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The fiery sun is losing its edges, a reddish gold singeing the sky. Fishermen pull in the day’s catch close by, shouting instructions to each other over the clamor of excited seagulls.

I am staring down at the yoga school built on stilts over the Arabian Sea—a sleek villa that offers rich foreigners a coastal break with a side order of spirituality and houses a hive of soul-searching beach bums who keep my aunt’s small cafe afloat. The same aunt who moonlights as the parents who left me behind, and for whom I bring to mind her dead children.

I drum my fingers on my lap to the rhythm of the gentle waves, waiting for a few yoga students to trickle into the cafe for Kerala fish curry. The usuals come in here at least once a day. They like to take the other meals in one of the fancier restaurants in the tourist town nearby.

The weekend has just started, and families are entering the luxury health resort across the street. I watch mothers holding babies in their arms and wonder what that might feel like. I listen to fathers give instructions to their children and imagine how I would respond. Then I lie face down in the sand and feel the fine grains chafe against my skin, afraid I don’t belong in my own life.

When nobody shows up even until nightfall, I lock the cafe and head to the tourist town where the circus troupe has been camped for one week.

Most of the performers are sleeping outside on the hot sand. Some are awake, talking, idling, playing cards. In one corner sits a carousel and next to it fiberglass elephants, Ferris wheels and mini bicycles. Making sure nobody sees me, I circle the structures repeatedly, touching the vintage canvas material of the tents and the circus wagons. I fiddle with the games, the puppets, and window displays lying around. When I turn around, I see the circus master observing me.

“Just a mirage,” he says.

I feel shame, as if caught thieving. I duck under the elastic cord holding up a tent and step away from the installations. How long has he been watching?

“A circus is a film is a book is a world is another life,” he says with a knowing look. “A mirage of a family for those who do not have one.”

Behind him, I see fishermen on handmade log boats vaporize into thick folds of water.

 

Late at night, when my aunt comes back from the city, her hands loaded with supplies for the beachside cafe, I wonder if I should tell her about my visit to the circus camp. When she sits next to me in the cafe kitchen, I notice how the ancient silver hoops have gouged out her earlobes. She uses the edge of her sari to wipe sweat off her face and a few drops fall on my feet.

I want to ask her if she has another photograph of my parents—I have folded my copy so many times it has started cracking, the image separating from the photo paper like dead skin. I want to ask her to tell me something new about them, anything that might resuscitate my fading memories of them. But I have learned to leave her alone as she retreats further into the black hole of her past.

She washes her face in the stainless-steel sink. “How were things at the cafe today? Anything special?”

“A little slow—” I begin.

“I am so tired,” she says.

I make her a cup of tea and do not ask her what a mirage means, just how I never ask her how my mother vanished during the 2004 tsunami or why my father left the next day, or if there was a link between the two events.

Then I start on the prawns that a surfer ordered earlier. Once they are pink and perfectly crisp, gently fleeced in the butter, with roasted garlic forming an aromatic base at the bottom of the pan, I plate them and carry them out to him. He is young, white, stationed in India to look for inner peace and Ayurveda. He also teaches Vinyasa yoga at the school on stilts and has a late dinner at the cafe every day.

“You never fail me.” He leans back in his chair. “Traveled everywhere in the world, Santiago, Madrid, Tokyo, New Orleans; never eaten seafood like this!”

How do I know he is telling the truth if I have never been to any of these places?

How did the circus master find the dark place in my mind to set up shop in?

 

We smile for the guests at the cafe, my aunt and me. Despite our tired eyes and hungry stomachs, we always do. We repeat stories we cooked with fragments overheard around the village, texts read in passing, memories, dreams, wishes; stories that would tug at the guests’ hearts and swell their lunch orders and gratuities. Sometimes, when my aunt is in a good mood, she sings for them songs she grew up listening to, songs about fishermen and mermaids and what would happen if the two got married.

I sing or joke with the guests only when my aunt is away; I don’t know why but I feel shy around her, like I am not good enough, like I will make a fool of myself, even though she doesn’t say anything when I attempt joviality, only turns around and leaves.

When she goes to the city, I twirl around the tables and balance multiple dishes on my forearms like I have seen servers do on TV. I show magic tricks to the children and praise the women’s clothes.

“The song is my husband,” I once hear my aunt tell a curious guest. “Always at my beck and call, always melodious, always on my lips.” She laughs. I stare in shock. Even though I know she is trying to please the guest, I suspect a true part of her has seeped through. She has never talked to me about her husband or if there ever was one. In their pictures her children look like nobody I have ever met.

That night, I dream about my aunt attending my parents’ wedding with her husband, blessing her younger sister with a love as glorious as hers. As if I’m directing a movie in my sleep, I control how the action unfolds. My mother asks my aunt to look after her future child. Only until we return for her, my father adds. But I am unable to play out my aunt’s response; no matter how many times I rewind the scene, her face remains elusive, her voice faraway.

 

Soon, some members of the circus troupe begin recognizing me. I manage the cafe during the day and when my aunt takes over in the evening, I spend my time with them. They say they like the pleasant expression on my face. I find it intriguing that my loneliness masquerades as pleasantness.

Two days before the troupe’s departure, Shirin, a dancer and a trapeze artist, and I sit together on the beach and watch the sun turn into the moon. The waves keep refilling the rock pools. The moon keeps burnishing the sand. I ask Shirin why she isn’t taking photographs of the sunset. Everybody who comes to this town does that. She says she has over five hundred sunset pictures from all over the world and she cannot distinguish one from another anymore.

When Shirin gets up to leave so she can finish packing her bags, I decide to return to the kitchen. It is surfing season and the beach is steadily spouting hungry people into the cafe. Shirin makes me promise I will join the farewell party the next day.

 

“My children loved the circus,” my aunt says when I mention the party to her that night.

I did not know that. I look at her face: stormy sea, big dark waves crashing on the shore. Her eyes: neat little banks of pain.

“Who sent the tsunami, do you know?” she asks me. “It did not belong here. Those were not its children to take,” she says.

The ground deforms under my feet, like the ocean floor does during a disturbance. This is the only time she has ever talked of the 2004 tsunami—grieving the children it stole from her. I learned of my own parents’ disappearance from a village elder. He said my aunt took me in the evening my father left. I was a year old, too little to remember.

I open my mouth to comfort my aunt, but words fail me, as always. I wish I knew her children, but not as much as I wish I knew my parents.

“I tried to save them. They did not know how to swim.” She is crying now, softly. “I failed my children.” I have never known my aunt to bawl like other mothers. Her life is an unending procession of low moans.

“You tried, Valiyamma. You did the best you could,” I say. “You made sure I learned how to swim.”

“We are good people, and yet the water came for us.” She turns to the window to watch the sea, the eternal object of her accusations. “Why?”

Suddenly I am not thinking about my parents or about the calamity that took them away. All I can think of is that my aunt will be forever unmoored from the present, and from me.

“I miss my children. And now I am so old, so tired,” she says.

We sit like that for a long time. We are two broken people trying to fuse into a whole family. But the fracture runs too deep.

We are shorelines on the move, continuously drifting together, before breaking apart in a never-ending cycle.

 

“What if she did not disappear?” I say to the thirteen-year-old kitchen boy the next morning. “What if he did not run away?”

For the last two years he has been washing dishes at the cafe in exchange for meals. For the last eighteen months he has been listening to me mourn my life. “You could go look for them,” he says.

“Look where?”

“Everywhere.”

“What about my aunt?”

“What about your aunt?”

“She has already lost her children.” I picture my aunt searching frantically for her little ones while I looked on from the sling crisscrossed around her back.

“Before taking you in or after?” he says conspiratorially. Then he shrugs. “You could be happy here.”

He has said these things before, but they sound different today. The circus is playing tricks with my mind.

I look in the mirror that night, combing my hair with my fingers. One day I plan to cut it short like my mother’s in the picture but for now I like how it reflects the moonlight. Or I could find her, and she could cut it for me while my father gives her instructions on how to. If my father could escape the tsunami, he must be an expert at everything. A warmth floods me but I am unable to decipher it. What does a thought without language sound like?

 

I step onto the party boat, bewitched by the lights and the laughter. The circus master finds me. He introduces me to his wife who smiles wordlessly, her eyes wrinkled around the corners.

Shirin hugs me from behind. “There she is!” she says, and I feel all grown up. Nobody has ever been thrilled to see me.

Then she takes me to the food counter and offers me dishes I have only ever seen on TV and never tasted. I accept generous helpings of everything and try to pretend I feel at ease. Someone laughs loudly at a half-told joke. Someone imitates a movie actor. Someone breaks into a song. Shirin excuses herself. “I hope you will be there to see us off tomorrow,” she calls out over the babble just before she disappears into the crowd.

I look over at silhouettes dancing on the upper deck. Stars change colors in the sky above as they issue starlight. Red-blue-red-blue.

The circus master’s wife brings me more food. “The boundary between family and friends is blurred here because we all live together,” she says. “We look after each other.”

“Are there vacancies?” I say, surprising myself, feeling like the jellyfish in the water below that float to wherever the current brings them.

“We’re always looking for performers with a strong stage presence,” she says.

I take the long way home, my ears still ringing from the loud music. Back at the cafe, a few pots and pans are waiting to be washed. I mix water in baking soda and apply the paste all over the bottom of a dark skillet. I scrub the burnt copper with an old rag, releasing the scent of stale garlic. Then I sit down on the floor and imagine the beach cradling a lone boat dancing in the frothy tug of the Arabian Sea.

 

The engine booms. After four weeks in the tourist town, the circus boat is ready to depart. I have to make a decision. It is now and forever, or never and what if.

I look at the flimsy wooden fence, waving gently. Then, at the meandering lanes beyond the fence, leading to hookah bars on one side and indie music lounges on the other, before connecting to the state highway.

Excitement bubbles on the boat. Hysteria of the beginning, panic at the letting go. Shirin hops on, but not before looking questioningly at me one last time.

The cafe door continues to rock on its hinges. The milk needs to be boiled. The table covers with prints of apples, oranges and strawberries need to be set out on surfaces crammed with coarse sand. The radio needs to be tuned to the local beach station. The coconuts need to be grated for Malabar chicken curry that needs to be cooked at noon. The Gods need to be freshened up and appeased for a hopeful day of business.

I close my eyes for a last-minute sign. Nothing. I walk to the boat. Then I stop, dash back to the cafe, lock the door without looking inside, run back to the boat and climb aboard. Navigation lights come on as I begin my new life.

 

It has been over a month in the circus and yet I have not spotted anyone in the audience who could look like my mother or my father. As a magician’s assistant, I hold props that I shift onto and off the stage, imitating a joyful character wholly unlike myself.

Shirin and I spend a lot of time together. She introduces me to all her friends. When we are alone, she talks a lot, as if in a hurry to tell me everything. Sometimes I try to narrate stories of my own, but I have so few. I embellish the actions of the cafe regulars, of the people who vacationed at the hotel and of those who passed through the yoga school, but I always feel less worldly, my stories less sophisticated.

She is an aerial wizard, moving like she is drawing a delicate pattern in the air, spinning midair with perfect grace. She tells me her family enrolled her in the circus without telling her. At the age of twelve, she lost her balance and fell backward while performing on a wheel suspended thirty feet above the ground.

She says she picked herself up, waved to the crowd and went back to her room to read a book. She tells me she likes historical fiction.

“Don’t you blame them for the accident?” I say to her in Siam Reap.

“I did, not anymore. You have to forgive your family one day, release the past to make place for yourself,” she says.

 

I have learned that circus mealtimes offer some of the only opportunities to talk to other human beings, so I eat with people from all over the world as they exchange stories. Most stories start with the old joke about running away and joining the circus.

Sometimes I watch mothers playing with their babies or listen to fathers narrate stories to their children. When the images of all the happy faces get too overwhelming, I hide in the bathroom.

“Fear is natural, but possibly irrational. Safety nets remove fear,” my acrobatics trainer says.

I agree. I found things like handstands and backflips scary when I was new. The trainer eliminated the fear by using pirouette bails and foam pits.

“Once you recognize your fears and learn that the risk is minimal, you can unlock your true potential,” she says.

I disagree. The more I see my fears, the more they tighten their fist in my throat, revealing a ghost that trails me everywhere no matter how hard I try to banish it back to my past. It feels as though I am a dedicated observer of events happening in my life, only to realize later that I am never a part of my own memories unless the ghost is also in the frame.

 

Although I had befriended a few members of the troupe back home, I am subdued around them. When they gather for drinks or games, I observe them quietly, sometimes laughing at inside jokes I do not understand so they do not think of me as foreign.

A few older people enquire suspiciously about my past life—dissatisfied no matter how I respond—but most others try to be familial, the men paternal, the women maternal. It rings false. My parents are impossible to replace, despite the fact that I never knew them. Plus, I prove unsuccessful in performing the part of a child. I do not know how to. Nobody ever taught me.

Some younger ones invite me to join their cliques where I struggle to act like them, never feeling like a good fit for those around me. Even the friendless and the family-less heighten my uneasiness. I want to tell them my innermost thoughts and fears, but I do not know where to begin. I want to feel attached to them, but I miss the intimacy I shared with the sea and the wind. I have learned that I am one of them and yet I am not. I am that leftover fish at the back of the circus refrigerator that the main cook always buys and forgets about.

 

Eight weeks since I joined the circus and Shirin is always busy now. Her stories have dried out, suddenly and with no warning. Has she tired of me? When she does approach me, I avoid her in resentment. Fever, I say. Or, late for practice. She never tries to make me stay, never adjusts her own day for me. I cannot remember if she was always like this and I never noticed, or if she has changed now. I am reluctant to approach her friends without her. What if they reject me? So, I wander the circus grounds alone, naming all the props and inventing lives for them. My heart races when someone catches me doing that. I try to tell myself I belong here as much as they do, but I am unable to believe it.

I pick a fight with my tent-mate in Cebu City, blaming her loud breathing for my lack of sleep. She apologizes, then defends herself. The next day she calls me crazy, and points at me when around her musician friends in the dining hall. I storm out without eating as if that would make any difference to their lives.

The circus master makes it a point to smile when he sees me, but it happens rarely. Once, when he has a moment to spare, he pulls a chair next to mine and says his life is cluttered with small worries. He says he admires how I look at things as if I’m seeing the world for the first time. I can see he is being kind, but his words make me sad, because they tell me that on the day of our first meeting, he had read his own mind, not mine. If he had read my mind, he would know that I see everything as if for the last time.

The circus has begun intimidating me. I feel like a trespasser here, visiting other people’s lives, uninvited. Like a stranger trapped in an alien body, inhabiting a reality that is not hers, deceiving the whole world.

The kitchen boy said I would find my parents if I looked everywhere; why haven’t they shown up yet? I want to run away.

 

Just when my thoughts look ready to collapse under their own weight, my trainer introduces me to Samar, the star acrobat who presents death-defying acts to adoring crowds, and I feel my head spin. His grey eyes remind me of warm sunlit sand. His calm voice evokes the village fishermen’s nightly song. Meeting him is like tripping over something and falling into the deepest hole on the Earth. Everything feels right again.

I start watching him all the time, deliriously, keeping a distance so he does not notice. While he is rehearsing his act, I pick up cleaning duties in the practice hall. I start going for early morning jogs and late-night strolls around his tent and lose a lot of weight. In Singapore I am convinced I love him. Is home an end point or where one starts from?

I ask my tent-mate where Samar is from, and she says she is not sure. He has been with the troupe since he was a boy of two, left in a bundle next to the circus master’s tent at night, not crying, just waiting to be picked up and trained to be a circus performer.

 

I offer to cook a meal for the whole troupe and, as expected, Samar seeks me out to offer compliments. We start talking regularly.

“As a child I learned all kinds of music, singing and acting to hone my craft,” he tells me in Makassar. We are seated among pots and pans in the moving kitchen van, shelling and eating peanuts, with him doing most of the shelling. Every now and then, the van goes over a speed bump, and we fly, our heads hitting the ceiling, the shells sticking to our clothes and hair, the pots clattering and knocking against each other. Each time that happens, we go quiet for a minute as if an announcement might follow, and when nothing happens, we clean our hair and clothes and go back to eating and talking.

That evening he casts a spell on the audience with his perfect acts of balance and flexibility. I feel my face burn.

I walk up to him after the show and before I can say anything he reads my feelings. Afterwards, we lie in an open circus wagon, and he kisses me for the first time. I close my eyes and feel his mouth brush against mine. From the stories told by village elders I know I shouldn’t be doing something like this before marriage, and yet I urgently feel I should be storing this feeling in my mind forever.

That night I dream that the two of us are surfing in the Indian Ocean long before the tsunami altered its temperament. We paddle out for glassy waves breaking over a rock shelf as the moon melts over our heads like a candle.

 

I have been in the circus for three months. Samar and I talk about life outside, which means I speak, and he pretends to listen. He is a circus person like he is a man or like he is tall or like he hates milk. It is a fact.

“Is this what you want our kids to grow up doing?” I ask him, only because I want to say ‘our kids.’ I pinch my cheeks secretly because I know he likes them flushed.

“Our imaginary future kids might be stronger than we think.” He laughs.

In the end, I cajole him to try life outside the circus, which means I lock eyes with him, and he smiles before looking away.

“Will you come find me?” I say in Hanoi, the wind whipping across my face.

“I will come find you,” Samar tells a star in the distance.

I look up at the star and the vastness overwhelms me. The sky appears ready to unleash a torrent of asteroids.

It suddenly feels as though I have arrived at a secluded house that no one invited me to and now I have to stay. I feel afraid while walking down long deserted corridors. Before I get over the first terrifying shadow, I find another one to fear. A lifetime passes but I never manage to work out why I am endlessly afraid.

 

The circus camps by the coast again, this time with me as an insider. In Da Nang, I walk out into the stray sun and reach the My Khe beach. As foamy waves rock me like a baby, I drift off to sleep on the smooth sand. Golden light squats on me.

Later, I watch my shadow grow and fade under the setting sun. Though the water is breathing life into my body, I cannot drink a drop. Light is converging on the ancient silver hoops in my mind. The blurred ghost is slowly coming into focus. Holding my waist so I can keep my head above the water, fashioning fictional mermaids with long hair like mine. I want to call my aunt and ask her if she misses me, but I do not. I am afraid the answer might be no.

“There is a path that leads back to her,” the waves say.

I shake my head. “Whatever I run behind, runs away from me,” I say.

“You keep running away because you are convinced you do not belong anywhere.”

“No!” My screams are towering storm waves, crashing into the rugged coast and churning high into the damp air.

I brush my hand against an umbrella-shaped jellyfish washed up on the shore. It is dead, and yet it stings me.

 

“What is a mirage?” I ask Samar that night.

“You,” he says.

 

A week later in Bangkok, I gather the nerve to walk faster than the rest of the troupe until I am out of sight. My thoughts are stuck in a junkyard like a rotting old fishing boat. My fear is not that if Shirin and the others see me escaping, they wouldn’t let me go, it is that if they see me escaping, they would let me.

The coastline stretches before me, waves rushing to the seashore like playing children, wearing out and tumbling over. Behind me sprawls the bustling night market, where the day’s catch—fresh lobster, prawns, clams, and whole fish—is displayed on ice. Recent rain lies on my path like beads. Families stroll around, skipping children, smiling parents. Backpackers sit in a circular arrangement of black plastic chairs, exchanging tales and preparing for their next adventure in Seoul and Singapore, or further down the Pacific in Sydney or Adelaide. Disco lights flash from clothing and footwear stalls. Red-blue-red-blue.

I want to call Samar and ask him if he misses me, but I do not. I am afraid the answer might be yes. So, I sit down next to a man selling banana sweets and think about my aunt. If I go back to the cafe, I will become her in fifteen years—sitting on the beach, near the reef, listening to the chants from the yoga school during the day and to the roars of the raucous waves at night. Going to the city every month to escape the listlessness of the beach, to escape the people who couldn’t stop talking about how they were escaping the cities.

 

It is that time of the day when the sun looks like a jar of honey. I use most of my money to buy a cheap phone and a temporary calling card. Then I take a train to Ayutthaya where I sit among the restored ruins of Wat Maha That and call my aunt. I remember her number by heart.

The phone rings several times. My aunt’s voice comes on the other side just as the last few tourists leave the temple area and the bricks change color from a burnt orange to a deep red.

“You called,” she says. She must be sitting outside the cafe, watching the lonely beach rise from lacy waves.

“How could I not?”

“I sent in the annual donation to the orphanage a week early so they could cook a feast for your birthday this year.”

“The children must have really enjoyed it,” I say.

“The director sent me a card signed by many of them. I wish you could read the messages.” Her voice is even like the sea’s surface on a calm day.

“I am in Thailand.”

“My children always wanted to travel the world.” This time, I am not jealous. This time, the invocation of her children comforts me, as if I am fulfilling their wishes.

“And how about you?” I say.

“I am tied to the water. I can never leave it.”

“You won’t have to, Valiyamma.”

I hear her shift in her chair. She pauses only briefly before she says, “Will you take me to the circus if I come and meet you there?”

---

Astha Gupta is a semi-finalist for the 2022 Marianne Russo Novel-in-Progress Award presented by Key West Literary Seminar and a fiction finalist both for the 2021 Porter House Review Editor’s Prize (chosen by Yiyun Li) and the 2020 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards competition. Her writing has received support from The Hambidge Center, The Sundress Academy for the Arts and The New York State Summer Writers Institute, and was nominated for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she was an MFA Fellow and won the 2021 Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Fiction. She lives  with her family in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

NYC, Winter 1985

I thrashed against the pillows, fist twisted into the linen, leg braced on a column of my canopy bed when my telephone rang. I kicked the satin coverlet over the phone to muffle it and plunged back into the fantasy of the hunk on a deserted island. On the cruise, I’d rebuffed him as beneath me, but now we were stranded together. I brought him a lobster; he dropped it. Night after night, I stupidly handed him rope with which he tied me to a palm tree. His betrayal flinted my anger. I scratched his neck and licked the blood, then savored the metallic aftertaste. His bronze chest gleamed, clean-shaven despite the fact that we were shipwrecked.

Giancarlo Giannini was about to fuck me when my answering machine clicked on.

“Stop masturbating and pick up,” Max said.

How did he know that? I stayed in bed. Let him talk to the tape.

“Are you still fantasizing about getting hammered by that hunchback blacksmith?”

I wanted to wring Max’s neck. I should have never told him that twisted fantasy; he mocked it, so he’d ruined it.

“Cause I realized he’s the ancient—” Max coughed. “Hold on. I’ll call back.”

“Vulcan,” I finished his sentence. Never thought of that. I buried my head in Mother’s satin pillow and tried to recapture the torrid scene, but the rope on my wrists slackened—did I have to instruct the shipwrecked lunk in proper nautical knots? He’d lost interest—even my imaginary lovers didn’t like me. In a coup de grace, the lobster I wanted more than the man crawled toward the surf, dragging its large claw. My Swept Away daydream swept away.

The phone rang again, and Max spoke to the machine. “EZ, I need you. Please, I have nobody else.”

“Whose fault is that?” I asked the answering machine.

“I only get one call.”

I talked though he couldn’t hear me. “Are you in prison?”

“I’m in Saint Vincent’s Hospital, and the nurses are killing me, which is completely unnecessary. I’m dying as fast as I can.”

I laughed. Max was a complete hypochondriac; he worked himself into hysterics, prognosticating the direst illness whenever he was constipated, calling me at seven in the morning to discuss the problem. But when he really fell ill, he refused to get help. I’d told him to get that cough checked out; it had sounded bad last time we met, the night he dumped me, two months back. It was freezing this February. He needed to stop cruising on the windy piers off Christopher Street at night. Let the doctors treat him. If I visit, he’ll only demand that I spring him.

The answering machine tape ran out. Max rang a third time. I struggled to my elbow and brushed the hair stuck to my lips.

“Dear Elizabeth, please pick up. I don’t have a phone, and if they catch me using this one, I won’t be able to call again.”

I reached down and answered. “You win.”

“Thank you. You are my true friend. I can’t say what I want on the phone; I need to see you. I wheeled my bed into someone’s room to use their line, but there will be hell if the nurses catch me contaminating the receiver.”

“Can I call someone for you?”

“No. It’s like Moscow in the Thirties. People vanish in the night.”

“Let’s not get dramatic.” I looked out my window across the park and the tumbledown conservancy gardens.

“Listen, you have to help me check out. I can’t afford this.”

“You don’t have insurance?”

“Of course not. Who can get insurance? Anyway, it’s no use. Chekhov said doctors are like lawyers, except lawyers just take your money, while doctors take the money and kill you.”

“You have to submit to their regime—”

“I did. They keep adding medicines to counter the side effects of the last dose. Chekhov said if many remedies are suggested, you can be sure there is no cure.”

“Enough Chekhov.”

“He was my pediatrician. Mom gave me his stories when I fell sick.”

“Chekhov died young.”

“Could you come soon?”

The phone rang again as soon as I dropped the receiver. The real estate agent left a message that she wanted to show Mom’s apartment to people who were “dying for it.”

I dressed and counted the money I’d saved from working. Three thousand. Not enough for rent and two months’ deposit, broker’s fee, and utilities, but I could split Max’s rent. This was a good moment to spring the proposal, with him incapacitated. I’d have his flat to myself. I grinned at my conniving as I left Mother’s house, crossed Fifth Avenue, and entered Central Park.

In the late afternoon light, I walked into my own shadow as I crossed to the West Side. Above the tree line, the wilderness of Manhattan raised its prickly head. I rushed through the woods I’d gazed out at from my childhood room, nights, sure that wolves lurked on the great hill and watered at Harlem Meer by moonlight.

 

Last Valentine’s Day, Max had taken me into this deserted corner of the park and given me a red velvet cloak “to warn the wolves.” Lined in satin and edged in brocade, an extravagance he could ill afford on his Radio Shack salary. As he draped it over my shoulders, he shivered. “Virgins scare the wolf more than anything.” As dusk fell, he built a fire by the lake. He roasted pomegranate-marinated shashlik, which he fed me; I nipped his fingers.

To that evening rendezvous I’d carried my grandmother’s pistol—winter nights, police didn’t patrol the park except in cars, their windows rolled up. Grandma had brought the gold-filigreed Remington by train from Denver; she’d tucked it under the pillow in her Plaza suite, and her new husband had said, “Darling, I don’t think you need this in Manhattan.” Times had changed. A mugger had shot Max’s KGB friend on the meadow; the doctors at Bellevue had sewn him up.

Standing close to the fire for warmth, I held the revolver’s pearl handle engraved with Oma’s maiden initials. I grilled Max on irregular verbs. “Burn, burned burnt.”

“Shoot, shotted, shut,” he tried.

“Nyet.”

Max baited me. “I slept with a Brazilian.”

“You slut! How many is a Brazilian?” I hefted the empty gun at Max, who stood in the snow in his grey army coat. I drew a bead on his drop-dead face, but the gun could not touch the Siberian distance of his eyes. He had smuggled his beauty out of the Soviet Union into my world. The moment hovered, eerie, romantic as a duel in deep snow—except I alone had the pistol.

He flinched in my gun sight.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“As far as I can throw Lenin’s tomb.”

I squinted down the barrel. Any minute now, he’d slip into the woods of the Ramble to squander his handsome looks on a stranger in the dark while I stomped the coals of our dwindling fire.

His eyes flashed. “I can see the tabloid cover. Little Red Riding Hood Kills Wolf.”

I didn’t want to kill him, I wanted to seduce him, but you can’t tame a wolf with a gun.

 

This week, a cold snap had hit the city; I crossed the park swiftly. Over me, the branches encased in ice rubbed against each other with a grim sound like an animal chewing a limb caught in a trap.

I vowed to give up my grudge against Max as I crossed the path where, one afternoon, he’d noticed my limp. “Just a splinter,” I’d said. I had kicked my empty bed, and a sliver had lodged in my big toe. I’d offered him a pocketknife. “Could you cut it out?” He had me sit on a park bench while he knelt. He’d worked at it, ignoring the knife I held, and then he’d sucked the wood from my foot. Passing that bench, I turned and walked backward. If only I could go back in time and unwind what went wrong. I tripped and turned forward. One can’t unhurt someone. Can’t unlove them, either.

Ice sheaths from the trees lay shattered on the sidewalk outside the park, glinting like broken bottlenecks in the streetlights. I rushed down the subway steps at Columbus Avenue. On the downtown subway platform, I watched the rats on the tracks. As the rats fled and the rails clattered, I thought of a joke to amuse Max: A casket walked into a bar, and the waiter said, “We don’t serve dead people here.” The casket pulled itself upright and said, “I’m not dead, just coffin.”

The train downtown screeched to a halt. I studied the sign, blackened by graffiti, and guessed it said B. The R didn’t stop here, except on occasions when the N/R line was diverted because of a body under the B or something. The car I boarded was empty except for a man whose swollen feet were bound with stained bandages. I scooped all the change in my pocket and poured it into his hands. The coins slipped between his fingers to the floor while I stared at his black palms. I glanced at my reflection in the subway pane above him: pallid, feral.

He looked up, mouth agape as if asking me to place a coin on his tongue so he could cough it up to pay Charon.

The train doors opened at my stop, and I stepped off. On a station bench, two figures intertwined under dark, heavy coats. Grotesque, insectish. I hurried past.

At a deli on Fourteenth Street, I brought white lilies, wrapped them in a tabloid, and headed for the hospital’s jutting white edifice and jagged black gap, a steel grimace. I went to St. Vincent’s old portico and, as I entered, wondered which room Dylan Thomas had died in.

The receptionist gave me Max’s room number, and I went to the isolation ward, ignoring the signs on the doors. The acrid scent of disinfectant stung my nostrils. Gurneys lined the walls like railroad cars shunted to a sidetrack. On each cot lay a thin figure, asleep beneath blankets.

I asked an orderly as he passed, “Where are the H rooms?”

“Here. H is for hall.”

“H-6?”

He gestured toward a torn bit of masking tape with 6 written on it, stuck to the wall over a bed. Yellow tape marked a small rectangle on the floor, a pretend room.

The thin form in the gurney curled toward the wall. A dinner tray lay untouched on his bed. The man rocked to whatever played on his headphones. The man with shorn hair couldn’t be Max, I thought, but he was a master of masks, dyed his paper-white hair red, then black, as if trying to fit in with a deck of playing cards. I opened the Walkman; the cassette was Bowie’s Changes. The head wearing the earphones still rocked, though the cassette had stopped. I lifted it, and the tape unspooled, a crinkled strip of confetti.

He turned, and I flinched at the sight of Max’s face. His skin seemed to have shrunk, a mask torn at the mouth, a botched clown grin. Red sores ringed his neck—had someone ripped his spiked collar inside out? His beard shocked me; he’d always shaved, even his torso.

I tried to smile, and Max’s face contorted in disgust—he had not molded me into the sunshine lady who cheered people up.

I looked askance at Max in a hospital gown, who had technical questions on the fine points of preppy style not covered at Bronx Science. He’d asked me, sunning on Columbia’s steps, “Is there anything Lilly Pulitzer that a man can wear?” I’d lied, “No.”

From the narrow bed, he studied my face.

“You could do more with your looks.”

“Like what?”

“Kill.” He waved his hand to the side. “You’re already famous, but only I realize it.”

Max had been the one sure to earn fame, barreling head-on for it. Fame had become a strange homelessness, gleaming cold.

No table or windowsill, no vase. I held the flowers.

Max tapped the newspaper wrapped around them. “What’s happening out there?”

“Donald Trump offered to negotiate with the Soviets on nuclear arms. Says he knows most everything about them and can learn the rest in an hour and a half.”

“Send him to the Kremlin.” Max placed a splayed hand over the photo of Trump’s face. “Blond Stalin.” He collapsed back into the mattress, and his thin arms flopped beside him, hitting the metal railings. “Ow. No pillows allowed because I might suffocate.”

He’d always had a huge bed. Every few months, when he moved from one fourth-floor walk-up to another, he called me to help him carry his California king. Why didn’t he ask the men who had slept in it with him? I dragged the stained mattress along the street; the fabric ripped, peeling back to expose the plastic. He’d yell at me, “Don’t drag the tip,” and I’d snap back, “I’m circumcising it.”

A nurse came and I asked her for a pillow and a glass for the flowers.

She swabbed the soft crotch of his elbow, then plunged a needle and worked a tube down under his skin.

Max squeezed my wrist. “I might as well have mainlined heroin.” He looked away while she hooked the saline drip.

He coughed, and the nurse jerked away. I held his hand. She grimaced at the glittering spit on my wrist.

When she left, I lowered the lilies to his nose; the pistils’ gold dust slippers trembled as he exhaled.

He breathed in their scent. “Lilies smell like cunts of angels.”

“You’ve never had an angel.”

An orderly dumped Max’s untouched dinner tray into the biohazard bin. I stared at his thick plastic gloves.

Max said, “The lilies and I have something in common.”

“What?”

“We’ll soon be dead.” Max nodded toward the man in the bed behind his. “Last night he said, ‘Who are all these people with wings?’”

I rested the bouquet on my friend’s chest.

He stroked the back of my hand. “You are my last love.”

“Shut up.” I shuddered. “What happened to your boyfriend?”

“Richard dumped me, so I went to the piers, where a man smacked me and threw me into the river. My head hit the pier post on the way down.”

“Was this a hate crime?”

“Love crime, hate crime, hard to tell.” Max shook his head. “The water glittered in the city light, a sea of stars at two in the morning. The river gripped me—no one held me like that. I let myself drift. Then I rammed against the sanitation dock. The workers heard me yell.”

“Well, that cured your urge to prowl the piers.”

“I went the next weekend to look for him.”

“To have him arrested?”

“To thank him.”

I started to swear and then fell silent when a nun approached, rosary beads on her wrist.

She leaned over Max. “Would you like me to pray with you?”

“God doesn’t care about me.”

The nun looked my way.

I shook my head. “God hates me, too.”

“Here’s a prayer,” Max said. “Dear God, you suck.”

The Sister veiled hurt with humility.

I pointed to the hard mattress under Max’s head. “We could use a pillow.”

When the nun left, I bit my lip, and it bled. I understood her bewilderment at this new illness that had quickly filled her halls with men whose secret rites excluded us.

Max took up his story again. “I felt fine after my swim, but EMS took me to the hospital, and here I got the flu and staph and every other germ on the ward.”

A janitor rolled Max’s gurney to the opposite wall and passed a mop, then rinsed it in a bucket. People were dying, and someone still had to sweep the floor. The wheels creaked as he moved down the hall.

“Alternate side of the street parking day,” Max said. “Move me back before someone else takes my place.

Over the cot hung an old print of Christ, arms open as he walked through a field of lilies. Above their white trumpets, pale butterflies fluttered. The flower fashioned the creature a home of wings, opening; the butterfly closed its wings to enter the lily’s throat, and it seemed to me, standing below, that the creature entered into the reflection of itself. Were heaven and earth that intimate?

Max touched the flowers I’d brought him; their petals darkened under his thumb. He held them up to the picture. “I bet Christ never walked through a garden in his life.”

From one room came a low moan.

Max saw my head turn toward that door. “He lost all his skin. Experimental medicine.”

“Do they give him morphine?

“Nuns? Illegal drugs?”

The man in the room cried out. A nurse went in. She gave me a pillow and a half-full water glass as she passed us.

Max cast a glance back at the religious print. “Don’t say anything treacly about me when I’m dead.”

The nurse left the room, shaking down the mercury in a thermometer, then returned to the station behind the double doors.

Max watched her leave. “Could you do one favor for me? I left shoes at the cobbler. I don’t want him stiffed for the labor. All those old shoes stuffed onto shelves at the shop, tongues crisscrossed with black lines, I wondered who had forgotten them. Now I suspect they’re dead.”

I looked at Max’s bare feet. Undertakers put shoes on corpses—not that they needed them, but to let them go barefoot would disturb those left behind as if the floor of the afterworld were strewn with shattered glass.

Max clutched his shoulders and rocked. “It comes in waves.”

I watched, helpless, as someone falling through air looked down at a man drowning.

“Save me.” He raised a hand toward my face. “The pain.”

I lowered my forehead to the rail.

Max traced the curve of my widow’s peak. “I want your face to be the last thing I see on this earth. You were the most beautiful woman I ever knew.”

I raised my head.

“Except for your mother. She’s more beautiful.”

I pressed the pillow over his face.

“Arderrr.”

I tossed the pillow aside. “I want to hurt you, not kill you. That’s game over.”

“You sucked at Atari.” He stroked my cheek. Max leaned to my ear, and though he whispered, he spoke with force. “I need you to kill me.”

The hair on my arms rose.

“Please. You have to mix pills and alcohol, and they won’t let me have liquor.”

I hid my hands below the bed; one hand clawed the other. I could not kill the man I cared for most. He’d hurt me, but that had tightened the knot that bound us.

From the bedrail hung a plastic bag. He untied it, fumbled inside, and gave me an envelope addressed in shattered script to The Hemlock Society.

“Call them. They’ll tell you which pills to collect.”

I shook my head.

“All right, just choke me to death. I heard one man tied a plastic bag around his head, but I don’t want to go with a sack on my face that says, ‘Have a nice day.’”

“What about me? What if they find I did it?”

“You are the most selfish girl ever.” Max waved his fingers. “Nobody is interested in you or me. Seven men have died in this hallway. Nobody investigates anything. They shove you in a bag so fast your last breath fogs the plastic.”

I reached through the bars of his bed. “I could have loved you.”

“But you never did. I invested a lot to make you the bitch who could do this.”

I shoved the bed, and it swerved away, jerking the IV line in his elbow crease. Blood pooled beneath the skin.

He closed the crook of his arm. “Listen, I have Hepatitis, TB, and cancer. I’m an entire hospital wing sausaged into one skin. To top it all, I have shingles, which are excruciatingly painful.”

What the hell was that—I thought they were things nailed to roofs.

He pointed to the boils on his throat, stained garish red from mercurochrome. “Once, I brushed past a leper; terrified of catching it, I researched leprosy. You think it’s a flesh-eating virus, but it just makes you numb, and when you can’t feel pain in your eyes, you scratch yourself blind. Lepers have no feeling in their fingers, so they carelessly cut them until they’re stubs. I wish I had leprosy. There’s a cyst on the tip of my penis. Do you want to see?”

“No, never!”

“It stings when I piss. When I get too weak to lift myself to the pan, the nurse will insert a Fosse—”

“Bob Fosse? Dream on.”

He threw back his head, but the laugh was silent. I saw black lumps on his white gums.

“I mean Foley. My tonsils are swollen and gag me. The doctors plan to cut my throat open and put in a tube, and then I won’t be able to talk.”

Every shining thing that was ever going to happen to him, the pictures in Time and Life, the wild nights, the whispers and sexual exploits, crumpled in my clenched fist. I crushed the lilies against the wall, then dropped them on the floor.

“I need you to be brave, not just reckless.”

He tapped my wrist. “What time is it?”

I checked my watch. “Seven twenty.”

“Night or morning? Prisoners are always executed at dawn to keep people’s spirits up.”

“Night.”

“Good. Less chance our tryst interrupted.” He arched his neck for me to throttle.

“I can’t do it in the hallway.”

He glanced at the empty corridor, then took my hand and laid it on his chest. “Look, the meter’s running, and this is one expensive ride. I’m sixth in line for a room—that many men have to die. Visiting hour ends in ten minutes.”

I arranged the sheet over him. “Sleep tight.”

He cast the sheet off and took deep breaths before he could speak. “At night, the illnesses scream at each other, and I can’t sleep; the light never dies in this hallway. I dreamed that a surgeon vowed to save me. He took a knife to my chest and sliced down the middle, then stripped my skin to the sides. He lifted my head to show me the thin bones winged out like a fish skeleton and said, ‘See, you had wings.’ I had to learn to fly from the inside, and no one could teach me. I thought maybe if I breathe—why are you crying? There’s no crying in dreams.”

My hands crossed on my chest.

“Don’t make me beg for my own death.”

I bowed my head.

“Do not write on my tombstone what you wished I had been”

I turned away and zipped my coat.

“Do not go.”

***

Either the girl in my medicine cabinet mirror had to go, or I would. I tried to smile, and the silent girl bared her teeth in a snarl. I raised my hand to my forehead and dug my thumb into the purple bruise stippled with orange, the impossible shade of sad anger. The queasy ache of flesh pressed against skull comforted.

My face in the glass withdrew into darkness as if the man who’d pistol-whipped me had stripped half a mask, but there were masks of loss beneath that. Let us pass over the incident. It happened all the time in New York. So I got out at the wrong subway exit after visiting Max, and I’d surrendered the wad of bills in my pocket. My black eye was nothing compared to what others suffered. Nothing next to Max’s pain.

Max had said he’d be happy if he could switch into my skin. Three days had passed since I’d seen him at St. Vincent’s. The meds would have kicked in, and he’d laugh at the bruise, who said my face was a silver prize I didn’t deserve, who called me doll in French, Poupée, with a Russian accent that made it sound like “Poopy.”

I read the clock over my shoulder in the mirror. The hands stretched straight away from each other, plumb up and down: 6 A.M. The train at this hour would be empty except for the men who slept on the benches; they’d leave me alone. I pulled a down jacket over my sweats, scrounged two tokens, and set off for the hospital.

 

The guard inside the front door glanced up at me and said, “Emergency entrance down the block.”

I walked past him. The isolation ward smelled of shit masked by ammonia scented with faux pine, each smell trying to suffocate the one below. Gurneys lined the hall, the figures lying in each covered in white sheets. Max had said that six men would have to die for him to get off the hallway, and now he had a private room. These must be new patients, but they seemed the same old men. One called out. No help came. Sunday before dawn, a skeleton crew manned the nurse station behind closed doors.

At the end of the hall was the room the receptionist had written on a slip.

“Is this Max,” I asked on the lintel step.

“Nyet.” The form in the narrow metal bed turned away as it held the IV cord to a thin neck. “If I could knot it in a garrote.”

I recognized his gravelly voice and came to the bed. Max turned, and I tried to stifle my shock. He seemed hollowed, a soul of skin stretched over a skeleton.

He saw me and winced. “Who raped your face?”

My nostrils burned, and I went to the window. Three days alone in this room must have felt several forevers—he who shunned hospitals as the cells where the sick put the ill. Outside, a garbage truck compacted trash, and through the windowpane came the machinery’s muffled hum and the high-pitched crackle of glass.

Max coughed. What had happened to his tongue? I reached toward him, and he pulled away, flattening his back to the wall. He clenched his jaw and shot me a scathing glance that enforced the distance he kept between us. He gazed away, toward the bedside table with an empty vase.

“Water?”

He jerked his head in response.

“What do you want?”

His eyes flashed stark blue in the fluorescent light. “You.” He watched hope open my lips, then ended the sentence, “to kill me.”

He rocked in pain, and his hospital gown fell open. I saw for the first time that cock I wanted to own. It flopped down, scab-black, along his pale thigh. I saw that the clock had run out of blood. Why would time heal me and kill Max? Time was irrational, two-faced—something watches failed to show us.

“Don’t cry.” He lifted his arm and tucked a fallen lock behind my ear. “I know I’ve hurt you, but we need to get over that.”

“So I can hurt you more.” I sucked in a breath that seared the skin inside my lungs. Neither words nor silence would embalm the scars from words we’d hurled at each other.

“Do it.”

I stiffened.

“Now.”

That sharp word in the sunk in, a needle to the chest. I went to close the door and returned to Max. Air narrowed around my right arm, a constricting sleeve; all I’d never said sheathed my hand as it hovered over him.

“Let’s go quickly.” He swept his hand away from his body, reached up as if to brush away the bruise on my brow. His hands slid down to my wrists and clasped my hand, then pressed my palm to his throat. I yanked free. He held my hand again, tighter, and stared with pure adoration that struck a last slap, after all, I’d failed at.

“Now, now.” I echoed his last words, softening them, then leaned with both hands on his neck and chest. His torso writhed. Ten seconds, then twenty. At thirty seconds, his hand released me; a man cannot hold your hand while you kill him. My wrist entangled in the drip line, a crimson bracelet. One minute in, I lost my hold.

His gasp dissected itself into spit.

I hooked a foot on a metal crossbar, hiked my other leg onto the bed to get myself over him, then slid my knee across the mattress to rest in the hollow below his ribs. I bore down with all my weight on his chest, my left hand on his windpipe. His arms flailed, and his nail scratched my lip. I swallowed the iron-bitter reminder and tightened my grip on Max. Ninety seconds. He knocked the empty vase to the floor where it smashed.

One hundred seconds. He looked up at me as I held him in passing between worlds. I forced my face to remain calm, to be the last thing he wanted to see in this world. His eyes widened; the white threads of his irises furled back from the night behind them.

One hundred twenty seconds. My hands ached for release. I willed them to hold on and tightened the tendons like puppet strings. The blood in my head deafened; if anyone knocked on the door, I couldn’t hear. A hard chill fell over me as dark sparks scattered around us. The watch face on my hand blackened. I had to count the seconds to myself. One hundred sixty. The air scraped my lungs as if it were shaved with steel. One hundred eighty seconds.

His head fell to the side, away from me. Max lay still. It took all my strength to let go. My arm hung, adrenaline numb as if my skin had been a glove shucked inside out and cast off.

I unwound my foot from the wheel and stepped back. My boot ground broken glass with its heel as I left.

 

Down the subway steps, I slipped my token in the slot and stepped through the metal cage into the station. Men lay curled on the soiled cement. The loss kept rushing past me, dragging cigarette butts, papers, and cups onto the tracks. Strands of hair whipped my face. On the wind drifted the front page of an old Post. In the yellowed photo, Reagan waved as he boarded a helicopter for another vacation.

I boarded the train and stood holding a metal strap.

Desperate, illegible scribbles covered the window, written by shadowy figures that slipped out at night to prove they existed to those who would never see them.

Skittish after the attack, I scanned the car for threats. That’s when I caught sight of a pallid face opposite, over the man’s head. The quicksilver girl in her silent world. A black wall passed through my flesh—or I passed through it. Dirt starkened her bloodless skin. On either side rose black lace wings of writing. With them, the gray window face floated overhead. Ragged graffiti writ on the pane crossed her chest like black surgical thread had roughly sewn it up. Something had been taken from her breast and something else sewn in.

The last time I’d ridden the subway with Max, I’d told him how Gorky had followed the elderly Tolstoy on a walk through his estate. Tolstoy saw a lizard bask in the sun on a rock and asked the animal, “Are you happy?”

Max cut in with the line Tolstoy told the lizard: “I’m not.”

---

Holly Woodward is a Russian poet who became one of the famed women snipers in World War II, and a Moscow actress who become part of the Red Orchestra network of spies fighting the Nazis. 

Oh, snap, those are the heroines of the novel she is writing. Holly leads a less interesting life as a writer and artist.

She served as writer in residence at St. Albans, Washington National Cathedral, and was a fellow for four years at CUNY Graduate Center’s Writers’ Institute. Woodward enjoyed a year as a doctoral fellow at Moscow University. She also studied at Leningrad University and has an MFA from Columbia.

Her poetry and fiction have won prizes from Story Magazine, the 92^nd Street Y, and New Letters, among other honors. 

 

Philadelphia, January 4, 1992

I could paint his face from memory. Crinkled and putty-colored and as aggravated as a tub of stucco. Right now, he’s grimacing at the newspaper, holding the front page a foot from his scowl and craning his neck all the way back like whatever he’s reading smells worse than the truth. He takes zero notice as I pull up in front of the building. The doorman tells him I’m here. Waiting. I nudge a few cans of turpentine under the seat and pick a dried flake of magnesium-yellow paint off the steering wheel. He walks over to the passenger side and signals for me to roll down the window. Bored circles in the air. Like he’s swinging a noisemaker with nothing at all pleasant to announce. His laser-blue eyes scan me over like a high-tech security device. I know what he sees.

He shifts his little black reading glasses up the bridge of his nose and sniffs. “We’ll take my car.” Then he backs away, waving me on with the paper. No hello, no smile, just a cue to move forward. With caution.

I wish I had my own daily rag to brandish, but I don’t. From the rearview mirror, I see him checking his watch.

“Traffic?” His eyes still on the time.

“There was tunnel congestion and then some idiot—”

“—Let’s just go. I don’t wanna be late.”

The keys to his pale yellow Caddy land in my fist. I straighten a kink in my spine and get in. The air is old, fraught with evidence of cigarette butts and stale cherry Life Savers. I move up the driver’s seat and adjust the mirrors.

“Don’t forget to put those back the way you found them. It always screws me up whenever you or your mother drive this car.”

“We can go in mine.”

“No.” He stops himself from any further comment. There are so few things he resists saying that I take his reserve as kindness.

The light turns red, and I hit the brake pedal. The Caddy jerks to a stop.

He tenses up against the worn leather.

“Easy on your old man, little girl. Easy.” The weak scaffolding of his faded plaid jacket barely props him up anymore. One false move and something might shake loose from his rafters—his Sunday jacket deconstructing. “You’re already grinning and you haven’t won anything yet.”

“I guess I’m just looking forward to getting there. Has it changed much?”

He belches softly and stares out at the road. “Everything changes, little girl. Everything. Believe me.”

He’s probably right. There was a time when he was able to smile back.

 

We arrive at the racetrack and make our way to the upper circle of the Philly Park clubhouse, a custom he’s kept from the days when even Mom enjoyed it here. She preferred not rubbing elbows with the riffraff and felt the dining room was a more sophisticated experience. A penguin-ed waiter escorts us over to a table where ice water and leatherette menus mark our places.

I don’t consult the menu; I know exactly what I want. “I’ll have the Caesar, please.”

The server’s barbed eyebrows spike at my good choice.

“And gimme a cup of black coffee, would ya? I’ll get some food later.” The menu gets pushed back toward our tuxedoed friend as the coffee is poured.

Coffee is the primer, a first coat before all the fiery layers of whiskey go down. He won’t get any food later. He dumps half the cream in his cup, his spoon clanging as if calling for order in all the cloudiness. One sip and he summons the waiter again.

“You call this coffee? Ballentine’s straight up, please.”

A raw egg cracks into the wooden bowl on top of the cart and my thoughts converge on all the things about to be tossed into the air in front of me. The big, creamy Caesar arrives like a long-awaited rendezvous, but I keep my mouth shut, not wanting to spoil an old hunger.

“Here. Put this on the Tunisian trainer, would ya?” He pulls two hundred-dollar bills out of his front jacket pocket, then a third.

I take the money from his hand, brushing the frayed edges of his sleeves, limp tracks of thread circling his wrist. He always dressed impeccably, but these days the slickness and preening are missing.

“What’s the horse’s name?” I get up to place the bet, still troubled by his cuffs.

He hijacks a minute before answering me, filling the space with ploys of status and guessing games. The more presumptuous his mood, the longer it takes him to respond as if he’s only stating the obvious. Then he tilts his drugstore specs toward the tip of his bloated nose. “Bet the one with the Tunisian trainer.”

I skim through the racing form and try to identify anything particularly North African in the jumble of rare names and tricky statistics. I think he gets a kick out of watching me scramble.

“I don’t know which one you’re talking about, and all bets have to be posted in five minutes. So just tell me the name of the horse, please.”

“And this is my brightest kid….” He burps in mild disgust.

I storm off with my order—but not to the ticket window. Instead, I make my way to the ladies’ room, identified by a horse head with Mares written underneath, and proceed toward the stalls. Three hundred dollars. All that money thrown away on a horse race. Three bills delivered like a direct threat, each zero poking fun at my struggle to make the rent. Who gives a damn about Tunisian trainers? I’ve got three hundred dollars and two minutes before posting. Screw it.

A bony woman edges her way past me, tucking her tickets into a flesh-colored purse. I shove my bills to the bottom of my pocket, splash myself with cool water from the dingy sink and check my reflection in the mirror. Those are his brooding eyes, half-closed as if scrutinizing some lost detail. The same reckless lips and protruding chin too. It’s his face, all right—the one that keeps showing up in my self-portraits—the ones I never finish because of the way they stare back.

 

He’s holding court at the table, his gaze fixed on the racing form, his drink severely diminished. I won’t put up with any more punishing laser scans or pop quizzes on Arabian horsemen. I take a seat and shoot him a disapproving look—one I’ve appropriated from Mom—then emphasize my choice of beverage to the passing waiter.

“Hot coffee, please.”

“And another whiskey for her old man,” Dad counters.

“And they’re off!” A piercing voice pipes in over the loudspeakers. Ten thoroughbreds speed out of the gate, kicking up a great wake of mud around each miniature man in bright-colored clothing. It’s de Kooning through a kaleidoscope; hues and forms ricochet until I can’t make out anything, just a vast, splashy tableau stretching in front of me.

Trixie Dipper, Day’s a-Waitin,’ Captain of My Heart, Tam Tam, Zeus’ Fire, Heaven’s Door. A breathless string of non-sequiturs flies from the announcer at monotonous hyper-speed. Names and numbers and necks and furlongs.

“…Deep in the stretch…coming round the clubhouse turn and heading for home…and it’s number two, Tam Tam, by a nose!”

I snap out of my Abstract Impressionist reverie. “Damnit. I thought Day’s a-Waitin’ had it pegged.”

“Day’s a-Waitin’? Did you say Day’s a-Waitin’?” His program slaps the table. “You put my three hundred bucks on that piece-a-shit horse after I expressly told you who’d win?”

“Sorry, Dad, but you never actually said—”

“—My dear, could you tell me who the trainer is for Tam Tam?” He aims his crossword pen at the racing form, tapping it twice. Tap tap. I follow his pointer and read the small print next to the horse’s name: Azzedine Bahbar.

“Sounds rather Tunisian, don’t you think?” He dismissively waves me off before hoisting his glasses back into position and studying the next race.

I spend the next few races devoid of interest, searching here and there for horses with names I can relate to: Delusion’s Child or Daughter ‘till the Death. But all I find are names like Warrior King and Shifty Dancer. It’s not a good day for the dark horse.

He collects money and whiskey in equal turns, madly scribbling notes in the margins of the form. There’s a pattern in how he picks his runners: He only bets the horses with a history of excuses. So if a horse ran fourth in its previous race, but the jockey wasn’t whipping the horse’s left side, then that’s reason enough for the horse to have lost. But whipped correctly, that same horse could win, in which case, he’ll bet on him. Or if the horse lost because it rained, then he’d probably do better with no mud. A sunny day could make a difference. He mutters things like, “How the hell could the horse win with that rider? Today, he’s got his usual boy.” And the margins get filled with cryptic calculations: rain + sub rider, ran 2^nd, cold = trot. There’s always a possibility a runner can win, given a second chance. He’s betting the excuses all the time.

I’d like to ask him why as I poke at my soggy Caesar.

After each losing race, he rips up the ticket and pitches it in the air. It’s something I’ve seen him do a thousand times. Once when I was a kid, after a big win, he drove to my school, dug deep into his golf pants and sprinkled dollar bills on the blacktop. Then he threw back his head and cackled like some rich, crazed Pied Piper while money and children piled up around him. Maybe it was the scrambling that made him happy. But his showboating pissed off the principal. Dad claimed it was a lesson about survival, about groveling around on your hands and knees while some jerk offers you alms. He insisted that most kids would be doing that for the rest of their lives; they just didn’t know it yet. They think the jerk is a nice guy. In the end, he said, survival was the only real lesson to learn.

He slugs back his fifth whiskey as the clubhouse waiter places a silver ice bucket on the table, and the maître d’ ceremoniously waddles over to greet us. This is a man with no formal education, a man who knows how to shake hands with the left or the right, to speak enough English to charm the ladies, enough proper Italian to satisfy the men, and plenty of unspoken words for don’t worry, you’ll get the best table in the house.

“Signor Vittori, piacere verderle. A pleasure to see you.” His labored speech is disrupted by a generous launch of spittle.

Dad plunks his drink down and acknowledges the familiar, dribbling gentleman. “Rafael, come sta?”

            “Bene, bene, e questa bella ragazza?  She must be your daughter.”

“Si, la figlia, Mia.” 

I can never tell if he means “my daughter” or “the daughter, Mia.” I assume it’s the latter because of the extra emphasis, and for that reason, I feel dispossessed whenever he says it.

“Well, she has your face, Rex. You can’t mistake that. But does she have your smarts too, eh?” Another superficial volley between men when in the company of a female.

Dad rotates toward his stubby compatriot as the air around him marinades in smoke and whiskey. “My smarts? You wanna know if she’s got my smarts? My kids would be lucky if they got my cobwebs.”

The shock of having provoked an insult seizes the jovial maître d’ who looks at me with centuries of shame painted in pushpin Calabrese eyes.

I will not give my father the satisfaction of a score. “If DNA is a bunch of random strands that develop in dim, dusty spaces, then I’ll bet we got both his smarts and his cobwebs.” I inch my empty coffee cup forward, indicating a refill.

The maître d’ exhales, settling uneasily back into his charm. Dad nods almost imperceptibly, probably thinking, “The kid doesn’t take my shit.”

I feel vindicated and flick a pitted black olive across the table to celebrate.

The line is suddenly clear: Where I, this filly, have been sired, where I get my swift comebacks, my defensive instincts, my breeding. My twenty-eight years of lineage are not printed up in a long rectangular form with block type but are a simple read nonetheless. Grandfather: a volatile workhorse; grandmother: a strong broodmare; father: hasty runner, inconsistent (list of excuses to follow); mother: easy-rider. Vittori, Altieri, Sarono. Breeding is never just an equation of two, but of many, tracing the bloodlines all the way back. A horse’s greatness depends on speed and endurance, its size and the distance it can cover while moving its fastest. The sum total of all of the strengths and handicaps add up to a stakes-winning family or not. And just like the racehorse, it seems our chances in life are tied to our own unique genealogy.

 

Dad remains buried in his racing form like a conjurer adrift in spells. His eyes are heavy with alchemy, turning them into hard beads of cobalt like he sees something no one else can. Then he whispers, “The grandson of Watusi. Well, I’ll be damned.”

“Watusi?”

“Now, that was an unbelievable horse. Brought over by a wealthy pineapple grower from Malaysia. Man, that stallion could run. They sired him good, I’ll bet.” He sets down the form and narrows his stare. “You and Ricky used to like him. You’d go see him over in his stall. But you wouldn’t remember Watusi…”

I say nothing. A father who has no idea what I like for breakfast, which painters I emulate, what my dead-end job is all about, or why I leave Manhattan to spend my Saturday in Philly with him. But he knows the horse I bet when I was thirteen.

Of course, I remember Watusi. I can never forget him or the mare in heat that was being held for him in the breeding shed. Before the horses got near each other, a short fat man with a washcloth and solvent cleaned their genitals while a group of people clustered around to observe. A bald guy went up front to film the whole thing. Ricky and I followed.

Let’s hope we get another champ! That’s what the breeder said when he let Watusi in the stall with the mare. The stallion was colossal in his state of excitement. Ricky was too embarrassed to watch. I couldn’t peel my eyes away. Watusi mounted the mare, pulling himself up with his teeth and hooves. A massive black leather cape protected her coat from the sexual mauling. The guy with the camera looked like he was shooting a porno. When it was over, he wiped the sweat from his shiny head and subtly held the camera in front of his crotch to cover any sign of arousal. All the men were probably feeling the same, thinking about whom they’d like to do that to and when, comparing their own prowess to that of the noble steed.

They took a sample of the stallion’s sperm to test his fertility and better gauge the probability for real success, as opposed to a quickie in the shed. The breeder made sure he left with the videotape as proof of his professional matchmaking. Everyone was in a congratulatory mood when the job was finished. They were all picturing the finest outcome—another Secretariat or War Admiral—and pretending it was all so civilized. As if successful breeding comes from nothing more than a series of staged rapes and arranged marriages.

It shook me to the core. I knew something irreversible had just happened, and I could never erase it from my mind. It would haunt me every time I’d encounter a horse, or a big man, or a defenseless woman or a black cape or large teeth. It would plague my sleep. And all these years later, I thought I would not be vexed by disturbing images of dominating stallions and captive mares and that I wouldn’t fall prey to my father’s games. But here I am all over again. A willing victim.

“I remember Watusi.”

“That stallion was a king, believe me. A king! Now let’s see what his grandson is up to.…”

 

Races eight, nine, and ten, I play only the favorites.

He examines my choice for the eleventh and final race and rolls his eyes. “Samothrace?”

“Yup.”

“Another favorite?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Excuse your old man for asking, but didn’t you pick chalks for the past three races and lose them all?”

“That’s right. All the favorites lost.”

“Your father may not know much, but he do know horses. Now, let me ask you: Do you know why the favorites don’t win?”

I exaggerate my exhaustion.

“I’ll tell you why. Because if the favorites won all the time, then there’d be nothin’ but white people. Think about that.” He smacks his lips to suck at the souvenir of whiskey and slams five-hundred dollars on the table with emphatic, end-of-lesson punctuation.

“Now go and play the number-two horse for your father. I’m gonna risk it all, little girl, on the least favorite of all: the darkest dark horse, Nevermore.” His voice gets low and literary when he says it. 

The knot in my stomach slips downward as I use my last bit of strength to walk away from the table with the remaining stack of bills.

“Nevermore,” I hear myself say to the cashier as she takes my bet. Nevermore to win. Nevermore to place. Nevermore to show. There it is: five-hundred dollars on the longshot. I feel a sudden pang of sympathy with the horse, knowing there’s always someone on his back, riding him, leading him on, forcing him round and round, even when it’s certain he’ll lose. Solidarity is my only consolation as I slide the money under the metal gate.

The eleventh race comes and goes. Dad jabs out his cigarette with a decisive party’s-over twist.

“You know, I went to the track last week and bet a horse in the eleventh called Writer’s Daughter. Had terrible odds. The worst. Guess what? It won. Can you believe that? Writer’s Daughter. It was just a hunch.” He tries to sound enthused, but habit makes him cough instead.

I say nothing.

“You wouldn’t understand….”

I understand. The writer, the one he dreamed of being. And me. He was betting on us. I get it.

An awful rattle rises in him, which I pretend not to notice. As he bends over, spitting yellow globs into his napkin, I can only think about one thing: The Taiwanese businessman who came for dinner. He tried to impress Dad by drinking too much wine and devouring Mom’s meal. But he turned green after the sausage and peppers. He opened his jacket and regurgitated the antipasto in the inside pocket, then kept on talking as if nothing had occurred. It was masterful. Dad sat there respectfully conversing and continued to eat, mopping up the lumpy red sauce with his bread. Mom panicked. Ricky did imitations. And I learned something useful: Almost anything can be ignored if you try hard enough.

Dad coughs for the hundredth time, amassing sour contents in the table linen. I continue to disregard it, but his skewering blue eyes knock me off guard. They leave me with the terror that I might not always have them around. He lights up yet another Marlboro in front of them.

“Why can’t you stop?”

A protracted draw on his cigarette. “What difference does it make?”

“Could be life or death.”

He pats at the corners of his mouth, coaxing the words to come out dryly, carefully. “You know, there are a lot of scared people in the world flapping around like fish, hoping that they won’t get hooked—hooked on smokes, hooked on booze, hooked on horses. And the ones that get caught think they’ll get released. They think they can beat the odds and make it. Make what? I look around, and I don’t see any winners. All I see are gutless corpses. So don’t try and sell me on life, little girl.”

“But what else is there?”

“There’s sacrifice. Like the saints and martyrs and Jesus. Just consider His actions. There he was, washing the feet of his apostles before his own crucifixion. That’s like going to the racetrack broke and paying for everyone else’s debts.”

“Well, Dad, Jesus must have had a hunch of his own….”

A lengthy silence. Furlongs of stifled reflection. But now he’s the one scrambling. He discards the racing form with all its tiny markings and smooths back a few pewter strands on top of his thinning crown. The restlessness drains out of him; the bluster dies down. What’s left is unraveling.

It’s time to forget all desires and disappointments, steady myself against the musty headrest of his pale yellow Cadillac and drive him safely back home.

 

A green Chevy swerves in front of us. The guy is leaning on the horn and yelling something nasty. Dad croaks “Va fa’n culo” from a half-sleep. My hero.

I turn on the radio and change lanes. The first bare notes of music drift through the speakers. A searing soprano elevates the score like a flock of birds lifting off a wire. He likes opera. The Italians mostly: Verdi, Puccini. I don’t think he gives the Germans a second thought. Not since World War II. His favorite singer was always Lanza. He’d belt out imitations of Canio in I Pagliacci.

I slam on the brakes, nearly missing the exit. The jolt wakes up my passenger, who crows “Nevermore…” under acid breath. He lost the big race and is going home a bit broker than he was when we left. But he’s used to that.

I pull into the Lincoln Society Tower with its burgundy and gold sign in lavishly flowing script like a giant wine label. The sign is supposed to make the people living here believe they’ve made a tasteful choice in choosing to inhabit a concrete high-rise off Route 1. Dad settles into the dependability of his plaid blazer as the engine goes off and the mirror and the seat are adjusted to their original positions.

Searching out my own car keys, I come across the crisp three hundred-dollar bills in my pocket and feel the burden of my keep. “Listen, Dad; you remember the first race? The one with that Tunisian trainer?”

“You mean Azzedine Bahbar?”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t put your money on Day’s a-Waitin’. I didn’t put your money on any horse.” I take the bills and press them into his palm.

He chuckles at the stowed-away cash and shakes his head. Then he plucks two tickets from his jacket. Tam Tam, the winner of the first race, is printed on both. “I bet the horse myself. Just in case. Besides, I wanted you to go home with a little something.”

I feel more guilt than gratitude as he folds the bills back into my hand. My own second chance. “I’ll put it toward art supplies. I’m working on a new portrait.”

“Any good?”

“It’s turning out okay.”

“I’ll bet it is.”

As he turns toward the light of the building, I take in the jagged angles of his profile, the embattled trenches that have burrowed into his brow, and I sense, perhaps for the very first time, that I look nothing like him.

“Thanks for taking your old man to the track.” He waves his newspaper, clearing me for departure. Then a stolen look back.

I say goodbye, noticing the place where his scowl resides, a small smile taking hold. His first of the day.

---

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Gina Angelone became a global citizen at age seventeen and has lived, worked, and traveled the world as a film director, producer, and writer.

Gina’s TV work is the recipient of two Emmy awards and multiple nominations. Her documentaries have garnered top festival prizes and notable grants from the NEA, Philadelphia Foundation, William Penn Foundation, Graham Foundation, New York Women in Film, Speranza Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts & Letters, among others.

Credits include founding Producer of Bravoʼs “Inside the Actors Studio,” Writer/Director of the original series, “Defining Beauty” (Disney), and Writer/Producer/Director of feature documentaries “Connections” (PBS), “René & I,” (NBC), “Itʼs Better to Jump,” (theatrical release).

 

ELIZA IS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY, on a hill from which the lights, streaming east toward the river, would’ve been beautiful if there were any. She is sitting and remembering.

She is remembering Daniel at the wheel of a yellow sedan the night they decided to get married, driving ten miles an hour into a stop sign. She is remembering his eyes crinkling in surprise at the impact, his too tall head hitting the rearview mirror.

She is remembering saying to Daniel, You’re drunk, even though she was too drunk to drive herself.

She is remembering Daniel replying, No, just high.

She is remembering Daniel getting out of the car and looking at the pole and then the car and then back at the pole, as if trying to figure out what happened.

She is remembering Daniel saying, You know, you’re right. I did have a beer or two.

She is remembering thinking I know you did, Daniel. Three pilsners. I counted them carefully. Thinking for every one you had, I could have two, the sharp crack of your new can opening an allowance for me.

She is remembering holding a cold can of soda from the vending machine at the body shop against the red welt on his forehead as it slowly turned purple. Holding his hand and kissing him carefully on the eyebrow. Getting a headache in the waiting room from the smell of oil and junk food and paint and the white thrum of the fluorescent lights as she slowly became sober. The shop replacing the window and pounding out the dents in the bumper, only charging them for the window.

The mechanic saying, You’re a cute couple. Too young to die being stupid.

Daniel saying later as they drove home, At what age is it okay to die being stupid?

She is remembering, later, meeting her sister Joan at the airport and taking her to a Mexican restaurant in South Philly where they could be alone for a whole hour, and she could have a margarita without feeling a tightening in her throat. The restaurant having Joan’s name at the door because Joan made a reservation everywhere she went, giving Joan another opportunity to say how much she hated her name, her 1950s housewife, hairspray starlet, dad’s secretary name.

Saying, What’s up with you, Joan? Holding a chip in the salsa verde so long it turned limp.

Joan saying, What’s up with everyone, Eliza. My boss is a prepper who steals creamer and salt packets and silverware from the kitchen for his undisclosed-location apocalypse shelter. I can’t quit my job because there’s no better one, and all I can say is I’m so glad to see my baby sister.

Eliza enjoying — although she was often worried that she looked too young — being the baby sister in this moment. The sister with possibility.

Joan giving Eliza a look when she declined a second margarita. Joan saying, Back at home already in your mind, aren’t you? Imagining what Daniel and Jovie are up to, and what they’ll eat for dinner? Be here, Eliza, be here.

But, really, feeling right there. Floating on the warm alcohol burn in her stomach and the feeling of control, the knowledge that she could turn the drinking on and off like a tap. Thinking, it’s not that I’m addicted but that drinking the correct amount seems impossible. It was either nothing or as much as I could hold. Who wouldn’t want the feeling of having a combustion engine inside your chest, the ability to run barefoot over glass and not feel a thing? But that night, riding the crest without tipping over.

She is remembering Daniel’s parents saying go ahead, have children. If the world is ending, you might as well get the joy of watching someone grow up, of having someone to love so much that a piece of you is always thinking about them no matter where you are. She is remembering being struck by the phrase, A piece of you is always thinking about them no matter where you are.

She is remembering the day she found out she was pregnant. Telling Daniel, You have to stop drinking and smoking, fucking around with our lives. This is real; we’re adults now. Not letting him see the panic, the desire to drink and drink until tasting oblivion but not quite reaching it. Wanting a barrier between her and that possibility.

Daniel saying, Our situations are the containers that shape our lives, as he carried six-packs and office boxes full of bourbon bottles to the curb.

Asking, What does that mean?

It means we’ll figure it out.

Daniel labeling the boxes:

Free, please take! 

Good quality. We stopped drinking for our baby. 

Save the Earth,

Your Neighbor

She is remembering Jovie crawling and then standing up and then walking.

Daniel saying, It scares me so much.

What? she’d asked.

Every moment I’m not watching her, and every moment I am watching her.

Saying, A piece of you is always thinking about her no matter where you are—

What?

What about your parents—never mind.

Laying at the bottom of the stairs in the middle of the night after uncounted glasses of bourbon. If she doesn’t count, she can’t be scared by the number. Thinking, no matter where you are. No matter where you are. No matter where you are.

Rain, rain, rain. Joan visiting for Jovie’s fourth birthday. Storm drains clogged with leaves and garbage. Cars splashing water from the street onto their front porch.

Joan saying, This weather, this fucking weather. Can’t let it decide what you do.

Setting up lunch at the rotting picnic table in their backyard covered with a giant umbrella. Shoes sinking into the porous ground.

Joan laughing, saying fuck it! and then slapping a hand over her mouth. Sorry, Eliza, sorry, Jovie! Jovie jumping with two feet to create the biggest splash. Four sets of shirts and pants bunched together over the shower rod like soggy, deflated humans.

The next day, hearing that the airport runways were covered in two feet of water. The lowest point in the city, practically below sea level. The Delaware could overtake it without even trying.

Joan saying, Who planned this? What idiots.

The airport delaying and delaying. Eliza coming home from work to find puzzles half-completed and dinner partly made, the sink full of dishes, Joan still in her pajamas. Jovie having so much fun she fell asleep in her clothes every night.

A week later, finding Joan in the kitchen, standing in the cool glow of the refrigerator. It was in the mid-90s and swampy, and their air conditioner was deemed non-essential by the city since there was no one under the age of 3 or over the age of 65 in the house.

Saying, You okay, Joanie?

Joan saying, Yes. The cool air just feels good on my skin.

Don’t leave it open too long.

Okay. Hey, what if I just stayed here?

What?

What if I just stayed here. I like being here with you. Here is as good a place as any.

As good a place as any for what?

For everything. For being hot and going to the grocery store and playing with Jovie on the carpet.

Thinking, Is that what life is? How tedious it sounds.

Don’t worry. The airports will reopen soon.

Wishing she had said to Joan, Then stay.

Three weeks later, hearing on the radio that the airports were opening. Leaving immediately from work, no explanation to her supervisor, who was sitting in one of the pleather waiting room chairs reading a novel. The internet had been down all week, no one had worked for days, but everyone who had kids still came in, hoping for a paycheck. And silence.

Taking Joan to the airport and staying with her for five hours as they got her tickets, checked her bag, waded through security. When they got near the front, saying, Here you are.

Joan saying, Yes, goodbye. Love you, too. Joan taking a folded envelope out of her pocket and handing it to Eliza. Joan saying, We’ll meet there if we ever need it.

On the outside of the envelope, in Joan’s loose handwriting, the address of their grandparents’ house in the Poconos. On the inside, a set of keys.

Saying, But we don’t even own it anymore.

The new owners live in the city and never go out there. They didn’t even change the locks.

Kissing, hugging, Joan going off through the airport doors.

Bringing new boxes of liquor into the apartment. Arguing with Daniel in whispers. Saying, If the world is ending, I need something, give me this, give me this. I can control it.

Daniel saying, Fine, but I won’t touch it, I can’t touch it, I won’t be your reason.

Saying, Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

Dosing out the bottles carefully. No more than a drink a day, evenings only. Weeks of tentative, joyous success before evenings became afternoons became lunch. One becoming two becoming four becoming six becoming eight.

Their yellow sedan driving into the stoop outside their apartment. Thinking who did that, was that me? How surprising it was. That was what she felt most, surprise.

The worst snowstorm in the city’s history. Losing power and heat, snow so thick all they could see was white out the windows. Not even a scented candle for light. Going to the bathroom at three in the morning and finding Jovie in her coat and boots, standing on a stool to get a better look through the open window, her torso halfway out like she’d already started to fall. Grabbing Jovie by the shoulders and pulling her away from the window, then shutting it with a slam. Picking Jovie up and carrying her back to her room while she cried and kicked.

Saying, Never, ever, ever open those windows.

I wasn’t going to go out; I just wanted to look! I was just looking!

Snot shining around Jovie’s mouth and on her chin, dripping down onto her coat.

Putting Jovie in bed in her coat and boots, throwing the blankets over her, holding down her kicking legs. Thinking, I will love you no matter what you do, no matter where you are, but don’t do that, stay safe for me, stay safe.

Staying there, like a weighted blanket, until Jovie fell asleep, and then finishing a bottle of gin and hoping her hands would stop shaking. Thinking, what if I’d been too drunk then? What if I saw her fall or accidentally pushed her out and forgot about it until the next morning? What if the next time the car hits her instead of the porch?

Remembering when Daniel grew out his beard, running his brush-bristle cheeks up and down her thighs. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel.

Receiving Joan’s letter. The letter saying, Come now. We’re here already. I was having nightmares of bridges collapsing and being stuck a few states away from you. Jim is here. Just come out and see what you think, if it could work. Come now. The postmark three weeks old.

She is remembering considering telling Daniel. Considering telling Daniel, except, except.

Thinking it’s just an experiment.

Thinking he will say No, if he says anything.

Thinking he will probably not even say No—he has said hardly anything to me since I brought the boxes back—but if he did say something, he will say It’s best to be with people. He believes in the city, maybe in a way that only someone from a small town can. He believes in the power of the city to sustain itself, to keep going through sheer will, to sustain its permanence. He gets upset when bars and shops he’s never been in close down. The city that’s been here since before the declaration, before Washington was even born, he’d said once. There were always people everywhere in this country, she’d said. Just not white people. Right, he’d said. Fair.

Thinking maybe they will do better without me, without someone who can’t be trusted to remember what she did the day before, who likes giving in and taking the drink, making a night out of it. Who prefers a string of disconnected days to long, steady hours preparing food and learning how to sew and making candles out of animal fat.

Thinking, but maybe I can become that person. Do I want that?

Writing, A piece of me will always be thinking about her, no matter where I am, on a notecard and putting it on the kitchen table. Thinking about changing it to say, “thinking about you,” but deciding against it. Taking the boxes out the sidewalk. Writing,

Free! 

Please take. Drink responsibly.

Mourning the earth, your neighbor. 

Deciding to leave them the car, walking to the train station, and then walking three hours to the house. Joan welcoming her as if she’d just come back from a run, nodding towards her old room and saying, You’ll be in there, of course. Where are Jovie and Daniel?

Saying, Not coming, I don’t think. Maybe later. Not answering any other questions about Jovie.

She is remembering learning from Jim about foraging edible plants and tying knots in fishing line for hooks, braiding rope out of old plastic bags and long grass and bits of wool. Jim the boy scout, Jim the man’s man she could never take seriously, Jim, the man who wanted to be a father so badly and will probably never be. Sifting flour and counting cans of vegetables. Stripping pine branches and bark off cut logs and leaving them to dry. To burn well, they must be dry.

The first week, then two weeks, then four weeks. Joan stopping her questions about Jovie, about Daniel, and in a way that being a blessing. The long hours of the sober day, the sober morning, the sober afternoon, the sober night. Quietness and stillness unlike any she could remember as if she’d slipped outside the whole world or misremembered that another world had ever existed.

She is remembering stacking wood, reading books about septic systems and well water, digging latrine trenches, boiling jars to sterilize them, ripping old bedding and clothes into bandages. Going on long walks to map the immediate perimeter and scout nearby houses.

Saying What if it’s not enough, Joan?

Thinking what if, after all the work, the necessities of life carefully prepared, what she really missed was something that she could not find or make, like her friends or Jovie’s school or her old neighborhood, its nineteenth-century rowhouses that had been built along the trolley lines, the gnarled trees that grew around poles and power lines.

A car pluming dust down the driveway. Thinking, Daniel and Jovie, Daniel and Jovie, Daniel and Jovie. Instead, a college friend of Joan’s arriving with the dust. The friend telling stories of the city. A dangerous place. Full of crime and starved animals.

Asking the friend, How many people are still there?

Him responding, Who bothers to count?

What about the parks, the museums, the rivers?

Who cares about them? Buildings are rotting, and people are being killed by roof collapses, fires, lead paint, asbestos insulation, contaminated water, waist-deep floods. They started turning off the electricity after sunset to conserve resources. Some people still work during the day, and then at night there’s nothing to do but sleep.

Asking, did you come from there?

The friend saying, No, I wouldn’t go near that place. Haven’t been in years.

Joan saying, We’re safe up here. The floods can’t reach us; the mountain air is clean, and the well still works.

Coming back from the toilet, seeing Joan and the friend in the forest, fucking desperately, almost cruelly. Hiding herself belly down in the thick forest loam, spongy and sharp as an old mattress, unable to look away. Joan holding a pine tree in her hands, completely naked. Joan’s skin covered in red splotches. Wanting to move, to close her eyes, but being unable to translate that desire from brain to muscles. She does not know anymore where her life ends, and the lives of others start around her. And there is something fascinating about their bodies, about their sounds. They are not like the animals that live in the forest; they are loud and obtrusive, their skin and clothes cut like neon through the carefully laced background of green-yellow leaves, mottled trunks, fermenting forest soup. And in the underbrush, Eliza, like a deer, spending so much time alone has made her timid, rooted in place by the sound of human footsteps. Thinking where is the line, how do animals know when to stay still and when to run?

A knife slip while chopping root vegetables just to see. Just to test that she’s still here. Seeing the slit in her hand slowly unfurl before the blood wells. Silly. Two weeks later, scraping along the jagged rocks by the lake. A week after that thrusting her hand into boiling water. Thinking maybe it is better if I’d seen what happened in the city. Thinking maybe I’d rather be dead in the city than safe in the mountains. Thinking, two years. God, how could it have been two years?

*

It was not the thought of any one person that compelled her to wake, to slip a children’s mountain bike out of the shed, to pack the extra inner tubes in her backpack even though she was not sure they were the right size. It was simply the feeling that she was floating away from the rest of the world, from Daniel and Jovie and even Joan and Jim, from the mountains and the trees and the small, two-bedroom cabin. She was losing clarity. Her mood was unpredictable; she rarely knew what day of the week it was. The feeling of boundaries was gone, between her and her environment, between thoughts that were reasonable and those that were dangerous, between missing Jovie and Daniel and remembering why she had come in the first place. She felt like something left too long in water, on the border of dissolving.

She was worried about having enough to drink and eat, about getting tired and not being able to finish in one day, about being attacked. But mostly about something going wrong with the bike and being stuck a hundred miles away from the city. When she left, she knew she could not go back.

Riding the bike was life-giving. The air was cool and calm, and it made a sound when it whizzed around her head that she’d forgotten about. It lapped at her ears. For so long, the sounds she’d known were animal or human. But these sounds, the wind and mechanical whirr, these reminded her of the old world. Speed. Machinery on pavement. Early morning city streets slick with rain. She almost smelled coffee and plastic trash bags, car exhaust and dog urine.

She knew the highways were her best chance. Flat and straight, and hopefully not too potholed. Much better than cycling through back roads, damaging the bike, and getting lost. It took all day, with only a few breaks to eat and pee, but she didn’t tire. By the time she was approaching the city, it was getting dark.

And now she is on the hill with her bike, sitting and remembering and deciding. Deciding what to say to Daniel if she goes back to their old apartment and he’s still there. What do you say to someone who you’ve betrayed like that?

She walks east into the city, rolling the bike along with her. She’s unfamiliar with approaching from this direction, through Cobbs Creek Park at the west end of the city and onto Baltimore Avenue. She expected chaos or silence. Blackened buildings, or perhaps cult signs painted onto walls. She expected fences and death, emptiness and hungry stray dogs. She didn’t expect sweet night air, the droning whine of cicadas. Murmurs of conversations and shouts, live music. She thinks, People are spread out here, all the way to the river’s dark edge and over that to the Delaware and over that to the sea. The city feels unbelievably large, each block a little universe. She passes friends and couples walking, people walking alone. A few bicycles click down the middle of the street, moving slowly to navigate the cratered asphalt, the protruding metal of the trolley tracks, straight and taught as guitar strings. She is used to this darkness. It is the darkness of the country, the sticky, tangible darkness that your eyes can turn to a navigable gray-blue if you stay in it long enough. A darkness clear enough for moonlight to cut through and guide your feet. Usually Eliza would walk quickly down a dark street like this, listening for footsteps behind her. But she has the bike, she can always ride away. She is slowed by the sounds, the sensation, immersed in it like liquid, that there are thousands of other people around her.

She is thinking, what if they’ve moved; what if Daniel is in love with someone else? Thinking, I don’t care, I came back for Jovie and Daniel and even our neighbors, in whatever way I can have them.

She is walking to the front door of the apartment with a plan. A plan to say, No matter where I was, a piece of me was always thinking of you. The two of you. Always, always. But thinking that was not, is not, enough.

Daniel opening the door.

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Robert Sorrell Bynum is a bi short story writer who grew up in the Midwest but became an adult in Philadelphia. In the city, he was a member of the Kelly Writers House Writers Workshop for 5 years where he first wrote and workshopped his Marguerite McGlinn Prize story “Here is as Good a Place as Any.” His nonfiction, journalism, and book reviews have been published in the South Side Weekly, Mosaic: Art and Literary Journal, and Philly lit mag The Cleaver.  Robert pushes the boundaries of realism in his fiction while still being deeply engaged in the dynamics, nuances, and politics of the present. He is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he lives with his partner, Elizabeth.