right off the fucking thing) as though hot-wired. He felt powerful and pressed up against the ceiling in exhilaration as he fired away, then left her flopping helplessly there below in her dark bathwater stew and flew out the window, stretching his limbs joyfully as he soared above the empty streets and sidewalks of his mean little town, now groveling contritely at his feet. He saw or heard (or was somehow aware of, as though she might be the town itself) Veronica crying (“What are you doing here?” he seemed to hear her gasp or maybe scream), and that reminded him that the reason he was out here was because he was searching for their runaway son. The little smartass: he’d tan his cocky hide, but good! Maynard spied the patch of woods at the edge of town, crotched between the highway and the road to the airport, and losing altitude, went looking there.

Oddly, his absent son, wherever he was (strange place), was at that same moment, if not exactly flying, at least getting about in some manner different from walking, more like swimming maybe, only not through water but through something like thick warm air. He felt, though unencumbered by those clumsy suits, like an astronaut on a space walk. Little, as his family called him so as to mark one Maynard from another, was a long way from where he’d started on his trip, and nowhere to go but on, having no idea, if he did try to turn back, where “back” might be, nor any desire to do so. Here down below, no mean empty streets, no patch of woods nor country club, just, wherever he looked: People. Doing it. A sea, a tumultuous sea, of people, of naked people, all coupled up and going at it, in all the ways Fish had shown him in those books from his father’s library, and in lots more ways besides. Wow! There must be thousands of them! Millions! No one that Little knew down there, or knew for sure. They sort of looked like people from his hometown, but they sort of didn’t, too. The heavy air was resonant with a distant thumping music like the kind made by an organ and heard in church, but more insistent, as though egging on the people below. It was like a giant noisy mall with just one thing for sale. Why, sure, this must be hell, Little thought, and he noticed then something like a whiff of brimstone in the air, or else eggs gone off. And so what was he doing here? Was he just making a discovery or did he have a job to do? Little felt privileged, afloat above this panorama of fornicating bodies (that Bible stuff now suddenly made real and vivid in his expanding mind), but he felt left out, too. As though he were reading about it instead of really living it, something between him and what was going on down there not unlike tracing paper or maybe more like plastic wrap. His own cool maybe. “Cool is cool,” Fish once told him rather mysteriously, “but too cool, Turtle, and you miss it all.” Even if that missed “all” was hell, which maybe—hell, that is—was not so awful after all. So, wait, Little/Turtle had wanted to know when Fish told him that, was God too cool and, so, you know, also out of touch? Was that it? Fish didn’t think so. Not a fornicator either, of course, how could He be? More like a pud puller, Fish had said and grinned, and both had flushed, then ducked the unsent bolt and laughed. Little wished his best friend Fish were with him now, he’d know what next to do. Lots of Fish-like types down below, but none he seemed to know or who knew him, though most were too far gone in what was either infernal torment or else the rapture (that word he’d got from the preacher’s books, now dazzlingly illustrated) to see past their noses (yes, they all had very noticeable noses, bobbing in the air to the organ beat like birds’ beaks at the feeder) even if they did know him. Which gave him, who wished to do but wished first to see before he did, encouragement: if he did get closer for a better look they’d hardly notice, so what the heck. He could almost hear it, like a divine command: let it happen. And so, like his father airborne in some other realm, through the pungent throbbing element, Little drifted down.

Though Little Maynard, aka Turtle, could not know it, his best pal Fish, having let it happen, had now, in consequential deep chagrin (he too wished for a friend nearby), confined himself to his own room, unwilling to leave it even to eat or watch a baseball game on TV, his sisters giggling and pointing whenever he had to step out to duck into the toilet (“Where can you see the full moon in broad daylight?” Jen called out, probably a joke she’d heard out at the mall), much worse, he knew, awaiting him outside the house, so fuck it, fuck them all. His father, made privy to the scene his tearful bare-arsed child had made climbing up on the car dealer’s roof to get his jeans down (he’d drawn a crowd, including a busload of summer campers from Lennox’s own church, stopped in the street to take in the glowing spectacle), had at last this evening been able to invade his son’s dark unkempt retreat, and now knew more than he wished to know. Behind the boy’s humiliation: dire events afoot. Or seemingly so. Lenny knew the woman rather too well, one of the first people he’d gotten to know here, and he doubted there was anything she was incapable of. Should he speak to the authorities or warn old Stu? Probably. But not really in Lenny’s nature. And so he stretched out beside his sleeping Trixie, restless in her new discomfort, and letting slumber draw him nigh, as with ease it always did, he played with the images his son’s story had provoked, searching for his Sunday sermon. The clothing of nakedness, Adam’s need to, e.g. Not in modesty: what did the dumb animals care who watched or even know of what they saw? But to symbolize the putting on of manhood. Of humanhood. No, too easy, ho-hum, they’d tune him out. To close an era, then. Not of innocence but of dumb abjectness. To dress is to speak. To assert dominion, self-dominion. And the pain of that, the terror, the loss of the father and all that. Okay, but to be naked is also to be without guile. Another view, so to speak, of those turned cheeks. Thus, Jesus naked, whipped, and naked on the cross. Could he do that? No: over the top. And too many would see the legend writ there where nailed up: DAPHNE AND STU: BEST DEAL IN TOWN. Jesus, too, was ridiculed of course. KING OF THE JEWS: just another piece of bumper sticker kitsch, meant to amuse while committing murder. And was it that? Or about to be? His son was understandably agitated, he seemed literally to be choking as he spat it all out, and the poor boy was desperate to bend the world’s burning gaze away from himself, point at anyone or anything in his agony, so who could say for sure? Ah well. “Suffer little children to come unto me,” said Jesus, “with their pants down.” Lenny laughed. Jesus, that great consoler, knew how to take the sting out. World-weary, though, you could see it in his face. Same old stories, always sad, over and over, stacked in the blood and reshuffled through time, the human comedy so-called, no way out. So, what was the answer? “Love,” said Jesus (another joke maybe, but maybe not) and, putting his arm around Lenny, led him over to where the disciples were gathered, drinking beer and singing bawdy party songs. There were some women, too, dressed in togas and singing along, John’s wife among them, whom he could hear but couldn’t see, and his own wife Trixie, silent but in full view, full-bellied, dancing. “Our little Salome,” said Jesus at his side, if it was still Jesus (more like John), “always good for a little head.” Which indeed she was giving, without losing a beat, the singing disciples having clambered up on tables and stools and raised their robes, Lennox thinking, at least she won’t get pregnant that way, though of course she already was. There were three clear knocks at the door. “Hey, Knucksie,” the disciples called, hustling Trixie out of sight. “Fresh blood! Bring the suckers in!” Right, his old job, how did it go? “Who is it knocks at the door of the hallowéd temple of brotherhood?” Something like that. “A lowly neophyte, master, begging he be granted entry, that he might pledge himself to grow in wisdom and in love!” “Enter in due reverence, neophyte, upon your hands and knees!” It was his son Philip, Lennox saw, who was to be initiated. They were alone on a barren hillside, overlooking the little town below. He could see the civic center, the golf course, the airport, the malls, the disciples in a distant faceless cluster at the hill’s foot. In his hands he held a wooden paddle bearing the fraternity coat of arms, and he felt old and betrayed by the callous ways of the world, misused, unfit for the tasks imposed upon him. Who was he to be so tested by God or by John or by anyone else? Who was he, easygoing Lenny, to play the patriarch? It wasn’t fair. His son knelt at a stone altar, charred with the fires of picnickers or maybe bums or gypsies, and he pitied him. “Don’t worry, son,” he said. “We’re only characters in an old story.” “It’s okay, Dad,” Philip whispered from his position of mortification across the altar. “Let it happen.”

There was a hollow knock at the master bedroom door in the house of the BEST DEAL IN TOWN, but the knocker entered without opening the door and not on her hands and knees, maybe not even on her feet, spectral as she was, her wet hair plastered darkly to her luminous skull and her eyes literally ablaze with a raging fire within. Her thin mouth gaped like a puppet’s and something like a windy sigh emerged and the whole bedroom turned ice-cold. Brrr. Never could keep her damned mouth shut, that woman. Perhaps it was just a drunken dream, Stu’s maybe, or else Daphne’s, or maybe somehow they were sharing the same shivery nightmare, or thought they were, hoped they were, how could you live with such a thing in the real world? Have to cut back on the joyjuice. Starting tomorrow, swear on the blue book. Though Winnie had never been short on self-expression, she had nothing to say on this occasion or others like them (too many of late), no need to, just her cold breath was nag enough, her fiery eyes were. The only voice in the room was old Stu’s, itself a sepulchral wheeze, broken up by snorts and hacks and toneless drowsy mumbles: “Oh, I do remember, Win, you old howler, remember it like yesterday—done you wrong, I know, and myself little enough good as well, though I did appreciate the silence after and, old head-blown junker that I was, felt souped up for a time. After all them years rustin’ on the blocks, shit, but it felt good. But what would you know about that, eh, Win? Born out of your time, you were. You could whip a drayhorse, but didn’t know an ignition switch from a handbrake, you had me runnin’ on no cylinders at all, I was due for a trade-in, damn your lamps—stop that! you’ll just smoke up your chimney! I told you I remember, how could I forget? Leaky old brainpan’s got more holes in it than a shot muffler, can’t deny it, but I can’t burn that night out of it, hard as I try. So, sure, I’m sorry. Sorry I looked back, for one thing. Damn near spoiled the good times. And of course, the joyride couldn’t last, beautiful as it was, too many potholes like always, I knew I’d throw a rod sooner or later and wind up in the crusher, but, hell, who don’t? It’s your time on the road that counts, not the boneyard you end up in, right? Ah, that stirred the embers, didn’t it? Can’t wait, can you, you old boat? So how’m I gonna get it, whaddaya got in store? Eh, Win? What’s it gonna cost me?” “Maybe if we’d offer her a drink,” Daphne said, or seemed to say (it was only a dream, wasn’t it?), and the flames in Winnie’s eye sockets blazed up again, her hissing exhalation frosted the room. “It’s you, li’l darlin’,” Stu rumbled (in his sleep, or in hers). “That’s what the old bird’s tryin’ to say. And behind you … I can see … someone else …”

So could red-eyed Gordon. He wished he was dreaming but he was not. He was in his darkroom, crying in his acid-stained sleeves. He hadn’t made an amateur mistake like this since he took up photography, and now, just now—! Outside his darkroom door, his wife Pauline was crying, too, he could hear her, a kind of dumb doggy whimpering. He’d forgotten to bring her any new clothes, except for the nightshirt which had had to be ripped at the neck and did not even cover her hips, and she was hungry (she was always hungry), nothing open until morning, but her problems seemed inconsequential compared to his own. How was it possible? Gordon had rushed home from the mall, trembling with excitement (nearly went right through the Main Street light, gave a giggly wave to the police chief as he hit the brakes that must have looked downright maniacal), and after splitting the new nightshirt hauling it impatiently over Pauline’s big weepy head and punching open their last ham for her, which she’d wolfed down nearly as soon as he’d wrestled it out of the can, he’d made straight for the darkroom, promising Pauline that as soon as he’d finished his first set of prints—“This is it, Pauline! The greatest artistic achievement of my life!”—he’d go out to the steak house on the highway and bring her back a quadruple Surf ‘n’ Turf special with extra potatoes and a whole Dutch apple pie for dessert. “With chocolate-marshmallow icecream and butterscotch sauce!” And then: the terrible discovery. Which he’d refused to accept. Of course he’d seen the dark muddled appearance of the negatives as soon as they’d come out of the developer, but no. Out of the question. Under the enlarger he’d seen it, too, and as the prints accumulated their emergent shadows in the acid bath, but not until, in his frenzy, he’d begun the third set of prints had Gordon finally come to acknowledge the impossible truth: he had somehow reused film on which he had taken pictures of Pauline standing in the tub. What was that used film doing in his camera bag? This had never happened before, and Gordon did not see how it could have happened now. But he could no longer deny it. The evidence of his unpardonable folly hung from nylon lines in the soupy red light above his head like freshly polished guillotine blades. On all of them, Pauline’s vast expanses of flesh, that flesh itself washed out and spectral, now bore spectral double impressions of another person who, so faint were the features, could be any person, the subject’s legendary radiance contributing to the evaporation of her image. In one double exposure, slightly less burned out than the others, perhaps because of the darkness of the cubicle he was aiming at or because there was a large patch of Pauline’s wet pubic hair in the original shot, he seemed to be able to make out John’s wife’s back, the linen tunic over her head and arms raised, and he worked desperately on that photo through several prints, isolating the area from shoulders to hips and carefully filtering out the hairy background, or foreground, which looked like a kind of beaded gauze curtain, but all he ended up with was something that looked more vegetable than human. The double exposures, had they been planned out, using Pauline’s monumental flanks, for example, as a shaped screen on which to cast the image of John’s wife striding through diaphanous clouds, etc., might have been beautiful, but opening the shutter fully twice over as he’d done had erased all the detail, all sense of a tactile surface, ruined, ruined, his chance of a lifetime. Gordon sat slumped in despair against the old metal high-stool in there, hot tears streaming down his cheeks, listening to the wistful whining of his poor grotesque wife curled up outside the door, and remembering something the woman at the library, the wife of the druggist, had once told him when he was still a young man and all afire with his highminded artistic ideals. Integrity, discipline, dedication, talent, faith in yourself, these are all very good things, Gordon, she’d said, and certainly you cannot be an artist without them, but they will not be enough. There’s something else needed, too, something much less easy to name or define. Call it, well, a mystery. The mystery. From which, at this moment, Gordon felt utterly closed out.

Rex also felt closed out, but not from any supposed mystery (though he would have agreed with Kate: the musicians he loved called it soul), rather just from the piece he wanted. The keys he’d stolen when he’d blown off the job out here at the airport had got him into the main building all right, but John had apparently changed the lock on the door to his private office, the suspicious bastard. The room, Rex remembered, had big steel-framed industrial windows that looked out on the loading ramps and runways but didn’t open. This cheapshit door would be easy to force, of course, or just to punch a hole in, but he couldn’t do that. His idea was to remove one of the rifles in the gun case, unnoticed, then return it the same way before anyone knew it was missing, no prints on it but John’s. Kill two birds, as they say, revenge the tune in Rex’s head even more than murder. He’d left Nevada sleeping fitfully, told her he was feeling edgy, had to go for a jog, back soon. She’d mentioned earlier that John was out of town for a couple of days, this was the moment. Would the sonuvabitch then, the evidence all against him, really take the rap in a town he owned? Nah, but it might at least cause the arrogant cocksucker a little discomfort, and cost him a night or two of sleep wondering who the fuck it was who could walk freely around inside his pants like that. So how was he going to get in to the goddamned place? Well, try turning the handle, numbnuts: wide open. Hah. It had been a while since Rex had worked out here, and he’d only been in John’s office a couple of times, but the big windows let in enough light from the parking and loading areas outside for him to make his way easily across to the big glass case that housed some of John’s famous gun collection. These keys worked. Smooth as silk. He had the glass doors open and his gloved hand on the piece of hardware he wanted when he realized there was someone else in the room. Sitting in the padded swivel chair behind John’s desk. Might be John of course. But probably wasn’t. Ice tinked softly against glass like chopsticks on a deadened cymbal: a lonely drinker. In the dark. Not John’s style. Rex was playing all this in his head with his hand on the rifle, just above the stock. He took the rifle down out of the case, turned, and aimed it at the figure behind the desk. “Turn on the light, mister,” he said. If it was John, of course, he was dead. The rifle probably wasn’t even loaded. “And don’t try anything funny.” He heard the ice again as the guy took a drink, set the glass down with a sigh, then reached forward and turned the little switch on the desk lamp. It was John’s sideman, the one Nevada described as a babyfucking psycho. Dressed in what looked like designer jungle fatigues. Was he waiting here for John? “Planning to kill someone?” the guy asked, his voice slurring slightly, and took up his drink again. “I heard someone prowling around,” Rex said, taking in the scene. “Thought I’d better arm myself just in case. So, what’s your story?” “Short on other options in this greasy little pit stop, my friend, I’m getting pleasantly fried, how about yourself?” Rex lowered the rifle, sat back against a butt-high filing cabinet, lit up. “I recognize you now. The hotshot in the sports jet. John’s buddy.” “His partner. Help yourself.” He gestured vaguely toward the bottle, staring at Rex’s gloved hands, seemingly amused. There was a picture of John’s wife and kids on the desk, an ashtray, the bottle, the brass lamp. And something else: handcuffs and a horse crop. “Don’t drink on the job. But you should let people know when you’re going to hang out here, General. Surprising nervous types like me can get you messed up.” “Work here, do you?” “Part-time.” “No shit.” Rex had the feeling he was not fooling this sneering wiseass with his jive and began to wonder if he’d have to waste him. Somehow he didn’t think so. It was like he was too cool to give a shit about anything, murder included. About that, he now said, as though tuning in to Rex’s head: “Ever kill anybody?” “No.” “Thought about it, though, I bet.” “Maybe.” “Sure you have. Natural as sex. We’d all kill if we could get away with it. Always somebody we’d like to have out of the way. Who’s in your way?” “Fat dudes. Like you.” The guy smiled, peered up at him over his whiskey glass, his face spookily half-lit by by the green-shaded desk lamp, his smirk luminous, his eyes, though gleaming, set in deep shadows. “How about John?” Rex was taken aback, took a quick drag on his butt. This cat was truly weird. Outside. “What about him?” “Well, he’s certainly rich. Big man, John. What do you think? Would you like to kill him?” Rex knew his hesitation had given him away, so he said: “Yeah, I think I’ll go look for him now, get it over with. Hang around here much longer and I’ll take out the wrong dumb motherfucker.” He pushed off from the filing cabinet, strolled to the door, rifle in hand, flicked his cigarette out into the corridor, then turned back. “If you need anything, pops, look for me down at the night watchman’s crib by the main hangar.” “Sure. You bet. So long, killer.”

Big rich John, pit-stopping Bruce’s lifelong pal and partner, was at that moment, give or take a time zone or two, stretched out under a lean handsome woman on a slowly rotating circular bed in her own bachelor digs, very fanciful and high-tech, up the coast from L.A. where they’d met earlier that day, though not for the first time. The woman collected Victorian children’s book art, it was all over her walls like a giant composite comicstrip, imaginative and sensuous and richly hued, color gradations as fine as hairs and all now in vibrant flowing motion, as though stirred by a fairy wind. Everything was in motion: the lights, the furniture, the undulating music which seemed somehow more visible than audible. In short, John was stoned, enjoying a magic carpet moment with a powerful young sorceress, wild and beautiful. Life was. He said that. Wild and beautiful. She, pegged to him, riding him like the golden knight on her wall, both hands at the pommel, kneading balls, clit, and thighs, digging in their pubic hair as though searching for buried treasure, agreed. He felt very peaceful, letting the bouncing cheeks of her solid little ass slap his cupped hands like juggled fruit, feeling a world away from ejaculation, yet racing along at cliff’s edge at the same time, ready to tip at any moment, but that moment still his to choose. And meanwhile, everything, everything was as though organically fused and doing a delicious full-spectrum color dance for his fiberless optic-wired head alone. This shit lasted forever, he knew, but he was in good company and prepared to squander a few of his life’s hours, his long life’s hours, it was like a time between times. He had just bought a national trucking firm to go with his air cargo operations, his money was on the right horse in the convulsive communications and entertainment industry, thanks in part to his fiery rider, and he was headed back home to his own annual Pioneers Day barbecue to announce plans to build a racetrack on a rundown farm he’d picked up at auction. For some reason, her sexual energy maybe, this woman reminded him of Marie-Claire, though of course not so mad—in fact, this woman was not mad at all, she knew exactly what she was doing, even spaced out on acid she did. John did not share Bruce’s regressive appetite for shy little girls, the fantasy fuck of eternal playboys who cannot grow up; John was turned on only by smart mature strong-willed women with lives, power, talents, wealth of their own. And if they lacked any of that he provided it for them, as best he could. Not for their sake. For his. It made the sex better. What about your wife? What? The woman had stopped bouncing for a moment and had settled back into his broad hands, doing a slow twist around his cock. Does she ever do this? Sure, everybody does. He couldn’t remember when last, though. Couldn’t even remember if he saw her the last time he was home. Must have. This feels very fucking good, he said. It’ll get better, sweet prince, she laughed. He saw now why he thought of Marie-Claire: her teeth. When the woman smiled, she displayed Marie-Claire’s pebbly little rows of white babyteeth. But whereas Marie-Claire’s smile suggested a catastrophic vulnerability, this woman’s was more sensuously calculating, witchy in a way, not unlike the mirrored smile of Snow White’s stepmother, probably on the wall behind her though seeming to hover in the air just over her shoulder. He told her so and she grinned again, her eyes gleaming, her auburn hair coiling around her perspiring face wild as the wild Medea’s now sliding into view, and told him about a pornographic cartoon she’d seen about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, all the time wriggling her hips round and round. The whole cottage got into it, humping away, shooting jism out its chimneys, and with all those dwarfs involved, of course, that girl got it every which way up every hole she had, gave me a lot of funny ideas. Not about dwarfs and princes, I hope. She laughed and, tightening up, twisted harder. I remember the first fuckfilm I ever saw, he said, fingering her circling anus. She gasped as he worked his finger in and grabbed at his nipples as though to brace herself. Saw it on a big screen. Friend of mine in town set it up, his father owned the moviehouse, the Palace, the old Palace Theater. The Palace, she repeated, her eyes squeezed shut. He thought his were, too, but he saw everything, and more besides. Home Movies, the film was called, I think. A smalltown couple with two kids, a girl and boy, have the neighbors in to look at their holiday movies. The neighbors sit around with their knees together, oohing and ahing politely, but what they’re seeing of course are all sex scenes, mostly incest in all the ways you could imagine with a few naked campers and gullible hitchhikers thrown in. The woman on top of him, still clawing at the flesh around his nipples, was pumping back and forth vigorously now, her eyes closed, biting her bottom lip with her row of little teeth. As he went on describing the movie, not really wanting to, but as though spellbound by his own voice, which seemed to be booming out of the quadraphonic speakers in the corners, he found himself at some point telling her instead about the last time he’d been up at the cabin with Bruce, together balling three women at once, two of them a mother and daughter. Nevada had apparently set it up, or some of it (the third woman might have been a scheduling mistake), but she wasn’t there. At one point when they were all in a sweaty tangle, Bruce had cast a poignantly sorrowful look at John over the ass of the woman on his face, then lifted one hand off her quivering butt and given John a brief high five, John slapping back, thinking nothing of it at the time, but worried about it since. What the hell was Bruce trying to say? Beats me, the woman groaned. But what about the neighbors? The family raped them, he gasped, and they had an orgy or something, but the strange thing was seeing that film in the Palace. The cliff, he realized, was crumbling at his feet. Or thereabouts. It was like a fucking cathedral, that moviehouse, a golden-domed two-decker with a lot of ornate detail, red plush seats, a lobby like a hotel’s, we’d all gone there with our parents to see the classics, the original Snow White, for example, it was like a part of history, something bigger than all of us, and suddenly, there we were—whoof! God! Great! Awesome! the woman rocking away on him whimpered, her head thrown back now (his view was of her slender white throat, arched chin, dilating nostrils, which seemed to be merging with the dancing overhead lights and swirling ceiling), her raspberry-tipped chest wet and heaving, her sleek belly rippling like the sails on Sinbad’s ship, listing beside the bed. He was asea on Sinbad’s sea, storm-tossed yet satin-pillowed, spume-blowing nigh at hand. But wha-whatever happened to—gasp!—that fantastic theater? The Palace? It was in the way, he wheezed. I tore it down. The woman jerked forward, her burnished hair whipping the air, her vagina convulsing. Oh Jesus! she laughed. Whoo! You fucking bastard! I think I’m coming! Pink labial folds had burgeoned around the mouth of the rabbit hole Alice was falling down, the wet red sides of the hole itself throbbing in constrictive waves like the vagina that clasped his cock, and Daphne sprouting laurel leaves while Apollo grabbed at her vanishing ass—there they came! pop! pop! pop!—was like the onset of some stupendous mythical orgasm. He felt like he was coming and not coming at the same time, and then, as she cried out, or the music did, or he did, the cry all around them like a lightning flash, there was a great quaking as though the Big One had hit, and in his balls at least, it had. John, shuddering blissfully as his loins turned explosively inside out, was intensely happy. Not as in ever after, but the genuine article. Right now. Life, goddamn it, if you lived it, really fucking lived it, was very very good.

The old Palace Theater that John suddenly erased from view one day was being, as time passed, erased from the communal memory as well, there was already a whole new generation in town for whom it was only a legend, remote as the fall of Rome, which had sometimes been witnessed there. John’s daughter Clarissa was just a toddler when the Palace came tumbling down, all movies were for her and her friends linked to the magic of the sunswept malls, and there were scores of people who had moved here since then who supposed that the bank and office buildings in that block had been there forever. Ask Kevin the golf pro out at the country club about the Palace, for example, and though he’d been in town for more than a decade and saw at least one movie every week, he would probably suppose it was a form of smalltown self-mockery of the sort he’d heard so much of here, or maybe a gibing way to refer to someone else’s fancy roost. Contrarily, his predecessor, a married man, had, while attending a predemolition festival there of big-screen epics, got blown in the back row, just under the projection booth, by the orthodontist’s daughter whom he later eloped with and whose own legend as a wild thing had itself achieved, in this town anyway, epic proportions. Both of them were long since gone, though, taking their memories with them. Floyd and Edna had also moved to town that year that Kevin came and so had never known the famous moviehouse, witnessing only the blocklong pile of rubble just up the street from the hardware store that Floyd managed, the rubble itself disappearing before they’d even got used to this new place and so by now forgotten as well. They’d even arrived too late for the auction of the appurtenances and decorations of the Palace and its near-neighbor, the even more famous Pioneer Hotel, though Edna did find at a junk dealer’s a pretty plaster of Paris statue from the moviehouse of a girl turning into a tree that she bought for the backyard for only three dollars on account of one arm was broken, but Floyd made her put it away in the basement because he said it was pagan and sinful, Floyd having become a (mostly) strict born-again Christian since coming here, even though, because of his new business position, they went to the rich folks’ church where the born-again notion was not very popular. The preacher at that church and his family had also come here after the downtown renovations and so knew nothing of all those old buildings that had once dominated the business center, though the reverend had once, tuning in to the memories of others and borrowing from archive photos published in The Town Crier, used the old Palace Theater in one of his sermons, his topic being the ephemerality of man’s brief gaudy show on earth compared to the simple grandeur of God’s theater of eternity, something like that, few could remember it afterwards any better than they could remember most of the movies they’d seen in the Palace. He did stir some tender memories, however, so his sermon, even if it didn’t make much sense, was, for some in his congregation, erotically stimulating, a fact that might have aroused old Floyd’s wrath, had he known of it, but not Reverend Lenny’s: God is love. And vice versa. The crippled lady at the pharmacy had come to town about the same time as the preacher and so had never been inside the Palace either, but her husband Cornell had rarely missed a movie there that he’d been allowed by the ratings to see, and his sister and brothers too had spent some of the most significant moments of their childhood and adolescence inside its ornate high-domed interior, their parents being themselves faithful customers, but one of Corny’s brothers was dead, the other had put on a dress and left town forever, and poor Corny himself either had no memories remaining or had no words with which to express them. Of the four children, only Columbia might have provided a significant recollection or two about the fantasy structure that was once the very heart of this community, though what she probably remembered best was the popcorn popper and candy counter.

Town chronicler Ellsworth, determined to preserve some record of that great secular temple, which he had disdained as a youth but toward which he now felt increasingly sentimental (he used to take Barnaby’s little girl there on Saturday afternoons, they saw Bambi together), had, long before he’d “turned darkly inward” as his friend Gordon put it and become so reclusive, pressed at least a dozen people in town to write an “I Remember” column about the old Palace Theater, all of them agreeing with embarrassed laughter that there were sure a lot of stories they could tell about that place, but none so far had. Most, when asked, said they were “still thinking about it,” though Columbia’s and Cornell’s father Oxford, having little else to do these days except mind the grandchildren now that Gretchen had taken over the pharmacy, had managed to compose a number of discontinuous fragments and lacked only a theme that would unite them, a kind of bonding agent, as it were, which, the more he thought about it, was turning out to be his dead wife Kate. That half-blind Oxford should be the old moviehouse’s memoirist was ironic, of course, since he knew nothing of its fabulous decor except by hearsay and had witnessed its spectacles through a myopic haze; even the stirring posters in the lobby he had had to examine with his nose pressed against them, unstirred by what he could not wholly see. But courting options were few when earless Oxford courted Kate, earless not just because of his disability (Kate could drive and when, rarely, they could, she did) but because gas was being rationed in those days and tires could not always be replaced, and that being so, the Palace Theater was about the best they had to hand by foot, other than the library where Kate worked, which served them for some of their more private moments, especially conversations of the intimate sort. Though she never went to university, Kate was a great reader, the reader Oxford always wished to be but could not for the terrible weariness it cost him, Kate often reading to him in those courting days, and after marriage, too, when work and children gave them time alone, and so every invitation to the Palace was accompanied by his apology, Kate insisting in return that she loved the movies, and learned from them, too, much as she preferred to read. “To imagine something is to create it in our heads when it is not there before our senses, and that’s what we do when we read,” she said one night as they walked out of the Palace after watching the newsreel twice (there was war footage and Kate’s brother was headed for the European theater, as it was called, soon after would die there, not centerstage, but lost in the chorus as it were, unbilled and overlooked in the reviews). “I would rather imagine something than see it, and there is something wrong with that, I suppose. It’s why librarians are thought to be such eccentrics. But sometimes I think that seeing is only a kind of imagining and an impoverished and unreliable one at that, even though our eyes probably lie less than words do, or can do. We like film because we feel like it’s connecting us immediately somehow with the real world and with no words in between, or anyway no words you have to listen to. Turning on the image directly turns off the imagination maybe, but we are given an existential assurance about the world and ourselves in it, even if illusory and superficial, that books can never give us.” Moments like that made Oxford adore her and want to hug her, and sometimes he did, so his memories of the Palace Theater were in effect bound up in the same kind of romantic sentiments and vague nostalgic impressions that everyone else had. Without any real reason, except that he was next to his wise Kate, his arm around her in the dark, sharing in some manner the unfolding play of light and shadows up above their heads (for Oxford’s sake, they always sat down front), Oxford would break into tears, not just during their courting years but in all the years thereafter as well until, Kate herself dying, the old Palace disappeared; they went almost weekly to the movies back then, sometimes with the children or with friends like Alf and Harriet, often just the two of them together, even after television became all the rage and they were the only people in the theater past adolescence. Kate even liked to go to the commercial genre movies, the westerns and romances, the gangster movies, thrillers, screwball comedies, because she said it was like going in for a tune-up: they reset the basic patterns. Coming out of a monster movie one night, a movie Oxford loathed for its antirationalist advocacy of faith in antiquated belief-systems as a means of problem solving and its depiction of scientists as either villains or victims of their own unfortunate capacity to reason, Kate, responding, said: “That’s one way of looking at it. Folk art is always afraid of the new, which science represents, and that’s part of the fear of monsters. But it’s scary for everybody to imagine getting turned into something entirely different from what we think we are, even if we don’t much like what we are, just as it would frighten us to have the world we live in change its basic rules in incomprehensible ways all of a sudden. Start spinning in the other way or something. Monster movies are not about the resolutions, that’s just tacked on to make them palatable. They’re about the problem.” She paused and turned back to gaze up at the old Palace Theater. The marquee lights were off, and the heavyset young man who ran the theater was up on a ladder changing the titles for the following day. The next movie, as previewed, was about a dangerous and seemingly indestructible criminal who enters a peaceful community and terrorizes it, called The Intruder, or something like that. Probably a man of reason who makes all the wrong moves in that movie, too. “We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, Oxford, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens who eventually subdue them.” “So what’s to save us from the abysmal monsters within,” Oxford sighed, “if faith’s not on and function we must?” She turned toward him with a smile, a smile he could not quite see but knew was there. “Irony,” she said, and took his arm to lead him down the dimly lamplit street. “And love. Which is also ironic.”

Ah, the old Palace Theater, loved too by Dutch, that heavyset fellow whom Oxford saw up a ladder one night. He was standing, not far from the popcorn machine, in the grand lobby of the famous old moviehouse, breaking his own no-smoking rules and nodding at acquaintances amid the sellout crowd passing thickly through to the auditorium, John and his wife and kids among them, he was amused to note. A coup: Dutch had managed to book The Back Room, a rare underground flick using amateur talent, for its first-ever viewing on the big screen: “Where the Movies Are Still the Movies,” as the faded lobby banner said. In the projection booth, he found the film already strung up on the projector, surprised to see it was on thirty-five-mil instead of eight- or sixteen-, though how could he have shown it if it wasn’t? He’d watched the thing a thousand times, but he still wasn’t sure what he’d see when he started it up. Ah, yeah, that’s right: the old Getaway. But tarted up by Hollywood, hardly recognizable: glass panes on the windows instead of chair seats, a brass bed in place of the old sprung leatherette sofa, an electric lamp over the table in the middle—though the pennants, panties, and tattered calendar pinups on the walls looked genuine enough. The door opened, a real door with moldings and panels, not the tabletop John had mounted there, and the crowd pushed in, the same crowd he’d just seen in the lobby. They looked confused, turning round and round, taking the place in but not knowing what to do with it. Dutch could tell them, but not without spoiling the film. In fact, he realized now, he was part of the film, the projection room where he sat being separated from the cabin by a glass panel, a two-way mirror maybe since the others didn’t seem to see him, though he could see them and himself, too, if it was himself and not just an actor playing himself. Or vice versa, whatever that meant—Dutch by now was sharing the confusion of the others. He was there in the room with them, wandering around, feeling lost, maybe he didn’t know this film so well after all, and holding on to his dick as though if he let go of it he might lose it altogether—and, now that he thought about it, maybe that was how this movie came out, the shock ending, it was what made it so famous in the underground, wasn’t it? He looked around for John, but he saw that there was no one here he knew. He was frightened now and wished he’d never booked this film. He tried to find some way out, but the crowd was too thick and there was a strange damp chill in the air. At last he spied old Stu the car dealer, sitting at the bar, and made his way over to him, still holding on. Something he had to tell him, couldn’t think what, a joke he’d heard maybe, but at least it was someone familiar, he might find a way out of this movie before it was too late after all. But when Stu turned toward him he saw that his face flesh was moldy and dropping off the bone and his eye sockets were empty, just dark hollows: oh shit! that’s it! these people were all dead! Dutch shrank back in terror and awoke in the dark. Where the fuck was he? His groin was wet: had he peed himself? No, beer, he’d spilled his beer. He was in the Back Room, sitting sprawled out in his velvety movie seat, salvaged from the Palace demolition, he could feel it under him, his pants down around his thighs and also wet from spilled beer, his limp dick, too, which he was still holding as if he were fishing with it, the lights out in the room at the other side of the mirror. Jesus, must have been some show, whoever it was, he couldn’t remember, put him straight to sleep. He could hear soft snoring, couldn’t tell the sex of it, thought it might be a woman. He wanted to get up, reel it in, pull his soggy pants on, go to bed. But he couldn’t move. Too goddamned tired or something. Lead in his ass. Then, suddenly, the lights in the next room popped on, so startling him he nearly cried out. There were five or six guys in the room, all dressed in dark suits. One of them came over to the mirror to comb his hair, peering intently into it as though trying to see beyond it. Dutch, feeling looked at, pulled his pants up. I probably ought to give this shit up, he thought. The guy turned away (who was he? Dutch felt like he knew him), someone opened the door, and John’s wife came in, dressed like a bride. They peeled the wedding gown off her, which was all she was wearing, and laid her out on the bed, her legs spread. Dutch was hard again (this was something different!) and, pumping away, he leaned forward to see what he could see. Oddly, not much. It was like there was something wrong with the camera, a water bubble on the lens or something—or on the mirror: he wasn’t sure where he was anymore—but the less he could see, the more excited he got. He stood, his pants dropping to his ankles, trying to get a better angle, but the bubble moved where he moved. Didn’t matter, the cream was rising, the lid was about to blow! But then the guys all turned toward him. The woman—was it still John’s wife? he couldn’t tell—curled a finger and beckoned him. There was no mirror. Dutch wanted to run but couldn’t move, he was rooted to his dropped pants. The guys in the dark suits walked stiffly toward him with black grins on their horror-movie faces and he woke up again. In the dark as before. Still fishing with his dick, everything wet down there, etc. Didn’t know where he was. Or if he was really awake this time or still asleep, or, whichever, what was going to happen next. Except that he had no intention of moving a muscle until it got light again. Probably going to be a long fucking night. But he’d sit tight, wherever he was, hold the hand he had.

The night was going to be a long one for Ellsworth, too, nor did he have a hand to hold, that was just the problem, empty-handed before the abyss was what he was. He’d made something out of nothing before, but did he have the strength to do so now, at this hellish hour, his spirit so depleted? After dozing and waking, dozing and waking more times than he could count, he’d stumbled down out of what he called his garret over the printing plant and Crier offices, intending to go home and fix himself something warm to eat, microwave a frozen soup or something, he was making himself ill with his obsessive work habits (pity the cafe across the street wasn’t open twenty-four hours, this town just wasn’t civilized enough for writers), when he had finally realized, pausing at the foot of the creaky old stairs to gaze blearily at the local wall calendar printed in the back shop each year for Trevor to provide to his clients at Christmastime, that the next issue of The Town Crier was indeed due out on the morrow, or later today as the case might be and undoubtably was, and he had not even started to put it together. For a long time, he didn’t know how long, he was still half asleep, he just leaned there, unmoving, in front of the calendar, thinking the unthinkable: that, for the first time in over twenty-three years, he might skip an issue, or even (the one thought seemed to follow inevitably upon the other) cease publishing altogether. After his forest fire nightmare, shared as it happened with the Artist, Ellsworth had tried to put himself back to sleep with fantasies (the Artist’s) of rescuing the captive Model from the nefarious Stalker once he was rested up enough to undertake it. But what was the Stalker doing to her? He had to imagine the Stalker’s fantasies before he could imagine the Artist’s, and this he found both more exciting and more disturbing, especially since the Model did not seem as upset about her treatment as he did. He or the Artist, he wasn’t sure now. Half asleep or half awake, it all tended to get blurred and come and go in odd ways, such that at one point he found himself dreaming about the time, or else remembering it, that he took Gordon and Pauline to the movies, this was when he was still trying to recapture the bohemian life, hoping to blend art, friendship, and free love in one exemplary contemporary relationship, perhaps even a legendary one, and Gordon pushed Pauline ahead of him into the row of seats and followed her in, leaving Ellsworth stuck on the outside; only in his dream, if that’s what it was, instead of Pauline it was a little girl and Gordon was still between them. Was he drawing her picture? What was he doing? When he shook off this confused and irritating image, he discovered that there was another buried beneath it, something he had in some way been envisioning all along: the devastated forest, stripped bare and charred to the roots, as far as you could see, no sign of life except for the Artist, alone and broken in the terrible black-stumped desolation, a man with nothing more to live for, more dead than alive, weeping silently as Ellsworth was weeping. Enough. (She was gone! Not a trace!) Time to take a break. This month’s town photo, the one at which he was now so bleakly staring here at the foot of the stairs, a photo taken by Gordon like all of the others in the calendar, was of some Pioneers Day parade of the past, John’s wife in a frontier costume waving distantly from an open convertible, as she did every year when she was not waving from a float. Must have been taken fairly recently, given the car models, but she looked like a child in the photograph. The child Ellsworth had once big-brothered. He knew that she was a faithful reader of the Crier and that if it did not appear she would be disappointed. Whenever duty called, as it was doing now, often as not it bore her cadences like an echo. “Tell me a story …” He checked the piles of unopened mail in the front office, hoping for hard copy, and there was some, but not enough. School was out, the high schoolers he’d come to depend on so heavily had other things to do, and even the contribution from the ministerial association was missing. There was an anonymous “I Remember” submission that he couldn’t use, all names deleted, about a “prominent local businessman” who had made “an innocent young kid” pregnant and forced a “fetal murder” upon her that had cast “a hopeless black cloud” over her whole life, which did not seem to have been a short one. Some rather dreary photos in the weekly packet from Gordon: a tulip bed in bloom, an unidentified pole-vaulter going over the bar, a wide-angle shot of young people in the food court of some mall, John’s daughter among them, a men’s-club luncheon meeting, vacant tennis courts with puddles of standing water, a group of leached-out old people at the nursing home, also looking vacant. Ellsworth wondered if the author of the “I Remember” love story was among them. Gordon seemed to be raiding his archives, too. He hadn’t even photographed the street repairs out front. But Ellsworth couldn’t fault him, he himself had not gathered the usual local sports and club news, called the police station, courthouse, hospital, checked with John and other community newsmakers, interviewed the lone mayoral candidate, had not even, until now, sorted his week’s mail—in short, Ellsworth had done none of the ordinary things necessary for putting out a responsible newspaper, he had no one but himself (and the Stalker) to blame. Too late now, though. Nothing to do but follow Gordon’s lead and load up with thefts from the past. He went through the old bound issues of the Crier, checking the June editions, every five years back, for in-this-month items, struck on the heroic death in battle fifteen years ago of the son of the local pharmacist, a death that had shaken Ellsworth in ways quite different from the rest of the community, triggering the commencement of his loss of faith in the very notion of keeping a human chronicle, an abandoned line in his work-in-progress once marking the moment. He remembered asking himself: Who was this young man, so loved, it seemed, by all in town (though Ellsworth hardly knew him), and what his untold, now untellable, story? Fragments he had, a few witnesses, personal tributes: all surfaces. Concealments of a sort. What did it signify that Yale’s real story, like those of countless others, was lost forever, replaced by a ceremonious invention? Or did it matter? Was that what all stories were, all lives? Yale had been a child here. There were Little League box scores. Boy Scout rosters. There were cast lists of school plays and class photos. John’s wife was in them, too, they were classmates. They went to movies together. This was not in the obit folder, but Ellsworth had seen them in the lobby of the Palace when he first came back to town. Shocked him at the time. How did that fit? The Palace lobby alone was so full of crossed trajectories it made your head spin. And the Eastern university, the French girl, the distant war that killed him, suddenly the whole world was crowding into this sad little town, his file cabinet couldn’t hold it all, his mind couldn’t. So he catalogued dates and achievements and listed the bereaved and quoted the official military report and announced the memorial service and scribbled a “30” at the bottom and, pretending he had not been defeated, closed the drawer, telephoned the hospital to see who’d been born that day. Since then: hundreds of editions, thousands of spurious stories, as though trying to paper over the flux, believing in none of it, but faithfully doing his duty as though there were a point to it. The image of the Artist in the charred forest came back to mind, and he knew that, inappropriate though it was for the novel (the Model would be found, he’d see to that), it was true for him. To beat back the crowding despair (hopeless black clouds piling up everywhere), he decided to reach back to a happier time, some three years before Yale’s death: the wedding. Not just to cheer himself up, but to reconnect with a more purposeful self, one who might see him through this dark night’s desperate task. He dragged the tall volume, more fingered than most, down from the shelf, opened it to his big photo spread the week after the nuptials: already he was feeling better. A few hundred words on some remember-when theme, he supposed, together with four or five photos, a couple of ads (if they hadn’t come in, he’d give them away), and another page was history, even if history it wasn’t quite. Might even find some unused wedding snaps in the archives, if they were still orderly enough to find anything in them at all. Or, better: a look back at the old Pioneer Hotel. A couple of postcard views, mug shots of past owners, mixed with Rotary, Kiwanis, and BPW meetings held there, that convention of regional state highway commissioners that had changed the map, high school team dinners, birthday parties and weddings, John’s included, Gordon’s moving portrait of the door left standing when all the rest came down. A good story for Pioneers Day and all that. The hopeless clouds were breaking up. He could do this. Then he noticed, for the first time, that in the group photo of the rehearsal dinner in the Pioneer Hotel banquet room the night before John’s wedding there was a young man in the front row with his fly agape, his white underwear, hopefully underwear, plainly showing through. Ellsworth had used and reused this photo countless times—how had he not seen this before—!? There was a typo in the caption he’d missed, too, “weekend festivities” actually reading “weakened festivities,” though that kind of a slip was more understandable, rare as it was. No, wait, it wasn’t “weakened,” it was “weakneed.” As was, double-k’d, Ellsworth. He slumped into a chair. What was happening?

A question much like the one the young man in the photo with the open fly asked when someone in a tracksuit thrust a rifle into his hands and said: “This way. Come on. She’s in the ravine.” Before Beans could get an answer to the inquiry he then posed, however, that rough gent was gone like he never was. Beans joined the hunting party creeping through the trees ahead of him for fear of getting shot at by mistake if he didn’t, but stayed to the rear, out of the flicking beams of their flashlights, which were like death rays to his throbbing head. A squat cop in sweaty shirtsleeves and suspenders and an old guy with a long snout led them. Toward what, Beans could not guess or even imagine, but he understood that it was very big. Crikey. Step out to take an innocent piss, and look what happens. Beans had awakened, still clutching his Swiss Army knife, in a closed-up Country Tavern, eerily empty, illuminated faintly by a bluish light filtering through the grimy windows, his face pasted to the table (must have passed out in spilled beer), his head cracking at the seams, and his bladder set to burst. The pornflicks were off, the jukebox dark. He’d pushed himself to his feet, feeling stiff and achey, pocketed the knife, picked up a fallen drumstick near his feet, and given the cymbals a sharp crack just to break the ponderous silence, scared himself doing it and sent a painful rip through what would be his brain if he had any. Dust had risen from the cymbals like a visible form of clatter, there was dust and dirt everywhere, stamped-on butts and food wrappers, bottles lying about in the gloom like spent artillery shells, unemptied ashtrays and dirty glasses, a veritable shithole. Beans thought about brother John entering on the morrow into the wedded life and wondered about the nature of this transformation: did it really bring an end to such joys as these? He shuffled creakily through the slough of disport to the door (tried the switch, the lights were dead) and stepped out into the moonless night. A few heavy mechanical hulks lay strewn about in the lot and ditch as though after a stockcar race, and there was roadkill at his feet, but across the way in yonder copse, he could see lights dancing in the branches, other trucks and cars pulled up on the side of the road. So, he was not alone in the world, after all, as he had feared. Not hoped? Was it human company at last, then, that misanthropic Beans sought? No, something far more precious at this hour, whichever hour it was: a hitch, a ride, a lift for heart and body, back in to the hotel where he might shed these fulsome rags and pillow his suffering head. First, however, he turned back and lifted his stream against the smutty flyblown windows of the Country Tavern, bringing the promise of light where heretofore there was none, as was always his virtuous wont. It was a record-setting pee, pity old Brains wasn’t there to time it, yet another momentous historical event that would escape the world’s capricious attention, and when he was done the lights in the woods he’d noticed earlier were gone. He crossed over, passing between the parked vehicles—a sporty lot, on the whole, models he’d not seen before, though on the wee side—and heard their voices deep within, saw a distant nervous glimmering like that of fireflies. He thought of curling up in a truckbed until they returned, but there was lightning behind the tavern and an unpleasant chill in the night air and uncurling later might prove an agony worse than the nocturnal nature stroll that was its present alternative. Beans walked into the woods. He was wondering how he might introduce himself if these were not members of the wedding party, but no introductions seemed necessary when he caught up with them, he was armed without a welcoming word, merely a brief instruction: “This way.” All right. Sure. Distantly, he caught a glimpse in the shadows of someone who looked like he’d just escaped a mummy’s-revenge horror movie: Beans, trailing at the rear, closed ranks. Was this a test? He was reminded of the fraternity scavenger hunt he went on as a pledge. That ordeal ended with a beer blast. He hoped no such revels were part of tonight’s program. He also hoped the rifle wasn’t loaded. Beans was the sort of fellow, he knew this all too well, who tended, no matter who or what he might be aiming at, to shoot his own foot off, and then be thankful after that was the worst he’d done. “We’ve lost her,” someone said. This was good news. But then a cantankerous old buzzard in cuffs and leg irons and wearing a ballcap backwards spat through gaps in his teeth and, nodding his head at something down in the gully, said: “Nah. There’s her scat. Still steamin’.” “How do you know it’s hers?” a younger burrheaded guy in yellow golf pants and a windbreaker of some kind wanted to know; Beans perceived immediately this whinging fellow had as much appetite for this exercise as he did and could be a useful ally. “By the size of it, buckethead,” said the old geezer flatly, and spat again. “Anyway,” said the stubby cop, “if he don’t know, who does?” This seemed to satisfy everybody unfortunately, and they all moved on, following their prey’s evacuations, pressing deeper into the treacherous undergrowth. Beans tagged along, having no choice, the way back by now beyond recall. His head was splitting. A puke loomed on the near horizon. Speaking metaphorically of course out here in the pitch-dark forest, as in: just around the corner. He sidled up to the burrheaded guy in the glow-in-the-dark arse-bags, who was now sneaking a suck from a hip flask, and said: “Some picnic, hunh?” The guy winced, offered him the hip flask, Beans took a swig without thinking, felt his stomach turn over when it hit. “I forgot,” he said, handing it back. “I’m a teetotaler.” “Yeah, me too.” And then they saw it. Her. Shit. Beans set his rifle down against a tree and backed off. He was at the wrong fucking party. He’d find his own way out of here.

Nocturnal nature strolls had been part of Alf’s insomniac routine ever since Harriet’s death nearly a decade and a half ago, though, if still nocturnal, largely deprived of nature now that the old city park was gone, he missed it sorely. The new civic center, if only tolerable by day, was a downright blight by night, a pale dead thing heaped up hugely in the murky half-light that hung around it like a disease. A “sleeping giant,” someone called it, though it reminded Alf more of certain lethal structures he’d seen during the war. He avoided it when he could, preferring the suspended stillness of dormant Main Street or the older prewar sections of town like the one in which he lived, though sometimes habit drew him back to where the old park had once lain waiting for him with its amusing wooden bandstand and its meandering paths lit by amber postlamps, welcoming as sleep itself. Used to walk with Harriet there in the evening, back when walking in the park was still something one did in a town like this, and after her death, while it was still there, he liked to wander in it at night, alone, feeling, not her presence, but the calm that used to accompany him when they strolled there together, which, sex apart, Alf took to be all he’d ever know of love, and maybe all there was to know. Alf believed hysteria to be the only reasonable response to the human condition, love, or whatever it was he was calling love, its unreasonable antidote which let you sleep at night (what wouldn’t let him sleep tonight, for all the drinking he’d done, the humorless TV sitcom reruns he’d surrendered to when he got back from the club, was a memory of some kind, it seemed to lurk at the end of one of his fingers, like the imprint of a switch that had to be toggled: as he passed under an intersection streetlamp, he stared at it, trying to see what it saw, but all he could make out was something like the pad of his own finger, softly mirrored: a compress? the bulb of an eyedropper?). Not that he’d forgotten that lean, vivacious, wisecracking, freckle-nosed nurse he’d met in the field hospital while taking some poor forgotten matchmaker’s shattered leg off, still gave him pleasure to think of her and the way she grinned at him back then, but that part of love he knew to be even more of an illusion than the soporific part, a kind of instinctive response to buried genetic coding, as most forms of pleasure were, and usually brief as appetite and its slaking, repeatable but not sustainable. Of course … there were, as Oxford would say, the grandchildren… Alf smiled to himself, ambling along there in the dim-lit dark, enjoying momentarily the joke he was in, was in a sense the butt of, or a butt, one among the multitudes, hearing Harriet say, looking up from one of her novels, You think too goddamn much, Alf, it’s going to give you nosebleed. Ellsworth, he saw, was working late again, his printshop windows all ablaze, the man himself pacing around inside, unkempt and frenetic, a scene Alf had witnessed walking past here in the wee hours before, usually about once a week. Another way to provoke a peaceful sleep, one that used to work for him: set yourself a task, no matter how pointless, and complete it. How much of the lives people thought they were living here were in fact invented by Ellsworth and his weekly (most called it “weakly”) Town Crier! Well, somebody had to do it, else they’d all be left without identities, no matter how spurious. His own included. Alf had always thought of his doctoring as somehow intrinsically meaningful, but given his perspective on life as a kind of horror show not meant to be consciously witnessed, it probably made less sense even than Ellsworth’s obsessive scribbling. Around the corner, the photographer’s lights were on, too: a busy night. Perhaps his wife was unwell and keeping him up, some sort of organic or possibly glandular disorder that Gordon had mentioned nervously to him a couple of days ago outside the Sixth Street Cafe. Behaving a bit strangely of late, that fellow, more strangely than usual, there was talk about him out at the club tonight, in and around the burlesque misadventures of the minister’s son (who had an acne problem Alf was treating, as well as the worst case of athlete’s foot he’d ever seen), some of it funny, some less so. Maybe his wife’s illness had something to do with it. The woman seemed unwilling to come see Alf, he should probably visit them one day soon. If he could find the time. Alf had stopped taking on new patients years ago, but the ones he still had, aging as he was aging, had more problems than they used to, and he could not easily refuse their many offspring (John’s daughter had just been in to seen him, for example, birth control pills she’d wanted, he’d said no, she wasn’t old enough, she’d thrown a tantrum and said he was out of touch, he’d agreed, let her have them), if anything his workload was getting worse. People he used to see once a year, he now saw every week. Gave up house calls a decade or so after the war, except for invalids and people in nursing homes—which, more and more, his patients now were. Poor old Barnaby, for example (the civic center, though a block and a half down the street he was crossing, had just made its dreary presence felt: Barnaby had built the park that it displaced), who’d told him when he’d stopped in at the retirement center to see him a day or two ago that he’d been having problems with Audrey lately, she’d changed his pills or something, it was hard to understand half of what he was saying, the words tumbling like chunky gravel out of the side of his mouth. Earlier, Alf would have gently reminded his old friend that his wife had passed away some years ago; now he merely said he’d talk to her about it, see what he could do, and Barnaby just shook his old grizzled head and pulled on his ear and said it wouldn’t do any good, her damned mind was set. The town was full of the ghosts of dead wives these days: out at the club tonight, old Stu had heaved his arm around Alf, leaned boozily against him, and rumbled into his near ear that Winnie was back, bedeviling him like she always used to do, he had to have a sleeping pill strong enough to stop the old girl from pestering him to death, can you help me, Doc? Alf had smiled but it hadn’t seemed to be a joke: old Stu’s damp red eyes were full of pain. Drop by, he’d said, I’ll see what I can do. “Nothin’ in your pocket? No? Shit, Doc, then I’m in deep trouble …” And then, for an alarming moment, the old doc feared he might be in deep trouble, too. He was just passing an unlighted alleyway (he’d been thinking: that memory at the tip of his finger: could it be of a tumor?), when he noticed there was someone skulking about in the shadows. It flashed to his mind what a dangerous place the world had become, he was a damned fool, people didn’t walk alone at night anymore, could he yell loud enough that Ellsworth or Gordon or someone would hear him, but then he saw who it was: Oxford’s odd boy Cornell. He was scrabbling about in there, feeling the walls, trying the doors, peering through the darkened windows. The family pharmacy backed onto this alley, a couple of doors down. “Corny? Are you all right?” The boy froze, pressed up in a tight little crouch against the small concrete loading platform at the back of the corner five-and-ten. A child still, though he’d fathered eight, at least eight, no doubt more to come, no sign of it stopping. “Hey, Corny, didn’t mean to take you by surprise. It’s just old Doc here, son. Come here a minute.” Corny hesitated, then abruptly obliged to the extent of taking up a position against a telephone pole a few feet away, moving toward it in his usual herky-jerky way, then slouching against it as though he’d never been elsewhere. His wispy blond hair, oddly luminous in the darkened alley, fluttered down over his heart-shaped face like dry weeds, giving him the appearance of a startled rodent peeking out from its nest in the straw. “Couldn’t sleep for some damn reason, so I was out taking a walk. Glad to find some company. How are you doing, Corny?” Corny shrugged: “Same old shit,” he said in a voice that was little more than a hiss. Alf smiled, approached him slowly, hands in pockets. “Listen, what are you looking for?” Cornell tensed, but stayed where he was. “You want to tell me, son? I saw you hunting about there. Maybe I can help.” Cornell looked doubtful, shrugged again, looked away, his skittish eyes scanning the alleyway. Alf thought: John’s wife! Was that it? He glanced at his finger, startled by his insight: was it possible? “What?” he asked, hearing Cornell mutter something under his breath. He leaned closer to the strange boy. “The door,” whispered Cornell.

Cornell didn’t think the old fart would help him, and he didn’t. He said to come see him at his office. Sure, man. See you around. Like many in town, Cornell was plagued by an elemental question about life, only his was not so much “Why am I here?” as “How did I get here?” He used to live here, back when his family was still all together, and then, for a time which he thought was going to be forever, he didn’t, and then suddenly he did again. The first part was the best part, being taken around by his big brothers, playing with his sister, being read to by his mom, and his dad still liked him then, even if he was always on his case about hanging around the house too much, playing with games and toys, you’re a big fellow now. Then he went away. It was his dad’s idea. His brother had got killed and now Cornell got sent away with his brother’s girlfriend. Who was nice to him at first and even let him take her clothes off, he could see why his brother liked her, but who then did a terrible thing. And Cornell had to admit that he probably didn’t make the coolest move when he saw what she’d done, he could hear his dad chewing him out for not using his old noodle, why don’t you grow up, Corny, and all that: he ran. Not smart but he was scared. He didn’t know anyone in that faraway place. He didn’t even know how to speak the stupid language they spoke, though he’d had a year of it in high school, it was all slurred when they talked it, like they were trying to hide what they were really saying. They were unpleasant to him and he was afraid they might blame him somehow for what had happened to Marie-Claire. So he ran, and the more he ran, the more scared he got. He’d left all his clothes and things behind, all he had was a little bit of money and the bottle of wine. He pulled his shirt over his head when he passed the wine shop where he’d bought it. There was something about “Love” on the label, he was afraid it might give him away, so he got rid of it in a street bin, or what he hoped was a street bin, it might have been a mailbox. He spied the big church he could see the top of from up in Marie-Claire’s flat, the one on all the posters, and headed for it, but suddenly there were a lot of police everywhere, so, in a panic, he turned and ran the other way. It was late, after nine o’clock, but the streets were lit up like the downtown back home at Christmastime and full of scowling people with cigarettes hanging in their mouths. He tried to stop running, he was just drawing attention to himself, but he couldn’t, he kept breaking into nervous little trots, stopping, running again, everyone was looking at him, and there were police here, too. Then he saw a sign with some steps down into a hole under the street, and though he didn’t know what the sign meant in French, from what he could remember of his high school Latin, he felt he would be safe there, so he ducked down the stairs. There was some kind of underground railroad at the bottom. He bought himself a ticket (should he give a tip? he didn’t know, but just to be safe, he did) and for a while he rode around, trying to think what he should do next. He didn’t know how long this went on but someone in a uniform woke him up when he fell asleep once and he had to get off. He pretended to leave the place where the trains came and went but he didn’t. He snuck down one of the tunnels. It was dark and smelled bad and he was afraid, but he was even more afraid to go back up on the streets again. There were little pockets in the walls he could squeeze into when the trains came by, which they did less and less. He found a tunnel that had no tracks and he went down it, a shortcut to other tracks, he figured, but he never found them. One tunnel led to another and he got completely lost. There were people living down there, he discovered, they were like half-dead and slept in newspapers and plastic bags and they spoke the same language as the people on top but they didn’t seem as bad somehow. None of them at least were police, he was pretty sure. He pretended to be deaf and dumb and they gave him something to eat sort of like tough baby chickens in a soup that smelled like bad breath, but he was hungry and ate it. Time passed like this, he didn’t know how much, seemed like forever, but he couldn’t tell because there weren’t days and nights down there, and his watch was gone, must have lost it, or maybe he gave it to somebody, until eventually he began to forget why he was down there and started looking for a way out. He had always avoided the tunnels that stank the most, but now he thought those must be the sewers and maybe he could get out that way. So he held his nose and plunged in. He was right, but it was pretty sickening. By the time he saw some metal stairs leading up into the roof, he was a soaking mess and feeling dizzy from trying to hold his breath all the time. He thought he’d have to crawl out a hole when he got to the top, but instead he found a door up there. He opened it, and stepped out, the light blinding him at first; he held his hands over his eyes and peeped out through his fingers: didn’t seem to be anyone around. He glimpsed a shady place and crept over to it, huddling there behind a trashcan until he could get used to the daylight and figure out where he was and what to do next. And that was when he noticed that the sign on the trashcan read KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL. He could read it, this was not French. He peeked around the side of the can. Some things seemed different, but he recognized where he was. He was in the alleyway behind his father’s drugstore. He felt like crying, he was so happy. He ran in to say hello to everybody and an ugly old woman with thick glasses and a clubfoot started yelling at him, saying he smelled like rotten fish. She closed the place down, banging about furiously on her clubfoot, dragged him back out into the alley and into the old pharmacy delivery van, and took him home (it was his home, but it was like she owned it and it was full of crying babies) and gave him a bath. There was nothing fun about this bath, she was very rough with him, though the usual happened a couple of times when she touched him there, and she smacked him for it. It turned out he was married to her and all those kids were his. Of course, by now he figured he was only dreaming and went along with everything the way you do in a dream, it was anyway better than a French sewer, which was where he supposed he really was and where he’d be again when he woke up. Only he never did. Or at least he hadn’t so far. Was this normal? That’s what he would have asked old Doc, if he’d got the chance. That bossy crippled lady who said she was his wife wouldn’t listen either. She only boxed his ears when he tried to tell her about it and sent him out to play pinball machines or video games, which were maybe the dream’s most interesting new things. His mom would have listened but she wasn’t in this dream. But what if it wasn’t a dream? He went back out in the alley and looked for the door he’d come through, but he couldn’t find it. If only he’d been paying more attention when he stepped out. He didn’t want to go back down there, he just wanted to know where it was so he could show it to that woman who wouldn’t let go of his ear (her name was Gretchen), and get his mixed-up life sorted out.

That woman whose name was Gretchen lay in Lumby’s bed longer than usual that night, clearly troubled, and not just because they’d broken the plastic penis while trying out some new positions Gretchen had found in a marital manual which were a bit beyond their athletic abilities. They had both pretty much worn themselves out playing with all those things and now they were in a more reflective mood. And what was troubling Gretchen, as she said, was her marriage. Well, it would trouble anyone, that was what Lumby replied, unable to come up with anything more humorous, feeling too contented and exhausted and also a little bit sore here and there, and having heard Gretchen’s complaints about her mentally defective brother Cornell many times before. Tonight, though, Gretchen seemed to have something else on her mind, and Lumby waited, half-dozing, for her to spit it out. They could hear one of the children crying, a nightmare or a wet bed or something, but they could also hear Granddad shuffling down the hall to take care of it. We haven’t had any more babies for over three years now, Gretchen said, not since the second twins, and Columbia, who felt that the eight that came the first five or six years were already eight too many, much as she enjoyed playing Auntie Lum, said she thought that was because of the IUD which she’d helped her put in, but Gretchen said no, she took it out almost the same day, it made her too twitchy, like it was all the time humming or buzzing or something. But what I mean, she went on, is he keeps avoiding me all the time, oh, I know, Cornell’s not exactly what you’d call an attentive husband—but, well, in a way that’s just the point, he used to pay me no mind at all except when I crawled into his bed, and then for only a second or two, which was enough for me, given the mess his pajamas and linens are always in, but now whenever I go over to his bed, he either pulls the sheet over his head, or else he jumps up and runs out, and during the day he won’t even stay in the same room with me or let me give him his baths any more, and you know what kind of baths he gives himself. Lumby still couldn’t see where all this was going, and she was starting to drift off, dreaming awake, sort of, about playing doctor with her little brother (she had to play nurse in just a few hours, she should try to get some sleep), and he asking her what she heard when she put her stethoscope to his weewee, she replying music because she’d once heard it called an organ. But then she woke up again, because what she heard Gretchen say was, I think there’s another woman. Corny? Columbia felt like laughing, but was careful and didn’t. Come on, Gretchen, who’d have the little pest? I don’t know, maybe someone before he met me? Before he met you, the only girls he knew were in comicbooks. Except for Marie-Claire. Who scared the pants off him. Do you think she did? Gretchen asked. You know, get the pants off him? Are you kidding? Lumby said. She was Yale’s girlfriend. Do you think she’d go for a basket case like Corny? I did, said Gretchen simply, and Lumby, sorry now she’d put it that way, realized that there was a real problem here. Her sister-in-law was truly and helplessly in the grip of the green-eyed monster, and if she was jealous even of a dead girl, making jokes would not release her. So instead she said: I’ll keep an eye on the little dimwit for a few days and let you know what I think. That seemed to make things better for Gretchen somehow and she snuggled up against Lumby as though in loving gratitude and when, in anticipation of her father’s wake-up knock, dawn cast its dim glow through the curtains like a movie on a screen, Gretchen, smiling in her sleep, was still there beside her.

The dawn movie on Veronica’s screen was more like a horror flick, or the fluttering tails of one, it was still ripping through her consciousness, shredding her sleep, leaving her too shocked and exhausted even to pry open her eyelids, which were mucky from crying all night. Everything was mucky, her whole body felt covered in slime from the awful thing. It seemed so real! She’d come across it while cleaning house, or dreaming that she was cleaning house. It was hunched down in the dirty place behind the refrigerator, where sometimes she was frightened by mice. She pulled out the ironing board and there it was with its large eyeless head like a cowled mendicant and bent shriveled limbs with little clawlike hands and feet. Veronica knew immediately who it was, of course: “What are you doing here?!” she’d screamed, holding the folded ironing board in front of her like a shield. No reply, just a wet raspy breathing as it huddled there in the dim niche, all curled up, throbbing faintly. Her first impulse was to throw the ironing board at it, but she was too terrified to move, her limbs were like stones, her heart, too, and she felt something hurting down deep behind her navel somewhere. She wished Maynard were home to shoot it (where was he?), but at the same time she was relieved he hadn’t seen it. Not yet anyway. He’d been in such a rage of late, this thing could make him dangerous. Yes, she had to get rid of it before he came back, but how? She realized that this was a question she had asked before, in real life, and all the guilt and pain of that came rushing back and made her scream again: “No! I didn’t mean it!” The thing in the corner cocked its high-domed head like it was trying to hear through the puckery hole in the side of it. Snot dripped from its nose and when it breathed it made a bubbly sound as if it were breathing underwater. She heaved the ironing board up against the space between the wall and the refrigerator so it couldn’t escape and went scrambling for the phone to call the doctor at his home. He wasn’t in; she left a message on his answering machine, still screaming, she couldn’t stop herself. She was afraid to go back to the kitchen, she needed help, she couldn’t face this alone. Help came. Ringing the door chimes. A miracle! “Yes! I’m coming!” she screamed. It was what’s-her-name, John’s wife. She used to be one of her best friends, probably still was, she told her all about it. About what was behind the refrigerator, about where it came from and how she got her bottom smacked in the motel shower after, about everything. Even about how she celebrated what would have been Second John’s birthday every year. “He would have been seventeen in March!” she cried. “The same age I was that night at the drive-in!” The drive-in? She told her about that, too, it all came shrieking out, high-pitched and delirious, like something had burst inside, even Ronnie didn’t know what she was saying half the time. “I was so scared!” John’s wife was very understanding. She said she was there to help. On behalf of the PTA, she said. Okay. Ronnie began to calm down. But she was still screaming. “Come, look! It’s horrible!” She ran into the kitchen to show her, but it wasn’t there any more. The ironing board had been pushed aside and there was a gleaming viscous trail from the refrigerator to the head of the basement stairs. “Oh no!” It was lying in a squishy heap on the concrete floor at the foot of the stairs. But it was still breathing. Sort of. John’s wife explained that it would be all right, its bones were too soft to break. This was not a consolation. Veronica wanted to smash it with something and put it out in the garbage, but instead she had to help John’s wife carry the slippery mess back up the stairs between them. Yeuck! It was oozing gunk and it got all over her. John’s wife wrapped it in a sheet (had she taken it off the bed upstairs? was that where Maynard was?) and together they took it out to a supermarket shopping cart John’s wife seemed to have brought along for the purpose. The swaddled creature’s wet strangled wheezing was terrifying and pitiable at the same time. Veronica felt like crying she was so sorry for it, but she also felt like throwing up. Then John’s wife told her something very important, so important Veronica stopped crying and carrying on and just watched, stunned, as the woman disappeared down the street, pushing the shopping cart with Ronnie’s unborn son in it. But when she woke, she could not remember what it was John’s wife had said. She lay there with her eyes closed, listening to Maynard’s bubbly wheezing beside her, trying to remember. It was so important! Something about—uh-oh. Wait a minute. Bubbly wheezing? Maynard—? Oh no …! It can’t end this way! she thought confusedly, trying to go back to sleep, or else to wake up again. She could hear the thing snorting and whuffing as it cuddled closer, blindly reaching out its slimy monkey’s paw. Oh my god! Was it trying to suck her breast—?! She screamed and, her eyes still glued shut, leapt from the bed.

Barnaby’s eyes were wide open. He had never been more lucid. It often happened this way at the dewy end of a night. The two halves of his cracked brain slid together like train cars coupling, and he could see clearly, if only for a short time, about as long as it took the dew to rise, what a fucked-up old ruin he was. In these dawn moments he had no confusions, understood everything: how Audrey, dying too soon, had undone him utterly with her bastardized will, how John had pushed him to the edge, then over, imprisoning him here in this cheap pre-cremation motel after the stroke, how his beloved daughter, literally all he had left in this world, had drifted away from him, probably blaming him for everything that had happened, how even his old friend Alf had lost interest (and, hell, who wouldn’t?), patronizing him at best and leaving him pretty much in the hands of that dotty old lady who liked to pretend she was Audrey. Alf at least took his side on the civic center controversy, even if he supposed Barnaby wasn’t listening when he talked to him about it, and, living in one of Barnaby’s houses, praised his craft in his dour taciturn way: “You built things to last, Barn. Trouble is, that scares people. Nowadays, they need things around them that wear out faster than they do.” Sanctuaries of the family, that was what Barnaby was building—solid foundations, rational structures you could trust, tasteful neighborly details, a principle of restraint and comfort and proportion throughout—but people didn’t have families in the old way anymore. If they ever did. Just an illusion maybe, a mere veneer. Look at his own. A damned catastrophe and heart irreparably broken after. Figuring out the real world made you want to kill yourself—in fact, come to think of it, he’d meant to, he had rescued his old handgun for the purpose, holstering it under his armpit so he wouldn’t forget where it was, but it wasn’t there anymore. John’s sponge-brained mother must have hidden it; maybe her son had told her to. He was as good as dead anyway, why not prolong the agony? Watch the old boy twitch and wobble, have a few laughs. So why hadn’t he shot himself when he had the gun in hand? Because he’d wanted to explain himself to his daughter before he died. Warn her about what was happening. Tell her how much he loved her. He no longer believed he was able to do that. Even in these sounder moments, the words that came out were not the ones he was thinking. Dying was about all he was able to do now, and that wouldn’t be easy. Barnaby had come to understand that dying was not acquiescence to something inevitable, quite the contrary—life was what was passive. The body could go on forever, or nearly; to die it had to be instructed. This was the function of what men called spirit, nihilism was after all man’s truest instinct, this was the ultimate message of his acids: turn it off. His own self-destruct switch had been flicked, the instructions had been passed, but the circuits had shorted out. At this rate of staticky disintegration it could take forever. So where the hell had that stupid old woman hidden the goddamned thing? Probably in the bottom of the laundry basket, said his daughter. Right. Good idea. The laundry basket. He sidled, dragging his dead leg, toward the bathroom door. This was hard work. He felt like he was struggling against strange impersonal forces. Like the sort that ran the town now. Used to be one big family. No longer. What John had done, in effect, was take the roof off. Neighbors and strangers were the same thing. Locks on all the doors now. Burglar alarm systems. Even though no one stayed home. He poked around, found a shirt he’d been looking for. Here all the time. Not why he’d come in here, though. He struggled to pee and dribbled on his bedroom slippers. Just a trickle, didn’t really need to go. So that wasn’t it either. His medicine maybe. He fumbled with the cap on the plastic vial. When it finally popped off, everything spilled into the sink and on the floor. To hell with it. Wouldn’t kill him to do without until Audrey came, and if it did, he’d have done himself a favor. Where was the old bag anyway? It was getting light outside. The birds were going at it. Was his daughter just here? Had he been able to tell her anything? Why was there all this dirty laundry all over the floor?

The early light of day found Barnaby’s lawyer and fellow plotter Maynard in the woods at the edge of town, kicking irritably through the dew-drenched undergrowth. He didn’t remember coming out here; rage must have brought him. The birds had their dawn chorus cranked up full throttle, the shrieking little shit-factories—he wished he had his gun along to shut the fuckers up. He must have dressed in the dark: red-and-orange golf shirt with the green monogrammed pocket now containing the house keys, chafing his left nipple, the shirt tucked into black pinstripe suit pants belted high over his pot, tennis shoes without socks. In the past when he’d stormed away on sleepless nights, Veronica had sometimes locked him out. She could never explain herself afterwards. Maybe she wanted him to hit her, needing the attention. She often hit him back or threw stuff at him. It was about their only way of talking to each other; the rest was mostly just senseless screaming. The only thing in his pants pockets was the ancient garter, always with him, frayed and limp from so much fondling over the years. Maynard fondled it now. It was dark in here and damp, but beyond the leaves a pale violet light was spreading across the sky like a morbid stain. It was probably going to be what some would call a beautiful morning. Maynard hacked up a gob and spat contemptuously. Beauty. Only humans in their egomaniacal perversity could dream up such a sick idea. Warped everything. One night out at the club he’d heard old Alf argue that intimations of beauty were nothing more than the old pleasure/pain principle in operation, and Maynard could go along with that but not with the association of beauty with pleasure. He came on a patch of wild bluebells poking up in the dim light, stepped on them. That’s it, he told himself. Fuck everything. Christ! He loathed—bitterly, deeply, and intimately—this town and everyone in it, loathed his wealth, his career, his family, his past, his future, life itself. What would have happened, he often wondered, had he not been born a Maynard between Maynards? What if he had been free to leave town for good when he left high school as so many did? As apparently his brat of a son had done, a Maynard or no? Same thing probably. And (he twisted the garter around his fingers) fleeing this shithole was just not on, not for him, not for the moony lovesick Nerd. Whom he loathed above all others. Ahead of him, like secret writing in the dark forest, loomed a stand of young birch trees, ghostly in the dawn glow, inviting his admiration. He turned away in disgust, found himself at the edge of a small thorny ravine. Recognized it. A grin spread painfully across his bristly face, couldn’t stop it. The little guttersnipe’s baptism that wretched night had been his as well. In commemoration of the sickening occasion, he took his prick out to pee and was just letting go when his true love came riding by on her bicycle, dressed in her white tennis costume. She waved and smiled, but he could not wave back, both hands busy trying to stop what he was doing and get covered up without pissing all over himself. And then (he was beardy and rumpled, unwashed, smelled bad, was dressed for the circus with his widdling weenie on view, no wonder she didn’t stop) she was gone. He staggered down through the ravine and up to the road, thought he could see her pedaling around the turn just up ahead, a flash of pure white like a bird in flight, and hitching up his pin-striped pants, Maynard II went stumbling after.

The daughter of the lady cyclist glimpsed by the rumpled lawyer at the edge of Settler’s Woods was getting married. It was a modern wedding. The bride was dressed in a string bikini, high heels, and a bridal veil that opened and closed like a shower curtain. It was not clear who the groom was, but Clarissa’s father was there, looking pleased as punch, and chiding Granny Opal for not being with it, the old stick. Jennifer, who had been kept awake all night by the wanderings in and out of her bedroom by her spacey sleepwalking big-bellied mother, was glad her best friend was getting married and so wouldn’t be mad about getting left out of the day’s coming adventures. Which she could not quite imagine but which filled her with a kind of apprehensive delight, like the first time she had to jump off the high diving board, knowing she’d love it if she didn’t kill herself. Her dad was there that time. He didn’t do anything, he didn’t hold her hand or jump with her or even say anything, he just stood down there smiling up at her in that easy way he had, and she knew it would be all right. Nevada had a smile like that and now it was Nevada Jen trusted to see her through whatever was coming next. She could hardly wait, she was so in love she ached all over, but she was scared, too, and Nevada’s smile seemed to say: Stay cool, don’t worry, it’s okay. Jump. Nevada was at the wedding, too. She was arranging the flowers. Heaps and heaps of them, so piled up that people disappeared in and out of them. It looked like fun, sort of like playing house in leaf piles, but when Jennifer started to follow her sister Zoe into a particularly inviting hole to roll around, Nevada, smiling her serene smile, steered her away and up toward the altar where the wedding was to take place. Jen’s mother, who was no longer pregnant, was up there playing the organ (dressed only in her underwear, good grief, Mom as usual), and her father was trying to get her brother Philip to come out from behind the pulpit where he was hiding. Philip was up to some kind of mischief back there, and her father was getting exasperated. “It’s beginning!” he shouted. But it wasn’t. Almost everyone in town was there, wandering about in a completely disorderly fashion like at a very crowded cocktail party. It’ll never happen, Jennifer thought, laughing. They’re just pretending. It was funny and she kept laughing, almost like someone was tickling her. But there was also something dangerous about it all. Clarissa had stained her lips with real blood as though to try to warn Jennifer about something, something she couldn’t tell her out loud, and when Jennifer, trying to be cool and friendly, asked, “So, who’s the lucky guy?,” Clarissa’s eyes flashed with anger and something like panic. “Hey, sorry,” Jen said (the church seemed to have darkened: had they started the ceremony?), and she noticed now the little tattoo just below and to one side of Clarissa’s navel. It was of a semiautomatic weapon, its black barrel pointed down into the bikini, butt toward the hipbone. This had several meanings, she knew, like “PULL MY TRIGGER” and “DO IT AND DIE,” which was the name of a hot movie out at the mall, but it also seemed to have a secret message, meant for Jennifer alone. There was a little flame at the tip of the gun barrel like a licking tongue and two words by the handle she couldn’t quite see. It was, she realized, a cry for help. Clarissa was going to die! Or someone was! Jennifer went looking for Nevada but apparently she’d done her decorating job and left. Her dad was gone, too, and the music had turned metallic and heavy, like a funeral march performed by a rock band, not at all the sort of thing her mother played. Old Hoot, the hardware store man, was in the pulpit, looking straight at her and shouting out in his loud nasal whine about the fires of hell, which sounded more like the farce of hail. But in fact it was getting hot in here. Jennifer understood now why Clarissa had been wearing a bikini, it made sense. The flowers had wilted and were beginning to rot, it was suffocating. There was a spotlight on her and the relentless music was driving her up the wall. Then the man in the pulpit shouted out something really weird: “Cut off her hair!” he cried. What—? Jennifer sat up, sweating, with the sun in her face and music blasting out of her brother’s room, remembering now the words she’d seen on the tattoo under Clarissa’s navel: “BUTT OUT.” She smiled to herself, pushing her tangled hair out of her face, wiping her neck and chest with her nightshirt. Her father was right. It was beginning.

It was the phone that made Otis sit up that morning: Snuffy had pulled him out of the line and put him in as quarterback in a tough game, and his throwing arm had gone dead on him just as he got the snap and the opposing team was coming at him: he couldn’t get rid of the ball, he couldn’t even get his arm above his waist, his linemen had faded from sight as though they didn’t exist, he was going to get killed. He came to with his arm gone to sleep from snoozing on top of it there at his desk. It was Pauline. He stood and did a couple of quick knee-bends, pumping his arm to get the tingling out, telling Pauline, yeah, yeah, speak slower. He hadn’t been sleeping well at night lately, too many worries, and so found himself occasionally nodding off like this at the station, making his workday a bit blurry at times. There were a lot of things about the town that weren’t sitting just right with Otis these days, but what was worrying him most was John’s wife. More than once now, he’d found her car, unlocked and the keys inside, parked far from home—in the empty supermarket lot late one night, for example, once behind the church, last night right in front of the station—and, his neck tingling in a funny way, had had to run it home for her. It was unusual and just the sort of irregularity that made Otis nervous, more so because it had to do with her. When John got back later today, he’d try to talk to him about it. Otis couldn’t understand what Pauline was saying, he was too groggy and she was very agitated, so he excused himself brusquely and set the phone down on the desk, went over to the cooler to splash his face with a handful of ice water. The thing that was most nightmarish about that football game was the crowd. The bench itself was empty, just a kind of cold wind blowing down it, even old Snuffy had left or else had gone to sit in the stands—where no one was cheering, it was very dark and moody up there, more like they were a crowd at a funeral. Or an execution (he remembered thinking, if only she were here, everything would be all right, but she wasn’t and he was up the spout). The field was dark, too. He could see those goons coming but he couldn’t see their faces. He wiped his own face with his handkerchief, blew his nose, and picked up the phone. Pauline said she had to see him, something awful was happening, there was no one else she could turn to, Gordon was gone, he had to come right away. The urgency of Pauline’s appeal, as though she just couldn’t wait for it, excited Otis, but the idea of seeing her alone again also made him feel uneasy. Last time was not so good, it was like he couldn’t get it up as big around her anymore or else she was getting loose with age or something, and he’d thought at the time that maybe their long romance was finally over. When the shoe don’t fit no more, as the old song goes … Though they could still be friends. Old shoe friends. But he could hear her crying on the other end so he said, okay, hang in, he’d be over in a jiff. “And bring a bag of doughnuts,” she begged. He supposed the problem had to do with her husband, the station had been getting several phone complaints about Gordon of late, that flake finally losing it maybe, so what met Otis at the studio, though he thought he was ready for anything, caught him completely by surprise. He pushed in with the doughnuts, ringing the little bells, called out, heard Pauline’s whimpering reply in the next room where Gordon shot his portraits. Otis noticed there was a scatter of unopened mail on the floor that had come through the door slot; Gordon didn’t seem to be paying much attention to business. Curtains were drawn, the place looked closed down, though he remembered seeing lights when he had passed by here on his rounds last night. Ellsworth had been up all night, too, maybe Gordon had had to get some work finished for the Crier. And maybe not. Otis parted the bead curtains and stepped back into the portrait studio, thinking he’d probably better check out Gordon’s newest batch of photos, there might be something to all those complaints, and what he saw, squatting on her haunches there on the little stage like a carnival exhibit, was Pauline, wild-haired and sobbing, wrapped in nothing but a bedsheet, and big as a mountain. Even squatting, she was eye-level with Otis. Otis couldn’t think what to say. He tipped his cap back and scratched his head. If that don’t beat all—! Her teary eyes spied the sack of half a dozen doughnuts and, from the look that crossed her big red face, he figured he’d better give them to her right away, though he had thought they were going to share them. They vanished in six bites and she looked like she might eat the sack as well. And then she did eat the sack. “Oh, Otis,” she bawled with her mouth full of chewed paper. “What’s happening to me?” He didn’t know. He had the idea, though, that those blown-up photos of her private parts might have something to do with it and he thought maybe he ought to examine them again. Just in the line of duty. He lifted one edge of the sheet to have a look (kept his other hand resting on his hip holster, didn’t know why, but it was like he was scouting out strange territory and had to be ready for anything): she was one huge woman. Not fat, just huge. Her flexed knees were big as football helmets, her colossal butt like a pair of boulders. Still soft, though. And they bounced when he jiggled them like they always did. His walkie-talkie buzzed, interrupting his inspection. The station had just got another complaint about that kinky photographer, he’d been caught hanging out in women’s changing rooms out at the mall again, what should they do? Otis told them to send a squad car out to pick him up and hold him down at the station until he got back. “Might be a while,” he said. Pauline was still sniveling, using a corner of the sheet to wipe her nose, but she’d calmed down considerably, and now watched him with the hopeful wet eyes of a good old birddog waiting to be told what to do. So he told her: “Now, let’s go see them photos again. You won’t need the sheet.”

Many—Dutch, for example, or Waldo, Nevada, Bruce, or Daphne—would have dismissed these photographs that Otis was now so intently examining (later, he would take them with him as “material evidence,” though evidence of what he could not say) as mere pornography, butt and beaver shots intended to arouse the scopophile, disparaging perhaps the model, whose shape was generous and skin not without blemish, even while admiring the technical quality of the image, some—Bruce in particular—admiring as well the perversity of the image-taker, a profession Bruce likened favorably unto the sadist’s. Others, too—Trevor, Marge, Lorraine, Floyd—would have found these photographs perverse or worse, a cruel theft of sorts, a violent dispossession of the other, and wretched of purpose, but Ellsworth, with an understanding bred of lifelong friendship, would have perceived their profound lyrical intent and artistic integrity—and did in fact, for he had viewed them and most others in Gordon’s private albums, kept unaware of one series only, that which now had undone (his own undoing) the photographer and plunged him into such despair as well as trouble with the law. For this was a man, Ellsworth would have said, who loved less flesh than form, more pattern of light and dark than what tales or implied excitements those patterns might bespeak, one who sought to penetrate the visible contours of the restless world, ceaselessly dissolved by time, to capture the hidden image beyond, the elusive mystery masked by surface flux, and the name he gave that which he pursued was Beauty. When Ellsworth, for whom movement was all and the stasis that his friend coveted was not Beauty but Death, or both at best, complained about “the easy accident of an opened lens,” Gordon had insisted that “accident,” as he called it, was in fact the essential creative gift, defending his photographs in terms of found objects and aleatory music, about which he knew only what Ellsworth himself had told him when he came back, showing off a bit, from the outside world. To prove it, he gave Ellsworth a camera and told him to go take a hundred photos or so (Ellsworth was bored after a dozen) and they would judge them after as works of art, and of course none stood up as Gordon’s did, though Ellsworth was personally fond of a picture he took at a young war hero’s tomb during a visit by his family there with the French girl who later committed suicide (this little exercise happened a long time ago), simply because there was so much story concealed in it, however ill-managed the shot, and another of three middle-aged women, grinning stupidly at him, seated together on a park bench in the old city park (now vanished), only one of whom, themselves at the time in mourning for a lost friend, was still alive today, an innocent image of love and grief, emotionally enhanced by overexposure and poor focus. He published both (with byline) in The Town Crier, but took no other, for his friend was right, he was no photographer, nor a visual artist of any kind, appreciative of the real thing though he could be, and moreover he came to understand, in more than just a metaphoric sense, that things as well as people actively showed themselves to the photographer because of his gifts, country roads stretching out to display their longing to him, vistas unpeopling themselves to reveal their troubled depths, houses fluttering their starched lace curtains at him like flirtatious lashes, light entering their wide porches to open them into a broad friendly smile, their flower-bordered cement walks reaching out to the front sidewalk like firm proffered handshakes or decorated cleavage. Sometimes. Sometimes there was a darkness, withdrawal, implicit rebuff, threat. Gordon shot the town, Ellsworth often thought, as if it were a strange dream enacted, a dream dreamt by the dead in which the living were condemned to mythic servitude, Gordon as artist not their liberator but the revealer of their common condition which might yet lead to liberation if they would but look closely enough, something his own Artist once said in another way (a line now lost, or rather, perverted by the Stalker, in the novel’s sudden turnings) with respect to the mythology of the pose. For Ellsworth, much as he admired his friend’s talent and respected his quest, no single photo, no single painting or artifact of any sort, no matter how magisterial, could equal any of these things, however modest their quality, when linked together in telling pattern, and for that he often loved the photos Gordon himself most disdained. The family portraits, for example, trite compositions when singly seen, utterly trivial, artificial, and repetitive, but bearing in their austere and staged formality the power of tragedy when seen in temporal sequence, a record of loss and joined resistance to loss. If Gordon prized most that photo of laundry hung out to dry, crisp and stiff in the cold, or this of pale luminous buttocks, all detail burned away except at the perfect fork, or that of a gleaming black coffin held aloft in an overcast sky by four ropy hands as white as bone, Ellsworth loved more his own fat photo archives with their gas stations and orators and sliding Little Leaguers and humpback bridges and trailer parks and Rotary club meetings and pet graves in backyards and Bermuda-shorted duffers and candy-poled barbershops and dancing high schoolers and ginger-breaded bandstands and beaming trophy bearers all ajumble, like a million stories waiting to be told and a million more with every shuffle of the pack. He could appreciate Gordon’s fascination with an empty mall parking lot as a mysterious space, as though nothing had given birth to itself, but he got much more out of it in context with other photos of that mall at other times and of other malls besides. Here a photo of a since-dismantled fountain from an early mall in town, its cement belly adorned with scrawled graffiti (all that rich local culture, lost forever!), there one of the glittery escalator at the inauguration of the new highway mall, the six-screen cinema ads and opening day sales as oracular backdrop, both set beside this one of the steamy food court, filled with the downy young like chicks in an incubator, at yet another mall (though the viewer might commingle them), each enriched with faces and fashions and all the passing foolishness of their times, and add to these another of the bus station soda fountain and pinball machines, once locus of the courting rites of the young now no longer young, and yet another of the abandoned Night Sky Drive-In movie theater, sacrificed to the highway which gave birth to the newest mall, showing its desolation of spirit by the grass and weeds sprouting through the cracks in the cement ramps, the sagging fences, leaning screen, marred by the stones and bottles thrown at it, and then a worker standing in rubble, guiding a beam aloft, and a tennis-costumed woman and her leather-jacketed children in that parking lot before seen so deserted, now filled with gleaming vehicles of the latest models, and a stark empty-windowed downtown dime store closing down forever, and so the story grows: of the town, and of the viewer, and of the photographer, too.

As they dragged the distraught photographer out of the fancy women’s-wear shop at the mall, his eyes filmy and unfocused and his knees giving way beneath him, what he kept blubbering over and over was: “It doesn’t matter, I didn’t have any film in the camera anyway,” a fact that seemed to be causing him more dismay than his arrest. They paraded the poor bewildered man down the corridor, through the busy cafe area, past the table where Opal sat alone, and on down the next corridor as though to prolong what perhaps they perceived as an entertainment for the shoppers, and from the grins she could see on people’s faces that was probably how it was taken. The young were openly laughing, pointing, making jokes. Opal was not entertained. Her own spirits were too low, her confidence in her own grip on the proprieties too shaken, to take pleasure in the humiliation of any fellow creature, especially one so harmless as the photographer, who was a bit idiosyncratic maybe, but a decent citizen and a loving son. Opal had known from church the man’s mother, a saint in her way, her husband killed on one or another of those beaches during the big war (Mitch had played his part on the home front in that one, as had her son in the lesser ones since then, for which she was grateful), the woman widowed so young and all but penniless with a son to raise, then in turn dutifully and tenderly cared for by that son when her own health and mind failed her, a fate that Opal hoped she would herself escape, but confident that her own son would be no less caring if such a calamity befell her. And what would her son say about her present troubles? He would not be patient with them. Mother, he would say, let that addled old man be, there’s nothing you can do for him, just watch over my wife and children when I cannot, I’m depending on you. And now she’d let him down on all counts and, moreover, behaved in ways he would not believe, nor could she still, though she knew she had. The girls were gone, she’d looked everywhere, it was all her fault, she’d stayed too long, but she’d called and they weren’t home either, no one was except the cleaning lady, and now she could do nothing but sit in this rancid public parlor, feeling utterly estranged, surrounded by misbehaving children and that indecent racket they called music, waiting, hopefully yet fearfully, for her charges’ safe return. She had brought Clarissa and her friend Jennifer to the mall this morning, as she had often done, though much earlier than usual, and she knew by their twittery excitement that something was up (those thin little shorts they had on didn’t even cover their behinds and they were wearing their belly buttons out like brooches) and she should stay, but her visits to the retirement center had become more than mere duty or habit, rather something like a compulsion, something she had to do more for herself than for that stricken old man, who had become, in fact, not so much a family friend as an adversary. And one of a very peculiar sort. It had begun simply as a way of coping with the awkwardness of Barnaby’s befuddled mind, humoring him in his confusions rather than forever correcting him, a sort of kindness, really, and therapeutic, too—he seemed to speak more clearly than before—that was how she had thought of it when she’d started taking Audrey’s part in Barnaby’s imaginary dialogues. These were not genteel or affectionate conversations: Barnaby was an angry man, and Audrey, he was convinced, had with malice done him wrong. Opal was equally convinced that Barnaby was misjudging her, her mistakes, if any, innocent (John was a charmer), and besides the dead should be allowed to lie in peace, so she took it upon herself to defend a woman toward whom in life she’d never really felt a fondness, at first in her own voice and then, when that only seemed to stir up Barnaby’s rage, in Audrey’s. Audrey had been so different from Opal—vivacious, brassy, self-assured, dynamic, daring, proud—that what most amazed Opal was the ease with which she assumed her role, standing toe-to-toe with the irascible old fellow, silencing his pigheaded bluster finally with the force of her own irrefutable logic, her doughty good sense, exhibiting then her own anger at his mistrust, backing him up until he fell into a chair, apologizing: “But… Aud, I’ve felt… such pain …” “I know.” Then he’d lean his poor damaged head into her bosom or onto her shoulder and rest there a while, she stroking his age-freckled pate gently, consoling him as best she could, until he forgot and it all started up again. She took to cleaning up his room for him, straightening the bed, sorting his laundry, scolding him for bad habits (“Don’t walk around with your robe gaping like that, do you think people enjoy looking at an ugly old coot like you in his underwear?” “Too much trouble, tying and untying it, Aud, slows me down when I have to go to the bathroom …”), even helping him with his baths because he said he hated the bath lady who treated him like he was three years old. “She’s right, you are three years old, now stop picking at yourself like that and lean forward, let’s get this over with.” “Wish I could, Aud. Get it over with, I mean.” “You stop talking like that, you old buzzard! Who would I have to fight with if you quit on me?” Which did remind her to take the gun out of the little raggedy holster in his bathrobe while he was in the tub and hide it at the bottom of his laundry basket. Sometimes she prepared some food for him or cleaned his refrigerator or microwave, read old newspapers to him, gave him his medicines, clipped his toenails. “Now, Aud, we’ve got to do something about that damned will.” “It’s been done. I don’t want to hear another word about it. Give me the other foot.” He’d been especially difficult today, spilling his medicine, dirtying the bathroom, throwing his dirty clothes about, refusing his bath, getting in a rage about a “dawzer,” whatever that was, even trying to strike her with his cane, but she took the cane away from him, pushed him down into his rocker, cooled his heels with a smart dressing-down, and then, when he’d lapsed into a more melancholic mood, gave him a haircut. She noticed he was eyeing the scissors, so she teased him for a while, setting them down where he could almost reach them but not quite, then quite casually popping them in her handbag when she got ready to go. Sometimes, leaving Barnaby’s little apartment, a funny feeling would pass over her, as though she had to remember to be Opal again and might not be if she forgot, just a fleeting sensation, but enough to make her shiver. Today, though, the funny feeling, after what she saw in the main lobby, had not gone away, the shivering hadn’t. Passing by the visitors’ logbook, she had glanced to see if she had remembered to sign in and was startled to see Audrey’s name written there. More than once. But in Opal’s own handwriting. She felt confused and somehow threatened, almost as though there were a hand at her throat, and she reached for the pen to do something, but there were other people in the lobby, coming and going, she had to leave it. And she’d lost all track of time, she’d been gone too long from the girls, Clarissa so irresponsible of late, she had her father’s bold independent ways, but not always his good judgment, and that dangerous mall crowd—Opal was suddenly afraid, for the girls, for herself, for her whole family, and dazed and panicky, she went scurrying back, hunched over the steering wheel as though trying to push the car instead of drive it, arriving finally, still shaken, but more and more her old self, her old dowdy steadfast inept and timorous self, to find her fears confirmed, the girls nowhere in sight, and nothing to do after an anxious search and a call home, an embarrassed inquiry or two (where were those scamps? they’d hear it from Granny Opal when they got back!), but sit and wait. In this glossy marketplace her son had made, though certainly not for her (she was not eating or drinking anything, people wanted her table, the busboys were giving her impatient looks, but she would not, could not really, move), a setting that seemed to demonstrate something her friend Kate once told her, sitting in the city park and speaking then about the most recent achievements in outer space: “When the edge becomes the center, Opal,” she’d said, “then the center becomes the void.”

Where were those two scamps? They were up in the air with Bruce and Nevada, not quite in outer space, but, as Clarissa put it: “Far out!” It had started as an ordinary highspeed joyride, but Clarissa had insisted Bruce put his sports jet through all its tricks, and so they’d climbed and rolled and looped and dived and then skimmed the whole next county in about ten seconds flat! It was unreal! Uncle Bruce and Nevada sat together up front, and it was easy to see how much in love they were, the way they couldn’t stop touching each other, Nevada especially—Bruce, who was dressed in silky soft army clothes, acted cool like he always did, but Nevada seemed crazy in love, and she and Jen were getting excited, just watching them. Uncle Bruce said you had to be careful, speed was a kind of addiction, “an escape from meat,” as a woman he once knew liked to say, she was so hooked on it, she came all apart each time she put her feet back on the ground again, she seemed constantly to be fluttering and spinning then like those little plastic whirligigs until she could get back up in motion again, just watching her in a closed room made you dizzy. “Was that Marie-Claire?” Clarissa asked, and Uncle Bruce smiled (sadly, she thought) and said: “Well, yes, I guess it was.” “But if you do get addicted,” Jen asked, “how do you stop?” “You learn its opposite,” said Bruce, almost as though he’d expected her question. “A sort of counter-addiction.” “Woo, sounds real Zen,” Jennifer said, making Bruce and Nevada laugh, though Clarissa knew it was just something she’d got from her mother. Bruce took them on a series of rolls then that made the earth whip round and round about them like he had it on a string. “Wowee! This is awesome!” shrieked Clarissa, and Jen agreed but said she was a little woozy. “Oh Jen!” Clarissa complained. “Don’t grinch us out! This is fun! More, Uncle Bruce!” “Well, if Jennifer’s not feeling well,” said Nevada, suddenly very concerned, and Uncle Bruce eased up. “How are you doing, kid?” “I’m all right,” said Jen, though she didn’t sound like it. Was this a trick? They seemed to pay her a lot more attention now. “Maybe you’d like to work the controls,” Bruce suggested, and Clarissa jumped up and said “Oh yes!” and beat her to it; from the greenish look on Jen’s face, she was probably doing her a favor. “Daddy always lets me fly his plane, sitting on his lap,” she lied—her father was pretty strict about the rules, though he did promise to teach her someday—and she popped herself on Bruce’s silky lap as though she knew exactly what to do, and, more or less, she did, she’d been watching closely and she was a fast learner. She felt very cool and, though she didn’t attempt anything crazy, she didn’t just fly in a straight line either. Meanwhile, she was very much aware of where her bottom was and, though she had never thought of it as a tactile organ before, she used it now as a kind of fat clumsy cartoon hand, very thinly gloved, and as she put the plane through its swoops and turns, she squeezed and pinched and scooted back and forth, until Uncle Bruce said he thought that was enough, they’d better get Jennifer back on the ground again, and he seemed a little ticked off, but he did give her a friendly smack and then left his hand there as he lifted her off his silky lap, she pretending she was having too much fun flying to stop, almost like she was already getting an addiction, so as to keep his hand pressed there as long as possible, but then she made a mistake and turned them upside-down when she didn’t mean to and that ended it. But her bottom was still tingling with the dreamy memory of what it had been holding on to when Nevada dropped them off at the mall and they found Granny Opal all alone at a table inside, looking like she was not having the best time of her life. So she and Jen bought her a cherry mush and diet colas with lemon slices for themselves and explained that Uncle Bruce came by and gave them a drive in a super new rig he was trying out, it was really neat, and they elaborated on that to make it sound real, but they didn’t really have to, she didn’t even seem to notice they’d been gone, and then she told them about the photographer getting arrested and, though she didn’t tell it very well, she and Jen laughed at everything Granny Opal said and that seemed to cheer her up and she even ate some of her cherry mush.

When from his second-floor office window in the bank building Trevor saw the rubber-kneed photographer being taken into custody down at the police station, he who had never known delight (this thought had remained with him, steady as pulse) suddenly experienced, like a brief foretaste of that which eluded him, a strange mixture of anguish and exhilaration, both emotions arising from the same realization: He had done this! He who had changed so little had, irreversibly, changed a man’s life, and maybe the lives of everyone in this town! Of course, Gordon had helped, but this scene transpiring in the street below was, in a real sense, Trevor’s own doing, his own, as it were, personal work of art. And his burden: Gordon seemed all but lifeless, as though his spirit had fled, and Trevor’s own heart sank when he saw the state the man was in. Trevor had, on returning yesterday from the spectacle at the mall, determined to end his mad clandestine pursuit of the photographer, but at the same time he had tried to understand what it was he had really been doing. He had been, in some sense, seeking after truth, yes, but of what kind? And to what end? He recalled an economics theory professor he had back at university who held that the central principle of all human interaction was simple raw power, he laced all his lectures with reminders that economics, history, life itself could not be understood without remembering that. He said it was the basis not merely of community order, but also of religious faith, science, and the search for truth, and of course of love, friendship, marriage, and family. There were jokes about the man’s home life and some pointed out he didn’t have tenure yet so no wonder his brain was a bit maggoty on the topic and it was popular to dismiss his lectures by saying that what little power those had was got by jacking directly into Machiavelli (an obscene image was often used to express this), but Trevor found the argument compelling and wondered often at his own powerlessness, which the accretion of knowledge by itself did not seem to overcome. His fascination with the professor came to an end when someone posed the question of the disinterested artist: his answer was along the same lines, but far less convincing, dismissing disinterest as though it were a silly myth, suddenly broadening his definition of power to include things other than the manipulation of other people, and refusing arbitrarily (“Let me teach you something about power,” he joked) to take any more questions on the subject. And now Gordon had, in effect, posed the question again. That question, or its answer, seemed to touch on this matter of delight, as had Gordon himself in an interview published a few years ago in The Town Crier (Trevor had clipped this interview, kept it in his office desk drawer, second down on the right, he was looking at it now): When asked why it was he had taken up the photographic profession, he’d replied, the profession to make a living, the vocation to devote himself to art. But then why not one of the fine arts, painting or sculpture? He was a poor man, his options were few; but his goal remained the same: the pursuit of beauty. But of what use, the interviewer had pressed on, playing the devil’s advocate, is beauty? None at all, the photographer had responded. Nor is there any use for the ecstasy that accompanies its contemplation … Had Gordon known such ecstasy? Trevor did not know, but he did believe that Gordon had chosen a life that made access to that sensation possible, even if it might mean you sometimes ended up running around in pink nightshirts and arousing the displeasure of the police. You could see intimations of it when Gordon worked: it was as though he were unaware of his own being in the world, transforming himself into a mere prism through which the beauty of the world might pass. This intensity: it was something Trevor felt he could never achieve, except perhaps through someone like Gordon, though he had not, when he’d begun this pursuit, foreseen his own active role in shaping its direction. At the time, he was simply fascinated with Gordon’s own covert pursuit of John’s wife—and that was another thing, John’s wife. Had anyone besides himself noticed that she seemed to be vanishing, not as when someone leaves town, but as an image might fade from a photographic print? If so, they were not mentioning it, and Trevor himself was reluctant to bring it up and risk looking the fool, but his old problem of being unable to register her features after seeing them had worsened: he could no longer register them while seeing them. He’d tried to come to some understanding of this by locating and replotting her point on his actuarial graphs, but her point had vanished, too, and he began to wonder if perhaps her disappearance might not have something to do with Gordon’s photographs of her, as though he might, so to speak, be stealing her image. Or was he, aware as Trevor was of her vanishing, trying to preserve it? His pursuit of Gordon had therefore acquired the additional motive—essentially altruistic, but not without its own links to power, beauty, delight—of watching over John’s wife, or at least of trying to understand what was happening to her, and it now occurred to him that the key to that understanding, and perhaps to his entire quest, might well lie in the photographs Gordon had taken of her. Was this the moment, with Gordon under arrest, to have a look at them? He put the interview away, checked his tie, blew on his hat and donned it. He might have accomplished more than he thought with those phone calls! Hastily, he dropped down to the police station to inquire about his friend whom he had seen in some distress, did he need any help, and was told he was only being held until the chief got back, it was no big deal, he’d be home by suppertime. He thanked them, exchanging pleasantries, and left, trying to move without undue haste, but heading straight for the studio; just as he drew near, however, the chief of police came backing out of it, his gray shirt dark with sweat, some books or albums under one arm, keys out to lock the door, so Trevor made an abrupt right turn and took a hopefully casual-seeming stroll around the block, cutting through an alley to shorten the circuit, getting lost briefly (it was as though they’d turned the block around on him—he was overexcited), his own back perspiring by the time he had finally returned. He peered into a display window (toys: perhaps he had a nephew) that reflected the street, having observed the way they did it on TV, and when he’d caught his breath and it seemed safe, he straightened his hat, dropped over (if anyone asked, he was ordering up a photo for Marge’s surprise mayoral campaign, to be announced today), and rang the bell. What would he tell Gordon’s wife? That he’d been taken on as her husband’s legal aide perhaps, she was pretty simple, probably didn’t know an accountant from an attorney, and under the circumstances she would no doubt appreciate any help at all. Just investigating the allegations, ma’am, and I thought it might be a good idea to look at a few photos. No answer. He rang again. Maybe she was down at the station, another break, he tried the door though he knew it was locked, he’d have the place to himself if he could just get in, but he’d have to hurry. There must be other doors. He’d try at the back. But whoa, inspector, walk, don’t run. And stop giggling.

The announcement of Marge’s candidacy for mayor did not, after all, appear as scheduled, inasmuch as its vehicle, The Town Crier, for the first time in its long history, did not itself appear on its scheduled day, and though most people in town did not even notice this until it was pointed out to them, Marge certainly did. She went immediately to the Crier offices to complain, but found them closed and dark, nor could she rouse anyone when she banged on the door, though she was sure Ellsworth was in there somewhere. She called Trevor from a payphone in the Sixth Street Cafe across the street (Oxford, sitting in there with two of his grandchildren, said he hadn’t seen him today, but then he couldn’t see her either, so what did that prove?) to ask him what she should do, but got only his answering machine. Everywhere she looked, there were giant posters pasted up with her would-be opponent’s goonish mug on them, and she felt ganged up on. What she needed was a friend, but Lorraine had been so evasive of late, Marge decided just to go over to her house and confront her directly: was she on her side or not? When Lorraine came to the door, she looked startled and confused, but she invited Marge in, in her clumsy way (Marge was thinking: even if she’s with me, is this sloppy awkward woman a useful ally or a liability?), and Marge, in spite of her momentary doubts (already she was thinking: if she’s with me, she’s beautiful, but she wondered still why she seemed so standoffish), was so grateful to see a friend in this moment of crisis that she wanted to give her a hug and only held back because so many contrary emotions were flickering across Lorraine’s face (the trouble with this woman is that she’s never grown up, Marge was thinking, somewhat contemptuously, she’s a silly cow who just lets the world run over her) and she was afraid of doing something (but she’s nevertheless the smartest woman in this town of dummies, Marge herself excepted, and she has to struggle against so much more than Marge does, starting with the lout she’s married to, she deserves nothing less than the unconditional love and admiration which she is now feeling for her) that might confuse her all the more. The poor woman seemed about to cry. Was she ill, Marge wondered? “Well, yes and no,” Lorraine said, her voice quavering. “Yes and no what?” “It’s sort of like an illness.” “What is?” It’s odd, Marge was thinking, it’s almost like she was reading my mind. “It’s not really like reading, it’s more like, well, just listening.” “What? You hear everything I’m thinking?” “A lot anyway. It comes and goes. And not just you. Everybody.” Though Lorraine was starting to cry, Marge suddenly felt like the vulnerable one: how do you turn this thing in the head off so you don’t give everything away? “You can’t. I can’t either. It’s very tiring. You were wondering why I’ve been avoiding you lately.” “Because you didn’t want to know what I was thinking?” “Are you reading my mind now?” “No, just guessing.” “I was afraid to find out what you really—well, you know, that you might—and now you’re wondering if I’ve always been doing this or if it just started up.” “Something like that.” “It began one night out at the club. That night John’s wife got the drink spilled down her front—” “I remember. I was there.” She recalled how silly Trevor had got that night, staring at those wet breasts. “He wasn’t the only one.” No. But this was terrible! “You don’t know the half of it, Marge, it’s a living nightmare!” gasped Lorraine, dabbing at her eyes with her blouse tails. “I’m sorry,” she added, responding to something unflattering that Marge was thinking, and tucking in her blouse, went into the kitchen, returning with a box of tissues. She blew her nose and said: “Oh, Marge, I’ve so needed someone to talk to!” Marge, who was not one to express her feelings aloud, was therefore relieved that the genuine warmth she was feeling toward her friend Lorraine at this moment did not need further expression, and instead she said, having just thought of it again: “Lorraine, I came to tell you, I’m running for mayor.” “Really?!” exclaimed Lorraine, her face lighting up with the surprise of it, with the surprise of being surprised. “That’s wonderful! I had no idea!”

Marge had been right. Ellsworth had been in the Crier offices when she knocked, still was. Or, rather, he was on the floor above them in what he liked to call, as a struggling artist, his garret, but which was today just his old dusty workroom above the shop. He’d been dozing fitfully on the cot, exhausted but too disturbed to sleep. He had not, for the first time since he undertook the task, kept today the record, he knew that, but the record he had kept all these years, or thought he’d kept, was now, he’d found, dissolving on him, as though to teach him what he had always known—that words were not, as he liked to pretend, the stubborn monitors of time, adamant and fixed as number, but were time’s recombinatory toys and about as hard as water—and so to taunt him with the futility of his record-keeping mission. Or so it seemed last night: he allowed he was not well, his tired mind too lost to imaginary realms to keep its grip on real ones as firmly as a good reporter’s must. Specimen: the caption he had written for the famous cake-in-the-face wedding photo so many years ago, which, when in his most panicky moment last night he’d looked, had seemed to read: “MAID OF HONOR NOURISHES WEDDING GHOST”—but which had resolved itself to “GUEST” once more when, merely, he had rubbed his eyes and taken a deep breath. In short: the word had not lost its stability, his perception of it had. Was this a consolation? That, in effect, this book—the Stalker!—was driving him mad? Not much of one, nor was the less hazardous notion, which he could not quite believe, that what the word had faithfully kept he had simply remembered wrongly: the bride’s dress, for example, or the year the Pioneer Hotel came down. Dates were dates, places places, and that special wedding section was too well thumbed for him to find himself reading, for the first time, a paragraph deep in the story that began: “On the night before the exchange of vows, the groom bade farewell to the solitary life at a well-rounded entertainment provided by his many staunch friends …” Ellsworthian, no doubt, he could not deny it, but he knew he had not written it, or if he had he had not printed it, and if he had he no longer knew what he had done his whole life long. A possibility, of course; another: that he’d somehow nightmared himself into such an hallucinatory state last night that in his fevered eyes, no boundaries were secure. He’d half-reasoned so, half of reason being all he’d left to work with, and so, as history melted and mutated before him, he’d shaken his head, slapped his cheeks, stomped about the room, and looked again, often to good effect. What finally defeated him, however, and deprived this day the town of its weekly self-portrait was what he found in the celebrated photo of John and his bride dashing for the limousine under a shower of rice. This photo was one of his favorites, for it seemed to capture in its communal seed-burst gaiety the great promise of that historic occasion—only now the unanimity of that good cheer was marred by a single solemn face, staring ominously out through the cloud of falling rice, straight at the camera, and when Ellsworth saw that face he knew in an instant who it was: the Stalker! He was sure of it, even though he didn’t really know what the Stalker looked like. And as Ellsworth in dismay stared back, the Stalker’s eyes seemed to widen and his cheeks to tremble (though perhaps it was only Ellsworth’s hands trembling) as if suppressing laughter: Ellsworth fled. And up here remained in full retreat, thinking, somewhat foggily: the book must go. The burning of the forest was not a nightmare, it was a kind of prescription. He rose from the cot, feeling shaky, stared gloomily at the heaps of manuscript pages scattered about the room: on chairs, the table, in shelves, on the floor. A great devastation loomed; probably he should eat something before he commenced it. He picked up a sheet off a nearby chair, read: Art emerges, not from what is seen, but from the longing for what is not seen. Did he write this? He didn’t remember. Who said it? The Artist, consoling himself now for his loss? No, he was inconsolable. But not really the sardonic Stalker’s style. Then—? Good grief! The Model!

Hunger was making Pauline shaky, too, and though devastation was not on her mind (it never was, not even back when Daddy Duwayne tried to implant it there), something approximating it was already taking place in the studio as she blundered about desperately, looking for something to eat, knowing, even as she squeezed painfully through doorways and knocked things over in her clumsiness, that there was nothing to be found. When Otis left with the albums, he had promised to order up a dozen pizzas for her, but they hadn’t arrived and she really couldn’t wait much longer. She tried to call him again, but found it hard to work the little dials on Gordon’s old-fashioned rotary phones (had to turn them like bottle caps) and kept getting wrong numbers and busy signals. Putting two and two together was not what Pauline did best, but as she pressed her bulk through the doorway to check the downstairs refrigerator one more time (empty of course; on her last fruitful pass, she had found a withered lemon stuck to the back of the vegetable drawer by its own rot: she’d brushed it off on her thigh and eaten it whole like a piece of candy), it suddenly came to her with the force of a blow to the head, the sort of blow she was constantly giving herself now whenever she moved, that she was still growing and if she didn’t get out of here soon, she’d be trapped inside this building—already she couldn’t get up and down the stairs—and that would mean (two plus two) she’d probably starve to death. Even if they let her husband out of jail, Pauline knew she couldn’t count on him, he was so caught up in his work these days. But if she went outside, what would she wear? The one bedsheet she had wrapped around her was flimsier than underwear, and the other bedsheets and blankets were upstairs out of reach. She remembered the dusty old burgundy backdrop curtains in the portrait studio, and she squeezed back in there to (woops!—crash!—sorry about that) take them down, hoping Gordon wouldn’t be too mad about her borrowing them. She couldn’t get her big fingers around a safety pin, much less a needle, so, her stomach rumbling volcanically all the while she worked, she fashioned a kind of loose simple cloak (good old high school home ec!) and stapled it together with the stapler from the front-shop counter. Reaching through the bead curtains for it, she decided to take them along, too: “for dressing up,” as she thought of it, though mostly it was to belt the loose flaps in place. Leaving by the front door with bells jingling did not seem like a good idea, and anyway Otis had locked it when he left and the little catch would be too fidgety for her fingers to work from the inside. But the back door was too small, even sideways she kept getting snagged on something. Of course, it would help if the screen door weren’t there. How do these little hinge gizmos work? Never mind, it was off. Still couldn’t get through, though. She took off her new cloak and beads, lay down on her side and pushed her legs out into the alley and then (ouch!) her bottom, got up on her hands and knees and, jiggling back and forth, worked her top part out, dragging her new clothes with her. As she was still wiggling her shoulders through, she peeked through her flopping breasts and legs and saw a man watching her from across the alleyway, one hand clapped over an eye as though he were taking an eye test. She recognized him: Gordon’s insurance salesman. He couldn’t seem to stop staring, though the look on his face was different from most she’d suffered all her life. More like he was having a heart attack or had eaten something he shouldn’t have. Well, who could blame him, she probably was a sight. Pauline, being an incurious sort, did not stop to wonder what the man was doing there, nor why he didn’t at least come over and give her a helping hand, she figured most people would be put off, seeing her like this, and they would anyway suppose she was big enough to take care of herself. She pulled the cloak on over her head again and tied it with the beads, then went over to apologize to him and ask him where she might find something to eat—quickly!—but he just fell back into the rubbish there, still holding his eye and stammering something about his wife and the mayor. Well, too bad, but she had problems of her own, so, her growling stomach replying for her, she left him sitting there and made her way, knees bent and head ducked so as to cause as little alarm as possible, down the alley toward the Sixth Street Cafe.

Where Alf at the time was taking his midmorning coffee break, hunched over in front of the dusty plateglass window with his old friend Oxford and Oxford’s two youngest grandchildren, a pair of twins, not yet four, who had their father’s heart-shaped face and wispy blond hair but who, under their granddad’s patient tutelage, were already reading and doing their numbers. “It was like he felt he was locked out or something, and didn’t know how to get back in,” Alf said, gazing wearily out on the asphalt street which seemed to be sweating in the morning glare. He had been trying to describe his nighttime encounter with Oxford’s peculiar son Cornell in the back alley, but Oxford, fascinated by his grandchildren, excitedly filling in their dot-to-dot books at the table next to them (“It’s a lady! With a pointy hat on!”), seemed to be only half listening. The street was eerily empty. Civic center or no, the downtown was going to hell. The newspaper office across the street looked shut for the duration. No paper so far this week and no sign there’d ever be one again. Alf rubbed his eyes, wondered if he ought to look in on Ellsworth, make sure he was all right. “Still not sleeping well, I take it.” “No.” “Alcohol’s a clumsy sedative, Alf. Flurazepam’s better.” “Tried it.” “Methaqualones? There are some good ones out now.” “Hard on the liver.” “Especially when mixed with scotch, I suppose. You know, now that you mention it, Kate once said something amusing to me about doors. It was not long before she died, at the time they tore down the Pioneer Hotel. It was a sturdy old thing, that hotel, not unlike an ancient warrior, as Kate said, hard to bring to his knees.” “Mmm. Harriet and I stayed in that old warrior for a week or so when we came back after the war. From the smell, we must have been booked into the armpit.” “So John finally had to use dynamite—” “I remember. It was like a goddamn bomb had hit.” Brought it all back. Couldn’t sleep for a week after. It was the week when missing Harriet hit him hardest. “And when the dust cleared, all that was left standing was the big front door, completely intact, columns, architrave, and all. Majestic. Inviting. But opening onto nothing.” Alf remembered that standing door, remembered identifying with it in some way, but the memory seemed to be in black and white, so he didn’t know whether it was from actually seeing the thing itself or from the photo of it in the newspaper. If Alf had been asked, he would have said he never read the local rag, but now that it had not come out, he realized he was badly missing the silly thing. ‘“Mostly we build walls,’ Kate said then, ‘to separate the inner from the outer, the private from the public, the sacrosanct from the common, the known from the unknown. Doors are put in the walls to ceremonialize the crossing from one into another, which is sometimes a fulfillment and a delight and sometimes a frightening transgression.’” Oxford glanced over at his grandchildren. “Like in the story of the three little pigs: a ritual transgression of the sanctity of the home that takes place at the doorway.” “Always thought that was an oedipal fantasy,” Alf said, signaling for a coffee refill. Should get back. The preacher’s wife would be there by now. And there was that hysterical message on his answering machine this morning: “Help! That thing you took out! It’s back!” No clue who it was who’d called. “You know, the home as womb with Big Bad Daddy outside, trying to blow his way in.” “Maybe. Same thing. The door as a ‘magical threshold,’ as Kate called it, promising access to some mystery beyond or within. And what John had done, she said, was strip the door of all illusions, reminding us that all magic was nothing but sleight of hand, and thresholds were mere artifices in the middle of nowhere.” Oxford smiled wistfully, glancing over at his busy grandchildren. “And maybe you’re right about the three little pigs, Alf. Maybe poor Corny is just missing his mom.” John was back. Alf saw him emerge from the hardware store next door with a look on his face that said he’d either just fired old Floyd or given him a raise, with John you couldn’t tell which. Alf, glancing at his finger, remembered there was something he needed to talk over with John (what was worse, it seemed to be growing), but just then the waitress came over to say that he had an urgent phonecall. It was his nurse. An emergency. A man struck blind. Come quickly, she begged, the poor man was beside himself.

Nurse Lumby’s quaint expression, used figuratively to describe her hysterical patient (to whom, on the doctor’s orders, she was now administering a mild sedative, with some pleasure, by injection), would have been understood more literally by her brother Cornell who had become more and more convinced that there was not one of him but two. It was as though there were a parenthetical Corny inside the outward one (or containing it), or as if he were carrying a shadow around that did not always move as he moved, and from time to time he would spin around to see if he could catch the shadow out, or if not the shadow, then, in whatever form, that other self. He had to be careful not to do this when the woman called Gretchen was around, because she cut him off from his video games whenever she caught him at it (this morning, for example: he thought he felt something, like—what?—like a tap on his shoulder, he spun around—and there she was, scowling at him through her bottle-glass lenses; she clumped over like a movie monster, pulled the plug on the one drugstore machine that still worked, slapped his head when he tried to protest) on the grounds that the games were making him battier than he already was, though from his perspective, if not from his shadow’s (he couldn’t speak for that other self who seemed, incredibly, to be married to that peg-legged freak and to be the father of more children by her than he could count, never mind learn their names), she was the one who was crazy. Sometimes the whole world seemed crazy, but this did not worry Cornell, his mother always said that most right thoughts were, when first thought, thoughts of one lonely person—most crazy thoughts, too, of course—but the point was, it was cool to be different. Which he was, really was, and she always said she loved him because of it. Now, deprived of his only compensatory pleasure in this upside-down world (or was it inside out?), Corny curled up in a niche behind the drugstore publication racks and thumbed gloomily through the magazines, exploding in his pants whenever he glimpsed plump bosoms or inviting nests of pubic hair or even sometimes just pictures of round juicy things with creases in them, but otherwise inconsolably bored and depressed. A bummer, man, it truly was. Life, everything. Maybe later, when fish-eyes wasn’t looking, he’d steal a pocketful of coins and the keys to the store van and sneak out to the mall arcade, in spite of the ridicule he often suffered out there from the teen-meanies—the zit-snits, as he used to call them in at least one of his lives. He was staring dejectedly at a picture of a nun, dressed only in her wimple and white stockings, being ogled by a priest hiding behind a cathedral gargoyle (it was the hideous gargoyle that most fascinated Cornell even as he popped off at the sight of the nun’s naked bottom with the thorned heart of Jesus tattooed on one cheek: when would this nightmare end, he wondered?), in a photo feature called “Les Girls de Paris,” when a woman standing near the racks peered over his shoulder and asked him if he was planning to travel to France this summer. He recognized her. Though she was married and rich and famous now, he remembered her mostly as Yale’s girlfriend in high school. He used to follow them around, especially in the house or at the movies, to see what they did together. What they did was hold hands a lot, though once Yale kissed her, and that was the first time that thing happened in Corny’s pants when he wasn’t asleep or at least in bed. Her remark now might have been meant as a joke, but she didn’t appear to be making fun. She seemed more like his mother when he brought stuff home from school, like, you know, really interested, and when he mumbled he could never go back there, she asked him why, and he (he was afraid the woman with the stubby leg would come over and tell him to keep his wackiness to himself, but she didn’t even seem to be listening) told her all about it. What door? she asked when he’d finished. So he led her out into the alley and took her, step-by-step, through his midnight searches, though everything looked different in the daytime. More ordinary. A plain old dirty alley, that’s all it was, it was embarrassing, man. He began to see himself as Gretchen saw him—a pathetic loony with messy pants—and he was sorry now he’d brought the lady out here. But then, in a dark place out of the sun, he saw the trash cans again: KEEP OUR TOWN BEAUTIFUL, they said. And he knew, if he turned around (why were his knees shaking? why was he hesitating? what was he afraid of?), the door would be there. But when, screwing up his courage, he did, it wasn’t. Nor was the lady. What was there was a great huge womanish thing hunkered down behind a pickup (she was so big she was only half hidden by it), snorting and whuffing like a wild animal as she pawed ravenously through the garbage of the Sixth Street Cafe. She looked up at him (or down, really) through her uncombed hair, a blob of meringue on her nose and wilted lettuce leaves hanging off her lower lip. His heart skipped a beat. But not from fear. “Corny?” she whispered. “Is that you?”

The old Ford pickup Pauline was crouching behind belonged to the hardware store on the corner, a family enterprise operated by John, run by his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him, and before that John’s great-great-grandfather, the famous pioneer horse-trough maker who first set up shop here where, on the rolling prairie, there was then no corner, thus, as though drawing an X on the ground, creating it and all that followed, or in some such mythic language had Ellsworth once put it in a popular Town Crier article years ago about “Dreamers and Builders.” The historic two-story brick structure was one of the few downtown businesses left intact, more or less intact, from the old days, though not the old days of the great-great-grandfather. Why had John spared it and so little else? Some said that it showed a sentimental streak in John, others that he’d cynically set out to enhance its value by destroying its more beautiful competitors; most, though, thought he just hadn’t got around to it yet. For the past dozen years or so, John had entrusted the day-to-day management of the old family business to an out-of-towner named Floyd, a former trucker and traveling salesman who happened to be passing through when the manager’s position was vacant. Floyd was not a hunter or a golfer, was not a social drinker, and had not flown nor would he ever, but he was a good bowler and his past life had afforded him opportunities to play a lot of cards (he had earned John’s respect as a bridge partner), to read the Bible through and through, and to pick up several manual skills of the sort taught in such places, which he had used to good effect since coming to town. And the store he managed, in spite of the competition of the malls, most of it created by John himself, had managed always to show a small profit from year to year, a tribute to Floyd’s nuts-and-bolts know-how and his tenacity. So while Alf, next door at the Sixth Street Cafe, might have surmised that John, emerging from the hardware store with that icy grin on his face, had just fired old Floyd (good riddance if he did, he was an irascible old sonuvabitch, and something of a religious kook, nobody liked him), the truth was that John, who knew how to use the talent he found, had just promoted Floyd out of the hardware store at last, doubled his salary, and put him in charge locally of the new national trucking line he had acquired on his most recent business trip out West, a company he intended to link, as he explained to Floyd, with his air cargo operations. Which was why the hardware store manager, more emotional than most in town supposed, could now be found down on his white-overalled knees in the do-it-yourself section, next to the wind chimes and redwood twin-lounge kits, giving tearful and vehement thanks to his divinity: Redemption! Sweet Jesus! It was really possible! All his dark and tortured past seemed to fade away like a dissolving nightmare and he bellowed out his rapturous joy (the high school kid who worked for him, alarmed by his employer’s hysterical rant, ducked out the back door: whoo, Old Hoot’s gone off the deep end again, time for a joint) as God’s grace descended upon him like light filling a room or water a bucket—Praise the Lord! He was saved! Saved at last! And, so saved, once-covetous Floyd, gripped by a love of the world now sublime and pure, coveted no more.

The man whose wife Floyd had once in sin but, now redeemed, no longer coveted felt himself, back in his old hometown after invigorating westward journeys, on something of a mission. The town (he had not been paying enough attention to it and it was important to him) seemed idled, confused, unfocused—“sunk in the doldrums,” as his mother would say—its communal pulse slowed, its eyes glazed over, and John, charging purposefully through it, was bringing it back to life again. At the airport when he’d landed (the last ten miles and final descent had seemed much longer than usual, he was probably trail-wearier than he thought, but he shook it off), he’d found his manager and town’s future mayor dozing, snorting resonantly through his sausagey nose, and unable to say, when abruptly awakened with a boot to his shins, whether he’d seen Bruce or not, though Bruce’s private jet was parked there. To get Snuffy up and running again, John had taken him on a brisk tour of the warehouse sheds, asking him to figure out where they were going to house the local headquarters of the national trucking firm he’d just bought and to get estimates on any new loading bays and access roads they’d have to build; when he left him, on the phone to his crew and barking out orders in his trademark no-crap rhetoric, the old coach’s eyes had brightened and the familiar fire had returned. In town, John stopped in at his bank offices (a teller whose child had developed bone cancer squeezed his hands and thanked him for helping to bump her up on the priority list for an urgently needed marrow transplant, which she said had gone well, and everyone in the bank seemed to straighten up an inch or two and flash a smile as he passed through) to check his mail, sign checks, return calls (Nevada said: “We have to talk …”), send out a couple dozen faxes, order up flowers for his wife and call the caterers to make sure everything was ready for his Pioneers Day barbecue: “Whatever we did last year, you better increase it by about twenty percent. It’s going to be a big one.” At home, he got Clarissa who, sounding radiant and cheerful, clearly shared his good mood; she said she just loved Granny Opal and she’d leave a note for Mom that he’d called. Yes, she thought Uncle Bruce was probably in town. He phoned his mother to thank her for all her help with the children and for visiting poor old Barnaby so regularly (“Anything I can do for him?” “No! No, he’s—he’s fine!”), then called Kevin out at the club to tell him to get his clubs ready, he’d be out shortly after lunch. When asked, he told Kevin to go ahead and hire someone for the club shop, he’d sort it out with the board later. “Also, start thinking about a food-services manager who’s able and willing to fill in at the bar, Kev. You need more time out on the course to keep your competitive edge.” “Great! I’ll get started on that today, John!” He had decided to accept outstanding offers, modest though they were, on some of the assets Barnaby had acquired in his failed takeover bid so as to help cover the purchase of the trucking firm and to provide cash for the development of the racetrack, so he dropped by Trevor’s office to get the paperwork started, but he wasn’t in. Off to lunch maybe. Not a bad idea, but John wasn’t hungry. He’d talk Kev into throwing together one of his classic hot beef-and-pepper heroes out at the club when he got there. Which he hoped would be soon: he felt a string of birdies coming on, lined up on his scorecard like fucking turtledoves on a clothesline. He dropped down to the chamber of commerce, back in their old quarters after finding their new civic center offices too damp and noisy, to see how the parade committee was coming along (lagging behind as usual, maybe more than usual, his visit serving as a wake-up call), picked up a map of this year’s route, told them about the latest new business he was bringing to town, dropped hints about the racetrack. They seemed upset that this week’s town newspaper had not appeared, not yet anyway, with all the Pioneers Day announcements and advertisements (it was almost like they’d begun to believe the goddamned holiday would not occur unless the paper announced it), and he assured them he would drop by Ellsworth’s shop to check it out. “Will, uh, will your wife be in the parade this year, John?” “Sure, why wouldn’t she be?” On his way over to the hardware store where he had a surprise to spring on old Floyd, he saw Lenny helping heavy-bellied Trixie out of their car in front of Alf’s antiquated medical facility. The only doctor still with downtown offices, the building itself a decrepit fossil like its occupier, ready for the wrecking ball. He’d offered Alf a good price to move to one of the new medical centers but Alf said he was too old to change kennels, he’d die soon enough, and John, though he’d joked to the contrary, allowed that was probably so. The minister and his wife waved and John waved back as he crossed over to the old family store. His cranky tough-as-nails manager in there collapsed unabashedly into tears when he told him he was putting him in charge of the central operations of the new trucking line and raising his salary by half again with additional bonuses based on traffic, after which the old cracker broke into either prayer or joyful cussing, John couldn’t be sure which. He paused at the door on the way out: about time to rethink this ancient relic, what his father liked to call the family’s public badge of honor, though he often winked when he said it. So what, then? A watering hole for the out-of-town racetrack crowd maybe? Souvenir shop? Museum? Or: all three at once. Why not? A slowly rotating bar, say, in the middle of a cyclorama of the age of the pioneers (he knew just who to hire as a technical consultant), old weapons, clothes, and implements on display, and some coin-operated interactive video machines for exploring the daily life of the prairie settlers. In virtual reality maybe: walk around in their vanished lives. Unspeakably dreary when lived, an entertainment when revisited. He already had a piece of the new high-tech action, he could put it to practical use right here at home. Probably have to buy up the cafe next door for floor space, eat up some of the alley, but it could be a big money-spinner, bring traffic in off the highway, too: he’d have them, so to speak, all drinking out of great-great-grandpop’s famous horse trough again. He called out to old Alf, just shuffling back to work across the street, reminding him about the barbecue (Alf nodded, asked him to give him a call later, John said he’d see him out at the club), then popped his head in the door of the Sixth Street Cafe to remind Oxford of the same thing. “Pioneers Day! Already? Can’t be—!” “I’m afraid it is, Oxford. Time flies!” “But—” “House flies!” shouted one of the children and they both giggled. “And bring the grandkids!” He left the old pharmacist, nose down to the table, muttering to himself and trying to read the dial of his wristwatch through his thick lenses, and crossed over in the direction of city hall and the police station, nearly getting run down twice, first by the pharmacy van reeling out of the alleyway with witless Cornell hunched over the wheel, then by his cousin Maynard’s black sedan, which came barreling around the opposite corner, tires squealing, driven by a wild-haired stony-eyed Veronica who looked like she’d just fallen out of bed. Had she been trying to hit him? John grinned his clenched-teeth grin, brushed his sleeve. He had a surprise in store for her fucked-up hubby, too, one that should cheer him up. He was planning to offer his abused cuz the chance to run the new racetrack (best to have someone in the legal profession in the front office, he figured), assuming of course that Mange was ready to make the right sort of investment in the enterprise, but he was saving this announcement (have to make sure they were invited, struck as they were from the official lists: he made a mental note) for the barbecue.

Where Veronica was headed (she wasn’t trying to run John down, she didn’t even see him, she’d have flattened anything in her path, blind with terror as she was, and the source of it just behind her like hot breath on her neck) was the doctor’s office: she burst in screaming something about John having come back, or some John, as though there might be several of them, she had him in the trunk of her car, she claimed, he was all covered with a wet sticky stuff, you’ve got to come see, I don’t know what to do with the thing, help me for god’s sake, she was totally incoherent, the poor woman, still in her housecoat and pajamas, and, like the insurance man before her, she had to be sedated—urgently, the doctor snapped, a kind of unpleasant rage overtaking him as it sometimes did on busy days, though restraining this one needed his help, so completely out of control was she. “There, there, Veronica, easy now …” Columbia, trying to be soothingly understanding while punching her with the needle, said she was really sorry about her son, and the woman shrieked out: “How did you know—?!” “Well, I think everyone—” “Everyone—?! Oh my god!” “You haven’t heard a thing since he ran away?” “Ran away? What—? Oh, that son! No, no, I guess I forgot, sorry, I’m so confused …” Columbia, too, popping the needle out past the cotton swab, was feeling a bit woozy from it all, this whole town was going around the bend and dragging her with it, really, it was too much. The waiting room had been filling up all morning and the phone ringing itself off the wall with people suffering from nothing worse than apparitions or odd premonitions, with itchy children who wouldn’t keep their clothes on and tired parents needing pep pills and people who just couldn’t remember what day it was and wondered if they’d come down with Alzheimer’s. She’d chased most of them away on the false grounds that the doctor was in surgery all day (in reality he was in one of his bitter-old-man days, drifting off groggily for coffee just when things were at their worst), but some were too desperate and hysterical to be put off so easily, the insurance man, for example, who had been struck partly blind and kept blubbering something crazy about a giant woman and a dead child (“It was my fault! I was the one!”), and who was now lying in his underpants, one hand clapped to his dead eye, on the examining table in the room where the doctor performed small surgeries, like removing boils, adenoids, or ingrown toenails. He was still attached to the electrocardiograph suction cups, she hadn’t had time to disconnect him, but anyway they kept him from thrashing about. Columbia had a policy with this man, her sister-in-law as beneficiary, she knew him well, and he’d always been such a reserved gentleman, so composed, it was a shock to see him in such a state. “Hello? No, the doctor can’t come now, he’s got a waiting room full of sick people, you’ll have to come here if you want to see him. But if it can wait until tomorrow, I’d suggest—all right, all right, I’m not deaf, I was just trying to help, there’s a long line but, if you must, come ahead!” The only one out there who had a scheduled appointment was the minister’s pregnant wife, fortunately a patient woman who was somehow able to smile benignly through all the pandemonium, in spite of the enormous weight she was carrying around, bigger than she was it almost seemed, while one lunatic after another came piling in, demanding the doctor’s immediate attention, which on this day was in short supply, even for real emergencies. One being the lawyer’s maniac wife, who had finally succeeded in dragging the doctor down to the street to look in the trunk of her car, threatening to throw herself out the window if he didn’t, and they didn’t doubt it. On top of it all, the only person in town whom Lumby felt she could count on was consumed by an insane jealousy and had been on the phone to her every fifteen minutes, in and around all the other calls, wanting to know if she’d been keeping an eye on her shifty brother as she’d promised, she couldn’t find him anywhere. While the doctor was gone, the minister’s wife suddenly started singing at the top of her voice, then stiffened up and skidded out of her chair onto the floor. She lay there on her back, limbs asprawl, obscenely exposed, her thin cotton dress rucked up over her naked body, eyes open but staring at nothing, a strange smile on her cracked lips, out of which a kind of whispery hum emerged as though from the back of her throat or below that even. Lumby tore off a few yards of paper sheeting from an examining room table and tossed it over her (the phone was ringing again), though most eyes in the room were on, not the poor woman’s private parts, but that great sleek quivering mound that rose high above her with a protruding navel on top like the knotted end of a balloon or the fuse of a bomb. The doctor returned just as Lumby was hanging up (this day was going to be endless, already it seemed like it ought to be over and it had hardly begun), holding his dripping hands out in front of him, barely glancing at the woman on the floor or those around her as he stumbled through, headed irritably for the restroom: “Nothing in the damned thing of course, just some mucous gunk like oily snot all over the floor! Remind me to take next week off!” Whereupon Gretchen phoned again in a panic: “Corny’s run off! With another woman! You said you’d watch him! You promised!” “What do you mean, run off?” “He’s stolen the van! And all the money from the store! And now the police are coming! Please! Help me!” The humming in the waiting room had risen to a wild whimpering whine, the sort that sometimes escaped Gretchen during their games together, and people were banging on the reception window, complaining about it. “And, Lumby?” “Yes?” “Lumby, who’s Pauline?” “Pauline?” “It’s his heart!” someone was shouting from the waiting room. They were carrying in an unshaven man in pinstriped pants and a gaudy summer shirt who seemed to be foaming at the mouth. She recognized him: the lawyer married to the hysterical woman with something nasty in the trunk of her car. “Get him out of here!” she cried. “Take him to the hospital!” She was nearly screaming. The phone started to ring again, she’d hardly put it down. The doctor came out of the restroom, scrubbing his hands with a paper towel, wanting to know why the hell that man was still attached to the EKG, and Columbia replied flatly, brooking no objection: “I have to make a run to the pharmacy.” Enough was enough, she was out of there, pressing through the madhouse of the waiting room, so dense with commotion and distress (behind her, the phone was pitilessly sending forth its demented appeal) it was like tearing through layers of unspooled gauze.

“Hello, honey—? Me again. Hey, where the hell are you? I ask, nobody seems to know. I hope at least you’re listening to your messages. I need somebody to talk to, sweetie, things are so weird now, you’re the last best friend I’ve got, and all I get’s your damned answering machine. And, believe me, I mean batshit weird—like, Winnie’s back? Living with us? I know, I know, there’s the old guilt trip crap, and I drink too much, we both do, and mostly it’s Stu who sees her or thinks he does, what’s left of his red hair standing right up on end, just like in the comic strips, but I saw her one night, too, when Stu woke me up with his goddamned country-boy snoring. Standing there, right at the foot of the bed, all lit up, big as life and twice as mean. And you know what I thought of when I saw her? It probably made her mad, but I couldn’t help it. You remember Harvie, you know, Yale’s brother, the one we called Hard Yard and King Dong? The one who’s carrying that monstrous thing around in girls’ panties now? Well, maybe you never saw it, goody-goody that you were, but it was not only long as your arm, it had a very peculiar color, or rather lack of color, pale and waxen from the root all the way to the end of it like all the blood had got sucked out, and faintly peachy in tone the way they paint up dead bodies, very spooky, at least in the dark. I never saw it in daylight. Maybe they were shining a light through it, I can’t remember. But even when it was soft, which I guess was most of the time, the end of it was a kind of see-through blue like it was bruised somewhere deep below the surface, the opening of it just a gray metallic slit—it looked like it had been stapled at the tip. Well, that’s what Winnie’s mouth looked like, a thin gray staple in her bluish face, and the rest of her, too: opaque like Harvie’s cock and waxy and sort of glowing from inside but pale and bloodless except for her eyes which were red-hot, just like Stu had said they were. Made me laugh, sort of, what I was thinking, but she scared the shit out of me, too. Almost literally—I mean, I was loose for a week, and I’m still not back to anything regular. Which is why I’ve been thinking about calling the whole thing off. What whole thing? You see why I need to talk to you? What’s the matter, honey? Are you ticked off at me because of what the useless asshole I’m married to did to you out at the club that night? Listen, forget it. Forget him. Remember that photo he keeps on his desk, the one from your wedding party? Well, just between you and me, old Stu-pot’s about to get a whop in the chops with another fucking piece of cake. Just desserts, as you might say, and none too soon either. How do I know? Amazing Grace told me, honey. Beats tea leaves any day. Jesus, I can’t believe I’ve let that limp-noodled hayseed sonuvabitch rob me of a whole damned decade of my life—my best decade—how did it happen? Life’s funny sometimes. Funny like a toothache’s funny, I mean. Over all those lost years, I’d almost forgotten what real fucking was like. Maybe I never knew, not until Rexboy came along. Not even John—well, you know, I shouldn’t even have mentioned it—but, wham bam, ma’m, and all that, and anyway it’s been ages, I’m sure you knew, and I’m sorry if you didn’t, but oh well… Anyway, Rex is different. He’s there for me all the time. He says he’s in love. That’s hard to believe, but what the hell, I believe it. And now all I can think of is hard dick, his hard dick, I’m thinking about it right now, I’m—ah!—excuse me, honey, I—ah! oh …! Whoo … Hang on, sweetie. Be right back … Hello? You there? No …? Sometimes I almost think you’re only… But where was I? Oh yeah, hard dick. How could I forget? Remember that knock-knock joke we used to tell as kids? Knock knock. Who’s there? Wilma. Wilma who? Will ma fingers do until… Well, I’m here to tell you they won’t do. But, t.s., baby, as my lover man would say, they’ll have to: he’s turned off the spigot, stopcocked the mains. Only until after the barbecue at your house. But that seems like forever. He wants to keep a low profile, he said. Hell, I said, you better keep it, your low profile’s the one I like best. It’s all yours, he said. After the barbecue. I can’t wait. Literally. I’m so fucking horny, honey, I can’t think straight. But happy, too, happy and horny, I can’t tell you how happy I am. But also confused. Worried. Mixed up. Scared. What are we doing? I don’t know what’s right and wrong anymore. The fucking I’m getting is so powerful, so real, everything else is just a dream, and in a dream what’s right and wrong, right? Somebody dies, who cares? It’s just a dream anyway. Speaking of which. Had a weird one last night. I think. Sort of last night. Rex and I had been having it off out at the motel on his midafternoon break—what Rex calls his tea break: t for tail—and we’d decided to go into the Getaway for a drink, we were both parched, drained of all our bodily fluids, I mean tears, too, it was our farewell fuck until, well, until later, and I was very emotional on top of being so randy I could hardly walk without leaving a snail trail between my legs. We didn’t bother to dress, I pulled on my raincoat, Rex his overalls, we planned on coming back to the room. But the bar when we got there was different. It was more like that old clubhouse that the senior boys built when we were in high school, you know, the place where I lost my cherry. Dutch, who was Dutch just like he is now, said that the old cabin, which had once been just where the new bar is now, had grown back overnight, there was nothing he could do. The place was full of sniggering nerds in baseball caps and pimpled burrheaded nosepickers wearing letter sweaters, which was how I knew I was in a nightmare. A couple of girls in white dresses with their black- and lime-colored underwear showing through were sitting at a table, chewing gum with their mouths open. A guy in pegged pants and a Hawaiian shirt came by, leaned over and kissed one of them, and when he raised up he was chewing her gum. I felt like I knew these characters but I didn’t know them. Rex was gone. I understood this. This was some other time and he wasn’t around yet. Somebody was playing ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’ on the jukebox, and I said that’s a laugh, and some guy with a ducktail and leather jacket over a tee shirt said what is, hot pants? He sat down next to me and then a bunch of other guys did, too, and they started playing around, undoing the buttons on my raincoat, popping my tits out and laughing at them, shoving their hands inside to grab at the rest of me, I was beginning to get scared, not only of them, but of myself, too. I hated what these little shits were doing, but I was too damned excited to make them stop. That was when you came along. In a ponytail and a cashmere sweater and pleated skirt and honest-to-god bobby sox. You smiled and sat down and put your books on the table and the guys all apologized and left. You’d just saved my fat ass, I don’t know how you did it, it was like a miracle, but, what can I say, I didn’t feel all that appreciative. There was somebody I wanted but I couldn’t remember who. I thought it might be John, but then he came in with Ronnie in her cheerleading rig with her bare tum ballooning out between the sweater and little skirt for everyone to see and admire. I started telling you about the time I put itching powder on her tampon just before the Homecoming float parade when she was your Maid of Honor—do you remember how she jumped around up there? you probably thought Ronnie was just trying to steal the show—but you weren’t there any more. I realized those guys must have come back and dragged you over to the filthy old cot they had in there. I could hear the springs going somewhere out of sight. I knew you needed me now, more than ever, but instead of coming over to help, I pulled the raincoat around me and walked out the door. On the way I passed Ronnie, and I said, I’m sorry about your missing kid. No problem, she said, sneering down her beak at me, always more where he came from. The smart-ass. All right. So, here comes the really freaky part, honey. Like I promised. It was dark outside, I knew Rex was gone, the car keys were in my raincoat pocket, so I got in the car and drove home, had a couple of shots of gin, said nighty-night to a snoring Stu, fell asleep, and woke up here at home this morning, still in my raincoat. So, tell me. When did I leave the motel room? Have I left it yet? Did I say goodbye to Rex if I did? Are you listening …? Where am I, sweetie? What time is it? What day is it? And why, feeling so good, do I feel so bad? Honey …?”

Ronnie’s missing kid had also long since lost, though no loss by him was felt, all sense of time and place, such coordinates being of little consequence to him in this dimensionless paradise wherein now, in joy, he drifted. He was in—he understood the meaning of this mysterious word now and he would not forget it—he was in ecstasy, pleasured in the mind and in the heart and in the body tip to toe. His journey to this blessed condition had been long and not without its false turnings, lured first as he’d been to other enticements, other anticipations. Foremost: fulfillment of all the implicit promises of those books that Fish had shown him, their images of enchanted couplings spread out below him in a panorama of such congested diversity as to dizzy the mind, even while prickling the weenie, drawing him downward, the better, he’d imagined, to see, and then, if he could, to do. But the view had not improved as, through an ever denser medium, he’d descended, and in some ways it had lost its clarity, as when a book is brought too close to the nose, becoming blurred and grainy and distorted. An effect, he’d supposed, of the strange atmosphere which, once passed through, would vanish like a mist, the way that the mind clears when full knowing is achieved, and he’d understood then, or had thought he understood, that he had seen all that could be seen by eye alone and that one must now do to see what was as yet unseen. Okay. I get it. So: ready or not… He’d braced himself for this manly test and, letting his clothes go as had seemed to be their own desire, he had thrust valiantly against that which was keeping him out, but try as he might, he had not been able to progress, feeling as he sometimes felt in bed at night, pressing against his sheets and pillows, barred from some unimaginable delights just beyond his ken. Then, as he’d pushed and fumbled, groping for flesh and contour where there were none to be found, he’d come upon a tiny rift in what he’d suddenly realized was something more like a movie screen, containing all these images but only as an illusion on its vast curved surface: he’d thrust one hand into the small gap and then the other, there’d been a soft crisp ripping sound as of discovery, and the scrim had suddenly split apart like drawn curtains, vanishing into the distance and carrying all those busy fornicators with it, leaving Little afloat in a luminous infinity decorated with brilliant-hued galaxies in the way that a Christmas tree might be hung with colored lights. Bright blue and scarlet comets and golden falling stars, and emerald, flashed across the depths like sensuous writing and there was an intensely beautiful murmur in the air as of hidden angel choirs that seemed not so much to strike upon his eardrums as to caress them and the rest of him as well. The colors of this spectacular cosmos did not remain constant, but slid through hue’s inexhaustible spectrum as if color were a kind of liquid, washing through it in tidal floods, and he felt intimately stroked, within and without, by these chromatic ebbs and flows. Delicate aromas floated upon the ether like edible fog in celestial icecream flavors, entering him through all his orifices, and he felt his body stretch out like modeling clay as though to offer more territory for their invasion. As the gentle murmur rose to a rhythmic hum, embracing him all over and penetrating him to the core with its rich hydraulic beat, he ceased to wonder where he was and instead surrendered to a bliss he knew to be—so many meanings this voyage had revealed to him!—beatitude itself. He was—his mind knew this, his heart felt it to be so, and his body, fondled by sound and color and fragrance as though these things were animate beings, ardently attentive upon his person, responded by raising his stiffened weenie like a quivering flagpole—in the land of glory. It was going to happen! It was really going to happen! No! It was already happening! He gazed down upon his resplendent weenie—no, not a weenie, but a penis—no, not a penis, but a prick, a dick, a what? a cock!—which now, so had he grown, seemed half a universe away, its bold head haloed by its own dazzling radiance and vibrating in the cosmic wind like a crawling thing’s antenna. It seemed to be trying to uproot itself—he could see the roots which were spreading their green tentacles through the tropical heat of his vast glowing body, as though reaching for securer moorings in anticipation of the brewing storm—and he felt a desperate and delicious tugging, not only in his thighs and bowels, but throughout his trembling frame, in his head and chest and even in his fingers and his toes. And then, as the kaleidoscopic colors burned in hotter hue and the air grew redolently spicy and the angelic chorus gave way to piercing trumpets, his whole body suddenly shrank into itself and then gloriously exploded, scattering itself majestically throughout the throbbing cosmic space to form vibrant new constellations in all of heaven’s hues, scintillant as sugar crystals, and Turtle, overpowered, overjoyed, at one with the universe and with himself, suffering still the honied aftershocks, gratefully wept, thinking: Wow. Cool. I like it.

The body as a cosmic, or at least an outsized presence and, when grasped entire, potential source of revelation, was also the subject of Otis’s sober (more or less sober) study, when abruptly interrupted by the arrival of John striding into his office at the police station with that team captain’s bearing of his and asking what was going on. “Material evidence,” Otis said, hurriedly shuffling the photos into a drawer. “Odd case. Has me stumped. I’m glad you’re back, John.” And he was, too, but wished he’d been announced, unable yet to stand to take John’s hand. It was the phone that rescued him. “Hasn’t stopped,” he said, leaning around to pick it up. Another call about the traffic lights, all out of sync. And who switched the street signs at Third and Main? “Some kid’s prank,” he growled, rising. “We’re working on it.” He hung up, ordered all calls put on hold, and John, shaking his hand, asked then about the photographer, offering to pay his bond and find him legal help; Otis said there was none to pay, he was letting the man out soon, and legal help was not the sort that sad fruitcake needed. He filled John in on what had been happening out at the mall and apparently at the swimming pool, too, maybe right out there on Main Street, they had a real problem here. He didn’t tell John about the ruined photos of Pauline he’d seen hanging in the basement darkroom, because he didn’t understand them himself. Like the man was losing his touch or something, and it might be pushing him over the edge? No, too simple and it didn’t explain Pauline. Might just be something artsy he was trying that Otis didn’t understand—or it might be more sinister than that. John wondered aloud about the newspaper that hadn’t come out yet this week, and Otis said he didn’t know what was wrong over there but planned to check it out when he got a moment free. Which wasn’t going to be right away, the calls were coming in about one every three minutes; he told John about them, disguising his own misgivings by saying it was probably just the kids let out of school with nothing better to do than mischief, and John, laughing, agreed. John did make Otis feel better just by being here, as though his mere presence in town were somehow a calming force, jurisprudential in nature, decreeing order and the common good. Otis told him so in his own gruff words (“This town needs you, John, you should stay home more!”), and when asked, agreed to tear up the overdue parking tickets (also two for drunk driving) of some of John’s visiting business associates on the grounds that the fines might get in the way of much larger investments here. Sure, why not, made sense. Hard to collect them anyway. He was glad to hear about the trucking firm, less happy about the racetrack, though he didn’t say so. Together, they went over the planned safety and security procedures of the parade route, which ended as usual with patriotic and political speeches in the civic center parking lot, where local churches, clubs, and merchants would be setting up the stalls that had replaced the old Pioneers Day fair since the city park had disappeared. Otis explained how he intended to have the cars off the parade route streets the night before, then went on to mention, a bit hesitantly, that, speaking of cars left on the street, he’d found one of John’s abandoned late at night a couple of times while he was gone, and had had to take it home for him. John thanked him, adding: “She’s getting a bit too big for her britches, that girl, I’ll have to talk to her. Let me know if it happens again.” That’s right, it could have been the kid, that made sense, too, as with most everything John had to say, and Otis let it go at that, but he didn’t think this was the answer to what he felt more like an eerie taunt. They were releasing Gordon just as John was leaving and Otis could see by the wince of consternation that John had instantly grasped how disturbed the man was, his round face flushed and his eyes damp and inwardly focused, his mouth partway agape. “If there’s anything my wife or I can do for you—?” John offered, startling the photographer, who seemed to see him now for the first time: he turned pale and began to tremble, then spun about and left without a word. “Better go with him,” Otis told the officer who’d brought him through. “Make sure he gets home okay. And check on his wife.” John had left while this was going on, saying he’d be out at the club if he wanted him, so Otis added: “And don’t be surprised by what you see.” More phonecalls then, stacked up on hold (“There’s been some kinda robbery over to the drugstore, Otis, I’ve sent a couple guys over to check it out…”) while John had paid his courtesy call, among them the sullen motel-keeper out by Settler’s Woods, reporting the bold daylight theft of sheets and food. “Right out the back door. A whole damned truckload, Otis. I think it was that dipshit kid from the drugstore.” Oh oh. Before he could get through to the photographer’s studio, his officer called in on his cellular phone: “It’s a mess over here, Otis. She’s broke out and took the back door with her.”

By the time John reached the club, Kevin had his irons newly polished, woods lightly waxed, their “Club Champion” mittens laundered, all grips gently textured with fine resin-dusted ebony paper (Kevin’s own secret treatment), the bag’s leather bits rubbed down with boot oil, and stocked with all new tees and golf balls, scorecard, sharpened pencils, and a couple of deeply dimpled, slightly heavier putting balls that Kevin had been experimenting with and which John, too, had taken a liking to. John was in one of his better moods and Kevin felt uneasy about disturbing it, so he held back most of the main news of the past couple of days, telling John only about the job interviews he was conducting and the story everybody was telling about the preacher’s kid on the car dealer’s roof, including Waldo’s version about polishing the shingles. John laughed generously and asked if his wife had been out. “Uh, not sure,” Kevin said, turning away. Wrong question. “Might have seen her out on the back nine.” John accepted that with a shrug, asked him to whip him up a beef-and-pepper while he was changing and Kevin had to tell him that the kitchen had been stripped bare this morning by thieves, the best he could offer him was peanuts or olives from the bar. John’s big smile faded and he glared at Kevin for a moment as though blaming him for the theft of his lunch. “Well, goddamn it, Kev, have you called Otis?” “Sure,” he lied, though it was only a white lie because he planned to, as soon as he could figure out what to tell Otis that he’d believe. “What is this, some fucking third-world country? Who the hell would steal food nowadays? Christ! Call Waldo at the mall and tell him to grab up a bunch of tacos out there, take the rest of the day off, and meet me in half an hour at the fourth tee.” Kevin could have laid on an answer to John’s question had he waited for one, but he was relieved not to have to, not yet. He had earlier spied the little piss-yellow van weaving up the groundsmen’s private access road, kicking up dust and gravel, and he’d gone trotting out to chase it away, but what he’d seen as he came up over the rise near the dogleg at the fifteenth had brought him up short: a gigantic woman in a red cape was squatting at the edge of the rough down there, taking a dump. She’d looked familiar, but Kevin hadn’t been able to place her, not in those proportions, she’d made the trees look like saplings, the van a toy. She was with a skinny little wimp less than half her size, and they were both staring up at him like he was the weird thing on display. He’d yelled at them to get the hell out, this was private property, and he shook his fist at them, but he didn’t go on down there. The woman had wiped herself with a big white bath towel, which she’d dropped on the fairway after using, and then had crawled back into the van, unable after several tries to get her humungous bod in any way but butt first, pulling her head with its thick bird’s nest of black hair in after, and off they’d gone. Curiosity had got the better of Kevin, and he’d gone on down to take a look at what she’d left there (he’d kicked the filthy towel into the rough, let somebody else bring the damned thing in), and while he was studying the amazing pile, he’d heard someone ask him if he needed any help. It was John’s wife, dressed in her bright blue-and-violet Bermuda shorts with the matching top, the one that left her midriff bare, just climbing down off her electric golf cart at the edge of the fairway. “No, no!” he’d exclaimed, stepping hurriedly out of the high grass and weeds. “Just, you know, making my, uh, whaddaya call ‘em, rounds …” She’d asked him then, showing him her seven-iron, if she was using the right club for her lie. He’d recommended the five and had found it for her in her bag. Her irons had seemed tarnished or smeared with something ugly and, oddly, she’d seemed to be playing without a putter. “Hey, bring me your clubs when you come in and I’ll clean them up for you.” She’d smiled, glancing over his shoulder into the rough, and he’d left her then, not looking back, knowing damn well if he did so she wouldn’t be there, humping it straight back to the clubhouse, where he’d discovered he had been cleaned out, right down to the mustard and ketchup pots, and not at all sure what he’d seen and not seen.

They were rocketing through town at what seemed to Pauline like roller-coaster speed, Corny hunched over the wheel of the old pharmacy van and jerking about as though he were playing an old pinball machine, or one of those new beeping and quacking games with the TV screens she’d seen out at the mall, her view out the windows from her scrunched-up position in the back not unlike those colorfully violent screens, full of racing objects streaking by and suggestions of mass mayhem at the edges. Rarely as many as half the van’s wheels were touching the ground at the same time, the shockless old vehicle hitting bottom with every serious contact, the wheels scrubbing the frame with each screeching turn; if Corny wasn’t hitting the things that flashed past, he was surely taking the skin off them. It was a scary ride, and painful, too, as her body slapped the sides and her head banged against the metal roof with every swerve and bump, but squeezed in there with all the tools and supplies and other junk, something big and hard wrapped in a tarpaulin had got jammed between her thighs and Pauline was riding it with the kind of abstract gratification she’d not known since she gave up bicycles. In truth, under the circumstances (what demands her body was making!), she appreciated Corny’s crazy speed and, even more, his amazing food-gathering ingenuity, which frequently, given his techniques, necessitated the sort of quick exit he always made anyway, Pauline being more afraid of death by starvation than of any mere car crash which, with her new size, seemed somehow less able to do her much harm. She felt, in short, she was more likely to dent than to be dented. A lot of the stuff in the back of the van had been hastily dumped out in the alleyway so she could squeeze in when Corny had first swung the old beat-up yellow van around, and he’d promised, looking over his shoulder anxiously, hair in his face and his wispy little moustache twitching, to get rid of more once they got underway—and he’d done so, they’d been leaving a trail of debris wherever they’d gone, clearing the van to give her more breathing—and eating—space, though the more room he created for her, the more she seemed to need. She knew she wouldn’t be able to stay in here forever, but at least she was free and being fed and maybe together they could find a safe place she could get in and out of, that was what she’d asked of him, and Corny, always the silent type, had nodded his agreement. Corny had seemed desperate to get out of the alley where he’d found her as soon as possible, shoving her in as soon as he’d cleared some space and then tearing out of there, wheels spinning, like a cat with its tail on fire (one of Daddy Duwayne’s favorite pastimes when he was in a good mood), leading Pauline to assume that Corny had probably borrowed the van without the owner knowing it was being borrowed, an aspect of this adventure that took her back to her high school days and added to the nostalgic pleasure she was getting from the rough lump of tarp and metal between her legs and from being unexpectedly reunited with this strange little boy from her past, the only person in the world who had ever said to her: “I love you.” Unless her mother had before she could remember, if she ever really had one. Pauline had never forgotten that touching but bewildering moment, even though Corny had seemed to, had seemed to forget over the years he ever knew her. Nothing strange in that. None of the boys she was friendly with back then acknowledged her now, and even Otis was a different Otis from the one who used to take her out parking in his panel truck, a smelly old thing with a corrugated floor not unlike this tin box she was rattling around in now, and he such a sweet softie back then, a harder man now. They all seemed embarrassed about that past they shared with her, which always gave her such pleasure when she thought about it, at best pretending to know her only as the town photographer’s wife and helper, as though, becoming that, the rest of her history had been miraculously erased from the town’s memory. But maybe Corny hadn’t been pretending. When she’d called out to him, he’d seemed suddenly to wake up, as though from a deep coma, and to see her there for the first time since before he went on his graduation trip to Paris. And he hadn’t hesitated. He’d come over behind the Ford pickup to let her pull the trigger on his twiggy little cock-and-load zinger three or four times in a row (not an easy thing to do without hurting him with her new treetrunk thighs and truncheon fingers: his testicle—she remembered how he loved to have her hold it as he spilled his seed—was like a seed itself, a wee little shotgun pellet, when she took it between giant thumb and forefinger), then, pulling up his pants, had dashed off to get the van and, hardly before she knew it, their wild ride had begun. They’d raided dumpsters and garbage cans, private refrigerators (starting with his own at home), restaurant kitchens and bakeries, supermarkets, butcher shops. He’d hit the malls, motels, the golf club (where, gratefully, she’d been able to use the bathroom), fastfood joints, and all-you-can-eat buffets. Some of it he’d paid for, most apparently not, for they were always on the run. But he actually caught up with her appetite, and soon they were emptying out more things from the van and stocking it with food and other supplies, such as the laundry sacks full of sheets and towels he stole from the motel, from which she might fashion a new garment now that she was outgrowing her burgundy cloak with the bead trim. There was a lucky haul at a highway steak house, where four black plastic bags of fresh garbage lay waiting for them, but they couldn’t fit them in, just splitting them when they tried, sowing her and the van with pungent refuse, and they knew then they’d have to find a place for her to hide while Corny went foraging on his own. But where?

Reverend Lenny had seen the pharmacy van careening past in front of the doctor’s office, just before Beatrice’s friend Veronica came squealing around the corner from the other direction, jumping the curb as she hit the brakes and the parking meter, more or less at the same time, crumpling one fender and popping the back trunk ajar. She flung the door open and dashed pell-mell into the building in wild-eyed alarm as though something were chasing her, whereupon, closing her door and trunk for her, Lennox had begun to rethink the central theme of next Sunday’s sermon, which, though not yet fully fleshed out, had to do with the miracle of motherhood, an ancient Christian topic of great inspiration and solace. Rethinking it because, to tell the truth (he had just stepped out to the street from the bedlam of the doctor’s waiting room where his miracle-stunned wife sat glassy-eyed and estranged, benumbed by her prodigious burden), there was also something eerily unsettling about reproduction’s uncanny power over the reproducer, as though God were in the gamete not the gamers, His eye on, not the sparrow, but the sparrow’s sperm, not the rueful soul, but the ruthless seed. As the police passed by with the downcast photographer, about whom dreadful rumors now circulated, he had thought of his own past trials with the law and with his loins, and of those of his children now, Philip and Jennifer, with little Zoe no doubt soon to follow, and the unborn unnamed child as well, ensnared, as all within the animate world, in pleasure’s cruel deceptions, condemned as all to suffer love’s remorseless punishments. His sermon, he realized, was not to be a message of good cheer, God bless Mom and all that, but rather one provoking somber meditation upon the enigma of life itself. When, in all sincerity, we ask, “Who am I?,” is there an I to be asking and is it an impertinence, mere tools of purposes not our own, to assume so much as an attribute of who-ness? In short, what can we be sure of beyond the middle term of that inquiry, the is-ness of our immediate presence in the world, an is-ness which itself knows no person nor belongs to one? Across the street, the old pharmacist whose van he’d just seen roaring past emerged from the cafe with two of his blond-haired grandchildren and was greeted there in the bright midday sunlight by John’s mother, holding the hand of her little grandson Mikey, and Lennox’s sudden affliction of the heart was in some manner assuaged, this genial clasp across the generations somehow ameliorating the essential tragedy at the core, to which, momentarily, he had been a witness but for which he need not be a servile messenger, and at the same time providing him a consolatory homespun image for a sermon which had threatened to become a bit doleful, not a great idea in the summertime when attendance was anyway never at its best. Alf came down then with Veronica, his head bobbing lugubriously, to look at something in the trunk of her car (he seemed appalled, she horrified, but as far as Lenny could see there was nothing there), then the doctor, holding up his hands from which some dirty ooze dripped, shook his old gray head in disgust, rolled his eyes at Lenny as though begging for mercy, and returned to his office, while the hysterical woman, pointing at something in the street, left the car and went running back in the direction she’d originally come from, and Lenny thought: Without an I as God-given, we have to invent one with our thoughts, our passions, our actions, or ones we think of as “ours,” and this we offer up somewhat desperately as our humanity, though, alas, no one may be receiving, no one watching. Well, I am watching, Lenny thought, and I will testify to the nobility of their self-creations and the righteousness of their desires, and thus, in spite of everything, will celebrate motherhood after all. A rusty old pickup pulled up and two men unloaded a man from the back, incongruously dressed in pinstriped suit pants and a golf shirt. It was Veronica’s husband. “Is that my car—?!” he gasped faintly as they carted him inside. For wasn’t survival within the dark inscrutable heart of paradox (he was staring into the junk-laden rusted-out back end of the pickup as though the awesome mystery he was contemplating might be physically visible there) miracle enough? And wasn’t motherhood’s essence the perpetuation, in blind hope and wistful joy, of that impossible paradox, of that unquenchable faith in life’s invisible but ultimately discoverable meaning? Yes, he had his sermon! Lenny was halfway home before he remembered that he had left his wife back in the doctor’s office, so he turned back, hoping he wouldn’t forget the best lines, and when he pulled up to the curb the nurse was just coming out the door, looking outraged about something, her face flushed and eyes wincing in the sunlight. “You’d better go in there,” she snapped. “Your wife’s making a spectacle of herself!” And then she charged off down the street, her fat back squared, in fury and disgust. Inside, Beatrice lay swaddled in wide loops of paper on the floor, ecstatically entranced, serenading the world with one of her otherworldly hums, her outlandish belly rising above her as though it were something that had fallen upon her, pinning her there. He decided to take her home and visit the doctor another day, enlisting the help of the two good Samaritans from the pickup truck in getting her out to his car. It wasn’t easy. The paper swaddling came unwound, tripping them up, and Trixie was into one of her more energetic trips, tossing and twisting as though in the grip of wild cosmic forces, her pink belly bobbing in the sunlight like a buoy afloat on a violent sea. “Looks like she’s about to pop,” grunted one of his helpers, gazing uneasily into the very source of the mystery that was the intended subject of Lenny’s sermon, and the one supporting her bucking rump groaned: “Whoof! What’s she got in there, cannonballs?” An ambulance came whining up while Lenny, one arm locked in his wife’s armpits, was struggling with the door, and the driver jumped out to join them. “Is this the one? I thought we was to pick up an older dude with palpitations.” “Nah, he’s inside, mac. But give us a hand, for chrissake, before we drop her and crack her open!” She sang to him from the backseat all the way home, going silent only at the moment he pulled into the driveway, when he heard her say, quite distinctly: “But where, then, is the center?” “What?” he asked, turning round, but she was sound asleep. Not a bad line, though: he could use it. He left her there and went inside to draft his sermon, thinking: it’s in life’s quiet moments when the truth most clearly resounds. This enlightening stillness did not last, however: his little daughter Zoe, apparently left all alone in the manse, shattered it with her hysterical wailing as she came running down the stairs into his arms. “Daddy!” she sobbed. “I’m so scared!” “It’s all right, honey. We’re home now. Where’s Jennifer?” “I—I don’t know!” Her little chest was heaving, her eyes swimming, she could hardly speak so choked up with terror was she. “Calm down, sweetheart, there’s nothing to be afraid of now.” “Daddy!” she blubbered, gasping for breath and hugging him close. “There’s a … there’s a great big monster lady in the church!”

While the preacher was searching for the Christian answer, or indeed any answer at all, to the dilemma posed by the unexpected encampment of the photographer’s monumental wife and all her attendant bags of garbage and heaped linens in the middle of what many in town held to be God’s house, or one of them anyway, old Stu the car dealer, butt of so many off-color jokes of late, was cutting a sweet deal with the son of the town’s leading pharmacist: they were taking his advice at last and turning in their antique van for a real delivery truck, big enough for heavy furniture removal, yet easy to hop around town in and no need for a special driver’s license, Stu’s only worry being whether, according to his calculations about car sales and life expectancy, he was about to sell one vehicle too many. Hadn’t old Win been flashing him the red light? He sent Cornell off on a test-drive while he thought about that and paid a visit to the gin bottle just to keep his mind clear and his morals clean. He saw his young mechanic taking a quick look-see at a possible transmission problem under an aging station wagon, which was being held up by a hastily placed hydraulic jack, thinking it probably wouldn’t need all that much to accidentally kick the jack out, but he wasn’t sure he could heave his freight all the way over there without a breakdown, and if he tried and blew it he’d probably rather have a fleet of station wagons land on him than that rough and randy boy with a blown gasket. Who knew the kid would never return from the test-drive, he was stealing the fucking thing, any asshole could see that, and feeling like a kind of partner in this scene already, Rex nearly rolled out from under the wagon to quash the stupid deal, but held back, thinking: fuck it, I’ll collect the thing when the spread is mine, and punch the little shit’s eyes out while I’m at it. Whose wife had similar intentions and indeed, having got wind of the possibility that her hated rival might have been offered sanctuary at the church, was already on the way over there, armed with her own tubular steel walking stick, swearing she would beat both their brains out, and that damned preacher’s, too, her sister-in-law Columbia clinging to her arm and begging her not to let jealousy endanger their familial harmony and to ignore her deranged halfwit of a brother who didn’t know what he was doing. But who did know, full well, and who was racing back to the church now to pull Pauline out of there before she got too big for the double doors, figuring this truck would do them till they got out of town if they could get out of town, and after that they’d have to play it by ear—or, rather, by rear, which was the biggest part of her and pretty much set the conditions of their flight. Not just getting it in and out of things, but also having to fill it up and empty it out so often, it wasn’t easy to keep moving. Which Otis knew and set his tactics by, figuring sooner or later, so long as he kept them encircled, they’d have to stop running and turn themselves in, a residual affection toward his old friend from the trailer camp with whom he’d shared so much making him want to bring this chase (it was a chase now, no avoiding that, too much had been stolen, those two seemed to have no respect at all for private property) to a peaceful conclusion, though, under the circumstances, he couldn’t quite imagine what it would be. She’d have to be kept somewhere, that much was clear, and given her new dimensions, they’d never be able to wrestle her into captivity, she’d have to be coaxed into it voluntarily. Otis had to hope the affection he felt toward her was mutual and persuasive enough, doubting that her increasingly moony husband (Otis was reminded of some of his shellshocked buddies from the war) could manage it or would even take the responsibility or be able to imagine it as his own. Probably true, for Gordon was utterly absorbed now in his own artistic crisis, unable even to load his camera or change a lens without dropping it, it was as though all his gifts and skills had fled or been stolen away, and he felt like a pianist with severed hands or a scholar overtaken by senility’s dreadful erasures. Moreover, Pauline, in her departure and against her nature (but of course she was changing), had seemed to take determined revenge upon his studio, the place had been wrecked and much seemed to be missing (had others been here?), and Gordon, in his distress and confusion, felt that his own sanity—and, more importantly, his art—depended upon a minimal restoration of order. Yet this, too, like the principal subject of his lifelong quest, eluded him, it was as though some essential pattern had been broken, some code forgotten, and all he could do in the end, after turning round and round, picking things up and putting them down, was sit and stare in bewilderment at randomly shuffled piles of photographs gathered up from the floor, searching out her image. Which seemed always to be blurred or partially blocked or oddly cropped or fading from the print he held. He came across a good one of her in a Pioneers Day parade from a few years back, but though the image was crisp and bright, it was as though she were in disguise. Still, he set it aside to examine more closely, along with one taken more recently at the dedication ceremonies for the new civic center, in which, during the keynote address by John’s father, she was leaning toward her own stricken father who was being honored on this occasion (he looked like halves of two different people clumsily patched together, not a pretty sight), whispering something to him behind her program. Gordon could see only part of her face, of course, and that none too clearly, but her knees under the hem of her skirt as she pivoted toward her father, one slightly higher than the other, were in provocatively sharp focus and, indeed, dominated the photograph. He knew he had, somewhere, from years back, a shot of her in a gently thoughtful mood, seated in the second row (there were only two) of a Literary Society meeting at the public library, on a night when Ellsworth read from his one-character novel-then-in-progress, The Artist’s Ordeal, which Gordon thought sounded more like an essay than a story, and said so (“How can you have a story with just one character?”) when Ellsworth asked him his opinion, causing a brief hiatus in their friendship (Ellsworth called him a fatuous provincial illiterate); but the photo that turned up in the pile he was sifting through had been taken at the back of the room, over her shoulder, and she was simply a shadowy presence—though the light on her cheek like a tiny luminous parenthesis made him catch his breath when he discovered it—foregrounding the writer and the plump bespectacled librarian who had introduced him, a woman who had once told Gordon: “Photography is a kind of magic, plucking images out of the flux like phantom rabbits. In the real world, Gordon, the thing we reach for is already something else when we grasp it; the photograph exists in the real world and shares in its mutability, but the image on the photograph belongs to the imaginary world, which is the world of death and never changes.” And then she’d smiled. Perhaps the best picture in his lap was one taken in front of the altar at the famous wedding nearly two decades ago, in which she was just lifting her veil to bestow the nuptial kiss upon her newly plighted spouse, while the minister and the four proud parents looked on, a photo that seemed to capture in its charm and freshness and simplicity the very theme of the entire series and thus of his life’s work: the unveiling of the mystery, gesture stilled and made incarnate, possessed, the hidden radiantly revealed.

When Barnaby gave the bride away that day, he confusedly answered for the groom as well: “I do!” At the reception banquet later on, during one of the many rounds of toasts, his wife Audrey, now dead these seven-some years, recalled that at their own wedding back before the war, when asked by the preacher “Do you take this woman,” Barnaby had tipped his head forward and asked: “Do I take what—?” “Well,” she added when the laughter subsided, “at least he didn’t say ‘which’ or ask how much!” But even when the father of the groom put his own two bits in, asking around his dead cigar whether it was true that on their wedding night Barnaby had taken the bed apart to show her how it was made and couldn’t get it back together again for want of the proper tool, Barnaby smiled through it all, feeling good about himself and about his life’s work, which, he felt, had reached a new level of grace and maturity: he was at his peak and enjoying it. And he was pleased, too, with his handsome new son-in-law and junior partner in the expanding family construction business, in spite of the boy’s unearned cockiness and the irony that he was Mitch’s son. The war that Barnaby had served in had been like a wall that had fallen between then and now, dividing one world from another in time as it was now divided in space, such that few present that day remembered or chose to remember that Mitch and Barnaby had once been rivals for Audrey’s hand, a grasshopper-and-ant story with Mitch the gregarious wisecracking ladies’ man, Barnaby the quiet but manly fellow with his nose pressed dutifully to the grindstone. While Mitch was up at State, playing the field with aggressive gusto, learning the rhumba and the shag, tooling around in Packards and LaSalles (once, until with a toot on he tried to drive it up a tree, he and the bank owned a flashy Cord convertible with a powerful V-8 engine and front-wheel drive which would do well over a hundred on a straight stretch, his ever-ready makeout special), mixing football and beer blasts with fraternity bull sessions, high-stakes bridge, and blanket parties, and cracking his econ and history books only when he had to (not often, the fraternity was usually able to steal the exams in advance), self-taught Barnaby was back home in the middle of a lingering Depression, turning the struggling family lumberyard into a successful construction company and honing, in deadly seriousness, his builder’s skills and vision. Barnaby was already constructing solid family homes of indisputable quality, testing out his innovative marriage of streamlined neoclassical designs with traditional American values of comfort and space, while Mitch was still swallowing goldfish and beetles and fondling his way drunkenly through Sorority Row. Barnaby owned a used Model A (in decent condition, though on dirt roads it was an embarrassment) which he drove when taking Audrey out on a date on those rare occasions when she was in town, otherwise he got around in the old lumberyard truck. No one gave young Barnaby (he was already, not yet thirty, known around town as Barnaby the Builder) much of a shot with Audrey, they all figured she’d end up with Mitch sooner or later, or some well-heeled party guy like him, wild as she was back then. It was said that, on a dare during a weekend fraternity party up at State while she was still in high school, Audrey had danced a fan dance, stark staring, just like at the World’s Fair. Mitch was there. Barnaby wasn’t. She had an hourglass figure back then, wore skintight molded dresses, mostly black, with pointy uplift bras and lots of gaudy costume jewelry, painted her lips and nails in matching carmine red, told naughty jokes with a gravelly voice, chain-smoked with intentionally provocative gestures. She was the first girl in town to wear a strapless gown to the senior prom and was known as a hot smoocher, fast and dangerous. Yet this was the young woman who, on the eve of the war, against everyone’s expectations, put on a white Victorian bridal dress and married in solemn ceremony old-shoe-common Barnaby the Builder, and who became, after the war anyway when everything settled down, his steadfast companion and business manager and caring and committed mother of their beloved daughter. Women, people would say (some of them), who can figure them? Not that that ended the rivalry between Barnaby and Mitch; perhaps it had never ended, even after the marriage of their children. Barnaby had been an old-fashioned prairie isolationist before the war, Mitch an outspoken interventionist (after all, there was money to be made), but Barnaby served throughout its duration as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers, often on the front line and in both theaters, while Mitch managed to be classified 4-F and, through defense contracts and speculation, became one of the richest and most powerful men in the state. Though he married, Mitch went on living the life he’d always lived, and so, some said, did Audrey, as though, snazzy in her narrow-waisted, wide-shouldered suits and her hair swept up in the latest fashion, rehearsing for war widowhood. But Barnaby, whatever he might have suspected was going on back home, never regretted his war years, and in fact it was while moving along just behind the front in the Old World, witnessing all those devastated villages and thinking about their reconstruction, what he would keep and what take down and what changes he would like to impose, that he came upon his concept of “town planning,” an utterly original thought that continued to excite him even after he discovered it had been thought of by others, centuries back—you could even get a degree in it up at the university. It didn’t matter, his mind was on fire with it, and when, as a lieutenant colonel soon to receive his final promotion (he would be the town’s most distinguished returning war hero), he was granted a six-week furlough before transfer to the Pacific theater, he spent most of it walking his little town, block by block, going over survey maps at the registrar’s office, plotting out his intended transformations once the war was over, even getting the city, through Mitch’s connections, to purchase some of the land he wanted, and, only incidentally, as it were, but as an immediate consequence of the powerful creative energies that possessed him, impregnating Audrey, who gave birth to their daughter about three months before his release and return.

Despite their rivalry and the social distance they generally kept from one another, even after they became in-laws, Barnaby and Mitch enjoyed a symbiotic relationship that helped make both their dreams come true, Mitch enriching himself on investments without which Barnaby could not have realized his vision for the town. Mitch’s political influence helped, too: his uncle by marriage was the mayor when the war ended, and his wife’s brother in time succeeded him, and what her kin couldn’t manage, money usually could. Thus when Barnaby, home on leave, told Mitch about his plans to develop the town around a new city park, the old one being a mere square block in front of City Hall and surrounded by business, making expansion of it impractical, Mitch set about buying up some of the rundown properties Barnaby had pointed out to him, surprising the owners with his generous offers, but knowing full well that the city, through Opal’s relatives, would pay him twice that when the park was built. And did. And he even got the old park in a tradeoff when they ran out of money, the most valuable piece of undeveloped real estate in town, demonstrating his generosity and public spirit (for which he was widely applauded) by moving the bandstand, statue of the Old Pioneer, and historic flagpole to the new park at his own expense, setting the statue on a new rugged stone plinth. The reshaping of the town around the new park was a phenomenal achievement. Only a war hero could have pulled it off. The whole community was reoriented, away from the dwindling creek and long-gone early settlements (even the Old Pioneer’s gaze was turned), toward its slummier back side which was totally erased and refashioned in Barnaby’s image, upgraded almost overnight into the most desirable properties in town, though Barnaby, taking only his construction earnings, owned none of it. Which Mitch thought was, frankly, pretty stupid. Mitch’s personal ethic, which he shared with most in town, was that the world, the only one around, the one they all lived and competed in, was a business world where wealth was synonymous with virtue and poverty was either a case of genetic bad luck (which was what charity was for) or of criminal weakness of character (poorhouses and jails). Mitch knew how to read this business world at a glance and act without hesitation (wherein lay his virtue), and he knew that within his own environs and generation the true saints would be in real estate and banking, quick-witted speculators, alert and well-connected, having, as it were, God’s ear. Grandpop’s old hardware store may have suited his own times (though Grandpop himself was a wise investor), but was now a mere symbolic relic, a sentimental image of his family’s proud historic role in the settling of this great nation, often mentioned in Pioneers Day speeches and newspaper articles, and worth keeping for that reason alone. If Audrey confounded everyone by settling down and marrying Barnaby, however, it was nothing to the surprise the townsfolk experienced when, within a year, rakish Mitch took to wife his business partner Maynard’s younger sister, plain straitlaced Opal. Well, it just goes to show, people said, that being about all they could say in the face of such a marvel, most predicting that Mitch, having married on the rebound from Audrey, would soon be chafing at the bit. The truth was, though, that Opal suited Mitch just fine: seducing innocents always did give him a charge, and then, after the pleasures of the conquest and the birth of a worthy heir, he was left free to live his life as he wished to live it, no bit to chafe him. And was Audrey ever part of that unchafed life? Who could say? Just how far Mitch ever got with Audrey was anybody’s guess, Barnaby’s included, but that Audrey developed such an intense affection, evident to all, for Mitch’s dashing young son surprised no one. With her daughter’s engagement and marriage to this bold handsome boy, Audrey seemed literally to experience a second blossoming; she became once more the life of the party, bright-eyed and vivacious, recovering as if a wand had been waved her lost youth, until it vanished suddenly one year and she was gone like the smoke, so moodily glamorous in its day, that killed her.

At the dedication ceremonies for the new civic center, built by John and named for his father-in-law, now retired, the honoree’s venerable colleague and one-time rival, standing under the inspiring statue of the Old Pioneer, which now rose up six feet higher than before thanks to an imposing new pedestal donated to the city by his son’s company, declared in his public eulogy that the structure they were dedicating today, one of the most magnificent ever seen out here on this great prairie, represented all the noble values that he for whom it was being named stood for: pioneering contemporary design combined with old-fashioned comfort and functionality, technical expertise at the service of communal harmony and the good life and traditional family values. Mitch cited the retractable sunroof over the swimming pool as a tribute to Barnaby’s own architectural innovations, and likened it to the eyelid of a sleeping giant opening onto the heavens, an image suggested to him, he said, by his granddaughter who was sitting on the platform with him. She was applauded. Mitch took the occasion to lament the absence of Barnaby’s dear departed wife, whose heart was always young and whose irrepressible love of life and beauty was somehow embodied in this graceful structure, and the dead wife was also applauded. Mitch went on to say that the civic center symbolized a coming together of the entire community and a revitalization of its heart and nerve center, which had been allowed to deteriorate, putting the health of the entire town at risk, adding that Barnaby himself (who, jaw hanging open, was watching all of this with one cocked eye, the other, heavily lidded, seeming to have something else on its mind) had often spoken of his desire for just such a complex. On a more personal note, he told about the time that he and Barnaby worked together to create, virtually out of nothing, the old city park, on whose former grounds they all now stood, Barnaby confiding to him then his secret vision. “One day, Mitch, he told me, something important will happen here on this piece of land, something that will bring all our townsfolk together in fellowship and prosperity, and meanwhile we have to protect it, keep it green and free from careless development and out-of-town speculators until that day when its true homegrown purpose will be made manifest. And now, today, my friends, his dream has come true!” Marge, obliged to be present that afternoon, but experiencing nauseating waves of helpless rage and loathing, could agree with only one thing John’s un-regenerate father said all day, and that was that not even the Old Pioneer settled this land all by himself: it required concerted action by many people to achieve great changes. In fact it became part of her mayoral platform call for radical electoral reform, as outlined in her unpublished position paper, and something she used while canvassing the very neighborhoods that Barnaby had once created and laid out: only by working together could they bring down the corrupt and ruthless oligarchy (sometimes, depending on her audience, she said “patriarchy”) that ruled this town for its own profit. But after walking her butt off all day, trying to arouse grassroots enthusiasm for her “Rout Out the Rip-Offs” campaign, all she had were the three votes she’d started with, and she wasn’t completely sure of the other two. It was a nice day (too nice: she had chosen an austere business suit with a long skirt for this historic occasion, and she was sweating like a pig), most people seemed to be off picnicking or holidaying, and those who weren’t just stared at her in alarm like she was something from outer space, most of them slamming the door in her face while she was still explaining who she was. This wasn’t going to be easy. But then, exhausted and depressed yet as determined as ever, Marge conceived of a bold maneuver: she would go straight to John and solicit his public support for her candidacy. Not only would he have to admit that she was right on all the key issues, but more importantly, inasmuch as all tyrants, she knew, liked to preserve the illusion of democracy, then in truth, a truth he could be made to see, he needed her, even if only, from his perspective, as token opposition. Moreover, she thought, striding into John’s broad-lawned neighborhood now as though to the first tee, feeling upbeat about this campaign once more (what a coup this could be!), he might even perceive, at last, the longterm wisdom of establishing some sort of practical political partnership with her, one based on mutual respect and frank exchange, thereby putting his great creative resources to more admirable ends. Like all polar opposites, they were two of a kind, a rare kind, persons of courage and integrity and boundless energy (in Marge’s mind, as she wove through all the cars parked out in front of John’s house as though negotiating the sandtraps at the twelfth green, and bounced up the front steps, she could see herself and John, crossing paths in all the air terminals and power centers of the world, acknowledging one another with an understanding nod and a smile—she was nodding, she was smiling—as they went about their complementary tasks for the betterment of all mankind): together they could do anything. John met her at the door in jeans and boots and a suede vest over his bare chest, a couple of bottles in his hand, and told her she didn’t need to knock, come on in, then turned his back on her and walked away, which threw her into some confusion and made her forget her opening sally. Nevertheless, Marge followed him on into the kitchen which was full of caterers and big metal boxes full of food, laying out her argument, or at least what she could remember of it that didn’t sound too silly in the rather stupefying circumstances of the crowded and busy kitchen, and somehow managed to get the point across that she was running for office and wanted his support. “Sure, Marge,” he said, setting the bottles down impatiently, and he reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and gave her a dollar bill. “Now, come on, this goddamn thing’s bigger than ever this year and I seem to be short of help, I have to get the drinks around.” “What?” He glanced back at her from the screen door, as if seeing her for the first time. She stood there in her unseasonal suit, sweat running down her spine, her hair hanging in damp strings around her face, still holding the dollar bill out as if it were a ticket to something. “What goddamn thing?” “Hey. For Christ’s sake, Marge, Happy Pioneers Day. If you need a shower, help yourself. And while you’re at it, change the towels for me in the bathrooms and I’ll give you another dollar.”