Five Good Things About New Jersey

Walt Whitman Rest Stop, New Jersey Turnpike

I was too old to use the ladies’ room, but my mother had to shit.

“I can’t leave you,” she said. “Children get abducted from these places.”

I was tall enough to look my mother in the stomach. Too tall to bend down and steal glances of ankles ending in high-heels under gaps beneath stalls. I did it anyway. My mother knew I was too old to be there. She’d already found my cousin’s Playboy tucked beneath the language arts book and the binders in my Spiderman backpack.

“Keep your head up,” she said. I didn’t.

Girls patrolled every sink, hands cupped with water. They all seemed to be in cahoots. They smirked and sipped and slurped from their hands. My thing swelled in my corduroys. I bent like I had a stomach ache and flipped my bulge into the waistband of my pants. A girl with a blond ponytail and a rash of acne across her forehead spotted me and pointed.

“Little pervert. He’s got a boner.”

Run, I thought, but there wasn’t anywhere to run. Just the road and the rest stop.

Too tall to hide, I ducked into the stall with my mother and pinched my nose.

One Good Thing

We couldn’t get married in New Jersey. We lived close enough to New York that Paul didn’t care. After some neighborhood kids chucked a brick through the bay window of our living room, Paul was hesitant to leave the house unattended. He refused to call the cops. No one, not even our families, knew we were getting married.

Ruth, our elderly, cross-eyed neighbor, tended the house the two days we were gone.

We spent a night at the Waldorf Astoria. Paul had to work on Monday.

On the ride back, Paul phoned Ruth to let her know we were running late.

“I have to go,” said Ruth.

When we pulled into the driveway, Paul observed the darkness.

“She probably went home,” I said. “You didn’t expect her to stay the whole weekend?”

“We shouldn’t have left,” said Paul. “How’s an old lady supposed to do anything?”

Paul opened the front door. “Ruth?”

The lights flashed on. Ruth held a cake with blue icing: Congratulations to the Happy Couple!

“How did you know?” Paul trembled when he said it.

“Isn’t it obvious?” She looked at both of us with crossed-eyes. I couldn’t tell who she was looking at.

The Walt Whitman House, Camden New Jersey

 Mom said to keep my fingers off the glass.

“Why is it leaves?” I said. “Don’t you say blades of grass?”

The cabinets bored me, as did the books inside of them. What I wanted was to get on the dusty old bed in the next room, the one the man said the poet died on. I’d never met a poet or a dead person, or jumped on a bed that was older than I was.

Mom got busy talking to the man, so I crept into the bedroom. The bed had this shelf above it with books and a glass bowl and a set of teeth with one tooth missing. The glass bowl looked nice and old, so I reminded myself to jump away from it. I climbed on the bed and gave a test bounce. Before I got my balance, the frame cracked and the mattress started to sink. It felt like quicksand. I grabbed the only thing I could—the shelf—but it broke easier than the bed. The bowl crashed to the floor with the books. The teeth chattered once, and spilled like marbles.

I paid for it. I cut lawns all summer.

 The Fallen Mayor of Medford

Father dragged us to this party in New Jersey. My brother George and I stalked the buffet for abandoned cocktails.

“Talk to anyone,” said father. “Anyone but Myers.” He flashed a picture of a bald man with glasses and closed eyes. The man didn’t have a shirt on.

Myers and my father belonged to the same fraternity. Father said Myers had disgraced himself, but wouldn’t say how.

George spotted Myers before I did, and waved like an idiot. “He’ll probably give us booze,” said George.

Myers was friendly, nicer than father. He told George and me a story about this boy that said he caught a humongous fish. Problem was, he hadn’t even gone fishing. The boy was scared of the river. He had a picture of the fish, so the people all believed him. Myers was about to finish the story when my father’s fist crashed against his temple.

“Pervert,” said father. “Not my boys.” He glared at George.

George pointed to me. “It was all his fault.”

My father grabbed me and shook. George pulled at Myers, tried to get him up, but he was too heavy. When I saw that, I wasn’t too sore with my brother.

The Jersey Shore

Yes, there were drunk girls wrapped around chairs, each other, and the columns of balconies. I didn’t care, though. I waded out with my jeans rolled up. I imagined Kate as she paced and checked her watch in Halifax. Fuck. It was a long drive. What made her want to go to college in Canada? Couldn’t say, but it started to piss me off.

The Jersey Shore receded in the shadow of the pier. A crab nipped my toe. All those sandbars. Myrtle Beach. Virginia Beach. Chincoteague and Assateague.

I took my time. You have to work the right words. “Marry me,” wouldn’t move a girl like Kate. I knew—it took gestures.

I trudged away from the water, the sand gritty and spackled to my feet. I plopped down with the note-pad still in my pocket. I could write it all down, but it would count more if I could remember.

My legs cut the Atlantic. I stepped without seeing. I moved or the water moved or we only appeared to move because of each other. We were like points on a map. I hoped our legs had been in the same water. At the same time, I meant.  

I’ve Got Hands, Don’t I?

While fishing with my father, I saw dead things for the first time. We had had no luck. Uncle Gene and my father wrangled over heading back. We had a heifer with calf. It was due, and my father prayed for clean birth.

Then Uncle Gene had a fish on. A mean one. The johnboat pitched and rocked with the shift of weight beneath his flannel. The trees over the pond turned the water a lush scum color. I sat in the middle of the boat, legs to Uncle Gene.

“Paul,” said Uncle Gene, to my father. “Get the pliers. Get the hammer ready.”

Uncle Gene had size on my father. He bunked on the farm. He snoozed in the workshop with a woodstove. The cows belonged to my father, but Gene tagged the calves by sight.

“Gene,” said my father.  ”They aren’t for keeping.” He passed Uncle Gene the pliers. I didn’t see the hammer by my father’s muck boots.

“Like hell,” said Uncle Gene. His bass pierced the water.

“When something’s underwater,” I asked my father, “and it’s getting pulled up, does it feel like it’s falling up?”

“Ask him,” said Uncle Gene. He pulled the writhing fish from the water by its bottom lip.

“Hooked him in the damn throat,” said my father.

“Don’t matter. Not where he’s going.” Uncle Gene smoothed the fins and hugged the bass with his bare hand. He fed the boney mouth the pliers and pulled. He worked the hook out and held the fish up like a dirty pair of underwear. “The hammer,” said Uncle Gene.

“I didn’t bring the goddamn hammer.”

“Don’t need it. I’ve got hands, don’t I?” Uncle Gene raised his mitt and squared it with the side-rib of the johnboat. He swung the fish like a hammer and smashed its head against the metal rib. He dropped the fish. It flopped and twitched and gasped between his muck boots and mine.

“Shouldn’t have done that in front of the boy,” said my father.

“Has to learn, don’t he?” The fish canted on the bottom-rib of the boat like a lever, its head raised, its mouth gaping.

“Pa, it’s still alive?” I had my head turned to my father.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’ll run out .” I turned back to the fish and closed my eyes.

My father and Uncle Gene humped the johnboat through the reeds and the cattails, and the fish thrashed alive against the metal floor. It was a bulky sound. I covered my ears. I found a soft, flat stone, big as a saucer, in the reeds. I put it in my pocket. Uncle Gene carried the fish in a burlap sack. He slung it over his shoulder as we walked. I couldn’t keep up. My father carried me up the gravel road, through the pine forest. The trees fell back and the cattle field swelled into view.

“Pa, look,” I said. I pointed. “Past the hill. The eagles.”

“Those aren’t eagles,” said my father.

 

My father told me not to look. He set me down and Uncle Gene dropped the burlap sack.

“Could’ve saved it,” said my father.

“Got seven more with calf,” said Uncle Gene.

I made my feet quiet and slinked up the hill. My father and Uncle Gene crouched low, the dead calf on the ground. It was wet and limp. The mother turned circles against the birds and bellowed.

I snuck back down the hill and snagged the burlap sack and spilled it. The fish jerked in the grass. Its mouth closed and opened on invisible words.  I rubbed the smooth stone in my pocket and took it out. I raised my hand and squared it above the metal eye of the fish. I wept. I brought my hand down like a hammer and wept.

The Fine Crystal Bowl

Looking back, she couldn’t swear that much had happened standing there before the front door, not in the physical sense of things. The only consequence, it seemed, had been the falling and subsequent shattering of the fine crystal bowl upon the brick walkup, a family heirloom rescued only minutes earlier from another certain destruction at the hands of her senile mother.

The strange incidence of her house key sticking in the familiar lock, a lock it had slid into a few thousand times with the relative ease of a young hand slipping into a satin dress glove, was only odd in a way relative to what she had been holding at the time. Even the bulk of the awkward load which she attempted to master, as one might demand, in vein, one’s own children to remain close, at a huggable distance, though they have clearly transcended the reach of such simple affectation, had all seemed perfectly manageable at the time.

This, though not precisely, had been the semiconscious, shifting content of her mind as she gathered the load from the minivan, consisting of two plastic jugs of water, one tucked beneath each arm, and the twelve pack of toilet paper clamped beneath her chin. The crystal bowl had been an afterthought, cradled between the travel pillows her children had once tossed about the car as projectile expressions of the boredom and sleeplessness of driving the unspecified distance to destinations which felt faintly unreachable, even mythic. At least that’s how she recalled car travel from her own childhood, though its memory too was vague and distant. True, she had thought, the fine crystal bowl could wait. There was nothing to keep her from taking the toilet paper and the water jugs into the house and simply returning afterward, or at any unspecified time, for the fine crystal bowl. Conversely, she considered, and yes, she was still thinking about all of this long after the dropping of the fine crystal bowl, it would have been just as easy to leave the water jugs and the toilet paper behind, even though the rational which followed this line of thinking was clearly irrational. She could go three days without the water, and if she couldn’t, there was always the tap. She could clean herself with paper towels. After the shattering of the fine crystal bowl upon the brick walk up, she resigned it all to laziness.

Her mother had grown senile, and many a family heirloom had passed with a similar fate. She perceived that her ninety year old mother, through the fog of her dementia, saw something more clearly than she, as if the purposeful smashing of priceless family heirlooms actually served some veiled utility, a preventative function. Wasn’t that the way things happened, she asked herself now? Wasn’t that the irony of things? That as soon as someone found them useful again, the grim outline of mortality would resettle upon their perimeters, as a thick dust upon an untouched mantle. It seemed to her the fate of loved objects to meet a violent if not accidental end. It was the abandoned or the lost that found their way up, unscathed, through the soil into the daylight and the dusty hands of the anthropologist. Perhaps museums were the only places where such things might honestly be preserved. She was beginning to see the truth in that. It was as if her mother’s condition endowed the old woman with an amount of harrowing foresight, illogical, yes, she thought, but withheld from the rest of the living world.

He Licks Her (A Tribute to Roberto Bolano)

November 7

Rummy and Cass split with my half of the money.

Cass had actually yelled Log! in the goddamn bank lobby. She actually said my name.
We were on the run. Rummy spilled gas on his only pair of jeans. At the Stop N Go—the real broke down one on Enterprise—Cass tried to tell me. The bank guard had fingered his piece. He had to be the hero. He had to give blood. He had these cheek flaps like a dog. His face had just melted there. It was pressed against the tile floor.

She actually said my name. Like nobody in Durham knows me—knows us. He Licks Her. A three piece. We haven’t played a show in over seven years, but somebody remembers. Somebody always remembers.

November 13

Ashville, Atlanta, Baton Rouge. Cass stole my Master Card and my twelve gauge. All I can say is those fuckers better duck. Better hope they hear me. Cass better watch the side of her pretty face. She better look for me in every goddamn window.

 

“Early” J. Watkins, Woodfin Police Department, Elk Mountain Road, Asheville NC, November 1989. Early’s good enough for now. Got a place off 70. Back in the woods. That’s where they found me. The ugly one, the boy. That one smelled like gasoline. Came up the road, said he and his wife needed gas. Didn’t see any car. He was too ugly to trust. It happened all too fast. I didn’t see her coming. She came around the corner of my shed looking cross-eyed down the long, black barrel. Like how-do-you-do. How do you like that? She was a pretty thing too. Would of kicked her clean into the shed, she’d pulled the trigger. She was all bowed up. Seemed kind of irate with old Ugly. Yelled some nonsense like “Log” and “the Alamo” but he just stood there, his black teeth out. Put his hand out like this. I’ve never been scared of dying, I tell you.

Little shithead stole my truck. I’d like to piss myself, the look on the pretty one’s face.

Rosita Wilson, Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department, Ashville NC, November 1989. When he told me his name was Log I was sure he was fooling, but that look on his face, like he was nine years old and some bully stole his ten speed, like it was the last ten speed on earth! He was a pretty one, and yeah, I’m not sorry to say, I put him up for the night, fed him a bowl of grits and bacon, sat up with him on the portico, pointed out the dog star, drank three bottles of wine, told him about Mr. Wilson and the blonde he took up with in Raleigh (he sells encyclopedias to housewives and swears to lots of things but to nothing more than the immutability [his word not mine] of encyclopedias. The market he means. It’s a long term investment, you see). I let him into my bed but all he wanted to do was spoon me and listen to records. He kept saying this name in his sleep. Something like Casey or Grass. I’m embarrassed to admit, I got a little jealous. He was gone in the morning.

He didn’t take anything. I’m not really sure why you brought me here. Is Log okay? Is everything alright?

Anthony “Tone” LeGrand, East Baton Rouge Parrish Sheriff’s Department, Baton Rouge LA, November 1989. The ugly one, he was on drugs or something. They came into my store, looked at magazines, made a call on the pay phone. She had me make a beef po boy with hot mustard and nothing else—I figured they were casing the place—but she didn’t even eat it. She just smelled it and handed it back to me. What the fuck was I supposed to say to that? I could only kind of hear what they said in front of the coffee maker. They were arguing about something. I heard the ugly one say something like Sonora, but the pretty one said a different place. New Orleans, I think. I’m pretty sure that’s where they headed.

Logan “Log” Barnett, NOPD, 8th District, November 1989. I found Rummy on Magazine St. Ugly ass Rummy. Stiff as hell in the only pair of jeans he had. I had Mr. Wilson’s Colt and fuck was it heavy. I felt pretty bad sliding out of old Rose’s house with her stinking husbands gun. But what can a southern man say? Revenge is like bacon and grits. Feels good while it sloshes around. Feels great until it’s all done and gone. Hell, I guess they’re in it worse than me. Rummy shot the bank guard. Cass instigated the whole thing. All I did was drive the car. Put me on the stand, chief. I’ll swear it happened. It really happened. Just like that. You can’t take anything. You can’t have anything I haven’t already pissed.

October 1

The judge went easy on me. They gave me a cell with a window. Five to ten for the whole business. I got out early for good behavior. No clue what happened to Rummy and Cass.

Rose put a word in, said she gave me the gun for protection, told the judge Rummy and Cass were the bad guys. Rose is a funny gal. We’re bunked up together now, in Asheville. At her place. She feeds me all the bacon and grits I want.

September 23

There’s another year going by—see it—outside the window.

Resurgence

She started to believe in the panacea of the bedbug-detecting dog, Masked Hunter.           PROPITIATION GUARANTEED, she read in the ad from the phone book. $110 per inspection. Male, three years old. Rat terrier. White with Zorroesque markings.

Her bedbug problem had begun over four months ago, though things had slightly improved. Not one of them—herself, her husband, their infant child—had been bitten in over a month. Despite the lapse, she still felt their invisible presence—on her legs, in the indeterminate spaces between her skin and other surfaces. No matter what she told herself, she couldn’t be sure they were gone. Everything has got to change, she would say. She repeated this religiously, though she couldn’t imagine herself changing.

Her husband had been hesitant to bring another dog into the apartment. Minnie, the Labrador mix they had had for three years before the birth of their child, had uncharacteristically snapped at her husband, late one night, as he lifted their baby from his crib. Minnie repeated this behavior several times, something she found odd, as the dog had never feigned biting either one of them before the baby came. And to confound things further, Minnie only did this when her husband arrived home late, which he did almost every night now, smelling heavily of vanilla-lime, coconut or pineapple. She first considered the new fragrant aura which enveloped him soothing and somehow medicinal. She attributed to these scents a cleansing affect upon her mind, which had been preoccupied in meditation upon the bedbug. Her husband blamed the dog’s sudden outbursts on a canine sensitivity to the new soaps recently applied at the office where he worked. She bought this initial theory, though it increasingly felt like an excuse. She found it strange that he only smelled of the fragrant soaps when he worked late. As if he were prone to using the bathroom in the evening, which she knew he was not.

He decided, and she reluctantly agreed, that it was the dog’s behavior which was strange, not his. They bathed Minnie in a solution from the vet and had her inspected for bedbugs at the shelter. They dropped the dog off with her friend, Margret, in the country. Margret was a dog person.

For a few days after Minnie’s departure, she would happen upon the dog’s short black hairs beneath the cushions of the sofa as she performed her daily, ritual vacuuming, or clinging to the lining of the box spring as she checked for fecal spots and molted carcasses. Once she had eradicated all of the black hairs, she somehow felt less secure, less safe.

Named for the assassin of the Reduviidae family of Arthropods, many cures had preceded Masked Hunter. Diatomaceous earth. The cock roach. The house centipede. Reduvius personatus, the insect namesake of Masked Hunter, one of which had bitten their infant child. Pesticides with names like malathion, pyrethroid, dichlorvos.
Propoxur had been the worst, the most toxic, but once, at four-forty in the morning and with the sentiment of a thousand apparitions of phantom legs upon her legs, she asked God to make her numb. An atheist, she had as much difficulty believing in pesticides now, as the itching grew worse, and with none of the familiar, visible symptoms. The rash: linear bite-marks blooming over time into the rosy blotches of a chain of Venn Diagrams. Her baby wore their scars upon his neck and wrist. Fecal matter. Pencil-tip blood smears on sheets. And finally―her anxiety. Episodes of paranoia overlapping into insomnia, even mild schizophrenia, or the terrible, rare sighting of an actual bedbug. She hadn’t seen one in over a month.

They couldn’t move due to rent control. The apartment had been a steal, and with her not working since the arrival of the baby, she conceded they had no other choice. This concession had triggered the start of something, a feeling akin to slipping down, of not being able to get her footing in the mud shoals beneath a steep embankment. She had barely perceived this at the time. She had been a PhD. candidate in medieval rabbinic literature, but had to defer the completion of her thesis due to the unexpected pregnancy.

She felt safest at the shopping mall. It embodied a serene sterility, an antiseptic property, evident in the plastic and fresh paper smells of piles and racks of new clothes. One Sunday afternoon, as she pushed her baby’s stroller through a frigid corridor of the mall’s atrium, she saw a woman with dreadlocks washing her face in a drinking fountain, and immediately thought of God. Was it judgment?

She felt as though she was being punished for something, some crime she had no recollection of committing. She watched the woman from a distance, and shuddered as she dipped a single dreadlock, thick and brown as a long cigar, into the clear stream of the fountain. What had she done to deserve this?

“The fuck you looking at?” said the woman, wringing the dreadlock over the fountain. “Get the fuck out of my house!”

“Children drink from that,” she said. She had suspected the woman was insane, too far gone to perceive that someone had noticed her unorthodox behavior, or even that what she was doing was atypical in the first place. She couldn’t look away. She felt an eerie suspicion resonating within her. She discerned something familiar, some kind of reflective quality in the woman’s face, glistening with the dripping water from the fountain.
“Do I come to your house and watch you wash your hair in your sink?”

The woman had begun to scream. As people gathered around them, an old man wearing a Harvard sweatshirt feigned a step forward, but retreated as the woman resumed her outburst. “Get the fuck out of my house!”

“I have just as much right,” she started to say, but stopped herself. She pushed the stroller away from the crowd of onlookers, embarrassment creeping and settling alongside her lividness, transmuting it into shame. She had recognized a dangerous quality in the woman’s face, a feature she hadn’t previously observed. The woman’s last outburst echoed through the tiled facade of the mall. Perhaps the woman had reiterated the indecorous command. She couldn’t be sure. Not in a place that suddenly felt so devoid of life—despite the crowds—a vicinity prone to echoes.

When she arrived home that afternoon, to an apartment empty of her dog and husband and of any pleasant memories these things might have once evoked, she cut her hair, letting each long ribbon fall into the bathroom sink. Curling into thick black coils beneath the running faucet, each lopped curl felt like a confession, an atonement for a mysterious though thoroughly suffered injustice.

Her haircut, angular in the incandescent glow of the bathroom mirror, emboldened her. She decided to respond to the ad for Masked Hunter. Her husband, working for the second Sunday in a row, wasn’t home to object. She had faith in Masked Hunter.
Her husband didn’t notice her hair until the following morning. She wasn’t even sure he had made it to bed the previous night, as she had actually fallen asleep early, slept in for the first time in months.

“You look like one of those French actresses,” he said, sliding a fried egg with a broken yoke onto her plate at the table. “You remember. The ones from the 60′s?” He ran his fingers through her hair. She shivered. Something about his appearance that morning sickened her. He looked like an overgrown child in his business suit. She found his leather shoes clumsy and comically large. She couldn’t remember the last time he had touched her like that. They hadn’t had sex  in over four months, not since the symptoms began. Though she felt lighter from the haircut, she couldn’t picture herself anywhere close to lying beneath him. As if the immense weight she had shed with the clipping of each strand of hair might suddenly return with his puerile bulk pressed against her. As the hand that stroked her hair settled upon her cheek, she found the vanilla-lime scent noxious and lost her appetite for the broken egg. She turned her head away from his hand, a gesture sharpened by the tinny, bell-like sound of her fork falling and striking the porcelain plate.

Her husband insisted they move the baby’s crib into the kitchen. After the first week of the infestation, she had quarantined the nursery with sheets of plastic and duct-tape, and purchased a new crib for their bedroom. Now her husband wanted to move the baby into the kitchen. It’s true, she thought, they had all three sustained bites in the bedroom, but they weren’t nearly as prolific as the ones suffered by the baby in the nursery. And further, not one of them had been bitten in over a month, not once. Every day, she tried to convince herself that the infestation was over, that Masked Hunter was merely a means of absolute confirmation. All of this offered little reassurance. She herself had only suffered a single bite this entire time, on the inner portion of her thigh. Its tactile memory was persistent.

But the kitchen? It was the only room in which her husband had faith. In which they had any hope of silently eluding the invisible presence of the bedbug. Or so he said. Her suspicion provoked an alternate theory. He wanted the baby out of their bedroom as her new haircut had awoken something dormant in his loins, an elasticity that needed room to expand, to express itself. Something less than hideous, but most definitely not for the eyes and ears of their infant child. Something animalistic and taboo, she thought. She noticed a bounce, a newfound buoyancy in the way he tossed the dry sauté pan and caught it by the handle like a juggler, like a slick street performer.

But she had no intention of moving the baby. She felt the kitchen, with its black-handled knives in the cutting block and the gas oven with its proclivity for finicky pilot lights, was no place for an infant child. But he wouldn’t let it go.  There was no fabric in the kitchen, he argued, no cushions. No warm place in which the bedbug might hide. True, but they had, she remembered, at his insistence, replaced most of their plush furniture with wicker equivalents, yet another of a steady accumulation of concessions. None of which included Masked Hunter.

On Thursday, they moved the baby’s crib into the kitchen. She had made an appointment with Masked Hunter behind her husband’s back, and felt the move to the kitchen a small concession for the slight infidelity. She was still working up the courage to inform him of the dog’s scheduled visit the coming Saturday.

She was in bed when he came home that night. Sickened by the pernicious smell of lavender beneath his fingernails as he stroked her boyish hair, she held her breath. She pretended to be asleep.

The next day, she had lunch with Margret, her friend that lived in the country. Margret came into the city once a month to purchase a special kind of kibble for one of her dogs. It was Margret that had shown her the ad for Masked Hunter. Margret was a dog person. In addition to their exiled dog, Minnie, she housed five others: a golden retriever with a missing leg; a beagle that had gone deaf with age; two Scotties, a brother and sister, perfect specimens of canine health and virility. And the rat terrier named Milky. Margret had told her these things, and would often give animated accounts of what she called the dog’s life in the country. Margret was one of the few people she spoke to anymore, someone she trusted and looked to for advice.

The small cafe brimmed with lunch-goers and yet felt strangely empty to her. It was as if something had been sucked out of it, as if the people and the forkfuls and spoonfuls of glistening bites had suddenly turned parasitic, all together and at once, eating up the necessary space and air of what should have been—but what was that, what should have been? Were restaurants the exclusive vicinage of lone wolf diners carrying thick novels and stray glances? She didn’t think so. The din of conversation and the cook’s calling of the orders and the ringing of the bell from the counter all seemed to hang in the air above her, feeling more like her memory of familiar sounds than their actual audible entities. What an odd feeling. She rarely sat down in public anymore. She had read an article in the paper about bed bug infestations, weeks before her baby wore the bracelet of bites around his wrist. Movie theater seats had been a primary culprit, along with massage parlors, motels, thrift stores.

As the waitress slid her plate of poached eggs across the table, a middle-aged man in a business suit, with a capacious gut but rather handsome complexion, winked at her from the lunch counter. She had once been attracted to men like this. He ran his thick fingers through oil-slicked hair.

“I think he likes your haircut,” said Margret.

“Is it normal to stop caring about sex?”

“No, I don’t think so, hon. It’s just a matter of recognizing a new phase in your life. It’s like Milky.”

“Milky?”

“The rat terrier I took in last year. I’m considering whether or not he might make a good candidate for bedbug training. Rat terriers make good bedbug dogs, if they’re trained properly.”

Masked hunter was a rat terrier. She had forgotten that. An immediate chill had pricked her legs at her friend’s mention of the bug. Her legs were the one part of her body where she had been bitten. A single rosy blotch, like a birthmark or a tattooed flower, had blossomed on her inner thigh, itching worse than anything she had ever known. She had to cut her nails and wear gloves at night, even now, to keep herself from scratching.

Margret signaled for the waitress and asked for a pepper shaker. The flecks of pepper on the white of Margret’s eggs sent another tremor through her numbness.

“Have you told him, hon? About Masked Hunter? He’s going to find out eventually.”

“No, I mean. I don’t think I can. I’ve grown frightened of him, Margret. I can’t really describe it.” She was lying. She had grown frightened of him in the same way he had grown frightened of dogs. It was like he could sense something in her that no one else could, a hideous thing she was desperate to conceal.

“He hasn’t hit you? You’d tell me if he hit you?”

“He doesn’t even raise his voice, Margret. It’s something else. It’s the way he looks at me. Like I’m crazy. It’s revulsion, I think. But whatever’s behind it, whatever makes him look at me like that, it’s like only he can see it. And he knows it, Margret. It’s like he’s holding it against me somehow.”

“Give me the word, hon. Minnie and I’ll be there. That apartment’s no good, hon. It’s not good, not for either of you.”

“I couldn’t leave him, Margret. He’d flip if I left. I know he would. He’d lose it if I took the baby.”
It started in the nursery. After they had vacuumed and sprayed the propoxur, they sealed the door with plastic sheets and tape. She had felt the death of something with its sequestering, as if each room in their apartment served a specific regulatory purpose, like an organ or a system of nerves. If the nursery were an organ, she once thought, which would it be? The heart? The womb?

The propoxur had been too toxic. She suspected it might have been illegal, though her husband assured her it wasn’t. She now felt the severity of this, and it pinched her stomach like a phantom cramp. She could never consciously move her child into that room again, no matter how many years might pass. The poison they had sprayed, never mind the memory of the bedbug, would never allow for the reclamation of her child’s room.

But was it irrational? Could she even shape herself into a vessel for rational thought anymore? She thought so, but it was a soft conclusion. The last actual sighting had occurred nearly a month ago, in their bedroom. She couldn’t bring herself to think about it now, not without scraping her legs with the exfoliative pad for twenty minutes or longer, beneath the scalding effluence of the shower head.

She had spoken to the last one, one of only five total visually confirmed over four months of sleep deprivation and failed placebos. She had woken as she did every night, seven or more times, terrified, throwing the sheets from the bed. Ninety-nine times out of one-hundred, she knew there was nothing there: phantoms, debris tracked into bed by her husband’s unwashed feet. She had scrubbed her legs in the nightly ablution of antibacterial soap and water, applied the talisman of diatomaceous earth. She had done everything she was supposed to. Such a morbid validation, finding the thing she had always known was there.

She had spoken to that bedbug as if praying, as if beseeching the omnipotent, invisible thing she had feared, but was desperate to confirm. Omnipresent in its unseen plurality, she felt the bug, as the unfelt singularity of the God she imagined, the God she had been hesitant to invoke. She had taken that bedbug, not yet distended with blood, and severed its head upon a dull fingernail.

After that, she was unable to sleep for three days. That was when her husband began to come home with the stench of vanilla and lime beneath his fingernails. She had found those smells pleasant once, but they had grown septic, as unbearable as the thought of the room her child was deprived. It seemed ironic to her now, but she didn’t feel like laughing. Laughter was as alien as any other small comfort. She hadn’t laughed in over four months.

He smelled like raspberries and red wine when he came home that night. His sweet odor made her feel like a child. She was sitting on the sofa in the living room with the hose of the dormant vacuum draped over the knee of her sweatpants. She thought she perceived the plastic smell of lipstick on his breath as he leaned in to kiss her on the forehead.
“I don’t think you’ve been working late,” she said as he hung his coat upon the rack.
“I guess I have been coming home earlier this week.” He sat down in the wicker rocking chair, adjacent to the sofa, and began to untie his leather shoes. “Things have finally slowed down, I think.” He looked her in the eyes for the first time. She saw it. He had just then realized something was wrong, but didn’t ascertain it from her words. She imagined how she must look, how she felt: short-haired and livid.  ”You know what?” said her husband. “Call the Loyola girl. We should go to the movies. You know what, I’ll call. We should go. Just me and you.”

“You don’t listen.” She sat up and straightened herself, moving her fingers over the hose of the vacuum as if it were the body of a musical instrument. “I said I know you haven’t been working late.” She felt something swell in her chest with each word. It was as if the repressed sounds of the last four months, of voices and bells and children laughing, were suddenly amplified by the growing feeling. She heard everything, from the ticking of the clock on the mantle to the sonorous cooing of her baby from the kitchen.
“What’s this about,” he said. “I think you’re implying something. I think you’re saying something you might regret.”

She thought he looked frightened, sitting there with his tie loosened and the comically large leather shoe still hovering in his hand. Great, she thought. At least she was no worse than, no lower than a dog. If he was still even frightened of dogs.

“I made an appointment with Masked Hunter,” she said. “They’re bringing him by in the morning.”

“I told you,” said her husband. She noticed the position of his tongue as he spoke. It jutted out between his teeth after every word.  “The last thing we need in this house is another goddamn dog.”

“I already paid the deposit,” she said, calculating the precise and most effective moment to run her fingers through her boyish hair.

“Like hell, you did,” said her husband. She could tell the gradient of his passion fell somewhere between livid and lustful. His confusion caused another acute swelling in her chest, a further amplification of sound. She now heard the neighbor’s television, its sitcom laughter, and a thumping from above―as if some newlywed couple were having vigorous sex on an unsound bed. She visibly perceived the flecks of spit and the pressure of his tongue against his teeth. The siren of an ambulance meandered up from the street below, followed by, or simultaneous to (she couldn’t tell, she felt both at once) the engine of an airplane burning its contrail across the opaque sky. She couldn’t see it, but she felt it.
“You know goddamn well we don’t have the money,” he said. “If we had the goddamn money to bring a dog into this house for every goddamn little thing that needed fixing, we could’ve moved out of this shit hole four months ago. Don’t laugh, goddamn it.”

But she couldn’t help it. The clock and the cooing and the television and the loud sex and the bells ringing from their countertops and the cafe conversations and the laughter of children and the voices of mothers’ screaming from the atriums of shopping malls, get the fuck out of my house, and the fork against the porcelain plate and the sirens and the contrails of  jet engines and the rasping of her husband’s teeth as he spit his words―all transmuted by the swelling in her chest into the profuse fit of laughter, as though she had never truly laughed in all her life. For a moment, his anger flashed, a violent twitch in his eyes which passed in an instant. She knew he felt emasculated, that her laughter had likewise reduced his arrogance into something feeble, a shriveled calves’ heart, something too good even for the numb and formless golem her husband had become. That she herself had become, those long four months, when the bedbug had usurped her devotion.
He slammed the door as he left the apartment, but their baby didn’t seem to notice. She hardly heard him stir: nothing more than an audible coo.

In the morning came Mort, the pest control specialist, with checker-piece-thick lenses and adult acne. Led by Masked Hunter, a dog blind to the lives of humans and dogs. Trained for the singular purpose, Margret had told her, to uncover the cilantro-coriander, rotten blueberry and almond smell of a bedbug colony.

“Going on vacation?” said Mort. He pointed to the suitcase and diaper bag stacked neatly in the corner of the foyer, his adult acne glistening with a reflective quality she implored herself not to forget.

“No.” She handed Mort the remainder of the $110 fee. “We’re not going on vacation.” The kitchen, she soon realized, through the impotent baying and nuzzling of cabinets, lacked the salvation they had imposed upon it, her infant child shrilling to the chorus of the dog.

Landscaping

Tom Landis received the call at noon—his father had been doing it again. A retired landscaper, he had cut the neighbor’s lawn. He had cut it, without anyone having asked him to.

The grandfather clock in the living room gave its last call of the fresh hour,  pouring its sun onto the kitchen table where Landis now sat, fingering the pages of a phonebook. His father had been asleep when Landis arrived, but Hilde, his father’s nurse, had since stirred the old man, and the doctor had been in to see him. The clock’s chiming offered a repose between his father’s banging on the wall of his bedroom—where Landis pictured his father, slumped into the chaise lounge, slipping down, little by little, mute and sedated—and the woody pacing of Hilde or his father’s doctor, their muffled whispers in the hallway beyond. As if the floor and their walking had voices.

“He points at the grass,” said Hilde, to the doctor. She ran her finger across the cover of the Golden Meadows Retirement Home brochure. “He points where the grass should be. At the lack of it.”

“I’ll ask if they have another pamphlet,” said the doctor. He had a syringe in his hand.

“I’m sure they have one with a garden. I specifically remember a garden.”

“One with pictures,” said Hilde. “This one hardly has any pictures. Shouldn’t they know? This is all a bad omen.”

Landis found the number he had been looking for and circled it with a green marker, the line of which turned brown atop the yellow page of the phonebook.

 

His father hadn’t spoken a word in five years. Time must slow in a world without voices, peel itself back, retract as curtains from a window, sucked into the vacuum. His father’s glistening head, floating above the stockade fence. His father had been mowing the neighbor’s lawn. Landis’ dead mother hung the white linens he pretended were the happy ghosts, the ones from the book his father used to read, so that Landis wouldn’t be frightened of things he could not see. The ghosts, on vacation from the attic or the basement, sunning themselves, sheets he hid behind so his mother might find him.

Landis was no longer in the kitchen. He was not in his father’s bedroom. Alone, watching the second hand tick into the shadow of his erect body,  projected upon the face of the grandfather clock by the fading light from the front-room window, having paused between what he was doing—straightening a framed photograph of his dead mother on the wall (she had been planting violets in the flowerbed before the fall of white linen from the clothesline, a garden spade raised in her right hand and the perceptible crust of soil, brittle upon the white glove) and walking to the kitchen—shuddered, a shadow other than his own having moved across the six-forty face of the outmoded timepiece (the words Tempus Fugit across its six-forty forehead), a clock that lived by the cranking of human hands, Hilde’s hands now, and whose gears turned like memories or bad conversation. The shadow from the window had eclipsed his own shadow across the face of the clock, but only for a moment, now moving away with the body that had cast it, suddenly, from beyond the window, only to lift it, surreptitiously, from the temporal face of the clock. It knocked three times now upon the front door.

He thought he’d like to kiss her.

Seated at the kitchen table and smoking 100 cigarettes and letting the ash of each grow long before severing on the plastic lip of the ashtray: Maria Luisa, Hilde’s nightly reinforcement, as if the gaunt German was a field officer at the end of some long campaign, a slow march in the black forests of that country.

Maria Luisa picked at a crusty spot on the kitchen table with the long pink nail of her finger. His father’s door slammed. Landis lifted his head, suddenly, as if waking from a dream.

“I opened his window,” said Maria Luisa. “Don’t worry. He falls in and out of sleep like a child.” She stood up and opened the kitchen window, bird song coming through it as though through a speaker on a stereo, as if someone had suddenly turned up the volume.

Landis stood up and walked over to the sink, where the salmon was still thawing. He sat back down at the table. Maria Luisa took his hand and squeezed her fingers against his palm. He felt her warm, pink fingernails. The thought of their color made him queasy. Wasn’t salmon supposed to be orange?

Landis suddenly felt the urge to lean across the table and kiss his father’s nurse.

“What was the thing you said?” said Maria Luisa. “Temper Fugis?”

“Tempus Fugit,” said Landis, suppressing the former urge. “Time flees.”

“Yes, it does. It’s poetic. The way you saw your mother, I mean. For the last time. In the face of the clock.”

“Tempus Fugit. I can’t conjure her face without seeing it across her forehead.”

“Conjure?”

“To make it appear out of nowhere.”

“Like magic?”

“Something like that.” Landis squeezed her hand before releasing it, but Maria-Luisa grabbed his elbows.

“I saw a magician, Mr. Tom. When I was a girl, in Mexico. He pulled a dove from his sleeve. He conjured it. It flew up to the ceiling, and when he called it, it came back. He made it disappear, and conjured it again. It conjured in a tall white cage. I wept the whole walk home, into my mother’s breast. It was the most amazing, the saddest thing I ever saw.”

 

Caves (from Word Problems)

Lou can’t figure out why on earth the trance won’t come.

The campfire flickers pink on his eyelids. Though he can’t see, the pine straw crunch of the other student’s squirming―in and out of their failed, statuesque poses―upsets his concentration.

Lou is on a writer’s retreat in the Appalachian mountains. He hasn’t been able to write a single line of poetry for the last seven weeks. He’s finally doing something about it; at least that’s what he tells himself.

R.C. Andrews leads the group in spontaneous chant, chirping more like a cricket than a friar. R.C. Andrews is a big deal! Lou, and probably every other student sitting cross legged around the camp fire, believes R.C. Andrews to be the real thing. A bona fide, writer-genius. She publishes her stories in the New Yorker.

Enough said, thinks Lou.

“It’s like the allegory of the cave,” says R.C. Andrews, brandishing a nearly empty bottle of cab and raising it to her lips like a comic book speech balloon. “The actual sun in our sky sheds no more light upon the vast set of objects we seek to describe, to animate, than this dwindling campfire. Liam, be a dear and fetch some twigs.”

She’s been calling Lou Liam for the last three days.

R.C. Andrews drains the bottle, her campfire silhouette taking on the appearance of an elephant raising its trunk, just before embarking on a rampage.

“And, while you’re at it, Linus, fetch me another bottle of cab from the cooler.”

Linus, he thinks. She drinks red wine cold. She called him Linus.

Lou can’t decide which twigs to take back to the campfire. Every stick he snaps or kicks with his hiking boot seems either too small or the opposite―too branch or log like.

He can’t really blame her, though. After three miserable days in the woods, he himself can’t remember any of the other student’s names―except for Joy Marty.

Joy Marty has published a story in the journal at her college. She is clearly the best student-writer at the retreat, at least that’s how Lou sees it. R.S. Andrews calls her Joy Marty. Enough said, thinks Lou.

Joy is exceptionally shy. Lou means that in the best way possible. It’s like she has some innate, sonar-like quality that blinks brighter and faster at precisely the best moment for blushing. A deceleration of the blinking translates into a bowing  of the head and the pushing of loose strands of hair behind her earlobes, translucent in the firelight. Nothing she does seems haphazard. Nothing feels forced, either. Lou is working up the courage to ask Joy Marty about the story she published in the college journal. It’s titled, “The Death of Something.” Student critics have written it off as a cheap, Hemingway imitation, but Lou isn’t convinced.

Joy’s story is about a college out west that admits so many students they have to commission portables from the local high school. “To handle the overflow,” she writes, as if the college is Noah’s ark, and the portables a string of dingies floating in its wake.

If things go well tonight, Lou might even work up the courage to read a few of his old poems to Joy. Maybe the ones about the flood in Mississippi; he doesn’t hate those half as much as he hates his other poems

When he returns with the twigs, R.C. Andrews says, “The first image that flutters across your eyelids―capture it.”

She has the fresh wine bottle clutched in her talons like a river trout.

“Once you have it firmly in the fingers of your mind, retreat to the cabin of your choosing. You must set about sketching it immediately, before it becomes lost to the darkness. Knead it with the fingers, until it too settles into the desired consistency. Two to three pages, dears, you have one hour.”

But Lou hasn’t channeled a single image all night. The trance has failed him. He kicks a pine cone along the path leading up to the cabins, but mislays it in a patch of Virginia Creeper.

What’s the point? His images are as convoluted and tangled as the vines of the Creeper; what he lacks, as sharp and clear as the points of their bladed leaves.

He checks each cabin through the fogged windows, finding each preemptively occupied with the steaming ideas of other students. A chink of bottles resounds from the campsite. They must really be piling up, thinks Lou. He imagines the bottles into a crude stack of cedar casks―but wait―who would put anything they hoped to someday drink in a cedar cask? It would all come out too floral, too effervescent. He strings a rope around the barrels and fashions them into a raft. A river might get him where he needs to go. But as soon as he pushes the makeshift raft into the water, the barrels morph into pine cones. The rope falls loose atop the running surface, like water moccasins swimming for their lives. The hawk, perched high in the pine trees and waiting, sharpens its talons on a rind of bark. The glassy effluence will engulf them all.

What luck! Lou finds Joy―the Joy Marty―alone and steaming up the furthest cabin, the one by the well where the whole camp takes their water―why the retreat people decided to tap the well so far from the main complex of buildings makes little to no sense to Lou. Joy’s hand moves so rapidly he can hardly catch its outline. She doesn’t even look up from the blur of pencil and recycled paper on the desk before her. She must be having some kind of trance, thinks Lou. He sits at an empty desk and takes a notebook from its cubbyhole. He wants to sharpen a pencil in the electric sharpener on the desk, but thinks better of it. Joy scribbles like a mad woman, like a machine trying to burn up its engine.

She must notice him for the first time, he thinks―the short, cutting sounds of her pencil, like scissors running through taught fabric, has suddenly stopped. She raises her head from the paper as if opening her eyes—Lou is staring at the back of her head, of course, so he can’t see her eyes, but he imagines them open—as if her eyes had settled for a time upon the arid desert of an undecided dream. She doesn’t look at him, but speaks―to him, or to whom or whatever else might be listening― “It’s more like a desert than a cave.”

“Or a river, even,” says Lou.

“Even better. Is that you?” She’s still looking down at the pad of paper on the desk.

“Who?”

“Lou?”

“I think so. I mean, yeah, it’s me.”

“I thought so. You breathe too fast. I can hear you breathing a mile away. Take a deep breath. It’s not as difficult as you might think. It doesn’t have to be.”

Lou takes a deep breath, like a whale sucking water and krill through its baleen.

“Thanks,” he says. “I tend to forget that part.” He writes a few words on the notepad, nodding his head with the rhythm of his hand.

“Don’t mention it,” she says. “We all need reminding sometimes. Even the river. It  needs us to remember where it is. What a salmon looks like, pink and shimmering beneath the current. We should let it know we’re listening. It might suddenly ask us something, like where on earth it’s going.”