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They were arguing, stupid fight, about if you were color-blind how many colors would you see.  Would there be only black and white?  Or is color-blindness something larger in scope, with many shades of color, only re-assigned to objects differently than others see them?  Listening to them fight, Elaine thought more than once that you could perhaps characterize the two men by the positions they took on the issue.  The one who believed that color-blindness reduces everything to black and white, was he the more romantic one of the two?  Or was he the more classical?  “Like Balanchine,” she thought vaguely, having forgotten most of everything she ever knew about Balanchine somewhere over the years.

No wait a second, there must be still plenty she recalled about Balanchine.  Seemed like she could almost see one of his dances, right in front of her eyes, the hush around the dancers, the andante of the music—live music, as she recalled.  Did the City Ballet rely on taped music nowadays, hard to know who to ask.  My God, George Balanchine meant everything to me at one point, Elaine thought, trying to work herself into a frenzy, and now I can’t even think of the names of any of his dances.

She sipped a little bit of her drink, then put the glass down on the marble coaster.  I love these coasters, she thought.

Balanchine, everything black and white, Allegra Kent in some kind of white leotard with little handles around her hips.  The stage all very dark except for spotlights from beneath the stage.  It must have been the 70s, she thought.  She remembered Balanchine’s profile, the way it looked like a mountain peak, and his long legs.  They’d met at a party and she wondered why all the women went for him, then she’d decided the women in question must be a horribly neurotic bunch.  Last autumn she was down in Los Angeles for the West Hollywood Book Fair, and a woman was speaking who’d written a book all about her late-blooming passion for anal sex, and Elaine had been puzzled and a little nauseated, and then all became clear when the speaker revealed she had been one of Balanchine’s ballerinas.

It had been a beautiful afternoon, outdoors, the speakers at long tables under tents, everyone wearing sunglasses.

The heat concentrating on the very top of your scalp, so Elaine had guarded it with some kind of flyer for the ballerina’s anal sex book.  A discreet flyer, thank God, it could have been far worse.  There was something almost dignified about it, just as there was, Elaine realized, about all of Balanchine’s work, no matter if he were choreographing for elephants at the circus (surely he did something of the sort, it was part of his legend), or for these incredibly elegant and soignee analholics like Suzanne Farrell or Vera Zorina.  And that woman Joan in The New Yorker who never wrote an article without bemoaning the way the City Ballet had forgotten about Balanchine and treated his legacy like so much flypaper.  Nowadays there’s a general cultural amnesia about the past.  Why in her dim memory she recalled being taken to the NYCB by her godmother, oh, in the middle of some war, everyone upset outside, but inside a dim sense of peace and money.

“You must know Mary Sue,” Tim was saying, “she’s colorblind and you don’t have to be intimate with her to know, just take a look at her outfits, stripes with plaids, everything five different shades of orange.  It’s like, when you go into an elevator and it’s all gray rubber, gray steel?  At least this is how I understand it, and say you stepped into a big puddle of blood, you wouldn’t even know it.  Gray and red are the same thing.”

“I do know Mary Sue and she has often told me, that she has shoppers who put together her clothes for her.  It’s a service for the colorblind, and there’s a whole C-B department at Macy’s or Saks.  One of them.”

“Oh, she doesn’t buy at Saks.”

“No, that’s true.”

They thought awhile about Mary Sue.  Elaine remembered her from the days when all of them used to act in Beach Blanket Babylon, a San Francisco institution that had been running a hundred years; a revue of songs and topical skits and big, brash satire like Saturday Night Live.  Mary Sue often played the big, clownish types like Dolly Parton, Peggy Lee, Imelda Marcos.  She always dressed beautifully, in Elaine’s opinion, but maybe she had the Macy’s shoppers working for her even then, or else maybe her disease hadn’t spread up to her eyeballs yet (or wherever color blindness affected you last).  She imagined it was in the eyeballs, sort of like cancer except not as painful, perhaps not painful at all.  You certainly never heard people give little gasps or clutch hankies to their eyes and claim they had just had an attack of color blindness.  It couldn’t be painful, but who knew?  That Balanchine woman had evaded the question entirely about whether or not anal sex was painful.  This guy who she met through the personals (of The New York Review of Books believe it or not) didn’t like her lubricated.  He would come over and she was just supposed to lie there while he plunged into her, without a word, without even taking off his pants, just pulling down his zipper—which he could have done easily, in her foyer—and he’d be out of there in two shakes—so to speak—and leave her rapt, restless, and with another chapter’s worth of anal sex to write up in her so-called “diary of obsession.”  So, Elaine thought, if Mary Sue indeed suffered from being color blind—in fact, whether or not she was color blind at all, and she, Elaine, did not think she was, despite what Tim and Gerald were swearing, so united in this one lie, despite being at loggerheads in every other aspect of the color-blindness debate; anyhow, if Mary Lou were colorblind she did not seem to ever have felt pain a day in her life.  Save perhaps for the day when she was fired from Beach Blanket Babylon for moving to Oakland’s Lake Merritt.  You were fired just for moving out of town?  They said it’s a betrayal of the BBB ethic.

 “Could we stop the car, please,” she said faintly.  They’d been bucking up and down the hills of Pacifica and Devil’s Slide for what seemed like hours, and she wasn’t feeling at all comfortable.  The drink she put down more firmly in its slot, above the cunning marble coaster.  Tim took another glance at her, over his shoulder, with an unspoken fear in his eyes.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, dear,” she said.  “That last drink was just a little on the strong side.”

“That’s Gerald,” he said.  “When it comes to pouring out, guy’s got an iron hand.”

Gerald protested, as Tim pulled over to the wide gravel next to Highway 1.  “It’s hard when someone else is driving.  You can’t anticipate, that’s the problemo.”

Elaine put one foot down on the sand, judging its wet firmness.  Thirty yards below, the ocean slopped and howled, a hungry beast prowling the shore.  When they asked her if she felt better, she nodded, but the truth is it’s so hard to gauge how well or ill you’re feeling when you’re looking down at this horrible wet ocean that’s suffering its own spectacular storm from underneath.  All roiled up as though octopi and squids were fighting it out on the ocean floor like King Kong versus the T Rex.  In France didn’t they call nausea the “mal du mer”?  That expressed it absolutely, the sea suffering, and “mal” meant—evil.

“I’m fine, Gerald,” she called back blithely while slipping a little mirror from her purse and quickly dabbing on some blush.  You’re never so sick as makeup won’t help put a better spotlight on things.  She wondered what the colorblind did about blush.  Weren’t they always putting weird colors on their face?  Maybe that’s what happened to all those women the Germans painted in the Blue Rider school, with deep blue cheeks and green chins.  It wasn’t the painters who were colorblind, she flashed, it was the models!  She should write an article for Art Notes about it.  Tiny flakes of powder dusted her fingers and surreptitiously she wiped them on Gerald’s leather seats, the rich leather he was so proud of.  However now the apricot dust was staining the black in a way that reminded her, disconcertingly, of a crime scene.

This wasn’t her first visit to Blanc Marie.  She had endowed the sisters with a $10,000 fellowship to say prayers in some sort of universal novena in Marty’s memory.

Tim had not been in favor of this investment at all.  And Gerald was, predictably, on the fence, not wanting to hurt Tim’s feelings by being disloyal to him, and yet not wanting to rock the boat so far as Elaine went either, for things had been rocky between them ever since Gerald had picked Tim up at some kind of gay cruise and married him on the steps of City Hall.  Tim didn’t understand why she felt it necessary to have prayers said in Marty’s name.  “I loved him too, Mom,” he said.  “But he’s dead and all the prayers in the world aren’t going to bring him back.”

That was his argument, and how could she say that she doubted his sincerity?  But the truth is she knew he would rather she spent the money on what, an extra bathroom on the house Tim was building for Gerald in St. Francis Wood.  Not that it was all so black and white, she admitted.  Marty hadn’t been the world’s best father, number one, and hell, maybe two men living together (with herself to be installed in this deluxe sort of “inlaw” apartment in what wasn’t actually the basement—but amounted to one)—maybe two men needed two bathrooms.  (She’d have her own, of course.)  Gerald thought it would be cute to have a bidet in his.  She made herself grin when she joshed him about it, but inwardly she was thinking of whether or not he enjoyed anal sex and if so, why and how.  She kept looking at Tim wondering how she had raised a son who would inflict anal sex on another, smaller boy.

Well, he was forty.  And Gerald close to it.  They weren’t boys, they just acted like it sometimes.

Today was supposed to be a nice drive in the country but now, as the two men stood there in twin sweaters, staring at her balefully, she felt alarm, seeing her nice afternoon go up in smoke.  “What?” she asked.  “I’m not going to feel any better with you two glaring at me as though I were–“  She couldn’t think of what.  Instantly they broke their gaze off, as though ashamed.  One looked up the side of the cliff; the other, to the rocks below.  They might have been two surveyors, in fisherman’s sweaters, assigned to measure cliff erosion.  Softly, out of the side of his mouth, Tim said, “Mom, do you want a handkerchief?”

“For what?”

“You’ve got all that makeup on the leather.”

Abruptly she swiveled in the backseat and pivoted herself out of the car entirely, hoisting herself up on her pins.  Marty always told her she wore too much makeup.  That she was beautiful just with a touch of lipstick.  She didn’t need all that junk on her eyes.  But what did Marty know?  He was the one who said they shouldn’t leave New York, they’d be crazy to leave a place they knew, and at night she would feel the fear in his bones as he lay next to her, feigning sleep, in that awful apartment on the Henry Hudson, their last before abandoning the city for once and for all.  That lumpy mattress she could have sworn had bedbugs.  Him staring at the ceiling through closed eyes but his pulses jumping like the trotters at Aqueduct.  

“Are you awake?”

No reply.

“Marty, you’re not kidding anyone, you’re awake.”

You’d hear a snore, a horribly unconvincing snore, a snore so fake it seemed to signal the very pit of despair, for it didn’t seem to, well, it didn’t seem to care if you thought it was real.  Whatever it was, it was not going to then turn around and say, oh yes, I was awake all along.  She got up, put her feet in her slippers, padded out to the kitchen, and in the glare of the pink “Pharmacy” neon she picked up her crossword and sat down again at the table, thinking that it would be the last crossword she’d ever do in New York.  The sugar bowl was empty, white crystals clinging to its rim.  The Daily News printed the most preposterous puzzles, clues so simple little Tim could finish one up by the time he was seven or eight.  They did have the Jumble puzzle which has pizzazz, a fairly elegant mess of consonants and vowels you could scramble till they formed a real word.  ECRMA.  You’d look at that combo and then “cream” would bubble to the surface.  She used to tell Marty, “People talk about ‘I love New York,’ all the shops and shows, but all I love is the Jumble puzzles and the City Ballet.”

“Yes,” she said to Tim, “I’ll take a hanky if you have one.  I don’t know why I’m so clumsy.  It’s just the emotion of the day, I suppose.”

“That’s all right, Elaine,” Gerald said.  “We understand.”

“Do you?”

Was there a simper of condescension in his voice?  There always is, when the young address the old.  But they were neither of them young, neither of them old.  Wasn’t there some fellow feeling among the middle-aged, or was your birthdate everything forever?

“Of course we do.  Marty was a great guy and you probably miss him to bits.  I know I do, and who am I?”

“Yes,” she mumbled.  In her fist she was rubbing great streaks into his leather, like a Number Two pencil eraser, till it foamed with shavings.  The white of Tim’s handkerchief, the thick black leather.  It was like some old-fashioned view of the world she had put behind her long ago when she had become a feminist and taken up International Modernism—the new.  No more black and white, she’d laughed to Marty, who shook his head like a rueful cart horse.  “Everything new,” Marty said, looking around him at the new place on Russian Hill—well, sort of Russian Hill.  She never knew when he was kidding.  She only knew when he was afraid of something.

Too, he was the victim of a dreadful pair of, well, you could hardly call them parents, they were just monsters.  That’s all, monsters.  The Nazis, Goebbels and Goering, were better parents, probably.  They gave all three of their kids a loveless childhood and made them feel guilty for wanting to get away from them.  They picked on the one boy so much he gave it up at thirteen, expiring in some sordid Coney Island brawl that made the papers.  And Elaine could just about remember Marty’s sister, who tried to join the Army during Korea and then disappeared into the bars and clubs of the Village sometime around 1956.  And the monsters lived on, as monsters always will, their posture stiff and immobile, ruling the roost and keeping poor Mart under their thumb as though he were still a little boy with his father’s—

“Stop staring at me, boys,” she said.  “It’s just not polite.  Let’s let this be a happy day, shall we?  And when we get to Blanc Marie the sisters are going to treat us to a lunch you’ll never forget.”  The food they offered the public was spectacular, that was the only word for it.  Pressed by friends to describe it, Elaine could only compare her experience at the refectory table to some great fireworks display, perhaps the one Leopold Bloom describes in Ulysses while he’s melting and rubbing himself over that innocent convent girl.  Vaguely she knew, somewhere in her soul, that the voluptuousness of the food was in some direct relationship to the simplicity, some might say harshness, of the nuns’ order, but she couldn’t think why.  “Sublimation” seemed too simple a concept, something beneath the register of the experience.  She had heard that M.F.K. Fisher, the famous California food writer, had devoted a chapter to Blanc Marie in one of her early books, either The Gastronomical Me or I Ate A Whole Fat Pig, but as of yet she hadn’t tracked down the reference.  M.F.K. Fisher—the Balanchine of food writers—joyous, vigorous, sensual, in fact downright sexy.

Gerald had picked up a small stone from the side of the road and was expertly tossing it from one hand to the other.  “Well,” he said, “you want to get a move on, Elaine?  You’re making me hungry, and we still have quite a hike.”

A hike?  Just as though they were walking instead of driving.  But that was Gerald for you: imprecise.  Sometimes, she thought, dealing with him was like dealing with someone who didn’t speak English very well.  His expressions were either slightly askew, or else so vulgar you’d think he’d have dropped them years ago as he rose higher in society and status.  “Chunk of change,” for example.  To Gerald everything was a big chunk of change.  The outlay for Marty’s novenas, of course.  The cost of a bidet.  He whistled beautifully, like Bing Crosby, but only in connection with mentioning a sum of money.  “Four hundred dollars!” he would whistle.  “That’s some chunk of change all right.”

“Oh yes, let’s move on, I’m so sorry,” said Elaine, drawing her feet together and lifting them back into the car proper.  Tim shut her car door from outside, then walked around the car, grabbing for his keys in his pocket.

“We had a little break, that’s all,” said Gerald generously.  He held the black stone he’d found in his palm, gazing at it as though it were worth something.  Elaine watched it glisten, catching the pinkish cool light and something of the rigor of the waves far below.  All greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely!  O so soft, sweet, soft!

“I don’t even know how the sisters get to the farmers market, considering they’re not allowed to talk to men,” Elaine said, looking forward now to her lunch.  “Maybe they speak only to the women farmers there, I don’t know.”

“Or eunuchs?” Tim said, pulling the car back onto 101, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.  “That would be practical.”

“Hard boiled eggs for lunch?” Gerald suggested.

“Stop it, do,” Elaine laughed.  “You two are terrible, terrible.”  Tim had grown up with Marty’s sense of humor, an uneasy humor you might say, one that found the wry jest in every awful turn of fate.  For Marty, she knew, all too well, such a philosophy had come naturally, for his life really had been tough.  Hearing it from Tim, it seemed a little false, for outside of being gay, which in San Francisco was hardly a tragedy, what had he to complain of?  It was the same way that the jokes coming out of Woody Allen’s mouth at least seemed felt, whereas the same jokes from Jerry Seinfeld lost punch somehow, or even meaning.  Still, nuns were always ridiculous, weren’t they, and the best of them even seemed to concede as much.  Mother Hilda always wore a little smile as though she, too, the intimate friend of Loretta Young and Teilhard de Chardin among others, saw how crazy it all was.  And good with money too!  Tim said that Mother Hilda had the mind of a steel trap, and sometimes she frightened Elaine, just a little; she was utterly pragmatic, hardly spiritual at all in affect.  Like a character from one of her favorite books, The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s divine novel about a cloistered order.  But then again, the older she got the more Elaine realized that the important part of life, the life of the soul, was all about simple things, and like it or not, the simple things cost money.

You could make a little chart, she thought, about which ballerinas, the ones she’d seen and envied over fifty years, which ones were Catholic girls and which were not.  Maria Tallchief, yes.  Alicia Alonso, for sure.  Janet Collins, probably.  Margot Fonteyn, don’t make me laugh.  The drive was lovely, but a little dizzying, and it was beyond her now to correlate the data of religious background to the need some lovely dancers seemed to have for anal sex.  Maybe after lunch all these columns and lists would add up.  In the meantime she applied a renewed vigor to finding a comfortable place on the bridge of her nose for her sunglasses.  In the shadowy back seat, she saw what amounted to a stranger—herself—reflected in the tinted glass.  A stranger with an expensive pair of shades that looked as though they were biting her nose, as though she were in pain, and a stranger who wore a grimace even on a lovely day.

“Can I roll down the window?” she called up to Tim.  “Or are we childproof?”  The three of them laughed, just burst out in guffaws, at the incongruity of—of what?  That she was no child, and that they had no parental authority over her?  That they had no children and they didn’t really want any, so why buy a “childproofed” car?  Well that last wasn’t strictly true, for Gerald in fact had three children, apparently, though Elaine had never met any of them.  To her they were phantoms, forgettable phantoms, to be trotted out whenever any of them wanted a reminder that Gerald wasn’t maybe one thousand percent gay as he so often seemed.  Those three kids, hidden from him by a vengeful ex-wife in Manila or Melbourne, were like the Lost Boys in the story of Peter Pan—they were doing something tropical somewhere, forever young, and noisy, but just about faceless.  Elaine supposed that Gerald knew their names but they were so little a part of her life that most of the time she forgot they existed.  She had to give him that, he wasn’t one of those fathers who was always trying to show you slides of his children, or JPEGs of their first day at school.  Even when he’d downed a few, he never sobbed into his beer about Gerald Junior and the others.

“We’re childproof,” Tim affirmed, and this sent them all into giggles all over again.  It was almost as though they had never been at loggerheads, her wonderful son and herself.

“May I see your little rock?” Elaine asked Gerald, raising her hand to his shoulder, pressing her fingers into the wool of his sweater, with what she hoped was a tender sort of touch.

The face he sent back was confused.

“What rock, dear?”

“That little stone you picked up from the roadside,” she said.  “It was such a thoughtful souvenir of our day.”

“Did I have a rock?” he said.  It was clear he’d forgotten the incident already.  “Sure it weren’t no hard boiled egg, Elaine?”

Her nose itched.  Sort of a flimsy sensation probably aggravated by the severe bite of the bridge.

“You were tossing that tiny stone around as though you wanted maximum publicity for it,” she said, coolly enough.  “I saw it in your hand and for a moment you reminded me of Saint Francis.”

“St. Francis Wood maybe,” said Tim, for that was the luxury neighborhood in San Francisco that he and Gerald aspired to.

“I’m no Saint Francis,” Gerald chuckled.

“Apparently not,” she agreed, with an asperity that afterward dismayed her.  Why couldn’t she keep any affection going for Gerald?  She would catch it for a second, and she could nurse it for minutes at a stretch, but then like a firefly in her hand it would buzz and flare out, you could almost feel it dying, vacant with beauty.  How long did it take to be able to love someone?  With Marty it had happened in an instant, like snapping your fingers—or was that the marvelous diminution that time brought with it—everything seemed to have happened in a jumble, fast as thought itself, even falling in love.  Or one day she, walking through Flatbush, seeing a used condom on the steps of St. Cecilia’s, suddenly deciding that come hell or high water she would move her family out of New York.  And that was that.  There were things irrevocable, matters of the spirit, decided in an instant; and then there were men like Gerald who no matter how hard you tried to treat him like a human being, you just kept seeing Tim’s thing in his mouth, his fat little mouth like a daffodil.

“It might be on the floor,” Gerald said.  He shook his head from side to side.  “The rock thing I mean.”

“You could look,” Tim said.

“Oh it is so unimportant,” Elaine said.  “What’s important is having a good time while we still can.”

“Or when we stop I could get out and get you another one,” Gerald said.

“It’s not like they’re expensive,” said Tim.

“Oh, that would be fine,” agreed Elaine.  “I wouldn’t want you to be out a chunk of change.”

She noticed, in the side mirror to her right, the cheerful orange and white boxy shape of a U-Haul van in their wake.  It was keeping right up; as she thought back, she had been noticing it here and there, in the twisty turns of 101 by Devils Slide, or later, along the bleak Dover Beach seascapes of Pigeon Point, in her peripheral vision that U-Haul van had been almost traveling with them.  When they had pulled over for their impromptu “stretch of the legs,” the van had maintained a discreet distance a hundred yards down the highway’s edge.

“Have you boys been watching this U-Haul truck?” she asked, wanting to amuse them.  “As Marty used to say, remember Tim?  It’s been sticking to us like white on rice.”

“I don’t remember the white on rice thing, Mom.”

Gerald laughed.  “What would he say today, when rice isn’t necessarily white, I wonder?”

Tim glanced in his rear view mirror.  His lip twitched.  “He’d say that the fucking piece of shit was on our ass, is what he’d say.”

“Tim, please,” said Gerald.

“’White on rice,’” he hooted derisively, and if there was one thing Elaine hated it was when someone mocked you by imitating your voice or your expressions—the very things that belonged to you.  “Give me a fucking break.”

Gerald leaned over the back seat, cuffed him on the shoulder.  “Tim, let’s just try to have a nice day, okay?  Our last one for a while, let’s make it nice.”

Last one for a while?

What was going on with that?

“I hurt you, Tim?” Gerald said in a small voice.  “Baby, I’m sorry.”  Then he must have pushed down a button in the armrest of the “childproof” car, for his window rolled down, nearly inaudibly, but she had always had good hearing and she could sense the atmosphere within the sedan changing, shifting slightly.  “I don’t think I hurt our boy, Elaine,” he continued, his voice getting blown about by the wind so that, or so it seemed to her, the syllables in the different words he used seemed to bounce all over them, like the inflatable silver pillows Andy Warhol made for his Factory parties.  Those silver pillows she had seen in Time magazine when all New York was talking of Pop Art and Warhol’s Silver Factory, which sounded so elegant.  Even in the best of times, Gerald had an affected way of speaking.  “He’s made of sturdy stuff as we both of us know all too well.”

Elaine was barely listening to him . . .  When she got to Blanc Marie she planned to tuck into whatever rich dessert the Sisters had set aside for her.  Too often in the past, she’d scrimped and cheated herself to keep the figure she’d had as a young girl, but we can’t all be sylphlike, so we might as well eat what desserts we may.  Look at Violette Verdy!  Balanchine had made dozens of dances for her, might as well call them “pipe cleaner dances,” but by the time she retired it was as though someone had pumped air into her like a dirigible so that by the time Reagan became President dear Violette had that silver pillow look herself, like a dumpling wrapped in foil at some dim sum place.

That U-Haul van was really moving. She saw its squarish cabin comically bumping up and down. She glanced at Tim’s knuckles on the steering wheel, how white and old they looked, his fingers knotted around the wheel as though arthritis had molded them into hooks.  Poor boy, really.  Upset about a tiff with Gerald, no doubt.

A good meal would sort them all out.

“Mom,” Tim said.

Chicken, spinach, chocolate cake—dumplings were in her head thanks to Violette Verdy; maybe there’d be dumplings.  Not the Chinese sort, the—

“Mom, it’s not like we haven’t talked this out over and over,” Tim said.  He sounded resigned.

She felt Gerald’s paw on her left shoulder.

“Oh, Elaine,” he said.  “So awful to see you like this.”

“Don’t pretend you’re, like, all in the dark about the U-Haul, Mom.”

“In the dark?” she repeated.  It was like he was being patient with her.  An unusual note for Tim.  Patience.  Something new for our boy.  “In the dark about what?”

“About the U-Haul,” Gerald whined.  Oh, maybe it wasn’t whining, but his affected way of speaking.  No wonder his kids never liked visiting him.  Who would want a Dad who talked like Lauren Bacall in an old Douglas Sirk weeper like Written on the Wind?  At least Tim had had a manly sort of father, a mensch as they say.

Marty.  Buried on a hill, the sea breeze lilting, the stars above blinking out unendurable messages of gravity.  A branch of one of those sea-drenched white trees pitched above his grave.  Him a suit of bones, as she had used to lie in bed next to him, pressing his skin with her thumb, feeling the bone along his skinny little spine, his absurdly large skull.

“In the dark about what about the U-Haul, can you tell me that?” Elaine cried.  “Because I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about.”

“Oh Elaine,” said Gerald, patting her shoulder, gently, as though she were some sort of National Velvet.  “Those nuns are gonna take such extra good care of you.  You’ll be their sugar doll with all your beautiful clothes and manners.  Look!  I can almost see it now.”  Suddenly his face was next to hers, wreathed in smiles.  “It’s coming up around the bend, just you wait and see.”

“#imaginary,” “#genuine” and “#phenomena” belong to a series titled with words from Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” that I have hashtagged and run through various social media platforms—Reddit and Twitter most often, though Instagram has played a role as well. Each poem is then sculpted from its hashtag’s search results. 

#imaginary

Her name was Nadine. She existed solely to blame things on.
I knew what she looked like. But I didn’t see her.
I understood that some people could be invisible. 

His name was Business Duck. He was the back half of a tugboat
and the front half of Donald Duck. He would do absolutely nothing
except occupy seats that other people wanted to sit in.  

I also had one named Boy for years. I had to intervene
in their arguments many times: you know, kid stuff,
like what to have for dinner or how they should murder everyone.  

I used to just talk to people, as if
there were people with me all the time,
even when I was completely alone. 

One of them was a skeleton dog.
It would race everywhere, and always be beside me.
I practically had a midget vampire following me. 

His name was Splashy. Miss that guy.
I had these black panthers that would run alongside the car,
going into the houses of kids I didn’t like and messing with them.  

My best friend and I each had a fleet of friendly bed bugs.
My Mum would often hear me when I was taking a tinkle speaking to them
and thanking them for helping me shake off my junk. 

I had a husband when I was four.
He was a giant sweater vest named Herman,
and we had a son named Boobie. 

We had two restaurant chains:
Chi Chi Nose Shop, a Chinese restaurant run by mice
in the roofs of cars, and the Nake, a restaurant that you ate in naked. 

Alice was pretty tame, just needed to have a spot saved at the table, car, etc.
Then one day, I just got sick of her, and threw her out the car window
as we were driving, saying, “Goodbye, Alice.” 

I remember what she looked like (a glow worm)
and I remember having conversations with her.
I would make my parents re-open gates and doors, telling them they forgot her. 

I even remember asking her to stop coming around
because I was too old to have friends like her anymore – five –
and when I couldn’t stop thinking about her,  

I tried to flush her down the toilet on a few occasions.
After that I had a star with a face that would float around after me,
or dance around during class to make me laugh.  

He was a blonde version of me
and we ran around on the edges of grass and pavement.
It didn’t take too long for my dad to inform me 

that my friends were the devil’s minions,
and he drew the star I described on a piece of paper
so we could burn it. That was the end of that.

#genuine

Death removes a lot of cover
When you’re covering the world in your thoughts.
It’s not like losing a pen, is it. 

That’s not the argument.
These are the sorts of things I say to people.
I work their job for them so they can stay home and grieve. 

I know you’re hurting.
I’ll be over Tuesday to mow your lawn for you.
I’m all for your fucking off with your secretly soy self. 

I’m talking about YOUR lawn, widow.
Not just some canned cliché that means nothing.
Surely you have more complex feelings about it than “thoughts and prayers”. 

There are no words that will fix it.
It’s not about you. Don’t try to make it about you
By being the one who has to say the deepest, most touching words. 

I’m Christian and personally don’t like this statement.
My child got run over by a car and is dead.
I’m going to write a facebook post about his death 

I’ll be tweeting about his death tomorrow #YOLO
It’s a double standard, and nothing changes: it falls on you.
I didn’t give a damn if they were sincere or not. 

You’re just throwing those emoticons everywhere…
protecting yourself from awkwardness
people use it use it on the internet all the time when someone dies. 

Hey man. I’ve been thinking about your dead mom.
I talked to Jesus about her for a little while. Mostly good stuff.
It felt like a token comment to make her lower her shields in respect 

while her boyfriend was getting a lung transplant
and was in the public eye too much. Shut the fuck up.
I acknowledge you, you’re part of my social group, and I’m not a threat.

#phenomena

A kid I knew lost his backpack and needed a replacement.
He came to school the next day with a big mailbox in his hands
Filled with his books. A couple of days later he added straps to it.  

Voilà, he had a mailbox backpack. He made a million dollars!
When women would wear thongs to show high on their hips,
Kids started to spike up their bangs and bleach them. 

Grown-ups are sporting plastic decorations on their heads
In the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers.
We had a few kids choke on them from chewing on them. 

If you survived the rubber band installation alone, you were lucky.
But if you snapped them open and slid them against someone’s skin
It was just like a knife. It had a star on it, so I told the gas station attendant  

I was getting another one for free.
She thought I belonged on the short bus.
We wrote a letter demanding reparations  

For having tracked down so many star-labeled pops.
They wrote back essentially saying, very softly,
You kids made this shit up, stop bothering us. 

Every flea market in Florida still sells these to old people.
Mine looked like it could fit a doll when I took it off.
If you stuck two together, it would make a baby. 

I worked at a day care when they got really big.
If someone ripped the bracelet off, you had to perform a sexual act with them.
They were color coded and could range from a hug to anal sex.  

Sixth graders said You have to do it doggy style! to each other.
Girls everywhere when I was in elementary school
Wore pacifiers around their necks like a necklace. 

Like women who purposely shave off their eyebrows,
Only to draw them back on with a pen.
It was pretty cool to color on yourself with those gel pens. 

Have we gotten to the point
Where we no longer understand
How ideas can spread without the Internet?

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death In Her Hands is a wry, toying tailspin of a book. It begins with the finding of a note: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” Its discovery sends the newest of Moshfegh’s eccentric narrators into a psychosomatic spiral of homespun sleuthing and self-realization. What results is an insidious meta-mystery that launches the protagonist on a twisted quest for justice, identity and erratic female independence.    

The novel tells the story of Vesta Gul, a seventy-two-year old widow who, after her late husband’s death, has picked up and moved to the rustic town of Levant with her dog Charlie. “I felt I needed to hide a little,” she explains. “My mind needed a smaller world to roam.” Her new home is a cabin on an old, abandoned Girl Scout camp. She has little company there besides her dog, her late husband Walter’s ashes and an evangelical public radio personality named Pastor Jimmy, whose show Vesta listens to every night. She hikes with Charlie each morning, reads, cooks and drinks wine—just generally “finding things to do to pass the time.” That is, until she comes across the mysterious note in her birch woods (“Her name was Magda…”). Just the note on the ground—no body or murder weapon or lingering clues. Nonetheless, Vesta is quick to assign herself the role of amateur detective, excited to have her mellow routine ruffled by the note’s unsolved mystery.

The detective narrative Moshfegh initially sets up plays freely with the hand-me-downs of genre conventions. Vesta herself has “seen plenty of murder mystery TV shows,” and as such her investigation begins traditionally enough. She brainstorms a list of suspects. She goes to the library and searches: “How does one solve a murder mystery?” She easily (and eagerly) conjures up graphic descriptions of Magda’s missing body, wondering, “was it so hard to come up with a description of her corpse, tangled in the brush under a fallen tree…her hands hog-tied behind her back, the blood from her stab wounds leaching into the ground.” Vesta, like any avid reader, is familiar with society’s favorite murder mystery tropes. Moshfegh has her fun with these from the get-go, setting our expectations up for an eventual slashing. She lines up parts of Vesta’s little world like game pieces on a chess board. Her lakeside cabin in the woods. Her mysterious neighbors across the water. A foreboding island in the middle of the lake, just a rowboat’s trip away…

Vesta herself is positioned as a potential Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher type heroine—a mellow old widow turned amateur detective, whiling away the back half of life solving local mysteries. Moshfegh lets her protagonist play to formula and fantasy, but she never lets things get too precious. Vesta’s trite conclusions ultimately reveal a lurking darkness to her character. At the very start of her investigation, Vesta casts Magda as the young, female victim—the mystery genre’s very own fetishistic version of the manic pixie dream girl. But Vesta soon becomes obsessed with acting the author and crafting Magda’s character—continuously morphing her looks, personality and backstory throughout her investigation. Her identity is entirely at the whim of Vesta’s oscillating mental state. One moment she’s a daughter-like figure, one the childless Vesta imagines nurturing. The next she’s a reflection of Vesta herself—a youthful, might-have-been incarnation that Vesta mourns the near-existence of. “It is easy…to find great affection for victims, emblems of vanished potential,” Vesta muses, thinking back on her marriage to Walter and its lopsided power dynamic. “There is nothing more heartbreaking than a squandered opportunity, a missed chance.” She sees her young self in Magda—the vulnerable victim in a man’s quest for control. After all, Magda’s murderer could only have been a man. “It seemed unlikely that a woman would abandon a dead body in the woods,” Vesta decides early on, “so I felt I could safely presume that the writer of the note, this me, this character, the I of the story, must be male.”

As Vesta’s role in the mystery turns more personal, Death in Her Hands in turn becomes increasingly meta. Vesta gets swept up in the romanticism of the crime and its telling, referring to the ominous message as an “invitation, or poem” and to herself as a “mystery writer.” She deems the story “a cozy little whodunit.” She remarks on the mystery’s pacing when researching at the library (“Let us hope [the killer’s] not presently strangling the lady librarian. If he was, the mystery would be solved too easily”) and invents a cast of supporting players to construct a more enticing narrative. “I still needed a strong male lead,” she declares as she brainstorms her suspect list. “Someone in his mid to late forties, a Harrison Ford type.” She fills out her cast and plot as only an author would, editing her narrative to bring her chosen reality to fruition.

Vesta’s god-like manipulation of Magda’s mystery allows Moshfegh to ironically remark on the authorial act of crafting a novel. Death in Her Hands is preoccupied with omniscient authority. God is always lurking, speaking to Vesta through a number of proxies—Pastor Jimmy, her late husband Walter, and the novel’s immense natural setting. Moshfegh—playing God—sets up the novel’s elements, but lets her protagonist manipulate them so that the reader can see the seams of Vesta’s makeshift narrative, the flaws in her reasoning. It would be easy to sum up Vesta’s investigation as the boredom or hysteria of an old woman, but just as we’re tempted to draw such conclusions, Moshfegh tips the novel’s tone from darkly comedic to downright disturbing. Vesta’s abandoned Girl Scout camp transforms into a scene of decaying girlhood—the perfect backdrop for the once demure and dutiful Vesta to succumb to the escalating madness of her mystery. Her actions, even simple ones like eating or dressing herself, turn primitive. The scattering of her husband’s ashes—an act Moshfegh heavily foreshadows—is handled bluntly, without ceremony. Just a sudden trip out in the rowboat at night. Not a laying to rest, but a dumping. The entire urn goes into the lake, its plunk into the depths not unlike the disposal of a body.

Such acts make up Vesta’s desperate attempts to reclaim her own mind. Early in the novel, Moshfegh introduces the concept of “mindspace” or the sharing of a mind with another, which Vesta says she did with her late husband Walter. “Walter and I had shared a mind, of course. Couples get that way. I think it has something to do with sharing a bed.” The reader shares a “mindspace” with Vesta; Moshfegh offers us no relief with any outside logic. Her perception proves claustrophobic, both for the reader and for Vesta herself. Vesta is badgered by a chorus of imagined critics—the late, domineering Walter, the Levant townsfolk and even, on occasion, her dog Charlie. Her “mindspace” is a crowded one, turning her search for Magda’s killer into a crisis of self, a quest for her own independence. Yet the voices in Vesta’s head call into question her reliability—are they a yearning for companionship, a sounding board? Or are they proof of an old woman’s mental demise?

Moshfegh never lets the reader get too comfortable in our assessment of Vesta, preferring to let us fester in her protagonist’s precarious mental state. The author has always enjoyed plunking her readers into the mindsets of oddball characters—people you’d never think to share a “mindspace” with. Take her past protagonists—the alcoholic McGlue, the prudish, sardonic Eileen, the sedated heiress from My Year of Rest and Relaxation who’s determined to sleep for a whole calendar year. Moshfegh’s true talent comes from her ability to craft characters who swallow up the reader in their bizarre plights. We become one with their oddity, subject to their stream of conscious narration, until we eventually uncover the blunt humanity Moshfegh’s hidden beneath their peculiar facades. We begin Death in Her Hands summing Vesta up as so many others do: a mentally stale old woman stuck in her routine. We aren’t inclined to take her seriously. She is entertainment, for we are the reader and Vesta our protagonist. But as reality and fantasy begin to blur in Vesta’s world, so do our respective roles. We become one with Vesta in her “mindspace.” We piece together unsavory memories with her, make conclusions with her, feel the walls of reality close in on her (our?) fantasy. As such, Vesta becomes less and less of a foregone conclusion. She sheds her tropes like skins, exposing something darker, messier. Her memories of Walter lose their initial rose-colored tint, Magda’s death its romanticism and Moshfegh’s tone its irony. What we’re left with is the portrait of a woman forced to face the ugly truth she’s disguised from herself.

“[It’s] good to have a few secrets here and there,” Vesta muses early on in Death in Her Hands. “It [keeps] one interested in herself.” Keeping interest is not something Moshfegh needs to worry about. Her precarious balancing act between fantasy and reality gives the novel’s protagonist and her mystery—no matter how cozy or claustrophobic it becomes—staying power until its conclusion. We are happy to remain here inside Vesta’s “mindspace,” grappling for clues to assure us that Vesta’s lucid, Vesta’s right—because if not, we will go mad, trapped in the mind of this protagonist. 

But maybe it isn’t madness at all—at least, not in the classic sense. The quest for identity is a mad one. The struggle for self-realization can drive anyone to extremes. In Vesta’s case, it transforms her into a force—whether sound or not is up to the reader to decide. Death in Her Hands isn’t a “cozy little whodunit.” It’s a character study, a twisted tale of empowerment. Vesta’s liberation might be warped, but by the end of her mystery, she’s definitely not the victim.

I got arrested in Venice, Italy for taking a picture of a synagogue in in the ghetto. It was three-stories and catty corner in the square where a policeman was talking to a short man in an overcoat with a flipped-up collar. The pre-dusk light made for great shadows and I took a half dozen shots.

Henry and our wives showed up to go to dinner and I pointed at the tall synagogue to show Henry what I was shooting and there was a tug on my arm. It was the short overcoat guy. “Get rid of the pictures you took of me and the officer,” he ordered.

“I didn’t take any pictures of you,” I said. “I was taking pictures of the synagogue.”

“Erase them,” he ordered.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I told you to.”

He walked a half dozen steps, turned, and faced me and two very large and strong policemen took my arms. “Do what he told you,” one said. I turned my camera over and erased a couple of gondolier shots instead and then I handed my camera to Henry.

He took a video of me waving my arms and yelling about being kidnapped as I was escorted off to a Venetian Police Station where they tossed me in a cell. “I’m thirsty and haven’t had dinner,” I yelled. The guard got on the phone and fifteen minutes later they brought me a covered tray and a bottle of red. It was my best meal since I was in Venice. My wife and our friends showed up as I was finishing my meal of pasta with black squid ink and most of the bottle of wine. Henry took pictures of me in the cell, mugging it up, grabbing the bars, and then I took pictures of them from the inside looking out.

The guard walked over, shook his finger, and said, “No photos.” I took his picture and asked why I didn’t get dessert. “I want Gelato and cookies,” I told him. “Enough for me and my friends.” He ordered and then I told him it was rude to have them outside and me inside, so he opened the door and let them in. I finished the bottle of wine and went to sleep with them still in my cell, but they were gone by the morning.

When I awoke I was visited by the overcoat guy who told me he was undercover keeping track of the Jews in the ghetto—a job held by his family and passed down since the fifteen-hundreds when they were the ones who won the “Name the area where we make the Jews live” contest. I told him he wasn’t funny, and I saw no humor in his story. “There is no humor in my story,” he said and told me I was free to leave as he unlocked my cell door. I picked up my camera and took his picture.

Out the window, the massive apartment building that has been of no interest for thirty-four years is being repointed or resurfaced or sandblasted, whatever it’s called, one by one every building on this block has been upgraded, spruced up, made new, though they are all unspeakably ugly and always will be, they’ve been freshened to reflect the invisible presence of money, the money of companies, all of them sinister, some of them under investigation, that have bought up the neighborhood from more artlessly grubbing slumlords now dying of old age, and this has instilled in those of us who have lived here a long time the identity of vanishing residue, potential targets for harassment or insultingly small buy-outs, we will either finish our days in apartments that disappear right after we do, or move somewhere stupid, and what did we expect, after all, in this restless world?  

That building has a single front entrance, but it’s covered in scaffolding overhung with dense grey mesh and from the window looks much larger than it is, it appears to stretch on endlessly down the block and resembles some maritime monstrosity, a freighter under repair. I assumed for a time that three or four houses were joined at their seams, after this mesh covered everything up, and I counted them, counted the stoops, and no, there’s only the one house, looking like several, because the scaffolding extends above the entrance of the building on the right and a window of the building on the left.  Surely in the past, the remotest past, I observed people living in that building, watched them through their grimy windows chewing snacks,  watching television, masturbating, going mad, at some distant moment I must have had some curiosity about what went on in those apartments, but what happens when you stay, and stay, and never really leave, though I’ve attempted many times to get away for good, is that you stop noticing, stop caring about little shifts and signs, and gradually start living elsewhere, namely in your head, and only belatedly, absurdly, for whatever reason, become cognizant one day that the whole environment has altered in a drastic way, as if it all changed into something else overnight, while you slept.  

The sandblasting commences at eight every morning, followed by air hammers, followed by the whooshing of a ribbed plastic hose that sucks dust and plaster and chunks of brick, a noise that has something weirdly human about it, like a giant wheezing, malefically, hoping to drive us all mad, drive us out of our houses into the street, where we would do what, exactly?  Wail, cry, gnash our teeth, overthrow the government, take back the night, or rather, the day?  Instead the days and nights slip by without a murmur, taking with them who we were today and yesterday, leaving a bit for tomorrow to dispose of.  One day the ruckus will stop, probably soon, and we’ll forget it ever happened, which in itself points to something dulled and habit-worn in the way we live, enduring things as long as we have to, forgetting them when they finish messing our brains up, and the same, I find, is true about people, for example Jill Ashford, who had a boutique in one of the basement apartments for six or seven years then moved away, replaced by a laundry, now the laundry seems to have been there forever, and but for a piece of misdelivered mail I found on the stoop this afternoon addressed to this Jill Ashford, I would have forgotten her existence altogether, who knows if she is still alive, or if so where she is, likewise the little gang of neighborhood thugs who terrorized the block for years in a desultory drunken way, employed as torpid building supers and avid spies for landlords, one by one they became more spectral and scarce and finally were no longer seen, having outlived their own malevolence and gone to wherever such people go when cities have no further use for them.  Florida, perhaps.  

Yesterday at lunch Marie-Louise asked if I go to a lot of parties, or go to the movies, hang out with friends, how did I spend my time?  I had gone to a party the night before, had even had several drinks, which I almost never do, but I don’t normally go to parties, I never go to the movies, I wanted Marie-Louise’s even-handed attitude to lever me out of the dreary matters stewing in my head but “heard myself say” (do people hear themselves say things?), “I hardly have any friends, almost all my friends are dead, at this point”, Marie-Louise laughed and said, “My friends are dead too, I open my address book and page after page, all dead, first it was AIDS, now it’s life,” then asked if I had seen a particular movie, which she described.  “Sometimes you see something good.  But why always want the best thing, sometimes when you get the worst thing that’s fine too.”  She meant this in a general sense, not only with respect to movies.

I had not seen the movie, set in the 1950s, I think, or the 1940s, in New York, it was a film about a writer who either believed himself a genius or was thought by others to be a genius, a writer who couldn’t control himself or contain everything he imagined seething inside him, who just wrote down anything that came into his head in torrents, in a state of galloping anxiety lest all the white man genius things inside him go unpublished and, more importantly, unrecognized; and a publishing house editor who calmly trimmed this Niagara of verbal incontinence into books he could publish.  Marie-Louise said the film was shit.  “But the photography was very good, showing people going in and out of Grand Central Station, the hats they wore, the shoes and so forth.”  I think the story behind this film still had some currency in my youth, which has drifted so far into the past that my mind only glimpses it in shreds.  And (yet?) there are moments when existence feels so motionless and my entire life so utterly uneventful that the shredded past and the static present might as well be the same thing.  I seem to remember something about a refrigerator, that this genius tormented writer, at one especially tormented juncture, perched himself on top of his refrigerator, writing the whole time in his habitual frenzy, like a bright chimpanzee.

The writer depicted in that movie still had books in print throughout my childhood, my adolescence, and then he was utterly forgotten about, so much so that another writer with the same name became famous for a while, completely erasing the popular memory of the first, except that the first was known as Thomas and the second one as Tom, so the slightly longer version of the name remained distinguishable, and vaguely recognized, as the name of a forgotten writer, and so on, by this time the second writer has also faded considerably from public view, a slowly evaporating totem of bygone times.  Now he’s remembered for the “dandyish” outfit he always wore, or wears, if he’s still alive, as the first, dead writer is remembered for having the longer first name, and for climbing on top of a refrigerator.  I think it would be possible, now, for a third writer, calling himself Tommy, to replace both Thomas and Tom in whatever mental space they occupied, in whatever minds.  

For some time I have been faltering.  Unable to see the path ahead, as if a path ahead existed previously.  I can only see what’s inevitable, but picturing the inevitable is a form of piling-on that does no one any good.  Sometimes we lose our nerve, lose it to all manner of unanticipated blows: damaged health, wrecked finances, even the untriggered onset of despair, which is always available, one doesn’t have to come up with reasons for it, the world is full of them.  Sometimes people squeeze despair like the proverbial lemon to make something wet and delicious resembling lemonade, quite often they just can’t.  Not everything is a matter of attitude.  (To speak objectively, if that’s even possible, I can think of at least five ways I’d change my life to make myself happier, if I were able to, and I’m not able to, not now, maybe never.)  But I have learned not to despise people who claim otherwise, such people seem wiser than those who make hopelessness their comfort zone.  

I don’t know how, for instance, George, who lives on this street, who recently turned 80, who once seemed robust, even offensively so at times, with his old-school tales of womanizing and vaguely right-wing attitudes, his sundown martinis and endless cigarettes at a restaurant around the corner, and now looks stooped and spectral on his brittle bones, would continue breathing in and out, much less hobble his perilous way down five flights to the street, to walk the Afghan hound that will probably outlive him, unless he believed, somehow, that tomorrow won’t be worse than today, that nothing new will go awfully wrong just yet, that his darkening eyesight won’t fail entirely or the final neoplasm announce itself with urinary blood or lumps on his pelvis, that he still has time before further calamity, to walk the dog and negotiate the sidewalk with the diminished gait that scares me when I see it, since I remember an earlier George, a George full of what he undoubtedly called “piss and vinegar.”  A George who was sly and full of rebarbative opinions and fitted his cigarettes into a sleek onyx holder, who sometimes wore black silk shirts open to the waist in summertime and still considered himself a dashing rogue, a George, in short, who wasn’t afraid. 

That George was an actor, gainfully employed for many decades in one of the longest-running off-Broadway shows of all time, and the current George, for that matter, still finds paying work from time to time, on television, though the demand for octogenerian actors is limited to nonexistent.  George reappeared last week, with the most recent of four Afghans he’s had in the years I’ve known him, after two months in hospital and another month recuperating at his son’s house.  I don’t know where the dog has been in these months, and in fact never knew George was gone, until he showed up on his stoop a few days ago, shrunken, fragile, declaring himself thrilled to be back here.  He spoke of his return as if he had regained something truly wonderful. I imagined the grim horror vacui of decaying memorabilia, broken furniture, and old newspapers that’s been described to me as George’s apartment, and realized what a blessing it must be, in George’s situation, to find something like that wonderful.  We have been neighbors for half my lifetime, almost half, and in that improbably vast time I have learned this about George: he acts, he’s a hoarder, he was married a long time ago, and has a son living somewhere in Pennsylvania.  That’s it, that’s all.

I learned about the hoarding, which I might have guessed at, from Celia, the daughter of Emma.  About Celia I have little to tell, except that she looks like someone who has had drug problems, that kind of ruined beauty, and a rough life, whereas Emma, I think, has lived rather safely, in slightly eccentric, middle-class comfort, these many decades, lived within her margins, so to say, attached to fervent leftist views and astringently formalist aesthetic judgments, while holding various academic posts in the city. I would guess that Emma was beautiful in her youth, though that was mostly gone by the time I met her.  I would guess that her late husband had money, though perhaps not endless amounts.  I know even less about Emma than I do about George.  Emma is another resident of this block who has managed to live eighty years, a writer of some distinction whose mind is now in sporadic retreat from itself, causing her daughter to come from wherever she was to move in and look after her, into the five story house Emma prudently bought with her husband in 1950 or 1960 or whenever it was, Celia says Emma has good days or good hours followed by times when all becomes blur, and fog, and terrified confusion.  The house is falling apart, Celia says, there were even strange people Emma had collected living in some of the rooms when Celia moved in, she’s gotten rid of them now.  

I used to run into Emma on the sidewalk all the time, the same way I used to run into George, randomly, and like George, Emma clung to her opinions about various things as if they were extremely valuable, expressed them with such tenacity that I always agreed with anything either of them said, or tried to, since I never much cared about the things they considered important, and it’s nicer to agree.  Where do opinions go, when we’re gone?  I sometimes avoided running into George, over the years, I probably also avoided Emma on a few occasions, changed direction or crossed the street when I spotted them from a distance, took advantage of their failing eyesight, not always, of course, not even usually, but lonely people love to talk, and sometimes other lonely people cannot bear to listen, since the loneliness they have in common is the one thing they have to avoid mentioning and the only thing they really have to tell each other.

These details, the hoarding, the fog, the strangers in the spare bedrooms, have been forming a collage of the worst that could happen in my mind for quite a long time, a picture that sinks my spirits when it slips into view; when you’re young you feel immune to the common fate of all, later every glimpse of how the body loosens its hold on life becomes a cautionary tale.  Is this the right expression?  Caution implies certain outcomes can be avoided, but there really is only one way to avoid old age.  As Marie-Louise said at lunch, “People want a happy ending, but there isn’t one.”  Yet she seemed, as she said it, happier than most people, happy to be eating a vegetable roll and grilled chicken on a skewer, happy she could see the plate in front of her or the movie about the genius, happy she wasn’t dead like all the friends in her address book.  Maybe it does come down to a question of attitude, when many options have disappeared, perhaps especially when it’s unclear which options are altogether gone, what wishes still have a chance of coming true, and what’s a pointless fantasy.

It began with a few grainy photos captured on a night vision trail camera: at the edge of the woods, bathed in lurid green light, was a group of children. Six of them, of various ages. None looked to be over ten, the smallest one a toddling baby. No one knew whose they were, or what they were doing on a stranger’s property in the middle of the night, or why they were just standing there. They stood for duration of three hours, according to the camera time lapse.

It wasn’t a natural thing, for children to be so still and quiet. There was something not right about them. Like creepy kids from a horror movie. Possessed kids, killer kids. Creepy little ghost prophets who knew no boundaries. A faded image from the back of an old VHS video sleeve.

After the photos went viral on social media, sightings of strange children began to spread until it was happening in small towns all over the country. Although the police increased their patrols, nothing was verified. That did not stop the townspeople from calling in reports of these strange children appearing in people’s yards, in vacant lots, under the lunar glow of utility lights in empty store parking lots.

Barron was sitting in the faculty lounge scrolling through his phone as he ate his lunch. There was another story in his news feed about the creepy kids that he clicked on, and as he was reading it, a female voice said from behind him,

“Maybe it’s some kind of viral marketing stunt. For a horror movie or something. What do you think?”

He startled and whipped his head around: it was one of the new teachers. Youngish looking, flax colored hair with a bit of washed-out pink at the ends. Eyes that were pink rimmed and rabbity. She always wore things that were oversized and black, lots of silver rings on her fingers. She had the look of one of those female techno artists who played the keyboard at festivals. Raspy voice over an industrial beat.

Barron worked tech support and rotated through the district. The teachers usually ignored him until they needed him to install an operating system or fix a laptop that a fifth grader used to smack their sibling in the head.

The teacher’s sudden question spooked him. He hadn’t been sleeping recently. His nerves felt raw an exposed as a frayed electrical cord.

But he took a draw off his coffee and tried to sound insouciant, bored: “Seems to me it’s a textbook example of social panic. It’s like a medieval village around here. When people stop getting hysterical, this will fade away. Just to get replaced by the next thing to come along.”

This must have come out harsher than he intended, because the woman gave him a look and muttered about forgetting something, and bolted. But that’s the way it was around there. He had been a temp worker in the school system going on years now. He was aware of the odd way people looked at him. At his curly blonde hair, still full but so thin you could see right through it. His worn Chuck Taylors, his pants with raggedy hems. He had a reputation for barbed sarcasm when he spoke at all. Mostly he didn’t.

She must be the new art teacher, he thought. It had been so long since he had talked to a woman that he didn’t quite remember how to. She snagged his brain for rest of the day. Trying to figure out why she asked him that. She had that look of an ex-punk. Not that it impressed him. He used to be punk, too.

*

Tick tick tick tick tick.

It had come back again. The thing that chased him through the murky corridors of his dreams. The thing that ticked. Like the crocodile with a clock in its belly that chased Captain Hook. Except it was different. Not a cozy analog tick. A slick, digital one, like the face of a bomb. And he could never quite see what the thing was. He knew it wasn’t human. It was more like a shadow, or a haze of static. A fragmented shimmering mirage of ones and zeros. He did not know what it would do if it caught him. He just knew he had to run. If it caught him, it would annihilate him.

The dreams had been bad since his fortieth birthday, but now it was getting worse. He wasn’t eating well. And sleep? Sleep was a fairy tale now, a story from childhood.

And he didn’t know how to feel better. Sometimes he would have the guys over, guys he had known from way back at Greenhill Country Day. They didn’t seem to notice that something was terribly wrong with him.

In school Barron had been that guy. Reckless. Not afraid of anything. They still retold the story about the time down in the islands, when he was fourteen and taken a jet ski fifteen miles offshore and ramped a very large boat wake at wide open throttle. Went ten feet in the air, knocked unconscious. Saved by the fishermen in the boat. Barron was always the most fucked up guy at any party, guaranteed!

But those guys had wives and kids now. And somehow, they saw the fact that Barron worked his shitty job and had a living room that contained one couch, one enormous TV, and an Xbox as evidence of his uncompromising nature. That’s punk rock, man, man! Fuck the world!

He wasn’t depressed. And he had never thought of himself as anxious. He had always been smarter than the other kids in his grade and tended to get bored a lot, or so the kiddie shrink had explained to his parents. So, what was wrong with him? Why were things increasingly feeling not right? Why did he feel so afraid all the time? He didn’t know how to describe the feeling. Except it was like some terrible knowledge, some secret was about to be revealed, and when it was, he would lose his mind.

It couldn’t be the methadone; he’d been telling himself. He’d already been on it for years now. Going to the clinic like he always did. Walking up to the bulletproof glass, yelling his ID number through the metal grating. Dealing with cops, questions, cameras, until he at last got that plastic cup of ruby red nectar. It went down bitter. After he swallowed it he had to say something to the nurse to prove that he swallowed it. It was now a running joke that Barron always said the same thing:

This is bullshit.

Though the doctor had not brought it up, he knew he should taper off. He knew he would have to, eventually. If only something, someone would make him.

His deck overlooked a backyard with nothing in it. It stretched out to a rim of woods in the back. The good thing about the little house was that it was tucked away behind trees, no neighbors to hassle him. The only bad thing was that it was in his mother’s name.

And it was his mother that had strung the deck with “fairy lights,” decorated it with absurd Tiki decorations. A little grill that he rarely used sat in a corner, collecting a scrim of pollen dust.

He liked sitting out there at night, though. There was an X-box game he played a lot, where the main character was driving a car across a vast, desolate landscape. Shooting guns at monsters. Trying to stop an apocalypse. He would play it so long that afterword he had a feeling of seasickness. Everything lurched and he felt nauseous. Then he would sit on the deck, smoking, gazing in an unfocused way into the night, letting the tension drain from his eyes; the tension took the form of showering sparks and flares on the backsides of his lids. When they went away, he felt clearer, more able to concentrate. And then he would indulge in his obsession with palindromes.

Live not on evil. Too bad I hid a boot. Rise to vote, sir! Draw, O coward!

It was a real compulsion, reciting palindromes in his head. They sounded like nonsense. But they were full of hidden patterns. The bridge between sense and nonsense, order and….

The cliff. Madness. The point of no return. All the things he would not think about.

When he was a punk, he had accepted that the world was chaos, but he was not part of the world, so it didn’t matter. He just flipped everyone the bird and had a good time. But ever since he turned forty, it was dawning on him that maybe it wasn’t all just chaos. That there was actually a terrible, occult order to things. A force that he couldn’t know or understand, but it was there. He could glimpse it in palindromes. He could glimpse it while programming, running code, watching it compile, making it optimize, could make him feel thrumming elation, a flicker of joy, something so beautiful it made him soar.

Until the magnitude of it became too much. And the fear came back, like a hand closing tight around his throat.

One night he was sitting out there, smoking in his rattan chair. Drinking his third beer, listening to the swaying of tree branches in the night breeze. The yip of a coyote out there, somewhere. There was a song nagging in his head, a scrap of melody, a bit of lyric that went, take me back where dreams of you never made me feel blue. Acoustic guitar, guy kinda singing through his nose like they did back then, what was that damn song? And why was he thinking of it? He tried to grasp at the significance, the hidden meaning, but the beer buzz was making him foggy…

…when a sudden noise intruded into his awareness. A stirring, a furtive breaking of twigs. Somehow he knew it wasn’t an animal noise.

He became all at once alert. Scanning the yard, out where the grassy lawn met the woods. It was so dark out here with no streetlights, only the golden glow of the fairy lights around the porch, couldn’t see a goddamn thing beyond that, really…

But he heard breathing. Then whispering. From down there.

He was frozen now, hand gripped on the neck of the beer bottle. Something about his aroused state made him feel he could hyper focus, could see in the dark like an owl: there was a group of shadowy figures down there, at the edge of the woods. Small figures. Children. And now they were very, very still.

And Barron, too, was very, very still. Time seemed to slow down, bending like taffy, then stopped. Instead of feeling advantaged by being up above them, he felt more vulnerable, like a lone figure on a stage.

“Who’s there?” he asked the night, the question catching in his dry throat and breaking in the middle.

There was no answer, but there was more whispering, and quiet laughter. Then, one of them, who looked like a baby who had just learned to walk, sallied forth on bowed little legs, panting excitedly. It let out a squeal that sounded like EEEEEEEEECH, and then it toppled over with a grunt, as though it couldn’t balance its oversized head on its little body.

Something about that squeal resonated in Barron’s very spine. Neural alarms were going off all through his body now, driving him to his feet. He let the beer bottle drop, spewing foam everywhere. He rushed back into the house, hurling the sliding door shut. Locked it, then sagged against the wall, breathing hard, wondering if this was how a heart attack could start.

*

“Sorry, I really didn’t want to bother you. But it’s the first time I’ve tried to hook up to the projector, and I just couldn’t get it, and I need it for class tomorrow, so you know….”

“Yeah. No problem. Everyone has trouble with these.”

It was her again. The art teacher, whose name was Sarah. The one he had thought he had scared off the other day. But here she was, and she was looking at him in this certain way. Piercing, avid. Almost brazen, in spite of the nervous, skittering way she spoke. It made him feel pinned in stasis like a moth in a case. It helped if he didn’t make eye contact.

All he had to do was plug in the HDMI and VGA cords. “Here we go. Okay. You can go ahead and turn on your computer now.”

She tapped a few buttons and the machine hummed to life. “Okay, I’ll just pull up what I was going to show, I guess?”

“Sure, sure.” He was exhausted from a sleepless night last night. The room felt like it was spinning. The creepy kids in his yard. It couldn’t have been real. And the way she had brought it up the other day…It didn’t sit right with him. What did she know? She must know, or why would she look at him like that?

“So anyway, I set these up as a slide show, where I show one to the kids and say a little bit about each painting, yadda yadda yadda…” As she prattled on, leaning over the keyboard, nose ring glinting in the screen’s glow, it occurred to him that maybe she wasn’t as young as he first thought. Sometimes he confused young with small.

The projector screen was suddenly flooded with amoeba shapes. Bright, exuberant and playful looking.

“Cute,” said Barron bemusedly, one eyelid starting to twitch.

“You like it? It’s Yayoi Kasuma. Let me just…there.” She clicked, and the image changed. This time it was a field of polka dots. But so many polka dots, multitudes. By some trick of the eyes they seemed to swarm and pulse in a way that was alarming. It made him feel scared and sick.

“Well, it’s different, I guess.” He was beginning to feel his pulse speed up. She was looking at him again. Like this was some kind of test. Who was she, and what did she want with him?

“Her paintings are about obsession.” She was moving her hands, gesturing excitedly. There were black leather bracelets on each wrist. “Her obsession with dots. She said, the earth is a dot. The moon is a dot. The sun is a dot. She is a dot. Dots to infinity.”

He stood there, feeling weak as though shot with a poison dart. She clicked to the next slide. This one had the design of a net. A very dense, very flat net. Where each stroke was tight, distinct, and had nothing to do with any other line.

“It’s… a lot. It’s making me feel kind of ill,” he said, and then added a laugh, so she wouldn’t see how afraid he was. Once again, things seemed to be coming together in a terrible sense. Whatever he was afraid of knowing, this person was going to show it to him. She may as well have been wearing an executioner’s hood. She wasn’t an art teacher. She was an agent of doom.

“That’s kind of the idea, though. Because the lines are full of energy. See? There’s a lot of passion in these lines. A lot of fear.” She paused to give him another long look. Unblinking, lips slightly parted as though in anticipation.

She wanted him to tell her. He would never tell her.

Before she could say another word, he said in a breathless rush, “Sorry, I’ve got another ticket. Got a lot on my dance card today. Just email me if you need anything else.”

“Did you maybe, want to…I just thought that sometime we could—“

He didn’t hear the end of her sentence, he was sprinting out the door so fast.

Spring had come when he wasn’t paying attention. The back yard would soon need mowing. There were purple crocuses sprouting. Birdsong at daybreak.

He inspected the place at the edge of the woods where they had been. The ground was damp from rain earlier in the week. And he could swear he saw children’s footprints. Very faint ones. Maybe? The more he stared at the ground, the more confused he felt. He didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t anymore. Without realizing it he had been holding his breath, holding it so long that now he saw sparkles.

He would quit the methadone, he decided a propos of nothing, staring down into the mud, not knowing what was real anymore. He would quit, effective immediately.

Son, where are you? Why haven’t you called me back? his mother pleaded in an aggrieved voice on his voicemail. We used to be so close! I worry about you. Anyway, Madrid, or no? You have to give me an answer this week!

His mother wanted him to go to Spain with her. He told her he was working and she had brushed it off, saying that the school took him for granted, He didn’t know why she didn’t go with a girlfriend. Her persistence rankled him.

But then again, even just the idea of escaping this place for a while acted on him like a balm. He could stop resisting, let his mother be in charge. Imagining it made him feel safely cocooned. Like the Vicodin he used to take after he crashed one of his father’s delivery trucks and fucked up his back. His father. Thought he was god, just for owning a beer distribution company. He had pulled strings to keep Barron from going to jail. Breathalyzer tests under wraps. Practically cut him off after that, though. Never even gave him credit for getting those IT jobs all by himself…

He deleted his mother’s message. She could find someone else. He couldn’t be all she had. Maybe if he were married, if he had his own kids, like his brother did, she would let him go for once.

He did not call her back. He did take some days off of work, though. To detox from the methadone.

The first day that he skipped the clinic, his eyes watered, his nose ran, and he felt jumpy as hell. All he wanted to do was look up stories about the mysterious children. He read op-eds. (Can we blame the epidemic of broken families? Or are we overdue for self-inspection: They are all of our children, and we are all at fault.)

He read message boards of other people who were tormented by the children. They’ve been here for weeks now. I can feel them, I know they judge and mock me. I’m a prisoner in my own head. I don’t know what’s real or what’s not any more. Anybody out there who’s seen what I’ve seen, know that it’s real. It’s a living hell. They’ll tell you it’s not real. No one will help you. Only we know how it feels. You are not alone!

He started making Excel spreadsheets to study the data, trying to find patterns of where it happened, when it happened, how old the people who made the reports were. He made tables of cells, columns, and rows. Intersecting letters and numbers. Cells of percentages, dates, times, durations. He couldn’t sleep, so he wrote formulas, combined and separated the numbers. Did the pivot tables. Soon his eyes trembled in their sockets and he was starting to sweat.

After hours of work, he had to admit that there was nothing there. It was all for nothing. And that’s when the nausea began to hit him.

It was manageable at first. He wrapped in a wool blanket. He gave up working the numbers and drifted into looking at fan art and memes made of the phenomena known as #CREEPYKIDS. There were comics drawn of the creepy kids running amok through a shopping center, eating people. An altered photo of a toddler, grinning, with large, jagged adult teeth, captioned THEY ARE GETTING SMARTER. The children standing impassively watching the scene of a horrific car crash. The children in silhouette against a wall of flame and smoke that said THEY WILL BURN IT ALL DOWN.

Worst of all was the original night vision photo, animated so that they the kids had weirdly glowing eyes and limbs that were being grotesquely stretched out, further and further, until they snapped off. This gave Barron a sick feeling.

It reminded him of being a teenager, in the early days of the Internet. He was only alone, online, when there was suddenly too much freedom. When he always had to brace himself for the next scary image. Anything could jump out and shock him, scare him, if he stumbled on the wrong site. It made him feel numb, but aroused and excited. He hated it, but he loved it, and couldn’t stop…

He was vomiting now. Feeling slightly delirious. He was afraid, so afraid, but he had to do something, because he knew the children were there, and they were starting a fire. He could smell the smoke. He could hear them chanting things in his mind, silly things, something that sounded like tail of the comet, tail of the bear. The baby had worked itself into a frenzy, bobbing up and down on its stunted legs and shrieking. Crazy shit, and it was all out there, but also inside of him, so he couldn’t get away. He pressed his hands over his ears.

Something was happening to him. The lines were being blurred between his interior and exterior. He was terrified of disappearing into his own visions. He felt the way he did when Sarah showed him the field of dots. Everything was swarming and churning. The world was too big. There were too many dots. Too many points of reference to know anything for certain anymore. His own mind was devouring him. The only thing that kept him from going under completely was focusing on a mental image of her, the way her eyes pierced and pinned him down to reality. She was a pale cipher, a flame that burned through his bad dreams. Her shapeless black, her absurd chunky boots. She wasn’t there to harm him. She was trying to save him. Maybe, just maybe, things could be different from now on.

But for right now, he needed all the help he could get. Because the monster was here. The thing that had chased him through his dreams was here.

The last time he had been this helpless, he had been lying in a hospital bed after crashing the delivery truck while driving shitfaced. He had awakened to his father standing over him, self-made man in work boots, faded jeans, and a Burberry scarf. Head cocked towards the door, a remote smile on his face. In the low Southern drawl that he used when he was being “real,” he intoned,

There’s nothing uglier than an adult infant. A mama’s boy gone to rot. You’re a colossal fuck up, my boy. You’d better wake up before something wakes you up.

The memory shocked him. Had he willfully repressed it, stuffed it down the memory hole? He saw himself now as his father might see him, a pale sick man wrapped in a blanket, peaking out the blinds, afraid of the world. First he felt ashamed. Then he felt…something else. A spark, and then a flickering. It was anger.

Though he staggered a bit, as though he were moving across the deck of a lurching ship in a raging storm, he got up, walked through the kitchen, and exited the side door, out where the trash bins were kept; the cold spring air was bracing, but made him tremble. It must have been three AM. The loneliest time, where it seemed like he was the only person on the planet.

He could hear them, out there, talking their nonsense and riddles.

The moon cast a bluish light. His feet were bare, and the earth felt cold and damp. The sense of vagueness and unreality was draining away from him as the adrenalin flooded his veins. He could see their shapes, standing there at the edge of the woods.

They could sense he was coming. He knew because they went quiet. The sense of suspended stillness like an intake of breath.

Then noises started coming from the baby, who was snorting and gasping, blowing wet raspberries.

The sounds were repulsive, but somehow spurred him on to yell, “Who are you kids? What do you want from me?” He kept walking, straight over to where they were.

But at the sound of his voice, they fled into the woods. Quick as a school of guppies, a swarm of hummingbirds.

“I’m not afraid of you! Here I am! Here I am!”

But they were already gone. Absorbed silently back into the landscape from which they had emerged. And he was standing by himself in his own backyard, in the middle of the night, in sweatpants and a robe, screaming into the dark; He closed his eyes because it felt all at once that he might fall over. He leaned forward, bracing himself against his own thighs, and drew ragged breaths. Alone.

Except he wasn’t alone. The baby couldn’t run as the others had. They had left him behind. Now the thing was overstimulated and confused, running away from the woods. It shrieked and huffed, its bowed legs pumping as it ran in circles, until it tripped and face planted onto the ground.

Barron slowly, warily, walked towards it. He squatted down to look closer.

It was trying to stand up again, but it seemed unbalanced. Its head was so round, as wide as its shoulders. Its body was so stunted and rubbery. Its eyes rolled up to look at him. Eyes so deep set and shadowed, like the eyeholes in a skull. Was it a baby or an old man?

“What are you?” he asked. He was no longer angry but stuck somewhere between revulsion and pity. When something was real and in front of you, everything felt a lot more complicated.

Its hands were rubbery starfish. Its mouth wet and gaping with drool. The baby sneezed, panted a bit, and gurgled a string of nonsense syllables. Or was it speaking a language of some kind? Maybe it was the palindrome he had always been searching for.

“Who are you?” Barron whispered hoarsely.

But then the baby was gone, as though it had never been there at all.