I love O’Hare Airport, with its unpredictable weather and constant gate and terminal changes. This is where I board my plane to Los Angeles. O’Hare is a zone with variables that can’t be controlled. Cell phone service ceases and nobody can tell me no.

I wander corridors that end in cul-de-sacs where I sit alone in alcoves. Loudspeakers announce implausible destinations like Madrid, Prague and Tokyo. I pretend I’m someone else. I have a red or black passport, a different genetic code and a suitcase full with lace mantillas and hand-embroidered shawls. I’m subject to random acts of nature — lightning storms, tornadoes and lethal black ice. But that’s at a distance so vast it’s incomprehensible and irrelevant.

It’s the summer of my 13th year and I’m supposed to make my decision. I must choose which parents I’ll live with for high school and what foreign language I’ll learn. I’m officially a teenager. I have a biological passport and carry tampons, lip-gloss and credit cards in my purse. My age has 2 syllables. And I count everything.

When I live with my mother and Marty in Beverly Hills, my bedroom is entirely Gucci pink — the walls and carpets, the cabinets with my TV and CD player, even the interior of my clothing and shoe closets. My mother took her vintage spring purse to a paint store and supervised the replication of a color only I possess.

My bedroom opens onto a tiled balcony where I can see the tennis court and swimming pool that’s lit even at night. Halogen globes make shadows in the water seem alive and insistent, as if urgently communicating in a language I will someday decipher.

It’s a June of Hibiscus and Magenta Bougainvillea. Night blooming Jasmine from Madagascar turns my skin fragrant. Marty says money alters planetary orbits and renders footnotes unnecessary. He indicates the terraced hillside garden surrounding the swimming pool.

“Race ipsa loquitur,” he says expansively, agreeing with himself.

“And you only need a sweater at night,” my mother adds.

My mother drives me to school in the mornings, even though it’s only 4 blocks away. She wears a tennis dress and matching sweatband around her forehead. Walking is déclassé, she explains. It’s for latchkey children. Or orphans. Or children of maids and gardeners illegally obtaining a Beverly Hills school experience.

“Walking is for peripherals,” she clarifies.

On Wednesdays we have our hair and nails done at Diva Salon on Rodeo Drive. In a curtained room dense with Philodendrons and musk incense, we’re given identical terrycloth robes lined with peach silk. A miniature Purple Orchid like a severed crab claw is tucked in the pocket. A willowy woman bows as she extends the robes like an offering.

We select identical colors for our manicures and pedicures. We are lacquered with apricot or strawberry. Then we meet Marty for dinner at the Club or Mr. Chow’s, where we have our own table permanently reserved for us. On holidays, we attend services at Sinai Temple on Wilshire Boulevard with all the movie stars and industry executives.

The executives wear suits and have their own yarmulkes. The directors are bearded; their hair is long and uncombed and their borrowed yarmulkes perch uncertainly on their matted curls and keep falling off. They wear sunglasses and talk throughout the service. They make rectangles with their index fingers and thumbs. It’s a geometry meant to show camera angles and close-ups.

On long weekends, we drive to Palm Springs or the beach house in Malibu. In between, Marty is invited to concerts at the Greek Theater and the Sports Arena. We don’t need tickets like peripherals. Marty’s name is on The List. We sit in the first or second row and go backstage with our special passes. We eat petit fours and palm-sized pizzas from Spago’s with the bands. I shake hands with Mick Jagger, who wears a purple bonnet, and David Bowie, who wears lipstick. Steven Tyler shows me how to play a tambourine and lets me keep it.

Marty knows everyone because he’s a record producer with 22 Grammy nominations and 9 Grammy Awards. When he greets a performer, his smile is suddenly abnormally wide, his teeth are enormous and inordinately white, and his hand reaches out as if by a mechanical extending device. It elongates dangerously and I think of the trunks of elephants and ivory tusks, swamps, cemeteries and poaching.

I watch the news with my mother. A river is swelling beyond its sand-bagged banks and houses look amputated at ground level. They drift past like a square armada with chimneys and dogs on leashes barking, and porches of Wisteria still attached.

“It doesn’t figure,” my mother says, filing her fingernails.

“The flood?” I ask.

“Floods. Rivers. They don’t figure. Corn doesn’t figure. Trailer parks with the obese in bathrobes don’t figure.” My mother pats my shoulder and smiles. “You’ll learn.”

A soaking wet woman who has never been to Diva Salon holds a sodden cat and a chair frame. Storms took her house, her daughter’s prom corsage, her son’s purple heart, and her marriage certificate. She points behind her floral printed bathrobe and indicates wood slats and glass panes scattered in mud. She’s obviously a peripheral.

One afternoon I hear my mother say, “It’s untenable.” She’s talking to my father on the telephone. “Why?” My mother holds the receiver in front of her eyes and stares at it like it’s an object of alien technology. “You’re joking.”

My father does not tell jokes. He’s laconic and rations his syllables. I imagine stray birds lodge in his lungs. If he laughed without warning, flocks of finches, the pink and yellow of chalk would fly out. Then I’d gather iridescent feathers and line a winter coat for him.

It’s the word untenable that catches my attention. I would have passed barefoot through the living room, with its floor of hand-painted Italian tiles and Persian rugs with authenticated stamped certificates Marty keeps locked in his office safe. I might have crouched behind rows of Cymbidiums in 42 cloisonné pots. But the harsh certainty of the word, untenable, stops me.

Untenable sounds ominous and ugly, like all the un words — unlikely, unhealthy, unemployed, unfortunate and unhappy. Un words are like pointed stakes in a field with No Trespassing signs.

“She’ll be in high school this fall. We’re talking educational sequences with profound continuity implications.” My mother is drinking brandy from a bottle she conceals in a cloisonné planter. My mother is in AA and she’s not allowed to drink.

“Listen, old pal,” my mother raises her voice. Her mouth is tight with frustration as if it has wires in it. Her eyes are cluttered like a pond overgrown with reeds and fallen red and yellow maple leaves like stained glass panels from a cathedral.

“It takes two weeks to wash the hillbilly off her. What about her interior? How’s that going to wash off?” My mother finishes her brandy.

At dinner my mother watches my mouth. Her eyes are magnifiers. From the shape of my lips, she’ll get an early warning. Selecting a foreign language has implications about character that last a lifetime like an appendicitis scar. Spanish is the language of the underclass. It’s for bus boys and their girlfriends who won’t get abortions because they believe God is watching. They’re peripherals who don’t figure. French, on the other hand, is the language of museums, fashion and money, style, diplomacy and ballet.

“There really is no choice,” my mother decides for me.

A my Gold hears the rumor and instantaneously recognizes it’s true. She’s being denied tenure. Then Alfred Baxter Coleman ambushes her in the corridor. Alfred Baxter Coleman, the ABC of the History Department, stage whispers the terminal news to her. He executes his standard mock Indian mime, emitting a sort of emphysemic whoop, and his arthritic fingers anemically slap his thin lips, sporadically, with no discernible rhythm. Whoop whoop. He ho. He ho.

What he actually says is, “No way, Sweetie. Told you.”

He’s intimated this for months. Amy ignored him.

She stumbles into her office and reaches onto her desk to steady herself. She picks up the first object she chances to touch. It’s her phone book. She holds it in her palm like a magic stone, an amulet, a medicine bag. The pages are fragile as petals or antiquities. It’s an artifact with disasters between the lines.

On this particular morning, she dials her mother. Then she waits for her mother to answer. Raven Gold is an integral component in her arsenal of weapons of personal destruction. Raven is the core, her plutonium centerpiece. Amy needs an action to definitively express her rage and grief, something like a hand grenade or bullet. Raven can pull the trigger.

Cellular service, with static intermittent voids and uncertainties involving wind currents and angles, has finally come to Espanola. Theoretically, they can now communicate directly. But Amy Gold cannot talk to her mother. They speak as if with flags the way people do at sea when conditions are mutable, possibilities limited and primitive. They choreograph pieces of cloth. The planet is compressed into a basket of fabrics. They wave at each other with rags.

Raven removes language and logic. Cause and effect are illusions. Raven has an unscripted life. No scrawls in the margins, and no footnotes.

Her mother has a cell phone now, but Amy is still rendered childlike and vulnerable. She presses the phone hard against her ear until the metal hurts. This is foreshadowing. Amy counts the rings. Twenty-five.

“They didn’t give me the job,” Amy begins, her thoughts spinning chaotic and circular.

“You’re surprised?” Raven laughs. “You’re not a team player. You always wanted a rank and serial number. The right uniform. Play first string for the military industrial complex.”

Out the fifth floor window ersatz palm trees are stunted by sun, and the air is oily and smeared. Outside is a slice of Los Angeles in early summer. Hills are a brutal stale green with brittle shrubs like dry stubble.

“Do you know how long it’s been?” Raven asks, softer now. “Since you called?”

“To the hour,” Amy answers. She tells her mother precisely how many years, months and days passed since their last conversation.

“I’m impressed,” Raven admits.

“You’re always impressed by the wrong things,” Amy says. “Men who add fast without scratch paper. Chess players and piano players, no matter how mediocre. Women with trust funds who sew their own clothes and bake breads.”

“I’m a simple country gal. You were always too smart for me,” Raven offers.

“I want to see you now.” Her words are sudden and tumble into the hot-stripped morning like dice hitting a wall and she wonders if she means them.

“Then get in your car. You’ll be here tomorrow,” Raven says with surprising urgency. “Just check that AA crap at the border.”

“I’ll leave half my IQ, too,” Amy offers. “As a sign of good will.” After a pause in which Raven fails to construct a reply, Amy asks, “How will I find you?”

“Ask in the plaza. Anyone can tell you where.”

Her mother hangs up. No more details. Just anyone. In the plaza. It’s like a treasure hunt. Or eating peyote and letting it happen. That’s what they did for years. Let it happen. They camped on mesas and the rims of canyons. Raven had a boyfriend with a jeep and a sawed off 12-gauge under the seat. His 9-millimeter was in his backpack, and he had a .32 semi-automatic in his pocket. A man, one man or another, who played drums or bass in a band, just returned from Australia or Japan. They stayed in the juniper forests for weeks. Finally, insect bites, sunburns and infected cuts made them return. Sometimes Raven just wanted a hot bath.

“I demand perfume,” Raven laughs, half-dressed on a plateau, her bare shoulders sculpted as if by centuries of wind and a gifted potter’s hands. “I must have musk and a new hat with an extravagant feather.”

They find towns with a hotel sporting an old west motif. Durango or Aspen, Las Cruces, Silver City or Santa Fe. Her childhood is a sequence of lead glass windows and crimson floral carpets, mahogany paneling and authentic antique saloon doors. The card tables and upstairs brothel are gone but somehow manage to assert themselves, not quite visible and completely intact. Chandeliers emit a tame filtered light like pueblo churches. Late afternoon is cool, and the amber of honey and whiskey. It’s the color of an afternoon shoot-out.

It’s the era of the commune and just before boarding school. Raven’s boyfriends have what they call business in town. They take unplanned flights to Los Angeles and Miami. Raven drives them to and from airports. Small planes land on salt flats in the desert where there are no roads, and Raven has flares, flashlights, and a basket of still warm tamales and rum in a jug. Amy is wrapped in a down blanket in the backseat. Why do they lean into one another whispering? She knows they’re dealing drugs.

Amy doesn’t confront her mother. They already speak in code, in a network of implications and arrested partial sounds like passwords. Between them, flannel and denim and gingham scraps wait to become a quilt that won’t be stitched. Plans for a house built of adobe on the mesa above Espanola that her mother somehow owns stay a rolled-up document, a parchment hollow inside a rubber band. It’s a navigational chart for a sea they won’t sail. Their ideas drift off, despoiled, weightless; they abort themselves.

Amy is leaving. She’s been accepted to a boarding school in San Diego. The provost pronounced her test scores impressive. He’s encouraging. It’s possible a college scholarship may eventually be granted. In hotel rooms with lead glass windows and red velvet curtains, she studies brochures for colleges in Vermont and Massachusetts.

In between, she just lets it happen. They return from the mesas, their vision quest Raven calls it, with their filthy clothing, ammunition and stray pieces of peyote stuffed randomly into plastic bags. It’s the best hotel in town and the bellman carries their trash bags with the gravity afforded real luggage. Raven is instantaneously elevated to Madam.

It’s usually a suite. Her mother’s boyfriend of the moment enters cautiously, his hand touching the gun in his pocket. He eases into rooms, opening closet doors and shower curtains. He glances at the street below, scanning for indications of an ambush by DEA agents, Zeta flunk-outs trying to make a name for themselves, or freelancers.

After weeks in canyons of juniper, sage, and pinion, cafes and boutiques are a fascination. It’s another form of foraging. She spends afternoons in tourist gift shops. She’s lost so much weight on their plateau vision quests, eating only dried fruit, crackers and an occasional rainbow trout, she fits into size 2s on sale racks in Pocatello, Alamosa and Winslow, where the women have either run away or gone to fat the way domesticated animals do.

In an Indian casino near the border she buys a hot pink mini skirt for 2 dollars. It feels like abraded Teflon. Eventually Raven has to cut it off her with scissors. Amy buys a silver blouse the texture of steel wool. She stumbles in neon pink spike heels and pretends she’s Brazilian.

She rides a dawn bus to work from the favala. She’s a clerk with ambitions. Her name was Gloria but she’s changed it to Marguerite. Her married boss takes her to hotels on Sundays after mass. Through the slatted terrace blinds, birds and cathedral bells in cobblestone plazas drift in, and the festive fluttering bells from old trolley cars with electric spokes that sizzle. A choir of indigenous orphans from the mountains offers an incoherent rendition of “New York, New York” and “Take Me Out To the Ball Game.” It’s mutilated by distance, intention and what resists translation. Nuns draped them in novice habits and glued gauzy angel wings to their shoulders. They’re barefoot and hungry.

Further, men in cloaks of magenta and electric blue feathers from jungle birds play flutes. In the plaza spreading beyond the cathedral, swarms of pigeons and yellow butterflies almost touch the faces of old women selling dried corn strung like beads and Chiclets arranged like miniature pyramids. Beyond, there’s something rhythmic and insistent that might be an ocean.

We are all clerks with ambitions, Amy decides then, stretching her insect bitten legs out on a brocade bedspread in a restored hotel suite in Colorado or New Mexico. She is fourteen or fifteen years old. Raven and her boyfriend are out doing business. They leave three hundred dollar bills on the brocade and instruct her to get an ice cream soda and go shopping.

Beyond town is thunder, glaciers on mountain peaks, then desert and finally San Diego Pacific Academy. Amy Gold imagines boarding school will be similar to the commune. But the sleeping and eating arrangements will be superior. San Diego Pacific Academy has desks and electricity and a library. Bells ring and they have specific and reliable meanings.

Now it’s noon in Los Angeles. She packs her office. It’s the end of the semester and she won’t be back in the fall. Alfred Baxter Coleman, chair of the promotion and tenure committee, has successfully convinced his colleagues they don’t need her. She’s only half-Indian, after all. Christ, she was born in Laguna Beach. They’ve hired a Palestine to replace her. It’s a more profound historical statement and irrefutably global.

Amy wraps a pottery vase in the school newspaper. Ink encrusts her fingers and she feels soiled to the bone. She doesn’t want to put her books in cardboard boxes again. It’s an obsolete rite of empty repetition. It’s the opposite of propitiation. It’s failure in a cardboard box the size of an infant’s coffin. Even her fingers resist.

The square book caskets. She’s been carrying dead texts from state to state, up and down flights of apartment steps bordering alleys and parking lots, Bougainvillea and Oleander strangling on cyclone fences. Amy realizes she doesn’t want the books anymore, period.

What she wants is a wound that bleeds and requires sutures and anesthesia. What she wants is a cigarette. Amy gathers her cosmetics and tape cassettes from her desk drawer. She takes the gym bag with her tennis racket, bathing suit, jeans, diamondback rattlesnake boots, flashlight and mace. She wraps her raincoat across her shoulders and thinks, I’m down the road. I’m out of here.

She wants someone to call, “Professor Gold?” Then she can reply, “Not anymore.” Her response will be fierce and laconic. It will deconstruct itself as you watch. Then it will explode in your face.

Amy Gold shoves U2’s Joshua Tree into the cassette player. She replaces it with a ZZ Top cassette. Yes, it’s an afternoon for the original nasty boys from Texas. They provide a further dimension to the concept of a garage band. After all, you don’t have to just rehearse there. You can throw a mattress on the floor, invite your friends, drink a case of bourbon, shoot coke and orchestrate a gang rape. Maybe she should get down even further. Maybe it’s an afternoon for chainsaws and a massacre.

She turns onto the freeway, and considers her final encounter with Professor Alfred Baxter Coleman. In instant replay, her knees wobble and she almost falls down. But she doesn’t. She manages to stay on her feet and give Alfred the finger. If she wasn’t having a seizure of vertigo, she would mace him.

Los Angeles is at her back, a solid sheet of grease that’s not entirely unpleasant. That’s why she’s been able to inhabit this city. Ugliness is a kind of balm. Beauty makes her uncomfortable. She instinctively averts her eyes from a flawless face the way some recoil from a car crash.

Amy Gold relentlessly attempts to annihilate all certified versions of perfection. The conventionally sanctioned snow-dusted mountains above wild flowers in alpine meadows that look designed to be photographed and sold as posters. She’s repelled by images resembling calendar covers. They’re faux artifacts of what you didn’t actually experience. And she loathes towns with contrived lyrical names that could be the titles of country western songs. They’re an accompaniment for the plastic scorpions tourists buy in stores with moccasins made in China and ceremonial headdresses of dyed turkey feathers.

That’s why she left Raven the southwest interior of the country. Amy took the coasts and gave her mother everything else. That is their real division of assets. She took abstraction, hierarchy, and systematic knowledge and left Raven the inexpressible, the preliterate, the region of magic chants and herbs. It was a sort of divorce. Her mother could have Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, and she would get her doctorate.

Raven accepts landscape as her due. She expects and collects it. Raven, staring at a sun setting in a contagion of magenta and irradiated purple. It’s begging to be absolved. Raven nods in acknowledgement, shaking her waist-length black hair as clouds pass in a flotilla above them. She pauses, as if expecting the skies to actually part.

Raven, wind-blown and barefoot is prepared for the sky to form a tender lavender mouth and confess everything. It’s the third or fourth day of a peyote fast, and her mother is a pueblo priestess, accustomed to tales of routine felonies and unavoidable lies. Transgressions aren’t absolute. They’re a matter of interpretation. Raven takes her form of communion beneath an aggressively streaked sunset the texture of metal. Amy knows the sky is a conventional polite lie. It’s politically correct misdirection. There’s something else behind clouds, a subterfuge of malice.

Her childhood is incoherent, images that stall stylized and suspect. They might be postcards. That’s curious, she realizes, they didn’t take photographs. Even when her mother married the magazine photographer, there were no cameras, no visual artifacts.

“You can’t paste this between album pages,” Raven says, standing in a meadow, her bare arms stretched out like twin milk snakes. Her paisley skirt is ripped to her thigh and wind-swirled. This what, precisely, Amy wants to know.

“Experience can’t be reduced to a 4 by 6 inch still,” her mother says. “People stick their loves in cellophane prisons. They incarcerate images. Then they put these cemeteries on coffee tables. They’re mockeries.”

Raven is topless on a mesa festooned with pinion and juniper, tilting her face to the sky, memorizing a spectrum of purple that runs from lilac and velvet iris to crushed antique maroon. It’s an alphabet bordered by cobalt and a magenta that’s gone a step too far, and committed itself to red. Amy wonders what can be distilled from such a sequence. You can’t arrange it like paint on a palette, or orchestrate it to sound like flutes or ferry bells. You can’t order it into stanzas or paragraphs. In short, it’s entirely useless.

Her mother exists in a series of indiscriminate moments, each already pre-framed and merely waiting for lighting cues. Raven poses with a canyon lake as a backdrop. Amy half expects afternoon to dissolve into a car commercial. This is what she resists. No to the plateaus of northern New Mexico. No to the vivid orange intrigue of sunsets you could stencil on T-shirts. No to men who spend summers in sleeping bags, backpacks filled with Wild Turkey and kilos of cocaine. No to Raven in August, scented with dope and pinion, sleeping oblivious under lightning and an outrage of stars.

“I’ve been tattooed,” Raven laughs in the morning, making coffee over a fire of purple sage. “Look.” she angles her face toward the new boyfriend. Her face is tanned peach, without a single line or freckle. Amy possesses a secret accumulation of invisible injuries. They’re the most exquisite. If there’s an entity Raven calls Buddha, it is these clandestine self-inflicted lacerations that attract him.

“You can live myth or be buried by it. It’s your choice,” Raven says. It’s her cocaine voice, vague and distant and leaking light. “I’ve been more intimate with this canyon than all 5 husbands combined,” she confides. “It’s revealed more. And it’s been more generous.”

Amy is on the periphery, simultaneously chilled and parched. She is not a team player. The sky is relentlessly alien. Plateaus are layered like a chorus of red mouths that have nothing to say to her.

Before nightfall and the desert, Amy Gold stops for gas. In a convenience store, fixed in the glare of anonymous waxy light, she decides, on inexplicable impulse, to change her life. She deliberately buys a pack of cigarettes, though she hasn’t smoked in eight years.

“Vodka,” she says, pointing to a fifth. The two-edged syllables are inordinately pale and mysterious, like something you can’t procure on this planet. I’ve been too long without the traditions, she thinks. Eight years. I’m estranged from my true self. I’m broken off at the root, amputated. I must graft myself back.

She wonders if she can still score amphetamines in a truck stop. They’re probably just kitchen bennies. White crosses, manufactured in basement labs, and sold as the trucker’s other fuel. Last time she copped roadside speed, she got a two-day stomach-ache and the sensation that a 747 was landing on her head.

Danger excites her. Once she glided between trucks somewhere near Albuquerque, walking between the enormous cabs oily with bold unapologetic streaks of red and yellow like war paint. There are enemies and rogue bands everywhere. She notes the enormity of the wheels. The truck stop is a metal graveyard not unlike elephant and mastodon burial grounds.

We know ourselves through architecture and indecipherable charred hieroglyphics. To see the monumental trucks at rest is like watching men when they don’t know they’re being observed. Men in their natural state. Their posture softens, they slap each other on the back, show one another their rings and tattoos, and laugh often and easily.

She is with Big Jeb. He’s impatient. There’s a new girl in the aluminum trailer behind the restaurant. 15 and a natural blond from Alabama.

“It’s show time,” he says. He nudges the small of her back. It’s the way a cat rubs against your leg.

“Got any whites?” she asks in her fake southern accent, leaning into a fierce crimson cab, her lips stretched into a smile that hurts her teeth. And, of course, the driver does.

“You mad?” Big Jeb asks later.

Amy translates his question. He means angry. She says no.

“Well, don’t tell your mother,” he says. His voice is light. It’s not a threat. He’s asking for a favor.

Amy smokes a cigarette, sips vodka and smiles. She takes another drink. There is no other way to cross the Mojave, she assures herself. At 3 a.m. she turns off the highway, finds a fire road, places her gym bag under her head as a pillow and falls asleep gripping the mace in her right hand.

She wakes stiff and feverish and drives to Santa Fe, singing with ZZ Top and drinking vodka from an orange juice bottle. Did she learn that from Wade or Gus? Who coached her on the southern accent and how to carry, conceal and shoot a weapon?

“I did all I could,” he tells Raven. She is leaving for San Diego Pacific Academy. He sounds disappointed. Her mother nods sympathetically.

Amy is startled to realize that Raven’s boyfriend was serious. Was it Big Jeb or Big Sam, Hawk Man or maybe Wade? Who positioned beer bottles on sand banks with tender precision and showed her how to put bullets in them? Who captured snakes for her to shoot, and bent to demonstrate how to remove the rattles and make them into earrings? Who explained spoor on trails and how to determine what coyotes, raccoons and rabbits had been eating?

Amy didn’t encounter men with multi-syllabic names until boarding school. She was stunned when strangers voluntarily offered their last names. It hadn’t occurred to her that people reveal this information. When asked, she automatically provided an alias. Marguerite.

Amy Gold checks into a new hotel near the plaza in Santa Fe. She’s disoriented. Everything is some manifestation of adobe, cement and mud. Buildings are a tainted orange and degraded pink. Houses are set behind walls like African compounds. The walls are designed to keep the inhabitants in. They’re ubiquitous, as if mandated. Here dirt and all its forms are not only obligatory, they’re deified.

She’s erased clay in all its permutations from her repertoire. In the millennium, we survive by aliases, photo shop and selective amnesia. It’s a new spiritual expression. It’s the first global mantra. We reclaim ourselves so that we can discard and bury them. Our AOL and Yahoo versions were insipid squalid forays into the wilderness within. We know better now.

In her senior year at San Diego Pacific Academy, her elective choices were pottery studio or wood world. She chose the later. The boys built a two-story house with a graceful staircase and balconies. She made small boxes and glued sequins and chipped tiles on them. Her latches fall off. She says they’re jewelry boxes. She defends herself. She’s a clerk with ambitions and no, they don’t have to close. They’re conceptual. The wood master wants to flunk her. But she already has a scholarship to Stanford.

The swimming pool is deserted. Everyone must be buying necklaces of plastic dyed to mimic turquoise and fringed jackets made in Thailand. Or else they’re stumbling up Canyon Road in their new boots that don’t fit. Canyon Road, with it’s 2,000 galleries, features what you’ve already seen. You know what’s on the walls and pedestals before you walk in. Tourists find the familiar reassuring.

It’s landscapes of Rio Grand gorges rendered in O’Keefe reds that look like lacerations. Then the heads of Indians in bronze. And bronze horses. And bronze Indians on bronze horses. It’s the third or fourth derivative generation. Still lifes of vagina sunflowers. And landscapes reiterating their original psychedelic palette. Now they’re actually spraying them with glitter.

Amy stands at the edge of the swimming pool. The water reminds her of Hawaii. The blues are so vivid and unadulterated, the elements seem participant.

As a child, she lived in Maui for three years. Her mother was married to Jerry Garcia’s photographer. Ed. Big Ed. The ocean beyond their lanai possessed a clarity only certain sunlight, strained and purified by currents and anointed cloud configurations, can impart.

The swimming pool is the turquoise of traditional Indian jewelry. There’s an enticement to this blue, with its suggestion of revelation and sacrament, of opening an enormous chamber into the world as it once was, into thunder and stone and sacrifices designed to engender an incandescent intelligence. It’s the turquoise of time travel, camouflaged salt flats at dusk, and prayer.

This terrain renders ideas and artifacts inconsequential. That’s why everyone was moving here, the ones who hadn’t migrated to Hawaii or Mexico. But she has no interest in this obvious and generic surrender. Such a seduction would admit the squalor of her ambitions and what they imply, namely the incontrovertible value of acquiring systemic knowledge. Amy swims three hundred laps. It does not clear her head.

She sits on the bandstand in the plaza. Late afternoon is the adobe of dust and apricots. The sky is a swarm of storm clouds and two rainbows appear in precise twin arches. As they break into Cubist fragments, Amy realizes they’re the DNA of the sky. Then she looks across the plaza, directly at her mother.

“Amethyst,” her mother calls, already moving towards her, awkward and determined. They embrace and Raven smells unexpectedly sweet, like vanilla ice cream and spring grass.

Raven’s hair is entirely white and tied into a ponytail with a piece of rawhide.

Raven in dusty black jeans. Her Saturday night end of the trail outfit. And she’s profoundly tanned. It’s not a skin coloration one can receive through ordinary daily living. It’s clearly a statement, no doubt the result of pronouncing the diminishing ozone layer an establishment rumor that has nothing to do with her.

“Too many tourists,” Raven says, talking out the side of her mouth. “Let’s go.”

Amy follows her mother’s jeep along the highway toward Taos, and then off and onto a road so sudden and narrow it seems hallucinatory. They wind up a dirt road of sharp curves and loose gravel. Her mother parks alongside a tiny yellow trailer.

“It’s temporary,” Raven says, indicating the frail structure with a dismissive flutter of her left hand. “Like life.”

“Right,” Amy answers. They are proto-humans, banging on stones. Language has barely been invented. They communicate by drums and smoke singles. She follows her mother, climbs three stairs into the trailer, and pauses, all at once listless and exhausted.

“Old hippies don’t die. They just quit drinking, take their milk thistle and liver enzyme counts.” Raven offers an unconvincing smile.

“Liver enzymes?” Amy wonders.

“Hep C,” Raven says.

“You have hepatitis C?” Amy is startled.

“We all do,” her mother replies, flat and off-hand. “I hope to live long enough to get Medicare.”

“Medicare?” Amy repeats.

“Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. It barely exists,” Raven says.

Her mother sits cross-legged on the floor at a low table, a child’s table, rolling a joint. When she offers it to her, Amy takes it. She left AA at the border. And half her IQ. Wasn’t that the deal?

The trailer is so minimal it seems unoccupied. There’s a tape deck that runs on batteries, a plate in what must be the kitchen and a bowl of bananas, strawberries and two onions. What’s become of the Navajo rugs, the carved oak furniture, the Mescalero Apache tribal wall hangings, Hopi baskets and masks? And where is the Santa Clara pottery?

She remembers the era they called the Harmonic Divergence. The commune dwindled. It dried up overnight like creeks in summer. First AIDS. Then the crisis no one anticipated. Their foundation was the exploration of human consciousness. Insidiously and inexorably, their beliefs were culturally degraded, marginalized and then outlawed.

They were a band of conceptual renegades, biochemical pioneers in an aesthetic frontier that was abruptly fenced. Suddenly, satellites provided surveillance. They were shorn of legitimacy. There’s no glamour in being a designated leper. Criminals have no justification. But there were treatments for their aberrant inclinations. Antidepressants. Rehab. AA. Support groups and disability payments. Everyone took the cure.

“I’m too old for this,” one of the Big Bobs or Big Jebs said. “I’m not taking a dump in mud in winter. Not at 45.”

There was attrition. Drugs were now controlled by men with computers in Nassau and Houston. Big Wade and Big Jake had arthritis and diabetes and the wrong skillset for the emerging global market place. They dispersed, took their medications for depression, and meditated in shacks on canyon rims, proclaiming themselves Zen masters. They had tape decks and bags of Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Metformin. And shelves of SSRis and Tricyclics. Nothing worked, but it was free. Some found apartments in town with electricity and watched CNN on 16 inch black and white televisions.

The Espanola property accrued to Raven. She was the last one left, keeping the faith in derelict rooms lit by kerosene lamps, incense and candles. Rooms collapsed around her. The roof fell down in chunks and walls disintegrated into powder. That’s why she purchased the trailer. And what was that green square outside? Was Raven growing marijuana?

“Corn.” Raven is amused. “Subsistence economy. Tomatoes. Squash. I put seeds in the ground. I eat the plants. A simple life. Much too boring for a professor like you. But you always thought me dull.”

Not dull, Amy wants to correct, just affected, predictable, and formulaic. The trailer reminds her of a boat, ingenuously compact, deceptively pulling in or out of the miniature closets and cabinets. They had a boat in Maui, she remembers later, when winds rise and batter the metal sides in a sudden squall with lightning.

They are laying side by side on twin cots like berths, rocking. The trailer sways and Amy thinks, We are floating through metaphors and into symbolic oceans, clutching our charred text as life preservers. We make a telephone call. Or stand in the glaring light of a liquor store on the edge of the Mohave and the course of our life is changed.

Once during the thunderstorm, Amy sits bolt upright and for an inconclusive moment, thinks she sees Raven standing naked at the tiny window, weeping. Her mother by moonlight, whitened, whittled.

“I’m a moon crone,” Raven says, directly to the night.

Her mother has sensed her movement, her intake of breath. “I’m 52 and haven’t had a period in years. I’m on hormones and I’m still burning up.” Raven turns toward her and speaks into the darkness. “You don’t have to fear me anymore. I’m not a competitor. You removed my 9 heads. Hydra is gone. You beheaded me. See me as I am.”

“Are you lonely?” Amy wonders, uncertain. She’s an ethnographer and Raven is her subject.

“Lonely?” her mother repeats. “I have two friends. New Mexico and Bob Dylan. He wrote the soundtrack for my life. When he dies, I’ll be a widow.”

Amy wakes at noon. Raven has assembled sleeping bags, a tent, stacks of camping equipment and a variety of canvas bags under the awning in front of the tiny yellow trailer.

“Let’s rock and roll.” Raven is enthusiastic. “Mesa Verde. I feel a spiritual experience coming.”

This woman has absolutely no sense of irony, Amy thinks. She inhabits an era of oral tradition, intuition and omens. The constellations aren’t named. One worships flint and thunder, bargains with stars and drums in solitude.

They drive north, Raven taking the curves too fast. Amy assembles a random list of what she hates about the Southwest. How everyone is making jewelry and searching for shrines. Santa Fe is an outdoor theme mall. Silver is a wound that gleams. It’s a cancer. It lays itself out in strands of necklaces and belts, a glare of dead worms, obscene. The entire Navajo nation is home in a stupor, smoking chiva and crack and watching TV while numbly pounding out conches and squash blossoms. It’s sickening.

Amy remembers a town on the way to Las Cruces. Shacks where she sees lava mountains out a broken window. Her real father is coming down from the reservation to see her. He’s out of prison. Amy hasn’t met him. Big Ed or Big Jeb are buying pot. Or maybe selling it. The adults are eating peyote.

Her mother and a woman she doesn’t recognize sit on the floor in the lotus position, stringing necklaces and laughing. The TV is on maximum volume, picture and sound wavering, ghosted and distorted. She became dizzy, and perhaps she fainted. She is carried to a car. It’s a special day. She is certain. Yes, it’s her thirteenth birthday and her father doesn’t come down from the reservation to see her after all. Later, the woman reaches through the car window, dangling necklaces. She offers her beads, silver and turquoise. Amy shakes her head no.

“Mesa Verde is a revelation,” Raven reveals. “The Buddha must have built it.”

“Didn’t extraterrestrials do the construction?” Amy asks. “Aliens from Roswell with green blood and implants in their necks.”

Raven smokes a joint. Amy Gold turns away, angry. She rejects the concept that enlightenment can be geographically pinpointed, that one can chart a route, follow a map, drive there, and purchase a ticket. Spirituality has been reduced to another commodity. Can’t Raven comprehend that? Probably not.

Amy experiences a disappointment so overwhelming it erases the possibility of speech. She drinks from her vodka bottle surreptitiously, leaning against the car window while afternoon falls in green and blue pieces against her face. The time space continuum is fluid and it’s flowing across her skin. It’s breaking across her flesh in a series of glass splinters.

They spend the afternoon in Indian ruins, peering through holes and slots implying windows. They climb reconstructed steps and wood ladders into the cliff dwellings. The repetition of identical ceremonial rooms is relentless. She feels sullen and futile.

“You’re still a bitter child,” Raven says, voice soft. It’s not an accusation. “You have a one word vocabulary. All you say is no.”

“You’re the queen of yes. What did it get you?”

Silence. Amy is wondering what the Anasazi did, how they lived. They smoked pot, no doubt, and strung beads, got drunk, hunted and gathered herbs. In between, they engaged in acts of domestic violence and child abuse. Now a slap, then a torn hymen. Human nature hasn’t changed. In 641, a pope decreed that a man could have only a single wife. But there’s no evolutionary adaptation to support that opinion.

Amy wants to discuss this with her mother. But Raven doesn’t have the attention span. They crawl through a tunnel, dust settling across her forehead like another coating of adobe or clay, a decorative filigree. They stand on the rim of the canyon, their shoulders brushing. It begins to rain; thunder echoes off rock and the ground shakes. It’s like being in a shooting range.

Raven is out of breath. “It’s the ancient ones talking,” she manages.

“Christ,” Amy says. “You’ll end up a tour guide.”

“Big Red’s a guide in Bandolier. He’s got a uniform and a pension,” Raven tells her with a rare edge. Is she jealous?

Amy touches the emergency pint of vodka inside the rain poncho her mother handed her. When she isn’t watching, Amy finishes the bottle.

“You don’t have to drink like this,” Raven said. “Pot is easier on the liver. And it’s more enlightening.”

In a deserted campground, they walk in mud up to their calves. Raven is wearing a stylish leather coat. It simply materialized. It’s like that with her mother, the costume changes, the inexplicable appearance of accessories, the silver belt pulled from a bag, the mantilla that’s both a veil and shawl. Amy is shivering.

“West and south,” Raven decides. “The first decent hotel where it’s hot.”

Gallup is a few disappointing blocks of pawnshops and liquor stores that seem to be lingering posthumously. A community center with windows broken, and a tennis court with the pavement ripped. The net has been hacked up with knives. She imagines playing on the court, bits of glass making her footing slippery. She could fall, sprain an ankle, get cut. But that scenario is too simple. The wound she’s searching for, what she’s stalking, is more profound and permanent.

“The whole infrastructure is going,” Amy notes, glancing at the gutted swimming pool, the brown lawn laced with glass. “It’s not just the cities.”

“My infrastructure is going. But government pills and AA aren’t my answer.” Raven stops the car. There is a pause.

“Listen, I had boyfriends,” her mother begins, almost whispering. “When you were 10, I was the same age you are now. But nobody laid a finger on you, Amethyst. You are my jewel. Everybody treated you right. I made sure.”

Late afternoon is a chasm of shimmering crimson that seems vaguely Egyptian. Raven gets out of the car and hands her the keys. “Your turn,” she says. “Surprise me.”

Amy drives west across desert. She stops in a liquor store, buys four pints of vodka and hides them. She drinks and drives until Raven wakes up, moaning. They’re almost across Arizona.

“What’s this?” Raven asks, mildly interested. She rubs her eyes, can’t find her eyeglasses and opens her map. She examines it, concentrating. The map is upside down.

“Laughlin. It’s a déclassé Vegas on the Arizona-California-Nevada border. Feeds off the retirement dollar. It’s nickel and dime all the way. They let them park their trailers free. Hope they’ll toss a quarter in a slot machine on the way to the john. It’s the collapse of western civilization. The final capitalist terminal. You can watch the empire fall here. Come on. We’ll love it.” Amy is incredibly festive.

She pauses in the oasis of lobby surrounded by casinos. They’re cavernous. They’re the magic caves where Ali Baba and the 40 thieves hid their gold goblets and chests of coins and rubies.

It’s oddly familiar, the assault of neon on walls, the leaden clinking machines and spinning wheels. Then the islands of green felt of card and dice tables. She understands this electric palette. The neon ceiling is like a cathedral. The neon-draped walls are layered in birthday cake pink and yellow icing. Come on. Spend a buck. It’s a holiday.

Here are men in cowboy hats and boots with spurs who recently won a minor event at a second tier rodeo. They have the prize money in their socks. And men who just buried their wives and have ten thousand insurance dollars in their sports jacket pockets. This is what they got for their 30 years, five of it spent going to and from chemo. The money is in a roll with a rubber band around it like another type of ring. This time, they’ll marry fortune.

Here are women who just sold their mothers’ wedding rings for four hundred dollars, their divorced husband’s bass boat and tool set. Nearly three grand in total. They wear flower print cotton dresses, and acres of pink and what might be bathrobes. They sit on stools, considering each quarter with deliberation, calculating their possibilities and counting their change. They extract one dime at a time, rationing themselves, and waiting for the right second, the anointed juncture, to spring forward and pull the lever.

Everyone moves in exaggerated slow motion through the neon drifting from the ceiling and sliding off the slot machines, making the air thicken like cornstarch. All carry coins in plastic cups the size of ice cream sodas, faces devoid of expression. Their limbs are stiff, arthritic. They look jetlagged and confused. They look like they need wheelchairs and want to go home.

Women on social security in mini skirts and fishnet stockings thread their way between the mock islands, carrying trays of free drinks. Only the dealers are swift, flipping out cards like whirling dervishes. Here come the royals. You’ve barely added up your hand and they’re already reaching across felt and raking the chips back in.

Bells are the punctuation, the music of the casino. Bells signaling a payoff and the impending cascade of nickels and dimes. Bells announcing the start of a new keno game. These bells don’t ring with the authority and purpose of churches. Or the promise of thrill like ferry and carnival bells. They don’t mark the hour. They’re designed to keep you from the walking coma you suspect you’re in. They’re like alarm clocks. Then the blast like a siren that doesn’t require translation. Jackpot.

This is the new American score, Amy thinks. It’s not a house, forty acres with a pond and mule and some stray grass to barbeque on anymore. Medicare is just a word, like democracy and justice. This is the global world of the dwarf dollar and the failure of gods and tradition and language itself. There’s been a mass reduction. Even fantasy is truncated, amputated, stuck in a box in the basement. In this new century, we just want one good weekend.

They have a suite on the 17th floor with a view of the Dead Mountains, a swath of the Mojave, and the whip-thin blue chalk line of the Colorado River. Millions of women and men are also standing at windows, at this precise instant, realizing their lives are nothing they thought they would be. Sun is a slap across their mouths.

Amy Gold feels a rising excitement as they ride the elevator back to the lobby. She listens to bells from slot machines and the constant tumbling nickels flowing into steel shells suggesting mouths. Of course, this is what you hear at the end of the world. It isn’t a whimper after all. It has nothing to do with anything human. It’s the sound of symbols in motion. It’s the sound of tin.

Raven is changing a ten-dollar bill for a foot-high plastic cup of quarters. She’s changed her clothes, too. It must be Act 2. She’s wearing a maroon caftan encrusted with tiny beads that sparkle and gold high heels. She has a canary yellow sash around her waist, bangles on both wrists and oversized sunglasses with gold frames. Two old men stare at her.

Amy hasn’t had the right accessories for any of the towns or situations of her life. In the lobby of the River’s End in Laughlin, Amy regrets the silver she didn’t buy in Aspen. And the squash blossom in Taos. She should have taken the birthday beads she was offered by a laughing woman on peyote. Or even a turquoise bracelet from a pawnshop in Flagstaff where she saw thousands in rows in display cases. The Navajo nation was divesting itself of its semi-precious stones for beer and crack and it was horrifying. She didn’t want any of it, not even for free.

Neon drifts like party streams and bolts of crepe paper. Or spun glass in the crimson of the plumes of jungle birds thought to be extinct. They didn’t disappear. They’re here, at the River’s End, in their giant electric aviary.

She should have acquired a silk shawl somewhere, brass hoop earrings, a skirt in a floral print or a chiffon dress, fall leaf colored and embroidered with flowers, iris and pansies and violets, perhaps. And a straw hat with a flagrant yellow silk flower. She could have made herself into a garden. But she was a professor of no. Maybe she was born this way.

The tinny bells don’t come from cathedrals or ships. They’re machine proclamations of impending money. And it occurs to her that no accessories could possibly be right for this occasion.

“Let’s check out the river,” Raven suggests. She’s put on mauve lipstick and a citrus perfume.

Outside the casino, air cracks against her face. It must be 110, Amy thinks. 115. Heat rolls across her flesh, laminating it. This is how time takes photographs.

It’s how you get into the eternal line-up. It has nothing to do with Homeland Security or INTERPOL.

They walk into liquid heat. Huge insects perch on the ground. Clusters of scorpions. And nests of roaches and maggots.

“Crickets and grasshoppers,” Raven explains. Her skirt is a compendium of all possible shades of purple. Her skirt is wind across dusk mesas. Raven brings her climate with her. She wears sunset around her hips and asks, “Are you OK?”

OK? Is that a state with borders? Or an emotional concept? Can you drive there, get a suite, break a 20 for buckets of dimes? Should she reply with a flag or a drum? And what is in the arc of light on the side of the parking lot? It’s a confederation of hallucinatory swooping forms, too thin to be birds. They’re creatures from myth. They’ve broken through the fabric, tearing through time with their teeth.

“Bats,” Raven says. “Can’t you hear them?”

Everything is humming. It’s a corrupted partial darkness, too over-heated and streaked with arrows of red neon to be real night. It’s grazing above the surprisingly cold river. Amy touches it with her hand. The riverbank is studded with abandoned construction sites, iron grids with no walls, roofs or windows. It’s a ghost town.

They stand on a sort of loading dock. The terrain is increasingly difficult to decode. What is that coming toward them? A sea vessel? Yes, a mock riverboat calling itself a water taxi.

Raven reaches out her tanned arms, and helps her climb down the stairs. “You’re going to vomit,” her mother whispers. “You’re drinking too much. You could never maintain.”

The boat motion is nauseating. The water taxi crosses one thin strand of river, disgorges silent passengers who seem already defeated, and takes new ones to the other bank. The water taxi rides back and forth, back and forth, ferrying gamblers from Arizona across the river to Nevada where it is legal. Everyone is somber.

Amy Gold closes her eyes and counts the rivers she’s been on or in with her mother. The Snake, Arkansas, Rio Grande, Mississippi, Columbia, Missouri and Wailua, and now this ghastly Colorado in July where she doesn’t have the right accessories, not a scarf, bracelet or shawl. And what do they call this? The Styx?

“You’re not smoking,” Amy realizes.

“Even bank robbers quit,” Raven replies. “Even guys in the can quit.”

It’s the last ride of the night. The driver repeats this twice. He’s accustomed to passengers with Alzheimer’s and hearing aids, canes and walkers. And she’s been in the boat for hours, her head in her mother’s lap. She’s finished her emergency pint of vodka. She manages to stand, and pauses on the dock.

There’s an anomalous movement in the river. Some rustling denting the water the way tuna do in shallow bays. Then the water looks like submerged dogs are running just beneath the surface. Two boys are doing something with white flowers. They toss bouquets into the muddy river and the flowers are instantly, savagely ripped apart.

Amy is startled by an agitation beneath the surface. Enormous fish circle around the wood planks. They must be four feet long. There are severed palms in the water. People have removed their hands and these grotesque fish are eating them. The hideous dark gray fish. It’s a ritual. They must supplicate themselves.

“My God,” Amy says, wondering if she should jump in. She’s an excellent swimmer. She learned CPR. She takes a breath.

“Just carp.” Raven is tired. “Hundreds of large carp.”

“But what are they eating?” Amy has a pulsing ache that begins in her jaw and runs through the individual nerves of her face. Fine wires are being pulled through her eyes. Perhaps they’re going to use her for bait.

“Bread,” her mother says. “Look. Pieces of bread.”

Yes, of course. Slices of white bread. It is not the amputated hands of virgins. It’s not the orchids the Buddha promised. It’s bread from plastic bags. And we are released. We are reprieved. Enlightenment does not announce itself on the map. It is random, always.

“Where are you going?” Raven demands. “You’re sick. Let me help you.”

She is frightened.

“I’ll come back,” Amy says.

“You haven’t been back in since San Diego,” Raven says. “You left too soon, Amethyst. Fifteen was too early, baby. And you’re not going anywhere now.”

Amy Gold is moving through the lobby; she’s running, and she’s way ahead of her mother. She’s been way ahead from the beginning. That’s why her attention wanders. It’s always been too easy, she remembers, finding a path between islands of machines with glittering gutted heads. She possesses the secret of this age. It’s about the geometry of cheap metal. And she knows where the parking lot is and she has the car keys.

Amy Gold stops, paralyzed. She understands this moment with astounding clarity. No. She’s not going to pack her office at the university. She’s not going to carry books through corridors, one cardboard box, one square casket at a time. We decide the components of our necessities. We design our own ceremonies of loyalty and propitiation. And history fails to explain the significance of accessories. The silk sash around your waist can be a fishing line. Or a noose to hang a man with. Why isn’t this even a footnote?

Raven is reaching through the garish neon, her palms open, waiting to receive something. Pages from the original Bagavaid Gita? The UFO invasion plan? An Anasazi document inscribed in glyphs on bark in a lime ink unknown for a thousand years?

“Give me the keys. Give me the booze and cigarettes,” Raven commands. “I’m taking you home.”

Her mother is a sly predator bird who avoided capture. She’s infertile, arthritic, and she’s lost her claws. Her liver is diseased and her nest is lit by kerosene and candles. She’ll be safe there. She will receive the correct instructions and this time she will listen. When they drive through the Four Corners, through the region of the Harmonic Convergence, this time she will hear.

Her mother is driving, white and stiff in the darkness, a woman with lines like dried tributaries gouged into her face. She gave birth to a daughter she named for the distillation of all strata of purple. Raven wraps a shawl gold as a concubine’s solstice festival vestment around her shoulders. This woman will give her tenure. Amy leans against her mother; her eyes close and she is completely certain.

The architectural drawings can be salvaged and revised. They can build with hay bales now; it’s cheaper. They can do it themselves. After the adobe walls and kiva beams, they’ll tile the floors. Later they’ll plant chilies. Then half an acre of lilies, Calla Lilies. They can have a roadside stand in April at Easter. They’ll be known throughout the northern plateaus as the women of the lilies. Some will call them the women who sell communion.

They’ll be known only by rumor. It will be said that the solitary raven of the mesa received a miracle. There was a brutal severing and a long season of mourning. Then, inexplicably, since this is the nature of all things, the unexpected occurred. Hierarchies are irrelevant because they do not examine central and recurring events. There’s the unknowable trajectory of inspirations that prove to be barricaded cul-de-sacs. Or a king has an aneurism, issues a final edict, and families collapse, and villages vanish.

As there is lightning and cataclysm, droughts and wildfires, so too exists the revelatory accident. Are we not reconfigured as we cross rooms, strike matches, and catch moonlight on our skin?

On a mesa above Espanola, where the Rio Grande is a muddy creek you can’t even see from the highway, it is said that one day a lost daughter bearing the name of a sacred stone was somehow returned.

For precisely twenty-five years, Barbara Stein has required her advanced placement English class at Allegheny Hills High School to produce a three-page creative essay describing their summer vacation.

Introduce yourselves to me, Mrs. Stein has asked a quarter century of 10th graders. Begin with the last three months.

In return, she’s presented with listless landscapes like postcards selected at random in convenience stores or found accidentally in a stranger’s drawer. Cities meet their harbors, waves unavoidably fill the centers with anonymous paint-can blues, but it’s all secondhand and detached from the speaker. They’re merely views without fragrance or the possibility of vertigo.

Her students omit the ambiguously provocative areas of their Julys and Augusts. They replace them with predictable travelogues. She is presented with formulaic montages of interchangeable beaches meeting cliffs with the remnants of fortresses and rubble of cathedrals and lighthouses.

The images are the certified version of location and event, but they’re a censored translation, generic, erased of danger and revelation.

This is so impersonal; it might have been transmitted from another planet. In red ink she writes, Nice image, but what are the sounds of summer? The specific smells of your July?

Mrs. Stein believes catastrophe has a distinct texture and climate. Summer disasters are deceptively intense and enacted under stark white light. It’s garish and has nothing to do with illumination. It’s the flash of a camera freezing your face with a comprehension of circumstances you don’t suspect you know. That’s why you reject the photograph. It isn’t because the angle is unflattering, but rather the image contains gestures and dialogue occurring just behind your shoulder. It’s in the hallway or on the pier, a subtle text you pretend doesn’t exist.

Tell me about the quality of light, Barbara Stein instructs, and you’ll find out who you are.

Some students begin to listen. They consider the periphery of their lakeside villages — the implications and the words they don’t actually hear but subconsciously intuit. On certain summer nights the prolongment of divorce is unmistakable — it’s an edgy scrape across an unwashed plate, an unexpected slap on a face, a slammed car door, a phone call in a voice too rapid and soft in a back room with the lamps shut off. The correlation between betrayal and darkness is obvious. One must listen beyond thunder and crickets, past wind blowing the motel banner advertising free dinners for children in six colors.

If you’ve trained yourself, you can hear disease and derangement growing. Cancer is sudden and yellow and smells like rotting tropical fruit and algae in neglected aquariums. Sickness favors surfaces like plaster hallways, mesh screen doors, and plastic kitchen counters in rented bungalows. Sometimes it appears after lightning storms as if electrically incited. Divorce has its unique architecture and undertow. You must search for this while you’re fishing. It’s not in the bucket of bait or on the nylon lines. Instead it’s in the wakes boats carve on water like a legible script.

This is a good setting, Mrs. Stein inscribes on the margin of a student paper. But I think there is more you want to say. Don’t be afraid. The page is your best friend.

Mrs. Stein is intimate with the core of summer. It’s the khaki of tents and sleeping bags and army uniforms. It’s the khaki of camouflage.

Her students entertain the notion that she has unspecified powers, perhaps of a telepathic nature. Yet Mrs. Stein is known as a teacher you can trust. You can tell her about your mother’s new boyfriend and how you’re having trouble sleeping. Mrs. Stein doesn’t demand specific information or what was actually suggested in the barn or pick-up, and the events that followed. She understands what you’re not saying. You can reveal yourself to her in a way you can’t to the guidance counselor who will report your confidences to the principal.

Barbara Stein is an expert keeper of secrets. It’s curious no one suspects her of also possessing them. That’s what keeping a low profile, rarely confiding in another human being, and buying your clothing from the LL Bean catalogue does. It renders the most salient aspects of your personality invisible. In an age of labels and categories, one can effortlessly disappear.

Barbara Stein is, in fact, festooned with clandestine hieroglyphics. If her subterfuges were made dimensional, shaped perhaps into ornaments, she could be Allegheny Hill’s annual Christmas tree. She would sparkle with the radiance of her concealment, her omissions, and what’s growing in her periphery and margins. There’s the matter of where her daughter is, and how she hasn’t spent the last twenty years of winter nights alone. If Barbara Stein told the truth, she’d blind you.

Her students respect Mrs. Stein’s courage. When the schoolboard banned The Catcher in the Rye and The Diary of Anne Frank, she continued teaching these books. She drove all the way to Pittsburgh to buy paperback copies. She purchased them with her own money. When the board threatened to fire her, she replied, “Fire is a weapon against truth. After all, they fired Joan of Arc.”

Students in graduate school return to pay their respects. Mrs. Stein doesn’t encourage this. She doesn’t save their postcards with literary allusions or their trinkets from England and Greece. She doesn’t read their publications and has only an abstract and minimal interest in their achievements in the field of the written word.

Mrs. Stein doesn’t think there is much field left for the written word. It was once a frontier, a primitive meadowland like the acres of shoulder high Mustard, Purple Thistle, and Golden Rod beyond her apple orchard and gardening plots. It’s become a squalid cul-de-sac, a footpath littered with garbage you can’t find on a map. The quality of books has changed in her lifetime. They’re constructed from a different sort of paper and poorly bound, as if intended to be discarded. They’re like cereal boxes rather than sacred artifacts. She’s seen exhibitions where text was used as a graphic element — letters were selected for their shape, rows of words were pasted into columns forming geometric patterns. These representations didn’t offend her.

In truth, few of her students want to read, not even the brightest and the most verbal. They’ve been inundated by more images in their fourteen years than entire libraries contain. Sentences and paragraphs are tedious, irrelevant like fortress walls. They don’t believe books provide revelation. Words are a version of stone.

Her students spend afternoons in computer chat rooms, employing aliases, and inventing constantly evolving identities. They exchange texts they mistake for accurate approximations of their values and psychology. They don’t recognize they’re engaged in acts of fiction.

Once she mourned the passing of the poets. She recognized that, when they became obsolete, something of what was intrinsically human would be extinct. So it was for the bards with lyres and the carvers of canoes who navigated Pacific islands by the sound and scent of currents. The Gutenberg Printing Press lasted five hundred years, certainly longer than airplanes or cinema will. The technological revolution is an abrupt compression, a swing toward an incremental and collective synthesis. Who is to say half a millennia of books are not enough? She keeps these thoughts to herself.

On Maple Ridge Road, her neighbors perceive her as neutered and eccentric. She’s beyond fertile and therefore harmless. She’s a middle-aged woman, predictable in navy and cranberry, who does her own gardening and house repairs. In late summer she sells eggs and blueberries from her yard. She looks like she’d defend Emily Dickinson’s honor with her own life if it came to it. Barbara Stein is viewed as a distillation of English literature and the teaching profession itself.

If there’s a sense of tragedy in her eyes, it’s an ancient wound — or the result of childhood abandonment. There are rumors of an unfortunate early marriage and a problem with a daughter. But it’s nothing anyone can verify. Invisible women do not invite serious investigation.

Mrs. Stein is aware of the multiplicity of rumors surrounding her. Some are perennials, flaring like banks of May Daffodils, Tulips and Lavender Crocuses. They have a short season. Then the anomaly of annuals that stun but don’t return. In point of fact, she has more than a passing interest in the powers of intuition. Mrs. Stein suspects she might be an adept. When she’s luminous with clarity, she can, in fact, see. She penetrates the ordinary to an enormous brilliant core like an inland sea. It’s a region of pure marrow, detailed and unspoiled. She could trace it with her fingertips.

The inland sea is a body she can open. She’s learned its subtle anatomy and how to subdue and characterize it. Ridges of bone are maple leaf green, the surrounding tissues are chartreuse, and the fluids are a jade she can split with her lips.

Mrs. Stein has a natural affinity for landscape and its seductive promise. All women in gardens sense there is a further purpose. Women on their knees in dirt are engaged in conspiracies of disguised eroticism. The shears, gloves and baskets are blatant props. Any woman gardening is prepared for acts of love.

“Menopause is turning me into a witch,” she told Elizabeth.

That was the last time they spoke. Elizabeth is her only child, the daughter she is going to Los Angeles to find. That’s what Barbara Stein does, secretly, during the two weeks of her summer when she has the budget to leave Maple Ridge and search for her daughter. She’s been doing this for twelve years.

“You were always unusual,” Elizabeth said, her voice raked raw and hollowed out. That was three months ago when she still had Elizabeth’s latest phone number. Barbara Stein inscribed it in her leather directory, in a section filled with discarded Elizabeth phone numbers and addresses. These are kept under D for daughter.

Sometimes she just layers blank papers with the ten phone numbers the way her infatuated students reproduce the name of the object of their desire. They’re engaged in acts of magic — a kinetic incantation, the pencil and paper are flints and there’s an angle that can produce fire. Her students wonder if this is the meaning of geometry and why mathematics is required. It’s an attempt to stem delirium.

For decades, notebook pages of —

Brian

Brian

Brian

Brian

Justin

Justin

Justin

Justin

— fall from folders onto her classroom floors. The repetition of the printed patterns, the crude calligraphy spilling beyond the margins, the curves and etchings suggest the deliberation of engineering and construction. Who is to say these are not novels about love?

Megan Miller returns to the farm in July or August when the river is low and the air yellow. There’s been a six-year drought. She looks across the barley field to the twin silos and interprets them as reassuring. It’s all a sequence of impressions to which we assign meaning. I could call them sores or anchors, she thinks, deliberately selecting the later.

Eleven Cottonwoods line the front fence. She counts them anyway. There’s a new horse in the pasture. There’s always a new horse in the pasture. She’s been told his generic name several times but forgets. Blacky. Honey. Wheaty. Rusty. She can’t remember them from season to season. There’s a take-home message here. One must not fraternize with livestock. To give them names implies a psychology, a personality, an emotional involvement. The next thing you know, you’re screwing sheep and everyone in church knows precisely the category of your sin. They smell it. It’s a capacity they’ve developed, like scenting sudden wind changes and ominous indications in shifting cloud structures.

She calls this horse Lady Gaga. “Hey Lady,” she yells through dense sunlight, across channels where voices are effortlessly lost. It strains the mouth to carve syllables into the laminated glare. The Sargasso is with us, Megan thinks, in our suitcases, our briefcases. We unpack salty red kelp as we do our silk suits. And the horse comes running. Megan waves a carrot she prepared in a slow motion, stood at the sink pealing with a dull knife while watching the aluminum coated silos. Such containers are festering lesions or acts of revelation. The farm is ground zero. And the silos her first punctuation. They rose from the ground like metal teeth.

Her father passes, almost grazing her shoulder, and climbs into his pick-up truck. “You’re going to spoil that horse,” he warns. He shuts the truck door hard, but it’s not a slam. That would be too decisive. Still, it’s a clear dismissal.

Megan observes her father drive away. This is how she remembers him, precisely, in insomniac nights in Paris, Maui and Los Angeles. He leaves a deliberate funnel of dust and the irritating scratch of gravel scattered beneath him. It’s an unmistakable threat. He’s a man of tornadoes and flesh wounds, surrounded and camouflaged by untouchable elements, stones, wind, motion, and the ripped air that leaks through wire fences. You know his plaid jacket better than his face.

An area is defined not only by what it contains but also by what is missing. That’s what Megan thought three days ago when they picked her up at the airport and drove home. She saw thunderheads and smelled damp barley. Fields like sea grass wind cut paths through. Perhaps this is the specific absence she is trying to fill or define, some weedy fluid movement loitering at her borders.

We carry intangible mistakes and garish miscalculations we never reveal. Megan recognizes they are simultaneously indulgent and brutally irretrievable. She glances at the barley. It’s a piece of her that’s been removed. It’s an amputation.

Megan is assaulted by the absolute knowledge of place. She surrenders to it, the river swollen with sun and insects, heat blowing in, thunderheads circling like gray walls growing up from the ground. Clouds are a speckled bouquet in reverse; a mysterious expanding fabric a woman initiated in such practices would know how to pick. Here all materials are saved, arranged and stitched. It is always quilting season.

August is white and yellow moths, monarch butterflies, oriels and golden eagles. Dust turns the sunset red and exquisite. It redeems and elevates the flat fields of wheat and barley, alfalfa and potatoes. There’s an insistent indication of gold between sheets of leaden gray and she thinks, suddenly, of medieval illuminated books.

That first afternoon, watching her father carry her suitcases into the house, Megan realized climate and personality are intimately linked. It is possible that geography is a form of fate. The valley is entirely ringed by clouds. They rise from the earth like a sort of crop. Potatoes are flowering with tiny white buds and if she ran the division of nomenclature, she would call the blossoms comafaces.

It’s two o’clock and Megan inhales heat from the unpaved road where her father drove away. It feels brittle, could settle on skin the way dust does, pollens, particles from plants and stalks when they’re cut and everyone’s eyes run. Harvest tears. But there’s more in this air, an underbelly tarnished with bits of wings from dying butterflies and yellowish feathers from sun-bleached hawks that often fall, a further layer of stained accumulation.

The posts on fences are ashy, the identical color of gravel in the driveway. Everything is chipped off, rubbed away. Even horses in the pasture with stalled summer across their backs are muted, dazed. The one blue spruce by the highway looks parched, neglected, scrubbed out. It’s merely an inconsequential blue afterthought, easily erased. There’s residue to this thought containing a darker implication, a midnight blue of bruises, perhaps. It’s not a psychological resonance but three-dimensional; you might actually see it in a mirror.

“She’s so dark,” her mother repeated. “That’s the darkest girl I’ve ever seen.” Dylan was four that summer, black haired and olive skinned like her ex-husband. A girl with enormous dark brown eyes who laughed and tanned easily, wanted to touch and ride the horses, swim in the river, pick flowers, eat peas from the garden, feed the chickens. A four-year-old from the season of infinite yes.

“I’ve never seen a child that dark,” her mother said again. “So dark and so small. Is that normal? You get her tested? She going to fade out? Is that her permanent complexion?”

Megan has not brought Dylan back. Now she wonders why she returns to her hometown, continues this pilgrimage in reverse, this journey where she expects to find nothing and does.

Restless, she drives the gray pick-up her father doesn’t use anymore. She parks on River Street, one block north of Main, and walks toward Maple. If the town had a center, this would be it. If there were answers, they would be here under the accidental circle of tall pines. In such shadows, one can engage in acts of personal architecture and invent a strategy for reconstructing seminal events.

Megan squints into sunlight. Morning comes at her in fragments, as if she’s an accident victim with extensive memory damage. She has a form of selective amnesia. That’s why she returns to the actual site where place should reveal itself as definitive.

Bernie Roth is not going to get his twenty-year service plaque in the lobby. The hospital he founded has been purchased by Westec Medical Division. Bernie Roth is merely the former figurehead of an ad hoc insurrection that has no meaning in the realm of litigation. The project coordinator makes it clear that his presence is unnecessary, in fact, it’s intolerable.

He leaves the merger meeting three days early. Bernie Roth takes a midnight flight and his green-tinted contact lenses sting as he drives from the airport directly home. The house is perched on a cliff of purple succulents above the ocean that is, today, a dark blue like certain fabrics where you see the grain and stitches.

Chloe designed their house with an architect from Milan. It’s a three-story Mediterranean villa with arches, balconies, a turret, orange tiles on the roof, and graceful windows of leaded glass that face interior courtyards enclosed by Bougainvillea draped walls. And it’s not painted pink, Chloe has meticulously explained. It’s a salmon terra cotta.

Chloe’s car is in the driveway. It’s a weekday and she should be out. He notices her car with surprise and relief, realizing that if she hadn’t been home, he would have called her and asked her to return immediately.

He finds Chloe in the bedroom, standing inside her closet, apparently arranging clothing. She is wearing a silk kimono imprinted with red Peonies, her blond hair is tied back in a ponytail and she seems startled to see him. She actually touches two fingers to her throat in a gesture of surprise when she looks up, and her mouth is momentarily wide. He starts to embrace her but, but for some reason, stops, and lays down on the bed instead.

“You’re three days early,” Chloe says. There’s something accusatory in her tone.

“I was invited to leave,” Bernie explains, prone. “I’m not getting my plaque.”

“Why not?” Chloe asks. She glances at him, briefly, then continues moving clothing through the 120 square feet of her cedar closet.

Spring-cleaning is inappropriate, he decides. Insulting and dismissive. Bernie wants a scotch and he wants her to lay down with him, in that order, now.

“Their focus groups don’t like plaques. It reminds the consumer of death. Their lobbies are strictly ferns with central gravel fountains. They’re identical, like McDonald’s.” He closes his eyes.

Bernie waits for Chloe to offer consolation. A drink and a quick tennis game, perhaps. It’s still early. They could have lunch, walk on the beach. Then he could tell her his joke. Westec Medical Division. WMD. See, there are weapons of mass destruction, after all. They’re just not in Baghdad. They’re in La Jolla.

Bernie Roth is aware of an agitating interference in the room. He must remove his contacts. His vision is blurred and scratchy, as if his eyes are being clawed. “What are you doing?” he asks.

“I’m packing, Bernie. I’m not getting my plaque, either. I intended to be gone before you got back.” Chloe resumes her closet activities.

He sees now, the selected dresses and suits and skirts hanging in one area, an assembly of shoes and purses already on the bedroom floor below the French windows leading to the mahogany bedroom terrace. Her entire set of luggage is in the corner, garment bags, cosmetic cases and assorted carry-ons. The suitcases are nearly filled.

“Where are you going?” Bernie sits up. Is this an unscheduled Book Club related journey? A prize-winning poet must be fetched at an airport and properly entertained? Is there a problem with the children? Maybe he needs a scotch and a cup of coffee.

“I’m just going, Bernie. That’s the point. Not where.” Chloe pauses. “I’m leaving you. This. Us. La Jolla. I’m through.”

“You’re leaving me? As in a separation? A divorce?” Bernie stares at her. “Now?”

“Affirmative. Sorry about the scheduling. But it’s always something. The siege of festivities. Christmas. Birthdays. Valentine’s Day. Our anniversary. Departures tend to be awkward.” Chloe looks directly at him. “Can you give me an hour or so to wrap it up here?”

“Wrap it up here? What is this? A movie set? You’re divorcing me and you want me to leave our bedroom now?” Bernie repeats.

He examines the bedroom as if he’s never quite seen it before. Their bed has four oak posts supporting a yellow brocade canopy. The walls are an ochre intended to suggest aged stucco. Ochre, not yellow. A stone kiva fireplace is dead center across from the bed. Navajo rugs lay over glazed orange Spanish tiles. The ceiling is a sequence of Douglas fir beams somehow procured from a derelict church in New Mexico. Bernie assumes her decorator hires bandits. An elaborate copper and glass chandelier with a history involving Gold Rush opera theaters and saloons hangs suspended from the middle of the beams. Chloe insisted it was necessary, despite the earthquake hazard. It was essential for what did she call it? The hybrid Pueblo Revival style?

“I have a list and this is confusing. Yes. Why don’t you make yourself a drink? I’ll join you downstairs in a bit, OK?” It’s not a question.

“Isn’t this sudden? I’ve been preoccupied with the merger, but—” he begins.

“Actually, it’s a coincidence. It doesn’t really have to do with you,” Chloe says, over her shoulder.

She extracts a pair of fire-engine red high-heel shoes. She holds them in her hands, as if determining their possible flammability. Or is she weighing them? Is she taking a special flight? Are there baggage limitations? Is she going on safari?

“We’ve been married twenty-four years. I must have some involvement.” Bernie entertains the notion that this is a ghastly practical joke, or the consequence of an anomalous miscommunication. A faulty computer transmitting a garbled fax designed for someone else entirely, perhaps.

Chloe is within her fortress of closet, on her knees, nonchalantly evaluating pocketbooks and shoes with both hands. She does have a list, he notices that now, and a pen where she checks off and crosses out items. She’s also listening to music. Bob Dylan live, he decides. It’s her favorite, the Rolling Thunder tour. Or the other one she plays incessantly, Blood on the Tracks. They made a pact when Irving and Natalie went to college. She would not play Bob Dylan in his presence. In return, he would not subject her to John Coltrane or Monk. No Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker, either. Chloe deems his music agitating. In fact, his entire jazz collection is, by agreement, kept in his study, as if they were vials of pathogens. Or slides of children with pre-op facial deformities.

Bernie stares at her back for an arrested moment, in which time simultaneously elongates and compresses. Then he pushes himself up from the embroidered damask pillows with their intimidating wavy rims of thick silk ribbons requiring handling so specialized he fears them, stands unsteadily, and walks downstairs to the kitchen. He pours scotch into a water glass.

Outside is a tiled courtyard with a marble statue of what he assumes is a woman rendered in an abstract manner embedded in the center of a round shallow pool with a fountain. Flowers that resemble lotuses but aren’t drift slowly across the surface like small abandoned boats. He realizes the petals form a further layer of mosaic. So this is how his wife makes stone breathe. Then he reads the Sunday New York Times front page twice. The script is glutinous, indecipherable. He pours another scotch and dials Sam Goldberg’s private emergency cell line.

“The WMD negotiations? You’re still there?” Sam doesn’t wait for a response.

“I’m at lunch with a client, Bernie. Can I get back to you?” “Chloe says she’s divorcing me,” Bernie begins.

“I’m representing her, yes.” Sam sounds equitable, even expansive.

“You’re my best friend,” Bernie reminds him.

“I love you both. She came to me first. I’ll call you back.” The phone goes still in his hand, which feels suddenly numb. He remembers that his hospital is now simply part of 250 small medical facilities owned by a corporation based in Baltimore. He is merely one of 12,500 doctors they choose to employ.

Bernie climbs the wooden stairs to their bedroom. Chloe is placing shoes in an enormous cardboard box. “Imelda Marcos had fewer shoes,” he notes. He’s wondered about her shoe accumulation, the pumps and stilettos and platforms, how odd for a woman who habitually wears sandals or is barefoot.

“Won’t you need a porter or two?”

“My job is over. The chauffeuring. The scheduling. Tennis lessons and matches. Music classes. Not to mention the soccer practices and interminable play-offs. The surfboard transportation logistics. Piano recitals. Ballet productions. The play dates,” Chloe pauses. She reaches for something in a drawer on the far side of the closet. She withdraws a package of cigarettes. She lights one and faces him.

“Listen. It begins in pre-school. These kids don’t play. They have auditions. If they pass, if they get a call back, a sort of nanny-chaperoned courtship ensues. It’s loathsome.” She expels smoke. “Later, it’s worse.”

He hasn’t seen her with a cigarette since Ion and Gnat first went to nursery school. The fumes are infiltrating the room, further irritating his contacts. Bob Dylan is whining off-key and out of time, contaminating the air, now on an auditory level. It should be labeled a posthumous rather than live performance, he decides. He shuts off the switch.

“I didn’t know you still smoked,” Bernie said. “Or that you hated the children’s activities.”

“Soccer did me in. Soccer, for Christ’s sake. How does soccer figure? When did that make your short list? How many professional soccer stars has La Jolla produced? It’s just crap.” Chloe is vehement.

“We accepted division of labor as a viable vestigial tradition. But you could have refused,” Bernie counters.

“You can’t say no to soccer. It’s the new measure of motherhood. It’s the fucking gold standard. I sat in parking lots between chauffeuring, feeling like Shiva with her arms amputated.” Chloe finishes her cigarette. She uses a yellow shoe with a red flower at the toe for an ashtray.

“Let’s have a drink downstairs,” Bernie suggests. His voice is reasonable. He is able to produce this effect by pretending he is someone else entirely, a concierge or a waiter. “I’m finishing the Laphroaig.”

Chloe consults her watch. It’s the Piaget he gave her when their son entered college. His wife shrugs, the kimono sleeves drifting briefly from her sides like twin cranes skimming an inlet, hunting.

“One drink,” she assents.

They sit in the kitchen. He considers the Westec buy-out. For two decades, he entered the hospital each morning and paused in a gesture of respect near walls engraved with the names of doctors who had achieved their 20, 25 and 30 year status. Next year, he would have had his own 20-year service plaque installed. Chloe has already arranged the catering. He would be permanently mounted beside Milstein and Kim, McKenzie, Fuentes and Weintraub. They were there when Northern San Diego Children’s Clinic was built, the landscaping just put in, the first Bougainvillea and Hibiscus bushes growing against still dusty cinder blocks. Chloe planted pink and white Camellias the next year. Then Wisteria and Roses.

Bernie realizes the kitchen floor is actually a composition of hand-painted tiles, purple and blue Irises and Violets. The stems and leaves are a raised green enamel suggesting channels and veins. So this is how she prepares their meals, barefoot, standing on a version of cool garden. He finds cheese and fruit in the refrigerator and bagels in the cabinet. A china platter with ornate silver handles he vividly recalls packing in plastic wrap and hauling in a special crate on a plane sits between them. Where were they returning from? Portugal? Prague? Chloe averts her eyes.

“I love California Lent. It comes the spring you’re fifteen and lasts the rest of your life.” She looks tired.

“Just gain a few pounds and let’s stay married.” Bernie spreads cream cheese on a bagel. It’s stale. Chloe smokes another cigarette.

“I’m leaving a few pounds early. I’m one of the last original wives. Do you realize that?” Chloe asks. “ I’m forty-six. Let’s just skip menopause and the obligatory trophy wife syndrome. We did our jobs. Now the task is finished.”

“We had a deal. We agreed to be post-modern,” Bernie points out. “No empires with historically disastrous ends. No mistresses with unnecessary dangerous complications. No tax fraud. No start-ups or IPOs. Just us, with plausible defendable borders.”

“We did that. You built the clinic. I did this.” Chloe indicates the formal dining room with her fingers, and by extension, he surmises, the entire house and grounds, courtyards, swimming pool and tennis court, gazebos and rose gardens.

“You saw it as a job?” Bernie is amazed.

“It was a performance art piece. Remember when Book Club discovered one man shows? Spalding Gray. Laurie Anderson. We went with the Weintraubs on opening night, remember?”

Bernie Roth thinks for a moment. Then he says, “No.”

“It was the hospital benefit that year. A bit arty for you. We went backstage.

“Elaine had Laurie Anderson’s entire tour profile. We realized we were earning more than she was. We had our own multi-million dollar performance art pieces. We just had smaller venues and a limited audience. Elaine Weintraub, the original wife. Before the current version. The ex-TV late night weather girl? The anorexic redhead with the room temperature IQ? Jesus. Elaine Weintraub was my best friend. You don’t even remember her.” Chloe finishes her scotch.

“Our marriage was an art piece, a performance?” Bernie is incredulous.

“The four piece choreography. The lessons. Sports and tutors. Surfing and swim meets. The theme birthday party extravaganzas. Christ. Not to mention the gardeners I bailed out of jail. The maids with alcoholic boyfriends. Their secret abortions. The relentless complications. The emergency loans. It was 24/7 for 20 years. And I’m not getting a plaque either.” Chloe stares at the table. Bernie pours more scotch.

Outside is sunlight that surprises him with its nuances, its fluid avenues of yellows that are not solid at all, but tentative and in curious transition. Streaks like gold threads waver across the surface of the fountain, a filigree embossing the koi. Bernie thinks of brass bells and abruptly senses a clash in the air. So this is the sound of a day being sliced in half.

“I walk through this house and it’s like being trapped in a postcard.” Chloe indicates the living room table, a square of inlaid mahogany completely covered with framed photographs. She picks them up, one by one. “Agra. Bali. Rome. Luxor. Maui. Everyone holding hands and smiling. It’s a laminated version of reality.”

“But this was our life,” Bernie realizes. He stands near her. “You wanted Thanksgiving in a Beirut back alley? Easter in a Turkish tenement? That wasn’t our experience. What’s encased in glass is, in point of fact, the truth.”

“Really?” Chloe sounds bitter and combative. She is still wearing the kimono with the extravagant sleeves that seem to suggest intention. She has put on pink lipstick and diamond earrings. She has brushed her hair. Perhaps she sprayed her wrists with perfume. Then her skin would be a distillation of all things floral and vanilla. “This isn’t truth,” Chloe said. “It’s an advertisement for consumption.”

For a moment, Bernie thinks she is alluding to tuberculosis. TB is rebounding globally. Half of Europe tests positive. Studies suggest nearly forty percent of New York City college students have indications of exposure. Malaria is also making a spectacular comeback. Polio is a possibility, too. Its crossover potential is seriously underrated. A major influenza epidemic is inevitable, actually statistically overdue. Of course, small pox could be the defining epidemic of the millennium. Then he realizes his wife is not talking about infections. He holds a silver framed photograph selected at random. “You don’t appear to be suffering in Tahiti,” Bernie observes.

“I didn’t suffer. I just wasn’t engaged. It was like filling stamps in a geography game. More accumulation. Just like the grotesque children’s activities.” Chloe seems to be considering another drink.

“Grotesque?” Bernie repeats.

“Piano. Cello. Guitar. Ballet. Gymnastics. Basketball. Karate. Theater arts. Choral group. Ceramics. Mime. What kid has that plethora of aptitudes?” Chloe demands.

He is apparently meant to say something. “I have no idea,” he admits.

“They don’t have affinities or longings. Every stray spasm of temporary enthusiasm gets an immediate new uniform. They lack affection and discipline. Activities are another form of consumption. Now a video. Now a violin. Now Chinese. Now a chainsaw.” Chloe sighs.

Bernie considers the possibility that he may pass out. He barely slept at the negotiations, which were not mediations, but rather the inordinately slow unraveling of a fait accompli. His hotel room was curiously uncomfortable, the sheets and towels abrasively starched, the walls a deliberately muted blue reminiscent of an interminable depression. The sense of transience in carpet and upholstery stains disturbed him. There were lingering odors he couldn’t identify. Perhaps it was perfume, insect repellant, spilled wine, suntan lotion and something intangible that leaked from a stranger writing a postcard. He had insomnia for the first time since he was an intern and nightmares about his father.

“What are you going to tell Ion and Gnat?” Bernie tries.

“I’ve taken care of that.” Chloe almost smiles. There is strain around her mouth. It’s as close to a sneer as she can permit herself. Her genetic code doesn’t allow her to further distort her face.

“You’ve talked to them?” Bernie is tentative and afraid. He needs to establish coordinates. He must assemble reliable data.

“Ion and Gnat. How chic we thought their nicknames were. How millennial. Naturally, I’ve spoken with them.” Chloe stares at him. “Natalie used to tell me what a great mother I was. I had my standard line. I’d say—”

“I’m compensated. I’ve got my CEO salary, yearly incentive bonuses, stock options and pension plan,” Bernie supplies. “Of course, I remember.”

“I wasn’t kidding,” Chloe states.

After a moment, in which he feels dazed and incoherent, and thinks oddly and wildly of hummingbirds and lizards, and how patterns on reptiles resemble certain common skin disorders, he asks, “What did the children say?”

“They’re a monolith of narcissism and indifference. They want assurances there’s no hostility and the finances are secure. If separation doesn’t intrude on their scant psychological resources, it’s fine. They require known quantities. If it arrives from two locations, that’s irrelevant. Just so we don’t necessitate their engagement.”

“Is that it?” Bernie senses there is considerably more. His best skill has always been diagnostic.

“Not quite. They both have messages for you.” Chloe pauses. She takes a breath. “And this is the last act of translation I’m going to engage in. After this, you’ll have to gather and distill your own information.”

“Shoot.” Bernie is dizzy. He doesn’t want to flinch.

“Ion quit the tennis team.” Chloe actually laughs.

“He won the Desert Classic as a sophomore. He’s ranked number three in California, for Christ’s sake. He has a full scholarship.” Bernie realizes he is yelling.

“He knows we can afford it, without his playing. He hates tennis. Thinks it’s decadent, imperialistic and retrograde. He quit last year. I’ve been paying his tuition. Quietly. Part of my job. The choreography, mediation and scheduling aspect.”

“What about his major?” Bernie insists.

“He hasn’t been pre-med since freshman mid-terms.” Chloe avoids his eyes.

“What is his major, precisely?” Bernie is more alert. He understands rage is a form of fuel.

“Urban Design. It’s like modern history but with community projects.”

“Community projects?” Bernie puts his glass down. “Like Houses for Habitats?” He has a vague recognition of this organization. Perhaps he’s seen it listed on intern resumes.

“He’s specializing in athletics for the handicapped. Creating playgrounds with wheelchair ramps in barrios. Also, he isn’t Ion anymore. He’s Grivin,” Chloe informs him. “ He plays drums in a band. He says it’s a good drummer’s name.”

“Grivin?” Bernie repeats.

“An anagram of his wretched birth name. Irving. I should never have agreed to that.” Chloe shakes her head from side to side. “But you were having that affair with the nurse. And I was on the verge of suicide. Guess I just lost that one in the sun.”

There is a pause during which Bernie considers the delicacy of the respiratory system and the necessity to gather filaments of air into his body, and keep his lungs oxygenated. “What about Gnat? What about Natalie?”

“No pre-med there, either. Sorry. She’s in Women’s Studies.” Chloe examines her hands. Her fingernails are translucent with pearl white slivers at their tips. Or perhaps they are arcs of silver, permanently embossed by some new cosmetic process.

“And? Come on. I feel it, Chloe. I’m down. Kick me hard.” The scotch is making him nauseous. He decides to make a pot of coffee and take a Dexedrine.

“She’s calling herself Nat and living with a woman,” Chloe reveals.

“She’s a lesbian?” Bernie tries to concentrate on Gnat, on Natalie. She was an excellent camper. When they rafted the Grand Canyon, it was Gnat who helped erect the tents, identify the correct poles and how to position them. Her natural ability to recognize constellations was exceptional. She rarely tangled a fishing line. Was this unusual? Was her spatial aptitude an indication of abnormality? Had he failed to diagnosis a monumental malfunction?

“Fifty-six percent of her entering class listed their orientation as bisexual.” Chloe finishes examining her fingernails. “I suggest we adopt a neutral position.”

Events are accelerating in a frantic progression, each revelation is increasingly surreal. Day is assuming hallucinatory proportions. He concludes that his present condition resembles severe jetlag combined with sixth round chemotherapy. And there is, of course, the matter of the luggage. The suitcases packed in the bedroom. She must have arranged for someone to carry them down the stairs and load them into her car.

“Do you care about that?” Bernie manages. “Our daughter is gay.”

“Why would I care?” Chloe seems surprised.

“What will happen to the Christmas decorations?” Bernie asks. He considers their holiday ritual. Chloe and Gnat selected new ornaments for their permanent tree legacy, one for each family member, one each year. The two-hundred-year-old brocade angels with twelve- carat gold threads around their wings from Belgium. The gingham elves with pewter crowns. The silver maple leaves. The glass snowflakes, each with intricate individual facets and panels.

“Nat will take them no matter what. If she goes butch. If she opts for artificial insemination. She’ll take the ornaments. And she knew you’d ask that.” Chloe is leaning against the wall, her eyes partially closed.

Bernie pours coffee. He removes a bottle of amphetamines from his suit jacket pocket. He takes three tablets and offers the bottle to Chloe. She moves toward it with such unexpected rapidity, he can’t determine how many pills she extracts. Bernie watches her hands, following her fingers to where they terminate in glazed nails translucent like the undersides of certain tropical seashells.

“Remember the glass snowflakes?” Bernie asks.

“From Tibet? With triangular amber panels like medieval cathedral windows?” Chloe recalls. “I thought they’d look good as earrings. I imagined them on a young wife on a pyre. Of course, that wouldn’t work for me anymore.”

“That’s what you were thinking? In front of the goddamned pedigreed twenty-two-foot Colorado blue spruce? Ritual incineration?” Bernie places his hands over his eyes. There are numerous anecdotally reported cases of sudden stress induced blindness. He puts on his sunglasses.

Chloe pours herself a cup of black coffee. Her movements are slow, listless, stalled. The room is a series of sea swells. He realizes they are floating like the petals of the flowers that are not lotuses just above the koi.

“And you’re putting the fucking suitcases in your car and driving away?” Bernie is incensed. “Sam Goldberg is your lawyer?”

“He can represent both of us. Or I’ll take Leonard and you can have Sam.” Chloe offers.

“Leonard is my golf partner,” Bernie says.

“We know where all the bodies are buried. It’s a cemetery. When in doubt, just keep it, Bernie.” She studies the interior of her porcelain cup.

Then Chloe goes upstairs. She returns, slowly and methodically, with suitcases. He’s surprised by her muscular arms. She knows instinctively how to balance her torso, shift her weight, and bend her knees. She is barely sweating. She has replaced the kimono with a short beige linen dress with spaghetti straps that accentuate her tanned shoulders. 20 years of yoga and tennis. Then the bags of groceries when the maids disappeared, were picked up by immigration, or beaten up by boyfriends. In between, they had babies and abortions. They visited relatives in their home villages and often didn’t return for months. Then the gardeners vanished. Chloe spent days in the garden with a shovel. Yes, she could easily load the baggage into her car. Even the inexplicable cardboard box of shoes. And that is the next step. Bernie considers the heavy carved oak front door that leads to the circular cobblestone driveway.

“What about the jewelry?” Bernie inquires. He always gave her a necklace on her birthday. Rubies in Katmandu. Pearls in Shanghai. Silver and turquoise in Santa Fe. Gold in Greece. He can remember each separate composition of stones and the rooms above plazas and rivers and lagoons where he unwrapped his offerings and fastened the clasps around her throat. Sometimes there were cathedral bells and foghorns, drums from carnivals and parades, waves and sea birds

“I took the diamonds. I left you the rest. They’re in my safe. The key is on my pillow.” Chloe pours another cup of black coffee.

“Why leave me any?” Bernie wonders.

“You may need them for bartering purposes later. Sometimes a strand of Colombian emeralds really hits the spot.” Chloe lights another cigarette. This is not the behavior of a novice. This is no small stray gesture of recidivism. Does her yoga instructor know? Her aromatherapist? Book Club and the hospital board? And what does she mean by barter? That’s a curious concept.

“Wait a minute. Look. This is for your birthday. I got it early.” Bernie is excited. It’s the amphetamines, cutting through his fatigue, his heavy and unnatural disorientation. Airports are terminals of contagion. A maximum exposure situation. He might be incubating a malevolent viral mutation. Still, he is clarifying his thinking.

“I can’t wait.” Chloe gazes at her watch.

Bernie walks into his study, the only room Chloe permitted him to decorate, and returns with a small wooden box. “Here,” he says. He feels wildly triumphant.

“I’m not interested,” Chloe informs him.

Her voice has more energy now. The amphetamines. Perhaps they should take two more. Bernie produces the bottle. Chloe allows her fingers to reach into the pills. She stands near him while he opens the box. A single grayish stone.

“I’m going to have it set,” Bernie explains. “It’s an agate from the beach in Chile. From Isla Negra where Neruda lived. I went there. I skipped Rio. Didn’t you wonder why I went to a river parasite conference in Brazil? I needed an excuse. I changed planes for Chile at the airport. Then I drove. I walked beaches for miles. I found it for you. I pulled it out of the water.” Bernie holds the pebble in his palm. His hands are shaking. “Now you can tell me what the stones know.”

“Bernie, you’re a lovely man.” Chloe touches his cheek. “You’ve made it a wonderful job.”

“I want to know what the stones know,” Bernie says. “That was your goddamned dissertation. Your personal grail. You were going to decode Neruda’s stones and explain them to me.”

“That’s pre-history, Bernie. You’d need an archeologist to dig back that far. A paleontologist.” Chloe turns away from the agate. It looks lonely and ashen. It knows it is an orphan.

“What about the house? The furniture? The paintings? The sculpture? Each sofa a distillation of your personal evolution? That’s what you said,” Bernie remembers.

“I tried to amuse myself. Forget it. The house is too big for you,” Chloe determines. “The kids are never coming back.”

“They’re never coming back?” Bernie finds himself repeating. The afternoon is a kind of three-dimensional mantra. Phrases are recited, but they are like howls people make on roller coasters, ludicrous vows and confessions. Words came from their mouths, but they are sacraments in reverse, staining the air. They are curses.

“Not for more than a day here and there. Now there won’t be the plague of holidays to entice them.” Chloe glances around the downstairs rooms, detached and calculating. “Unload it. The market is good now.”

“Chloe.” Bernie takes a breath. “I love you.”

“It’s been terrific, really. This is my terminal performance of prophecy on command. My final act of analysis and emergency emotional counsel. OK. I’m gazing into my crystal ball for the last time. It’s the goddess of real estate. She says sell.”

“Chloe. Let’s talk this out. There’s more to say. I can say more.” Bernie tastes the amphetamines now, an unmistakable metallic sting between his lips. It’s spreading through his body; microscopic steel chips, hard-wiring his muscles, his reflexes and agility. She can load the suitcases into her car. But he outweighs her by seventy pounds, and he is wearing leather shoes. One must not discount the element of surprise. Chloe can do head and shoulder stands, she has mastered all the strength and flexibility postures, but she has never been in a street fight.

“OK.” Chloe is unexpectedly agreeable. “One final note. That stricture I gave you about only wearing black and gray Armani?”

“Yes?” Bernie closes his eyes.

“I remove it. You should do jeans for a while, T-shirts. Downscale. Lose the Porsche.” Chloe takes a silver sandaled step toward the front door.

“You don’t love me?” Bernie is confused and chaotic and finds the combination not entirely unpleasant. His trepidation has been replaced by an erratic turbulent energy.

He is blocking the door, with its thick carved oak panels and intricate squares of stained glass implanted in the center and along the edges. Her decorator no doubt looted that from a church, too. And he is not going to let her walk out to the driveway.

“Love you? I’m all dried up in that department. One marriage, 2 children, and the full liturgy of soccer. The 100 unique ornaments I was designated curator for. The secret acts of mediation. Messenger services. Currency exchange. Frankly, specific love isn’t even on my radar screen.” Chloe seems resigned.

“What do you want? I can give it to you.” Bernie is desperate.

“Solitude. Drift. I’ll travel. Maybe pen a mediocre verse here or there. It requires a climate you can’t provide. You can’t survive the altitude I’m looking for, believe me,” Chloe says. “And no more question and answer quizzes. No more multiple-choice tests. No more essays.”

“Will you take this?” He extends the agate. “You said swallows and constellations of stars were inside. The mysteries of oceans. Metamorphosis and mythology. Take it.”

“No more homework. School’s out, Bernie. School’s out forever.” Chloe sings the phrase, twice.

He thinks it might be an Aerosmith song. Or, perhaps and worse, Alice Cooper. Once he settles the suitcase problem, he’s going to play Coltrane on the house speakers at full volume. Dizzy and Monk. Parker and Miles. It’s going to be jazz week. Jazz month.

Bernie stands directly in front of his wife. Her suitcases are near the door. She is holding her car keys. Still, Bernie is beginning to get his bearings. There is a machinery in the periphery. He is starting to hear it hum and pump. There are mechanisms. Barter? Deduction is a gift. It becomes a skill experience polishes into a tool. The most fiercely reckless intuitions often prove accurate. And he can see the schematics now. There are blueprints and diagrams and there is nothing subtle about them.

“You don’t visit the hospital anymore,” Bernie notes. “You used to come for lunch. We had our special noon appointment.”

“I couldn’t stand all the doors opening to those discreet pastel alcoves. The rooms where women who still have eggs sit. Women with babies in their wombs. I could hear them devising names for infants. They do it alphabetically. Amy. Beatrice. Clarissa. Devra. Erica. Francine. Gabrielle.” Chloe glares at him.

“That’s a lie,” Bernie says, shocked. He wants to slap her across the face.

“Back away,” Chloe orders. Her voice is high and thin. It wavers, hangs in the air and loses its sense of direction and purpose. He considers fireworks, how they explode, tattooing the sky with a passionate conviction that quickly dissipates. Then she says, “Do you want the police here?”

Bernie Roth envisions the La Jolla police; two or three freshly painted vehicles parked in the circular cobblestone driveway, each officer tanned and uncertain. He imagines them standing in the marble entranceway below the oasis of stately 60-foot palm trees. The fronds cast unusually vertical shadows like arrows and darts. From certain angles, the house looks like Malta. He once suggested mounting an antique cannon in the turret. And domestic complaints are a gray area. He is, after all, the senior doctor at the hospital. Alternatively, he imagines chasing her car, positioning himself at the end of the driveway, his back against the wrought iron gate, his arms spread wide. She might impale him.

What are his options, precisely? He can shut off the master switch on his computer, of course, locking the garage and gates. Chloe refused to learn how to manipulate the systems. She said she wasn’t intelligent enough for such smart appliances. He often worried what she would do in an emergency power failure. Or he could call Ron Klein. Ron is running the psychiatric unit now. A wife with a menopausal psychotic break requiring hospitalization. It happens all the time. Ron owes him a few favors. But favors are a limited resource and he needs to ration them.

“I’m delirious,” Bernie realizes. “ I need to take something.”

The green in his wife’s eyes intensifies. It is like observing a river coming out of a mist. Or emeralds just professionally cleaned by sonic wave devices in a jewelry store.

“You’re going to open the cookie jar?” Chloe asks. “But you’re under suspicion. You swore no more until Christmas.”

“That’s nine months away. Isn’t that unnecessarily punitive and arbitrary?”

Bernie wanders into his study.

This is the only area of the house he has been allotted. He designed it himself in one weekend. He didn’t need a decorator. He ordered over the Internet. The walls are mahogany and the bookshelves contain his medical library, computer files and jazz discs. The lamps are solid brass. The sofa is brown leather like oak leaves in mid-October. The floor is red maple. Chloe disparaged his aesthetics and dismissed his study as aggressively masculine. But she is following him now.

Bernie Roth has always possessed the capacity for strategic action. It might be time to retire now, after all. Empty nest syndrome demands attention. Menopause is problematic. They can build something new, on a beach in Costa Rica or Mexico, perhaps. Grivin can help with the construction. Maybe he can get extra credit course points. And Nat. She can bring her girlfriend. They’re probably both good with hammers.

Bernie walks directly to the wall safe and unlocks it. The safe contains one blue canvas duffle all-purpose sports bag wedged against the metal. It fills the entire safe and Bernie has to yank it out. Chloe watches him unzip the bag. Bernie extracts a handful of glass vials. He removes a box of syringes.

The agate from Isla Negra is in his pocket. Later, Chloe will tell him about Neruda, the poet she was enthralled with when they first met. When she recited stanzas about volcanoes and poppies, he didn’t hear the words precisely, but rather followed the narrative through her mouth and eyes. It was medical school and he was stupefied with exhaustion. He heard the phrases she offered as a music that was visual. It was a sequence of facial expressions, a tapestry of geometries composed from flesh. Trajectories formed on her lips, which were rivers and bays with bridges, and exited through her eyes, which were green wells and portals that could foretell the future.

Tell me what the stones know, he will command later. I want to be initiated into the language of agates. Show me how they form bodies like infants and feed themselves from stars. And Chloe will comply. She will find the capacity for jazz. It’s simple. Saxophones mean spread your legs. Later, she’ll laugh at his WMD joke. Her throat will emit sounds that look like strings of rubies and sapphires. She will fall down on her knees and explain everything. She will invent and improvise. He’ll help her remember why she has a mouth.

“The usual?” Bernie asks, glass vials in his hand. He prepares a mixture that is two parts morphine, one part cocaine. He prefers the reverse. He taps the air bubbles out of the syringes. “We’ll celebrate the birth of god early this year. Take a few weeks off. Reassess our position.”

Chloe apparently agrees. She has removed her beige dress with the thin shoulder straps. She isn’t wearing underwear. She curls on her side on the leather sofa like a fawn at dusk. Bernie Roth reaches for his wife. She extends her right arm, the one with the good veins. He injects her first. Then he injects himself.

They meet at irregular intervals at Fisherman’s Wharf. This is the neutral zone, the landscape of perpetual unmolested childhood where the carousel spins in its predictable orbit, and the original primitive neon alphabet does not deviate. Some hieroglyphics are permanent and intelligible in all hemispheres and dialects. No translation is necessary. The carousel doesn’t require calculus, rehab or absolution. No complications with immigration or the IRS. Just buy a token.

She phones Clarissa. “I’m here,” she announces.

“At the wharf?” Clarissa must clarify the conditions.

“Anemic waves and corndogs that give you cancer. Immigrants catching perch so full of mercury, they explode as they reel them in,” she reports.

“What color is the water?” Clarissa asks. “Precisely?”

“Last ditch leukemia IV-drip blue,” she decides.

“Half an hour,” Clarissa assures her. “I’m coming.”

They meet episodically. Conventional friendship, with its narrative of consensual commitments, has proved too intimate and demanding. Between them are houses, husbands dead or divorced, and children known only by anecdote and photograph. Entire strata of their personal history are less than footnotes. Decades passed when they were driftwood to one another, or vessels lost at sea. Or a drowned stranger, perhaps; why bother?

“Our litany of blame is tedious,” she once recognized.

“Human perimeters are background razor wire. We’re too hip for that shit,” Clarissa responded.”

“We’ll bite it off with our teeth,” she offered. “Napalm it. Grenade launchers and M-16s. Tec-9s. We’ll have our own Cultural Revolution. We’ll go post-modern, but fully armed.”

“We’ll invent rituals appropriate for our circumstances. We’ll whisper endearments while strolling the killing fields.” Clarissa was enthusiastic.

“But we’ll abide by the Geneva Convention,” she prompted. “Despite our emotional residue.”

“Directed psychological evolution. It’ll be more brutal than weight training,” Clarissa agreed. “But we’ll become better human beings.”

“We’ll redefine and transcend ourselves,” she said.

It was an earlier autumn on Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bluer than Maui, the bay studded with strands of cobalt that looked charged, technologically modified. She had lived two years in a bamboo and chicken wire shack on a nameless river of honey yellow reeds and orchids in the jungle near Hana. She had no electricity. She wasn’t in contact with Clarissa then. Clarissa probably doesn’t know there are seasons in Maui, too. A faint reddening, a moistening that seems a prelude, and sudden stillness as the mosquitoes enter temporary remission.

“I like it conceptually. But let’s go further,” Clarissa suggested. “We’ll be molecular. Just strands of light from one radiance to another.”

“We’ll reject linearity entirely,” she encouraged. “Sporadic moments of illumination in extreme altitudes requiring oxygen masks?”

“Discreet and unpredictable rendezvous with spectacular voltage. We’ll communicate by blowtorch,” Clarissa offered. Her eyes emitted an unnatural gleam suggesting rows of votives in deserted rooms and beaches of mica in white sand.

Their psychiatrists were cautiously optimistic. A process of accommodation and evolution was unlikely but not implausible. True, they had failed the traditional strategies of giving and receiving. But the standard methods by which one registers recognition and regret don’t apply to them. They had a pact, an armistice with the elements of aggressive radical improvisational surgery. Malignant complications were an acceptable risk. Then they had shaken hands.

Now she sees Clarissa exiting a black town car with darkened windows. She’s wearing her usual business outfit — aerobics pants and jacket, oversized Gucci sunglasses and a Giants baseball cap. It’s the popular camouflaged movie star look, designed to create the impression you’re attempting to be incognito. It’s the uniform the narcissistic personality disorder dictates. It’s become a global fashion statement. In the malls of all the capitals, passing women might be gangbangers, housewives or soap stars.

Clarissa is carrying not a gym bag, which would be appropriate and predictable, but a Chanel purse with leather quilting and long gold braided handles. It’s the second decade of war and alliances are ambiguous and brief. We’re polite but alert and suspicious. Vigilant.

They kiss on both cheeks. “You forgot my birthday,” Clarissa begins. She dismisses the car and driver with a hand gesture.

“I didn’t sign on as a soccer mom. I don’t decorate for holidays. I don’t bake or send thank-you cards. I throw away personal mail. You know this,” she reminds Clarissa.

“Don’t you go to bed at Halloween? And not get up until after Valentine’s Day?” Clarissa’s voice is light.

“That was my mother,” she replies, annoyed. “I just leave the country at certain junctures.”

She is fond of Christmas in Southeast Asia — ornately decorated pine trees in air-conditioned hotel lobbies like vestiges from another planet, and bamboo balconies draped in green velvets, antique brocades and holly wreaths. More fetishes. Christmas carols are rendered in versions so mangled by distance and erroneous translation they’re almost tolerable. Rivers smell of rotting vegetables, petrol, wood cooking fires and hunger. Air is layers of decaying prayers like a satellite losing orbit, falling down not as metal but as streams of origami. In Bangkok, in December, it’s 106 degrees.

“Let’s just be here now,” Clarissa says. “We know the rules. It’s play time.” Her mouth glistens with a red lipstick that seems to have small stars encrusted within it. There are implications in the sheen she doesn’t want to consider.

The wharf is almost deserted. It’s mid-day, mid-week in an undifferentiated season. It’s another windswept early November. They walk hand-in-hand down the pier past occasional men fishing and stray teenagers eager for corruption.

“Don’t look,” Clarissa cautions. “They’re contagious. We’ll get a contact psychotic flashback.”

They, too, grew up in tenements designed for transience, and shabby from inception. The rows of apartments like festering sun sores. They were an integral part of the blueprint for the millennial slums in the sun. They were the penciled-in stick figures on the diagrams.

The Last Edge Saloon perches on the furthest side of the wharf. Their reunions begin there. Clarissa sits in a booth facing the bay on three sides. It’s a bold and invitational decision. They’ll order expresso and take amphetamines. Or get drunk on something festive, White Russians or champagne. Since she’s technically still in AA, she lets Clarissa set the tenor. Clarissa orders a pitcher of Bloody Marys. From a caloric standpoint, it’s the obvious selection.

“You still look like a hippy,” Clarissa observes, regarding her with an expression that’s speciously conciliatory, even condescending. She interprets this as disturbing. Anxiety is inseparable from the air. It’s in the oxygen molecules their biochemistry fails to adequately process. There’s a perpetual uneasy truce.

“It’s my signature classic bohemian statement,” she replies quickly. She’s defensive and a bit agitated. “I want to formalize our alliance,” she begins.

“Want to get married?” Clarissa produces an unconvincing partial smile.

“I want a contract with precise specifications,” she replies. “And I want a weapons check.”

“Contracts are worthless,” Clarissa points out. “They’re a wish list for Santa.”

She’s a lawyer, after all. She knows.

“We could become cousins,” Clarissa suggests.

This appeals to her. Survivors of cataclysmic childhoods defined by poverty and isolation compulsively seek validation. They know they lack proper emotional documentation. Cousins evokes a blood connection that would substantiate and obviate certain complexities — the ebbs and flows, droughts and monsoons of their relationship. She wants a device that highlights and justifies their erratic and pathologically intense conjunction. In regions of bamboo and sun-rotted petals, hurricanes are routine and wind propels sand like tiny bullets, and there are too few artifacts. Cousins is an inspiration.

“I could draw up the papers,” Clarissa is expansive. “But adoption is superior.”

She came to San Francisco when she was 7. Her father, Marvin, had terminal cancer. Her mother was mentally ill. They were bankrupt. She thought heaven was a foster home. If Marvin would just finally die, perhaps she could even get adopted.

“I’ve missed you like a first love,” she says.

“I was your first love,” Clarissa reminds her. “And you mine.”

They lean across the faux wood table etched with knife gouged gang insignias and logos of metal bands and kiss again. They are both manic this autumn day. They share numerous personality disorders. They’re both bi-polar 2 with borderline features. Substance abuse is a persistent irritant. Recently, they’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Today’s sun turns the San Francisco Bay the purple of noon irises in country gardens in July. To articulate such facets, to know and chart them is a spasm of thunder inside, a tiny birth the size of a violet’s mouth. If she extracted this entity from her body, she could present it to Clarissa like an infant.

She examines her almost cousin’s eyes. Even through dark sunglasses, they are inordinately bright. Then she senses that she, too, is glowing. Her eyes are brass corridors reflecting fluorescent light. They’re both candles today, unusually in sync, radiant with clarity and energy. Clarissa wears a silk scarf, a vivid purple implying motion and vertical waves.

“Like it?” Clarissa asks. “Hermes. Take it. I just stole it on Maiden Lane.”

“You still shoplift?” She holds the scarf. It feels moist and sanctified. It reminds her of the Mohave in December, crossing from the east into an inland ocean of relentless purple and mauve waves. The scarf is an embrace around her neck.

“Theft is like guerilla warfare,” Clarissa explains. They’ve finished their second round of drinks. “A thrill kill requires mental discipline. I put it on and keep walking. I know I’ve had it for years. I bought it on the Champs Elysees. It was raining. I was at the George V. No one could dare question me. And no one does. Let’s ride the carousel.”

They carry their drinks across the stained wooden planks of the pier. The carousel is closed. Clarissa makes a cell phone call and a man appears. She produces three hundred dollar bills. They wait for the right seats, choosing recently painted twin horses, white and intricately decorated like certain antique porcelain plates, and ride for half an hour. Clarissa vomits twice.

She searches her theoretical arsenal. Is it time for a hand grenade? Should she call for a chopper with medics? Then she remembers her mission. “Are you OK?” she manages.

“I understand how children discover bulimia,” Clarissa reports, excited. “It’s an accidental miracle.”

Despite the gym-suit camouflage, it’s obvious Clarissa has gained weight. But even they have taboos. Eating disorders are a forbidden topic. They meet on neutral ground, but there are still no-fly zones, areas of fragmentation and carpet bombs, landmines and IEDs.

Clarissa borrows the purple scarf to wipe her mouth. She’s contaminated the silk, but she still wants it back. She thinks, suddenly, of flower bouquets and their inadequacy. The floral arrangements of her life have been too much and not enough. The petals stained, fragile and insubstantial. They were debris.

“If a contract is insufficient, what can we do?” she wonders.

They stand on the wharf where the carousel is no longer spinning. Gone are the circles they inscribed in the too thin aqua air, engraving midnight blue trails like marks made by fins. Somewhere these etchings floated into a river winding to a bay. More invisible origami.

“We could get a tattoo,” Clarissa proposes. “Our names together in a heart.”

“A tattoo?” she repeats, delighted. “Isn’t it painful and dangerous? The possibility of AIDS and infection?”

“But you love needles.” Clarissa is annoyed. “You’re a professional junky.”

“I’m in remission,” she replies quickly. There’s no doubt anymore. Clarissa is attacking.

In truth, during one particularly virulent carousel rotation, she decided to call a drug dealer in North Beach. It’s walking distance, over a steep sequence of stone steps in a cliff. Then the sudden unexpected gate. Within, a creek is dammed and trapped, the water stalls green with slime and duck excrement.

There’s a bridge to the Victorian house. She knows the grain in every wooden floorboard and the way sunset displays itself through each glass pane in every room. There’s a geometry to how sun impales and dissects the Golden Gate Bridge. If you comprehend this mathematics, you can construct spaceships and time machines with common household appliances. You can turn on the radio and talk to any god.

“You always relapse,” Clarissa observes. “And don’t you already have AIDS?”

She is shocked. She stares at Clarissa. Even with Gucci sunglasses, there’s a distinct softening around her chin, and a loss of definition in her cheeks.

“No. I have hepatitis C.” She is angry. “And you need to get your face done.”

“What part?” Clarissa is concerned.

They’re walking from the wharf toward a tattoo parlor on Columbus Avenue.

Shops offer stacks of cheap plaster statues, saints and children, dwarves and obese laughing frogs. Someone will purchase and paint these objects, display them, or give them as gifts. They pass display windows offering plastic replicas of Alcatraz, and T-shirts saying PRISONER and PSYCHO WARD.

“What part?” she repeats. “It’s not a fucking negotiation. It’s a composition. Just give the guy a blank check. And don’t use a Marin surgeon. You’ll end up looking like a clone. I found an Italian in Pittsburgh.”

“I noticed you finally got your father off your face,” Clarissa slowly admits.

“Well, the police wouldn’t do it,” she says with an edge. “And Mommy was in a locked ward.”

Slow swells are below the wharf. The bay is a liquid representation of fall. It’s in continual transition. All fluid bodies are autumnal and promise betrayal. That’s what leaves signify, flaunting unrepentant criminal reds like vengeance and adultery, and yellows like lanterns and amulets. Fall is about packing and disappearing. It’s the season for divestiture. Time of the severing. That’s the obvious subtext. And it occurs to her that her elation may dissipate. Emotions have their own inexplicable currents and random lightning storms.

She follows Clarissa into the tattoo parlor. “Let’s rock,” Clarissa says. “Lock and load.”

The Eagles are playing. It’s “Hotel California,” of course. A tanned man with a blond ponytail who looks like a yoga instructor opens a book of designs. Dragons.

Butterflies. Demons. Flowers. Guitars. Spiders. She vaguely remembers negotiations involving a fifth of vodka, and a complicated argument regarding the aesthetic implications of scripts. They selected a gothic font. Then she may have passed out.

She realizes they’re in an arcade on Pier 39. It’s three hours and six Bloody Mary’s later. They have gauze and adhesive tape on their shoulders where their names are carved into their left upper arms in navy blue. They’re leaving the encircling heart in red ink for their next reunion. Banks of garish video games surround them; hip-hop blasts from speakers in the ceilings and floors. Boys who look part Asian or Mexican are armed with laser levers and plastic machine guns. They keep the real Glocks in their pockets.

“This is not the global village I envisioned,” she says.

“That’s politically incorrect enough to get me disbarred,” Clarissa whispers. She places two fingers against her red lacquered lips in a gesture of mock fright.

The photographic booth is on the far side of the arcade. 4 shots. They’ve been taking pictures here since they rode buses and walked from Daly City in 7th grade. It cost a quarter then. Now it takes dollars. The photographic session is a ritual element in each of their meetings. It’s their sacrament. When they leave the booth, they cut the strip in half. She saves her photographs in the shoebox where she keeps her passport and birth certificate. She assumes Clarissa does the same, but in her Swiss jewelry vault. Or perhaps she just throws them away.

The photographs are a necessary component of their liturgy. They can only see one another by laminated representations. It would be too disturbing and intrusive if they actually perceived one another without artificial mediation. They communicate by email, fax and newspaper clippings.

“Marvin’s jowls are definitely gone.” Clarissa examines the thin strip of facial shots. “You have cheekbones. Are those implants? Jesus. You’re gorgeous. You didn’t look this good at sixteen, even. Cosmetic surgery already.”

“We’re breathing on 40.” She is bewildered. Certainly Clarissa comprehends the necessity of proactive facial procedures. This is San Francisco and Clarissa is an entertainment business attorney with a penthouse office above a Chinese bank. Is Clarissa in denial? Are her medications interfering with her functioning on even this rudimentary a level?

“After you psychologically resolve the slap across the face, and its more damaging verbal resonances—” she begins.

“And that takes decades and costs what? A quarter of a million?” Clarissa is still holding the strip of photographs.

“Then the next step is actual surgical removal. It’s a natural progression. It’s how to treat emotional cancer. Keep them,” she decides. “Get some reference points.”

They sit on a bench on the south side of the pier, sun tamed and restrained. The water is agitated, white caps like mouths open, baring teeth. The bay reminds her of a woman in autumn in an imaging office. First the locker, the paper bathrobe, the chatty blond with the clipboard who walks you into the room with the mammogram machines. Then the stasis before the X-rays are read. Yes, the bay is waiting for its results. Poppies encrusted with resins or blood float like prayer offerings in the dangerous toxic waters.

“We used to walk here. What were we? 11, 12?” Clarissa asks. Her mood is also shifting. They’re both still drunk.

They hold hands. Her childhood is a sequence of yellows from trailer park kitchen cabinets and the invisible poisons leaking from fathers undergoing chemotherapy. Take a breath of rancid lemon. You’ve seen the Pacific, reached the end of the trail and don’t linger at the edges. They had a final punctuation for that. It was called the iron lung.

“They hadn’t invented a vocabulary for us yet,” Clarissa says to the waves. “Dysfunctional families. Latchkey children. Remember when I lost my key? What my father did? Jerry tied me up in the carport in pajamas for a week.”

“I brought you a canteen with orange juice.” She recalls. “And a few joints. You were handcuffed. I fed you like a sick bird.”

“How did you get a canteen?” Clarissa asks.

“I took it from the hospital outpatient closet,” she says.

Her head is throbbing. She stares at sea swells that are the process by which an autumn forest becomes water. If you understand the bay, it smells of slow burning cedar. Midnight currents are actually leaves brushing the ocean with russet and amber. Waves answer to the moon and immutable laws of spin and fall. They don’t get dinner on the table at the appointed hour. They don’t carpool or pick up the suits on time, or have the cufflinks and invitations ready.

“Only you know,” Clarissa says. She looks like she may vomit again.

She nods. Yes, only I was at ground zero when it happened. This is why we’ve tattooed ourselves. We alone comprehend adolescence in the margins of a hardscrabble town in the conceptual latitudes. The late 50s and their village was subdivided wood frame houses and stucco bungalows nailed in rows like the fruit trees above gashes of alley, oranges and lemons so bitter they burned your mouth.

“We sat next to each other in home room,” she offers.

It was 7th grade and they were learning the history of America, but they couldn’t find their geography or circumstances in literature. Nature was oaks and maples, not a riot of magenta Bougainvillea, not a blaze of red and yellow Canna bursting through bamboo fences sticky with pink Oleander. Families had two parents and pastel houses behind lawns with white picket fences where characters experienced angst rather than hunger and rage. They didn’t sift through trashcans in dusk alleys searching for glass soda bottles redeemable for 2 cents apiece. Gather enough glass and you had bus fare. On a fortunate hunt, you could trap enough coins for lunch.

“Remember digging for bottles for food money?” she wonders.

“I remember what you said.” Clarissa smiles. “You said Holden Caulfield would have taken a taxi.”

She nods. “Remember our black berets? We were trying to meet Ginsberg and Kerouac. We wore those berets every day. We got lice.”

Clarissa shrugs. “We looked for beatniks right here, on this pier. Boys with sketchbooks and guitars. We said we were French. We practiced our accents at recess.”

Recess in the region of broken families, of divorces and single mothers, of stigma and words that could not be spoken out loud. Alcoholism. Cancer. Child abuse. Illegitimacy. Domestic violence. The special yellow smell of Sunday evenings when the mothers who worked as secretaries poured peroxide on their hair. The tiny implications of illumination from the one lamp you were allowed to turn on. Electricity was an extravagance. Their San Francisco was a medieval oasis — ocean at your face, mountains at your back. There were warlords at the utility companies with incomprehensible powers. Phones were instruments of terror. It cost money every time you touched them. Long distance calls were rationed, like chocolate during a war. The world as it was, before hotlines that could put your father in prison.

“I still have nightmares about the apartment in Daly City,” Clarissa reveals. “At every St. Regis and Ritz, from Beijing to Buenos Aires, I wake up shaking. At the Bora Bora Lagoon Resort Hotel. At the Palazzo Sasso in Ravello, for Christ’s sake. The plot complications vary but somehow I’m back there.”

“Remember the neighbors?” she asks. They lived next door, with a cement hall between them. She’s dizzy and her arm burns.

“The wetbacks and hillbillies? The identical blonds with drawls?” Clarissa is unusually bright. “It was still the Depression. I had a friend once. Another friend, not like you. A hillbilly. Jerry found us listening to the radio. It was Elvis. Jerry started yelling, ‘Y∆159ou’re playing colored music? You’re putting colored music in my house?’ He threw the radio at my face. Took out my front tooth. That’s how I discovered caps.”

“That was me,” she corrects, moderately annoyed. “It was Marvin, not Jerry. And he used the ‘n’ word.”

“We had the same father, metamorphically. A barbarian with bad grammar who thought a yarmulke was a ticket to prison. A guy who could plaster and drywall. They were house painters. When they were employed. House painters.” Clarissa stares at the bay.

“Like Hitler,” she points out. Then, “Had your mother run away yet?”

“Rachel? She was on the verge. She was morphing into River or Rainbow or something in secret. Preparing for her first commune. After Jerry, a sleeping bag and a candle was a good time.”

She remembers Clarissa’s mother as a woman sheathed in dark fabrics who sank into shadows, kept her back to the wall, found her own periphery, and rarely spoke. Jerry had pushed her out of a moving car. He kicked in her ribs and put her in a cast. Clarissa’s mother, a bruised woman in the process of metamorphosis. Yes, molting like the Hibiscus and Night Blooming Jasmine beside the alleys, sheathed in long skirts, shawls, and kimonos. She was younger than they are now.

Then Clarissa had a family of subtraction and she envied her. All the neighbors had incomplete families — the brothers in juvenile detention, the sisters who disappeared when they started to show. If Marvin stopped lingering, if he would just die, she could have a similar reduction. She could escape the stucco tenements with torn mesh screen doors and vacant lots behind cyclone fences. And the mothers and aunts who rode buses and worked as file clerks between nervous breakdowns. Even second-hand cars were an aberration. If she was placed in foster care, adoption might follow. She had straight A’s and she won the poetry and science competition. Maybe she could be given a new name with syllables that formed church steeples on your lips, like the women in books. She could be assigned a stay at home mother with a ruffled apron who baked cookies and called her Elizabeth, Margaret or Christine.

“Did you realize we were Jewish?” she suddenly wonders.

“I never revealed that. The hillbillies thought we were Christ killers and owned all the banks,” Clarissa tells her. “And Jerry said they’d deport us. Send us back to Poland.”

“I wanted a bat mitzvah,” she remembers. “Marvin said, ‘You mean a Jew thing? It costs a fortune to get into that club. They inspect you first. You have to shave your head and show them your penis.’”

“Speaking of Marvin’s penis, remember the Polanski scandal? When he sodomized a 13-year-old?” Clarissa asks.

It happened in California. It was front-page news in an era when newspapers were read and discussed. The details were graphic and comprehensive. They were indelible as a personal mutilation.

“Jerry said, ‘I knew that guy in Warsaw. He’s 5’2. He’s got a 3-inch dick.’ Jerry mimed the organ dimensions with his fingers.” Clarissa repeats the demonstration for her. “Then he said, ‘Why is this a headline? What kind of damage can you do with a dick that small?’” Clarissa turns back to the bay.

“Is that when it happened? When you disappeared? The phone was disconnected. I couldn’t find you for a year.” She tries to form a chronology.

“Brillstein says it wasn’t rape. It was an inevitable appropriation. I was chattel. Rachel left and Jerry just moved me into their bedroom. I came home from school and my clothes were in their closet. My pajamas were folded on their bed. Then he found us an apartment in Oakland. He let me pick out curtains,” Clarissa explains. “Hey, I was the first trophy wife on the block. It’s my mother I hate. She knew what would happen. I was expendable.”

“But she came back for you,” she says. “She took you to a commune. You went to college. You got out.”

“Nobody gets out, for Christ’s sake.” Clarissa is angry. “You chance to survive.”

She examines the bay. There’s less agitation, swells are softer and a haze grazes the amethyst surface. The diagnosis has come in. The bay had its biopsy. This stretch of ocean is terminal.

“Didn’t Marvin break your wrist?” Clarissa asks. “You had bandages all summer. You had to stay on the pier, reading.”

“Mommy did it. She was between mental hospitals. Maybe a weekend pass. Her contemptuous glare. It cut right through the chemo and antipsychotics. She ratted me out. She said, ‘Marvin, look, that kid’s talking with her fingers again. Don’t you know only Jews and Gypsies talk with their hands? You think you’re a neurosurgeon? A symphony conductor? You’re not even human.’ Then she seized my hand. I had three fractured fingers but they took her in the ambulance.”

They are quiet. Through haze, sun is lemon yellow on the heavy waters. Accuracy is a necessary component of civilization. Daddy knocked out your tooth. Mommy broke your fingers. There’s an elegant mathematics to this, to these coordinates and their relationship to one another. The accumulation of slights. The weight of insults. The random resurrection of coherence. And the way you are no longer blind, cold, and bereft. Then the indelible vulgarity you finally have the vocabulary to name.

Their fingers are entwined. She notices Clarissa is wearing a platinum set VHS-1 Tiffany diamond of at least 4 carats. And a gold Rolex with the perpetual oyster setting. She withdraws her hand.

“You know how it is,” Clarissa dismisses the implication. “When other women evaluate their black velvets, I consider a cool set of razor blades.”

“So you transcend the genre?” She is enraged.

“What genre would that be? Survivors of squalid adolescences? Best aberration in the most abhorred class?” Clarissa looks at her, hard. Her red lipstick with the embedded stars are like tiny metallic studs or hooks. They help you shred flesh.

She considers their shared childhood; their parents had been disenfranchised for generations. They were pre-urban and unprepared for a remote town perched at the edge of the implausible Pacific. Appliances overwhelmed them. The garbage disposal must never be touched. What if it broke? The refrigerator must be strategically opened and immediately shut. What if it burned out? And their offspring became mute with shock, there in the dirty secret city, deep within a colossus of yellow Hibiscus and magenta Bougainvillea, behind banks of startled red Geraniums and brittle Canna.

“We are what coalesced at the end of the trail. After the bandits, cactus and coyotes. We are the indigenous spawn of this saint. His bastards,” she realizes.

“We were spillage,” Clarissa replies. “Don’t romanticize.”

Everything is suspended. The bay is barely breathing. Perhaps it’s just been wheeled back from a fifth round of chemo. Maybe it’s hung-over. Or slipping into a coma. It needs a respirator. Come on. Code blue. It needs CPR.

“The immigrant experience, my ass,” Clarissa adds.

“But we have instincts.” She is exhausted. Her arm with its gauze-bandaged shoulder extends. She can talk with her limbs now. Marvin and her mother are dead. She gestures with her fingers, a motion that includes the bay, an outcropping that is Marin and Sonoma, and a suggestion of something beyond.

“We understand ambushes and unconventional warfare. We’re expert with camouflage,” Clarissa agrees, offering encouragement.

“They’ll never take us by surprise,” she responds. She feels a complete lack of conviction and a sudden intense longing to get a manicure.

Silence. Palms sway, windswept and brazen. Vertical shadows from fronds appear without warning, random spears. One must relentlessly improvise. Holden Caulfield would get knifed in the gut.

“I have to go now,” Clarissa abruptly announces. “But you look stunning. I’m impressed. Have you considered a wardrobe update? Do shmattes prove you’re an artist? Listen, I brought some Prada that were sized wrong. I’d sue if I had time. They’re in my car.”

“That’s OK,” she manages. This is emotional aerobics for the crippled, she thinks. Then, “I appreciate the gesture.”

“I don’t have a generous impulse in my repertoire.” Clarissa is tired. “This is a search and destroy in the triple-tier. But we must keep trying. Let’s end our reunion with a celebratory benediction.”

This is their ritual of conclusion. They exchange tokens of mutual acceptance. It’s how they prove their capacity to transcend themselves. It’s the equivalent of boot camp 5-mile runs in mud and climbing obstacle course ropes in rainstorms.

“I brought a postcard you sent me from Fiji 16 years ago.” She produces it from her backpack. She reads it out loud. “On the beach under green cliffs, I feel God’s breath. I make my daughter smile. She laughs like an orchestra of bells and sea birds fed on fresh fruits. Her hair is moss against my lips. How pink the infant fingernails are. I wish you such sea pearls.” She offers the postcard to Clarissa.

“I forgot that completely.” Clarissa doesn’t take the postcard. “That was Anna. A guy with the name of a reptile, Snake or Scorpion, took her away on a Harley to Arizona. I sent you newspaper clippings.”

“She testified against you,” she tries to remember. “In that divorce.”

“I was accused of witness tampering. I almost lost my license,” Clarissa says, and stands up.

She returns the postcard to her backpack. Their reunions are conceptually well intentioned. But leaches and bloodletting were once considered purifying and curative.

There is a long pause during which she considers radium poisoning, Madam Curie and the extent of her fatigue. Then she asks, “You still doing the venture capital thing? Private jets? Yachts to beaches too chic to be on a map? Everybody loses but you?”

“When the Israeli money dried up, I thought I was through. Then the Persians. No sensibility and billions, all liquid. An entire race with an innate passion for schlock. Payday.” Clarissa is more alert. “Then détente. Russian mafia money poured in. Cossacks with unlimited cash. Who would have thought?” Clarissa places the strip of photographs in her Chanel purse. And, as an afterthought asks, “What about you?”

“I’m getting married,” she says. “I’m moving to Wood’s End, Pennsylvania.”

“Jesus. The grand finale. OD in a barn with a woodstove? Twenty below without the wind chill? Your halfway house skirts in a broom closet? What now? Another alcoholic painter fighting his way back to the Whitney? Or a seething genius with a great novel and a small narcotics problem?” Clarissa extracts her cell phone.

“Fuck you.” She is outraged.

“I apologize. That was completely inappropriate,” Clarissa says immediately. “Forgive me, please. It’s separation anxiety. We have difficulty individuating. Partings are turbulent. The overlay and resonances are unspeakable. But Brillstein says we’re improving.”

“You’re still with Brillstein? Jerry’s psychiatrist? The Freudian with the high colonics and weekend mud baths?” She stares at Clarissa. She’s so startled, she’s almost sober.

“He’s eclectic, I know. But it’s like a family plan. I’m grandfathered in at the original price,” Clarissa says.

The stylish phone opens; the keyboard glows like the panels on an airplane. It’s the millennium and we have cockpits on our wrists. Clarissa’s phone is voice activated. She says, “Driver.” Then, “Pier 39. Now.”

“Does your arm hurt?” she wonders.

“No pain, no gain. My dear cousin,” Clarissa smiles. “Keep your finger on the trigger. We must soldier on. Our cause is just.”

She realizes Clarissa has already moved on. The conference is over. The documents will be studied. Further discussions to be scheduled. My people will calendar with yours. We’ll synchronize by palm pilot.

Suddenly she feels she’s on a borderless layover. It’s last Christmas in India again. She began in a broken taxi 5 hours from Goa. Then a 6-hour delay in the airport and the run across the tarmac for the last and totally unscheduled miraculous flight to Bombay. A day room for 7 hours. The flight to Frankfurt and another day room and delay. Finally, the 14-hour flight to New York. 70 hours of continual travel and she was just finding her rhythm. She could continue for weeks or months, in a perpetual montage of stalled entrances and exits, corridors and steps, tunnels and lobbies all in vertigo, in free fall, where no time zones apply.

They are no longer holding hands. A distance of texture and intention forms between them. The geometry is calculated. Not even their shadows collide.

“Another bittersweet reunion barely survived,” Clarissa says. “My beloved almost cousin.”

“And you, my first and greatest love,” she replies. “Another high risk foray we deserve purple hearts for.”

“We’ll get red hearts next time. Our next tattoo.” Clarissa produces a small false smile. Her lips are stiff beneath the lurid lacquer coating.

They kiss on both cheeks. The glitter has departed from their eyes. They’ve slid into an interminable foreign film they have neither interest nor affection for. But she knows the name of Clarissa’s lipstick now. It’s called Khmer Rouge.

There’s a certain pause just before sunset when the bay is veiled in azure. It’s the moment for redemption or drowning. Inland, cyclone fenced freeways carve cement scars beside bungalows with miniature balconies where parched Geraniums decay in air soiled from the fumes of manufacturing and human wounds. The bay is a muted defeated blue, subjugated and contained. At night, they pump the antidepressants in. Or maybe there’s enough Prozac and beer already in the sewage. Pollution turns the setting sun into strata of brandy and lurid claret, smears of curry and iodine. It looks like a massacre.

“Listen. My car can take you where you’re going,” Clarissa offers.

Clarissa’s driver has short hair, a thick neck, aviator sunglasses and an ear attachment like a Secret Service agent. Clarissa indicates the car door. It is open like a dark mouth with the teeth knocked out. And she’s waving the purple scarf like a banner. She refuses to admit that she doesn’t know where she’s going. She turns away and starts walking.

“Look. The Prada coat that doesn’t fit right,” Clarissa calls, waving a patch of blue silk with both her hands.

She turns away and starts walking. If those are words issuing from Clarissa’s mouth, which needs immediate surgical attention, she can’t hear them. There are shadows along the boardwalk and alleys bordering residential streets with ridiculous insipid seaside names. Bay Street. Marine Drive. North Peninsula View. Who do they think they’re kidding?

Keep walking and shadows find you. They’re the distilled essence of all harbors and bays. They taste like a wounded sherry you can drink or pour on your cuts. Shadows are graceful and do not require explanations. They know you’re more dangerous than they dare imagine. They cannot fill in your blanks. Simply surrender and they do everything.

There are no neutral zones. They’re an illusion, a delusionary construct, like movie and real estate contracts. Satellites map each zip code and tap every telephone. Cities are enclaves between combat arenas. We are born with weapons of mass destruction. They’re within us from inception and we pass them down the generations like poisonous heirlooms. It’s ground zero now and forever. She senses the car moving behind and away from her, and she’s grateful. She hopes Clarissa loses her license and becomes destitute. She should have her hands amputated like any other thief. Then she should get a slow growing undetectable ovarian cancer that metastesizes in her stomach and brain. The Russian Mafia should gang rape her while the Iranians eat caviar and watch. In any event, she never wants to see Clarissa again.

It’s a brisk, wind-thrashed morning in early April and Professor Malcolm McCarty is riding his bicycle along Maple Ridge Road toward campus. His bike is winter gray and weathered, with a wire basket attached in the back and front. It’s ideal for transporting books. He purchased it from a Sorbonne classicist during his first graduate school sojourn in Europe, and despite the shipping expense, he knew he would cherish it.

Malcolm has an intuitive sense of his emotional parameters, his range and repertoire. It’s an unwavering internal mechanism of measurement that gives the impression of confidence. Some perceive it as arrogance. It’s not. Rather, it’s a trick of the genes he was born with, a small gift, like absolute pitch and eidetic memory.

Not that he knows himself, of course. Who can purport to possess that gift? Still, Malcolm McCarty exercises a consistent ability to articulate and prioritize the morphology of his sensibility. In a millennium of inchoate folly, even rudimentary self-awareness is considered impressive.

There’s ice on the road from a recent snowstorm, and with characteristic lethargy, the town of Allegheny Hills has not sent out plows. If he was the sort of man who shrugged, and he isn’t, he might be tempted to do so now, to convey his indifference to the condition of Maple Ridge Road. As a man of implacable aplomb, insignificant external details do not affect his fundamental purpose.

Professor McCarty is completely disinterested in the exchange of verbal banalities and displays of conventional gestures. That’s the sort of behavior junior faculty refer to as body language. Body language, he thinks derisively during faculty meetings, wondering if any of the new boys have read a Shakespearean sonnet. Or more accurately, any sonnet.

He remains calm. He conceals his contempt for the assistant professors from California and eastern seaboard cities. It’s the principles of the institution he’s devoted to, not the transitory personalities. Let them come and go. Milton and Chaucer are permanent like the universal law of gravity, the force fields and the speed of light.

Malcolm McCarty believes universities are akin to the monasteries of Europe’s Dark Age, the last repository of illumination in a barbarous era that lasted a thousand years. During particularly offensive curriculum discussions, where the canon is autopsied and body parts assigned to what is indisputably the province of women’s studies, ethnic sociology, film appreciation and abnormal psychology, Professor McCarty maintains his restraint. He has an appreciation for grace and the discipline of modulation.

In the third decade of his academic service, Malcolm recognizes that bureaucracy eventually reduces and degrades. He’s become strategic. Junior faculty present passionate justifications for Hip Hop: The Poetry of the Present. They’re not arguments, but clearly rehearsed theater pieces. It’s a charade with syllables intended for another format entirely. Twitter? YouTube?

Given these rules of engagement, a monosyllable is appropriate. A simple no. He has a reputation as the man of the no. He’s their anchor, their barricade, their unrelenting referee. He instinctively recognizes where the borders of civilization are and when there’s an incursion. His sense of violation is absolute. He’s been department chair for two decades.

Invariably these boys and, increasingly girls, move away. On, they call it, as if Boston and Los Angeles automatically conferred clarity and vision. He can define them with the elegance of a simple equation. Movie theaters with ornate facades + plazas selling the paraphernalia of diversity + concoctions with curry from Cambodian villages = an unassailably better destiny.

During their last faculty meeting, he glanced across the Formica table in the conference room. Their oak table disappeared one weekend and the replacement appears to have come from the student cafeteria. It’s leached beige plastic, no doubt assembled by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines who have no concept of what a conference table looks like or what its purpose might be. They don’t know much about the Imperial Examinations, either.

Malcolm McCarty was looking for Bob Lieberman, his staunchest ally. They came to the College of Northern Pennsylvania at precisely the same time. It was spring and nearly thirty years ago in the placid era before the vulgarization of culture. There was a before, when the knowledge of literature was a necessary attribute of the intelligentsia. Books were discussed at dinner parties where wit and controversy engendered a verbal choreography similar to performance art.

Malcolm McCarty wasn’t alone. Bob Lieberman can bear witness. They saw the delegitimizing of the experimentalists and the subsequent round-up of the stylists, the stilt dancers who parachuted for locomotion. When asked for proof of authenticity, the stylist held out his palms and smiled. There it was, stigmata on demand. Then the critical apparatus, the intellectual’s compass, collapsed.

This was before the college was called CON PA. Or as the students say now, without irony, the Con.

An excessively thin, completely bald man is occupying Bob Lieberman’s regular chair, the one with wheels and torn leather upholstery decorated with masking tape like bandages. The stranger is picking his nails with a Swiss army knife. Malcolm will have him removed by security. He reaches for the department phone and simultaneously realizes that it is, in fact, Bob Lieberman. It’s a maliciously vandalized rendition. The sixty-six-year-old version of his former colleague and confidante is unrecognizable. He’s progressing through his collection of miniature instruments with intense concentration. He’s a slow moving chameleon extracting a filing tool.

Their recent conversation was disappointing. Bob Lieberman had taken to staking out his office and ambushing him. He’d suddenly spring from a nook in the corridor as Malcolm walked toward his office.

“You can have the 49ers on Sunday. Give me eight points,” Bob proposed.

Was this an attempt at appeasement? The official line was ten. Malcolm was suspicious.

“Why this generous offer?” Malcolm asked. “What do you want?”

“The spring grad seminar,” Bob admitted.

“Have a topic?” Malcolm didn’t want to know.

“The genius of Bob Dylan.” Bob Lieberman offered a partial smile so small, it seemed purely conceptual. He looked feral and wizened and his skin was dull gray.

“Take it to the curriculum committee,” Malcolm said. He reached his office and pulled the key from his pocket.

“You are the curriculum committee,” Bob pointed out, following him.

“What did I say last time?” Malcolm was annoyed.

“I believe you said not in this life time or any other,” Bob recalled.

“Correct,” Malcolm replied, his key in the slot; he opened his office door. Bob Lieberman was still there. Then Malcolm shut and locked the door.

Tommy Sutter rides his bike along Maple Ridge Road from Wood’s End to the college. It’s precisely twelve miles from his house on Lincoln Street to the campus and he’s ridden this road thousands of times

Sometimes he passes Professor McCarty and waves. Professor McCarty teaches at the College of Northern Pennsylvania and only wants to talk about bicycle construction, the intractable stupidity of his students and books. Has he read Catcher in the Rye yet? What about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? His wife, Patricia, comes out on the porch to announce that they’re retiring to Florida. Tommy nods and pedals on.

He has an affection for the campus. It’s an outpost where the forest is tamed and paved paths lead to known and predictable destinations. The four-story brick buildings rise at measured distances from one another, asserting order, the unquestionable triumph of the scientific method, and the value of geometry.

He enters through the main gate, where a twelve-foot-high marble statue of Galileo stands on a granite pedestal. An inscription detailing his life is engraved on a bronze plaque. Tommy’s memorized it, but he feels the act of reading it justifies his presence.

He watches football games — he’s seen Penn State, the Nittany Lions from Altoona, and the Pittsburgh Panthers. The college has an ice-skating rink, and a chess and science club. He’s a member of both. He enjoys the sense of other people, their accidental jostling and sudden random clusters, how strangers brush arms or legs, then suddenly splinter into distinct smaller tributaries. It’s like a chemical reaction.

Tommy Sutter’s boyhood is solitary. His father, Joshua Sutter, is the Wood’s End veterinarian. Everyone calls him Captain. There are constant emergencies. His father’s suitcase is packed and he can disappear in minutes. Cows cough with respiratory disease and yellow mucus leaks from their eyes. They have stillbirths, lesions on their teats, infections and parasites. Horses come down with influenza and tetanus, pulmonary hemorrhages, and colic. They get leg fractures, skin cancer and encephalitis. Sheep have bloat, meningitis, fungus and fevers.

The country folk bring Dr. Sutter deer and lamb meat, chickens, and bags of corn, tomatoes and carrots. They bake breads and blueberry pies. When they come to town, they stop by the clinic with baskets of eggs, jars of applesauce and milk in gallon jugs. It isn’t payment for services rendered, they’re all in debt, but token offerings acknowledging his father as intrinsic to Wood’s End. The clinic is part of the spine of the town — necessary as JJ’s General Store, the sheriff’s office, United Methodist, St. Stephens, and the post office.

His father gives the meat to Sheriff Murphy. His mother doesn’t want flowers and she refuses to make stews. She’s a vegetarian. The storeroom is littered with Mason jars of decaying Irises, and Lavender and Mint are buried beneath the acrid smell of alcohol, Betadine, astringents and pipe and cigarette tobacco. Ivermectin for the horses is a subtle and insistent musty scent like apples in mud. Pink antibiotic leaks from gallon bottles and looks like bubblegum.

The clinic storeroom is off limits. His father smokes cigarettes in secret there and paces in circles. He keeps his files on the floor and can immediately locate what he needs. He’s memorized precisely where each case is — baskets of roses gone stiff, foul eggs and collapsed tomatoes form a perimeter along the back wall. There’s one oak cabinet and it is locked.

Then there’s an outbreak of bluetongue that could kill off half the sheep in the county and his father leaves for a week. Goats stop eating, get infested with worms and turn mean from arthritis. The fields are actually composed of wounds, abscesses, dysentery and viruses, foot rot, liver flukes and lesions.

His father picks up his doctor’s bag and dozens of keys sway between his fingers. They’re held by a large bronze disc. It’s the Governor General’s Gold Crescent Award. His father drilled a hole in it to accommodate all his keys. He has keys for the clinic and storeroom, the locked oak cabinet, the house and Buick, and numerous small silver and gold keys in odd shapes he doesn’t recognize. Tommy assumes they’re for camouflaged doors his father keeps hidden. The tiny keys are delicate and look designed to fit jewelry boxes and dollhouses. Or mailboxes in other counties.

Sometimes his father has to go to the horse farm outside Harrisburg. He’s signed a contract, after all. They have seventy thoroughbred racehorses and need him to examine a new arrival. Two horses are shivering. One is limping and off his feed. There is blood in the barn.

Sam Markowitz often telephones from Erie. He’s scheduled twelve surgeries in three days, and he’s desperate. He begs his father for help. Sam is seventy-nine. He has glaucoma and his hands tremble. Latex gloves give him hives, he wheezes and can’t breathe. Poor Sam can’t retire. His wife has cancer and Sam has to keep up their insurance. His father can’t refuse. Then he might drop by Cornell for an emergency conference on rabid red fox and rabid raccoons. A frat kid got bitten and the trustees funded a research grant six hours later.

“All frats are naturally rabid,” his father observes. “This kid’s a business major with a room temperature IQ. I wouldn’t give him a tetanus shot. Truth is, I wouldn’t give him a tourniquet.”

Joshua Sutter has a reputation as a man of fierce convictions. When he makes up his mind, it doesn’t change. Some consider him arrogant and stubborn. But it’s generally agreed that he’s smart in an uppity way, and he has steady hands.

His father is 6’5” but seems larger. He uses his whole body unapologetically when he speaks. He bends his knees, and his hips move side to side as if performing a two-step. He spreads his arms wide for emphasis and his limbs punctuate the air.

Joshua Sutter has a melodious voice and a deliberately slow delivery. His movements are calculated and languid. He wants to be certain you see him coming. His father rarely raises his voice. He’s committed to the discipline of modulation. He claims it’s part of being professional.

His father’s red hair is long, past his neck, and falls around his face in ropey tendrils like kelp. Tommy thinks his father’s hair is a distraction — like the red cape of a matador and the misdirection of magicians.

Joshua Sutter is given to overly nonchalant entrances and exits that conceal quiet flourishes. His father actually has a repertoire of sly moves. He’s sleek and subtle and travels inside shadows. His Buick is the color of winter. It has 300,000 miles on it, and a bumper sticker that says Make Love Not War.

His father is always getting in or out of the Buick, humming “Tambourine Man” and “The Times Are A-Changing” with a corncob pipe jammed between his teeth. His riverboat gambler’s hat seems to float on top of his red hair, perched like a large nesting bird. His hat is ivory and made from shantung straw. Its wide brim conceals his forehead and bends at an angle, permanently shading his brow and left eye. He has black, red and white hatbands. Sometimes he wears his red and or black, triple-rose brocade vest, and has an entire drawer just for his sleeve garters.

His curls tangle and swirl like ocean waves he doesn’t bother to brush. He carries his doctor’s bag and suitcase in one hand, and presses a bottle of scotch to his chest with the other. Keys dangle from his middle fingers and a hundred dollar bill is folded into a little square in his palm. When they shake hands, the money transfers to Tommy’s palm and adheres to his skin.

“Keep yourself in feed,” his father says. “Have a problem, call 911.”

Just before he drives away, with the engine already running, his father motions him closer. This is the conclusion of their ritual. His father reaches in his pocket and presents him with a silver dollar. “Buy a lottery ticket,” he advises. Then the car is gone.

Tommy believes his father can will himself into invisibility. He’s magical and his doctor’s bag and big brown leather suitcase are somehow suspicious. His father is a circus with rings of acrobats, clowns, strong men and limping horses smelling like rained-on apples. He’s the grand master. His suitcase must be filled with confetti, ready to burst in a storm of gold flecks, and silver sparkle fireworks that could escape and resound like ricocheting bullets. Then plumes of purple smoke would pour through the house and into Lincoln Street. He has miniature missiles in his suitcase, and milk snakes coil in his folded brocade vests and sleeve garters. His father invented the universe. Time didn’t exist until he devised watches and clocks.

Tommy thinks his father can pull rabbits and lambs from his special riverboat gambler’s hat. He can extract water buffalo, mammoths, and make golden eagles fly from his hands.

Tommy frequently examines the Buick. He’s disappointed when nothing is added or subtracted. He knows precisely what’s in the trunk — remnants of a tool kit, a parka, card decks, playing chips from the Flaming Arrow Indian Casino south of Altoona, a Frisbee, and two bottles of scotch. In the glove-box his father keeps chocolate bars, two cartons of Marlboro 100 cigarettes, and his expired driver’s license.

Tommy watched his father install a cassette player. But he didn’t buy anymore cassettes. He only plays three tapes —The Best of Bob Dylan, The Best of Frank Sinatra and The Best of Cream. On a recent reconnaissance, Tommy realized his father doesn’t have a single map in the car.

“Maps are for people who care where they’re going,” his father said, corncob pipe in his mouth, hat covering his forehead. Then he’s walking out to the gray Buick that’s so identical to the gray air, it’s camouflaged.

Tommy Sutter spends his boyhood in the vast green chambers of the forest that begins at the backyard gate. The forest is an inland sea with wind currents the texture of waves. He’s disguised and protected here. Trees are mysterious and practice their own forms of sorcery. They communicate with gestures revealing their intentions. They are agile mutes and natural mimes. Their language evolves seasonally. Branches sway suggestively to one side, offering a deer path he follows, zigzagging to the creek beneath stands of sepia and glazed young oaks.

He jumps the creek to ridges of brazen scarlet and vermillion maples. They’re a battalion of renegades. He calls that Revolution Hill. Low slopes are intricate displays of leaves turning cinnamon, cordovan and oxblood. They remind him of the leather and high- ceilinged rooms at the college. He names this path Library Road.

Some maples look dipped in wine, burgundy and sherry. A good chemist could take the separate elements of autumn and distill them. The first chemists were alchemists. A superior chemist could put them in a bottle and drink it. That’s the hazard of maples and the lure of clarets and grenadine.

Oaks are sturdier. Their strewn leaves resemble buckskin, pelts, leather patches and gourds. He could gather them, and devise clothing and weapons. Or he could graft them on for hands. Tommy is certain he could survive winter.

The forest is an engine, a wind-fueled orchestra. Oaks are anchors and provide a steady rhythm. On the banks of 5 Eagle Creek, the maples are younger and subdued. When dry, their leaves rustle like tinny castanets. That’s Gypsy Ridge. The west-facing slopes go brown and brittle early. He can step on them for percussion. He calls this section Death Row.

He knows where he is and rarely encounters anyone. It’s his forest and he can orchestrate it.

Tommy was angry. The week began with a rare family discussion about his request to join Boy Scouts. He needed twelve dollars for dues and a uniform. His father said no.

Tommy offers to clean cages in the vet clinic. He’ll wash the storeroom floor.

Betadine and iodine leak from ten-gallon jars and fall in streaks like stalled creeks polluted with rust. Pink antibiotic drips thick like spit-out bubblegum. The floor is encrusted with what fell and lodged between the layers — pens and keys and business cards, cotton balls, swabs, gauze and coins are permanently laminated. Each year the county health department cites the clinic for multiple violations.

“That’s my Sargasso Sea,” his father said. “I like it as it is.”

Tommy rarely has a specific desire that he can articulate. He doesn’t want a Walkman, a Star Wars video or a guitar. But Boy Scouts is an urgent necessity. He must make fire from sticks and the movement of his wrists. He wants to learn Morse code and how to send smoke signals. For an astronomy badge, he’ll identify constellations and the Pleiades meteor shower in August when the troop camps out for a week at Hamilton Mountain.

Tommy doesn’t know how to say he longs for companionship. He can’t recognize his loneliness, how remote and distant he is, how stranded. He’s sympathetic to the moon, barren, pock-marked and futile. Rogue asteroids excite him. They’re fearless delinquents without rules. When satellites lose orbit, and are condemned to fall back to earth as incinerated pieces, he mourns their fiery extinction. He has no idea why.

During their formal family discussions, he talks in a rush about knots, lassos and securing boats at docks. The principles of aerodynamics are demonstrated by archery. He mentions badges for cooking and house repair. He’s nervous and passionate and senses defeat. He wants to dig for arrowheads and fossils in amber, and recognize archeological sites from Indians and wagon trains.

Tommy is trying to create a dialect in which he will be fluent. Perhaps it’s a language of ropes, flints, canvas tents and sticks that transform into flames. He’s small like his mother, with thin wrists and ankles, and doesn’t play sports with his father. He isn’t chosen for teams or after-school football. He is trying to survive.

“Your thoughts are so primitive and generic, I can’t process them,” his mother says, taking off her apron.

After dinner his mother goes to clay class or a lecture at the college. Woman’s Circle meets once a week and she’s taking another sewing class. Democratic Club is mandatory. The county has never voted democratic, not even for Roosevelt. Of course the cause is futile. That’s why it’s so important, his mother tells them. She’s president and has to open the door and start the coffee pot. She has the only set of keys.

“Uniforms and saluting lead to Idi Amin, the shithead Shah of Iran, and that bastard in Iraq,” his father says. He stands up. “I can’t support that.”

Tommy feels betrayed. He rides his bike to the college, barely noticing the rain. No one is outside, not on Lincoln Street or Maple Ridge Road. Campus is deserted. As usual, he reads the plaque on the marble statue of Galileo. Then he rides home in the dark.

It’s the cusp between fall and winter and he’s uneasy. The zone of transition is like a frontier where there are no rules and the unpredictable is constant. Wind rips random paths through the forest and maples’ leaves fall in the shape of broken hearts, mouths, and twisted upended shells. The sun thins as if strained through a colander. Tommy knows the architecture of November. It’s an anatomy of edges and pebbles, gravel-mouthed thunderstorms, and abandoned nests finches left. In the planet’s shift, he has the sensation he may fall off the world.

He’s surprised to find Captain waiting for him. “What have you got in that backpack?” he asks.

Tommy takes out his compass, flashlight, buck knife, matchbooks, and paperback copy of On the Road that Professor McCarty gave him. He doesn’t like it and isn’t reading it.

He places the items on the table near his father. He doesn’t have a canteen. He drinks from 5 Hawk Creek below a colossal maple. It’s one of the oldest in the forest and invariably turns a bold magenta. Its leaves stay on as if somehow attached past the first freeze. The bark is thick and complex, a sort of Braille he tries to read with his hands. There are epics beneath his fingers, formulas and footnotes. Puncture such a tree and the history of the world pours out. Cut it down and time stops. He calls the place where he drinks Cistern of the Sage.

Under the lamplight his tools are a paltry assembly. They’re squalid and starkly inadequate.

Captain examines the contents of his backpack. He picks them up one at a time and evaluates them.

“A substandard Cro-Magnon could rule the planet with this gear,” his father decides. Then he opens a statistics book.

Tommy can’t translate his emotions into intelligible sentences. He recognizes his father is wrong, but he can’t go further, can’t say You’re an unreasonable, selfish man. He believes he’ll someday navigate back through time, return to precisely this moment, and say, You’re a bully and narcissist. Give me the money. He doesn’t yet know that what is lost cannot be retrieved.

Hailed as one of America’s foremost writers of short fiction, KATE BRAVERMAN has been included in nearly every preeminent story collection, including Ben Marcus’ New American Short Stories, Tobias Wolff’s The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Best American, Carver, The Paris Review, and The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. She is the author of many books including the groundbreaking novel Lithium for Medea, which caught the attention of Joan Didion, Janet Fitch, Rick Moody, Greil Marcus, and others, identifying Braverman as a remarkable literary voice in American letters.

Copyright © 2018 by Kate Braverman

“What the Lilies Know” (published as “The Woman Who Sold Communion” in McSweeney’s, 2005 and Best of McSweeney’s, 2006.)

“Skinny Broads with Wigs” (published as “Mrs. Jordan’s Summer Vacation,” “Editors Choice” Carver Award, Carve Magazine, Volume 5, 2005)

“Feeding in a Famine” (published by Connotation Press online, June 2015)

“Cocktail Hour” (published in Mississippi Review, Volume 33 #1 & 2, winner of the Mississippi Review Prize)

“Women of the Ports” (published as “The Neutral Zone” in San Francisco Noir, Akashic Books, 2005)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Braverman, Kate, author.

Title: A good day for seppuku : stories / Kate Braverman.

Description: San Francisco : City Lights Publishers, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017043863 (print) | LCCN 2017046533 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867222 (ebook) | ISBN 9780872867215 (softcover)

Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Family Life.

Classification: LCC PS3552.R3555 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.R3555 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 813/.54—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017043863

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