© 2007

The Book of Other People is about character. The instruction was simple: make somebody up. Each story was to be named after its character: ‘Donal Webster’ by Colm Tóibín, ‘Cindy Stubenstock’ by A. M. Homes, ‘Frank’ by A. L. Kennedy, and so on. When the commission was sent out, there were no rules about gender, race or species. This freedom resulted in ‘The Monster’ by Toby Litt and ‘Puppy’ by George Saunders. Late in the making of this book I tried to make a case for first and last names, for reasons of uniformity. The idea was not popular. Reproduced here is Edwidge Danticat’s protest, convincing in its simplicity: ‘I think the variety of names is good. It makes it less monotonous-looking. Since people are named different things by different people.’ Surnames have not been forced upon Danticat’s ‘Lélé’ or Adam Thirlwell’s ‘Nigora’ or on any others who did not want them. In one case, the omitted last name is the deliberate secret upon which the story hinges. In another – to use a distinction of Simone Weil’s – the character is a sacred human being and not a ‘person’ or ‘personality’, and his particular name is not important.

There are twenty-three stories in this volume, too many to mention individually. Each is its own thing entirely. The book has no particular thesis or argument to convey about fictional character. Nor is straight ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism’ – if such things exist – the aim. The hope was that the finished book might be a lively demonstration of the fact that there are as many ways to create ‘character’ (or deny the possibility of ‘character’) as there are writers. It is striking to see how one simple idea plays out in individual minds, the ‘character’ of the prose itself being as differentiated as the ‘other people’ with which these stories are nominally populated. As editor, I have tried to retain the individuality of each piece by leaving them, by and large, little changed.

There is, however, an element of their character that has been removed: the fonts. Publishers standardize fonts to suit the style of the house, but when writers deliver their stories by e-mail, each font tells its own story. There are quite a few writers in this volume who use variations on the nostalgic American Typewriter font (and they are all American), as if the ink were really wet and the press still hot. We have two users of the elegant, melancholic Didot font (both British), and a writer who centres the text in one long, thin strip down the page, like a newspaper column (and uses Georgia, a font that has an academic flavour). Some writers size their text in a gigantic 18. Others are more at home in a tiny 10. There are many strange, precise and seemingly intimate tics that disappear upon publication: paragraphs separated by pictorial symbols, titles designed just so, outsized speech marks, centred dialogue, un-centred paragraphs, no paragraphs at all. It seems a shame to lose these idiosyncratic layouts and their subtle effects. Anyway: I hope what remains will satisfy.

Before leaving you to the stories themselves, I’d like to speak briefly of a technical matter, one that is usually considered to be in bad taste if you are speaking of the ‘Art of Fiction’: money. This book is a ‘charity anthology’, which means the editor must ask writers to work for free, knowing full well that a ‘story’ is like a gas that expands into whatever available space one has. When you begin a story it’s impossible to say how much time will pass before you’re able to finish it. It might take two hours of your time, or a few days, or four months, or more (this is particularly true for graphic novelists). So it was with this project. I want to thank all the writers for putting time aside – sometimes a great deal of time – to do something for nothing. Traditionally, writers denounce the very idea of writing for no remuneration (‘I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books,’ George Eliot once said, ‘except money to save me from the temptation of writing only for money’), but maybe there is also an occasional advantage in writing once again as you wrote in the very beginning, when it was still simply writing and not also a strange breed of employment. It is liberating to write a piece that has no connection to anything else you write, that needn’t be squished into a novel, or styled to fit the taste of a certain magazine, or designed in such a way as to please the kind of people who pay your rent. In The Book of Other People we find writers not only trying on different skins but also unlikely styles and variant attitudes, wandering into landscapes one would not have placed them in previously. I recommend them to you with the proviso that their order is simply alphabetical (by character). Each reader should line them up as they like.

The beneficiary of this book is 826 New York, [1] a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students aged six to eighteen with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. So The Book of Other People represents real people making fictional people work for real people – a rare example of fictional people pulling their own weight for once.

‘Hello? Judith Castle?’

‘This is she.’

‘My name’s Leo Dunbar. I’m Oliver’s – ’

‘Oliver’s brother! Oh, I’ve heard bucketloads about you, Leo!’

‘Uh… likewise, Judith. Look, I’m – ’

‘All rapturous, I trust?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What Olly’s told you. About little old moi. All rapturous, I trust?’

‘Look, Judith, I have… some, well, some rather dreadful tidings.’

‘Oh, I know! And let me tell you, I’m spitting kittens about it.’

‘You… know?’

‘It’s all over the news, of course.’

‘What?’

‘A national rail strike is national news, Leo! The very weekend I’m due to come down to Lyme Regis and consummate my relationship with Olly, those bloody train drivers go on strike! It’ll be back to the seventies, spiralling inflation, Saturday Night Fever and uppity Arabs all over again, mark my words. These things go in cycles. Still, no union bully is going to stand between your brother and me. Now I do drive, but motorways bring on my migraine, as Olly has doubtless explained. Are you driving up to fetch me, or is he?’

‘Judith, my news was a little different.’

‘Spit it out, then.’

‘Oliver’s… dead, actually, Judith… Judith? Are you there?’

‘But our suite is already booked. A de luxe double. The girl at, at, at the Hotel Excalibur took my credit card number. It’s all confirmed. I told Oliver yesterday. Olly wasn’t dead then. He wasn’t even ill.’

‘It was a hit-and-run. He went to buy a bag of frozen peas, but never made it back. The ambulanceman said he was… the ambulanceman said Oliver would have been dead before he landed.’

‘But this is… outrageous…’

‘We can’t believe it ourselves.’

‘This is… well… your brother… when’s the funeral?’

‘The funeral?’

‘Olly and I were lovers, Leo! How can I not come to the funeral?’

‘I’m… I’m afraid we’ve already had the funeral.’

‘Already?’

‘This morning. Very low-key. I tipped his ashes off the Cobb.’

‘Off the what?’

‘The Cobb. The sea-wall at Lyme Regis.’

‘Oh. The Cobb. Yes. Olly promised to take me there… for the sunset. Tomorrow night. The sunset. Oh. This is all… so… so… dead?’

‘Dead.’

‘The very least I can do is to come and help out.’

‘Judith, you’re an angel, and Olly spoke about you in the fondest possible terms, but, if I can be frank, best not to. Everything’s very… intense. You understand, don’t you? There’re relatives to be told, an ex-wife, and then the business to be wound up, solicitors… mountains of paperwork… insurance, wills, powers of attorney… a thousand-and-one things… it just never stops…’

The cinema was tiny: twelve rows deep from the blacked-out wall and the shadowed doorway down to the empty screen, which had started to stare at him, a kind of hanging absence. How did they make any money with a place this small? Even if it was packed?

Which it wasn’t. Quite the reverse. There was, in fact, no one else here. Boy at the door had to turn the lights on just for him, Frank feeling bad about this, thinking he shouldn’t insist on seeing a film all by himself and might as well go to the bigger space they kept upstairs which had a balcony and quite probably gilt mouldings and would be more in the way of a theatre and professional. In half an hour they’d be showing a comedy up there.

Or he could drive to a multiscreen effort: there’d been one in the last big town as he came round the coast – huge glass and metal tower, looked like a part of an airport – they’d have an audience, they’d have audiences to spare.

Although that was a guess and maybe the multiplex was empty, too. The bar, the stalls that sold reconstituted food, the toilets, the passageways, perhaps they were all deserted. Frank felt that he hoped so.

And he’d said nothing as he’d taken back his torn stub and walked through the doorway, hadn’t apologised or shown uncertainty. He’d only stepped inside what seemed a quite attentive dark as the younger man drifted away and left him to it.

Four seats across and then the aisle and then another four and that was it. The room wasn’t much broader than his lounge and it put Frank in mind of a bus, some kind of wide, slow vehicle, sliding off to nowhere.

He didn’t choose a seat immediately, wandering a little, liking the solitude, a whole cinema of his own – the kind of thing a child might imagine, might enjoy. He believed he would move around later if no one else appeared, run amok just a touch and leave his phone turned on so he could answer it if anybody called.

Then behind him there came a grumble of male conversation, a blurry complaint about the cold and then a burst of laughter and the noise of feet – heavy steps approaching and a softer type of scuffling that faded to silence. Frank was willing to be certain that Softer-foot was the kid from the door: lax posture and dirty Converse All Stars with uneven wear – product of a careless home, a lax environment – probably he’d padded in close again and then headed back out to the foyer – that’s how it sounded, but you never could tell.

At least one person was still there, still loitering, and for a moment this was almost unnerving. Frank being alone in a cinema, that was all right – alone in a muddle of people in a cinema, that was all right – just yourself and one other, two others, strangers at your back as the lights dim and the soundtrack starts to drown out everything – that might not be good. Silly to think that way, but he did.

For a moment.

Then he focused on being irritated, his nice privacy broken when it had extended so very far by now, right up to the black walls that melted when you studied them, disappeared down into the black carpet and left you adrift with nothing but the dull red shine of plush seats and a sense of your skin, your movement, fidgets of life.

It was fine, though. Nobody joined him. The heavy steps withdrew, closed themselves up, Frank guessed, inside the projectionist’s box, along with another, more ruminative laugh. After that a regular, clattering slap started up and he supposed this to be the sound of loose film at the end of a reel, but he couldn’t imagine why it was simply rattling round again and again.

He waited, the clatter persisting, his feet and fingers beginning to chill. One punter, apparently, didn’t merit heating. Even if he did still need it. Simply needing didn’t mean you’d get. Little vents near the ceiling breathed and whispered occasionally, but that would be the wind outside disturbing them. The night was already roaring out there and set to turn worse, rain loping over the pavements, driven thick, and a bitterness underlying it that ached your teeth, your thinking. Warmth had drained from his shins where his trousers were soaked and the coat he was huddled into was only a fraction less damp.

Frank put on his hat.

The rattle of unattached film continued. And he believed he’d heard a chuckle, then a cough. Frank concentrated on his head, which felt marginally warmer, because of the hat. Good hat: flat cap, proper tweed and not inexpensive. A man should have a hat, in his opinion. Beyond a certain age it will suit him and give him weight, become a welcome addition to his face, almost a trademark. People will look at his hat as it hangs on the back of a chair, or a coat hook, or rests on the edge of his desk, and they will involuntarily assume – Frank’s here, then. That’s his hat. Frank’s old, familiar hat. Through time, there will be a small transfer of emotion and people who are fond of him will also like his hat, will see something in it: a sense of his atmosphere, his style – and they’ll be pleased.

His own transfers were largely negative. For example, he truly detested his travelling bag. This evening it would be waiting inside his hotel room, crouching by his bed like the guard dog in an unfamiliar house. It always was by his bed, no matter where he was sleeping, neatly packed for when he’d have to leave, fill it with his time and carry it the way he’d enjoy being carried, being lifted over every obstacle.

Never thought he would use it on his own account – the bag. Never thought he’d steal his days from everyone and run away.

Not his fault. He didn’t want this. She forced his hand.

He’d been in the kitchen, preparing soup. Each Friday he’d make them both a big vegetable soup: beans, leaves, potatoes, celery, lentils, tomatoes, bits of pasta, seasonal additions, the best of whatever he found available. Every week it would be slightly different – less cabbage, some butternut squash, more tamarind paste – but the soup itself would be a steady feature. If he was at home that evening he would cook. It would be for her. It would be what he quietly thought of as an offering – here I am and this is from me and a proof of me and a sign of reliable love. She would open some wine, maybe, and watch him slice: the way he rocked the knife, setting a comfy rhythm, and then the onions and garlic would go on the heat to soften and the whole house would start to smell domestic and comforting and he would smile at her, tuck his ingredients into the pan, all stripped and diced, and add good stock.

He’d been in the kitchen, slicing, no one to watch. French knives, he had, sharp ones, well balanced, strong, a pleasure to work with, and she’d been late home so he’d started off without her. The blade had slipped. With squash you’ve got to be careful because it’s always tough and can deflect you, slide you into an accident. But he hadn’t been paying attention and so he’d got what he deserved.

He’d been in the kitchen alone. Funny how he didn’t feel the pain until he saw the wound. Proximal phalanx, left ring finger, a gash that almost woke the bone. Blood.

He’d been in the kitchen and raised his hand, had made observations, considered his blood. It ran quickly to his wrist, gathered and then fell to the quarry tiles below, left large, symmetrically rounded drops indicative of low velocity and a perpendicular descent, and haloing every drop was a tiny flare of threads, of starring. The tiles were fairly smooth, but still confused his fluid into throwing out fine liquid spines. Glass would be better, holding his finger close over glass might give him perfect little circles: the blood, as it must, forming spheres when it left him and the width of each drop on impact being equal to each sphere’s diameter. You could count on that.

He’d been in the kitchen, being with the blood. He’d allowed the drops to concentrate at his feet, to pool and spatter, patterns complicating patterns, beginning to look like an almost significant loss. Twenty drops or so for every millilitre and telling the story of someone standing, wounded, but not too severely and neither struggling nor in flight.

He’d been in the kitchen and laid his own trail to the French windows. Tiny splashes hazed a power point in the skirting board, dirtying its little plastic cover – white, the kind of thing you fit to stop a child from putting its fingers where they shouldn’t be. No reason for the cover, of course, their household didn’t need it – protection from a danger they couldn’t conjure, an impossible risk.

He’d been in the kitchen marking the reflections with his blood. Then he’d paused for a few millilitres before he needed to swipe his whole arm back and forth in mid air, blood hitting the dark glass of the doors in punctuated curves, the drops legging down before they dried, being distorted by motion, direction, gravity. He’d pumped his fist, then tried to cup his hand, catch some of his flow, then cast it off again, drive it over his ghost face and the night-time garden outside, the dim layers of wind-rocked shrubs, the scatter of drizzle, thinner and less interesting than blood. He’d thrown over-arm, under-arm, tried to get a kick out of his wrist until the hurt in his hand felt anxious, abused. Then he’d rubbed his knuckles wetly across his forehead before cradling them with his other palm, while his physiology performed as could be predicted, increased heart rate jerking out his loss, building up his body of evidence. Read the blood here and you’d see perhaps a blade that rose and fell, or the clash of victim and attacker: blows and fear and outrage, shock.

He’d been in the kitchen and she had come in. Never even heard her unlock the front door, nor any of the usual small combinations of noise as she dropped her bag and shed her coat, made her way along the corridor and then stood. He’d only noticed her when she spoke.

‘Jesus Christ, Frank. What have you done. What the fuck are you doing.’

He’d turned to her and smiled, because he was glad to see her. ‘I’m sorry, the soup’s not ready. It’ll be…’ He’d glanced at the clock and calculated, so that she’d know how to plan her time – she might want a bath before they ate. ‘It’ll be about nine. Would you like a drink?’ He could feel a distraction, a moisture somewhere near his right eyebrow.

‘What the fuck are you doing.’

He’d smiled again, which meant that he might have seemed sad for the second or two before. ‘I know, but nine isn’t too late.’ He needed to apologise and uncover how she was feeling – that would help their evening go well. Time spent paying attention to people is never wasted. ‘Unless you’re really hungry. Are you really hungry?’ Her hair had been ruffled, was perhaps damp – a pounce of bad weather between her leaving the car and reaching their doorstep had disturbed it. Skin paler than normal but with strong colour at her cheeks, as if she was cold. Her suit was the chocolaty one with this metallic-blue blouse, a combination which always struck him as odd but very lovely. ‘You look tired.’ It was the fit of the suit. So snug. It lay just where your hands would want to. ‘Would you like a bath? There’ll be time. Once it’s ready, it doesn’t spoil.’ She’d kept her figure: was possibly even slimmer, brighter than when they’d first met. ‘I got some organic celeriac, which was lucky.’ He seemed slightly breathless for some reason and heavy in his arms.

‘What if I’d brought someone back with me. What if they’d seen… you.’

‘I didn’t…’ and this was when he’d remembered that his finger was really currently giving him grief, extremely painful. He’d felt confused. ‘I didn’t think you were bringing anyone.’

At which point she’d lifted up a small pot of thyme he kept growing near the sink and had thrown it towards his head and he’d bobbed down out of the way so it had broken against a wall behind him and then hit the tiles and broken again. Peat and brownish ceramic fragments were distributed more widely than you might think and the plant lay near his feet, roots showing from a knot of earth as if it were signalling distress. Thyme was quite hardy, though, he thought it would weather the upset and come through fine in the end.

‘It’s all right. I’ll get it.’ Frank wondering whether the pan and brush were in the storm porch or the cupboard underneath the stairs. ‘It’ll be fine.’ He couldn’t think where he’d seen them last.

‘It’s not all right. It won’t be fine.’ And she walked towards him, sometimes treading on his track, her shoes taking his bloodstains, repeating them, until she stopped where she was close enough to reach up with her right hand – she wasn’t right-handed – and brush his forehead, his left cheek, his lips. This meant his blood was on her fingers, Frank softly aware of this while she met his eyes, kept them in the way she used to when he’d just arrived back from a trip, a job – this was how she’d peered in at him then, seemed to be checking his mind, making sure he was still the man he’d been before.

After the look she’d slapped him. Fast. Both sides of his jaw. ‘It’s not all right.’ Leaving and going upstairs. He didn’t follow because he was distracted and he shook his head and tasted metal against his teeth and felt he might have to accept that he no longer was the man he’d been before.

Not that he’d been anybody special.

And this evening he was apparently even less: the sort of man who’d sit in a cinema but never be shown a film.

The projection box had quietened, the rattling stilled. There had been a few ill-defined thumps a while ago and then silence and the sensation of being watched. Frank was quite sure the projectionist had decided not to bother with the movie and was waiting for Frank to give up and go away.

But that wouldn’t happen. Frank was going to get what he wanted and had paid for. Overhead, deep mumbles of amplified sound were leaching through the ceiling, so the other feature had begun. Still, he suspected that no one was watching upstairs, either – he’d not heard a soul in the foyer.

Half an hour, though – if the comedy had started, that meant he’d been stuck here for half an hour.

He removed his hat and then settled it back on again.

Being left for half an hour was disrespectful, irritating. Any longer and he would be justified in growing angry and then making his displeasure felt.

He coughed. He kicked one foot up on to the back of the chair in front, followed it with the other, crossed his legs at the ankle. He burrowed his shoulders deeper into the back of the seat. This was intended to suggest that he was fixed, in no hurry, willing to give matters all the time they’d take. The next step would involve conflict, tempers, variables it was difficult and unpleasant to predict.

Only then a motor whirred and the lights dimmed further then evaporated and the screen ticked, jumped, presented a blurry certificate which adjusted to and fro before emerging in nice focus and showing him the title of his film, the entertainment he had picked. Silently, a logo swam out and displayed itself, was replaced by another and another. Silently, a landscape appeared and displayed itself, raw-looking heaps of brown leaves, blades of early mist between trees, quite attractive. Silently, the image altered, showed a man’s face: an actor who’d been famous and attractive some decades ago and who specialised these days in butlers, ageing criminals, grandfathers, uncles. Silently, he was looking at a small girl and silently, he moved his lips and failed to talk. He seemed to be trying to offer her advice, something important, life-saving, perhaps even that. But he had no sound.

The film had no sound. What Frank had thought was an artistic effect was, in fact, a mistake – perhaps a deliberate mistake.

He kept watching. Sometimes, when he’d been abroad, he’d gone to the cinema in foreign languages and managed to understand the rough flow of events. He’d been able to enjoy himself.

But this was an artistic piece, complicated. People seemed to be talking to each other a good deal and with a mainly unreadable calmness. As soon as the child disappeared, he was lost.

So he stood, let the chair’s seat bang vaguely as it flipped out of his way, and strode up the incline of the invisible floor towards the invisible wall and its hidden doorway.

Outside, the projectionist’s box was clearly labelled and its door was, in any case, ajar, making it very easy to identify – an unattended projector purring away there, a dense push of light darting out through the small glass window, thinning as it spanned the cinema and then opening itself against the screen. It was always so cleanly defined: that fluttering, shafted light. Frank briefly wondered if the operator had to smoke, or scatter talc, raise steam to make sure it stayed that way, remained picturesque.

In the foyer, there was the boy with the dirty shoes, leaning against a pillar and looking drowsy.

‘There’s no sound.’

‘What.’

‘I said, there’s no sound.’

The boy seemed to consider saying what again before something, perhaps Frank’s expression, stopped him.

‘I said, there’s no sound.’ Frank not enraged, not about to do anything, simply thinking – no one helps and you ask and it doesn’t matter because no one helps and I don’t know why. He tried again. ‘I can’t hear. In the normal way I can hear. But at the moment I can’t. Not the film. Everything else, but not the film. That’s how I know there’s something wrong with the film and not with me.’

The boy was eyeing him, but didn’t seem physically strong or apt to move abruptly.

Frank believed that he felt calm and was not at risk. He continued to press his point. ‘There is a problem with the film. The film is playing, but there’s no sound.’ And to explain what he’d been doing for all of this time: ‘It’s not been started long and it has no sound.’ Although this maybe made him seem foolish because who would have normally waited more than half an hour in a cold, dark room for a film to start?

‘There’s no sound?’ The boy’s tone implied that Frank was demanding, unreasonable.

Frank decided that he would like to be both demanding and unreasonable. If he wasn’t the man he had been, then surely he ought to be able to pick the man he would be. ‘There’s no sound.’ Frank swallowed. ‘I would like you to do something about it.’

This wasn’t a tense situation, he’d thought it might be, but he’d been wrong. His potential opponent simply shrugged and told him, ‘I’ll go and find the projectionist.’

‘Yes, you should do that.’ Frank adding this unnecessarily because the boy had already turned and was dragging across the foyer carpet.

Something would be done, then.

Frank sat on the small island of seats provided, no doubt, for short periods of anticipation – people expecting to be joined by other people, parties assembling, outings, families, kids all excited by the prospect of big pictures, big noise, a secure and entertaining dark. The door to the larger auditorium was open and he could see a portion of the screen, the giant chin and mouth of a woman. There were also figures in some of the seats, film-goers. Or models of film-goers, although that was unlikely. They must have been stealthy, creeping in: or else they’d arrived before him, extremely early. Either way, he’d not heard them, not anticipated they’d be there.

That was surprising. Frank prided himself on his awareness and observation and didn’t like to think they could fail him so completely. In a private capacity this would be alarming, but it would be disastrous in his work. He was resting at the moment, of course. Everybody who’d said that he ought to rest had been well intentioned and well informed. He’d needed a break. Still, there would come a day when he’d return and then he’d need his wits about him.

Expert. That’s what he was.

‘There are other things you can do.’

She hadn’t understood. When you’re an expert then you have an obligation, you must perform.

‘There are other things to think about.’

She’d never known the rooms he’d seen: rooms with walls that were a dull red shine, streaking, hair and matter; floors dragged, pooled, thickened; footprints, hand prints, scrambling, meat and panic and spatter and clawing and smears and loss and fingernails and teeth and everything that a person is not, should not be, everything less than a whole and contented person.

Invisible rooms – that’s what he made – he’d think and think until everything disappeared beyond what he needed: signs of intention, direction, position; the nakedness of wrong; who stood where, did what, how often, how fast, how hard, how ultimately completely without hope – what exactly became of them.

Invisible.

At which point, his mind broke, dropped to silence, the foyer around him becoming irrelevant. A numbness began at the centre of his head and then wormed out, filling him with this total lack of anything to hear. He tried retracing his thoughts but they parted, shredded, let him fall through into nowhere. And the man he’d been before was gone from him absolutely, he could tell, and whatever was here now stayed suspended, thoughtless.

No way of telling how long. Big numb space, not even enough to grip hold of and start a fear. Maybe mad. Maybe that’s what he was. Broken or mad. Broken and mad.

Then in bled a whining: a thinner, more pathetic version of his voice and his mind seemed to catch at it, almost comforted.

No one helps.

It felt like a type of mild headache.

No one ever helps. I just stay at home and the light bulbs die and the ceilings crack and everything electrical is not exactly as it should be – there are many faults – and I call the help lines and they don’t, I call all kinds of people and they don’t help, I spend hours on the phone and I get no answers that have any meaning, I get no sense – there are constantly these things going wrong, incessantly, every day, and I want to stop them and I could stop them but no one helps and I can’t manage on my own.

Like that evening with the blood – he couldn’t very well have been expected to deal with those circumstances by himself.

He’d done all he could, waited in the kitchen and kept the soup on a low heat so that it would be ready for her. Except that wasn’t the main point.

His finger was the more important detail. He washed that under the tap and then wound it round with an adhesive dressing from the first-aid kit. He’d used the kit in the hallway cupboard rather than go and maybe disturb her in the bathroom.

The bathroom, that was more important than his finger. He’d been guessing she was in the bathroom, because the hot water was running, he could tell from the boiler noise, and she’d probably be in there adding bath oil, enjoying the steam, getting the temperature right for steeping in – he hadn’t known. He never had seen her bathing, the details.

The bathroom was connected with his finger because he’d bound his injury downstairs so as to avoid her and had possibly not done this well, maybe he should have taken better steps to close the wound, because the scar that he’d eventually grown was quite distinct. If anyone examined his hands closely they would see it – an identifying mark.

Then – a key detail – he’d noticed that his shirt was bloody and he should change it, padded upstairs, and that had meant changing his plans and going upstairs, sneaking into their bedroom, pulling out any old sweater and wrestling it on.

The smell of her in the bedroom. Same thing you’d get when you hugged her, or rolled over on to her pillow when she wasn’t there. Frank had seen men hug their wives, the way they’d fit their chin down over the woman’s shoulder and there would be this smile, a particular young-seeming grin with closed eyes – always made him think – bliss.

That one soft word, which in every other context he did not like or use.

Going up to the bedroom had been a risk – she might have been there, too, resting on her pillow, or undressing and having some kind of large emotion that she didn’t want to be observed. But he’d been careful to listen at the bathroom door as he passed it and had heard the sound of her stirring in the bath, a rise and fall of water, some kind of smoothing motion.

Somehow, that was another point to emphasise. It should not be forgotten, that moment of leaning beside the door and listening to a movement he could not see and imagining his wife’s shoulder, side of the breast glimpsed, her cheek, the lift of her ribs – always a slim girl – and a glimmer of water chasing over and down, being lost.

Once he’d put on his sweater, Frank thought he was hungry and so he’d gone down to the kitchen, cut into the bread he’d baked – a moist, yeasty loaf made with spelt, which was a little difficult to get, but worth the effort – and he’d ladled out some soup. When he took the first spoonful, though, it tasted salt, peculiar, and a fierce weakness of his arms and throat disturbed him and he ended up throwing his soup away.

It wasn’t that he didn’t realise she was upset.

He did know her and did understand.

She’d brought no one home and they had no children, no child, and she was the only person who’d seen him, just her, and they were married, had been married for years, so that should have been all right. But her feelings did exist, of course, and should be considered. She was upstairs bathing and having emotions. Undoubtedly the most important thought that he could have, should manage to have, would be that she had feelings. These feelings meant she didn’t like his soup, or his bread, or his hat, and she blamed him for terrible things, for one terrible thing which had been an accident, an oversight, a carelessness that lasted the space of a breath and meant he lost as much as her, just precisely as much.

He wanted to go to her and say: I’ve watched this before, been near it – the way that a human being will drop and break inside, their eyes dying first and then their face, a last raising of light and then it goes from them, is fallen and won’t come back. They walk into our building and whatever they think and whatever we have told them, there is a person in their mind, a living, unharmed person they expect to greet them and return their world. Then our attendants lead them to the special room, to the echoing room, and they see nothing, no one, no return, a shape of meat, an injury. Some of them cry, some accept the quiet suggestion of tea and the plate of biscuits we set down to make things seem homely and natural and as if life is going on, because it is, that is what it does – picks us up and feeds us with itself, drives us on until we wear away. Some of them are quiet, inward. Some I can hear, even in my office. They rage for their lovers, their loves, for their dead love, their dead selves. And they rage for their children. And they fail to accommodate their pain. And they leave us in the end, because they cannot stay. They go outside and fall into existence. Our town is full of people running back and forth in torn days and every other town is like that, too. Our world is thick with it, clotted in patterns and patterns of grief. And, beyond this, I know you’re sad. I know your days are bleeding, too. And I know I make you sad. I don’t understand how not to, but please don’t bring in more of the grief, don’t add to it. If there is more, then I won’t be able to breathe and I’ll die.

And I miss her, too.

And I miss her like you do.

The no one who comes home with you holding your hand.

The girl who isn’t there to mind when I hurt myself.

‘That’ll be okay, then.’

Frank saw the young man’s sneakers, the intentionally bedraggled cuffs of his jeans. Frank looked at them through his fingers, keeping his head low. ‘I’m sorry.’ This emerging less as a question than a statement, a confession. He rubbed his neck, his helpless sweat, and said again, more clearly and correctly, ‘I’m sorry?’

‘The projectionist’s just coming back. You can go in and wait.’

Oh, I know about that, I’ve done that. Wait. I can do that. Past master.

Frank swallowed while his anger crested and then sank. These spasms were never long-lasting, although they used to be less frequent. That could be a cause for concern, his increased capacity for hatred.

‘Are you okay?’

The boy staring with what appeared to be mild distaste when Frank straightened himself and looked up. ‘No. At least, yes. I am okay. I have a headache, that’s all.’

Standing seemed to take an extremely long time, Frank trying not to fall or stagger as he pressed himself up through the heavy air. He was taller than the boy, ought to be able to dominate him, but instead Frank nodded, holding his cap in both hands – something imploring in this, something anachronistic and disturbing – and he cranked out one step and then another, jolted back to the doorway of the cinema and through.

The dark was a relief, peaceful. He felt smoother, healthier as soon as it wrapped him round, cuddled at his back and opened ahead to let him pad down the gentle slope and find a new seat.

It was actually good that his film had been delayed. This way, his evening would be eaten up – back to the hotel after and head straight for bed. Double bed. Only one of him. No need to pick a side: her side, his side. He could lie where he wanted.

She preferred the left. He’d supposed this was somehow to do with the bedroom door being on the right. Any threat would come in from the right and he would be set in place to meet it. Frank had thought she was letting him guard her while she slept: Frank who was perfectly happy on whatever side was left free, who might as well rest at the foot of the bed like a folded blanket. It didn’t matter. He didn’t mind.

Really, though, she didn’t expect Frank to defend her. Her choice had nothing to do with him. In fact, they’d had other bedrooms with the door in other places and with windows that could be climbed through, you had to consider them, too – their current window was to the left – and she’d still always lain on the left. She was left-handed, that was why. Easier to reach her book, her water glass, her reading lamp if she was over there.

She hadn’t read on their last night, at least he didn’t think so. He’d waited for her in the kitchen with the soup and she’d never come down. He’d cleaned up his blood and repotted the plant and listened to the sound of the water draining from her bath and her naked footsteps on the landing, not moving towards the stairs. Then he’d decided his first cleaning hadn’t been thorough and he’d scrubbed the place completely – work surfaces, floor, emptied out the fridge and wiped it down, made it tidy. The cupboards needed tidying, as well. That took quite a time. Finally, he decanted the soup into a container, washed the pot, looked at the container, emptied it into the bin and washed the container.

It was two in the morning when he was done.

And when he had slipped into bed he had expected her to be sleeping, because that would be best.

‘What were you doing?’ Only she wasn’t asleep, she was just lying on her back without the light on and waiting to ask him, ‘What were you doing?’

‘I… cleaning.’

‘What’s wrong with you.’

And Frank couldn’t tell her because he didn’t know and so he just said, ‘I understand why people look at fountains, or at the sea. Because those don’t stop. The water moves and keeps on moving, the tide withdraws and then returns and it keeps on going and keeps on. It’s like – ’ He could hear her shifting, feel her sitting up, but not reaching for him. ‘It’s like that button you get on stereos, on those little personal players – there’s always the button that lets you repeat – not just the album, but the track, one single track. They’ve anticipated you’ll want to repeat one track, over and over, so those three or four minutes can stay, you can keep that time steady in your head, roll it back, fold it back. They know you’ll want that. I want that. Just three or four minutes that come back.’ Which he’d been afraid of while he’d heard it and when he’d stopped speaking she was breathing peculiarly, loudly, unevenly, the way she would before she cried. So he’d started again, because he had no tolerance for that, not even the idea of that. ‘I want a second, three, four seconds, that would be all. I want everything back. No stopping, I want nothing to stop.’ Only he was crying now, too – no way to avoid it. ‘I want her to be – ’ His sentence interrupted when she hit him, punched out at his chest and then a blow against his eye causing this burst of greyish colour and more pains and he’d caught her wrists eventually, almost fought her, the crown of her head banging against his chin, jarring him.

Afterwards they had rested, his head on her stomach, both of them still weeping, too loudly, too deeply, the din of it ripping something in his head. But even that had gone eventually, and there had been silence and he had tried to kiss her and she had not allowed it.

That was when he had taken his bag and left the room, the house, the town, the life.

I miss her, too.

Behind Frank, the projector stuttered and whirred, light springing to the screen and sound this time along with it. He fumbled into his pocket and found his phone, turned it off. That way he wouldn’t know when it didn’t ring, kept on not ringing.

Frank tipped back his head and watched the opening titles, the mist, the trees, the older man’s face as it spoke to the small girl’s, as he spoke to his daughter, while the world turned unreliable and salt. And the film reeled on and he knew that it would finish and knew that when it did he would want nothing more than to start it again.

You know what I mean? I was nineteen and crazy back then. I’d met this Jewish guy with this really Jewish name: Gideon. He had hair like an Afro wig and a nervous smile that kept unfolding quickly, like origami. He was one of those white guys who had a thing for black women, but he’d apparently been too afraid to ask out anyone, until he met me.

That one day, when it all began to unravel, Gideon was working on his dissertation, which meant he was in cutoffs in bed with me, the fan whirring over us while he was getting political about something or other. He was always getting political, even though his Ph.D. had nothing to do with politics and was called ‘Temporal Modes of Discourse and Ekphrasis in Elizabethan Poetry’. Even he didn’t like his dissertation. He was always opening some musty book, reading it for a while, then closing it and saying, ‘You know what’s wrong with these fascist corporations?’ No matter how you responded, you’d always be wrong because he’d say, ‘Exactly!’ then go on to tell you his theory, which had nothing to do with anything you’d just said.

He was philosophizing, per usual, all worked up with nervous energy while feeding our crickets. ‘And you,’ he said, unscrewing a cricket jar, looking at the cricket but speaking to me, ‘you think the neo-industrial complex doesn’t pertain to you, but it does, because by tacitly participating blah blah blah you’re engaging in blah blah commodification of workers blah blah blah allowing the neo-Reaganites to blah blah blah but you can’t escape the dialectic.’

His thing that summer was crickets, I don’t know why. Maybe it was something about the way they formed an orchestra at night. All around our bed, with the sky too hot and the torn screen windows, all you could hear were those damn crickets, moving their muscular little thighs and wings to make music. He would stick his nose out the window and smell the air. Sometimes he would go out barefoot with a flashlight and try to catch a cricket. If he was successful, he’d put it in one of those little jars – jars that once held gourmet items like tapenade and aïoli. I’d never heard of these things before, but with Gideon, I’d find myself eating tapenade on fancy stale bread one night, and the next night we’d rinse out the jar and voilà, a cricket would be living in it.

Whenever he’d come back to bed from gathering crickets, he’d try to wedge his cold skinny body around my fetal position. ‘Come closer,’ he’d say. And I’d want to and then again I wouldn’t want to. He always smelled different after being outside. Like a farm animal, or watercress. Plus he had a ton of calluses.

Sometimes I’d stare in the mid-darkness at how white he was. If I pressed his skin, he’d bruise deep fuchsia and you’d be able to see it even in the dark. I was very dark compared to him. He was so white it was freaky, sometimes. Othertimes it was kind of cool and beautiful, how his skin would glow against mine, how our bodies together looked like art.

Well, that one day – after he’d railed against the Federal Reserve Board, NAFTA, the gun lobby and the neo-industrial complex – we fed the crickets and went to bed. When I say went to bed, I mean, we made love. I used to call it sex, but Gideon said I might as well call it rape. Making love was all about the mind. One time, in a position that would have been beautiful art, he said, ‘Look at me. Really look at me.’ I didn’t like looking at people when I did it, like those tribes afraid part of their soul will peel away if someone takes a picture of them. When Gideon and I did lock eyes, I must admit, it felt different. Like we were – for a moment – part of the same picture.

Hanwell Snr was Hanwell’s father. Like Hanwell, he existed in a small way. Not in his person – he was a ‘big personality’, in that odious phrase – but in his history, which is partial, almost phantasmagoric. Even to Hanwell he seemed a kind of mirage, and nothing pleasant about it. A feckless and slapdash man – worse, in many ways, than a cruel man. Those who have experience of such people will understand. Cruelty can be righteously opposed, eventually dismissed. A freewheeling carelessness with your cares is something else again. It must teach you a sad self-sufficiency, being fathered like that, and a brutal reticence of the heart. A reluctance to get going at all.

Hanwell Snr came to Hanwell like a comet, at long intervals. He was there when Hanwell was born, surely, and six years after that on a beach in Brighton, holding Hanwell by the armpits and dangling him over a pier. Hanwell Snr spent that evening away from his family, to whom he gave a little money with the generous idea of a round of fish and chips. It didn’t stretch as far as that. A boyo, with charm in spades. That sounds antique, but ‘boyo’ was the word one would have used at the time. First to raise a glass and last to put it down – very much hail fellow, well met – although he was never a drunk, and never incompetent. The type to sing along with those far worse gone than himself, with the idea of gaining advantage over them in their weakness. Back at home, he had a machine he put tuppence in and a fag came out, like in a pub. Also, an eye for his wife’s nearest neighbour, a widow, Sue Boyd – Sue, Sue, I’m very much in love with you, to the tune of a famous ballad of the time, catching her round the waist and waltzing her from the back door to the gate, Mrs Hanwell smiling helplessly on from the window.

A big man physically, far bigger than Hanwell. And then later, maybe that same year, maybe the next, on November the fifth, suddenly at the back door in the blackness with the gift of some penny bangers. He didn’t stay to light these with Hanwell. Then gone again. ‘Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back’: a common enough refrain in England, then and now. Only, Hanwell Snr was one of the periodic returnees. This makes it worse, as previously discussed. Leaving Hanwell standing in the blackness in short trousers holding bangers. This was never forgotten. It persists, a fleck of the late 1920s. It is recorded here by a descendant of Hanwell Snr of whom he could have had no notion, being as unreal to him as broadband or goblins. No one can explain the process by which these things are retained while much else vanishes – a lot of sentimental rubbish is written on the subject. Hanwell himself kept faith with scientific explanations. He knew nothing whatsoever of science. Dimly, he imagined chemical flare-ups in the brain chemistry, arresting moving images (his analogy came from photographic film, of which he had some experience), and that these ‘flare-ups’ are random in their occasion and unobservable at the moment they happen. Of course, the writing of this is also a kind of ‘flare-up’, albeit of a sadder, secondary and parasitic kind.

In the mid-thirties, Hanwell Snr went to Canada, an attempt to make his fortune in logging. Hanwell was given a brief, thrilling tour of the ship before it sailed, although not by his father; a crewman put a candle on a thick brass rail and thus demonstrated to Hanwell how crosswise scratches turn orderly and concentric in thrown light. Three years later Hanwell Snr returned, still with no money. He was now able to roll a cigarette with one hand the way the cowboys did. Hanwell was not especially impressed. Subsequently, Hanwell Snr became a conductor on the buses. Then came the war, from which he never really returned, having fallen for a middle-class lady who drove an ambulance. Turned up once at Hanwell’s own barracks, with a new name – ‘Bill’ – and the affectations of an Irishman. It was eerie to witness. Words held no security with Hanwell Snr, served as no anchor, bore no relation to the things of the world. A darker shade of this same tendency is called ‘psychopathy’. He took out a few filthy photos from the Far East and told amusing, believable anecdotes set in Kerry. This, to a stranger, would appear to fit well with the copper-wire hair and the close eyes. Hanwell wished himself more of a stranger. As it stood, he could only wince inwardly at this second, false personality, while making a good show of laughing along as Bill made a friend of all the young soldiers whom Hanwell himself had not yet managed to befriend. ‘Good sort, your old man! Lively, good for a laugh!’ Said approvingly, and probably true (Hanwell tried hard to be generous in his interpretations), if you happened not to be his son. If you happened not to be his son. Bill walked out two hours later, merry as Christmas. Wasn’t seen again by Hanwell for twelve years.

It was August of 1956. Hanwell got word that his father was nicely set up with a little business in an obscure village in the county of Kent. Without any real expectation – or none he could confess to himself – Hanwell got on his bike. This time, he would appear. It was nothing to him, back then, to ride from London to Kent. He was young, relatively speaking, though he wouldn’t have thought himself especially so, with a young family already. He did not know then that a second family lay in wait for him, not yet sprung, coiled in his future.

A roasting August day. Hanwell had devised a water carrier out of an old plastic kerosene bottle and strapped it to the crossbar – an invention a little ahead of its time. He powered along a newly built stretch of the A20, wherever possible nipping off and taking byroads through the villages, feeling that the air was purer there. I hope I can say ‘hedgerow’ and it will be clear that I don’t mean to be poetic, but only historically accurate. Hedgerow, thick and briary, caught his shirt twice and made it ragged round the elbow. He had it in his mind – as I have it in mine, with equal stubbornness, when I am writing at length – not to stop before a certain point; he would eat at his destination and not before. One more mile, one more chapter, one more mile, one more chapter. The village was in a little valley; Hanwell swooned round the bends and rolled into town, stopping at the village green, which was all the village there was. Two establishments stood nearby: a redbrick pub with pretty clumps of lavender growing in the window pots and, on the other side of the green, a luridly painted fish-and-chip van. Hanwell knew better than to hope. He got off his bike and pushed it with a sure touch round the perimeter, the faintest pressure of left hand to saddle. It was four o’clock – the van was shut up. He leaned the bike against gypsy-red lettering outlined in gold: HANWELL’S FINEST FISH AND CHIPS. He went to sit in the grass, beneath a tree, overlooking the cricket pitch and the marshy land near the ponds. He was unable to absorb these various lessons in the colour green. Instead, there was smell: sear-leaved, blowzy roses, last of the summer. Collect them, give them to your sister, 1931.

Recipe for Irene Hanwell’s Lady’s Perfume

It was so hot in Léogâne that summer that most of the frogs exploded, scaring not just the children who once chased them into the river at dusk or the parents who hastily pried the threadbare carcasses from their fingers, but also my 39-year old sister Lélé, who was four months pregnant with her first child and feared that, should the temperature continue to rise, she too might burst. The frogs had been dying for a while, but we hadn’t noticed, mostly because they’d been doing it quietly. Perhaps for each that had expired, one had taken its place along the river bank, looking exactly the same as the others and fooling us into thinking that a normal cycle was occurring, that young was replacing old and life replacing death, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, just as it was for us.

‘This is surely a sign that something terrible is going to happen,’ Lélé said, as we sat on the top-floor verandah of my parents’ house one particularly sweltering evening. Even though my father, the former justice of the peace of the town of Léogâne, had died more than ten years ago, and my mother five years before that, I’ve never been able to stop thinking of the place that I, and now my sister, called home as theirs. The dollhouse façade of our wooden ginger-bread had been meticulously sketched by Papa, who’d spent his nights after work updating and revising each detail as their home was built from the ground up. He and Maman had driven to the capital to purchase the corrugated metal and bordered jalousies, a journey which at the time, before my sister and I were born, took several agonizing hours in an old pick-up truck that they’d inherited from my half-French grandfather, the previous justice of the peace. The shell of the truck was still out there somewhere among the dozens of almond trees that dotted our three hectares, its once thunderous engine rusting into the earth, like the neglected memorial it was.

The air on my verandah was just slightly cooler than it was in either of the two bedrooms where my sister and I slept, just as we had as children, surrounded by shelves lined with leather-bound notebooks filled with the concerns and complaints that had consumed the days, and sometimes nights, of our father and grandfather. Last year, I decided to read all their notebooks before I moved them to the courthouse archive in town. And now, despite her current condition, my sister, who was in the middle of a separation from her husband, was helping me sort through them.

The crowd is whirring in a cloud of brazen afternoon dust; they have waited too long already. Finally, the Procurator steps down to the penultimate stair, spreads his feet and installs his arms akimbo to assume a routine pose of authority. His impressively rotund belly is outlined under the sweaty toga, the shadow of the navel at its center. He scans the crowd with contempt, the eye of the navel following his gaze as he turns a little to the left, a little to the right. The din dies down. With their swords, the soldiers push forward two tattered men – the men’s shackles rattle as they totter – and position them on each side of the Procurator, who doesn’t even glance at them. It all looks like a well-rehearsed performance.

‘People!’ the Procurator shouts. ‘People! Look at me!’

The crowd has been looking at him all along, but now it tightens, as if each man were a blood vessel and the air has just become colder. The dust is slowly settling down, coating their bodies, biting their eyes.

‘These two caitiffs here have violated the laws of the Empire,’ the Procurator thunders. ‘They ought to be punished with the utmost severity. But they are just men and the Empire is merciful – one of them shall live.’

The crowd rumbles with excitement. The Procurator points at the man on the right: he is scrawny, with long, narrow arms and broken teeth, his left eye turgid with blood and pus. ‘This man is a thief,’ the Procurator says. ‘He has robbed men of their sustenance. He has sneaked up on them at night. He has stolen their meager property. Fathers have become destitute, mothers have wept, because of this scoundrel.’

The thief looks at the crowd with as much innocence in his right eye as he can muster. The crowd knows his ilk, they recognize his sinewy greed, but they can also see the bruises on his forearms; they can see the crusty gullies of blood stretching from his nostrils along the curly curve of his mustache to disappear in his beard.

‘People,’ cries the thief with a cracked, screeching voice. ‘I was hungry, my children were hungry. I was hungry!’

A soldier smacks the thief across the face with the back of his hand and a fresh spring of blood sprinkles the thief ’s beard. The crowd mutters, excited by blood promising more blood.

‘This one,’ – the Procurator points at the man on the left – ‘this one is a mountebank, a liar. He has uttered many a humbug. He has spread calumnies, lies, false stories, besmirching honest men and the Empire. For him, nothing is sacred. He has transgressed against the truth, my friends, not just the Empire – the truth. And the truth is the mother of law and order.’

The crowd turns its attention to the man on the left: his hands are tied behind his back; his shoulder blades are sticking out like fins; his kneecaps are as bare as baby skulls; his flocculent beard is sagging with sweat, as if he were shriveling – but he has no bruises, other than the shackle blisters on his ankles. He confessed to the guards whatever they wanted to hear, and then told them what they didn’t ask for, freely embellishing so as to make them agreeable – they just listened, shaking their heads in disbelief, yet unable to stop listening or beat him. The liar looks back at the crowd innocuously: there are the bloodthirsty, law-loving brutes, ever picking their asses in the first row; and there are the handy pick-pockets pilfering their pockets; and over there, safely on the flanks, the citizens of good standing, disgusted and scared by the spectacle, shouting down a drunkard whining about his unfaithful wives. He recognizes the children with pockmarked faces and tawny teeth, who scuttled after him and pulled his donkey’s tail not so long ago; and there is the drunk harlot with her green eyes filling up with tears, as though he were her husband. He spots the spies watching the crowd from within the crowd, pricking up their ears for a nefarious word about the Procurator or the Empire.

He knows he should be calm and dignified and serene. He knows he could turn the crowd and make it love him – he has done it before. He could just look them straight in the eye, lock the harlot’s gaze, or touch the hairy brute, and tell them one of the tales he picked up roaming the land, or a parable Joseph told him, or the story he dreamt up last night. But the Procurator would never let him speak; and, even if he did, the crowd desired blood, not words. A strange panic possesses him, as if his whole being sneezed – a painful, shattering, humiliating desire to live and breathe in this body, now and forever. So he begins twitching his head to the right, throwing his glance at the thief like a tether, saying with his body, because his suffocating voice would not do it, saying: ‘Take him! Take him!’

The crowd is bedeviled by a sudden change in the liar’s demeanor. His face is madly taut; his neck keeps cramping; his eyes are bulging out sideways, as if trying to sneak out of the sockets. They see now that the liar is not just a liar, but that he is overtaken by evil spirits; they can see he is a bad seed. The thief does nothing, conscious that something good for him is beginning to happen.

‘Let the thief go,’ they shout. ‘Let him go.’

‘Let him go,’ the Procurator orders the soldiers.

The liar drops his head to his chest, as if all the neck tendons suddenly snapped, and closes his eyes. The crowd stands in silence for a moment, enjoying the moment of his recognition, but then they start fidgeting and shuffling their feet, and the dust is aroused again, darker this time, as the sun has begun to set.

It is 4.30 am and Magda would like us, her neighbours, to know that she is a very talented woman, a woman of accomplishments. Magda is a nurse, a qualified pilot, a businesswoman and philanthropist, a gifted and sensitive lover, the holder of certificates in computing and English grammar, a semi-professional country singer and a mother. Yes, a mother! Magda has a daughter. Who came out of this pussy right here.

Right here, she says. Out of this pussy. RIGHT HERE. And all along the street we come to our windows to twitch the net curtains and face the awe-inspiring truth that is Magda in her lime-green thong. She’s standing on the top step, the lights of the house blazing behind her, a terrifying mash-up of the Venus of Willendorf and a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, making gestures with a beer can at the little knot of emergency service personnel gathered on the pavement below.

One of the younger and less experienced constables has obviously asked her to accompany him to a place where, as an agent of the state, he will feel less exposed. A police station, perhaps. Or a hospital. Anywhere that will tip the odds a little in his favour. Magda has met this suggestion with the scorn it deserves. She knows she outnumbers these fools. YOU KNOW ME, she says. Then, with a sinister leer, AND I KNOW YOU.

Being known by Magda is a messy and unavoidably carnal experience. All of us neighbours are known by Magda. Last time she knew me, she pushed me up against the side of my car. I know you, she breathed huskily. I knew I’d been known.

In their big reflective jackets, the policemen appear crumpled and insubstantial. They are visibly trying to block out the knowledge of her knowledge, no doubt using mental techniques they were taught at the training school: I am a powerful person. I control my own destiny. Behind the ambulance, one of the paramedics is taking a quick nip of oxygen.

They don’t realize what they’re up against. Magda is the daughter of Nelson Mandela, major world leader and saviour of his country. Don’t these Day-Glo fools see the resemblance? It’s staring them in the face. If they have any doubts, ANY DOUBTS AT ALL, she tells them, they have only to consult the autobiography Long Road to Freedom. Read the autobiography! Read page 37 and page 475! They will see. THEN THEY WILL KNOW.

Magda is coated in something that I suspect is coconut oil. She has the air of a woman who has roused herself from titanic erotic exertions to be here with us on Westerbury Road tonight. She has been INTERRUPTED. She has THINGS TO DO. There’s no sign of Errol. I hope he’s all right. Errol is quite fragile.

These were the names of the men who would have slept with Nigora (thought Nigora), if only she had encouraged them:

Komil

Bakhitiyor.

Then there were the names of men whom Nigora had successfully pursued, but who would not sleep with her again, for various reasons (loyalty to their wives; loyalty to her husband):

Shuhrat

Muhammad.

Next there was the list of men whom Nigora had successfully pursued and who, she thought, would still sleep with her if she wanted to: this list, therefore, could be further and more precisely divided into those whom Nigora would also sleep with, for various reasons (pride; vanity; love) -

Aftandil

Aziz

– and those whom Nigora would not sleep with, for various other reasons (boredom; fidelity; love) -

Khayrullah

Jalol

Abdullah.

And yet this list was complicated by the fact that all these men were absent. They were all in another city, in another country, to which Nigora would never return.

In a cake-shop – in this city which was not her city, this city in the west – Nigora was compiling imaginary lists of her life, while watching the sullen assistant stroke sky-blue ribbon into curlicues with the back of a pair of scissors.

And finally (thought Nigora) there were the men with whom Nigora, in this city, had a chance:

Yaha

Taha

Naguib.

This was the list which mattered to Nigora. Or no. To be more precise: Nigora’s imagination dwelt on those she had not pursued, and those she could still pursue – whether conquered already or not. She only left alone the list of those whom she had conquered and to whom she would no longer return. She was haunted by the spectre of non-fulfilment.

But one name was more present than the rest.

Yaha.

On the final dusk of her life, Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sits in a green velvet armchair reading – or rather not reading – a dull nautical mystery called Trouble Astern. Her chair faces a large window overlooking a long driveway lined with oaks. Beyond the furthest oak she can see the ocean and, riding the horizon, a house-lit island.

Behind her is a closed door.

From this vantage point, we cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz. She is blocked from view by her throne-like chair. Glad Parks-Schultz’s name suggests she is as dull as her mystery, an insincerely cheery woman compactly assembled, her bland orb face stacked directly atop her middle like a snowman’s. Her name suggests a curt and stilted manner. We see her barking monotone pleasantries, scaring children unintentionally. There is no sense arguing with this perception, even if there is only a little truth to it. We cannot see Glad Parks-Schultz, we can only hear her name in our heads, and her name has carved a lumpen shape for her there.

Glad Parks-Schultz tries repeatedly to lose herself in her mystery – a love affair, a sailing trip, a cabin, a knife – but cannot. Following the spat over the Christmas ham (‘How can you serve ham?’ her daughter had asked, a fair question; Sylvia was a vegetarian, something her mother had willfully forgotten), Glad Parks-Schultz finds herself in a familiarly pinched humor, her Holidays Gone Wrong mood. To go with this mood she plays in her head images from another Christmas, images from Fanny and Alexander, the only Bergman movie Glad has ever seen, and then only because Sylvia, a film major minoring in psychology and thus a self-appointed Bergman connoisseur, gave it to her as a Christmas present last year (‘This is more your speed,’ Sylvia had said, not uncritically). Fine if it was. Glad preferred her cultural enrichment free of anguish.

Outside her window (in which only she can see her faint reflection), the tree-lined drive extends to a distant point. It is the trick of perspective, thinks Glad Parks-Schultz, whose face, in the half-reflection in this dying-light time of day, appears longer and thinner than it might to anyone actually seeing her. Glad Parks-Schultz splays her book over her lap (only twenty more pages to go), giving up on the cowardly pair of lovers who have sailed and anchored in a cove, who have rowed their dinghy to the secluded beach, who are sneaking through the woods to a cabin to kill the woman’s husband with a knife. Why the husband is alone in the cabin is itself a bunch of self-reflexive foolery – he is a writer putting the final touches on a mystery book. She wants to ask the husband about this book – not the book he’s writing, but the book he’s in. What kind of mystery, she would ask him, makes you wait until the very end for a dead person? She is a district judge. She is not interested in crimes before they happen. She detests the why of most novels, which is the reason she sticks to mysteries. There is no emotional worrying of the why in mysteries – she cheated on him; he wanted her money – there is only the outcome, and the intricately explained how.

Meanwhile, Glad waits impatiently for Sylvia and her college boyfriend, her son Rod and his college girlfriend, all of whom she has banished from her house in a fit of ham pique, to return from the beach.

But once these people (her children and their temporary beloveds) are out of her sight she feels unseen, and not terribly easy as a result of it. Better to be loathed on a major holiday. Better to feel hated and alive. She is a stern district judge despised for her imperviousness to human context, to bad-luck stories. (‘No Glad-Handing Parks-Schultz’.)

The first snowflake of the season tumbles past the window. Glad huffs. She brushes the spine of Trouble Astern and prays for an escape from her tedious self. She’ll take any old diversion from this green velvet armchair – her mother’s favorite armchair, the upholstery warted with burn marks during her mother’s final days smoking in this very chair, dying in this very chair. She wants to be free of this Holiday Gone Wrong mood, this overheated pair of woolly mukluks.

This is where, Glad thinks, if I were, say, a less cooperative character in the relentlessly trouble-free Trouble Astern, I would set the writer-husband’s peg-leg afire (were he to possess a peg-leg), I would crush the whiny lover’s head with a winch handle. If impulsive violence isn’t part of my character, I could instead (as is the annoying tendency of the characters in Trouble Astern) flash backward to some baldly moral exemplar from my childhood. I could allow myself to be sucked backward and molecularly reassembled as a younger, sweeter person, available to be efficiently known by others via some traumatic event involving – preferably – my mother. This is the way of the world, Glad knows. She hears it from the lawyers every week. Mothers are, in some soupy way, to blame for every act of criminality.

Glad rubs at the spine as if it were some tinny magic lamp, promising instantaneous transport to an enthralling past. For the purposes of heightening the intrigue at this particular moment she thinks of this enthralling past as Her Secret Life. Everything has a secret life these days – birds, bees, alphabets, armoires, the characters in Trouble Astern – and Glad feels quite comfortable in claiming one for herself as well, even if she’s not entirely clear on what constitutes a secret exactly. If she’s never spoken of it, is it a secret, even if the content isn’t particularly combustible? After all, it’s not that she failed to tell this ‘secret’ on purpose (to deceive, protect, gain financial or emotional advantage, whatever); really it existed as a part of her past person that was inextricable from her current person, and so to know her was to know this about her.

Or so she’d assumed. During the ham incident, when Sylvia had unfairly accused Glad of not knowing her (didn’t Sylvia know that Glad’s way of knowing was what looked like not knowing?), she had then gone on to say something that was, perhaps, true. She had claimed that Glad refused to be known. I don’t know anything about you, Sylvia said, and I’ve known you for twenty years. I don’t know why you are the way you are.

A person needs a reason to be herself? thought Glad. But instead she said – fair enough. This is her measured, judicially minded parry to every little trauma Sylvia kicks her way. Fair enough.

Glad looks at the falling snowflakes, thicker now, ghosting the branches of the oaks. The green velvet prickles the backs of her arms. She squirms uncomfortably, then settles down to concentrate, closing her eyes and straining her face muscles. Pushing her brain backward is like trying to nag a boulder uphill with a feather. She begins with something easy. Where was she when she heard the explosion? She was hiding from her mother behind one of the oaks lining the drive, fingering the bark as she is now fingering her book. The scientist’s house next door, unseen behind a wall of arbor vitae, emitted a cloud of white smoke. The slate tiles from the garage roof scattered through the air like shot from a rifle, growing larger and larger as they spun towards her. A late-blooming sense of self-preservation drove her behind a tree trunk, into the front of which, a second later, two tiles thunked themselves with the sickening sound of axe-heads. Her mother emerged from the house. She noted her sunflowers, decapitated by a low-flying tile. She spied a speck of Glad’s dress, protruding from behind the impaled oak.

Get in here and finish your chowder, she said angrily. Or did she? Glad honestly couldn’t remember. She was only sure that her mother treated her as if she were to blame for the accident, as if Glad’s availability to be freakishly killed had caused the neighbor’s house to explode.

(She can imagine Sylvia asking at this point: why really did the house explode? And was anybody killed? But this is not the secret. Or rather these questions, the inevitability of Sylvia’s literal-minded questions, discourage her from sharing this secret past of hers. Not to blame Sylvia and her pointless redirects. But to moderately blame Sylvia. Yes, indeed. If Sylvia’s searching for the why, the why Glad is the way she is, why Sylvia has never been permitted to know her in a way that feels satisfactory to her, Sylvia must in part take responsibility.)

But returning to the flashback. Her own mother, Glad remembers, steered her into the house. Glad felt invigorated by proximity to annihilation, her head lighter for having nearly been detached, airborne – and then her mother’s total inability to accurately read Glad’s emotional state made her remember (she actually remembered remembering) an incident with her piano teacher who had quit the previous year.

(Your piano teacher, Sylvia would say skeptically, implying that, after a near-death experience and an explosion, some actual lesson might be extracted.) But soon she was remembering inside of a reminiscence (this was another reason why she’d never revealed her secret life to anyone, such an aimless tributary it was), feeling quite viscerally beneath the hands of her mother the touch of her old piano teacher, Mr Phillips. Something about Mr Phillips’s sleazy availability, especially as he hovered over the keyboard with his chin practically brushing her sort-of breasts as she clunked her way through ‘Greensleeves’, appealed to her. Or not his availability – his stupidity. He was so certain that she was a hapless, naive girl of what – twelve? eleven? – that he could nearly brush her breasts and she wouldn’t notice. That he could caress her elbow as she mutilated ‘Good King Wenceslas’ and she would read his attentions as teacherly.

It was a sweetly vile arrangement, everyone more or less content to behave dishonestly, until Mr Phillips came late one day, so late that Glad convinced herself that he was not coming. And thus she allowed Harold Blunt to kiss her by her back door, the door Mr Phillips used because he was a back-door sort of man. She often kissed Harold Blunt because Harold Blunt was such a far-flung outcast that no one would ever believe him if he claimed to be kissing Glad Parks practically daily. On this day that she was kissing Harold Blunt, Harold Blunt had been chasing her with a water balloon. He cornered her by her back door and, balloon held threateningly over her head, clamped his lips over hers. When Mr Phillips found her kissing Harold Blunt, he stared at her as an adulterer might stare at his cuckolding mistress. She averted her eyes, but even so it was as if every belittling, superior thought she’d ever had about the man was broadcast over the neighborhood loudspeaker. He knew he’d been had. Harold Blunt responded by smashing the water balloon on Glad’s head and running away. Glad stared at Mr Phillips through her raining-down bangs. He hardened to her in a matter of mere seconds; she was no innocent, she was just another ‘Greensleeves’-mangling trollop who’d made a fool of him.

As the balloon water dripped into her eyes, she was reminded (a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence) of another moment in her life, although in fact this moment was in her then-future, so how could she have ‘remembered’ forward from the past? Confusing, and yet this was how it happened, or rather this was how this past of hers existed. As an ever-shifting matrix of falsely interconnected selves. Somehow as a twelve- or eleven-year-old she remembered being sixteen, she remembered riding in the back of a rental car driven by her parents, rain sheeting down the windshield, too much for the the hairpin wipers. Their Bermuda vacation had ‘turned’, as her father phrased it – a hurricane loomed, the three of them had colds, her mother, an incessant liar who lied about things that shouldn’t be lied about, was ‘in her element’, i.e. raucously miserable. When miserable she told stories that Glad herself knew to be untrue because they had happened, or rather hadn’t happened, to her. At this moment she was telling Glad about the time she and Glad had taken the ferry to the Vineyard and Glad had tried to jump overboard. ‘You loved to self-destruct in a crowd,’ her mother said, forgetting that Glad had climbed atop the railing in an attempt to rescue an old lady’s escaped parakeet, clinging to a porthole bolt. She’d lost her footing and slipped safely back to the deck, but not before knocking the parakeet from its perch and sending it hurtling to its death in the wake below. When the old lady approached them worriedly for a report, her mother patted the old lady’s forearm and said, ‘He flew away, dear.’

From that moment on the boat (which was, technically, an anecdote inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence inside a reminiscence), she recalled a time when, at nine, her mother calmly watched her fall out of an apple tree; at ten, when she ran over a baby vole with her bicycle, and her mother, who was poisoning voles by the thousands in her vegetable garden, called her a murderer; at twelve, when she meticulously sliced her own thumb open with a penknife and bled over her mother’s silk party dress, hanging on the bedroom hook. The pattern was unrepeatable, and thus more dangerously ineffable than a single memory. The sensation felt like spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. Each fraction of a second her eyes focused on a new face in a crowd. Within seconds the face was gone, whisked to a blur, replaced by another face that would just as soon be lost.

Glad clutches her book, feeling rather sick. She finds herself recalling incidents that are technically impossible to recall, looking up from her changing table as a weeks-old infant, a miserable ball of heat and squirm observing the haggard look on her mother’s face, then gradually moving forward again, each memory chain-linked only by this: all involved her mother. This is why she doesn’t put much stock in so-called secrets, or the meaningfulness of untold recollections that become, in their airtight echo chambers, the supposed stuff of secrets. They are only a way to become retrospectively enraged at somebody else so that your own adult weaknesses can be tidily excused.

But even more alarming is this: the woman who appears as her mother in these memories begins to morph into a woman resembling Sylvia – thinner and more likeably imperious, but Sylvia nonetheless. And she, Glad, is nowhere to be found. Yes, a corner of the red dress she was wearing the day of the explosion protrudes from behind the tree; possibly she can even see her transparent reflection in the rainy Bermuda car window. But she is not an active participant in these recalled scenarios with the unnerving mother / Sylvia composite, she is not a person at all. She is just a psychic recorder, an eye attached to a woundable spirit.

The lights between the oaks snap on, illuminating the drive like a smuggler’s runway, startling her. She is alone, isn’t she? Who turned on the lights? Then Glad remembers the timer she’d had the caretaker install after her brother – a drunk – drove into a tree after dinner and blamed the dark rather than the umpteen glasses of wine he’d consumed. When inebriated, her brother took to confessing amped-up, profanity- and sex-laced versions of his childhood to a painting of their mother. The painting featured their mother as a gimlet-eyed sixteen-year-old girl, one finger encased by a bulky signet ring, both hands resting over a prop book splayed in her lap.

This painting stares at Glad from the wall to her left. The prop book’s spine features a single rectangle of black; the title, though indicated by a line of white-painted switchbacks, remains maddeningly indiscernible. At just the right distance, she’d always believed, the letters would coalesce and she would be able to read the title. As a child she’d stood in front of the painting and stepped forward and backward, forward and backward, adjusting her position by fractions of inches, but no matter – the switchbacks failed to signify. What was this book her mother held for eternity? Why did it matter? Why did she need to know?

Her old frustration disentangles itself from the painting and redirects itself full-forcedly at the absent Sylvia – Sylvia whose shadow she thinks she’s spotted skittering between the oaks. She wishes Sylvia would come back, if only to tell her that her ‘need to know’ was as pointless as Glad’s need to know the title of the book in the painting. It would reveal nothing. And, what’s worse, Glad’s memories are not only opaque and meaningless, they are ultimately more boring than Trouble Astern, in which (Glad flips skimmingly ahead) people are still failing to die. Glad is half tempted to kill someone herself.

Why not? The sky has purpled behind the oak trees, the island indicated only by the faraway blinking of disembodied lights. The kids are still not home, and when they do return, Glad expects they will be drunk or high. It is the perfect time for a murder. She recalls the time when she’d been grounded for half the summer for dropping one of her mother’s diamond studs down a heater vent. She decided to run away with her best friend, and the two had canoed to a nearby island, pitched a tent, tried to build a campfire, and settled down to sleep before realizing that they were cut out for neither campfire-building nor tent-sleeping. At 3 am Glad’s friend deposited her on the beach across from her driveway. Glad expected to be met by her angry parents, but instead the beach was spookily quiet. She walked down the drive, growing increasingly panicked by the property’s creaking emptiness. She picked up a rock and cocked it overhead, planning to strike whatever bear / moose / murderer might try to attack her on the way to the house. Lamplight from the study spread like a white carpet over the lawn. Someone was awake. Her mother, no doubt.

Still terrified, she cocked the rock overhead as she opened the front door, blood thudding in her ears. She couldn’t pinpoint her nervousness; was she still in danger? Or was she the source of danger? She walked through a blue room, then a hall, then to the closed door of the study. She put her hand on the knob. Once she opened the door, there was no going back. She knew this.

She turned the knob. The door opened soundlessly. From above the high back of the armchair covered in green velvet, she could see the graying head of a woman. Glad tiptoed closer, the shadow of her arm extending across the face of her mother in the painting, then rounding the corner like a snake. The woman in the chair did not move. Glad thought she could hear the sound of snoring. How pitiful, she thought. What kind of sad old woman falls asleep at night in her reading chair? What kind of person would so willingly lose control of herself like that? Angrily, Glad raised the rock higher above her head; a sense that she is acting nobly energizes her arm, causing the muscles to tingle. She is saving this person from her own pitiful dreamy tendencies. This is not an act of murder. This is a mercy killing. Just before the rock strikes the woman’s temple, she looks into the window. The last thing Judge Gladys Parks-Schultz sees before she dies is the translucent reflection of her own sleeping face, her hands folded peacefully on top of a book whose title is inscrutable.

Twice already Marie had pointed out the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn, because the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect field of corn put her in mind of a haunted house – not a haunted house she had ever actually seen but the mythical one that sometimes appeared in her mind (with adjacent graveyard and cat on a fence) whenever she saw the brilliance of the autumnal sun on the perfect etc., etc., and she wanted to make sure that, if the kids had a corresponding mythical haunted house that appeared in their minds whenever they saw the brilliance of the etc., etc., it would come up now, so that they could all experience it together, like friends, like college friends on a road trip, sans pot, ha ha ha!

But no. When she, a third time, said, ‘Wow, guys, check that out,’ Abbie said, ‘OK, Mom, we get it, it’s corn,’ and Josh said, ‘Not now, Mom, I’m Leavening my Loaves,’ which was fine with her; she had no problem with that, Noble Baker being preferable to Bra Stuffer, the game he’d asked for.

Well, who could say? Maybe they didn’t even have any mythical vignettes in their heads. Or maybe the mythical vignettes they had in their heads were totally different from the ones she had in her head. Which was the beauty of it, because, after all, they were their own little people! You were just a caretaker. They didn’t have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.

Still, wow, that cornfield was such a classic.

‘Whenever I see a field like that, guys?’ she said. ‘I somehow think of a haunted house!’

‘Slicing Knife! Slicing Knife!’ Josh shouted. ‘You nimrod machine! I chose that!’

Speaking of Halloween, she remembered last year, when their cornstalk column had tipped their shopping cart over. Gosh, how they’d laughed at that! Oh, family laughter was golden; she’d had none of that in her childhood, Dad being so dour and Mom so ashamed. If Mom and Dad’s cart had tipped, Dad would have given the cart a despairing kick and Mom would have stridden purposefully away to reapply her lipstick, distancing herself from Dad, while she, Marie, would have nervously taken that horrid plastic Army man she’d named Brady into her mouth.

Well, in this family laughter was encouraged! Last night, when Josh had goosed her with his Game Boy, she’d shot a spray of toothpaste across the mirror and they’d all cracked up, rolling around on the floor with Goochie, and Josh had said, such nostalgia in his voice, ‘Mom, remember when Goochie was a puppy?’ Which was when Abbie had burst into tears, because, being only five, she had no memory of Goochie as a puppy.

Hence this Family Mission. And as far as Robert? Oh, God bless Robert! There was a man. He would have no problem whatsoever with this Family Mission. She loved the way he had of saying ‘Ho HO!’ whenever she brought home something new and unexpected.

‘Ho HO!’ Robert had said, coming home to find the iguana. ‘Ho HO!’ he had said, coming home to find the ferret trying to get into the iguana cage. ‘We appear to be the happy operators of a menagerie!’

She loved him for his playfulness – you could bring home a hippo you’d put on a credit card (both the ferret and the iguana had gone on credit cards) and he’d just say ‘Ho HO!’ and ask what the creature ate and what hours it slept and what the heck they were going to name the little bugger.

In the back seat, Josh made the git-git-git sound he always made when his Baker was in Baking Mode, trying to get his Loaves into the oven while fighting off various Hungry Denizens, such as a Fox with a distended stomach; such as a fey Robin that would improbably carry the Loaf away, speared on its beak, whenever it had succeeded in dropping a Clonking Rock on your Baker – all of which Marie had learned over the summer by studying the Noble Baker manual while Josh was asleep.

And it had helped, it really had. Josh was less withdrawn lately, and when she came up behind him now while he was playing and said, like, ‘Wow, honey, I didn’t know you could do Pumpernickel,’ or ‘Sweetie, try Serrated Blade, it cuts quicker. Try it while doing Latch the Window,’ he would reach back with his non-controlling hand and swat at her affectionately, and yesterday they’d shared a good laugh when he’d accidentally knocked off her glasses.

So her mother could go right ahead and claim that she was spoiling the kids. These were not spoiled kids. These were well-loved kids. At least she’d never left one of them standing in a blizzard for two hours after a junior-high dance. At least she’d never drunkenly snapped at one of them, ‘I hardly consider you college material.’ At least she’d never locked one of them in a closet (a closet!) while entertaining a literal ditchdigger in the parlor.

Oh, God, what a beautiful world! The autumn colors, that glinting river, that lead-colored cloud pointing down like a rounded arrow at that half-remodeled McDonald’s standing above I-90 like a castle.

This time would be different, she was sure of it. The kids would care for this pet themselves, since a puppy wasn’t scaly and didn’t bite. (‘Ho HO!’ Robert had said the first time the iguana bit him. ‘I see you have an opinion on the matter!’)

Thank you, Lord, she thought, as the Lexus flew through the cornfield. You have given me so much: struggles and the strength to overcome them; grace, and new chances every day to spread that grace around. And in her mind she sang out, as she sometimes did when feeling that the world was good and she had at last found her place in it, ‘Ho HO, ho HO!’

Have a cookie. It’s good for you. You know what your problem is? The problem with you is that your wife is a little too, let me put it this way, she’s intelligent. I hope you don’t mind me saying that. I’m not telling you you should be married to someone ignorant, which has been my experience. I’m only telling you it’s better to have a life partner who is somewhat unintelligent. I know things. She doesn’t feed you because she’s too intelligent. It’s none of my business.

It’s good to see you, from what my eyes can make out. You could be a super-model! It brings a smile to my heart. Your brother is growing a bosom, but you still have all of your hair. Lemme touch it. That beautiful, thick hair. You’re so handsome! So gorgeous! My joy! It doesn’t matter. You should be healthy. That beautiful, Kennedy hair. Enjoy your hair in good health.

Have a drink. Lemme get you a soda from the basement. Go get a soda from the basement. Drink something. Please. For me. I have some orange juice in the freezer. I could warm it up for you. A slice of bread? What would make you happy? You’re gorgeous, I’m telling you. Gorgeous! Just looking at you, I’m forgetting everything. I got a tea bag I used last night that’s still good.

I don’t want to take your time, but I’ll tell you about my heart scan, and then we’ll do your business. I’ll tell you about your cousin Daniel. The machine is recording? Your cousin Daniel called from Brown University last night. The machine heard that? He’s making A’s in all of his classes, and two B’s, and he’s going with a girl, not a schwartze. She’s studying – how do you call it? I can’t remember the American word. Anyway, I don’t know what are her grades, but her family lives in Philadelphia and belongs to Congregation Beth David, which is Reform, but that’s none of my business. Her father is a lawyer, and I don’t know what is her mother. This girl, she’s a little overweight, but otherwise very nice. They’ve been on four dates. Over there there’s a picture of her on the refrigerator.

I’ll tell you about the first schwartze I ever saw. Because I was thinking about Daniel, I was thinking about schwartzes, from the one he went with briefly. Remember that one? It was his life, and that’s why I didn’t say anything, but it was my death. I told him, You can fall in love with anyone if you have to, so why mix blood?

When we came over, in 1950, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a schwartze. Nobody told me. Nobody sat me down and said, By the way, there’s schwartzes. I got off the boat, and I’m holding your mother, and your grandfather, your real grandfather, was looking for our bags, and the first person I saw was a schwartze. I thought maybe he had a disease. What did I know from schwartzes? And then I saw another schwartze, and then another schwartze. It was like seeing green people to me, only with longer arms and bigger lips and, you know, the schwartze-hair. Then, when we opened the grocery store on K Street, that was in a neighborhood that was full of schwartzes. Only schwartzes, I’m telling you, because that was all we could afford at the time. If there had been coins smaller than pennies we would have saved those, too. Money can’t buy you happiness, but happiness isn’t everything. My only point is I don’t have any problem with schwartzes, but I’m happy for Daniel that he found a nice girl, even Reform. Lemme give you a piece of free advice: if you have to wash your hands after going to the bathroom, you did something wrong. I’m talking about number one only.

We knew all the schwartzes that robbed us, and this will be the last thing that I say about schwartzes. They would come in with masks on, and once I said, ‘Jimmy, if you need money, just ask. You don’t have to make a scene.’ And so he asked, ‘Can I have some money, Rhoda?’ I told him not over my dead body. He made to put the gun at my head. I told him I had to refrigerate some cold items, so if he was gonna shoot me he should do it already. He said, ‘I’m not messing around, Rhoda.’ I said, ‘Who’s messing around?’ The schwartzes loved us, to tell you the truth.

I’ll tell you about my heart scan. Have a cookie. I’m not gonna take your time. I got a popsicle in the basement. Your father told me they didn’t find anything. I’m begging you, drink a little Coke for me. I’m not gonna push. I didn’t ask him to double-check. Not even a sip for your grandmother? When the news is that your heart scan is OK, you believe it. I hope you don’t mind me saying that. You’re perfect, but I know things. I told Dr Horowitz that I’ve had the kind of life that Spielberg could make a pretty good movie about. He said he was honored to know me. I’m gonna make to send him a card. I wonder when he’ll be fifty, ’cause I got one of those cards around. Can you drive me to the bank when we’re done with this? And then to the supermarket? And then to the other supermarket? And then to the bakery? There’s a nice Oriental girl there who gives me a discount. She has an ugly face, but that’s her business. Your father would put me in a taxi. He thinks I’m cheap, but he’s the cheap one, because he won’t come out here to get me. It’s good to hold your money in a fist. If you don’t believe me, no one will.

And anyway – you wanna fresh sliced tomato? – some mornings I don’t feel any pain. I’m not complaining. There are worse things than pain. How could I be unhappy with that hair of yours! You probably didn’t appreciate this, but when you were a baby I used to sing you to sleep with the American alphabet. By the time you were two you could speak better than me. That was my Nobel Prize! You were my diamonds and pearls! My revenge!

But then I have pains, I gotta tell you. They start at the ends of my fingernails, almost like little animals biting me. Eventually they spread somewhat. And in the chest. The scan said nothing is wrong, but you think that makes any difference to my chest? Who do you trust? My body isn’t good anymore. What did I expect? With my hemorrhoids it’s OK to be sitting or standing. But even sitting is difficult when I’m making a number two. Can I ask you a personal question? Do you have a list of the serial numbers of your savings bonds? I know it’s none of my business.

How’s your brother? He’s doing great. I think he’s great. I think he’s somewhat lonely. He calls me every day. He thinks I’m lonely. When’s he gonna get married? He needs to meet a nice girl. Such a brain! There’s nothing he can’t do. He’s losing his hair, but that doesn’t matter. Everyone gets older. Whenever I think about you I go crazy. You’re so gorgeous! I’m somewhat lonely in this house. I’ve taken your time. The machine’s working? You think I’m dying. It’s OK. You don’t have to say anything. I know. I know you all have been lying to me. When they bring out the tape recorder, it’s either because of a school project or because you’re dying. And you graduated from Princeton University nine years ago.

So I need you to promise me something. Come close. Somewhat closer. You know that your grandmother never asks anything of you, but this is one thing. I beg you, no matter what happens, no matter where you go in life or how many millions you make, no matter anything, I beg you: never buy a German car.

So wha’d’ya wanna talk about?

‘Well, looks like Soleil is coming to visit,’ Gabrielle’s mother announced, hanging up the phone. Gabrielle was setting the kitchen table while her father concocted a dressing for the salad.

‘You mean S-s-s-soleil,’ Gabrielle’s father said.

‘Stop it,’ her mother said, but laughed. The orange lipstick she’d worn all day at the bank had faded, leaving only a few vertical stripes in the dry creases of her lips.

‘S-s-s-s-stop it,’ her father said.

Gabrielle’s mother turned to her. ‘Soleil stutters.’

The name Soleil began to collect random anecdotes and attributes from the corners of Gabrielle’s memory. Wasn’t Soleil her mother’s college roommate in Hawaii? Gabrielle had seen a photo of this woman waterskiing while wearing a top hat – it made her look six feet tall and, Gabrielle thought, like a magician.

‘Is she still a hand model?’ Gabrielle’s father asked.

Gabrielle suddenly remembered something else. ‘Didn’t she used to go through your garbage?’

‘No, she’s not a hand model. And it was just one time with the garbage,’ her mother said dismissively. ‘She said it was work-related. ’ Gabrielle’s mom shared a smile with her husband. ‘I think, if anything, she had a little crush on your dad.’

Gabrielle didn’t look at her father – his reaction, she was sure, would embarrass or upset her, though she couldn’t say why. She hoped he wouldn’t stutter again; Gabrielle felt sorry for Soleil, and for anyone with any sort of impediment. Her best friend at school, Melanie, had only four toes on her right foot, and Gabrielle had recently been successful at convincing her she could wear sandals.

‘Where’s Soleil living now?’ Gabrielle’s father asked.

‘You know, I don’t know,’ her mother said slowly. ‘Maybe Texas? A part of me thinks she’s still going from friend to friend, man to man.’

‘Huh,’ her father said, sounding impressed.

Twice I have sat next to a famous man on an airplane. The first man was Jason Kidd of the New Jersey Nets. I asked him why he didn’t fly first class, and he said that it was because his cousin worked for United.

‘Wouldn’t that be all the more reason to get first class?’

‘It’s cool,’ he said, unfurling his legs into the aisle.

I let it go, because what do I know about the ins and outs of being a sports celebrity? We didn’t talk for the rest of the flight.

I can’t say the name of the second famous person, but I will tell you that he is a Hollywood heart-throb who is married to a starlet. Also, he has the letter V in his first name. That’s all – I can’t say anything more than that. Think espionage. OK, the end – that really is all. I’ll call him Roy Spivey, which is almost an anagram of his name.

If I were a more self-assured person I would not have volunteered to give up my seat on an overcrowded flight, would not have been upgraded to first class, would not have been seated beside him. This was my reward for being a pushover. He slept for the first hour, and it was startling to see such a famous face look so vulnerable and empty. He had the window seat and I had the aisle, and I felt as though I were watching over him, protecting him from the bright lights and the paparazzi. Sleep, little spy, sleep. He’s actually not little, but we’re all children when we sleep. For this reason, I always let men see me asleep early on in a relationship. It makes them realize that, even though I am five feet eleven, I am fragile and need to be taken care of. A man who can see the weakness of a giant knows that he is a man indeed. Soon small women make him feel almost fey – and, lo, he now has a thing for tall women.

Roy Spivey shifted in his seat, waking. I quickly shut my own eyes, and then slowly opened them, as if I, too, had been sleeping. Oh, but he hadn’t quite opened his yet. I shut mine again and right away opened them, slowly, and he opened his, slowly, and our eyes met, and it seemed as if we had woken from a single sleep, from the dream of our entire lives. Me, a tall but otherwise undistinguished woman; he a distinguished spy, but not really, just an actor, but not really, just a man, maybe even just a boy. That’s the other way that my height can work on men, the more common way: I become their mother.

We talked ceaselessly for the next two hours, having the conversation that is specifically about everything. He told me intimate details about his wife, the beautiful Ms M. Who would have guessed that she was so troubled?

‘Oh, yeah, everything in the tabloids is true.’

‘It is?’

‘Yeah, especially about her eating disorder.’

‘But the affairs?’

‘No, not the affairs, of course not. You can’t believe the ’bloids.’

‘ ’Bloids?’

‘We call them ’bloids. Or tabs.’

When the meals were served it felt as if we were eating breakfast in bed together, and when I got up to use the bathroom he joked, ‘You’re leaving me!’

And I said, ‘I’ll be back!’

As I walked up the aisle, many of the passengers stared at me, especially the women. Word had traveled fast in this tiny flying village. Perhaps there were even some ’bloid writers on the flight. There were definitely some ’bloid readers. Had we been talking loudly? It seemed to me that we were whispering. I looked in the mirror while I was peeing and wondered if I was the plainest person he had ever talked to. I took off my blouse and tried to wash under my arms, which isn’t really possible in such a small bathroom. I tossed handfuls of water toward my armpits and they landed on my skirt. It was made from the kind of fabric that turns much darker when it is wet. This was a real situation I had got myself into. I acted quickly, taking off my skirt and soaking the whole thing in the sink, then wringing it out and putting it back on. I smoothed it out with my hands. There. It was all a shade darker now. I walked back down the aisle, being careful not to touch anyone with my dark skirt.

When Roy Spivey saw me he shouted, ‘You came back!’

And I laughed and he said, ‘What happened to your skirt?’

I sat down and explained the whole thing, starting with the armpits. He listened quietly until I was done.

‘So were you able to wash your armpits in the end?’

‘No.’

‘Are they smelly?’

‘I think so.’

‘I can smell them and tell you.’

‘No.’

‘It’s OK. It’s part of showbiz.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Here.’

He leaned over and pressed his nose against my shirt.

‘It’s smelly.’

‘Oh. Well, I tried to wash it.’

But he was standing up now, climbing past me to the aisle and rummaging around in the overhead bin. He fell back into his seat dramatically, holding a pump bottle.

‘It’s Febreze.’

‘Oh, I’ve heard about that.’

‘It dries in seconds, taking odor with it. Lift up your arms.’

I lifted my arms and with great focus he pumped three hard sprays under each sleeve.

‘It’s best if you keep your arms out until it dries.’

I held them out. One arm extended into the aisle and the other arm crossed his chest, my hand pressing against the window. It was suddenly obvious how tall I was. Only a very tall woman could shoulder such a wingspan. He stared at my arm in front of his chest for a moment, then he growled and bit it. Then he laughed. I laughed, too, but I did not know what this was, this biting of my arm.

‘What was that?’

‘That means I like you!’

‘OK.’

‘Do you want to bite me?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t like me?’

‘No, I do.’

‘Is it because I’m famous?’

‘No.’

‘Just because I’m famous doesn’t mean I don’t need what everyone else needs. Here, bite me anywhere. Bite my shoulder.’

He slid back his jacket, unbuttoned the first four buttons on his shirt and pulled it back, exposing a large, tanned shoulder. I leaned over and very quickly bit it lightly, and then picked up my SkyMall catalogue and began reading. After a minute he re-buttoned himself and slowly picked up his copy of SkyMall. We read like this for a good half-hour.

During this time I was careful not to think about my life. My life was far below us, in an orangey-pink stucco apartment building. It seemed as though I might never have to return to it now. The salt of his shoulder buzzed on the tip of my tongue. I might never stand in the middle of the living room and wonder what to do next. I sometimes stood there for up to two hours, unable to generate enough momentum to eat, to go out, to clean, to sleep. It seemed unlikely that someone who had just bitten and been bitten by a celebrity would have this kind of problem.

I read about vacuum cleaners designed to suck insects out of the air. I studied self-heating towel racks and fake rocks that could hide a key. We were beginning our descent. We adjusted our seat backs and tray-tables. Roy Spivey suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Hey.’

‘Hey,’ I said.

‘Hey, I had an amazing time with you.’

‘I did, too.’

‘I’m going to write down a number and I want you to guard it with your life.’

‘OK.’

‘This phone number falls into the wrong hands and I’ll have to get someone to change the number and that is a big headache.’

‘OK.’

He wrote the number on a page from the SkyMall catalogue and ripped it out and pressed it into my palm.

‘This is my kid’s nanny’s personal line. The only people who call her on this line are her boyfriend and her son. So she’ll always answer it. You’ll always get through. And she’ll know where I am.’

I looked at the number.

‘It’s missing a digit.’

‘I know, I want you to just memorize the last number, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘It’s four.’

Cindy Stubenstock is trading up – at a recent auction, she flipped two Gurskys, an early Yuskavage and her husband’s bonus, and was on the phone later live from London topping the bidding on a rare Picasso etching that looked ‘beautiful over the fireplace’.

‘Gives whole new meaning to up in smoke,’ the cryptic British auctioneer mumbled under his breath.

Now Cindy and her Scarsdale sisterhood – aka the ladies who linger at lunch – are on the tarmac at Teterboro, wandering from plane to plane.

‘There never used to be so many,’ one says.

‘Do we really need to take two planes?’

‘Well, there are six of us and I just hate being crowded, and besides, what if I want to leave early?’ They all nod, knowing the feeling.

‘Just the thought of being trapped somewhere makes me nervous – does anyone have anything – a little blue, a little yellow?’

‘I’ve got Ativan.’

‘I’ll take it.’

‘We’re going to Miami, it’s not the rain forest, not the darkest Peru, you can get a commercial flight out any time you want – just call JetBlue,’ one of the women says.

And the others look at her horrified, aghast, shocked that she can even say the words ‘commerical flight’ so easily, without pause. Flying private is one of the perks of being who they are; it’s why they put up with so much. NO airport security.

‘Soon that will change, they’re going to have scented dogs everywhere.’

‘It’s not scented dogs, it’s sniffing dogs. Scented dogs would be like soaps, verbena, vanilla, Macchu Picchu.’

‘Why do you always correct me? I’m an old woman – leave me alone.’

‘You’re forty-eight, you’re not old.’

And then there is silence.

Long had the poets pointed to the steep green hills around the village, noting in prose and song that with their irrational curves, their ridges rising and falling just so, the low mountains resembled the shapes of sleeping men and women. Most practical people thought the poets were pushing it a bit too far, poets being poets, but then something new happened one morning, just after most of the humans, about five or so hundred in that village at that time, were finishing their breakfast and dressing their children.

The land shook. Homes, all of them built with stone and barley, trembled and soon collapsed. Animals stampeded, birds dropped from the sky, and in the midst of the chaos, the first giant emerged. The soft green rolls of the hillside gave way to a pale shoulder, an arm of twisted muscle, a waist, a hip. In minutes the hill had become a man, a colossal man everywhere striped with dirt and grass, rubbing his eyes. He sat up, his legs akimbo before him, and he began chuck-ling. He wiped the grass from his bald head and his shoulders, swept the dirt from his stomach, and, while he did so, he laughed softly, nodding to himself as if something long mysterious was finally clear.

His name was Soren.

Soon after, a mile or so away, the ground rattled again. The villagers looked south and saw another hillside rise. It was a range that the poet Eythor had called The Woman, and all the humans who watched the giant emerge from it thought, Too bad Eythor is dead, he would have loved to see this. This hill became a woman, as tall as Soren, and she rose from the earth covered in oil and soot, hair long and wild. Like Soren, she was greatly amused and only somewhat surprised by her awakening. She wiped her eyes clean and picked stones from between her aristocratic toes.

This was Magdelena.

By the time Theo, the last giant, arose from the hill closest to the human settlements, his arrival caused little notice. He was shorter than the other two giants, with a ruddy complexion and wide-set eyes. While Soren and Magdelena were tall, of noble and sinewy form, Theo had long arms but short legs, a flat face and narrow shoulders. But no one noticed the differences between them, at least not on that day. Already four people were dead, crushed under falling debris. There were tears, prayers, wails of men and women. Already the landscape had been broken, recast. Already the sky was brown with dust, and it was into this day, full of misery and regret and rebirth, that Theo awakened.

I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time. (Which is itself hardly an uncommon situation, for me.)

This was in the headquarters of the Criterion Collection, on 52nd Street and Third Avenue, on a weekday afternoon. I’d gone there to record a series of voiceovers for one of Criterion’s high-end DVD reissues, a ‘lost’ 1950s film noir called The City is a Maze. My role was to play the voice of that film’s director, the late émigré auteur Von Leopold Dresden. I would read a series of statements culled from Dresden’s interviews and articles, as part of a supplemental documentary being prepared by the curatorial geniuses at Criterion, a couple of whom I’d met at a dinner party. In drawing me into the project they’d supplied me with a batch of research materials, which I’d browsed unsystematically, and a working version of their reconstruction of the film, in order for me to glean what the excitement was about. It was the first I’d heard of Dresden, so this was hardly a labor of passion. But the enthusiasm of buffs is infectious, and I liked the movie. I no longer considered myself a working actor. This was the only sort of stuff I did anymore, riding the exhaust of my former and vanishing celebrity, the smoky half-life of a child star. An eccentric favor, really. Anyway, I was curious to see the inside of Criterion’s operation. In those days, with Janice far away, I lived too much on the surface of things, parties, gossip, assignations in which I was the go-between or vicarious friend. Workplaces fascinated me, the places where Manhattan’s veneer gave way to what I liked to think of as the practical world.

I recorded Dresden’s words in a sound chamber in the technical wing of Criterion’s crowded, ramshackle offices. In the room outside the chamber, where the sound man sat giving me cues through a headset, a restorer also sat peering at a screen and guiding a cursor with a mouse, diligently erasing celluloid scratches and blots, frame by digital frame, from the bare bodies of hippies cavorting in a mud puddle. I was told he was restoring I Am Curious (Yellow). Afterwards I was retrieved by the producer who’d enlisted me, Susan Eldred. It had been Susan and another colleague I’d met at the dinner party – unguarded, embracing people with a passion for a world of cinematic minutiae, for whom I’d felt an instantaneous homely affection. Susan led me to her office, a cavern with one paltry window and shelves stacked with VHS tapes, more lost films petitioning for Criterion’s rescue. Susan shared her office, it appeared. Not with the colleague from the party, but another person. He sat beneath the straining shelves, notebook in hand, gaze distant. It seemed too small an office to share. The glamour of Criterion’s brand wasn’t matched by these scenes of thrift and improvisation I’d gathered from my behind-the-scenes glimpse, but why should it have been? No sooner had Susan introduced me to Perkus Tooth and given me an invoice to sign than she was called away for some consultation elsewhere.

He was, that first time, in what I would soon learn to call one of his ‘ellipsistic’ moods. Perkus Tooth himself later supplied that descriptive word: ellipsistic, derived from ellipsis. A species of blank interval, a nod or fugue in which he was neither depressed nor undepressed, not struggling to finish a thought or begin one. Merely between. Pause button pushed. I certainly stared. With Tooth’s turtle posture and the utter slackness of his being, his receding hairline and antique manner of dress – trim-tapered suit, ferociously wrinkled silk with the shine worn off, over moldering tennis shoes – I could have taken him for elderly. When he stirred, his hand brushing the open notebook page as if taking dictation with an invisible pen, and I read his pale, adolescent features, I guessed he was in his forties – still ten or fifteen years wrong, though Perkus Tooth had been out of the sunlight for a little while. He was in his thirties, no older than me. I’d mistaken him for old because I’d taken him for important. He now looked up and I saw one undisciplined hazel eye wander, under its calf-lid, toward his nose. That eye wanted to cross, to discredit Perkus Tooth’s whole sober aura with a comic jape. His other eye ignored the gambit, trained on me.

‘You’re the actor.’

‘Yes.’

‘So, I’m doing the liner notes. For The City is a Maze, I mean.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘I do a lot of them. Prelude to a Certain Midnight… Recalcitrant Women… The Unholy City… Echolalia…’

‘All film noir?’

‘Oh, gosh, no. You’ve never seen Herzog’s Echolalia?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I wrote the liner note, but it isn’t exactly released yet. I’m still trying to convince Eldred – ’

Perkus Tooth, I’d learn, called everyone by their last name. As though famous, or arrested. His mind’s landscape was epic, dotted with towering figures like Easter Island heads. At that moment Susan Eldred returned.

‘So,’ he said to her, ‘have you got that tape of Echolalia around here somewhere?’ He cast his eyes, the good left and the meandering right, at her shelves, the cacophony of titles scribbled on labels there. ‘I want him to see it.’

Susan raised her eyebrows and he shrank. ‘I don’t know where it is,’ she said.

‘Never mind.’

‘Have you been harassing my guest, Perkus?’

‘What do you mean?’

Susan Eldred turned to me and collected the signed release, and we made our farewell. Then, as I got to the elevator, Perkus Tooth hurried through the sliding door to join me, crushing his antique felt hat onto his crown as he did. The elevator, like so many others behind midtown façades, was tiny and rattletrap, little more than a glorified dumb-waiter – there was no margin for pretending we hadn’t just been in that office together. Bad eye migrating slightly, Perkus Tooth gave me a lunar look, neither unfriendly nor apologetic. Despite the vintage costume, he wasn’t some dapper retro-fetishist. His shirt’s collar was grubby and crumpled; the green-gray sneakers like mummified sponges glimpsed within a janitor’s bucket.

‘So,’ he said again. This ‘so’ of Perkus’s – his habit of introducing any subject as if in resumption of earlier talk – wasn’t in any sense coercive. Rather, it was as if Perkus had startled himself from a daydream, heard an egging voice in his head and mistaken it for yours. ‘So, I’ll lend you my own copy of Echolalia, even though I never lend anything. Because I think you ought to see it.’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a sort of essay film. Herzog shot it on the set of Morrison Roog’s Nowhere Near. Roog’s movie was never finished, you know. Echolalia documents Herzog’s attempts to interview Marlon Brando on Roog’s set. Brando doesn’t want to give the interview, and whenever Herzog corners him Brando just parrots whatever Herzog’s said… you know, echolalia…’

‘Yes,’ I said, flummoxed, as I would so often later find myself, by Tooth’s torrential specifics.

‘But it’s also the only way you can see any of Nowhere Near. Morrison Roog destroyed the footage, so the scenes reproduced in Echolalia are, ironically, all that remains of the film – ’

Why ‘ironically’? I doubted my hopes of inserting the question. ‘It sounds incredible,’ I said.

‘Of course you know Roog’s suicide was probably faked.’

My nod was a lie. The doors opened, and we stumbled together out to the pavement, tangling at every threshold: ‘You first – ’ ‘Oops – ’ ‘After you – ’ ‘Sorry.’ We faced one another, October mid-Wednesday Manhattan throngs islanding us in their stream. Perkus grew formally clipped, perhaps belatedly eager to show he wasn’t harassing me.

‘So, I’m off.’

‘Very good to see you.’ I’d quit using the word ‘meet’ long ago, replacing it with this foggy equivocation, chastened after the thousandth time someone explained to me that we’d actually met before.

‘So – ’ He ground to a halt, expectant.

‘Yes?’

‘If you want to come by for the tape…’

I might have been failing some test, I wasn’t sure. Perkus Tooth dealt in occult knowledge, and measured with secret callipers. I’d never know when I’d crossed an invisible frontier, visible to Perkus in the air between us.

‘Do you want to give me a card?’

He scowled. ‘Eldred knows where to find me.’ His pride intervened, and he was gone.

For a call so life-altering as mine to Susan Eldred’s, I ought to have had some fine reason. Yet here I was, dialing Criterion’s receptionist later that afternoon, asking first for Perkus Tooth and then, when she claimed no familiarity with that name, for Susan Eldred, spurred by nothing better than a cocktail of two parts whim and one part guilt. Manhattan’s volunteer, that’s me, I may as well admit it. Was I curious about Echolalia, or Morrison Roog’s faked suicide, or Perkus Tooth’s curious intensities and lulls, or the slippage in his right eye’s gaze? All of it and none of it, that’s the only answer. Perhaps I already adored Perkus Tooth, and already sensed that it was his friendship I required to usher me into the strange next phase of my being. To unmoor me from the curious eddy into which I’d drifted. How very soon after our first encounter I’d come to adore and need Perkus makes it awfully hard to know to what extent such feelings were inexplicably under way in Susan Eldred’s office or that elevator.

‘Your office mate,’ I said. ‘They didn’t recognize his name at the front desk. Maybe I heard it wrong – ’

‘Perkus?’ Susan laughed. ‘He doesn’t work here.’

‘He said he wrote your liner notes.’

‘He’s written a couple, sure. But he doesn’t work here. He just comes up and occupies space sometimes. I’m sort of Perkus’s babysitter. I don’t even always notice him anymore – you saw how he can be. I hope he wasn’t bothering you.’

‘No… no. I was hoping to get in touch with him, actually.’

Susan Eldred gave me Perkus Tooth’s number, then paused. ‘I guess you must have recognized his name…’

‘No.’

‘Well, in fact he’s really quite an amazing critic. When I was at NYU my friends and I all used to idolize him. When I first got the chance to hire him to do a liner note I was quite in awe. It was shocking how young he was, it seemed like I’d grown up seeing his posters and stuff.’

‘Posters?’

‘He used to do this thing where he’d write these rants on posters and put them up all around Manhattan, these sort of brilliant critiques of things, current events, media rumours, public art. They were a kind of public art, I guess. Everyone thought it was very mysterious and important. Then he got hired by Rolling Stone. They gave him this big column, he was sort of, I don’t know, Hunter Thompson meets Pauline Kael, for about five minutes. If that makes any sense.’

‘Sure.’

‘Anyway, the point is, he sort of used up a lot of people’s patience with a certain kind of… paranoid stuff. I didn’t really get it until I started working with him. I mean, I like Perkus a lot. I just don’t want you to feel I wasted your time, or got you enmeshed in any… schemes.’

People could be absurdly protective, as if a retired actor’s hours were so precious. This was, of course, a second-hand affect, a leakage from Janice’s other-worldly agendas. I was famously in love with a woman who had no time to spare, not even a breath, for she dwelled in a place beyond time or the reach of anyone’s Rolodex, her every breath measured out of pressurized tanks. If an astronaut made room for me on her schedule, my own prerogatives must be as crucial as an astronaut’s. The opposite was true.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’ll be sure not to get enmeshed.’

Perkus Tooth was my neighbor, it turned out. His apartment was six blocks from mine, on East 84th Street, in one of those anonymous warrens tucked behind innocuous storefronts, buildings without lobbies, let alone doormen. The shop downstairs, Brandy’s Piano Bar, was a corny-looking nightspot I could have passed a thousand times without once noticing. BRANDY’S CUSTOMERS, PLEASE RESPECT OUR NEIGHBORS! pleaded a small sign at the doorway, suggesting a whole tale of complaint calls to the police about noise and fumes. To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement-demolishing workmen periodically wrench open to the daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances. We only pretend to live on something as orderly as a grid. Waiting for Perkus Tooth’s door’s buzzer to sound and finding my way upstairs, I felt my interior map expand to allow for the reality of this place, the corridor floor’s lumpy checkerboard mosaic, the cloying citrus of some superintendent’s disinfectant oil, the bank of dented brass mailboxes and the keening of a dog from behind an upstairs door, alerted to the buzzer and my scuffling boot heels. I have trouble believing anything exists until I know it bodily.

Perkus Tooth widened his door just enough for me to slip inside, directly into his kitchen. Perkus, though barefoot, wore another antique-looking suit, green corduroy this time, the only formal thing my entry revealed. The place was a bohemian grotto, the kitchen a kitchen only in the sense of having a sink and stove built in, and a sticker-laden refrigerator wedged into an alcove beside the bathroom door. Books filled the open cabinet spaces above the sink. The countertop was occupied by a CD player and hundreds of disks, in and out of jewel cases, many hand-labeled with a permanent marker. A hot-water pipe whined. Beyond, the other rooms of the apartment were dim at midday, the windows draped. They likely only looked onto ventilation shafts or a paved alley anyway.

And then there were the broadsides Susan Eldred had described. Unframed, thumb-tacked to every wall bare of bookshelves, in the kitchen and in the darkened rooms, were Perkus Tooth’s famous posters, their paper yellowing, the lettering veering from a stylish cartoonist’s or grafittist’s hand-made font to the obsessive scrawl of an outsider artist, or a schizophrenic patient’s pages reproduced in his doctor’s monograph. I recognized them. Remembered them. They’d been ubiquitous downtown a decade before, on construction-site boards, over subway advertisements, another element in the graphic cacophony of the city one gleans helplessly at the edges of vision.

Perkus retreated to give me clearance to shut the door. Stranded in the room’s center in his suit and bare feet, palms defensively wide as if expecting something unsavory to be tossed his way, Perkus reminded me of an Edvard Munch painting I’d once seen, a self-portrait showing the painter wide-eyed and whiskered, shrunken within his clothes. Which is to say, again, that Perkus Tooth seemed older than his age. (I’d never once see Perkus without some part of a suit, even if it was only the pants, topped with a filthy white t-shirt. He never wore jeans.)

‘I’ll get you the videotape,’ he said, as if I’d challenged him.

‘Great.’

‘Let me find it. You can sit down – ’ He pulled out a chair at a small, linoleum-topped table, like something you’d see in a diner. The chair matched the table – a dinette set, a collector’s item. Perkus Tooth was nothing if not a collector. ‘Here.’ He took a perfect finished joint from where it waited in the lip of an ashtray, clamped it in his mouth and ignited the tip, then handed it to me unquestioningly. It takes one, I suppose, to know one. I drew on it while he went into the other room. When he returned – with a VHS cassette and his sneakers and a balled-up pair of white socks – he accepted the joint from me and smoked an inch of it himself, intently.

‘Do you want to get something to eat? I haven’t been out all day.’ He laced his hi-tops.

‘Sure,’ I said.

Out, for Perkus Tooth, I’d now begun to learn, wasn’t usually far. He liked to feed at a glossy hamburger palace around the corner on Second Avenue, called Jackson Hole, a den of gleaming chrome and newer, faker versions of the linoleum table in his kitchen, lodged in chubby red-vinyl booths. At four in the afternoon we were pretty well alone there, the jukebox blaring hits to cover our bemused, befogged talk. It had been a while since I’d smoked pot; everything was dawning strange, signals received through an atmosphere murky with hesitations, the whole universe drifting untethered like Perkus Tooth’s vagrant eyeball. The waitress seemed to know Perkus, but he didn’t greet her or touch his menu. He asked for a cheeseburger deluxe and a Coca-Cola. Helpless, I dittoed his order. Perkus seemed to dwell in this place as he had at Criterion’s offices, indifferently, obliquely, as if he’d been born there yet still hadn’t taken notice of it.

In the middle of our meal Perkus halted some rant about Werner Herzog or Marlon Brando or Morrison Roog to announce what he’d made of me so far. ‘So, you’ve gotten by to this point by being cute, haven’t you, Chase?’ His spidery fingers, elbow-propped on the linoleum, kept the oozing, gory, Jackson Hole burger aloft to mask his expression, and cantilevered far enough from his lap to protect those dapper threads. One eye fixed me while the other crawled, now seeming a scalpel in operation on my own face. ‘You haven’t changed, you’re like a dreamy child, that’s the secret of your appeal. But they love you. They watch you like you’re still on television.’

‘Who?’

‘The rich people. The Manhattanites – you know who I mean.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re supposed to be the saddest man in Manhattan,’ he said. ‘Because of the astronaut who can’t come home.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s what they adore.’

‘I guess so.’

‘So, just keep your eyes and ears open,’ he said. ‘You’re in a position to learn things.’

What things? Before I could ask, we were off again. Perkus’s spiel encompassed Monte Hellman, eBay, Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, the Mafia’s blackmailing of J. Edgar Hoover over erotic secrets (resulting in the bogus amplification of Cold War fear and therefore the whole of our contemporary landscape), Vladimir Mayakovsky and the Futurists, Chet Baker, Nothingism, the ruination Giuliani’s administration had brought to the sacred squalor of Times Square, the genius of The Gnuppet Show, Frederick Exley, Jacques Rivette’s impossible-to-see thirteen-hour movie Out 1, corruption of the arts by commerce generally, Slavoj Zizek on Hitch-cock, Franz Marplot’s biography of G. K. Chesterton, Norman Mailer on Muhammad Ali, Norman Mailer on graffiti and the space program, Brando as dissident icon, Brando as sexual saint, Brando as Napoleon in exile. Names I knew and didn’t. Others I’d heard once and never troubled to wonder about. Mailer, again and again, and Brando even more often – Perkus Tooth’s primary idols seemed to be this robust and treacherous pair, which only made Perkus seem frailer and more harmless by contrast, without ballast in his pencil-legged suit. Maybe he ate Jackson Hole burgers in an attempt to burgeon himself, seeking girth in hopes of attracting the attention of Norman and Marlon, his chosen peers.

He had the waitress refill his gallon-sized Coke, then, as our afternoon turned to evening, washed it all down with black coffee. In our talk, marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloudbank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes. Did I read the New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the New Yorker’s font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth’s mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine’s oppressive context. Once, I’d entered his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. ‘So, how’, he asked me another time, apropos of nothing, ‘does a New Yorker writer become a New Yorker writer?’ The falsely casual ‘so’ masking a pure anxiety. It wasn’t a question with an answer.

But I’m confused in this account, surely. Can we have discussed so much the very first time? The New Yorker, at least. Giuliani’s auctioning 42nd Street to Disney. Mailer on NASA as a bureaucracy stifling dreams. J. Edgar Hoover in the Mafia’s thrall, hyping Reds, instilling self-patrolling fear in the American Mind. In the midst of these variations the theme was always ingeniously and excitingly retrieved. In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself.

Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked. Perkus Tooth used this word without explaining, and in the way that the Mafia itself would: to mean a whack, a rub-out. Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot. Further: always to blame was everyone; when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself. Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. The worst thing was to be sure you knew what you knew, the mistake the New Yorker’s font induced. The horizon of everyday life was a mass daydream – below it lay the crucial material, the crux. By now we’d paid for our burgers and returned to his apartment. At his dinette table we sat and he strained some pot for seeds, then rolled another joint. The dope came out of a little plastic box marked with a laser-printed label reading CHRONIC in rainbow colors, a kind of brand name. We smoked the new joint relentlessly to a nub and went on talking, Perkus now free to gesticulate as he hadn’t at Jackson Hole. Yet he never grew florid, never, in all his ferment, hyperventilated or, like some epileptic, bit his tongue. The feverish words were delivered with a merciless cool. Like the cut of his suit, wrinkled though it might be. And the obsessively neat lettering on the VHS tape and on his CDs. Perkus Tooth might have one crazy eye, but it served almost as a warning not to underestimate his scruples, how attentively he measured his listener’s skepticism, making those minute adjustments that were the signature of his or anyone’s sanity – the interpersonal realpolitik of persuasion. The eye was mad and the rest of him was almost steely.

Perkus rifled through his CDs to find a record he wished to play for me, a record I didn’t know – Peter Blegvad’s ‘(Something Else) Is Working Harder’. The song was an angry and incoherent blues, it sounded to me, gnarled with disgruntlement at those who ‘get away with murder’. Then, as if riled by the music, he turned and said, almost savagely, ‘So, I’m not a rock critic, you know.’

‘Okay.’ This was a point I found easy enough to grant.

‘People will say I am, because I wrote for Rolling Stone – but I hardly ever write about music.’ In fact, the broadsides hung in his rooms seemed to be full of references to pop songs, but I hesitated to point out the contradiction.

He seemed to read my mind. ‘Even when I do, I don’t use that language.’

‘Oh.’

‘Those people, the rock critics, I mean – do you want to know what they really are?’

‘Oh, sure – what are they?’

‘Super-high-functioning autistics. Oh, I don’t mean they’re diagnosed or anything. But I diagnose them that way. They’ve got Asperger’s Syndrome. I mean, in the same sense that, say, David Byrne or Al Gore has it. They’re brilliant, but they’re social misfits.’

‘Uh, how do you know?’ As far as I knew, I’d never met anyone with Asperger’s Syndrome, or, for that matter, a rock critic. (Although I had once seen David Byrne at a party.) Yet I knew enough already to find it odd hearing Perkus Tooth denouncing misfits.

‘It’s the way they talk.’ He leaned in close to me, and demonstrated his point as he spoke. ‘They aspirate their vowels nearer to the front of their mouths.’

‘Wow.’

‘And when you see them talking in groups they do it even more. It’s self-reinforcing. Rock critics gather for purposes of mutual consolation, though they’d never call it that. They believe they’re experts.’ Perkus, whether he knew it or not, continued to aspirate his vowels at the front of his mouth as he made his case. ‘They can’t see the forest for the trees.’

‘Thelf-reinforthing exthperts,’ I said, trying it on for size. ‘Can’t thee the foretht for the threes.’ I am by deepest instinct a mimic. Anyway, a VHS tape labeled ECHOLALIA lay on the table between us.

‘That’s right,’ said Perkus seriously. ‘Some of them even whistle when they speak.’

‘Whisthle?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Thank God we’re not rock critics.’

‘You can say that again.’ He tongued the gum on another joint he’d been assembling, then inspected it for smoke-worthiness, running it under his odd eye as if scanning for a barcode. Satisfied, he ignited it. ‘So, I’m self-medicating,’ he explained. ‘I smoke grass because of the headaches.’

‘Migraine headaches?’

‘Cluster headaches. It’s a variant of migraine. One side of the head.’ With two fingers he tapped his skull – of course it was his right side, the headaches gravitating toward the deviant eye. ‘They’re called cluster headaches because they come in runs, every day for a week or two at exactly the same time. Like a clock, like a rooster crowing.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘I know. Also, there’s this visual effect… a blindspot on one side…’ Again, his right hand waved. ‘Like a blot in the center of my visual field.’

A riddle: what do you get when you cross a blindspot with a wandering eye? But we’d never once mentioned his eye, so I hung fire. ‘The pot helps?’ I asked instead.

‘The thing about a migraine-type experience is that it’s like being only half alive. You find yourself walking through this tomb-like world, everything gets far away and kind of dull and dead. Smoking pulls me back into the world, it restores my appetites for food and sex and conversation.’

Well, I had evidence of food and conversation – Perkus Tooth’s appetites in sex were to remain mysterious to me for the time being. This was still the first of the innumerable afternoons and evenings I surrendered to Perkus’s kitchen table, to his smoldering ashtray and pot of scorched coffee, to his ancient CD boombox, which audibly whined as it spun in the silent gap between tracks, to our booth around the corner at Jackson Hole when a fierce craving for burgers and cola came over us, as it often did. Soon enough those days all blurred happily together, for in the disconsolate year of Janice’s broken orbit Perkus Tooth was probably my best friend. I suppose Perkus was the curiosity, I the curiosity-seeker, but he surely added me to his collection as much as the reverse.

I did watch Echolalia. The way Brando tormented his would-be interviewer was funny, but the profundity of the whole thing was lost on me. I suppose I was unfamiliar with the required context. When I returned it I said so, and Perkus frowned.

‘Have you seen The Nascent?’

‘Nope.’

‘Have you seen Anything That Hides?’

‘Not that one either.’

‘Have you seen any of Morrison Roog’s films, Chase?’

‘Not knowingly.’

‘How do you survive?’ he said, not unkindly. ‘How do you even get along in the world, not understanding what goes on around you?’

‘That’s what I have you for. You’re my brain.’

‘Ah, with your looks and my brain, we could go far,’ he joked in a Bogart voice.

‘Exactly.’

Something lit up inside him, then, and he climbed on his chair in his bare feet and performed a small monkey-like dance, singing impromptu, ‘If I’m your brain you’re in a whole lot of trouble… you picked the wrong brain!’ Perkus had a kind of beauty in his tiny, wiry body and his almost feral, ax-blade skull, with its gracefully tapered widow’s peak and delicate features. ‘Your brain’s on drugs, your brain’s on fire…’

Despite this lunatic warning, Perkus took charge of what he considered my education, loading me up with tapes and DVDs, sitting me down for essential viewings. Perkus’s apartment was a place for consuming archival wonders, whether at his kitchen table or in the sagging chairs before his flatscreen television: bootlegged unreleased recordings by those in Tooth’s musical pantheon, like Chet Baker, Nina Simone or Neil Young, and grainy tapes of scarce film noir taped off late-night television broadcasts. Among these treasures was a videotape of a ninety-minute episode of the detective show Columbo, from 1981, directed by Paul Mazursky and starring John Cassavetes as a wife-murdering orchestra conductor, the foil to Peter Falk’s famously rumpled detective. It also featured, in roles as Cassavetes’s two spoiled children, Molly Ringwald and myself. The TV-movie was something Mazursky had tossed off around the time of the making of Tempest, a theatrical release featuring Cassavetes and Ringwald, though not, alas, me. That pretty well summed up my luck as an actor, the ceiling I’d always bumped against – television but never the big screen.

Cassavetes was among Perkus’s holy heroes, so he’d captured this broadcast, recorded it off some twilight-hour rerun. The tape was complete with vintage commercials from the middle eighties, O. J. Simpson sprinting through airports and so forth, all intact. I hadn’t seen the Columbo episode since it was first aired, and it gave me a feeling of seasick familiarity. Not that Mazursky, Falk, Cassevetes and Ringwald had been family to me – I’d barely known them – yet still it felt like watching a home movie. And it led to the odd sense that in some fashion I’d already been here in Perkus’s apartment for twenty-odd years before I’d met him. His knowledge of culture, and the weirdly synesthetic connections he traced inside it, made it seem as though this moment of our viewing the tape together was fated. Indeed, as if at twelve years old I’d acted in this forgettable and forgotten television show alongside John Cassevetes as a form of private communion with my future friend Perkus Tooth.

Of course Perkus paid scant attention to the sulky children tugging at Cassavetes’s sleeves – his interest was in the scenes between the great director and Peter Falk, as he scoured the TV-movie for any whiff of genius that recalled their great work together in Cassevetes’s own films, or in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky. He intoned reverently at the sort of details I never bothered to observe, either then, as a child actor on the set, or as a viewer now. Of course he also catalogued speculative connections among the galaxy of cultural things that interested him.

For instance: ‘This sorry little TV movie is one of Myrna Loy’s last-ever appearances. You know, Myrna Loy, The Thin Man? She was in dozens of silent movies in the twenties, too.’ My silence permitted him to assume I grasped these depth soundings. ‘Also in Lonelyhearts, in 1958, with Montgomery Clift and Robert Ryan.’

‘Ah.’

‘Based on the Nathanael West novel.’

‘Ah.’

‘Of course it isn’t really any good.’

‘Mmm.’ I gazed at the old lady in the scene with Falk, waiting to feel what Perkus felt.

‘Montgomery Clift is buried in the Quaker cemetery in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn. Very few people realize he’s there, or that there even is a cemetery in Prospect Park. When I was a teenager a girlfriend and I snuck in there at night, scaled the fence and looked around, but we couldn’t find his grave, just a whole bunch of voodoo chicken heads and other burnt offerings.’

‘Wow.’

Only half listening to Perkus, I went on staring at my childhood self, a ghost disguised as a twelve-year-old, haunting the corridors of the mansion owned by Cassavetes’s character, the villainous conductor. It seemed Perkus’s collection was a place where one might turn a corner and unexpectedly find oneself, a conspiracy that was also a mirror.

Perkus went on connecting dots: ‘Peter Falk was in The Gnuppet Movie, too, right around this time.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah. So was Marlon Brando.’

Marijuana might have been constant, but coffee was Perkus Tooth’s muse. With his discombobulated eye Perkus seemed to be watching his precious cup always while he watched you. It might not be a defect so much as a security system, an evolutionary defense against having his java stolen. Once, left alone briefly in his place, among his scattered papers I found a shred of lyric, the only writing I ever saw from Perkus that wasn’t some type of critical exegesis. An incomplete, second-guessed ode, it read: ‘Oh caffeine! / you contemporary fiend screen / / through my face – ’ And yes, the sheet of paper was multiply imprinted with rings by his coffee mug.

It was impossible for me not to picture the fugue that eventually produced this writing being interrupted by a seizure of migraine, the pen dropping from Perkus’s hand as he succumbed to one of his cluster headaches. Impossible not to picture it this way because of the day I walked in on him in the grip of a fresh one. He’d e-mailed earlier to invite me to drop by, then fell victim. The door was unlocked and he called me inside from where he lay on his couch, in his suit-pants and a yellowed t-shirt, with a cool cloth draped over his eyes. He told me to sit down, and not to worry, but his voice was withered, drawn down inside his skinny chest. I was persuaded at once that he spoke to me from within that half-life, that land of the dead he’d so precisely evoked with his first descriptions of cluster headache.

‘It’s a bad one,’ he said. ‘The first day is always the worst. I can’t look at the light.’

‘You never know when it’s coming?’

‘There’s a kind of warning aura an hour or two before,’ he croaked out. ‘The world begins shrinking…’

I moved for his bathroom, and he said: ‘Don’t go in there. I puked.’

What I did I will admit is unlike me: I went in and cleaned up Perkus’s vomit. Further, seeking out a sponge in his kitchen sink, I ran into a mess there, a cereal bowl half filled with floating Cheerios, cups with coffee evaporating to filmy stain-rings. While Perkus lay on the couch breathing heavily through a washcloth, I quietly tinkered at his kitchen, putting things in a decent order, not wanting him to slip into derangement and squalor on what it had suddenly occurred to me was my watch – he appeared so disabled I could imagine him not budging from that couch for days. And I’d still never seen another soul in Perkus’s apartment, though he claimed to have other visitors. The dinette table was scattered with marijuana, half of it pushed through a metal strainer, the rest still bunchy with seeds. I swept it all back into a plastic box labeled FUNKY MONKEY – another of his dealer’s brand names – and scooped the joints Perkus had completed into the Altoids tin he kept for that purpose. Then, growing compulsive (I do keep my own apartment neat, though I’d before never felt any anxiety at Perkus’s squalor), I started reorganizing his scattered CDs, matching the disks to their dislocated jewel cases. This kind of puttering may be how I set myself at ease, another type of self-medication. It was certainly the case that blundering in on Perkus’s headache had made me self-conscious and pensive, but I felt I couldn’t go. I made no attempt to conceal my actions, and Perkus offered no comment, apart from the slightest moan. But after I’d been clattering at his compact disks for a while he said: ‘Find Sandy Bull.’

‘What?’

‘Sandy Bull… he’s a guitarist… the songs are very long… I can tolerate them in this state… it gives me something to listen to besides this throbbing…’

I found the disk and put it in his player. The music seemed to me insufferably droning, psychedelic in a minor key, more suitable for a harem than a sickroom. But then I really know nothing about music or headaches.

‘You can go…’ said Perkus. ‘I’ll be fine…’

‘Do you need food?’

‘No… when it’s like this I can’t eat…’

Well, Perkus couldn’t eat one of Jackson Hole’s fist-sized burgers, I’d grant that. I wondered if a plate of some vegetable or a bowl of soup might be called for, but I wasn’t going to mother him. So I did go, after lowering the lights but leaving the creepy music loud, as Perkus wished. I found myself strangely bereft, discharged into the vacant hours. I’d come to rely on my Perkus afternoons, and how they turned into evenings. The light outside was all wrong. I realized I couldn’t recall a time I’d not gone back through his lobby, brain pleasantly hazy, into a throng of Brandy’s Piano Bar patrons ignoring the sign and smoking and babbling outside on the pavement, while piano tinkling and erratic choruses of sing-along drifted from within the bar to the street. Now all was quiet, the stools upturned on the tables. And all I could think of was Perkus, stilled on the couch, his lids swollen beneath the washcloth.

The next time I saw Perkus I made the mistake of asking if his tendency to veer into ellipsis was in any way connected to the cluster migraines. He’d been bragging the week before about his capacity for shifting into the satori-like state he called ‘ellipsistic’; how, when he ventured there, he glimpsed bonus dimensions, worlds inside the world. Most of his proudest writing, he’d explained, emanated from some glimpse of this variety of ellipsistic knowledge.

‘There’s no connection,’ he said now, where we sat in our Jackson Hole booth, his distaff eye bulging. ‘Cluster’s a death state, where all possibilities shut down… I’m not myself there… I’m not anyone. Ellipsis is mine, Chase.’

‘I only wondered if they might somehow be two sides of the same coin…’ Or two ways of peering out of the same skull, I thought but didn’t say.

‘I can’t even begin to explain. It’s totally different.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said spontaneously, wanting to calm him.

‘Sorry for what?’ He’d spat out a gobbet of burger in his fury at refuting me.

‘I… didn’t mean… anything.’

‘Ellipsis is like a window opening, Chase. Or like – art. It stops time.’

‘Yes, you’ve said.’ The clot of chewed beef sat beside his napkin, unnoticed except by me.

‘Cluster, on the other hand – they’re enemies.’

‘Yes.’ He’d persuaded me. It hadn’t taken much. I wanted to persuade him, now, to see an Eastern healer I knew, a master of Chinese medicine who, operating out of offices in Chelsea, and with a waiting list of six months or more, ministered to Manhattan’s wealthy and famous, charming and acupuncturing away their ornate stresses and decadent ills. I promised myself I’d try, later, when Perkus’s anger cooled. I wanted so badly for him to have his ellipsis, have it wholly and unreservedly, wanted him to have it without cluster – however terribly much I suspected that one might be the price of the other. I wanted this selfishly, for, it dawned on me then, Perkus Tooth – his talk, his apartment, the space that had opened from the time I’d run into him at Criterion, then called him on the telephone – was my ellipsis. It might not be inborn in me, but I’d discovered it nonetheless in him. Where Perkus took me, in his ranting, in his enthusiasms, in his abrupt, improbable asides, was the world inside the world. And I didn’t want him smothered in the tomb-world of migraine.

The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother. She is full tonight, and brighter than the brightest neon; there are folds of red in her vast amber. Maybe she is a harvest moon, a Comanche moon, I do not know. I have never seen a moon so low and so full of her own deep brightness. My mother is six years dead tonight, and Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep.

I am walking. No one else is walking. It is hard to cross Guadalupe; the cars come fast. In the Community Whole Food Store, where all are welcome, the girl at the checkout asks me if I would like to join the store’s club. If I pay seventy dollars, my membership, she says, will never expire, and I will get a seven per-cent discount on all purchases.

Six years. Six hours. Seventy dollars. Seven per cent. I tell her I am here for a few months only, and she smiles and says that I am welcome. I smile back. I can still smile. If I called you now, it would be half two in the morning; you could easily be awake.

If I called, I could go over everything that happened six years ago. Because that is what is on my mind tonight, as though no time had elapsed, as though the strength of the moonlight had by some fierce magic chosen tonight to carry me back to the last real thing that happened to me. On the phone to you across the Atlantic, I could go over the days surrounding my mother’s funeral. I could go over all the details as though I were in danger of forgetting them. I could remind you, for example, that you wore a white shirt at the funeral. It must have been warm enough not to wear a jacket. I remember that I could see you when I spoke about her from the altar, that you were over in the side aisle, on the left. I remember that you, or someone, said that you had parked your car almost in front of the cathedral because you had come late from Dublin and could not find parking anywhere else. I know that you moved your car before the hearse came after Mass to take my mother’s coffin to the graveyard, with all of us walking behind. You came to the hotel once she was in the ground, and you stayed for a meal with me and Suzie, my sister. Jim, her husband, must have been near, and Cathal, my brother, but I don’t remember what they did when the meal was over and the crowd had dispersed. I know that as the meal came to an end a friend of my mother’s, who noticed everything, came over and looked at you and whispered to me that it was nice that my friend had come. She used the word ‘friend’ with a sweet, insinuating emphasis. I did not tell her that what she had noticed was no longer there, was part of the past. I simply said, yes, it was nice that you had come.

You know that you are the only person who shakes his head in exasperation when I insist on making jokes and small talk, when I refuse to be direct. No one else has ever minded this as you do. You are alone in wanting me always to say something that is true. I know now, as I walk towards the house I have rented here, that if I called and told you that the bitter past has come back to me tonight in these alien streets with a force that feels like violence, you would say that you are not surprised. You would wonder only why it has taken six years.

I was living in New York then, the city about to enter its last year of innocence. I had a new apartment there, just as I had a new apartment everywhere I went. It was on 90th and Columbus. You never saw it. It was a mistake. I think it was a mistake. I didn’t stay there long – six or seven months – but it was the longest I stayed anywhere in those years or the years that followed. The apartment needed to be furnished, and I spent two or three days taking pleasure in the sharp bite of buying things: two easy chairs that I later sent back to Ireland; a leather sofa from Bloomingdale’s, which I eventually gave to one of my students; a big bed from 1- 800-Mattress; a table and some chairs from a place downtown; a cheap desk from the thrift shop.

And all those days – a Friday, a Saturday, and a Sunday, at the beginning of September – as I was busy with delivery times, credit cards, and the whiz of taxis from store to store, my mother was dying and no one could find me. I had no cell phone, and the phone line in the apartment had not been connected. I used the pay phone on the corner if I needed to make calls. I gave the delivery companies a friend’s phone number, in case they had to let me know when they would come with my furniture. I phoned my friend a few times a day, and she came shopping with me sometimes and she was fun and I enjoyed those days. The days when no one in Ireland could find me to tell me that my mother was dying.

Eventually, late on the Sunday night, I slipped into a Kinko’s and went online and found that Suzie had left me message after message, starting three days before, marked ‘Urgent’ or ‘Are you there’ or ‘Please reply’ or ‘Please acknowledge receipt’ and then just

‘Please!!!’ I read one of them, and I replied to say that I would call as soon as I could find a phone, and then I read the rest of them one by one. My mother was in the hospital. She might have to have an operation. Suzie wanted to talk to me. She was staying at my mother’s house. There was nothing more in any of them, the urgency being not so much in their tone as in their frequency and the different titles she gave to each e-mail that she sent.

I woke her in the night in Ireland. I imagined her standing in the hall at the bottom of the stairs. I would love to say that Suzie told me my mother was asking for me, but she said nothing like that. She spoke instead about the medical details and how she herself had been told the news that our mother was in the hospital and how she had despaired of ever finding me. I told her that I would call again in the morning, and she said that she would know more then. My mother was not in pain now, she said, although she had been. I did not tell her that my classes would begin in three days, because I did not need to. That night, it sounded as though she wanted just to talk to me, to tell me. Nothing more.

But in the morning when I called I realized that she had put quick thought into it as soon as she heard my voice on the phone, that she had known I could not make arrangements to leave for Dublin late on a Sunday night, that there would be no flights until the next evening; she had decided to say nothing until the morning. She had wanted me to have an easy night’s sleep. And I did, and in the morning when I phoned she said simply that there would come a moment very soon when the family would have to decide. She spoke about the family as though it were as distant as the urban district council or the government or the United Nations, but she knew and I knew that there were just the three of us. We were the family, and there is only one thing that a family is ever asked to decide in a hospital. I told her that I would come home; I would get the next flight. I would not be in my new apartment for some of the furniture deliverers, and I would not be at the university for my first classes. Instead, I would find a flight to Dublin, and I would see her as soon as I could. My friend phoned Aer Lingus and discovered that a few seats were kept free for eventualities like this. I could fly out that evening.

Newton’s best friend, back when he was New, was chosen for him. First friends often are. Hard to know how it started, though two children, five years old and wary from the world of kindergarten, must have been put in a living room together, as zoo handlers will place two creatures of the same species in the painted setting of their habitat. The young adults – untenured colleagues – sat in some other room and laughed over the clattering ice of their drinks, over the Peter, Paul and Mary album (they will call the kids in when Puff comes on), and the boys were left to stare wildly at each other. Who knows if they even recognized their own kind? Who knows if this was even hard for them, a first friendship, when every single thing is thorned with newness? The boy’s name was Martin, and, since this was his house, he introduced Newton to his various toys. There was a tense silence as Newton held a small plastic fireman with Felix-the-Cat eyes; he moved the arms and legs, and suddenly he was miniaturized into the deep beige pile of the carpet, shoulder high, and the world was a jungle for a fireman to escape from. ‘No, no, see,’ Martin said, and Newton was full sized again, ashamed, as the toy was taken from him and made to sit in a dirty carriage clearly made for some other toy, now lost. ‘No, see, he rides in here and goes around, see, he’s in charge of looking out for bats.’ And indeed two rubber bats were taken out of the box and jiggled in the air menacingly. Like a TV show – like everything, in fact – Newton had stumbled upon a long-running story whose beginning he would never be able to deduce. He was given another fireman, who wore his vest backwards and no hat. ‘You be the princess.’ This was only fair. In time, at Newton’s own house, Martin will himself be forced into minor roles, talking animals and sidekicks. And eventually Martin will relinquish even his own heroes to Newton, the better storyteller. But this is probably why they became friends: because Newton, in the first few moments of their meeting, rather than snarl and complain, accepted the shame of playing the girl. At other meetings, Martin revealed that these toys were minor, like a preamble set before the curtain rises, or the series of people who interview you before you are shown into the executive office. Newton was shown into Martin’s bedroom, where a hopeful puppet theater sat on folding feet, striped and painted with an elaborate foreign announcement (German, it turned out, meaning: ‘The next performance is at…,’) drawn above a clock with real cardboard hands, set to 4.30. It was 4.00. The performance – scheduled by optimistic Martin – never came. Instead, Newton was drawn to a tableau of paper knights, each only two inches high, in a magical woodland setting. Martin explained he had punched them out of a book, but he did not explain his problems with their paper half-moon stands, how they bent in his eager sweaty hands, or why his favorite one – the Black Knight – had a mangled stand and had to be leaned against a wall or a bedpost in order to take part in battle. Once they were in the fur of the rug, of course, it didn’t matter. They could be pushed down into the pile and made to sit there forever. The bunkbed became a tower, the sheets became a mountain, the underbed a cavern, and, while they kept to realistic roles for a while, eventually each was granted one wish: to fly. Soon the knights did battle from bookshelf to bookshelf. The bats were brought up from downstairs. Nobody had to play the princess.

There was also a secret cache of cars, gold-and-red metal, with real turning wheels that got carpet fluff caught in them and wouldn’t go anymore, except it didn’t matter because Newton and Martin couldn’t be bothered rolling them along the carpet but ran them almost anywhere else, up and down the bunkbed and the little blue desk with a matching chair (both glossy from a repainting) – all the while imitating each other’s noises that went from Martin’s antique ‘burton burton burton’ to Newton’s futuristic ‘vvvvuuuh’ – until they ended up, magically, backstage at the puppet theater, where Martin parted the curtain to reveal (as in a comedy) the headlight-eyes of the cars staring out unexpectedly at the audience. Then, with a scream, they plunged to their doom.

There was a pet, as well, a hermit crab in a shoebox (crayon-decorated with the coral-hands and seaweed boas of the ocean), and the two boys would set the striped shell on a table and wait patiently for it to emerge like a celebrity from a limo: first the filament feelers, then the dainty little legs, and then at last the great brown claw that meant Hermie was feeling bold. As soon as its eyes appeared, one boy or the other (the honor was shared) would poke the thing in the claw or the legs, and the creature would withdraw, suddenly, creepily, with just the tips of his toes showing in the orifice of the shell. But the stupid thing would never learn; another wait, and again the sensual nudity of his legs would tap one by one against the tabletop.

Martin, like any child, also had unplayable toys. Either broken, like the legless horse who rode only in Martin’s solitary playtime, or out of sync with his age. There were, of course, the puppets themselves, lovingly donated by a rich aunt. These included hand-made finger puppets, representing a family, and a trio of knitted hand puppets: a tiger, a cop and a wizard. What scenario these three could enact was a puzzle. In the very back of his closet was a marionette of a small boy with a cap, something the old childless woman must not have been able to resist, though it was complicated, and too precious for the boy until he was much older, when he would probably consider it girlish or haunted. There was a dour, eyeless collection of animals housed in a hinged barnyard. Each was badly made of colored plastic, and long tabs from the extrusion process showed along their backbones, like the spines of dinosaurs. One was forever coming across them hidden in the carpet, yelping barefoot and retrieving a little pink pig with sharp feet and no smile at all on its face, though you felt it deserved one. They were too featureless to be loved – no child’s mind could fold itself small enough to fit inside – and there were so many of them, a hundred, perhaps, that one could only imagine a child lining them up dutifully along the barnyard wall, species by species, like a slaughter of innocents.

They were at the age when every movement was as incredible as a spacewalk. Leaping from the front step could entertain them for hours, even though the step was identical to every step they’d ever seen in their lives. The stunted San Francisco backyard, though – so much better than Newton’s own precipitous one – could telescope from an ant-kingdom in the grass to an interplanetary realm below the sadly unclimbable eucalyptus trees. But mostly they were so young that they needed nothing more than to run in circles among the trees, slipping now and then on the sickle-shapes leaves, finding new and yet newer hiding places for their tiny bodies among the bushes and the few patio chairs, waiting with a tiny beating frog-heart in the darkness of the woodpile until either the other boy leapt upon him with his own squeal of terror or the game went on too long, with the seeker beginning to cry beneath the scent and the surf-sound of the trees, and the hider jumping up, nearly in tears himself at having been lost for so long. At those times, an adult had to go outside to comfort them. They were for some reason incapable of comforting each other.

That was during the day. At night, their bodies still longed to run in circles, and, though it was clearly forbidden, they did it anyway. It was amazing to them that Martin’s mother could sense immediately if they were jumping on his bed; they both stood with wide-eyed looks of wonder as she ran in, clairvoyant perhaps, and scolded them for ruining the bed, telling them to find something else to do. Sometimes there were spankings; if Newton’s own parents weren’t there, Martin’s mother did not pause to spank him as well. For instance for standing on a stool and reaching into the cookie jar, fearing it was empty, and having the exhilarating sensation of feeling, among the ocean of crumbs, the half-raft of a cookie… before bringing the ceramic jar crashing to the floor. Or for getting into Martin’s mother’s closet and making a mess of things, rooting through her exotic paraphernalia like pirate treasure and tossing long rosy satiny things onto the floor in search of diamond buckles and pearls, which Martin, at that age before a boy knows better, would wear around his own neck. But mostly Martin’s father believed in letting them be wild, and if he were around, they could take the sofa apart and make the most astounding fortress out of it, and even – on the best of all possible days – be allowed to eat dinner inside and watch, through the cracks of the cushions, an hour of blessed television. That was life until thirteen.

There are a thousand kinds of thirteen, more than there are kinds of fifty, or eighty. There is Oddly Childlike Thirteen, and Worried and Obsessive, and Alarmingly Manly, and Girlish, and Gothic Horror, and Scapegoat, and Something Happened to Him as a Child, and Beatific and Despised, and Lonely, and Just Plain Stubborn. There is Manic and there is Depressed, still leading separate lives. There is Loves Adults and there is Steals Dad’s Antique Pornography. There is Steals Everything, Period. There is Already Smokes and Already Drinks and Already Screws. There is Weeps Alone. And Misses Childhood. And Hates the World. He was none of these; he was less than these. He was the kind of boy who had been a prodigy at six and faded by seven, the kind who would be handsome by twenty and show his old yearbook photos to girl-friends, unable to feel joy when they’d exclaim how hopeless he used to be. Somewhere in between those points was where he lay, and somehow – and this was the hopelessly sad part – he knew it. If you asked him, on a test sheet, to name his own type of thirteen, he would write in his seismographic hand: ‘Waits for Time to Pass’.

Pictures, also, reveal very little. There is one of him at that age, in 1984, standing by the fireplace in a navy blazer and gray slacks his father had helped him pick out, clearly dressed for some acquaintance’s bar mitzvah, his hair parted and set with a wet comb, dried into long lines like grass when it’s been raked of leaves – possibly also sprayed with a canister of his father’s Commander, it’s that solid. It’s a shame that photos, like children, remember only rare moments and never the everyday, for he has never looked like this in his life. A look of guilt, of surprise. Eyes a deep blue, the blue of a baby’s eyes that will eventually turn to brown, wide open. Eyebrows raised, perhaps in his first failed try at posing, at elegance. Or perhaps he has set his face this way as he waits. For his father to adjust the lens; for the sweat to trickle into the pits of his new shirt; for the terrible moment when they have to go. A dismembered hand floating in the ink of navy. One gold button, the only proud thing in the room.

The photo has captured nothing. Not the glow from the flowers on the mantel behind him, a present, which in this picture might as well be fake, or the evaporating droplets on the windowpane. Not this boy’s beautiful, desperate love, tamped-down inside him like brown sugar in a measuring cup, which should fill every corner of the frame. Which should make that sad house plant beside him burst into flower. You would never guess that he is not looking out of a picture at all but is standing in a room looking at a grown man, at his own father, and what he thinks of that man we, looking at the picture, will never know. His is not the first photo not to capture these things, but for the viewer they might as well never have existed.

DANIEL CLOWES was born in Chicago in 1961 and now lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Erika, their son, Charles, and their beagle, Ella. His books include Ghost World, David Boring, Caricature and Ice Haven.

Thanks to Ted Thompson and Sarah Vowell for suggesting the project, to Linda Shaughnessy and Georgia Garrett for ensuring publication in many territories, and to Nick Laird for the title.

Zadie Smith

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[1] You can find out more about their work at www.826ny.org.