Peshtigo

My grandfather watched the great Peshtigo fire from a bridge two miles down river. His father was constable of the neighboring town, Marinette. He was a boy then, my great-grandfather, four years old and barely a thing at all. He told us, when we were boys, about the corpses that came down the river charred black. About the screams of those being licked by flame, and those drowning in the river. He said the horses, as they clambered into the water, made a sound like nothing he ever heard again. He was four, barely a thing at all, and now that I have some hindsight of my own, I wonder how much of it he could actually remember and how much was invented for effect, or extrapolated. I also wonder why he would tell us such a story. We were just boys after all. There was my brother, Nathaniel, who was two years older than me, and our innumerable cousins, that nameless, gangly horde. Now I understand, of course. It was the great event of his life. It was what he had to give us, an image of a child and black water and an all consuming flame. He never believed in God. He said that night seared the faith right out of him.

Once, when I was a much younger man than I am now, my grandfather visited me in a dream. I don’t remember where we were; probably one of those indistinct dream labyrinths. I asked him about the fire. How could he possibly remember the details that he said he did? He’d been four. Any memories I have from before seven or eight resemble a primordial film, flits of color, pieces of dream and creation spliced with actual fact. I don’t trust memory, especially early memory. He looked at me sternly. He’d been a tall Germanic man, well built in the shoulders and with a rigid, impressive jaw. He was younger in my dream than I’d ever known him in real life.

“There are some things in this world that not a soul could forget witnessing,” he said. “If I’d been a baby I would remember those flames. Those screams. The horrible braying of those horses. The endless autumn sky devoured by the maw of hell. No one could forget such a thing. Not me, not any man or woman or baby, not the deer in the forest, not the bears in the forest. There were bears back then, and we hunted them sometimes, and in their eyes, I swear to you, boy, there were flames in their eyes. Flames that could not be extinguished.”

~

“Pull over.”

“What? Here?”

“Yes, here. I need to pee.”

I pull over and Ramona climbs out of our rental car and strolls nonchalantly to the threshold where road meets forest. The woods up here, in Northern Wisconsin, are dense and mysterious. I try peering into them, hoping to see what’s there, but all I find is a menacing blackness. The road is empty up here; there’s not really any chance another car will pass and see my wife pissing. I watch her jaunt out the open door. When I fell in love with her, all those years ago, she had a solidity that drove me mad. Solid hips, solid shoulders. It ran in her family. A few years back she became a running fanatic and now, to be honest, she’s emaciated. Her legs are stringy and the tendons of her neck show. It means that her breasts, which for our whole lives together were ample, have now shrunken and deflated. But it makes her feel good, to run, to be so in shape. So I try to be supportive.

She hovers over the gravel and weeds, her underwear and jeans held at arm‘s length. I look for her familiar charcoal brillo. She sees me watching and scowls.

“Are you serious, Paul?”

“What?”

“Don’t watch me pee.”

I’ve seen her pee, what, hundreds of times? So instead I watch the road dissipate into the steamy, peatgrey horizon.

~

I show her the bridge where my brother and I used to fish at dusk and on Sundays.

“We’d ride down here after church and we’d stop at the gas station to get worms.”

The traffic behind us is insistent and steady; it’s almost rush hour. The bridge is flanked on both sides by a stretch of fast food joints and gas stations. The big trees have all been felled and shipped off; most of them were gone by the time Dad and I left. The old paper mill, just down river, is still there, spewing a snowy mist. Dad drove forklifts there one summer.

“What did you catch?” Ramona asks. She’s leaning her head out over the railing, childlike, looking into the shallow, placid stream. A few weeds glissade like quicksilver just beneath the surface.

“Pan fish, mostly. Sun fish and blue gills. If we caught enough, we’d take them home and scale them and fry them whole for lunch.”

“I didn’t know you could scale a fish.”

I shrug. Skills like this didn’t seem relevant anymore, so I hadn‘t told her. She pivots to face me, brushing a frond of dyed black hair from her eyes. It’s windy out here. I miss when she left her hair alone, when it had streaks of beautiful grey. She looks out the river towards the bay. The paper mill bleats and blinks and spits, its arachnid stacks jutting hideously skyward. I’m taller than her, though not by much, and she stands straighter than I do. So we’re about the same height.

“Once, I remember, Nat and I caught 123 perch here. We never came close to that many again. I don’t know how it happened. One of those magical days. You could see them down there, wriggling and kicking, so dense and thick. It was like a blanket of fish. We could have jumped in and pulled them out with our bare hands. We had to throw half of them back because we ran out of room in the ice box. But we kept count.”

She’s tying her hair back, the mechanisms on the bottom of her wrist visible and flexing. She half smiles, the kind of distracted affectation I can’t stand.

“I thought it was pretty amazing.”

“I’m sure it was.”

We visit the museum of the fire and the graveyard where most of the children are buried.

“Who visits these places anymore?” she asks before reflexively frowning. I’m certain she’s thinking of her brother, Isaac. “There’s no family left. Probably not even family of family. So why do people still come?”

~

My grandfather’s house was a small two story home. It was shambly with do-it-yourself additions and do-it-yourself fixes. The front porch listed away from the house. The shutters did not match, as if he’d picked each pair up at separate antique sales (which he probably had). The surrounding gardens slowly took dominion over the house as age incapacitated him. Tomatoes and corn, blackberries and raspberries, grape vines and half a dozen cherry trees. We would visit and leave with enough produce for an entire summer. My mother, before she died, would turn the raspberries and blackberries into jams. She made enough that, for years after her death, we would eat our morning toast with her jams. We never did open the final jar, and it was lost somewhere in the move to Michigan.

My grandfather made jams, too. He made jams, and he pickled cucumbers and beats and even onions. He also made wines and champagnes. His cellar was a labyrinth of decades-old pickles and forgotten aperitifs. My father kept three bottles after the old man died, choosing them at random. Every Christmas, for the three years after, we would open one and have it with dinner. It was a big deal; even Nat and I were allowed a glass. I don’t remember the first two. But the third one, a pumpkin raisin champagne, went down in family lore. My father talked about it for years, whenever he reminisced about the old man. I’ve told the story to more than a few friends and family, even though I couldn’t remember what it tasted like if I tried. I suppose it doesn’t matter. The fact is, it was good.

My grandfather’s house was bulldozed in the late 80’s to make way for a subdivision. Ramona and I drive through the neighborhood’s wide, flat streets. They’re flanked by thin, generic maple trees that are so small that they barely even cast shadows. I try to approximate, amongst the McMansions that already seem faded and out of date and kind of cheap, where my grandfather’s house must have stood. We park in front of one of the homes and we get out and take a few paces onto the front yard, standing at the poorly mulched, weedy base of a mostly leafless maple.

“This was probably it,” I say without much confidence.

“Huh,” Ramona says, appropriately.

A young woman holding a baby opens the front door and warily pokes her head out.

“Excuse me,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“Oh. No,” I say.

“What are you doing?” she asks. She’s pretty in a Midwestern way: broad cheeks, a small nose, big wide set blue eyes. Her blonde hair is cut short.

“Nothing,” I say. “We’re about to leave. I’m sorry. We’re just a little lost.”

~

We take the lonely road out to my the church where my grandfather is buried. The forest gives way to soft glacial hills. This time of year, they’re billowy and gold with wheat, wimpling and verdant with corn. Silos and farm houses break the rollicking horizon. A few tractors mutter down the road; a hand painted sign advertises a county wide tractor pull for the Sunday upcoming. I watch Ramona carefully for signs of curiosity or awe, but she’s lost in her own memories. Her dark eyes are open but looking at nothing. I roll down my window and smell manure, earth.

The church is still where I remember it from his funeral, nestled at the bottom of a small dell, at the crossroads of two county highways. The white paint needs a fresh coat or a power wash. The small stained glass windows shimmer with the day’s last, best sun. Across the street is the small graveyard where my grandfather is buried and rotting. A few mature maple trees lariate in the wind. Most of the gravestones have abraded elementally; the names are almost indecipherable. There are no flowers, no American flags marking the resting places of veterans. I wonder how long until this place is forgotten.

We find his grave. It’s right where I remember it, a few paces from the edge of the property, which happens to be a field of corn. We stand there dumbly, looking at his headstone.

“I wish I’d met him,” Ramona says summarily.

I laugh, because what else makes sense? I tell her the story of the fire again, which I’ve told her probably a hundred times. She sits down in the grass and plays idly with a white clover. Then I sit beside her and the two of us lay down in the warm grass beside my grandfather’s grave and we watch cumulous clouds that look thin and fragile like paper mache. Her head is on my shoulder, and it’s there long enough that my arm goes numb. The clouds drift by in diaphanous movements. One mass is the skeletal map of a pan fish; another is a fossil from the Mesozoic period. Most are meaningless and random and impossibly beautiful.

~

We eat a late dinner at a roadside bar somewhere in the UP. It’s Friday night, so we both order beer battered perch with French fries. She eats about half of hers and smiles politely, though I can tell she’s unimpressed. I wolf down the rest of her plate while she visits the bathroom, and I also go to the bar and have a quick shot of brandy, for my grandfather.

We drive until nearly eleven. Then a thick fog descends from the fecund trees. It smells like autumn all the way up here, that crispness that lurks like a considerate predator before striking quickly, killing painlessly. We’d talked about sleeping in the car to save money, but now that the moment of decision is at hand, Ramona balks.

“You always hear stories about people killed in their cars. Naïve couples that thought, no, it wouldn’t ever happen to us. Not us, not us. We’re too old for that kind of thinking, aren‘t we? Besides: who would be out at this time of night except for someone deranged?”

We find a few cottages that look empty. Tourist season ends early up here. A light is on in the reception office. We go in together, holding hands, trying to look reasonable and sane. Her body sags with exhaustion, and it feels good, natural, beside mine. A sleepy old man emerges from a narrow flight of stairs and rents us a cottage on the cheap. While Ramona showers, I roll a joint from the weed in my toiletry bag. When she comes out in her towel, I’m already smoking. She takes it from me and takes her three hits, then slumps into bed. The towel hangs loosely from her frame, coming slowly unraveled around her chest. I smoke while standing at the window and watch the towel, willing it to fall open. I know the weed is taking effect when I start thinking I can notice every millimeter that the towel creeps open. The smoking is something we’ve been doing for a few months now. We’re trying new things, because the truth is, we don’t have sex much anymore. She takes her urges out on long runs. I usually fantasize about my students.

Finally, mercifully, the towel unfurls and falls off of her, and my wife is sprawled naked on the bed, her significantly smaller breasts pancaked against her prominent rib cage, her bush unruly, the pink of her cunt barely visible beneath the brittle hair. I try to not remember all the hotels we’ve shared in our lifetime. The first one was in Annapolis, Maryland. That I remember. An Indian man who barely spoke English sold me the room even though I was only nineteen and didn’t have valid I.D. Ramona was probably fifty pounds heavier back then, pale and supple, and we fucked standing up in the shower, and then I bent her over the bed and fucked her, and the next morning she woke me up by stroking my dick and climbing astride me and fucking me ravenously. Things moderate, which I don’t need to tell you.

I come into bed beside her, still clothed. I suck on her nipples, getting them to rise. Right when I think she might be asleep, she jolts awake with a gasp.

“Oh, wow,” she says, dazed. “It’s late, isn’t it?”

“Not that late. Barely midnight.”

I’m fingering her, trying to get her wet. She clamps a hand to my wrist.

“Mm? Not tonight. Not tonight, ok?”

“Ok.” She gets up to turn off the overhead light, still naked. There’s a space between her thighs now that wasn’t always there, a sliver of open air. It’s tufted with pubic hair, which I like.

“Do you mind if I jack off?” I ask as she climbs back into bed with her iPad.

“Sure, why not? Go for it.”

I stare at her ass, and especially at the hair visible at its bottom, and masturbate while she checks her email.

“Kara wrote,” she tells me as I’m getting close. Kara, our daughter, is watching our house back in Philadelphia. She’s dropped out of college and is working at a record store down on South Street. “She said that the dogs are doing fine, but that you forgot to pay the cable bill.”

I’m trying to regulate my breathing so that I don’t grunt too loudly. I don’t think she cares, or even notices, but I just don’t like feeling so beastly. I finish on her ass. She squirms with displeasure.

“Ew, goddamnit.”

“I’m sorry.” I fetch her towel from the floor and clean her off. She puts the computer away and turns off the bedside lamp and we sit in the darkness listening to each other breathe.

“Do you think we’re bad people?” she asks.

“Why?”

“Because we’ve put David through rehab twice and here we are, stoned.”

David is our son.

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“Are you sure?”

“We weren’t smoking when they were kids.”

“No, but we knew that they were. And we didn’t dissuade it,” she says.

“If we’d been too strict, they just would have gone behind our backs.”

“Well, could it have been any worse than it was?”

“…”

“I shouldn’t have traveled so much.”

“It was for work. It was important.”

“No, I should have stayed home more. I could have found work closer to home, where I didn’t have to travel. I’m so selfish, Paul.”

“No, you’re not. Not at all. We always said that we wouldn’t let kids end our lives, especially yours. And we didn’t.”

“…”

“We both agreed that we’d let them make their own decisions. And we have. Maybe it hasn’t worked out great so far, but I think they’ll be better for it in the long run,” I say.

“Do you? Really?”

“I don’t know.”

She sighs and plucks thoughtlessly at my chest.

“You and David were so close,” she says. “What happened?”

“We still talk sometimes. Not like we used to, but I guess that couldn’t have lasted. I don’t know what happened. What happens to everyone.”

“And what happens to everyone?”

“You know. We grow apart. We want to define ourselves. We’re too stubborn to admit how lonely or lost we are.”

“How do you think he is?”

“I think he’s pretty good.”

“He’s such a good Dad.”

“He is, you’re right. He’s amazing with Lee.”

“I’ll be honest…”

“What?”

“Well I’ve told you before. I thought she should have, you know. Not kept the baby.”

“Aborted it.”

“Yes. Yes. I thought it was an enormous mistake. I didn’t think there was anyway they could possibly raise a child together. I had visions of us raising this poor baby while we had no idea where the two of them were, disappeared on some binge.”

“Me, too.”

“He surprised me.”

“Me, too.”

“It’s scary. Lee will grow up. And David will fail him, too. It won’t even be his fault. He won’t try to. It scares me what will happen to Lee as he gets older. I wish he wouldn’t get older.”

“…”

“You should tell David how proud you are of him more often, by the way.”

“I know. I know I should.”

“Why don’t you?”

“I don’t know. It’s not easy, I guess.”

For a time we’re silent.

“Are you asleep?” she asks after a while.

“Nope. Wide awake.”

“I’m drifting in and out.”

“I can tell.”

“I know that you don’t like my body anymore.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That’s not true.”

“Ok, well you don’t like it the way you once did. How about that? You’ve always liked women curvy. And now I’m not curvy. But I like feeling this way. So I’m going to keep running.”

“Good. I think you should.”

“You’re sure?”

“Of course.”

“Ok.”

“I still love your bush.”

She laughs a drowsy laugh, and slaps the back of her hand against my chest. I’m wide awake and my legs are getting stiff. I think the high is wearing off. I stand up and find my shoes.

“I’ll be back, ok?”

“Mm?”

“I’m going for a drive.”

“Paul, are you sure?”

“I’m fine. Go to sleep.”

~

The fog is still dense as smoke. I drive slowly because I can barely see fifty feet in front of the car. When I was eight or nine, my father was driving us back from a square dance in an old gymnasium. He was an interim pastor then, at a church about an hour from our home. Nat and I were asleep in the back of the car when we hit a deer. I thought, for a second, that someone had shot the car with a shotgun and that the windshield had exploded. I haven’t forgotten that experience. So I drive slowly.

I find a roadside place that looks open. It’s Friday, after all. It’s not all that different from where we ate dinner. Just a little concrete slab with a few windows that glow neon with beer signs. There are a few pick up trucks in the gravel parking lot. The faint sound of music permeates the chilly night.

Inside an absolutely enormous woman is singing karaoke. It’s something country that I haven’t heard. My daughter would probably know what it is. The woman’s voice isn’t bad. She’s the kind of woman who could work as a telemarketer or for a phone sex service. Her voice has that quality, the kind of voice you trust implicitly. Her face is bloated and her hair is bleached blonde and her brown roots show. In the dim lights of the bar it’s easy to see that her wrists and ankles are bruised. A few men at the bar watch her, guys with tattoos and big ear studs and prodigious guts. I sit down at the end of the bar and order a shot of brandy and a beer. I watch a slew of women, each of them indistinct, sing various country song. None of their voices can match the first girl’s voice, though. Later in the night she gets up to sing again, receiving warm applause. I clap loudly, whistle too loudly, and draw a few impolite stares. I’m on my fourth beer. She closes her small eyes and sings a long, sultry ballad. She puts as much energy and passion into this cheesy song as I’ve seen anyone put into anything in a very long time. Where do we muster this kind of strength? This persistent passion for irrelevant, pyrrhic things?

When David came home from rehab for the first time, his hair, which he liked short, had grown long and greasy. The first thing he did was go up to the bathroom and get out his clippers. He lined the sink with a trash bag (he’s always been considerate like that, even when he was at his worst), and he started to shave his hair off in terse, angry strokes. When it came time to do the back of his head, he stopped. His hands were shaky. I’m sure he was worried about nicking his scalp.

“Here,” I said.

He looked at me like he was unaware I’d been there, like he’d been so absorbed in the act of cutting his hair that he’d failed to notice the world around him. He gave me the clippers and I helped him trim the back of his head, cleaning up his neckline. Both of us started to cry. I don’t know why this girl reminds me of that, but she does. She wraps up her song, eyes closed, and we all applaud sincerely, earnestly, like it’s the most beautiful thing we’ve seen in a long time. She opens her eyes and there’s something there, something irrevocable and bottomless, that none of us could explain, or would even acknowledge. But it’s there, and we’ve all seen it, and shared it. It’s there, I promise you.



　

Camden

My father almost died twice before I was born. The first time, which he only ever talked about in passing, as if it were an anecdote barely worth telling, was shortly after the war ended. He’d been a pilot during the war, and when he came home, it seemed only logical that he would be a pilot here, too. So he flew puddle jumpers between places like Cedar Rapids and Bismarck, Rhinelander and Pierre. Boom towns that, before anyone knew what happened, became bust towns.

Well, one July afternoon, on a flight from Rhinelander into Green Bay, Dad flew right into the heart of summer evening storm. It was a wall of cumulonimbus that was electric at its heart. That’s how he described it. Hail started to batter the plane; they got caught in shears and downdrafts. He decided to ditch in a field, which he did, landing belly first in a soy field outside of Gillette. Dad walked away with a broken wrist and a punctured lung, but two of his passengers - two G.I.’s going on a fishing trip - weren’t so lucky. I don’t think he ever got over that, which is probably why he didn’t like to talk about it.

The second time Dad almost died was a few years later, shortly before he and Mom got married. He’d abandoned the pilot business and was working on the Carl D. Fitzgerald. It was the newest and biggest of the Lakers at the time, a cathedral of Midwestern commerce, lean and long and breathtakingly beautiful. We had a stunning black and white photograph of the boat hanging above our mantle when I was a kid, and I could spend hours staring at it, studying the lines and curves of the ship, mesmerized by its size, by its implacable grace.

They were making their last run of the season, a mid November slog from Duluth down to Gary. The old bastard was heavy with iron ore. The storm came up about the time they were hitting the locks at Sault St. Marie. It hit them full bore when they passed through the straits. The bridge was in its early days of construction then, back when it still seemed impossible. Only the outward stanchions had been erected, and they‘d been covered over for the winter with thick tarps that whipped and tore in the gale. Dad said it was like steering through a graveyard.

By night fall the ship was hog backing like mad. Dad and all the other guys had gone below deck, where they were holding on for dear life, passing around a bottle of whiskey, talking about girls they’d loved or fucked, girls that they’d drop down on a knee for and marry the Goddamned minute they got back on land. They were being shadowed by The Eiger Maru, one of the old guard ships, but she took refuge when they passed Manitou, preferring to take her chances with the notorious shoals than with the storm.

The Fitz fought bravely, but right before midnight he went over a thirty-five footer, and when he came down the other side, there was nothing there. The middle of the ship sagged one last time, and with a shudder that my father would never forget, snapped. The front half of the ship, which had buried its nose on the lake’s bottom, immediately foundered. But the back half, where the crew’s quarters were located, bobbed like a lost buoy for a few minutes in the frothing sea. The men scrambled on deck. Most of them refused to believe that the sound they heard - like a giant ripping a sheet of steel in half, Dad said - was the boat splitting apart. They came up to see most of their ship completely vanished.

Dad said that standing there in the wind was lonelier than he imagined a person could feel. It was like staring into an abyss with a fire moving fast at your back and knowing you had no choice but to jump. They scrambled for life rafts while what was left of the Fitz hemorrhaged iron ore and gasoline, and inhaled water. Dad made it onto an inflatable dinghy with three other men. They were able to launch the raft just before what remained of the Fitz went under. He said they could hear their friends and crewmates shrieking with increasing, and then decreasing, urgency, but that with the swells and in the pitch black of night they couldn’t find any of them. After thirty minutes or so all they could hear was the wind. They spent the remainder of the seemingly endless night being battered and overturned by the malicious waves. At first they sang hymns, to stay warm. Then they talked again about women. It was amazing, he said, but they were able to laugh and smile. But eventually the cold took its toll. Their replies grew briefer, less immediate, and then they stopped talking altogether. Each man was alone with his thoughts and with the elements. Dad said he went through fits of resolve and hopelessness, sometimes vacillating violently between the two. One of the other men was sobbing quietly. They were all holding one another for warmth. By the time morning broke Dad was the only one still alive. He held onto the corpses of his friends because he figured even cold and dead they were worth some warmth. He laid on his back with the bodies of his dead friends covering him like a blanket of bloated, frozen flesh. He tried to take off their clothes but his fingers were useless. His thoughts drifted into absurdity. The daylight was sickly and pale, but the wind had finally begun to abate. Dad began to lose consciousness. He’d lost the will to fight, he said. He was on the verge of accepting death. He was too cold and exhausted to even feel sad, he said.

And then a coast guard boat appeared on the crest of a wave and pulled him from the raft, alive.

He told this story almost obsessively to anyone who would listen. It was the story of how he found his faith. Sitting on that coast guard schooner he decided that God had chosen him to survive. His night on that raft had been his purification by grace. The only way he could ensure that his friends had not died meaninglessly was to spread the Gospel.

I tell Ramona both of these stories while she looks out the window. I’ve told them before, but they seem more poignant here, on the mighty Mackinac bridge, the straits below us. The bridge sways almost imperceptibly in the morning wind, like a monumental cradle. The deep verdure of Michigan sweeps away north and south, gently rumpled like a blanket covering multiple bodies. The hardwood forests are much as LaSalle found them. The trees here have begun their flirtations with scarlet, violet, and vermillion.

Out on the water, hyrdojet boats whiz and whir towards Mackinac Island. Lake Huron is to the east, and icicles of sun glitter on its heaving surface; Michigan spills out to the west, ashimmer and azure, beautifully hiding its three thousand shipwrecks, and a bottle of my father’s whiskey, and his friend’s bones. I like to think of him on the Lakers. I’ve always liked imagining him before he found God, when he drank and cursed and talked about women. It’s a difficult picture. He only drank in front of me and Nat on Christmas or Easter. He only ever swore when recounting the sinking of the Carl. D. Fitzgerald. And he never talked about women, not even our mother.

~

Highway 31 traces the shore of Lake Michigan the way a woman‘s tongue might trace her lover‘s spine. We follow the sinuous road southwest. Occasionally the blue of the lake emerges on our right, or through the forest thatch. Occasionally we pass through one of the small towns that were once fishing or timber havens but have long since become vacation towns. Petoskey, Charlevoix. Towns that vaguely resonate from the well of my memory, like long ago girls that I once had crushes on. Girls that I took to the country fair and ate caramel apples with. Girls that I watched play volleyball in spandex and knee-high socks. Towns that are already contracting for the winter ahead.

In Traverse City we drive out onto the peninsula between the two bays. Matrixes of cherry trees fall away to the water on both sides. We stop at a winery and buy a bottle of cherry wine and a jar of cherry jam for Kara. The harvest has come and is months gone. The trees are already tinctured with garnet and ready to hibernate.

South of Traverse City the forest is only broken by groves of apple or cherry trees. We can see the men out there amongst the apples, perched on their ladders with wicker baskets around their necks. The process of picking apples has changed little. Most of the men are beige skinned, Hispanic. Sometimes we pass their little communities situated on the edge of the orchards. They are mostly trailers and shanties. The yards are cluttered with tricycles and toys, and lacerated by limp clotheslines. These transitory settlements seem small against the backdrop of forest, like temporary blemishes.

“I’m hungry. We haven’t eaten all day,” Ramona says. She’s been reading Murakami’s memoir about running. I’m jealous of her ability to read while in moving vehicles. I turn down a dirt road that circumnavigates one of the apple orchards. I park behind a copse of trees. Ramona fetches a half-eaten foil of crackers from the glove box. We get out and stretch. Ramona extends heavenward like a quarter moon so that I can see the stippled muscles of her stomach. She makes a wincing soprano sound, something she’s been doing for as long as I’ve known her, and that always makes her seem much younger. I scrounge a few apples for us from low hanging branches, discarding those with wormholes or soft spots. We rinse them with our bottle of water and I polish them on my shirt. They’re the green-gold of fallen leaves. We sit down beneath one of the apple trees. The day is very still out here; it will be a different story once we reach the lake. Across the hollows and dells of the orchard men are working on their ladders. We watch them, and eat. The sky is pewter and tenebrous. It portends rain. Ramona finishes her apple and throws the core away and goes in search of another. She takes hold of a low hanging branch, and with girlish ease, swings herself up into a tree. The bones of her spine are prominent, the muscle of her shoulders.

“Hey, come here,” she says. Then she starts to toss apples down. “I don’t want them to bruise. There are still some good ones up here.” I make a basket out of my shirt, and when it’s overflowing, she throws a few more down and then she lets herself down, too, dismounting with the dexterity of a heron.

Soon we’re back on the road. The terrain becomes more familiar. We pass simple, white churches that seem to have been built in dreams of mine. Lutheran churches with their accompanying graveyards that are slowly being commandeered by the forest. I remember my father preaching. He was a natural storyteller. He preached in many of these churches. He was never ordained. In Wisconsin, he knew enough people that when a pastor went out of town, they would call my father and ask him to fill in. It took him much longer to establish his reputation out here, and that was hard on him. Our first winters here, I remember we left before dawn most Sundays. We drove two, sometimes three hours, so Dad could preach to a congregation of no more than twenty people.

We stop at one of them. It’s a church at the intersection of two county roads, two roads from nowhere leading nowhere. It’s the only building in sight. We turn off the road we’re following and descend a small hill. I stop, pop the car into neutral.

“What are you doing?”

The car begins to roll methodically in the opposite direction, back up the hill.

“No way,” she says. She gets out while the car is still moving and lays down on the shoulder of the road so that gravel and little luminous pieces of glass and mica sequin the front of her shirt, dapple the bottoms of her forearms. She studies it from every angle. She looks at me from the ground, stumped.

“Impossible.”

I’m out of the car, looking down at her. I battle the arthritis in my knees and crouch down to kiss her, right here on the pavement at the bottom of spook hill. The last of the summer’s cicadas are strumming sadly.

“Fucking impossible,” she says. The car is still ascending, empty, slowly ascending.

About ten minutes later we meet up with Highway 22. The forest on both sides is impenetrable. We drive south, sweetly ensconced with the windows down. With each turn my heart braces itself, and then palpitates with pleasure deferred. Ramona has forgotten about the lake. Suddenly, then, the forest breaks and the lake is upon us, dominating the horizon, vast and rippled and monumentally blue. She gasps. Some beauty is so very simple: an expanse of water framed by trees singed with the first hint of autumn.

~

Sylvan is a very small town, no more than fifteen residential blocks in total. Two north-south streets run between Highway 22 and the lake. Four east-west streets run from the lake out across the highway, where, after a short while, all but one of them disappear into fields of milkweed and wild wheat. These four cross streets are named for trees: Oak, Cherry, Maple, Pine. There is one bar in Sylvan, and it rests on the southern outskirt of town, and it’s named The Little Fish. There is one store, on the corner of Cherry and Highway 22, and it sells only the barest of essentials.

From the top of either bluff that flank the town and its small harbor, the only part of Sylvan that is visible through the tree tops is the weathervane of a church steeple. Perhaps it’s better to call Sylvan a village, in fact.

Nestled on the north side of this village, and sprawling like a fishhook along the lake, is Camp Sylvan. It’s a Lutheran family camp. After my mother died, my father found work here. During the brief, ephemeral summers, he served as chaplain to the camp’s staff of twenty or so college students; during the interminable winters he worked as assistant caretaker, repairing and patching the camp’s buildings, installing new plumbing, fortifying the place against the onslaught of Michigan snowstorms and gales.

We park in a field of grass behind the camp’s inn. The inn abuts the lake, separated by only a sidewalk and a small beach. Jetties extend like gnarled fingers into the lake. The water is low. I walk Ramona out to one of the jetties, and from here we can see the skeleton of a grain ship that ran aground and sank during the autumn of 1897. Six men died and two more were saved when a group of timber men pulled them from the waves. The wreck is like the fossil of a prehistoric fish, threadbare and ominous.

We walk across the camp’s main quad. It‘s empty, the picnic tables and rocking chairs already put away. Somewhere a hammer sounds; evergreen shutters are closing like eye lids around the camp‘s windows. The lake is behind us. To our right is the inn. In front of us is the main office and the ice cream parlor, and above them are the staff quarters, where my father, my brother and I lived for six years, and where my father died of a heart attack one sunny afternoon in October. To our left is the chapel, and beyond it the meandering sequence of athletic fields and bike trails that have been carved out of the woods and exist tenuously, like civilizations perched on the brink of ruin. The buildings are homogenous: white washed with red slate roofs and green shutters. A fine patina of scum dusts the white clapboards.

We go into the office. An old man is at the front desk, his face softly glowing with the dull light of a computer screen. He glances up when we come in, then instinctively looks back at the screen before double taking. He breaks into a natural smile. His teeth have worn to nubs with the years, and are deeply stained by his love of coffee.

“Oh my, you could be Frederic’s ghost,” Jasper says. I smile; my father was a very attractive man, right up to his death.

Jasper stands and we hug for a long time. His hands fall on the back of my neck.

“Oh my,” he says again as we come apart.

“Jasper, this is my wife, Ramona.”

He takes her hand. His fingernails have been bitten raw. His shoulders, though, are still fulsome. His face is lean and Nordic. His skin is like the hide of a horse that’s been left to bake in the sun and then forgotten. His eyes are the color of the lake on a clear day if you were submerged and looking up to the surface. Like water shot through with light.

“It’s a pleasure,” she says.

“Of course, of course,” he says. We stand like this, her hand in his, for a while and then Ramona laughs brusquely and Jasper smiles sadly, as if he once had a premonition of me, when I was a young man, returning to visit with a wife who had poor manners and hated small talk. I remember the spring that he, my father, Nat and I re-shingled the roof of the inn. It was the first, and last, time I drank beer with my Dad. Dad and Jasper shared stories about legendary winter storms, and both of them cursed freely, as if the normal procrustean rules of behavior had been temporarily suspended. We drank beer and they cursed.

“Well we’ve got an apartment ready, if you want to see it.”

“Sure.”

Jasper leads us through the office and upstairs. The place smells intensely of pine, but pine that has lingered past its freshness.

“We re-did the whole interior a few winters ago and improved the insulation. We stripped the finish off the walls, and it really brightened the place up. It feels less like a dungeon.”

We go to the end of a narrow hallway and Jasper opens the door to a small, clean bedroom. There’s a modest double bed, a cloudy mirror, and an old porcelain sink that has recently been polished and sheens like mother of pearl. Jasper waits politely at the threshold of the doorway while we settle in.

“I left you a few extra towels, just in case. The hot water is a little finicky. So be patient, and be prepared for it to go out on you without warning.” He smiles, this time with more warmth. My transgressions have always been venial in Jasper’s eyes.

“Thank you,” Ramona says.

“Do the kids still drink up at Aral?” I ask.

“The city of ghosts,” Jasper says; I smile. “Who knows what the kids do these days. I don’t ask.”

“But it’s still there?”

“I haven’t been up there in years. Probably.”

“What’s Aral?” Ramona asks.

~

We follow the beach north until the jetties end. A few cottages hunker on the beach’s edge. They’re squat and unadorned, like pill boxes. The coastline extends majestically ahead of us, steep faced bluffs of sand topped by forest so dense as to appear black.

“When we first moved here, Nat and I would walk out here in the morning and look for Petoskey stones.”

“Petoskey stones?”

“They’re fossils. They’re only visible when they’re wet or polished. They look like turtle shells.” I smile. “When I got older I’d bring girls out here to look for them.”

“Not surprising.”

We spend a time looking for Petoskeys. I want, very badly, for Ramona to find one. Not that it matters one way or another, or that we’ll even remember her finding one. It’s one of those urges I can’t help. She doesn’t find one. I find two, though one is just a fragment. I give her the better of the two. We walk about a hundred yards past the last of the cottages and turn off the beach onto a trampled path that carves through a field of dune grass that’s blown flat by the wind coming off the lake. The field burns like pale green flame against the roiled sky. Ramona’s shoes are slung over her shoulder. I’ve taken a chance and left mine on the beach. We move like scythes through the tall, unfettered grasses until we come upon an embankment of forest. I find the familiar deer trail the penetrates into the darkness. We follow it until the meadow is a ghost, a scintilla of gold in the past. We move further and deeper into the wilderness. A fear comes over me, a fear of bottomless spaces and endless wilderness. It is the fear of life in the suburbs. The fear of my childhood skills blunted by misuse. Of permanent disappearance. This fear compels me deeper, to where there is no striated drama of shadow and sun. There are no eddies or swales of brightness. We are submerged; light has become a muted whisper. The wind high in the trees is a primordial, monosyllabic instrument. Branches clatter to the ground. The trees quiver like girls in the throes of first pleasure. They’re like old lovers visited in a dream: trembling aspen, balsam poplar, white birch, honey locust. Slender, tall, and supple. The trail is faint and easily lost. The wind is immense and mythical, it bellows and obliterates the sundries of my past, the minor affections of my terrified heart and obsessions of my body. How small a thing love is, it serenades. How fragile a creation you are. I am being hunted like a small animal.

And then we emerge upon a luminous fissure of creek bed. We reconvene with light. This narrow channel is so crystalline my eyes ache, failing against the clear, ascetic splendor. You cannot live a life of absences, I think. Those vacancies and hollows come naturally enough. And yet this is exactly what I’ve done. Find something and hold it, wrap the might of your mortal self around it. We move upstream. I’m beginning to sweat, and my fear is a soluble element. It dissipates and settles like silt beneath a languid current. The creek is rocky; its flow is swift and cold against our ankles. The sky above breaks like an Artic ice floe in summer. The sun cascades over the water and the smooth, ferric stones. The bottom is sandy and shallow. At times the creek is so narrow that we move single file, but then it widens and shaggy grasses flop over the bank, and willow trees drag their trellises in the water and the tall pencil poplars sway sweetly like dancers drunk on the wind. We are in a chasm of light. In these wide sections we walk astride. Ramona looks up and closes her eyes, taking in the wind and the sun. I entreat the wind: move me the way love once did. Her body is a brittle, foreign thing. Move me the way language once did. Because all systems fail. She lets the wind and the sun throttle her. It’s a power I can’t imagine. It burns and stings, her hair undulates with the trees. The savage terror of being lost.

Finally the creek bends and we come to it, a small convocation of dunes and a cluster of cottonwoods huddled like desert Bedouins. We climb out of the creek. Between the dunes it is quiet as a dolmen. A fire pit is charred black and surrounded by beer bottles that are beginning to lose their shape, battered by sand and water and sun. There are a few pieces of exposed wood still visible, their forms indiscernible, like figures formed when blood spurts into water. Human forms rendered incoherent. The earth is a tapestry of light and shadow.

At one edge of this chancel is a tablet, about waist high, that has been scoured and graffitied. It’s always reminded me of a rune.

“Aral was, around the turn of the 20^th century, a major timber town on the Michigan coast. Ships bound for Chicago, Gary, Cleveland and Detroit routinely stopped and filled their coffers in Aral.” Ramona reads in a monotone, unaffected voice. “Along with these boats came Scandinavian and German immigrants seeking work in the forest, the mill, or on the dock. By 1902, Aral’s population had reached 500. A church was built, and on weekends, it was not uncommon for there to be dances at the town hall or in one of the empty storage barns. However, as the first growth forest was cleared away, the flow of timber coming from the forests around Aral slowed. Families began leaving for fresh opportunities. By 1914, when a fire ripped through the mill and the surrounding homes, Aral’s population had dwindled to less than 150. The fire struck late in the night, and it burned with such intensity that it was described as a false dawn. Nearly three dozen people perished, many of them children. The town was mostly destroyed, and most of the survivors fled with what few possessions they had left. But a few stayed behind and resettled just a mile south of Aral. They named their new home Sylvan.” She touched the tablet as if she were wiping water from the cheek of a child. “There’s a picture here, too, identifying the ruins.” She looks up, and then down, and then up again.

“The sands shift,” I say. “The landscape is always changing. We would camp out up here, sometimes. We threw parties back here. The first time I ever saw a girl naked was up here. I was fourteen and she was eighteen and we got naked by the light of a bonfire. At night, when it’s windy, you could hear the sands moaning, like they were a living thing.”

“The city of ghosts.”

“Yep.”

She shivers. The wind sounds far off and refracted. The sun is frail and thin, here on the palimpsest grid of the old timber town. There were dances in the barns. Whole lives lived in this little chancel between the dunes. The girl had pale skin and freckles on her shoulder and a thick, brittle bush. You can search for the secret heart of a place, a person, a whole life. A fulcrum around which things bend, an aperture through which things filter. You can search and search.

~

Clouds descend; the ice floe compacts again. As we walk back up the beach a soft, slate rain begins to fall. Ramona smiles to herself as I wrap my arm around her waist.

“What?”

“I just remembered something that I hadn’t thought of in a very long time. Isn’t it remarkable how that can happen? Sometimes I’ll have memories that I’m pretty certain I’ve never had before. They just bubble up out of nowhere and then they vanish.”

“What was the memory?”

“I was standing at the front door waiting for Kara to get home. It was her first year of middle school, I think. Maybe her second. It was raining, really raining, not like this. It was very humid. I remember I had the door open and was listening to the rain come down on the front yard. And at some point I looked out and there was Kara walking slowly down the street, completely alone, completely drenched. But it didn’t seem to bother her at all. She looked so stoic and so independent and just so beautiful, so much like a young woman and not at all like our kid. I didn’t recognize her expression at all. I didn’t recognize her at all.”

“Are you worried about her?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not.”

“She fell in love with a girl, you know. Well, you don’t know, of course. But she did. She fell in love with a friend of hers. A very old friend. Rebecca. She told me about it one night. I don’t know where you were. You might have been teaching a night class that semester. She said one day it just occurred to her that she’d been in love with Rebecca for pretty much her entire life. So she told her how she felt, and Rebecca said she felt the same way. So they spent one of their summers between college making love. They both had boyfriends at the time. Kara was dating Nick that summer. They would see their boyfriends and then they would meet up and make love. Or, they would fuck. That’s how she termed it.”

I cringe.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I say.

“She would fuck Rebecca. And then it ended. She was very broken up about this. When she told me all this, we’d been drinking, of course. She was very embarrassed and confused. She said they talked about having a life together. About running away and getting married. And then one night, at the end of summer, Rebecca confessed to Kara that she wasn’t really in love with her, that what’d they had hadn’t been real, that it had just been playing, experimenting. That it had been foolish all along, and that she was going to move in with her boyfriend.” She looks directly at me and smiles with a sadness so irrevocable and bottomless. It’s the purest sadness I’ve ever seen, devoid of any selfishness or pity. What was I doing that night? “Kara tried to convince Rebecca otherwise, of course. She said she made her cd’s and wrote her letters. ‘How could she have felt that it wasn’t real?’ she asked me. ‘I’d never thought I was lost until the two of us started sleeping together. Then I saw how horribly lost I’d been my entire life. And with her, I saw a way out. A way to the life I’d always wanted and had never admitted I wanted.’ She was crying then, on the couch, and I had my arms around her. ‘I know she loves me, though she’s too strong to admit it. She wants a family, I know, a real family. And her parents, her grandparents, they’d never accept us together. She had to end things. She’s so loyal to her family.’”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I was sure Rebecca loved her, too. That she would find someone else to love her. But she said, you know, she didn’t want anyone else. That she wasn’t attracted to girls, just Rebecca. That she couldn’t imagine finding what they had together with someone else.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I told her that she would heal. That she didn’t think she would, that she didn’t think the hurt would ever go away, but that it would, incredibly enough. And that when it did, in a strange way, she’d miss that pain, how intense it was. She’d miss feeling something that strong. That it would be replaced by something milder, and maybe wiser, but definitely milder. Something resembling happiness. That the world would seem sharper, but you wouldn’t feel it as deeply, if that makes sense. The world would be very clear but very shallow, but that you would accept these new parameters. That’s what I told her. That she’d eventually feel deep gratitude for things in a way she hadn’t before, because that’s what you feel when you lose the most important thing in the world and then, to your own disbelief, you recover.”

~

We eat dinner in the inn’s cavernous dining room. The light is dark and damp, sepulchral even. Our voices become lost and diffracted amongst the dozens of empty tables. It’s like talking off the edge of a cliff. The room smells deliciously of tree sap.

Jasper made fresh perch with butter and onions. He also made a few ears of corn.

“The last of the season,” he says ruefully. The end of the corn harvest is serious, doleful business in these parts. He opens a bottle of cherry wine and pours each of us a glass. We eat mostly in silence, talking only in halting stanzas about this past summer, or sharing anodyne memories about my years here. We listen to the wind as it howls off the lake like a specter of winter. The food is good. The perch is perfect, sweet and flaky. I’m sure Jasper has made it hundreds or thousands of times. The wine is a bit too sweet and lacks subtlety but it goes down easily. At the end of the meal Jasper brings out three bowls of raspberry sherbet and pours us more wine. As we’re finishing, Jasper leans forward onto his elbows. His napkin is tucked into the front of his shirt.

“Be honest with me,” he says. “When Frederic passed, how was it for you and Nat? Be honest with me, Paul.”

“It was hard, of course. Of course we missed him,” I say benignly. I wait, but Jasper says nothing. His silence baits me. “There was some relief, too. On my side, at least. I was relieved, yes. I was.”

“He put a lot of pressure on you two. He wasn’t good at communicating. He told me, once, ‘It’s very hard for me to talk to the boys. I try. And I know that it’s easier for me to talk to them than it was for my father to talk to me. That’s the good kind of progress, I think. I hope it will be easier for them with their sons.’” He sips his wine and pours the last of the bottle into my glass and Ramona’s glass. I think about our son, and wonder what he‘s doing right now, wonder if he is happy, or if he is afraid, or if he is dying to go out and find some pills, and I wish I had the courage to call him up and ask him but I don‘t.

“My dad was an Army man,” Jasper says. “You know that, of course. I was sixteen when he died. I remember feeling that, finally, my own life could begin. I spent a few years on the boats, but I saw the direction all that was going. Not a good direction, mind you. The direction of fewer boats and longer hours and less pay. And people fighting for those few jobs, even though they were worse jobs. Frederic and I connected over our time on the Lakers. We connected over getting out at just the right time, too. When I found a chance to thrown down here I did, and I haven’t moved since. I don‘t think Frederic would have left, either. I think we would still be here together, riding out the winters.”

“But he did leave,” I say.

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

I finish my wine. “How was Nat’s lecture this year?” I ask.

“It was good. He talked about modern sacred spaces. Malls, stadiums, the suburban home. I think it was probably a little bit over the heads of some of the folks. He’s more liberal than Frederic was, and less rigorous. Which, honestly, isn’t a bad thing. He’s not a natural though. The effort shows. Very few are naturals, of course.”

He takes his napkin out of his shirt and purposefully wipes his face with it and then folds it neatly and places it on his thoroughly cleaned plate.

“Be honest with me,” I ask. “Doesn’t it get lonely here? Haven’t you been lonely here all these years without anyone? Without Dad or without a wife?”

He thinks about this for a while and studies Ramona. Her face, in this melancholy light, is fissured and multifaceted, like a gemstone that was cut many years ago and has begun to erode. “There’s always work to keep me busy,” he finally says. “There’s always work to be done in my relationship with God.” He smiles. “There was a bar. The Apple Orchard, up in Frankfort. They bulldozed it probably a decade ago and built an Applebee’s. But every Wednesday Frederic and I went dancing there. There were women that we knew. Widows and single mothers. And we danced with them. I’ve never told anyone that. Not even Nathaniel.”

“No shit.”

“No shit,” he says admonishingly.

“How was he?” I ask.

“Frederic was a very good dancer. He had real flow to his movements. Especially if the band was good. If the band was good you could see him feed off the energy. The women loved dancing with him. They were crestfallen when he died.”

“Well, they didn’t know him all that well.”

He raises his eye brows but then says nothing. For a time we sit in silence. Ramona takes my hand under the table. Her hand is warm and dry and heavily calloused.

“So you’re grandparents now,” Jasper says.

“We are.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” Ramona says.

“How old is he now?”

“Almost two. Twenty months.”

“Mm. Amazing.” He shakes his head. “Nat has shown me the pictures you’ve sent him. He’s gorgeous. He has your eyes,” he says to Ramona, and she averts her eyes, smiling to herself. “It must be strange.”

“Strange but mostly wonderful. I’d forgotten about kids at that age. How happy they are, how wondrous everything is. I can talk to him now and he actually understands most of what I say.”

The room shudders and creaks with the wind.

“Well,” Jasper says. “I’m sure you’re tired. And you’ve got a long day tomorrow. You’re driving to Chicago?”

“Yes.”

“For a wedding?”

“Yes.”

“Whose, if I can ask?”

“My brother’s widow’s,” Ramona says politely, bemusedly.

Jasper nods and smiles. Slowly he stands and gathers his dishes. We help him clear the table and then we do dishes in the kitchen’s large, industrial sized sink. While Ramona and I dry the dishes and put them away Jasper wipes down the table and closes up the dining room. I watch him from the doorway. With its pillars of glazed pine and its cherry wood tables, the vast room seems carved from the belly of a great tree. It reminds me of a great Viking hall awaiting the return of its village, waiting and waiting, slowly being consumed by entropy. The wind sounds like a gale outside, hammering the shudders, whistling in the trees. We finish in the kitchen and walk through the dining room into the inn and its slumbering shadows. The moon light meandering through the windows is the only light. It’s the austere color of bone, and it creates lapidary, wimpling tapestries on the floor. The building moans as if it is full of ghosts, loquacious ghosts laughing and making love and pitying those of us not yet dead.

We step outside into the wind and the cold. The night has turned hard and mostly clear. Most of the clouds have been blown off by the prodigious wind. Those that remain are thin and gauzy. They slide like translucent fish, fleet and fast, across a faint, waning moon.

~

“I can’t sleep,” Ramona says.

“Me either.”

“It’s so quiet.”

“The wind is going crazy.”

“Yes, but it almost accentuates how silent everything else is, if that makes sense.”

“Sure, yeah, kind of.”

“Isn’t there somewhere we can go?”

“Like a bar? We could see if the Little Fish is open.”

“No, not there. I’m tired of these forgotten towns. They’re making me antsy. I’m talking about a real place.”

So we go in search of civilization. We debate going north, to Frankfort, or south, to Manistee. As a general rule, in this part of Michigan, if you’re in search of civilization or something resembling it, south is the safest bet. So we head south on Highway 22. We pass the decrepit Little Fish, its windows blinking like a lost ship. A few oxidized cars are in the parking lot. Soon we’re climbing the south bluff away from town, and then we’re back into dense forest. For at least fifteen minutes we drive without seeing another car on the road. While I’m driving Ramona rolls a joint. We smoke with the windows down. The acute air bites into us. It smells of cedar, of organic matter being burned. She puts on an old, baggy sweatshirt. She curls into her seat and lets her head loll, canine-like, out the open window while I finish the joint.

“Pull over,” she says.

I stop and we get out to admire the stars. I forget how clear they can be. The sky is so sharp that it’s actually milky. The stars vibrate and pulse. Ramona’s head is back and her eyes are narrowed in concentration. Her jaw is agape. “I’ve never seen such stars,” she says.

We get back into the car and continue driving south. We meet a slow, but insistent stream of traffic now. A few new developments have been sliced from the woods, places with names like Whispering Pines and Lake View Lagoon and Rambling Creek Estates. We’re nearing Manistee. We pass a few fast food places. Further down the road, not a quarter of a mile apart, are a casino and a Wal-Mart.

Both boxes blaze brightly.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask.

“Huh?”

“The only places open are the casino or the Wal-Mart.”

“Let’s do both.”

“Sure. Let’s.”

We stop at the casino first. It’s a flat roofed, ranch style building. Inside industrial lights hum opprobriously. A thousand slot machines skirr and whirr, their voices merging into an insufferable cacophony. The casino floor is packed, overflowing, populated by an entranced horde that slips and slides from machine to machine lugging oversized beer steins jingle-jangling with quarters. Waitresses dressed as Indian papooses serve drinks in plastic cups. Here they’ve come, hoping to get lucky, chasing some oppressive dream. Old women stare glassy-eyed at the blinking lights of movie-themed slots. Old men tug and pull oversized levers. The carpet is an impenetrable labyrinth of stains and designs, flutes and pirouettes of color, elaborate ouroborus leading nowhere but further into the heart of the madness, the noise, the chintz of commerce. I’ve lost Ramona somewhere. A papoose stops me, sensing maybe I’m lost, sensing maybe a soul in need, but no, she just wants to take my drink order.

“I’d like a whiskey and coke.”

“Ok.”

“But how are you doing to find me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean how are you going to find me in this place. I don’t know where I’m going to be.”

She shrugs. Her charcoal hair is pulled tight into two puerile pigtails and the skin around her brown eyes glitters with imitation stardust. “I’ll find you.”

I stumble into the smoking section and manage to bum a cigarette from a slack-eyed woman whose face is etched and lacerated by the irrevocable lines of nicotine and alcohol. Her eyes have the quality of used up coal. I can’t be sure that she isn’t some sort of demon except that she keeps feeding me cigarettes when I ask and I watch her press a button, again and again, and some ancient seeming figures, glyphs and hieroglyphs and sphinxes and pharos, throttle past in an indecipherable stew before settling into indecipherable patterns that cause my smoking partner to either chomp down on her cigarette or cackle with paroxysms of greed or joy or fury - which I can’t be sure.

“Hey, what are you?” she asks. “Some kind of creep? You just going to stare or what?”

“Who? Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Oh, no. I’m not a creep.”

“You sure?”

“Pretty sure. Maybe. I don’t know.”

I think about jacking off on my wife’s ass. Where does a thing like that come from? Where does it hide? What is its origin? I can’t imagine my father jacking off on my mother’s ass. But I suppose my desire can’t have germinated from thin air. I remember, now, showering with my mother when I was very little, running my fingers through the mottle of her pubic hair. Say, where is Ramona? I’ve got an erection on the way.

The papoose finds me and hands me my whiskey and coke. I’m thirsty so I chug it while she waits for a tip. She’s scowling at me, either because I’m rapaciously spilling my drink down my chin or possibly because I’ve got a bulbous hard-on sticking pretty noticeably against the thin fabric of my khakis. I want to explain to her that the erection is from my wife, and not her, but then I don’t want to offend her, either; she’s lovely, in a detached way. She has the kind of hopeless, middle-distance stare that I suspect most casino waitresses and strippers and bartenders develop. The sterilized smile of an incurable cynic. I could see coming to this place night after night, bantering with her while she brings me drinks, maybe suggesting we go for breakfast one morning when her shift ends. She probably has a few kids at home; a boy and a girl, is my guess. I could see quietly making love to her in the backseat of a car parked in the driveway outside her modest home. Then staying friends with her when we run out of things to talk about and still coming by once in a while to play the slots, pick up a few beers, smile nostalgically, and wonder when my life will start making sense.

“I’ll have another.” I tip her five dollars.

“Do you like rum?”

“Sure.”

She hands me somebody else’s rum and coke.

“My order still stands,” I say, handing her another five.

I find a middle aged man wearing a cut-off t-shirt playing electronic bingo. He’s got a few faded tattoos, nothing too glaring or embarrassing.

“Hey, do you know if they still have bingo Thursday nights down at the VFW?” I ask. He scowls at my tersely, as if I were interrupting some serious onanism, or as if I were speaking Chinese. Or as if I were speaking Chinese while walking in on him rubbing one out to some really bizarre porn, like bestiality or BDSM. What did men with those fetishes do before the internet? Did they just gently suggest to their wives that they incorporate the family dog? I’m grateful that I just like hairy cunts and cellulite and, occasionally, fucking in public. These are mostly normal things, I think.

“What?” he asks.

“Bingo. Do they still play it at the VFW on Thursdays?”

He’s got a lean face with big, malicious eyes.

“Dunno.”

“Hm. Well I remember going down there when I was a kid with my Dad. They played with pennies back then.”

“From around here?”

“Me? Oh, not anymore. I used to be.”

“Don’t look from around here, know what I mean?” he smiles perversely. I remember some of my father’s friends from Peshtigo. They were men who worked in the mills or out on the boats; that’s how he knew them, from when he worked on the Lakers. They’d come over with a case of beer and shake their heads and laugh at Dad trying to be a preacher. Sometimes I’d hear them laughing hoarsely from my bedroom.

“What kinda work you do?” he asks.

“Me? Oh, I’m a professor.”

Again he smiles. “Coulda guessed.”

“Really?”

“Your glasses.”

“What about you? What kind of work do you do?”

“Don’t, currently. None. Nada. Zilch.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“I worked at a golf course, cutting grass, for a summer. But they brought in some Guatemalans. Had us train them, then they took our jobs. Ain’t their fault. The Guatemalans. Nice enough guys. Just looking for work, like you or me. Well, like me. Don’t blame them a bit.”

“That’s good.”

“Now I ain’t saying I’ve been perfect. I got some friends who are really into PCP, meth, that kind of thing. I try to steer clear of it, much as possible. I got kids, right?”

“How many?”

“Three. Don’t see ‘em enough. They’re down in Lansing. I had a decent gig down there for a while before Ford went shit up. Worked for a few years in a gun range my wife’s family owned, but then they got into some trouble for selling without doing proper background checks. The software for that’s expensive, you know? Had to file for bankruptcy. So I’m out of luck again. Drove trucks for a few years, which wasn’t bad, ‘cept the bosses like to run you into the ground. Tell you that if you ain’t gonna drive eighty hours a week somebody else is. And who are you to report ‘em? You need the money, right. Got pretty into caffeine pills, a bit of speed. But then one of my good buddies, best buddies really, was out on the road after somethin’ like four days straight going sixteen, eighteen hours, and he wiped out pretty badly down in Indiana, killed himself and a sixteen year old gal. So the company went under.”

“Jesus.”

“You got kids?”

“Yeah, two.”

“That’s nice. Good kids?”

“Sure, mostly. A little lost. But I suppose that happens to kids these days.”

“Does it ever!”

“My boy just had a kid, actually. A son. Although it was almost two years ago now.”

“Time goes fast when they’re young.”

“It does.”

“It ever seem to you like time’s speeding up?”

“What do you mean?”

“I dunno. Just a crazy thought I had. That maybe time just keeps goin’ faster and faster. That when you’re a kid the years really seemed like years. Now they seem like months, or even less. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“So your son’s a good kid?”

“He is. I’m proud of him.”

He smiles and I know that he has sons, too. There’s an honesty to a father’s smile when he’s thinking about his sons, an honesty that doesn’t come from anything else.

“My boy’s just learning how to drive,” he says. “So I’ve been helpin’ him fix up this Camaro. Put in a brand new V-8. Added a second exhaust line so that that baby really moves. Spent pretty much every afternoon workin’ on it last time I went down to visit.”

“That’s nice. I don’t know anything about cars. I wish I did.”

And suddenly the conversation dies. It’s like we’ve plunged into some abyss and are both, in our last tumbling moments, revealed. I will never see this man again and I’ll probably never think of him again. Without even saying good bye I back away and try to dissipate into the clang of the slot machines. I move blindly, disoriented, feeling like every object is either wheeling away from me or closing around me. It’s like the claustrophobia of the desert. So much open space that you feel trapped. Who am I to judge these people? Why not waste your time stuffing quarters into a slot and pulling a lever? A different papoose is standing over by a row of payphones. Her legs are mapped with purple varicose veins. She’s making out with a bald man whose scalp has been tattooed with an American flag. I look down at the carpet and think, for no reason at all, that it’s like a bloody sea full of jellyfish.

I go outside to reorient myself. I’m gasping for air. The night is cold enough to sting my throat. I look at my cell phone. It’s after one in the morning. I try calling Ramona once, then again. She doesn’t answer. “Hey, where are you? Did you leave? I’m outside. I got lost in there. That place is a hellhole. Let’s get out of here.” I hang up and feel a bottomless loneliness encroaching. I think: the fire was so intense it was like a false dawn. I call the only person that I know will be awake at this hour.

“Hello?” my daughter says. “Dad?”

“Hi!” I say, trying to sound cheerful but sounding flat and etiolated. “Kara, hey. I’m glad you’re up.”

“Yeah…what’s up?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing. I’m just waiting for your mom outside a casino. We’re in Michigan. God, it’s so beautiful here, Kara. Not the casino, of course, but everything else. I’m looking up at the stars right now and they’re incredible. I really think you’d love it out here. One of these years we’ll have to come out here, just me and you, the way we used to take skiing trips when you were younger.”

“Are you drunk, Dad?”

“No. Well, mostly not. I’ve had a few drinks. But I’m not drunk, per se.”

“Mmhm.”

“I’m a little drunk. Moderately drunk. Tipsy.”

She laughs.

“I’m sorry about Becca,” I blurt out. It’s met with silence. “I’m sorry. Mom told me today. Don’t be pissed at her for telling me. I asked, I pushed her. It’s my fault, really. I wanted to know about what’s been going on with you. I’m sorry for not asking myself. I know that I’ve been too wrapped up in my own things. It’s just, I’ve been a parent such a long time now. I’m worn out a bit. I’m ready for another chapter. But that doesn’t mean I need to be absent, or can’t talk to you more. It’s my fault.”

“It’s ok, dad,” she says calmly. My daughter. Incredible.

“Well, I’m still sorry. I am. You may not think so, but I remember what it’s like to go through break ups, too. They suck.”

I can practically hear her smiling. There is a noise bleating softly in the background, something scratchy and distorted. She’s probably listening to one of her vinyl’s.

“You know, Dad, what I miss most are the nothing afternoons we spent together. She’d come home from work at the greenhouse. I’d be waiting on her front porch and we’d just sit in her bedroom listening to records. Lounging around, sometimes talking but not needing to. It was like we’d known one another for a thousand years and had already said everything two people could say to each other. All we had to do was sit in the sun and listen to music. That was just so perfect. I miss that. But I’m doing better, I swear. Mom’s been really helpful. I’ll be ok.”

“I know you will.”

Just then Ramona calls me from her phone.

“Hey, sweetie, I’m really sorry. Your mom is calling. I’ve kinda lost her. I need to take this.”

“That’s ok, Dad.”

“Ok. I love you. I miss you.”

“You, too.”

I answer my wife’s call.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she says. “Where are you?”

“Where are you?”

“I’m playing black jack.”

“You play black jack?”

“Sometimes, sure. I’m winning. Come find me” And then she hangs up. I stand for a while longer and look at the stars. The nothing afternoons. I know the kind. The kind where the light is so pure that you can see dust motes rising from the floor and sparkling in the sun. I remember the mornings when David would stay home sick from school. We would eat Spaghetti-O’s and I would read C.S. Lewis to him and we would play tabletop football. And the dust motes would linger in the splendid sun.

I wade back into the maelstrom of the casino. Now I’m thinking about David again. I remember three years ago when he called me at two in the morning.

“Dad, I need help.”

“Where are you? Do you know what time it is? Some of us, those of us with responsibilities, have to be up in three hours for work?”

“Dad, please. Please.”

“Where are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the fuck do you mean you don’t know? Where the fuck are you?”

He’d been in rehab once already: for pills, and for heroin. It had started innocuously enough. A few dollars would go missing from Ramona’s purse, enough that she’d think maybe she was hallucinating the whole thing. Or a check would go missing from my check book and I’d think Ramona must have taken it to pay the water bill.

“I don’t know, Dad. I’m in Camden but I don’t know where.”

“Find a street sign,” I said. I was wide awake by then. “Can you do that, David, or is that too hard?”

Pretty soon a few dollars turned into hundreds of dollars. Jewelry began to vanish; old electronics and video games, too. David would disappear for days at a time. He was twenty; what could we do? Ramona was traveling a lot, and I was teaching a full course load.

At the sports book old men smoke cigars and watch horse races on small televisions screens. The races are in Japan and Honk Kong, on grass tracks surrounded by skyscrapers. The old men smoke and drink and stare intently at the screens as if their livelihoods depend on it.

I drove down I-95 into Philadelphia, and then I took the Ben Franklin across the jet black Delaware into Camden. The whole time I was ranting into the empty car, practicing the speech I was going to deliver to my son, the speech that was long overdue. I was going to lay into David like I hadn’t before, the way my father would almost certainly have laid into me. This is absolute fucking bullshit. This is over. You cannot treat the people that love you most like this. You can’t lie to us, you can’t steal from us. That’s not how you treat the people that love you most. You are wasting your life, David. You are standing on the threshold of an absolutely squandered life. I’m embarrassed by you. I’m ashamed to think about you. I drove into the ruined heart of Camden. I passed the boarded up warehouses. Behind some of the boards lights flickered, the flames of the homeless and the destitute. Junkies lingering in their endless dreams. You keep waiting for other people to fix your mess, but we can’t do it for you. At some point it’s on your shoulders. I drove down blocks of row homes that had been gutted by fires, homes that spilled their entrails out onto the street, homes that gaped like festering wounds. And, honestly, I don’t know if you have it in you. But I can’t worry about this anymore. I drove down blocks where there were only two or three homes still standing. The empty lots were overgrown with tall grasses, were littered with trash. I can’t go to bed expecting these phone calls. I can’t put my life on hold to fix yours, because that’s not my job anymore. It’s your life, and it’s time for you to own it.

I find the black jack tables. Fallow eyed men and women lean forward onto anxious elbows. My wife is among them. She stares directly in front of her like a hunter waiting for her one shot. She has a high stack of chips in front of her, and she twirls two of them between her fingers. The dealer is an indistinct middle aged man who looks like he’s slowly dissolving.

I found my son. His car, our car that he’d taken without a word, was parked on the corner of two wasted, forlorn streets. I parked behind him and could see him check his rearview mirror. I rehearsed my speech one last time, piquing my indignation. It was nearly three-thirty on a Tuesday morning. I walked quickly to his car and knocked on the window, which he rolled down. And then David looked at me. There was a terror in his eyes, my father’s eyes, that I’d never seen before. His cheeks were blanched and his eyes shone like embers of sapphire.

“Dad,” he said softly. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

My anger washed away. I looked at my son, my son who had been into these scorched homes, who had slept in them, who had shot up in them, who had probably fucked in them, who had probably thought he might die in them. He looked at me with a liminal terror. It was something I couldn’t place. It was like he’d fallen into a chasm and broken every bone in his body and spent weeks in complete darkness at the bottom and them, improbably, he had crawled out, only to find more darkness at the surface.

“It’s ok,” I said. “It’s going to be ok.”

I will never forget his eyes in that moment. There are some things in this world that not a soul can forget witnessing.

Ramona sees me. She smiles, and waves. I go over to her, bend down, and kiss her behind the ear.

　

　

New York

The planes bank high and fast out over the lake, bound for Midway, and as their wings turn just so and glint in the early evening sun, if just for a second, they resemble meteors, falling.

“When is the dinner?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“Ok.”

“Where did you put my tie?”

“I folded it and put it in your suit jacket.”

~

“I’m surprised she invited us.”

“Claire?”

“Mm.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t think she ever felt that welcomed by our family. You know how my parents are.”

“Well, neither of you married somebody Jewish.”

“Claire converted, though. And you didn’t have any qualms about raising the kids Jewish. That‘s all they were worried about.”

“Did she invite your parents?”

“Hm?”

“Your parents. Did she invite them?”

“Oh. Yes, she did. They thought about coming for a while. But they decided it would be better if they didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. You know how they are. They didn’t want to feel like they were imposing. They didn’t want to feel like they’d been invited out of sympathy. They didn’t want to be this sad reminder of Isaac.”

“What are you looking at out there?”

“Just the lake. The planes coming in off the lake on their way to Midway.”

~

“How do you think Isaac would feel about everything that’s happened?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean everything. The wars, civil liberties, immigration. What’s happened to the world.”

“He’d probably hate it, just like the rest of us. It’d probably make him sick. He was a liberal guy. Some of the best conversations I had with him were about politics. He was thoughtful.”

“He was naïve, too, though. And besides. I don’t hate all of it.”

“What?”

“The wars, the civil liberties. I don’t hate all of it. I’ll let someone listen to my phone calls if it means I’ll be safe. And I was happy when they killed bin Laden. I cried. You were out of town. But I cried.”

“Well that’s different. I thought the whole thing was disgusting. People chanting at a baseball game. People taking to the streets, cheering, waving flags. Making a spectacle out of death.”

“He was evil.”

“He was a product of his environment. He was passionate. If you’d have asked him, we’re the evil ones, sitting here in this hotel, watching our TV that’s made in sweat shops, driving around in our car that’s made in sweat shops, burning our gas, running our AC, consuming and using.”

“He killed innocent people. We haven’t.”

“We as in you and I, or we as in this country.”

“Me and you. This country, sure. Yes, we have, haven’t we? But it was in retaliation. We were like a wounded animal fighting for survival.”

“Survival.”

“I’m not stupid, Paul. Don’t use that tone.”

~

“You know, after everything happened, I would still call his phone to hear his voice mail. Have I ever told you that?”

“No.”

“Well, I would. And I’d always be so terrified while I dialed that his line would have been disconnected.”

“When was it disconnected?”

“I don’t know. I finally stopped calling.”

“Why?”

“I guess life got busy again. David was going off to school. Things just wouldn’t stop moving. Then one day I realized I hadn’t called in a while. And I just felt so guilty, so guilty that I’d thrown myself back into life. I was too guilty too call. And then I was just too afraid to, because I was so sure it would have been disconnected.”

~

“I’m sorry. I know you don’t know what to say.”

“I try. It’s not easy.”

“Why is it so difficult for us to talk together sometimes? There’s so much I want to say, and I have no one to say it to.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Paul. It’s tough to put me on the spot like that. It’s not general things. Half the time it’s not even things that I think there would be words for. It’s thoughts I’ll have about death, or the kids, or loneliness. Sometimes this loneliness comes over me and it feels like I’d explode just to be somewhere else. It’s an energy that I can’t seem to get rid of, if that makes sense. And it’s made worse because you’ll be right there, and you’ll be lost in your own world, and I’m trapped in mine. I don’t know. We don’t talk like we used to. For a long time, whenever I had these things to say, or to try to say, I would call Isaac. He never looked at me like I was crazy.”

“I don’t look at you like you’re crazy.”

“No, but that’s because I don’t tell you the crazy things.”

“Well you should. I want you to.”

~

“Why is it so difficult to say anything meaningful? Shouldn’t that be the most important thing to all of us?”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“I mean this wedding. People are going to come up to me and tell me what a great guy my brother was. Tell me how they miss him and how he’s a hero. Which he’s not. But they’ll say it. And I’ll nod and smile and thank them. Why?”

“Social decorum. It’s not your night. You’re a guest.”

“I’m a symbol. That’s how they’ll treat me, and it’s how I’ll respond.”

“Then don’t. Be honest.”

“I can’t be. You know that.”

“Of course. What would you want to say, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I’d like them to tell me the truth. ‘I thought your brother was a pussy and I’m glad Claire moved on.’ I’d appreciate that. Or maybe someone could tell me that one night they were at a party with Isaac and he was very funny, and very charming, and I don’t know, there was just an energy between us, something inexplicable and charged. Something rare. Claire was talking to her friends, so Isaac danced with me in a corner and he put his hand on the small of my back, and I straightened his tie, and we barely talked, but during those few songs I felt something I couldn’t put into words. An acknowledgement that we could have had a life together if maybe things had turned just a little differently. That we’ll think about that dance for a few weeks and then we’ll probably never think about it again and then we’ll die. Except then the towers fell down on top of Isaac and now I have dreams about that night. I’d like to hear that.”

“That’s a fantasy.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve danced with men like that.”

“I’m not doubting that.”

“More than once. More than twice. Men who are now dead. Men I think I could have had a fine life with.”

~

“You don’t have women like that?”

“Of course I do.”

~

“But no one will tell me that. No one would want to share that with me. They’re too respectful. They’ll think I’d be offended to find out that Isaac had once had an affair of the eyes. I’d be overjoyed to find that out. I hope he had many affairs. I hope there are a hundred women in this city and in New York that find themselves taking a piss and remembering something about Isaac, something so brief and startling that it takes their breath away. And you won’t tell me about your women.”

“No. I won’t.”

“Why?”

“Because I like having them to myself. Besides. I couldn’t do them justice. It would sound trite.”

“Maybe because it is trite. Maybe we make our own lives out to be not trite when they’re painfully, awfully trite. And that’s the power in them.”

“Can you help me with my tie, please? I can’t seem to get it right. I hate ties.”

“We kissed once, you know.”

“Who?”

“Me and Isaac.”

“When you were kids? Those things happen all the time. Kids experiment. I remember, me and my friends would build these forts in our basements and then we’d get naked inside them…”

“We weren’t kids. I was 17. He was home from college. I hadn’t seen him in a long time because he went to school so far away, and he was going through a period of lashing out against our parents. He only came home because his girlfriend’s parents finally kicked him out of their house. He came home and we went to a bar, and he got me drunk. Then we went home and we were sitting in our living room. I remember that I was on the couch, with my head hanging off the edge of it. Lolling off the edge of it, I guess. And he’d made us more drinks. He came over and knelt beside me and kissed me for a long time.”

“With tongue?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever do anything more?”

“No.”

“Would you tell me if you had?”

“Probably not.”

~

“Do you know what last night reminded me of?”

“What?”

“It reminded me of this little town near where Isaac went to school in Virginia. I went to visit him once.”

“Before or after you kissed?”

“I can’t remember, to be honest. The chronology of things gets so fuzzy in my memory. I can’t even discern between things that happened three or five years ago, sometimes. I get too lost. That suit looks lovely on you, by the way. It fits really well. Have I ever told you how handsome you are in a suit?”

“Thank you.”

“Not that I need to. You know anyway.”

“I still like to hear it.”

“Anyway. I visited Isaac, maybe before we kissed, maybe after. And we got very drunk our first night there. Isaac always drank a lot, too much. We were very hung over the next day but we’d vowed to go hiking. So we drove out to Skyline drive, in the Shenandoah, and we found this trail we’d read about that traced a creek and overlooked a few waterfalls. It was beautiful, I’m sure. I don’t remember, of course. You know how it is with memory. You record a moment as ‘beautiful’ and then the specifics fade except for the fact that it was beautiful. There were trees and water and I remember once that we were walking in the middle of a creek like you and I were yesterday.”

“Do you want some coffee?”

“No, I’d have to pee every five minutes if I drink coffee this late.”

“Ok.”

“What really reminded me of last night, though, is that after we got back to our car from the hike we drove out of the mountains and into a small Virginia town. It was very poor and I felt nostalgic for something I couldn’t place. Some romantic idea, probably, of the small town life that I felt I’d always wanted even though I didn’t know anything about it. I remember seeing the lights of the town as we were coming out of the mountains at dusk, surrounded by the black of the Shenandoah, and I thought it was like a small universe. We stopped at this greasy little burger joint, some place old and established and local. And we ate burgers and fries and drank some beer and were very, very tired. I don’t know why that sticks with me. But I thought about it last night because it occurred to me that that burger joint probably isn’t there anymore. That that town is probably unrecognizable. And that makes me sad, but then, who I am to say if it’s better for that town, or if it’s better for the world. Because I don’t know, Paul. I don’t know anything.”

“Are you sure you want to go?”

“Yes. Yes. I’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

“I always thought he was in love with you.”

“Who?”

“Isaac.”

“Oh. Sure, maybe. What does it matter anymore?”

~

“Some mornings I wake up and there doesn’t seem to be any coherence or order to the world. It’s like everything that holds us together is so blatantly false. How does life make sense except in memory, Paul? And what is memory if we’re dead? And then I think that nothing matters because only memory matters and then it’s obliterated. And I think that my job is so stupid, that our marriage is so stupid, that I should just go out and fuck whomever I want and that I should let you do the same. Sometimes I‘ll be in the office and this urge comes over me, so strongly, like my body is containing something and it has to get out, like if it doesn‘t get out I‘m going to explode. The urge to scream. I wonder what would happen if I actually did scream, if people would pretend I didn‘t, or if they‘d call me in for a meeting, or if everyone would look at me like a crazy person. Or maybe everyone would just assume they‘d imagined it.”

“…”

“Don’t you have anything to say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sometimes I look at you and wonder what secrets you’ve been hiding from me all these years, and I think about my own secrets. I think we don’t know each other honestly in any way. I’m sorry, this is all so childish. I should get over it, but why do we do this to ourselves?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean everything. I look at everyone I know and they’re so wounded and lonely. And they just keep moving, moving through the same patterns and systems. We’re grandparents, you know. How did that happen?”

“I thought about David last night. I thought about finding David last night. I thought about that night when he called us at two in the morning and I drove down to Camden and found him.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“I think he’s ok.”

“So do I. I hope he is. I don’t want to stop worrying and thinking he’s out of the woods. I’m worried if I do that it’ll jinx the whole thing. All I want for him is what we have. Which is funny. I keep thinking that maybe he won‘t make such a mess of it.”

“I know.”

“I thought he was going to die. A part of me had resigned myself to that. He was going to die and there was nothing we could do. That was selfish. Absolving myself.”

“Have you forgiven him, Paul?”

“Yes. I have. Of course.”

“Do you remember his face the first time he held Lee?”

“I do. Yes, I remember. I’ve forgiven him. I’ve forgiven him for everything.”

"Do you think he's forgiven us?"

He comes up behind me and presses his weight against me, pressing my face into the cool glass. It could break and we could fall into the street below. He puts his hands on my ribcage and kisses my neck. The room’s air-conditioning trundles to life. I smell Freon, I smell his deodorant and remember a neighborhood Christmas party from long ago when we were just married and we‘d gotten too drunk and made love in the bathroom, I smell coffee on his breath.

Dusk shoots through Chicago and the skyline smolders like pale, blue ice.