I did not want to, but I had to return to Fremont that night. We stood on the floor, Rebekah, Lucy, Carver, Ophir, and I. We stood where we always stood, on the floor by the stove. The carved phrase “we are ingenious” was directly under Ophir’s left toe. We closed our eyes and let our heads loll.
Ophir spoke in a silent voice that we all felt vibrating at the point that the spinal column joins the skull.
Go, he said, slay the english who stalk the elk.
I folded at my waist, my eyes pressed shut, and fell to the ground. My forearms guarded my eyes. I rolled onto my back, and I smelled Carver, a vortex of poison sweat, as she bolted past and out the door.
I had just started to breathe again when from the street I heard the roar of a lion. The roars of the great cats, I have heard, have an effect immediate and instinctual on the human brain, triggering without reason panic and flight. Not one human note or timber distinguished her call from theirs.
My sister was a cannibal, and we who sent her out to defend ourselves... what were we?
I said goodbye to Lucy and Ophir and then I reached a hand out to Rebekah to touch her cheek. She lurched and snapped at me like a turtle with her teeth. I yanked my hand away, and she flinched and turned away and stood against the wall, forehead pressed against the window.
“She can’t,” whispered Ophir. “Not when Carver’s gone.”
That night, I wrote in my diary things that may or may not have been true:
It’s nighttime. I want to sleep. I’m so lonely. Why shouldn’t I be able to sleep?
Is this paranoia?
I found a cartoon in the television this morning. A cat stalked a colony of mice, and for an imagined infraction, a trumped-up charge involving the loss of a heroic quantity of cheese, one mouse was shunned by her community. They turned up their noses, in fashion iconic, when she approached, and when the cat came in, starving pathetically, drooling for mouse-flesh, they made the outcast mouse find her own hiding holes. The mood of the program was humorous, but its message is true. I am being shunned, and the world is growing cold as the great cat draws close to my hurriedly scratched hiding holes.
It’s that, or I’m the cat. I’m one of the ones, not one of the many.
I’m starving.
I guess the cat and the shunned mouse were both starving.
The metaphor was breaking down, and I let the diary slide to the floor and flipped the pen away.
I sat by the bookshelf in the floor grime, my heart pounding too hard, the muscles in my armpits sore, and was there till I woke the next morning to light snuck through dirty window slats.
In Orgolmacozna. From the thamp of dalinga.
Euselia rose with high head from the land of motorcycles.
Euselia, with high head and fierce brow, she strode. Out of the black beyond Nevada she strode, and over lightening hills, and through a road of cars that broke and swerved and did not once dare honk. Her name was, like the name of so many others, the name of the act of murder, and she bore in a flesh satchel the memory of Sumer. Her womb was the store of all the lost races of the Earth, collected from the victims of genocide famine and dwindle. Her genes partook of every race of slaves. It was her father who slew the lions and gave birth to the Sahara, and her mother who had laid down the ancient law: Neanderthal man must be stalked and slain till there is no danger of his seed entering the line of my daughters’ daughters.
Across the Earth Euselia strode, and when she crossed the California 24, she came to a raised island of domesticated grass, and there she sat. It was an hour later that the black-striped orange convertible slowed and rolled its left wheels onto the grass. Ursule stepped out and climbed to the top and sat down next to her and gently locked her left elbow into Euselia’s right.
For four more hours they sat there, whispering so softly they could not have heard each other over the scream of traffic.
Screaming and laughing, it is where it always is, where the stars fall, when the elk cry like babies and the english circle their wagons. Making love. Somewhere someone is making love. It is immensely difficult; the parties involved have cleansed their souls and performed feats of devotion and endurance that are terrifying to consider. It is so much work. So much work that no one can do it any more but those devoted few who might in centuries past have secluded themselves in monasteries where realms of inhuman reason could swallow their efforts, remove their faces.
I rotated the slats and sneezed the dust away and let the morning light into the living room. My legs were sore, my chest was sore, and my head was sore. The cat mewed and the sound hurt my head.
“Stop,” I said, and swatted it away, a little harder than I intended. It continued to whine and I poured it a bowl of food and walked into the kitchen.
In the cupboard, I counted twenty-five cartons of butternut squash soup and one of winter squash soup. From the refrigerator I decreased the count of beer bottles by one and then, unsatisfied, by one more. I took one bottle by the neck, inverted it, felt its heft in my hand, then tossed it five feet, tumbling, into the trash can. I walked over to the trash can, the other bottle, half full, dangling from my arm, and there I spent a moment grinning from spite at the trash can full of beer bottles and the empty recycling bin behind it, permanently up-ended, stuck to the floor with a glue of beer effluent, cat hair, and miscellaneous grime.
I filled a bowl of water for the cat, who had finished its food and was crying again. My teeth were grinding, and I noticed and moved my jaws apart and ran my tongue around.
“Hold on,” I said. I walked back towards the living room and smashed my toe against the stupid fucking raised inch in the door between the rooms. I screamed and my whole body tensed.
The cat cried.
“Shut up!” I yelled, and I threw the water from the dish onto the cat’s fur. It went suddenly silent, crouching low against the ground. All its sense of what was safe and right in the world had just been smashed, and I calmed myself, rubbed my toe, and wished there was some way to let the lower animals understand a human form of apology... not only that I was sorry, but that I was ashamed of myself, that I had violated my own decent vow, informal though it may have been. Was it as bad as hitting a baby? Maybe it was.
The cat cried again, and I shrieked and dove face forward onto it, smashing its body down with my forehead and then pummeling its belly with my fists. The crying became high-pitched and panicky and in one last awful blow I landed a fist on its left foreleg and heard a crack.
I pulled myself up in a jerk and sat there on the floor hugging myself.
The cat limped out of the room.
What was wrong with me? Why did I do that? Would I do that to another person? Maybe I knew why I did it... during the very moment I was thinking high-minded thoughts about guilt and duty, I was interrupted and reminded that the thing I felt this onerous duty to had not the barest shred of respect for me. Pride twice punctured.
The door opened behind me and I knew it was Lucy. I turned my head over my shoulder to look at her, and in my imagination heard myself cracking innocent bones again.
“What are you doing on the floor?” she said.
“Go away,” I said.
She stepped backward, surprised, onto the top step of the stairs. “What’s wrong?” she said. “Are you OK?”
“I broke the cat’s leg,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, clearly disappointed, and she walked back in.
“What’s wrong with me?” I said.
“It was an accident,” she said.
“I broke his leg with my fist. I was mad because I stubbed my toe and he was making noise. I think of him as it, did you know that? I think of him as ‘the cat.’ He was just fucking crying and I stubbed my toe, and I was so mad I don’t know why I did it.”
She touched me on the shoulder and led me to the squeaky leather chair. “I know you,” she said. “You love that cat. You would never hurt him.”
I looked at her, caring about me and not believing me, and felt a confused miasma of horror.
The cat whimpered from my bedroom.
“Shut up, cat,” said Lucy.
God? I thought.
“Shall we eat among the english?” said Lucy.
The english. “I don’t think we call them that,” I said.
“We’ve always called them that,” said Lucy.
“No,” I said, “you never said it in your life till Ophir said it last night. Ophir never said it in his life till last night.”
“English,” she said. “Why english? It doesn’t really make any sense, if you think about it.”
“Right,” I said. I pushed her shoulder. “If you think about it.”
When Lucy was in junior high, she came home to our dark little shack on Tamershan one afternoon wearing a tight purple shirt that she shouldn’t have been wearing, and into my hand she shoved a half sheet of paper.
“Sign this,” she said. “Say you’re my dad.”
I read the paper, and it said:
I hearby [sic] authorize my daughter, Lucille Pershing [handwritten, sloppily, in red ink] to train with and participate in any and all school-condoned activities of the Pink Panthers Cheer Squad.
“Sign here,” she said. She looked in my eyes, twisted up her cheeks, and stabbed the bottom of the page. She was wearing perfume. Then as now, I was no educated judge of perfume, but even I could tell it was not a good one.
“Who’s been painting you up?” I said. “Is someone giving you slut lessons?”
Slut lessons. Ha ha. Poor girl. She looked like she’d been slapped cross the face. I don’t mean to laugh in retelling, it broke my heart, but it was the only way I knew how to say it. My sister come home dressed to lay the english?
But no, that’s OK. It’s her life, isn’t it? So I said so: “I’m sorry. It’s your life,” and I crouched down by the cement doorstep, brushed the dust and the pebbles away, and traced, illuminated the name of the brain-dead man onto the page. I handed it back, authorized, and felt great satisfaction. My face muscles were so relaxed. I could never feel that happy today, outside where eyes can see me. But enough about me.
She took the permission slip and stuck it in her skirt. It’s that thing, you know, moral absolutism. Evil always re-arises from the frustration of the difficulty of maintaining the Good. And so decency divides wrath. And so modesty comes from the libertine.
Dad talked that way, before the thing happened. I don’t really like the way it sounds, but I like the way it feels saying it.
Poor Lucy. She was the obedient child in a family that did not value obedience, at least not in those days. Her right foot slid in the grass and her arms hung at her side.
“Whose idea was it for you to be a cheerleader?” I said. She wouldn’t answer. “Come on and tell me.”
I remember this because I never spoke before or since with such a sense of self-possession. And I would hope that I haven’t spoken with so little compassion. Because she started crying. Not uncontrollably, she cried too often to let it incapacitate her. The tears trickled and she kept a light smile on to ward off any attempt I might otherwise have made to end the conversation and apologize. And I would have, I like to believe, but I’m too stupid. I believe girl’s faces, and hers said she could take it.
“Who told you to be a cheerleader?” I said again.
“Val-anne Barryby,” she said, or something like that. To expect me to remember a name like that after all these years is frankly unreasonable. It wasn’t a name I recognized, which I understood to be a warning sign.
“You’re...” I crumbled imaginary brain dust between my fingers, looking down, “You’re changing your friends around? Are you having trouble? You can tell me about the trouble if you’re starting to change your friends. It’s a warning sign, I read it in, um, the paper.”
“I read it in the paper.” My parenting was thwarted when Ophir’s gray sedan pulled up on the glass, flaked paint scattering the sunlight. I never came so close to parenting. The thought still makes my blood run cold... which I realize is an image I use frequently, but my insides are subject to a monotonous climatic sine wave of eschatological terror and prepubescent glee.
Lucy never turned in the permission slip, and she never joined the Cheer Squad. To this day she spits bile when talking about the practice of cheer-leading. The strange thing, though, is how often she brings the subject around to the self-help movement, or sports motivation tactics, or other phenomena she believes are similar to cheer-leading. She hates cheer-leading with an eloquent, discursive erudition that could only have grown out of the deepest, most passionate love of cheer-leading that this world has never had a chance to see. That, hidden behind the mist of lost possibilities, this love still lives bright and keeps her mouth corners twitching upward, at her age, is her greatest secret. When I recognized this, the pall of guilt that came over me felt almost painful enough to be a fitting punishment for what I’d taken away from her.
Wherm and cotsin cotsin gotsin cotsin near far forever narrrrrrrr.
I dreamed that night of a world where honey poured from the sky, dark honey from black flowers, and for a while I reclined on warm cushions, in comfort and love. My brothers were there, both of them, and my sisters, and another woman I knew and loved but whose name I cannot now recall. I went out of my room onto the balcony, and looked down, but the streets were empty. There were no men or women but my brothers and sisters anywhere in these cities, and the surface of the square and the alleys was a solid mass of giant, swarming, rats as big as jackals.
Tetchy is the word for a broken-legged cat, his injury ignored out of a refusal to admit guilt or shatter another’s image of me.
Roam in the realm where the rock writes rand-slips. They say these things but they can’t mean them. Cobblestones crawl with rats. It’s a classic tale of Flowers Become Screams, the worm that ate its own tale. Oh, imagine, listening to music where others can hear.
A pack of thick-coated river Welsh island foxes waits in the clearing between forest and wood-pile. In Sumer we walked with the wolf.
This is what Euselia told me.
We walked with the wolf, man and beast together. Our stature of privilege over the other species was new and unwise displays were the norm. Tigers and she-lions followed us through the wheat gate of the great walled city Uruk, and they paced by our sides when we went to tend our wife’s baby. When wild animals live at our throats we are safe for days or even weeks at a time, but one will always turn on us and we must be as swift to kill the beasts as to love them.
The keeping of the beasts, said Euselia, came to change us more than it changed them; we raised our hands to our children as easily we plunged our spears through the ear and into the brain of a fat wolf we found standing too near the newborn baby while we slept.
Since she moved into the Dump with me, I have been wondering how I can give her back her cheer-leading. I rented a documentary, not pornographic, about cheerleaders and made sure to put it on when she was out at the store and likely to come back within five minutes. Surprised, if you will, thus a few times, I hoped to convince her that it was my guilty pleasure as well.
I failed to realize that for a man, heterosexual, professed, to have cheerleaders as a guilty pleasure was a decidedly more common and well-understood phenomenon than for a man to have cheer-leading as a guilty pleasure. Each time it happened, and I tried it four times, she left the room immediately upon realizing what was on the TV, wearing an air of having walked in on a brother masturbating. It was not till the fourth time that I realized this was exactly what she thought I was doing, and that I would have to shift my tactics.
In the morning time, I awoke. The cat’s whimper had ceased in the night and I had slept well. It lay now, broken leg and all, on Lucy’s bed-pile in the hallway by the heat vent. She was gone, Lord knows where.
I had been up only minutes and was staggering slowly through the house wrapped in a sheet when there was a knock on the door.
I groaned and then walked over to the door, flipped the bolt, and yanked the knob.
A short woman with inviting cleavage stood there. There were freckles on her face and lies in her eyes.
I choked, grabbed a handful of the sheet near where my chest hair was exposed and bunch it up to cover myself. She smiled, her head tilted forward, and my throat went dry and I felt so awkward I was surprised I could stay standing up.
“Erdogan?” she said, “I’m Astrid. You remember me, right?” I pumped my head up and down with my eyes closed to indicate that, yes, I did remember her. “Yeah,” she said, “three weeks ago I met you in the party your brother had. How is... the short blonde girl?”
“I remember,” I said. No, I was answering the wrong question. She asked another one after that. “That was Lucy,” I said, “my little sister. She lives with me.”
Her eyes slid into the the right corners of her eye sockets, then jumped to the left. I interpreted this as comical, because to her left there was only a coat closet. “Where is she then?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “She went out.”
“So,” she said, tilting her head and rubbing behind her downward-facing ear, “how have you been?” I had only met her once before, at the aforementioned party. She had an accent that I hadn’t noted before... it sounded a little like a Southern drawl, but with strangely rotated vowels, like the New Zealand accent.
“Good. Well, honestly bad. I mean... good,” I said. I shrugged and was reminded that I was wrapped in a sweat-stained blue spotted bed-sheet. “Do you want to come in for a minute? I’ll go put on something, um, clothes.” Please come in.
“Oh,” she said. “I was just on my way somewhere. But I’m in town all day. Would you be at all interested in getting together this afternoon at a coffee shop? I’d like to talk to you.”
I thought for a very long time, during which Astrid remained calm, only once or twice glancing up at the sky or down the stairs towards the street, and finally I came up with the name of a coffee shop near the college grounds, far from Jessica’s known radius of activity.
“I’ll see you then,” she said, and touched my left hand with hers. I looked down at it in confusion. I thought to myself, what’s the point of touching somebody when you’re talking? Isn’t that just going to distract them from what you’re saying?
“Right, bye, see you,” I said, and the door was closed and she was gone and my hand had gone without conscious thought directly into my underpants before I realized neither of us had mentioned any specific time.
That’s all right. I was prepared to leave the house and skulk around that coffee shop from noon till nighttime, waiting for her.
What did Ophir call her? No, don’t think it.
It was yes no don’t think it. Don’t, no. Why does my knee hurt.
Oh, God, the cat!
I ran back to the cat’s body on Lucy’s fuzzy blanket. It was curled like a prawn. I ran my hand gently along its spine. There was no resistance; the skin was loose under my fingers. I shoved my palm onto its chest and felt around. No motion, no flows, no beats.
“Shit.”
I put my ear down on his chest. “Basket. Cat,” I said. “Cat, come on.” There was no heartbeat.
Shit shit shit.
What did I do? Why didn’t I take him to the vet after it happened? Society may not call this murder. I think that makes it worse. If murder was legal, wouldn’t you still look down on those who chose to do it? At least if it’s illegal, you know the perpetrators are going to jail and hell. I fucking killed my own cat. Killed him with two blows -- one from my fist. The second, negligence.
Lucy bought me this cat, a long time ago. She gave me a speech about how responsible I would have to be, now, that it was like having a baby.
There was a knock at the door. Oh, no, God. The knock came again. “Artican?” came the voice. No, she must have said “Erdogan.” Astrid, her accent thicker.
I picked up the corpse of Basket the cat. My thumb encircled his ear and plucked it like a violin string. He was so soft and limp. I ran into my bedroom, pulled the wastebasket out from under the desk, and dropped him in. Then I ran to the door, looked down at my sheet, looked down at my hands that had touched a dead animal, and stood, frozen and confused.
“Erdogan?” she called again. I sat down in my chair and stared at the door. After a few minutes I heard a firm pressure on the door, and a scratching sound. A paper slid over the door stop, and footsteps disappeared down the stairs.
The door swung open.
“Now what?” said Lucy.
“Basket’s dead. I killed my cat,” I said. Lucy’s eyes went wide and then her head shook.
“He’s right there,” she said, index finger outjutting. The cat jumped into my lap and stared at me. I grabbed it and held it, my hands clutching and releasing, and then I hugged it to me, kissed its head, and started crying. The cat slipped out of my lap and looked back at Lucy and me. A curiously human expression passed over its face... eyes squinting slightly, head at an angle, blinking, mouth twisted in the corner.
“You have to get out of this house,” Lucy said. I looked up at her, shell-shocked, and then I reached down to the floor and covered myself with the dropped bed-sheet. Out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw the cat scaling the wall. I looked over and he was casually striding away from us along the wall, a yard off the ground, as effortlessly as if he were the one on the ground.
Lucy and I were both quiet for a long time.
“So do I,” said Lucy.
“Do you remember the girl Ophir went to that Christmas party with?” I said, in order to distract myself.
“Not really,” she said.
“Her name was Astrid Cohen. She had curly fingernails, like Fritos.”
“The one who rode him home, piggy-back,” she said.
“I assume so,” I said. “I didn’t follow them home. She came by the house this morning. Where were you?”
“That woman was here?” said Lucy.
“Yeah,” I said. “Oh, she left that note.”
Lucy walked to the door, kicked a sandal off, and picked up the paper with her toes.
“Dear Erdogan,” she read. Artican. “I realized after I left... this woman writes her E’s weird. I realized after I left we did not settle on a time. Shall we say three. If not, please ring me up at...” she looked up. “So you got her phone number.”
I tried to smile but it must have looked like a wince.
I got out of the shower and put my clothes on and went out into the living room. Lucy was dressed and made-up, dark leaked in from the open front door, and she was leaning against the wall, angled impatiently towards the opening.
“Where should we go?” I said.
“I don’t know. Anywhere. Isn’t there a bookstore over by Establishment Coffeebeans?”
Jessica’s shop. “You like books?” I said.
“Yeah. So do you. Let’s go.”
“Fine,” I said.
We walked outside. The door was as hard to close as ever; there was a piece of metal bent on the jamb that scraped and sent up sparks. It finally latched after a couple of slammings. A face in the window of the house next door stared at me, then flashed away when I craned my head for a better look. “Boykin” was written on their mailbox. I had never met the Boykins.
The street lamps cast negative shadows of white light on the noon streets. As we walked, I cast my eyes down cross streets. Some were as well-lit as this one, but most were like black caves.
A pair of middle-aged women wearing brown clothes and crystals approached. I nodded in greeting. One of them looked at me, then the other whispered to her and they hurried past us. Lucy said nothing.
We crossed Sacramento Avenue. A man and five girls were scurrying in the mechanic’s shop.
I elbowed Lucy and pointed to the man. He was middle-aged, bald, and jowly, but she spent a moment appraising him before shrugging.
“When’s the last time you saw Braulio?” I asked.
She flushed. “Not lately,” she said. “I haven’t seen him lately.”
That had been my assumption till she stated it. Now I was suspicious. Where had she been last night and this morning? Could she have gone to meet with the husband she purported to be running from?
We crossed Establishment Coffeebeans, but the angle was such that I couldn’t see who was behind the counter.
“No,” I said, then realized I had only imagined Lucy asking if I was thirsty. She looked at me, her eyebrows furrowed. “Never mind,” I said.
Across the street there was a large crowd and flood lamps.
“You want to take a look?” said Lucy.
“You know they don’t want us there,” I said.
“What are they gonna do?” she said.
I wondered if someday they would do something besides glare and whisper, and acceded with a shrug.
We crossed the street and as I stepped up on the sidewalk the crowd pushed away from us and left us several feet on each side. There were a number of dogs in a few large cages, whimpering. I found a brochure on a rapidly evacuated table. The event was revealed to be a dog show put on by the local animal shelter in a last-ditch effort to sell off dogs who were due to be put to sleep.
“You want a dog?” said Lucy.
The image of the cat’s corpse dead across my right arm flashed before my eyes, and then the surreal image, which I must have imagined, of the cat alive again and levitating, and I groaned and hugged myself. “No,” I said.
“You used to love animals,” said Lucy.
“OK,” I said. I pulled on her arm. “Come on, let’s go to the bookstore. I want to go there. I like books.”
I turned and felt Lucy following. The sky was dark and I saw her again, the witch.
“Ursule,” I whispered to Lucy. Ursule was ten feet away. She did not look at me, but walked on by. Her jacket was orange and her skirt was black, and there was a wart on her nose.
“Who?” said Lucy.
“Sssh!” I said. I jogged off the sidewalk into the street and turned and followed her. She was moving quickly and I had to trot. The pace made my feet and calves sore. She turned a corner and went down one of the dark streets, and then she stopped, barely visible in the shadows.
“Hello,” I said.
“Two elk,” said Ursule. Lucy appeared on my left, panting. “You are becoming thin,” she said to me.
“Who are you?” I said.
“For this you chase me?” said Ursule. “We let you stay here. And then you two have come too far north, and we have allowed it, because your conduct has been inoffensive. Isn’t that enough?”
What did that mean? I wished I knew what to ask her. “Are you a witch?” I said, and then immediately knew I was a moron.
By her face, though, she took the question seriously. “Like you, I have a familiar spirit,” she said. “Of old this was the meaning of witch, that it meant not what things you knew but what spirits.”
“What spirits,” I whispered.
“If the natives are treating you poorly,” said Ursule, “this is something you must deal with. Our hands, we washed them in calves’ blood in post the deal. If you feel the terms have not been obeyed, say a word and I will send a civil agent to hear your complaint and present it to the executive. Now you must excuse me. I have responsibilities down this corridor that must be carried out unseen.”
Lucy stepped forward and said, “OK, ma’am, we’re sorry to bother you,” and turned, eyes wide, gesturing back the way we had come with her head. I turned to go with her, and when I cast a glance over my shoulder, Ursule was gone.
“Who was that?” said Lucy, hissing.
“I don’t know,” I said.
She stopped. “You don’t know?” she shouted.
“Woah,” I said, “hey. I don’t know who she is, but I saw her and immediately knew her name. I must have met her somewhere before.”
“That really doesn’t explain this whole ridiculous encounter,” said Lucy.
“Did you recognize her?” I said. We started walking again.
“No!” she said. Then she seemed like she was about to say something, and didn’t.
“You did, didn’t you?” I said.
“Maybe,” she said. “There was a weird feeling when I saw her face. And the more she talked, the more I felt, well, a familiar feeling of irritation.”
We were at the bookstore now, and we started to climb the steps.
“Please think about it,” I said. “I’ve got to figure out who she is.”
“You’ve been talking to a lot of strange ladies, lately,” she said. “Two of them, all in one day. Have you ever talked to that many women? Is that a record? And I don’t know about that last one, but the one that used to be going out with Ophir was kind of pretty.”
“The only pretty ladies I usually talk to are my sisters,” I said. She rolled her eyes. “Wait a minute. Does that mean you saw Astrid this morning?”
“I saw her leaving when I was coming up the stairs,” said Lucy.
“You’re awful secretive lately,” I said.
“OK,” she said. “I’m gonna go look at books.”
“Me too,” I said, and we veered away from each other into the shelves.
Narration switches, the ATP depleted. The fingers are too tired to hold on a single actor.
Blurring.
Two women, soldiers of the cohenate.
Whimpers caught up in aspic. The taste of the spinal fluid of those slain unjustly. Up and down the street they stalk.
Did you hear, whispered one.
I heard it, said her sister. They eat babies.
No, said the first. They eat male babies. It’s their fault there are no men.
I lose them.
V-neck warriors. Bleak, the voice of passion. Patterns of loss. Spheres of influence. The vagrant flees the fool, and out of the sea the element queens rise.
Standing on the sidewalk, a girl and her mother look down at the sea.
Are they coming out of the sea? asked the little girl.
Her mother said yes.
Do they live in the sea? asked the little girl.
No, said her mother, of course not.
But she was wrong, some of them had lived in the sea. Some of them had been the sea, some of them had been patterns of saline crystals, and more than a few of them had been kelp.
Heads rise out of the sea.
Cohens, and we their people, or we their victims. A matter of dispute in some circles. The argument ran like this: they loosed us from our bodies, but the years lost in the wilderness were a punishment as hard on them as on us. We are all changed. How much more can you hate those who not only suffered but were also tortured by the guilt of responsibility? How responsible can you actually be in a world where the most obscure scientific investigations can break every law previously known?
But then a second question was raised. How were we evacuated, given new flesh, if the cohens were as lost as we were? Could they have restored our flesh all along? It seems hard to believe they could not have, for the invasion of the South Place by an alien monster could hardly have made them more capable of such complex impossibilities. The alien monster who was in a sense what they had been, a possessing spirit, but unlike them, not lost. Not at all. It was making this world its body, and all the fleas had better flee. We were fleas to her.
How many of the malkist were lost in her expanding consciousness, lost forever into the cells and mitochondria of a demon as big as a planet? How many who were not even malkist, but who missed the call the one beloved cohen put out, the one who saved them... “come to this point in the water, ride turtle, seahorse and wave, till you are equidistant from the three cliffs I have marked with bat flags, and there join your bodies, and we shall escape through the service path.” Every abandoned radio and television slamming out that message at top volume, fighting a losing battle of noise pollution against the increasingly articulate screams of apes and crocodiles who multiplied and stood and twitched while staring directly into the sun from the streets of the cities they had taken away. In those days, there had still been a sun.
(Some of the ones just out of the sea still talked about the sun. “Don’t you remember?” they said. “It was there, all your lives, longer than that, it existed throughout all of time, forever! It just disappeared a couple days ago!” But it didn’t take long before they too forgot.)
And so they did, drifting and riding till they found their long-lost flesh lying in rafts and entered back into it and touched one another and cried out in anguish and glory, before the service path opened and they were sucked down through a whirlpool into another Pacific Ocean.
So now the soldiers of the cohenate stalked the streets. There were elk here, and the alien monster must have been elk, some form of elk. A superior form, clearly a higher order, but perhaps these elk served that one. They were undecided whether they hated the elk or the cohens more, but there were more cohens than elk, and the cohens had more guns, so it was clear who they should kill first.
Bats, bats everywhere.
Some of them were still in the sea, and some of them lost on the other side, where the demon was.
And the malkist.
I was popular today with young ladies wearing bat earrings.
There were more of them around than you would expect... bat earrings, I mean. Halloween was not far off, I thought, after the third pair I saw. That must be it. Seasonal women’s fashion.
I was standing in poetry, wondering suspiciously about Lucy’s night-time activities. A girl with metal in her face was near me. I glanced over. She was no more than five feet away, crouched on the floor, reading a graphic novel. The stud in her nose was shaped like a bat.
She looked up at me. Her face was fierce and ugly.
I have never been one to talk to strangers, especially of late, with strangers as a rule hissing, whispering, and leaving a wide margin when I passed by. But today, having confronted the mysterious wart-nosed Ursule, this woman’s visible hate seemed like a puzzle.
“Hello,” I said.
Her face softened a little. She was young, probably barely out of high school.
“What are you reading?” I said.
She put the book on the floor and stood up. She glanced around.
She whispered: “you need to get out of here. I think we’re going to kill you.”
“What?” I said.
“Idiot,” she said. “Get sister elk out of this store, off this block, and out of well-lighted areas. Do it fast. There are a lot of soldiers out today, and I’ll bet they sent us out for you.”
“Who?” I said, then realized that I should just do what she said. “What’s your name?” I said.
“Meg-yan,” she said, or something like that, and glanced around again.
I tried to clarify: “Megan?”
“Is that the name you say?” she said. “Megan? My name is Megan.”
“Thank you, Megan,” I said.
“Get out of here,” she said.
I hurried away to look for Lucy and found girls wearing bats throughout the store.
By the glossy magazines, a red-headed girl, a bat on her shirt. I hurried past. By the compact discs, a Pakistani girl reading a jewel-box. The other hand hung at her side, every finger wearing a ring with a small black angular shape. I did not have time to look closely. Behind the long bar of cash registers, a girl with nose and eyes as sharp as daggers below a mouse’s haircut. I only looked for a second, and I saw no bats, but her face was shaped like a bat’s.
Where was Lucy?
Through travelogues and maps and guidebooks. By languages, a teenaged girl, shaved head, in a tank top with bat earrings. I dared not look behind me; I imagined that as I passed each girl, she casually put down the item she was inspecting and began purposefully to stalk me. I imagined them behind me, almost half a dozen now. If they were following me, was it such a good idea to lead them to my sister?
The alternative was to leave her here with them.
I walked past biography, past fiction, past architecture.
I found her by a display of cookbooks. To her left, holding a book with a celebrity chef on the cover, was a brunette with a small black design tattooed under her eye. To her right, flipping through a display case of laminated individual recipe sheets, another brunette, her hair in a bun, a bat tattoo peeking out from under the hem-line on the side of her leg. Her very... beautiful leg.
“Hey... Lucy,” I said.
She looked up.
“Let’s, uh, go,” I said.
“I’m reading,” she said.
If they were trailing me, we were surrounded now. “Hey! I’ll buy it for you. Let’s just go,” I said.
The leggy brunette glanced at me. Her cellphone rang, a sound like horse hooves stomping on cement. She stuck her thumbnail into the hinge of the phone, flipped it with her wrist, and stepped out of sight behind the shelves.
“You’ll buy it for me?” said Lucy in disbelief.
“I can afford it,” I said. The other brunette, on the left flank, made a sound that might have been a snigger. “Please. Pleeeeeease. Let’s just go.”
Lucy set the book down. “It’s OK,” she said. “I don’t really want it.”
“Oh my GOD! Can we just go?” I said.
Her eyebrows went up. “OK, OK,” she said.
Together we walked towards the back door in the cafe. She was walking slower than me and she wasn’t taking the hint.
“We’re in danger,” I said, sotto voce, through clenched teeth. “We need to get out of here and we need to do it fast.”
“Danger?” she said, and I saw the leggy brunette coming up the ramp to our left. “From who?”
I hissed. “The english,” I said. Any other time I would not have used this slang Ophir had somehow inculcated into our brains, but it seemed so easy and right at this moment. I put my hand in the small of her back and hurried out of the store.
Outdoors the major streets were tunnels of light.
At the corner of 4th we turned onto University, and I cast a look back to make sure we had not been pursued. But in fact we had been; the short-skirted brunette, with whom I was strongly tempted to fall in love, stood a hundred feet from the store, watching us and speaking into her cellphone.
“You said we were in danger?” said Lucy.
“One of the girls in there told me something might happen,” I said.
My legs were pulsing with pain from the walking pace.
“What?” she said.
“She said, maybe they were going to kill us,” I said.
“Who?”
“Well, I think the girls,” I said.
“The girls? Every girl in the store?”
I thought. “No, not all of them. There was a woman asleep on the bench by the door. I don’t think she was wearing any bats.”
“Got it,” said Lucy. “Bats.”
It started to rain.
We entered the house. “I’m taking a nap,” I said, and went into my room, undressed, and lay under the covers listening to the rain on the street below an the tar roof above.
I dreamed of a flood. I dreamed I was on Noah’s Ark, but the animals had turned on us and we had kicked them off the boat, and the water was never going to stop falling, and we were all going to die. I dreamed there was land, but we could not set foot on it, or we would die. I dreamed the water seethed with crocodiles. I dreamed I had married my sister, and one of my brothers had killed the other. I dreamed that I was Spider-man.
When I woke, the rain was still falling, and my clock blinked 2:38. I swore and jumped out of bed and flung open the door of the bathroom.
“I’m sorry!” I said to Lucy, who sat, aghast, on the toilet seat. I closed the door again. Grumble grumble grumble.
Should I dress up? Probably not. Wait... what was I saying. Of course I should. Casual but understated, like Capitan Rodriguez, lady’s man, on my favorite Mexican soap opera. I looked at my watch. God, how long was she gonna be in there.
I went back into my bedroom and pulled my plastic filing cabinet out from behind the desk. Dress shirts, top drawer. This one’s wrinkled. So’s this one. So this one. OK, they’re all kind of wrinkled. Which one’s the least wrinkled? Navy blue. Very thick material. Whatever. I don’t know any better. How long is she gonna be in there?
It was 2:45 now. There wasn’t going to be time to shower. I put on the navy blue shirt, and a yellow rubber jacket. “I hope your spleen falls out in there!” I said in raised voice to the bathroom door, and raced outside to my car.
There was no parking within 4 blocks of Intermezzo. I finally found an unoccupied curb-corner and parked there across the crosswalk lines. I turned off the car, then reached up to press the button on the car’s clock to light it up by battery power. 3:10. Terrific. I had to run in the rain.
I arrived under the Intermezzo awning, panting, and soaked in water from both the sky and my own sweat glands. My legs pulsed with pain and buckled with every step, pant-legs clinging soggy and cold about the inflamed muscle.
I stood there a moment, waiting for my breath to come back, and then I turned and went inside. It was bustling. I spotted Astrid in short order. She waved, and I hurried past, pretending I hadn’t noticed her yet, and hobbled towards the bathrooms. The line to the women’s bathroom stretched to the condiment stand and bent back again halfway. The man’s bathroom was empty. I surveyed the three urinals and threw the latch on the main door. It was all mine now, the whole bathroom. Women, what suckers, not being men.
I stared into the mirror at my face. The hardest thing about looking at your reflection is meeting both of your eyes at the same time. Focusing both eyes on the reflection of the left eye is easy, and if you realize you’re looking at the left eye it’s easy to look at the right eye instead. But to focus the eyes independently so that each stares into its own reflection... that takes some concentration, and honestly it makes you a little dizzy. I stood there for a few minutes, locking my gaze with myself, facing myself down. The cafe sound system picked up and I heard a lyric that said “do you realize, you have the most beautiful eyes.” Yes you do, I mouthed, and pointed at myself in the mirror. Yes you do. I looked at the pointing finger. I liked the look of it, but it needed a little something extra, so I imagined I was a spy holding a gun, putting great energy into the pose. The thumb stuck up straight, the index finger pointed hard forward, trembling a little from the effort, and the curl of the remaining three fingers was so tight that contours raised on the back of my hand.
Wait, I thought. Take this seriously. I tried to look deep inside my own eyes, to make sure both of me, on both sides of that mirror, were in absolutely perfect communication about the importance of what might be happening here. I looked at myself, trying to find that sign that I was willing to share, to open that part of my heart to myself, because if not to myself, then how to another? But I was letting myself down. My eyes were small, my cheeks slack. I looked tired. I looked resigned, like I knew I could never win, like I wouldn’t mind so much if, over the course of the next twelve months, I just shriveled up; I would let myself die, turn into a skeleton, and fall apart into a pile of fragile, cracked bones.
OK. I was ready for both best and worst. Although now I had a headache. I unlatched the bathroom door and walked out.
“Erdogan,” called Astrid.
I pretended that I had to look around to find the source of her voice. “Hello,” I said suavely. She was at a card table by the window, seated on a tough wooden Shaker-style seat.
I pulled the other chair out and sat in it, then rose up on the balls of my feet and scooted the chair in closer. She looked short and voluptuous. I was disappointed to see she had less skin exposed now than she had earlier. I hate the rain, I thought.
“What were you doing in the bathroom?” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You looked at me when you came in, and then you were in the bathroom for a long time. Were you jacking off in there?”
I felt my skin turn red and burning hot.
“I’m kidding!” she said, and her hand slapped down, trapping my fidgeting left hand on the table. “I’m just kidding.”
“I wasn’t doing that,” I said.
“I know, I know,” she said. “I was just kidding. You can do that any time you want, I don’t care.”
I couldn’t stop swallowing.
“Do you want some steamed milk?” she said.
I’d never had steamed milk, and I didn’t really like the idea, but I nodded.
She got up, brushed by me, and walked to the counter. She stepped in front of the squirrelly woman at the head of the line and ordered immediately. Neither the barista nor the customers in line said a word. “Two steamed milks with almond, peppermint oil, and pumpkin. And nutmeg and cocoa and top,” said Astrid. My stomach growled and I felt light-headed.
“I’ll bring them to your table,” said the barista.
She strolled back to her chair. “You’re very poised,” I said, because she looked so self-satisfied. She looked also like she knew exactly who was watching her, from where, and why, but considered it too unimportant to acknowledge the watchers. And there were watchers; I could see eyes watching her out of the corners of my own eyes. I was the only man in the shop, but I intercepted more than one lustful gaze directed at her.
“Thank you,” she said, and she looked pleased but unimpressed. “So, Erdogan, what do you do for fun?”
“Sleep, mostly,” I said.
“I knew it,” she said. “You look like a man who values his sleep.”
The barista arrived at our table with two glasses of brownish orange viscous fluid. “Two very sweet, very weird drinks,” she said, and placed the glasses between me and Astrid, evenly spaced, and then she returned to the register. The glasses sat there, equidistant from me. I did not know which to take. I thought about reaching for the one on my right, but then I imagined that maybe she would also reach for that one, and purely by accident our hands would touch, and she would think it was a cheesy pickup plan.
I kept my hands in my lap. My stomach growled again.
She took the cup on her right, my left, and sipped. I guess I hadn’t needed to worry about that. I reached for the other cup and she shot her free hand out and I yanked mine back in the air, almost falling out of my chair. She cackled.
“Drink up, honey,” she said.
I grinned and flushed and took the cup and sipped. It tasted good, I guessed. The pumpkin syrup reminded me of butternut squash soup. But what if it didn’t taste good later? What if there was an aftertaste, or it gave me heartburn? I don’t like to take chances with food.
Although I guess you could argue I was taking a chance by deciding not to eat solid food any more. But that was a different kind of chance entirely, and not relevant to the point I was trying to make, which was that in my ideal world, there would be only one solid food, only one thing to drink, and it would all come out of cans or crates so there would be no chance of one batch not being as good as the others.
“So, what have you dreamed about, lately?” she said.
“Well,” I said. I thought. Best not to talk about winged bulls; it was hard to say why, but that dream felt too personally threatening to trot out so we could laugh at it. “Well, I dreamed I was relaxing on cushions in absolute comfort in a city out of Arabian Nights.”
“So you dreamed you were sleeping,” she said.
“No! I had just got up,” I said. “Oh. Yes, very funny.”
“What color was the sky?” she said, as if trying to imagine.
What color had the sky been? Oh. My heart contracted a little. “The sky was black, with red clouds. Racing, the clouds, not drifting. Racing. When I looked at them I felt dizzy and tiny, like I was being smashed under somebody’s foot.”
“Oo,” she said. “Anything else? What was the city like?”
“Empty,” I said. “Full of rats.”
“The city of rats,” she said. “Yeah. I heard about that one.”
“What about you?” I said. She shrugged.
“I’d rather hear about yours,” she said.
“Weren’t you going out with my brother?” I said.
“For a little bit,” she said, “I had fun on him, but he’s a very guarded person.”
“Well, that’s true,” I said.
“I’d just got into town,” she said. “And you know there aren’t a lot of men around.”
“Where are you from?” I said. “If you don’t mind me asking. You have a little bit of an accent.”
“I have an accent?” she said, laughing. “You should hear yourself! You have an accent.”
“I have heard myself,” I said. “I sound like most people. Except my voice is more embarrassing. But I’ve never heard your accent before.”
“I’m from, what’s south of here? Mexico? Mexico.”
I stared at her. I saw no indication she was making a joke, no knowing grin.
“So, you speak Spanish?” I said.
Her relaxed face grimaced slightly about the eyes. “Do you have other dreams?” she said.
“I had a dream earlier today, actually,” I said. “I took a nap before I came over here.” I was reminded that I was sweaty, and that my clothes had been wet and were now drying, odorous. “I was on a boat.”
She was excited, all of the sudden. She leaned forward and her eyes made my heart jump.
“Yes,” she said, “you were on a boat, go on.”
“There was a flood,” I said, and she was nodding. “And we were floating down a giant river, and we were in a jungle.” I stopped. “Are you crying?”
Her finger slapped the tear running down her cheek, briefly revealing a long, narrow, jagged fingernail. “No,” she said. “Go on. On the river, in the jungle, in a boat.”
“I was there with,” and I gulped, remembering certain salacious details, “my brothers and sisters. And I knew we were all going to die.”
Astrid nodded, her eyes on the floor. “You have no idea what it means, do you?” she said.
“My dream?” I said.
“There must be something in the water here,” she said.
“You mean something in the water’s making me hallucinate?” I said. “While I’m... asleep? Why would they bother?”
“Tell me more about the dream on the boat,” she said.
“There isn’t much more,” I said.
“Dream it again,” she said. There was a command in her voice.
“This isn’t a date, is it?” I said. “I feel like you might be lying to me about something.”
“Oh, honey,” she said, “I’m lying to you about a lot of things. But not like you lie to yourself.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Let’s ask you some basic questions,” she said. “Basic questions about the world. You ready? How old are you?”
“How old?”
“How many years old are you.”
“In years?” I said in disbelief.
“You don’t know how many years old you are, do you?” she said.
“I was born on... January 2, 2000.”
“Really?” she said. “That is an auspicious birthday. You were born in 2000. And now it is...”
“2002.”
“So then, you are two years old.”
“Well, technically, but nobody counts in years. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the year is a different length...”
“Every year,” she said. “How long will this year be?”
“How long?” I said.
“How many days?” she said.
“How can I know now?” I said. “It’s only October.”
“Now,” she said, “let me ask you a question about men and women.”
I steeled myself up for some kind of psychosexual humiliation, but the angle was not what I expected.
“The ratio of the population of men to the population of women,” she said. “Do you know what it is? How many men are there for every woman?”
“In Berkeley?” I said.
“Whatever.”
I thought. In high school, home room had twenty-one students. Jarvis Tanenkrak and I were the only boys, till senior year when that wire-headed kid with the scared eyes had come in. So that was three, but if you counted turnover every year among the girls... “3 in 30? No. 1 in 20?”
She nodded. “Like that. 1 in 28, we think.”
“What’s your point here?” I said.
“Oh, honey,” she said. “2002 will be eight hundred and seventy seven weeks long.”
“How can you know that?” I said. I had never even heard of anyone trying to guess how many days there were in a year.
“There is a simple formula,” she said. “The average length of a month increases linearly, and within a year the length of months deviates from the average as according to a sine wave. August had 64 days this month, and so will October, because September is the minimum of the sine wave. How long was September this year?”
“I don’t remember September.”
“September had no days this year,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I must have... what happens during September?”
“Nothing happens, this year,” she said.
“Labor Day. Labor Day’s in September,” I said. “What did I do for Labor Day?”
She looked at me and raised her eyebrows.
“OK, I don’t remember Labor Day,” I said.
“September was zero days,” she said again. “September was no days, and March was nine hundred and sixty three. But here is the funny thing... this is all an illusion.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Years are always the same length,” she said. “A year is 52 weeks. Someone with your skin and belly I would say had lived 30 years, if I did not know perfectly well that if you are who I think, you were born 40 years ago. The year is not 2002, it is 2163. You were born in 2023, not 2000. To find your age, you subtract the number of this year from the number of the year you were born. It is a simple calculation, not an insoluble question. Every year is the same length, Erdogan, and every year every month has the same length.”
There was a screeching sound, and I turned my frozen face and saw the leggy brunette from the bookstore pulling a wood chair along the ground and over to our table. “That’s not entirely true,” said the brunette. “What about leap years?”
“I was hoping to sweep that under the rug,” said Astrid.
“Twenty one sixty three?” I said. The brunette was whispering in Astrid’s ear now. They weren’t even looking at me.
I sipped my beverage. Pumpkin. Who drinks pumpkin syrup? It was pretty good, though. At the very least, it was nice to be drinking something warm on a cold day when my clothes were soggy. And then the brunette slid onto the side of Astrid’s chair, put an arm around her neck, pressed their mouths together and there was a kiss. The pumpkin juice went down my gullet wrong and I choked. I managed to maintain enough dignity to put the glass back down on the table, but then I grabbed a handful of napkins and swiveled my chair around and coughed and coughed, trying to get my breathing passages open again.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” I said.
Astrid’s face emerged and she said, “do you know what he does in there?”
“I do not!” I said. “I only jack off at home. When I don’t have guests. I mean...” and then I managed to walk away without saying anything worse.
I pushed through the bathroom door. “God,” I said, and seated myself on a toilet with the stall door open and my pants up. My stomach was twisting up, and I could taste the almond syrup more than the pumpkin now. It was on my chin, I realized, that’s why I could smell it. I got up and went over to the sink. I started the water running, reached over for the paper towels, and realized they only had blow dryers, so I walked back to the toilet stall. I took a couple arm-lengths of toilet paper, returned to the sink, wetted a wad, and dabbed at my chin.
There was a sticker on the mirror. It said “blue, wie kulunos.”
I turned off the water. I had just finished drying off my chin when the door of the bathroom opened. I looked over. It was the brunette woman last seen on Astrid’s lap.
She smiled and latched the door behind her.
A feeling of panic welled up in my belly.
“How are you?” she said. “Feeling nervous?”
“What?” I said.
She meandered over towards me, stroking her neck, her head tilted. “Do you like me?” she said.
“I don’t really know you,” I said. “What’s your name?”
She put her hand on my crotch. My belly rumbled.
“I’m Barbara,” she said.
“My stomach’s a little unsettled,” I said, hoping to apologize for something.
“You like me?” she said again.
“Yesh,” I said.
She pressed up against me and I found myself led backwards till my knees ran into a ceramic bowl edge and I fell into a sitting position on the toilet seat. I looked down between my legs into the water.
“Take your clothes off,” she said.
“OK!” I said. She was standing inside the stall, and I didn’t have much room. I scooted my feet back a little and reached a semi-standing squat. I unzipped my pants, pulled them down, taking the underwear with them. My feet were now locked together in jean-handcuffs.
She pulled a condom out of some back pocket, put a drop of something in it, and handed it to me.
I gestured with my penis, but she pretended not to notice. She just nodded. Oh, you’re not gonna touch it, huh.
Fine. I rolled it on myself. My penis was no more than half as long as usual.
Barbara pulled a rubber glove out of that same back pocket and squirted some fluid on it. “You ready for some romance, baby?” she said.
I looked at the glove and my miniature penis. “Yes,” I said.
She grasped the shaft of the penis. I expected a jolt of pleasure, but the actual feeling was like getting an exam in a doctor’s office. She started rubbing up and down. “Oo yeah,” she lied, “your cock is so hard.”
She was squeezing tight and moving her hand very fast.
“I like to imagine you’re fucking me,” she said. I squinted at her and down at my rubber-clad penis. “I like to imagine you’re fucking me... and my girlfriends are watching.”
Her fist was bumping my testicles, and there was a dull aching feeling. “Can you... slow down a little?” I said.
“Oh, yeah, baby, tell me how you like it,” she said. She slowed down and it started to feel a little bit good.
“And maybe loosen your fingers a little,” I said. I shouldn’t have to be telling her how to do this, I thought. What’s going on here? I barely know how to make myself happy.
She pumped. My testicles were taking a beating, but I felt too shy to correct her a third time. She was fully clothed. I craned my neck and tried to look down her shirt, but there wasn’t much to see. Her legs were curled up out of sight. She was moving her hand awkwardly; the angle was not so good from where she sat.
Slowly, mechanically, the act was doing its job. “I’m coming,” I said, helpfully. I ejaculated briefly. She continued pumping. Ow. Ow. OK, just wait it out. I closed my eyes. Ow. Ow. She stopped.
My whole body, from my belly-button down, felt sore and twisted up. Barbara smiled up at me and handed me a moist wipe, as if we had been eating ribs. I took the condom off and placed it atop the toilet paper dispenser, then I tore open the moist wipe and looked at it and at my penis. I guess it was to get the oil off. I dabbed around until I thought it was clean enough, and then I replaced my pants. I felt even more shy than before our sleazy moment of intimacy.
When she stood, I saw her legs again. They were without a doubt her most striking feature.
“Did you like that?” she said.
“Sure,” I said. “I mean... yes.”
She reached for my crotch and I swatted her away. “Oops,” I said. “Sorry, just a little tender right now.”
“Of course, honey,” she said. I squinted at her face. There was something in her eyes, something like maybe she wasn’t the kind of girl who normally did things like this.
“Was somebody paying you to do that?” I said.
She shrugged. “I just wanted to do it. I should have paid you.”
“Uh huh,” I said. I cupped my testicles to calm the pain a little.
“There’s something I wanted to ask you,” said Barbara.
I dropped the condom and moist wipe in the wastebasket by the door. “What is it?” I said.
“Do you know a woman named Carver?” she said.
I swallowed and looked at her. “My little sister,” I said.
Barbara walked up to me, standing too close. “Short, brown hair?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And her teeth are filed down.”
She nodded. “I need you to do something for me.” My belly and testicles groaned. “I need you to stop her.”
“Stop her from doing what?”
“She’s killing us,” said Barbara.
“At... what?” I said.
“Killing.”
My back was itching. I washed my hands, faux-casually. “What do you mean?” I said.
“Your sister,” she said, “is killing, like with her fucking bare teeth, my girls.”
“Not my sister,” I said, though I half believed her. Then I remembered the blood trickling down Carver’s chin after she got her teeth filed into points, and the belief crossed over the half line.
She pushed me up against the mirror. My head bounced off the glass. “Hey,” I said, and held my hands in front of me to guard. “My sister’s not doing anything to you. To your... girls. What do you mean your girls?”
Now there was a knife in her hand.
“Where are you getting all these things?” I said. “Do you have an airplane in your backpack too?”
“OK,” she said, “you’re right, I’m not gonna stab you.”
I hadn’t actually been sure of this. My outburst had more to do with too much stimulation in too brief a span of time than any intentional bravado. In fact, I was having trouble breathing and I was currently struggling with an urge to bark. Ruff ruff ruff, said the voice in my head.
“Phew,” I said. “Whew. Augh. OK. What do you want me to do here?”
“Go to your sister,” she said. “Tell her to stop.”
If Carver were in fact doing something wrong, she would never listen to me. She might listen to Ophir. But Ophir would never listen to me. But there was a knife in my face, and the woman in front of me had definitely crossed some line in my head where I couldn’t make her angry.
“OK,” I said. “OK, I’ll tell her. Is that what this was all about? Is that why you gave me that terrible hand-job? To freak me out?”
“You didn’t like it?” she said.
“Are you kidding?” I said. I looked at the knife and closed my eyes. “Sorry. Never mind.”
“I thought you liked girls,” she said.
“It’s not that,” I said, my eyes still pressed shut. I was willing myself to shut up, but it wasn’t working. “You were just really, really bad at it.” Stop. Stop making her mad. “Never mind,” I said again. I opened my eyes, kept my hands up, and tried to back away, but there was no space left in the bathroom.
She looked crushed.
“Please...” I said. “Let me out of here.”
“I don’t have much practice with this kind of job,” she said. “Anyway... tell your sister,” she said.
That you give bad hand-jobs? Ha ha. No! Stop that! Gonna get killed! “I will. I’ll tell her to stop.”
“Tell her to stop,” she said.
“I’ll tell her stop, I mean I’ll tell her to stop, I will, OK,” I said. “OK.”
She reached around her belly, pulling a very complex backpack around under her armpit, and slid the knife into a holster on it. The backpack was dark green and looked very heavy duty.
“Are you... a...” I said, and started casting around for a word that wouldn’t get me in trouble.
“I’m a soldier,” she said. OK, that was a nice easy handle.
“For what... with what... division?” I said.
She smiled glumly. “I am not the one who will tell you that,” she said.
She unlatched the door and walked out. I stood quaking for a minute, my knees twittering unpleasantly up and down. I sat down on the toilet for a minute. Then I stood up and walked out the door back into the coffee shop. Astrid and Barbara sat at the table. I looked out the window; rain was falling in sheets. I looked at them and I looked at the rain and then I broke for the door and ran for blocks. I slipped and fell and slid several feet, getting mud and blood on my knees, and then I got up and staggered the last few dozen feet to my car and drove home, terrified of what Lucy would think, convinced that she would know.
It was hard to park at home, and I ended up down a transverse block. The first spot I found was, I discovered as I was about to walk away, overlapping a driveway, and I had to reenter the car, splooping again into the soggy seat, and drive it another half block. I parked it just short of the crosswalk.
The rain had stopped. The cement was slick, and there were filthy rivers flowing where sidewalk met street. My clothes were soaked. As I trudged, a pondered a phrase that had been the centerpiece of a recent crass sitcom. The phrase was “walk of shame.”
I came to the corner and turned onto my street, and then I knew something was wrong. I felt my nostrils flare and my ears prick up and my head turned to look down an alleyway. My reaction frightened me, because I was not aware of smelling or hearing anything; it was as if there were a bloodhound living in my body, not sharing my senses but using a second set to which I had no access.
I followed my thrusting nose down the alley. A man lay asleep in a bedraggled sleeping bag. I passed him, glad that I wasn’t personally aware of a heightened sense of smell. There was a dumpster under a barred window. I stood by it for a moment, my head probing the air without volition. My eyes set on a stream of brown fluid running down from the lid. I reached to open the lid, but it wouldn’t move. There was a metal arm swung atop, blocking the lid. With both hands I shook it till it moved, and I swung it down and lifted open the lid.
There were three dead women in the dumpster.
I replaced the lid and turned, trembling. I had seen bat earrings on the twisted head on top. Think. Think. These girls must have been soldiers, like Barbara. Barbara thought Carver was killing her girls. Clearly somebody was. And this must have happened recently, in the last hour or so, because the blood on the dumpster hadn’t washed away.
Barbara told me to stop Carver. She was going to blame me for this. Did she know where I lived? Of course she did. Or, anyway, Astrid knew. I was convinced, suddenly, that Astrid was some sort of general in the army in which Barbara and these girls were soldiers. Without evidence, I knew there was no room for doubt.
After the soldiers discovered this new attack, they would come after me and Lucy. It was our fault now.
I am not a fast thinker, even under pressure, and I was at the foot of my house’s staircase by the time I’d worked all this out. I climbed up the stairs and swung the door open.
“Lucy!” I shouted.
“Out in a minute,” came her voice, muffled.
I strode four strides, bringing me to the center of the living room. Five feet away on the left, the bathroom door was closed.
“This is serious!” I said.
“Just a minute,” she said, and she sounded so annoyed I couldn’t make myself force the issue, though it was a matter of life and death. Probably. I mean, there had been deaths, but I didn’t know for sure that we might die. I looked at my watch. It was 5:30.
“You’ve been in there for three hours!” I said. The life or death point would have been a better one to make, but I heard the toilet flush and a moment later the door opened. It was like air rushed out, having expanded while trapped for hours in that room.
“I...” she started, slowly.
“Later with the feminine troubles!” I said. “We have to get out of here. Carver’s got us in bad trouble. Maybe. Probably. There’s dead girls in a dumpster. Come here! Look!”
She was hard to hustle out of the apartment, but after I took her down the street and opened the lid of the dumpster and physically rotated her head to make her look into it (“gross,” she was saying) and pried open one of her eyelids, she turned pale and pliable..
“We have to call the police,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, “good idea. But. First, let’s get the hell -” one of them was familiar. Her face peered up from the
... thamp of dalinga. No. Her face peered up from under a powder of egg-shells and vomit. It was the girl who had first warned me of her fellow soldiers in the bookstore, before I’d realized what they were. Megan.
“OK,” I said. “Listen. These girls, they’re soldiers. There’s more of them. Do you remember? In the bookstore?”
“Soldiers?” said Lucy. “They look like they worked in a tattoo parlor.” But her voice was thin.
A whining sound was keening inside my head and the backs of my eyes hurt. I closed them and rubbed them with my palms. It felt like an eye-strain headache.
“I ran into one of them later,” I said. “She said she was a soldier. She had weapons.” Well, a knife and rubber gloves. Maybe there was more in that backpack. Help, it hurt. “They’re afraid of Carver. They’re gonna come after us when they find out about this.”
Lucy was just swallowing.
“OK,” I said. “Come on. We’re going to spend the night hiding out. Figure out what we’re doing.”
We returned to the apartment, my hand on her back to keep her moving. I opened a drawer in the kitchen and pulled out two little guns.
“Don’t ask,” I said. “Bad area.” I shoved one down my pants and the other down hers.
Then we trotted down the block, each of us carrying a bundle of blankets, and we crossed two streets, and turned left, and crossed one street, and never once saw anyone.
“We could hide here,” said Lucy.
“Maybe a little further,” I said.
We went four more blocks, till we were near an old office park where I had once known someone to work. We walked around it till I found a loose window, and we crawled in, dropping and regathering our blankets in the process, and we went down a dark stairwell by the light of our wristwatches. On the bottom floor, I came out of the stairwell and looked around. It was the bottom of a parking garage.
In the back of the garage, we found a locked door.
“Great,” said Lucy.
I pulled a key out of my pocket and tried it in the lock. It worked.
“Uh...” said Lucy.
“I used to know somebody who worked here,” I said.
“Who?” she said.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“And you got some sort of storeroom key from somebody, you don’t remember who, and you just happened to have it on you?”
“Well,” I said, “I was planning to come here.”
“Ohhhh,” said Lucy.
We had not been in the hiding place for an hour when there came a knock at the door.
I took the gun in my hand and stepped towards the door. Lucy took her gun and stepped back into shadows.
The knock came again.
“Who is it?” I said this in a soft, conversational tone.
“Pershings, open the door. Pershings, open the door,” said a woman’s cracked voice. It was not a young woman’s voice. Perhaps it was not a soldier?
Or was it worse? Was it some sort of officer?
I stretched myself up tall, breathed in a deep breath of air, bounced on the balls of my feet twice, and opened the door.
Ursule stood in black and orange, head casually cocked. Her hands were empty. She did not look as old as her voice sounded, but now that I looked, there was wear around her eyes. “Erdogan Pershing,” she said. “I have a message for you.”
I aimed my gun directly at her head.
She said “desist.” She reached her hands down to the collar of her shawl. My finger stroked the trigger, but she had done nothing directly threatening as of yet.
She stretched the collar down to reveal an necklace bearing the image of a horned animal, an antelope of some sort. Its horns were long and they curved away from each other.
“Erdogan Pershing,” she said. “You see it. An Ibex, not a Bat. I am not with those who hunt you.”
“Come in,” I said. I had no idea what she was talking about, but it seemed she might perhaps be able to explain a little.
She came into the storeroom. From a rack, she lifted a folding chair, expanded it, and was seated. She glanced towards the back of the room and snorted. I followed her eyes and saw nothing, but guessed that it was where Lucy was hiding.
“I told Euselia that you had asked if I was a witch,” said Ursule. “She said this had a meaning. I had not considered that the act meant anything but that you were rude. She said that perhaps your mind had fallen under the confusion that afflicts our people in the East Place. She said that perhaps you had forgotten important things, and that this could be a matter of great military importance. She said that it was even possible that you had forgotten the accords signed in the Court Martial. She said that this possibility was of grave military importance and I was therefore to come to you in lieu of the civil agent. Can you speak to this question?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
She slid a paper from some pocket under her shawl and ran her eyes over it and then looked back up at me. “You have sisters,” she said, “who share your surname.” I nodded. “How many?” she said.
Rebekah, Lucy, Carver. “Three,” I said.
“You have forgotten one sister,” she said. She looked at the paper again. “What are the proscribed boundaries beyond which the elk must not go?” I shook my head. “Thirty-one mark iv. For the security of the hidden nation lines have been drawn...” she prompted, and I shook my head again.
“What do elk have to do with this?” I said.
“You are elkh,” she said, and for the first time I noticed a phlegmy sound emphasizing the word. And then, she said gutturally, “which word is a form also of ‘Elokhim.’ So you have indeed lost your mind.”
“Hey,” I said, though in speaking to her I had in fact felt that I was losing my mind. And then I remembered that Ophir had used the word “elk” when we were last... loosing Carver.
“Please be seated,” she said. “Lucille, be seated as well.” Lucy’s face emerged from the dark, shadows hooding her eyes. “Lucille, I asked Erdogan two questions. How would you have answered?”
“The same as him,” said Lucy. “Except I only have two sisters.”
“Be seated,” said Ursule. “You have three sisters, and he has four.”
Lucy shrugged at me, shoved her gun into her cleavage, pulled a chair of the rack, unfolded it, and sat down on the other side of Ursule.
“I will attempt to explain a bare minimum of things to you,” said Ursule. “Explaining is not my job. I do not talk. I drink blood. And even after I explain these things, you will forget them unless you can escape from the realm of power of the eighth elk.”
“The which elk?” I said.
“There is one elk that is not your brother, is not your sister, and is not you, He sits on the a throne in the empty heaven and makes you forget. To continue, my name is Ursule,” said Ursule. “I am an agent of the Eagle nation.” She pulled two pamphlets from the same hidden pocket and held them in her lap. “The Eagle nation is the democratic union of all men and women who survived the falling down time.”
I shook my head.
She must have noticed because she rolled her eyes, but she did not stop to explain the term “falling down time.” “Many members of our populace, the majority in fact, have, like you, been made to lose certain powers of the mind, of memory and cognition. We refer to these members as fallow, and do not accord them votes, for democracy cannot function with an uninformed electorate. They are nonetheless precious to us, because they preserve the genetic diversity of our race.”
“I live in the United States of America,” said Lucy.
“That is correct,” said Ursule. Her eyes contracted, quizzical.
“The country I live in,” said Lucy, “is called the United States of America.”
“Oh,” said Ursule. “Yes. The United States of America is a false country. It was once a real country, but now it is only a pretense maintained to entertain the fallow populace.”
I began to consider that this crazy woman might be distracting us with nonsense while our enemies snuck up on us. I glanced at the locked brass door.
The nonsense continued to issue from her disinterested face, the words quick as if she were very impatient. “The primary political parties of the Eagle nation are the party of the Ibex and the party of the Bat.”
“An Ibex is a... bird?” said Lucy.
Ursule drew her back up straight. “The Ibex is the wild mountain goat. Its spine is rigid and it may therefore not bend its head to look back. If attacked from behind, the Ibex will run and dive blind into the abyss, landing in safety on its great horns. Whereas the Bat is a symbol of night predation, of those who abandoned the flesh of man to become possessing spirits spreading their depredations across all nature.”
“So... you’re an Ibex,” said Lucy. I snickered.
Ursule sighed, seeming to be very sick of talking to people as stupid as us.
“I showed you the Ibex I wear,” she said to me, “but I serve the executive of the Eagle nation. Today the ruling party is the Ibex, and the recent acts of the Bat’s militia are criminal. But if the balance shifts, illegal war crimes will be no doubt be pardoned, for the parties are immensely polarized. I will then serve the Bat. I am an organ of the executive.”
I got up and walked to the door. “But you sound like you’re more sympathetic to this Ibex party,” said Lucy.
“Yes,” said Ursule. “The Ibex arose from the remnants of that nation in the North Place which was Sumer reborn. The Bat arose from the hedonists, cohens, who ruled the South Place.”
Cohens. “Astrid,” said Lucy. I felt a peculiar feeling in my crotch.
“Astrid is, I believe, the name of a cohen,” said Ursule. “I am tired of this conversation. I am a military liaison. It is not my responsibility to entertain the defectors of a crushed army. Please find in these booklets,” and she thrust the booklets from her lap to us, arms outstretched a hundred and eighty degrees apart, black lace dangling, “replicas of the list of laws you swore to uphold, signed with your signatures, in my presence and in the presence of Euselia.”
I took the booklet in my hand and flipped to the end. The last seven pages consisted of color photographs of reddish symbols, strange squiggly things like squares and triangles and signs of the Zodiac.
“Is this supposed to be my signature?” I said.
Ursule stood and peered down at the page I had open and said, “Yes, that page is yours.”
“I didn’t mean this page specifically,” I said.
“And yet,” she said.
“How can this be my signature if I can’t even read it?” I said.
“I would imagine,” she said, “that you can read it if you try, and have merely forgotten that you know the language.”
I shoved the booklet in my back jeans pocket and pulled open the brass door. “OK,” I said, “can you leave now please? Lucy, we need to...”
Ursule howled and sprinted into the shadows at the back of the room. I spun to face the door and a short woman slammed into me. She was heavy, but I was heavier, so I was able to maintain my balance until three more burst in.
A black-haired woman stood over me. From her ears dangled earrings shaped like bats, and she held a foot-long knife in her left hand. I grasped the handle of the gun, stuck in my belt, and then launched myself back with my feet as she stabbed the knife. The knife-point stuck in the sole of my shoe and I twisted my leg, trying to pull the knife away from her, but she dropped to the ground and maintained her grip.
I had the gun free now, and I aimed and fired. It kicked and flew out of my hand and I swore and scrabbled for it as it fell and the grip bounced off my nose. The woman at my feet was shrieking and twitching -- her face stared at me, awful sounds coming out of her wide open throat, blood covering the left side of her face. I shot her in the head again and she fell down, silent.
Two other soldier-women turned, knives drawn, and began to approach.
“Erdogan!” said Ursule’s old-woman voice, “Stop that!” The soldiers stopped and looked in the direction of her voice. One pulled a flashlight out of a backpack and explored the dark in the back of the store room with the beam. The beam stopped on a woman’s crumpled body, and a knife swooped out of the dark, slit one soldier’s throat, and then Ursule was standing over the last soldier. She stomped on first one knee and then the other.
The woman thrashed on the ground.
“Erdogan,” said Ursule, stepping over the soldier on the ground and walking over to me. “Do not shoot these women. Do not kill these women. Do not harm these women. Any violence by your family against human beings, be they mine, theirs, or the gene-store, is cause for an immediate execution of your whole family. It is in the booklet, section 1 mark v.”
I held on to the gun, shaking, but Ursule’s knife, still dripping gore, went back into her pants.
“I will hide your violation today, this one time only, because, through no fault of your own, you may not have remembered the accords you signed,” she said. “This was the very message I was sent to give you. Human wars are between humans only. You must not participate.”
“I am human!” I shouted.
The door slammed open again. Ursule spun and I tried to get to my feet, but something smashed past me so fast I could only smell stale sweat. The light bulb exploded and I thought I saw a winged bull, and I heard the roar of a lion, and then a keening that made me press my palms into my ears and collapse in a fetal position.
The sound relented and I smelled gasoline and opened my eyes. The body of the soldier who had still been alive was burning, and some spots on the ground around it. From the dark, Carver appeared, hunched low, dragging a body behind her. She tossed it on the first body and the fire spread, and she disappeared again into the dark.
“Lucy?” I said.
“Here,” she said, and she emerged from the vicinity of the rack of chairs. I walked over to her.
“Carver?” I said. I could not see her, but I heard her snarl. “Carver, what are you doing?”
She returned with the corpse of the soldier I had shot and threw it atop the others. Carver disappeared into the dark again. The body she dragged out this time was Ursule’s.
“Oh, God,” I said.
“I don’t know if you should have killed her,” said Lucy. Carver looked at us from under a jutting Neanderthal brow, reached down, grabbed the fourth soldier, and tossed it next to the other bodies. Then she threw a red plastic container onto the fire, and there was a huge explosion, and now the whole floor was on fire.
I tore the door open and ran out with Lucy. We ran past parked cars and into the stairwell and up flight after flight, till we stood on the street.
“Where is the car?” said Lucy.
“At home,” I said.
“Won’t they be there?” she said.
“Probably,”
“So what are we gonna do?” she said.
“We could get a ride back with Carver,” I said.
“Shut the fuck up!” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “She probably didn’t drive anyway.”
Lucy pushed ash-blackened hair behind her ears. “Where did she say to go?” she said.
“She said to go somewhere?” I said.
“Not Carver. That old goat woman. She said we would forget what she told us unless we went to the desert or to the sea.”
“Would that be such a great loss?” I said. “No, you’re right. Some of it might have been true.”
“You think so?” said Lucy.
I thought. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, “and then let’s read these contracts we supposedly signed in a language we supposedly know but don’t know we know.” I could feel the neat booklet in my back pocket. “What happened to Carver? What was she doing?”
Lucy looked at me.
“What?” I said.
“She was doing what we told her to do. She slew the english who stalked the elk.”
We ventured up the alley way, moving slowly in the dark. “I think we should leave town for a while,” I said. Why? What was so unsettling? There had been violence. Bad violence... I could steal smell the smoke in my nose. But who had committed it?
“Without a doubt,” said Lucy.
“I’m forgetting already,” I said. “Write it down.”
“You write it down,” said Lucy. “Write what down?”
“Ursule’s bizarre ramblings. I think we should write down what she said. That we have a sister we don’t know, bird and bat makes eagle...”
“It was a goat, not a bird,” said Lucy.
“Are you sure?” I said. “The ibis?”
“That does sound like a bird,” said Lucy.
“No,” I said, “you’re right, her necklace thing was a goat.”
“Ibex, not ibis,” said Lucy.
“So you see why would should write it down,” I said. “I want to look this stuff up.”
The alley dumped out onto a well-lit side street. I inched up to the corner. “Clear,” I said.
We walked down the street, staying close to the storefronts.
“I’m really tired,” I said.
“Well, you haven’t been eating,” said Lucy.
“Oh,” I said. “You noticed that.” I stopped and pulled the booklet out of my pocket. The inner cover was blank. “Do you have a pencil?” I said.
“Why aren’t you eating?” said Lucy. “Is it a... diet?”
It’s suicide.
“Yeah, it’s a diet I read about,” I said. “Your body processes energy better in a starvation mode or something.”
I want to die, because then Ophir can’t use me like he uses Carver.
She had a pencil in her hair, I noticed. I gently reached over and slid it out. She said nothing. I opened the booklet up, pressing the jacket up against the concrete wall, and scribbled rapidly in the inside cover.
“Don’t forget, we’re supposed to read those,” said Lucy.
I flipped through my booklet... tiny print, legalese. “Later,” I said. “We need to leave town. The sea’s too close. Let’s go to the desert.”
“Where’s the desert?” said Lucy. “This is the first time I’ve ever left Fremont.”
I thought for a minute.
“Nevada? Or Baja California?”
“Which one’s closer?”
“Nevada, I think,” I said. For a second I considered backing up this decision by mentioning that Astrid had said she was from Mexico, but I thought better of it, realizing her lie was too bald to dignify.
We rounded a corner onto my street and drew up close. The car appeared to be undisturbed. I gave Lucy the car key and she jogged over to check it out. I turned to run inside for clothes and a street atlas.
“Don’t forget the cat,” she said.
“Forget... how?” I said.
“You have to bring the cat!” she said. “We could be gone for days. They could raid the house.” I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t remember exactly who it was we were running from.
Ohhh. I didn’t want to bring the cat. Something about it freaked me out. But her argument made sense. It would probably shred all the furniture in my absence anyway.
The house also seemed to be intact. Lucy pulled the car into the driveway (in which I wasn’t allowed to park because the landlord wouldn’t give me the key to the garage, and sitting in front of the garage, the car blocked foot traffic and earned me parking tickets). We loaded the trunk with clothes. I stuck the street atlas on the floor and took the booklet from my back pocket and stuck in between the visor and the roof so I wouldn’t forget to read it when we got where we were going.
Finally I went for the cat. There was a carrying case at the foot of my closet. I hadn’t moved it for years. It was inconveniently large and prevented the closet door from closing all the way. When I lifted it, I discovered some hideous, previously undiscovered form of grime made from years of cat hair, dust, and fluids collected over years of unwashed floors. So revolting.
When I had moved from Fremont, the cat had been terrified of this contraption. The sight of it would make him scream and flee the room. He hid out of reach, behind the refrigerator, and then in Ophir’s bedroom, screaming, for hours before I finally managed to convince Ophir to let me go in after him. It took the help of Dov... wait, who? Scratch that. It took the help of someone, probably Rebekah, to hold the cage open while I pinned all four of the cat’s legs, pushed him through, and then held him down with one hand, lowering the cage door till my arm and the cat’s arms were all clamped tight between cage door and edge, and then I slid my arm out and, one by one, pried the cat’s claws toes loose from the edge and finally slammed it closed.
You will understand my surprise, then, when the cat sat docile, blank-eyed, as I set the carrier in front of him. I touched him to make sure he was alive, and there was a soft thrum, so I lifted him and placed him inside the carrier and closed the door. I leaned down on the floor and looked in at him. He sat, calm, flat on the plastic floor of the cage.
“Maybe being around Ophir was driving you crazy, too,” I said. I filled a zip-lock bag with cat food and took food and cat downstairs and put them in the back seat of the car and away we all drove.
We drove for hours.
“California sure is huge,” I said, after hours of silence. I got no reply, so I looked over. Lucy had fallen asleep. “Great,” I said, out loud, “now it’ll be really easy to stay awake.”
I pulled over in the next town and went into a bookstore to buy a book on tape, but what I ended up buying was a box set of old radio programs of George Burns and Gracie Allen. I took the first tape out and stuck it in the tape player and put the rest of the box set on the floor under Lucy’s legs. She stirred and grumbled.
“We’re just in Bakersfield,” I said.
She turned over and went back to sleep. I turned the car on. George and Gracie bantered. I imagined their routines penetrating Lucy’s sleeping brain and derailing her stylish dreams.
About an hour out, the tape flipped over. About an hour after that, the second side was done. I ejected it.
I glanced down. The box with the rest of the tapes had slid over to the far side of Lucy’s seat well.
“Lucy?” I said. “Hey! Lucy?” She didn’t move. “Lucy!” I elbowed her.
She swung an arm out impulsively, but I caught it right before it hit my face. “What!?” she said.
“Can you hand me tape two from that box down there?” I said, pointing.
She muttered something, reached down and passed it over.
“And put this back in?” I said, handing her tape one.
She put it into the box where tape two had been.
“No,” I said, “come on. Put it after the last tape. Consume from the front, retire to the back. That way it’ll always be easy to get out the next one and they’ll stay in order.”
“God,” she said, and moved tape one after the last tape. “Where are we?”
“Last sign I saw said Four Corners,” I said.
“Where are we going, again?” she said.
“Nevada. To the desert,” I said.
“Yeah, OK,” she said. “I’ve never been to the desert.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It should be great. We can camp or something.”
“Or we could stay in a motel,” she said. “No, I’m sorry, we can do whatever you want. It was your idea.”
“Was it my idea?” I said. Yeah, it must have been. “Yeah. Anyway.”
She closed her eyes and went to sleep.
“Do you want to drive?” I said, but of course she was too heavy a sleeper to hear something like that.
We crossed the state line after midnight. I pulled into a motel, roused Lucy and sent her in to reserve the room.
She got back in and directed me to 25 on the top level. We drove 20 feet and parked. I took the cat carrier up first and loosed him on the floor, and then Lucy came in and we both fell asleep on our beds.
I dreamed a lucid memory that night.
Today my brothers and sisters came into town. We ate at a diner.
One of my sisters was a cannibal.
Ophir talked about the day I was born, and it freaked me out, because I knew it was a moment he had shared with my mother and my father, and he would never be able to talk about that story with them again, and nobody else would ever understand it, and I was the closest of anyone because in a sense I was the only other one there, and I was a poor substitute. It freaked me out.
I came home,
I got high,
I whacked off to Jennifer Tilly,
It was my birthday.
The next morning, Lucy woke up first, took a shower, came over to my bed, and shook me. I’d been awake off and on for about twenty minutes.
“Where are we?” she said.
I sat up. “A motel room?” I picked up an ashtray with a book of matches in it. “This matchbook says Primm, Nevada.” The cat was roaming free on the floor.
“Must have been your idea to come out here and go camping or something,” she said.
“Sounds right,” I said. “Let’s go to the store and buy some supplies.”
While Lucy checked out of the motel, I sat in the car with the cat, playing George and Gracie routines loudly so the clerk wouldn’t be able to hear the cat yowling and charge us a retroactive pet deposit.
Lucy got in the car and we got back on the road again.
A sign said “Las Vegas.” “Ever been to Vegas?” I said.
“You’re too cheap to go to Vegas,” she said.
“Well, I’m too cheap to gamble. But let’s go take a look,” I said.
A couple hours later, the black sky was bright with reflected lights from the approaching city. It actually stung my eyes a little. I reached up and flipped down the visor.
A booklet fell in my lap.
“What’s this?” I said to Lucy, but when she didn’t answer I realized she was asleep. I elbowed her, blocked an instinctive blow to the head, and repeated my question.
She pushed herself up straight in her seat with her legs and took the booklet in my hand.
“Molokai Accords,” she read. “The back cover’s blank. Let’s see. OK, inside the cover there’s some handwriting.”
“Do you recognize it?” I said.
She shrugged. I glanced over. “I’m pretty sure that’s my handwriting,” I said.
“Really?” she said. “Do you remember writing anything?”
“Until this minute I could have sworn I’d never seen that booklet before in my life,” I said.
“OK, here’s what you wrote.” She scratched the back of her head. “You should work on your handwriting.”
“It’s too late for me,” I said.
She read the note.
I put on my blinker and swerved into the right lane. There was some honking, and Lucy grabbed her chest.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
“I don’t think we should go to Las Vegas,” I said.
“I knew you were too cheap.”
“It’s not that,” I said, although that was certainly a lot of it. A new thought had just pushed me over the decision boundary to whose brink fear of slot machines and their consequences had already pushed me. “It says to go to the desert.”
“Las Vegas is in the desert,” said Lucy, pointing, and indeed the terrain was dry and blasted. She was whining. She must really have wanted to go to Las Vegas.
“I just don’t think that’s what... I... meant. I’m thinking open desert, sand dunes and tumble weeds. Death Valley.”
She groaned loudly and sunk down in the passenger seat. “Why did I let you of all people drag me off on a vacation?” she said.
“Honestly,” I said, “I don’t remember anything from last night. We must have got really drunk.”
I pulled off into a gas station, parked the car in a handicapped spot, and studied the road atlas. We would have to backtrack. Lucy said, “I have to go to the bathroom” and sprung out of the car. This irritated me, because it exactly succeeded the moment that I had decided I was ready to start the car back up. I reached over, locked her door, then opened my own, holding the handle open with my fingers as I slammed the lock down with my elbow, a maneuver possible only in cars in which handle and lock are exactly one cubit apart.
I went into the QuikStop where they kept the clerk who took money from gas buyers without credit cards.
The Pahrump library was a short gray building with only one floor above ground. I opened the door and we walked in. A stairway, ragged cement, ran down to our right, so I knew there was a basement. We continued in, past a checkout counter manned by a dowager with frizzy gray hair like a clown wig.
“I’ll catch up with you,” said Lucy. I nodded and she veered away, walking so quickly I thought there was some danger she would trample the toddler by the water fountain. But Lucy zoomed past here without injury and began browsing a wall of magazines.
Intuition. What is it? Is it being able to fit things into a pattern without being aware that you know the pattern? Is the smartest part of your brain the least rational part, impossible to direct or employ, handing out presents like Santa Claus but remaining distant and unknowable, never how when you have a question or a puzzle or just want someone smart to talk to? Following you around, eavesdropping, making judgments so harsh and appalling that you want to hear them all the more because you know they will sandblast away all your preciously held justifications for your repellent, craven life?
I had switched from Biblical cross-references and hermeneutics to big, hard-backed picture books purporting to teach Bible stories to Sunday School children. They were much less taking. I was considering relaxing and falling asleep; the next time my head nodded, letting it go to fall all the way down to the table instead of jerking myself awake. It was in this state, in the waking world only out of habit, that my intuition came down my chimney with a big bag of toys.
In a drawing of Daniel standing in chains in front of some ancient king, I noticed something: a statue of a winged bull. I stared at it. The face was wrong, but it was like looking at a faded childhood photograph. I flipped through the book and near the end found a legion of Roman soldiers. One of them was carrying a statue of an eagle. I reached into my back pocket and pulled out a quarter. There was an eagle on its back. The Eagle Nation, Ursule had said.
“Excuse me,” I called out to a librarian, grabbing her elbow as she tried to squeeze by. “I want to see the flags of all the countries that ever existed.”
“Sssh!” she said. She pointed to the back corner of the room. In a whisper, she said “Encyclopedias. Look under ‘flag.’ Or gazetteer.”
“Thanks,” I said, and she shushed me again. I walked over, sat on the floor, and looked through the World Book Encyclopedia: flag, eagle, underwear, nationalism, Eastern Europe, Nazi, America, Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, back to underwear, Ottoman Empire. There were eagles everywhere except in underwear. Every country had them somewhere, on flags or crests or engraved on the sides of government buildings.
I stood up and looked around. There she was. I jogged over to Lucy.
“Lucy!” I said. “I’ve discovered something.”
“You’re supposed to whisper in libraries,” she said.
“Oh,” I said, “really?”
“Have you ever been in a library?”
“No,” I said. “But anyway...” she made a gesture in the air, like she was frantically swatting my voice down to the ground. I switched to a whisper. “There’s an encyclopedia over there, in reference,” and I pointed. “And over there, in Juvenile, there’s Bible picture books. And you know what’s in all of them?”
“Information,” she said. “Useful information. Have you discovered the secret librarian’s code? It’s called Dewey Decimals. See, they put the books in order by subject, and then they give each subject a number, and then they put the books with the same numbers together, on shelves. And no one knows where the books are... unless they read the map!” and she pointed at a big poster on the wall, a map of the floor, which I had in fact not noticed before. I looked at it for a minute. Yep. Juvenile, reference, fiction, non-fiction, young adult.
“Not that,” I said. “Honestly. I found eagles everywhere. There’s like this unbroken line of countries with eagles on their flags or on their money going back to... at least back to ancient Rome.”
“Mmm,” said Lucy. She turned the page of her magazine.
“You understand what I’m saying? The Eagle nation?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m not sure you’re on to anything.”
I expelled air from my lungs in a disgruntled fashion. “Forget you, woman,” I said. I couldn’t explain it to her, but I felt memories stirring. I was sure now that I’d forgotten all kinds of terrible things over the years, over, even, the last few days, and that I was inches from being able to get them back.
I walked over to a woman behind the counter.
“Hi,” I said, in a whisper.
She looked up. Her face was a mask of dislike.
“I’m whispering now,” I said. “I’m sorry about that. I’ve never been in a library before.”
Her eyebrows went up. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.
“I was wondering if you could help me,” I said. Should I ask about eagles? No, despite Lucy, I was satisfied for now on that front. Winged bulls? “There’s this word I heard. I don’t know how to spell it. I was wondering if you knew what it meant.”
“What’s the word?” she said. She pulled out a scrap of tiny paper and a pencil shorter than her thumb.
“A-Low-Kkkkkh-Eeem,” I said. She squinted up at me. “A-Low-Kkkkkkh-Eeeem,” I said again. I almost handed her the note from myself, but thought better of it when I say the phrase “extra sister.” I took another one of the tiny pencils out of a tiny pencil jar and wrote “A-Low-(throat clearing sound)-Eem” on a scrap of paper and pushed it over to her.
“What’s this?” she said, tapping the parenthetical phrase “throat clearing sound.”
“That’s what it sounded like,” I said, “like somebody clearing her throat.” At least, so I assumed, because that seemed like the sort of thing I might have meant by that sort of note. Oops, I said “her.” Didn’t matter.
The librarian tried to say it. “A-low-heem. A-low-heem. That does sound familiar. Come with me...” and up she got.
We walked together across the library. She wore boots, brown pants, and a umber-colored sack thing. Her hair was huge and unkempt. We passed Lucy, who smiled primly and looked back into her magazine.
The librarian took a black-spined book off the shelf. I looked at it. “That’s the Bible,” I whispered.
She nodded. “Annotated,” she said. “And a concordance...” and she plucked down an even larger black-spined book. We went back to a desk and she put the books down and opened up the one she’d called a concordance.
“Here it is,” she said. “Elohim. Enjoy.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“That’s your word. Elohim, also Elohiym,” she said, and pointed. I looked at it. It was most definitely my word. “And then, see, these tell you where it appears in the Bible...” there were little jumbles of letters and numbers where she was pointing.
“Got it,” I said. I opened the Bible.
“Right,” she said. “So,” she looked at a bundle of symbols after Elohim: “here,” and she turned the Bible to page one and pointed to the first line.
“Hey,” I said, “there are little notes in here!”
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s what annotated means.”
She walked away.
“Thanks,” I whispered, and sat down and read for a long time.
The concordance said the word meant “God.” That didn’t match what I was looking for. But there was a note that the ending “-im” was plural. I looked at one of the corresponding Bible passages; the word “God” was in the singular. I started looking up all the listed passages. The most interesting was 1 Samuel 28:13:
And the king[4428] said to her, “Do not be afraid; but what do you see?[7200] And the woman said to Saul, “I see a divine being[430] coming up[5927] out of the earth.”[776]
The word God did not occur anywhere. I flipped around in the back till I figured out what the numbers corresponded to, and looked them all up. 430 was Elohiym. So it meant divine being, not just God. What else was a divine being? I went back to the Bible verse. Apparently a ghost was a divine being.
I went and grabbed some other books off the same shelf. One of them had a section on the word “Elohim.”
Not, as some claim, a “royal we” usage, as it predates the first occurrence of this concept[209] by some millennia; some Christians claim the plural represents the Trinity, but most secular scholars agree some parts of the text were simply not monotheistic when first written.
So it did mean gods. Or divine beings. Plural. In the beginning, the gods created the heavens and the earth.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost dinner time. Not that I was hungry... well, maybe a little.
“The library will be closing in five minutes,” said a whiny voice over a loudspeaker. I saw the librarian who had helped me over at the desk by the door, setting down a black speaker thing on a cord. I waved at her and jogged over with four books in my hands.
“Can I borrow these?” I said.
“Please don’t run in the library,” she said.
“Man, do you have a lot of rules,” I said.
“Do you have a library card?” she said.
“Um,” I said. “No.”
“Here,” she said, pushing me a piece of paper. I filled it out and pushed it back to her.
“Valid Nevada ID?” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “I live in California.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, we do have a short term borrowing program on deposit. For a twenty dollar deposit, you can borrow up to two books for one week. You just need to fill out this other form....”
She pushed another form at me. I was grimacing involuntarily. I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Did you just ask him for money?” said Lucy.
“Just for a deposit,” said the librarian.
“Yeah, he has a hangup,” said Lucy. “How much is it?”
“Twenty dollars.”
Lucy handed her a twenty dollar bill. I couldn’t tell whether I was OK with this.
“Folks,” said the librarian, “you’re going to have to hurry up. The library closes in thirty seconds.”
I scribbled rapidly on the other form. I left the phone number blank, and for the address I listed last night’s motel.
With just a few seconds left on the clock, I pushed the form and the books over to her.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the librarian. “I can’t let you take these. They’re reference books.”
“What?” I said.
“Reference books can’t leave the library,” she said.
“Come on,” said Lucy. “Come on, Erdogan.” My fingers were flexing as if around a neck.
“Here’s your deposit,” said the librarian, sliding the twenty back over the counter. I grabbed it and stalked out.
“Oh my God,” said Lucy in the parking lot. “Did you leave the cat in the car with the windows closed in Death Valley?”
“No,” I said, although obviously I had. I ran to the passenger side door, fought the lock for a moment, got it open, opened the back seat door, and pulled the cat c