Notes

Los Días de Muertos

After.

After they had walked.

After they had walked, they drank soft red wine.

After they drank the wine, they ate. Sweet slices of pan de muerto with honey,

And, after they ate the pan de muerto, they danced.

“This is rich! Two men dancing in the middle of the afternoon,” said Sedge. “This is rich!” he said again. “That’s what me Mum would have said.”

They had gone back to Javier’s house. It was the day after the election though that was not why they had met on the beach or why they were dancing. Nor why Javier was wearing a mask, a COVID mask, a black one with the cadaverous white bones of a smiling skull face painted on the front, una calavera. It was the one he made for the Days of the Dead, on the weekend just past.

When they had gotten back to the house. Before they had the wine, Javier turned to Sedge. “I am sorry, my friend” he said. “Maybe we should not have walked all the way down to the inlet. Not today.”

“Maybe we had no choice,” Sedge offered. His voice as thin as a reed.

They had walked on the hard-packed sand as far south as the mouth of the intracoastal inlet. The closer they came to it, the more anxious Sedge felt.

They stood looking down at the water.

The tide was rushing out, forced, through the narrow inlet, pulling the water through in swift and strong swirling eddies. Coiling currents over and under one another.

Sedge could see how easily a person, a body, would be dragged down in an instant, below the surface, twisting and turning in the turbulence and carried out into the dark sea, possibly never to be found or perhaps, he thought, carried back somewhere along the long stretch of the shore by a reciprocating, incoming, tide, as had been Adelaide.

Adelaide.

It was a year, almost to the day, since her body had been found on the beach. In her black bathing suit. The suit she loved, the one she wore in the picture he has of her on his phone, holding her glasses down at her side, rows of incoming waves behind her, standing in that quarter-turned, shoulders-back, way she did for photos. Her vanity showing. After which she put her glasses back on because she could not see more than a colorful blur without them.

The two of them, Sedge and Adelaide, had met Javier years back at a Ritmo 95.7FM fundraiser for Miami’s troubled Hispanic youth. He’d been the weekday morning man before the station was bought and went to all-day-cubatón programming and the youthful audience had become Latinx and Javier’s olden-days voice had aged him out.

They had become tight. The three of them.

After her body was found on the beach that evening, Sedge was beset with grief. So deep and so constant, it filled his days as completely as darkness fills a room when the lamp is extinguished. He wore his grief like a repellent raiment of rags.

At the sharp drop at the water’s edge, where the stream erodes away the sand, Javi touched Sedge lightly on the arm.

“Take this,” he said, separating a marigold from the bunch he held, carried from home.

Sedge took the flower as Javi tossed one and then another into the water, watching as each one was spirited swiftly away on the surface. He felt the near-weightless earthy vibrance of it, smelled its unmistakable pungency and, as Javi had done with the others, he tossed it into the stream.

“We do this to remember. To celebrate the dead,” said Javi.

“Celebrate?”

“Yes. To celebrate their lives and what they have left with us. Siempre, always, una mezcla de la felicidad y la tristeza. The happy and the sad. So, we gather at their graves, or just together as we are now and we think good things about them and tell their stories. All of them. All the lives lost. Each one mourned. Those laid to rest and others who have never found a resting place. They all look to us to recognize them and to remember.

“How can I celebrate her death? What a horror that must have been. To die like that.”

“Do you know of any death, Sedge, that is not a horror?”

“And we celebrate that?

“No, of course not.”

“Then what?”

“A person just like us who lived and died. As we will. Is that not what you want in some way. To have your life celebrated?”

“The marigolds?”

Yes. The marigolds. We believe they have the power to open the door between the living and the dead, to bring their souls, their beingness, if you will, into the present moment. Your mom. Adelaide. A Salvadoran man with a family of eight who was disappeared. Trayvon and Breonna. A million people who had the COVID. My parents, who were Marielitos who climbed into a twenty-foot boat in the dark with one bag and held onto me and my brother for dear life. For dear life, and then…,” he said. “When we lose someone close to us, when we grieve in our hearts, and give room to the emptiness we feel, when we share that loss with others, we bring ourselves closer to them, both the ones we’ve lost and ones we grieve with. This is why we do this.”

“I am sorry for you. For them.”

“Listen to me, Sedge, I miss her too.”

“Not as much as I do.”

“Oh, no? How do you know that? You are not the only one to grieve for her.”

Sedge was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry, he said. “I don’t know. I cannot know. I should not have said that.”

“Nor should have I, Papi,” said Javier. “Let’s forget that. Come with me. We will bake some Pan de Muerto together and talk of other things. We will put aside sad thoughts and pray together for them and us, and dance La Danza de los Viejitos, for we soon will be little old men ourselves.”

And they turned back. The sun hard and warm on the back of their necks and they spoke of Adelaide and their parents and friends and even those who they had never known.

When Life is Enough

Noah Larsson lay in bed. An empty water glass on the bedside table. His reading glasses resting on his copy of McCoullough’s The American Spirit. The curtains are drawn closed but still the white afternoon light and heat penetrate the room.  

August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties each night.

When he awoke earlier, he’d turned on his side to get up. He needed to go to the bathroom and down to the kitchen for something to eat. He could not. He had not even the strength to move his legs over the edge or shift the weight off his bad shoulder.

The bed was the one in which his father had been born; in the house his great-great grandfather had built, in the town in which he’d cut stone from the steep, deep sides of the granite quarries.

Larsson had been a Navy man, joining right out of high school, flying crew in east coast patrol bombers.

After he was discharged, he met Margret. Two months later, they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottninghol. They took a bus to Stockholm to meet her parents. They stayed a week, returning to Boston, to take whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter, Ulla.

He started an accounting business he’d kept for fifty years, moonlighting selling insurance for a company in Hartford. He never took out a policy of his own. With his clients, he never spoke about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was the right thing to do.

Margret died young. There was not a day he did not mourn for her. He raised Ulla until she married and left home. For fifty years he kept the old house. And when Ulla, too, died young, he mourned doubly each day.

He paid his bills on time, read books by Goodwin, Tuchman, and Mantel, remembering each one as they sat in rows on his bookshelves. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm in good running order.

He saved every nickel, owed not a penny, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Mailed fruit boxes from Florida each Christmas to close family. Late in life he found companionship with a woman close to his age whose quiet good humor and cooking he enjoyed. 

He never spoke ill of another soul. He kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit a light only when he needed one, shutting it off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and warmed  Swanson’s dinners in the microwave. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.

One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will and never would.

Trust one’s own counsel, keep one’s affairs in order, plan well and prepare for adversity, ask for no favors, offer kindness and accept kindness with grace . That’s all one need do.

He’d handwritten his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law. He had files and note cards for everything, catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a single newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, a cup of hot coffee in front of him, and a smile on his face. He found comfort in solitude as well as community.

Later in the blistering August afternoon, Noah’s son-in-law and his new wife came to check on him and found him in bed with the door and windows closed and the air conditioner off.

“Oh my God, Noah,” he said. “It’s like an oven in here. It must be a hundred.”

“Noah? Can you get up?” said the woman, “Open a window and put the A/C on.”

“Don’t you turn it on!” Noah said. “It’s old and it won’t last if you run it too hard.”

“Noah it’s so damn hot in here, you won’t last as long as the A/C if you don’t let us turn it on.”

They managed him out of the bed, to the bathroom and down on the stair-chair to the kitchen. He drank a glass of orange juice, ate an egg,  toast, and a cup of coffee. He thanked them and asked them to help him move to the couch in the living room where he could rest, which they did and where he fell quickly asleep.

When they returned and tried towaken him the next morning, they called the police. The ambulance came. From the couch, in a weakened, near inaudible voice, he said, raising his head, “I know my rights. I have authorized no healthcare proxy and no power of attorney. I speak for myself. You can’t make me leave my own house! I refuse any treatment, to be placed on a gurney, or to be taken to the hospital or anywhere else. I need rest. Leave me and do not come back under any circumstances.”

They did as he asked.

He lay his head back on the pillow, closed his eyes. The afternoon was waning.

When he was younger, he had smoked a pipe, as had his father. His grandfather’s meerschaum. He imagined himself now filling the bowl with fresh tobacco from a leather pouch, tamping down the soft, thin aromatic ribbons with his finger and putting a match to them, drawing in the warm soothing sweet savory smoke into his mouth and deep into his soul.

His bones and muscles relaxed to nothingness. Gone was the sensation of lying on the couch. Intermittent light and shade through the window drift over him as at the beach when thin cirrus clouds pass slowly across the sky. Moments of cooling shade alternating with warming rays of sun. His mind finds rest, carelessly floating on a calming sea before slipping beneath it into a long dreamless sleep.

Afterthought

Autumn. Leaves just beginning to fall. The seminar room is filled with counselors, faculty, and caregivers. Marcus stood, along with a few others, mostly men, who, like him, had been among the last to arrive. They leaned with their shoulders against the reluctant gray concrete wall opposite the high windows on the other side of the room.

There were slide presentations, personal stories, some gruesome and some not, role play, Q&A, prompts from the leader (“Perhaps it was someone close to you or even yourself,” was the way she put it) to which many raised their hands (some slowly and some quickly) or nodded, or touched their hand to the shoulder of a person next to them. He had not responded in that fashion, nor was he moved to.

As an afterthought, though, later, during the lunch break, he recalled there had been a student of his, Rodrigo, who’d hanged himself over the door closer arm of his dorm  room and was found the next day. And, of course, there was Ralph who’d refused food and water and died a week later in his bed in St Vincents, and then, too, his own lawyer, Friedman, who’d driven his car into a bridge abutment on the Bronx River Parkway and survived but remembered nothing about it. Yes, there were those.

“Shit!” he said, shaking his head. Where had his mind been?

After the evaluation forms and the chit-chat with other faculty in the hallway and in the parking lot, he got into his car,  put down the pamphlets and notes he had taken and, only then, when he retrieved the key from under the seat, holding it cold and firm in his hand, about to insert it into the ignition, he shuddered… and it came so very clearly to him as if it were, in fact, the present …

He is thirteen…

… kicking his shoes through dry brown leaves along the curb, walking home from the school bus. The late bus. Mrs. Gormley, his homeroom teacher, made him stay after to clean the chalkboard erasers.

Walking behind Francis Romeo. Francis always has to take the late bus home, and he always sits in the back, smoking.

The front door had been left unlocked and wide open.

The house quiet. Dim, behind pulled-down shades. He puts his books on the stairs. No TV on. The door to the baby’s room is closed.

“I’m home. Sorry I’m late. Mrs. Grumbly made me stay after. Don’t tell Dad, and don’t tell Angie, but did you know that Francis smokes?”

No answer.

The hall bathroom door is closed.

“Mom?”

She says something.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

In the kitchen, he pours a glass of milk.

“Mom? I got myself some milk. Ok?”

He knocks once on the bathroom door. “Mom?”

“Leave me alone. I’ll be done in a minute.”

“Is there anything wrong?”

“No. Go away.”

He knocks again. “Do you need anything?”

“Noo-oo-oo,” in a whimpering wavering tone.

He jiggles the doorknob. It is locked.

“Get away from the door.”

“Mom, please, can you open the door?”

“I can’t. Just go away.” Her angry voice.

“Mommy, I can’t go away. I live here. Are you sick? Can I help?

No answer.

He waits… and waits… and then…

“Mommy, if you don’t open the door I’m going to get Angie.”

“Don’t you dare do that!” she screams.  

At that, doorknob turns, the door clicks open.

With his hand pressing against it, he looks in.

His mother is standing at the sink, facing the mirror, dressed in the yellow housedress she was wearing this morning as he left for the bus. Barefoot. Her hair hanging down on either side of her face.

Her glasses folded at the back of the sink, her eyes red-rimmed and wet. Her nose is dripping onto her upper lip.

She is rocking, slowly, side to side.

“Mom, what are you doing? What is wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong,” folding her arms across her chest. “What are you talking about?”

“Mommy, I can see that something is wrong. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Please, Marcus, just go out and leave me alone.” She smoothes her hair back.

Her left hand, the one closest to him, is balled into a fist.

“What’s in your hand?”

“Nothing.”

A bottle of Bayer aspirin lays in the sink. The cap off. The bottle empty.

His knees shake. Heat rises into his head. Tears fill his eyes. He is frightened. So alone.

He reaches forward to take hold of her arms, to turn her toward him. She moves responsively at first and then pulls sharply away.

“Don’t touch me!” she screams. “You can’t stop me. No one can.”

White streaks run from the corners of her mouth.

“Mom, please. ”

He sees how miserable and sad she is. He has never ever seen her like this before.

She swallows hard. Gags.

He backs away.

“Mom,” he pauses, then says no more.

She looks at him.

Then slowly, assuredly, his voice calmer and softer now…

“Ok,” he tells her. “I don’t want to stop you.”

Silence.

“I know I can’t. Believe me. Just let me see how many pills are in your hand.”  

She looks into his eyes.

“Open your hand and let me see how many are there. That way I can tell the police when they get here how many you took.”

She keeps her gaze on him. He takes her closed fist in his hand.

“Please, just open your hand a little to let me see them.”

They watch her fingers uncurl. A cluster of tablets, some moist with her sweat, rests in her palm.

They both look down at them. Counting.

And, holding her hand firmly in his, he suddenly, with his free hand, strikes the bottom of hers with a violent, concussive blow. The pills scatter, hit the mirror, bounce into the sink and into the tub.

She gags and retches, lurching forward grasping for the edge of the sink, losing her grip, she slips back.

Her full weight falls against him, forcing him hard against the wall and the towel bar. He grabs hold her from behind. Together, they slip, drop, and fall as one, hitting the edge of the sink and curling tightly beneath it onto the cold, checkered, green-and-black tile floor.

Adelaide On the Beach

When Sedgwick saw the body on the beach in the morning he resisted believing it was Adelaide, the woman he had been seeing until they had wordlessly drifted apart without, he thought, having made any sort of commitment, save for the unspoken assumption that they’d spend an evening or two together when she was in town, mostly on the weekends, at one of the beach bars along the A1A strip up by Fort Pierce for drinks, slow dances, and sharing their stories over a bowl of peel n’ eat shrimp or maybe the conch fritters which she liked better even though they were greasy and she’d have to take a Zantac later but truly because the lingering smell of shrimp on her fingers kept her from teasing herself with the smell of Sedge on them after he would leave with the sky beginning to lighten over the water in the east through the windows of the condo she rented in the winter months, but before the beachgoers had set up their chairs and umbrellas, save for the brown-skinned men in Panama hats, long sleeve shirts, and their tall fishing rods to catch the blues or whatever was running from the tuna that early in the day and, when Sedge, that day, saw the body, a shudder ran down his spine to behind his knees from the adrenaline or whatever chemical it is that shocks into your veins and your heart and lungs and stomach even before your eyes have adjusted to what you are seeing, like how your brain knows what is coming before the tires screech and the metal crushes you into the exploding airbags and breaks your nose, and he realized then that it was her, with the leathery men and women around her with their tucked-in towels and their heads bent, and she, lying on her stomach with her arms spread out limp and wide and her head turned away from him as if she could not bear to think of him looking at her lying flat on the beach in the black bathing suit she loved and thought she looked stunning in and how he might think then that she’d worn the same bathing suit two days in a row instead of how she washed it each evening and hung it to dry on the railing of the deck of the condo, soaking up the morning sun and the freshness of the sea and, with her hair red and clogged with clumps of brown seaweed, and the drying sand adhering to her back and her thighs in a way that she would feel made her look dissolute and un-ladylike, and as if she wanted him turn and walk back up the beach while the other men and women standing over like mournful Neolithic sarsen Stonehenge pillars created long slow shadows across her body, with one of them pointing toward her as if questioning whether or not to cover her before the police came, and talking in soft funereal tones to spare her from hearing what perhaps only she, if she were alive, would hear, as she always had, as criticism and fault with her, as had her father in the years before he left her mother and herself in the one bedroom apartment in Kissimmee where she had slept on the pullout couch and, even then, at the age of seven, was expected to have washed and dressed herself and made her own breakfast and folded the bed back up into the rank and moldy innards of the couch that had been in the apartment they rented by the month, and hearing, on the first day of every month, the rapping on the door as she picked up the trash and bottles from the kitchen floor and put them in the bin as she had been told to do whenever the landlord came for the rent, peeking in over her shoulder, breathing his rancid breath with his hand on the small of her back in a way that chilled her and made gooseflesh on her arms and she would tell him that he should come back in the evening to see her father who had the money for him, while her father, at that very moment, was laying in his shorts and tee shirt with his arm across her mother, before she dressed and left for work at the nail salon in Orlando six days a week, knowing that the life she had was not the life she wanted nor wanted for her daughter and prayed that when Adelaide was old enough she would leave this tawdry place and its guns and ammo shops and have a life that would bring her a little happiness, a little rest, and a man who would treat her right, like a woman wants to be treated, and which, she told Adelaide, that that life would come to her because she was smart and strong and wily, to which Adelaide would laugh and say that she never wanted to be like Wile E Coyote because he’s the one who always runs off the edge of the cliff or has an anvil falling down on him and maybe he dies or maybe he doesn’t but she didn’t really know because she’d always put her hands over her eyes when she saw that starting to happen and she hoped that it never ever would happen to her, and her mother would grab her up in her soft white arms and hold her as tight as could be and squeeze Adelaide’s breath out of her and say to her, “Adelaide, my baby, that will never happen to you,” and, when Sedge saw her lying there in her black bathing suit in the center of the growing crowd on the early beach with the receding tide, his heart sank and his knees sank, falling to the rough sand, he shielded his eyes in his arms, wanting in desperate hopeful hopelessness for what he had seen to be unseen, undone, and erased from the eternal memory of the universe and feeling, too, that somehow, someway, he had what?…. failed her?…. forsaken?…. her by not caring enough to avert whatever had happened to her, while knowing in the deepest depths of his being that, yes, that was, in truth, what he had done.

Jake. Julia. Winter. 1948

In her housedress, Julia opens the kitchen door. She looks out, folds her arms across her chest. It is dark. The wind blows the thin fabric against her legs.

“Get your slippers on,” she tells her son.

“Jake,” she says, speaking to her husband in their bedroom, behind the curtain separating it from the kitchen, “I wish you didn’t have to go in today,”

He pulls aside the curtain wearing his brown suit and a matching wide tie.

“Please leave if it starts to snow.”

He shrugs on his officer’s overcoat, stuffs his pant legs down into his galoshes, snapping shut the metal buckles.

Julia hands him his thermos of coffee. He leans over, kissing her cheek, tousling the boy’s hair. “Be good,” he says.

“Bring me something?” the boy asks. “A pencil?”

“Maybe,” he replies. Holding his hat fast on his head, he steps out into the wind.

“Call me,” Julia says. “Be careful,” then louder, “Jake, don’t you think you really should stay home today?”

He turns his head and waves. The wind flaps his coat around his knees.

The street is empty. He pulls the car away from the curb, trailing exhaust vapor behind, passing a row of garbage cans. One topples, rolls and bangs against the steel side of a neighbor’s hut, colored lights blink in the window.

He turns right onto Bruckner Boulevard. Juia closes and locks the door. The kitchen heats again.

Earlier, at breakfast, she had said, “I just don’t understand why you have to go in on the day after Christmas. Nobody else will be there. And it looks like it might snow. You think Eddie will be there?” 

“We need the money, Julia. We’re not in the army anymore. If I don’t go, I don’t get paid and we don’t eat.” He pushes his bowl toward the middle of the table and gets up.

Julia draws aside the window curtain now, looks out, lets it fall back, and clears the dishes from the table, where the boy sits with a few books, paper, pencils, and a box of crayons.

She mops the floor and folds laundry.

Every few minutes, she stops, looks out the window, sighs and returns to what she had been doing. The boy sighs as she does. He draws RAF P-40s fighters and Messerschmitt 109s in a dog fight shooting a flurry of bullets, popping his lips with each one.

The wind picks up. Snow begins falling after lunch. The phone has not rung all day. Julia picks it up, listening for a dial tone. She dials, waiting, listening, a finger pressed to her lips.

A woman answers, ”Hello. How can I help you?”

“Hello, can I please speak to Jacob?”

“One moment please.”

“Hello?” the woman says. “Jake is in back and cannot come to the phone. May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is his wife. Can you please ask him to call me as soon as he can?”

“I sure will, Julia.”

Julia starts to say something but stops, pressing the receiver against her chest for a moment before putting it down. Standing next to the bed, looking at the phone, thumbing her wedding ring around her finger.

She dials the phone again. This time she says, “Tell him it’s very important.”

In a moment, he picks up. “Why didn’t you call me?” she says. “I’ve been waiting all day. When are you coming home? Don’t you see it is snowing?… It certainly is snowing,” she says. “I can see it. It’s not just flurries. Don’t treat me like I’m crazy. It’s a foot deep. Please, Jake… Wait,” she says. “Don’t hang up… Jake…”

The oven ticks. She sits with boy in her lap, resting her head against him.

“It will be okay,” he tells her.

Snow now blankets the window.

She carefully opens the door an inch or two to look out. Blown by the wind, it swings in against her. Snow tumbles in around her legs, filling the entrance. She pushes back against it, packing the mounded snow tight. It will not close.

Books, papers, crayons, napkins, and cups blow off the table. The bedroom curtain is blown off its rod. The bedside lamp falls. Snow covers the floor, puddling by the oven.

“Where is he?!” she cries.

She  carries the boy into the bedroom, dresses him in a snow suit, boots, and hat. Her hands shake. She pulls her brown cloth coat from the narrow closet. Tears run over her cheeks. Her lips are pressed together, wrinkling her chin. She sinks to the bed, holding the boy, shivering, holding their backs against the wind.

“Why is he doing this to me?” she cries. 

Wind-blown snow whips through, toppling the hot pot on the stove, snuffing out the flames. 

She carries the boy back toward the door through a mat of snow and green peas. Her hand blocks the wind from their faces.

“Where is he?” she pleads. They retreat to the bedroom, but once again she goes to the door. Back and forth, to and from the growling wind and the spitting snow.

In her wet hair and shivering cheeks, they huddle, holding tightly to each other. Waiting.

Waiting.

And then the door pushes further open. He is covered in white. He kicks the packed snow out, bracing his shoulder against the door, slamming it shut. The frigid, racing, air stops. It is silent.

The three stand in the melting snow.

The room smells of gas. He turns the burners off.

 “What are you trying to do? Kill yourself?” he says. His face is red with cold and anger.

“Where have you been?” she says. “”I’ve been sick with worry. Can’t you see what the storm has done?”

“What the storm has done? How did the door open? Didn’t you lock it?”

“We opened it,” the boy says.

He looks at them.

“I opened it,” she says.

“What for? Are you nuts?”

“I wanted to see if you were coming home.”

“I can’t believe this. Look at this place. I told you I was coming home. I Can’t believe you opened the door.”

“I was so afraid you weren’t coming home. I didn’t know what to do.”

He kneels, picking up the pot and peas from out of the slush.

“You didn’t know what to do?” he says, his hands filled with filthy water and shreded napkins. “That’s hot,” he says. “You had nothing else to do but call me five times at the office.”

“I only called twice.”

“Becky said you called a few times.”

“Oh, so now it’s Becky. She treats me like dirt and then lies to you. Is that why you had to go work today? To see her?  Who knows what you were doing there all day.”

“Now I know you’re nuts. She’s Eddie’s daughter. She’s seventeen, for god sake. She answers the damn phone. I have nothing to do with her.”

He stands suddenly. His face clenched hard as a fist. She flinches, falling backwards, grabbing hold of his arm, knocking the boy down, pulling them all down to the puddled floor beside her.

Silas Cleary, Friday Morning 

Silas Cleary awakes slowly. Friday morning. It is grey with wind and rain.

He draws the covers aside and lifts one leg, and then the other, over the side of the bed. He feels the cold floor on the soles of his feet as he walks into the kitchen. His sleep had been fitful, interrupted, and difficult falling back to sleep.

He takes his morning meds from the cupboard and swallows them with a cup of warm coffee from the pot Mirette had made for the two of them before she left for work.

The day is his. Nothing required of him. Only what he wants to do. And what needs doing.

Rain thrums against the roof shingles. After coffee, Silas sits at his desk to write a few emails. He is wearing headphones, listening to a recording of Dion in concertat the Tropicana in Atlantic City in 2004.

A brief intro followed by two, three, and four beats of silence. The next thing you hear is an acapella solo, by a bass-baritone, his lips and breath pushing out heavy, propulsive consonants into the mic: Dun-dun-dun-dun, Dun-dun-dun-dun-dah, and in comes Dion riding above the bass, with his B-flat tenor, asking, I wonder why, I love you like I do. is it because I think you love me to?

The do-wop, the rhythm, the lyrics of teen angst, wonder, and the anticipation of first love.  All as real and present for him as in ’58 when he first heard it on the radio in the back seat of his brother’s black 1951 Ford Custom Tudor sedan … Dun-dun-dun- dun- dah...

Last night, as he has done on every-other Thursday night for the last sixteen weeks, Silas went to sleep wearing an infusion pump as he will for two nights and three days. Chemotherapy agents flowing through a port in his chest. The pump emits a low whir and click. In the days after the infusion begins, the fatigue, the neuropathy, the GI symptoms, and low appetite come again.

Silas has cancer. It is treatable the oncologist says. Treatable, but not curable. It was diagnosed five months ago.

An endoscopy had revealed a bleeding gastric ulcer which would be biopsied.

Two days after the endoscopy, the hospitalist came into his room, pulling aside the curtains between the beds. “You have cancer,” he said. He’d been brief, disconnected, barely making eye contact. If he’d said more, Silas could remember none of it. And then when he was done, Silas was left alone, sitting in bed.

It, the diagnosis, was unexpected. A surprise. Coming at him like a sand-spreader truck backing out of a blind alley onto a dark, icy road towards his car at three o’clock in the morning.

And as it is backing out, for an instant, time slows to a slouching crawl; the mind moving at one-quarter speed in the single second before the crash.

In a way, though, it was less of a surprise: the slow motion truck coming toward him was real. For years he’d had heartburn, anemia, fatigue, cramps, taking Tums, and pantoprazole. It all kept getting worse.

And then he’d gone to the ER.

Alone in the hospital bed, surrounded by sadness, he felt the tickle tears that would have come if only someone else had been there by the bedside. But no one was, and the tears did not come.

It didn’t matter that the doctor didn’t stay. The diagnosis had become the new incumbent shape of reality. The frame, the context, the backdrop.

But within that, nothing had changed. The room. The light through the window. The metal chair in the corner. The closet with his coat, shoes and a bag of his belongings. The white board with his last and first name, date, and who the on-duty nurse was. The book he brought, the phone, and a plastic cup of water on the wheeled table. Everything was the same, exactly the same, as moments before, but everything was different.

Later, Silas will feed the dog and then they’ll walk up into the woods behind the horse farm, avoiding the puddles and mud, and  taking the path that circles the lake and leads up through the cemetery. 

When they come back, he’ll make something for breakfast, pay the bills coming due, and write for a few hours. Maybe a nap before starting dinner.  Tomorrow he’ll return to packing up books for the thrift store and the used bookstore, considering which ones to be left on the shelves.

Yesterday had been the last infusion in the first treatment cycle. Eight, three-day infusions, two weeks apart. Sixteen weeks of first line therapy. Whatever line might come next will depend on the results of the PET scan he’ll have in four days.

Don’t know why I love you. I just do.

Silas no longer wonders why. There is no point to wondering why.

Not why his life has taken the turn it has. Nor why he loves Mirette or their dog or cooking, or mowing the lawn, or reading books about slavery and the Third Reich, or why he spends his time writing short stories. This is what he does now, what he wants to do, what he will continue to do.

By next week, the fatigue will have worn itself out, and the mouth sores and tingling fingers will lessen. He will call a friend, and they’ll meet for coffee and talk about the novels they’re reading, Wimbledon, and the state of the world. And they’ll make plans to play tennis one morning, and to go to the little seafood place on Hanover Street in the North End and they’ll order a skillet of the black ink pasta and garlic calamari meatballs with a house salad with oil and vinegar, and maybe also a bottle of Nero d’Avola… if the spirit so moves them.

 And come fall, he and Mirette will rake and bag up the oak and maple leaves, and they’ll plant the bulbs they’ve kept in the basement. Maybe they’ll plan a vacation to someplace simple and warm, and with a language they will not have to practice and learn to speak beforehand.

My Dinner with Andra

Andra and I met for dinner at Wo Hop on Mott Street. It serves what she calls the most “authentic New York-style” Chinese food. It is bright, loud and crowded. It smells heavenly. And the waiters rush dishes out as soon as they are prepared.

Because her flight from Europe was delayed, we met there at 9:30 pm, shortly before closing.

We sat at a booth in a corner furthest from the kitchen. She’d slept on the plane intermittently and she was ravenous. She ordered for the two of us.

 We spoke for a while about Budapest, her writing, and the course she taught there. She was animated but soon her mood shifted.

She folded her arms in front of her on the table and leaned toward me.

“I am spent,” she said. “I had such great hopes for my year away and much of it was wonderful. But I now feel lost, unmoored, and meaningless to a certain extent and that life, in fact, lacks any inherent meaning.”

“Andra,” I said.

“No, I’m serious. I was there for a year and my classes were going well. I even considered moving there, at least for a few years, but as time went on, I felt the work was dispiriting. I was diligent. I admit, I had high expectations. However, my students were unengaged, uncommitted, at least in the way I had expected them to be: European, whatever that might mean. They were no better by comparison to those I had been teaching here. I began to ask myself, am I making any difference at all in their lives? They certainly were not making any difference in mine.”

“Andra, I know you. You’re a good teacher. Your students speak highly of you.”

“Yes, yes, I know that, but…”

“And this just began in Budapest?

“No. In fact, I had taken the job there because I felt that living here, in this New York bubble, was, with the constant hype, celebrity, needy causes, acquisitiveness, and self-satisfaction, stifling. Don’t you feel that at times?”

“About New York or that I am going through life playing a part of some sort with no meaning?”

“Well, both, but more than that, that life ultimately has no meaning. We fill our days with work and phone calls and dinners out, and futile political conversations without any effect. When, in fact, they are simply diversions from facing that we are alone in the world which cares nothing about us and which itself has no meaning.”

The waiter had brought platters of chow fun, spareribs with ginger and scallion and a shrimp dish I could not identify. I spooned some of each dish onto my plate.

“Andra, I don’t disagree with you at all. The world is, in fact, pointless. But life need not be meaningless or pointless. If you are thinking that because, ultimately, as perhaps you are, we all die, therefore life has no meaning, I disagree with you. If anything, death gives us the opportunity to find meaning in life, in relationships, family, and creativity.”

She was quiet while the waiter filled our glasses with ice water.

“On the flight back,” she said, “I had this terrifyingly real dream that I had somehow contracted a painful and incurable condition, much like when I was younger and had endometriosis which they could do nothing for except remove my uterus which I refused to do, and now I had this disease, equally painful and incurable. I woke up in fear. I may have screamed, because the attendant came over to me and she actually sat down next to me and asked if they should divert the fight for me, and of course I said no, I apologized and passed it off as nothing of concern.”

“That must have been so frightening.”

“Yes, yes, it was, but of course I don’t have such a disease. Not that I know of, but what if I do? It would be all over. How could I go on? Maybe I could. I mean it just shows you how flimsy life can be. Ultimately how meaningless it is. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Yes, I said, “I am constantly aware of the tenuousness of life and, and, how close to death we might be at any moment. Even at this very moment.”

“Doesn’t that terrify you?” she said, “I try not to think about that. I don’t think I could get up in the morning or go to work if I thought like that. But you have not touched the kung pao shrimp, it is truly scrumptious.” 

I took a bite of the shrimp.

“And then,” she continued, “just when I was considering lengthening my stay there, to focus on the book I had started, there was this student, an attractive young man from the Pest quarter of the city, who was clearly one of the better of the group, invited me to lunch after the semester ended. We went to the Espresso café near the Montenegro Embassy. He was an earnest young man and quite well dressed. I admit I felt a twinge of what, affection, perhaps. But as the afternoon went on, I was unprepared for what he began talking about.”

“What was that?”

“Well, at one point over our coffee, he said, conversationally, that he was studying acting and that Stanislavski taught that the essence of acting was to constantly ask oneself, ‘Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from, and where am I going?’ And he told me, again quite earnestly, that to truly live we must ask those questions of ourselves. Only then, he said, can we act with honesty, compassion. and empathy. Only then can we live rather than just perform.”

“That is remarkable insight is it not? I mean, for a young man. And, was that not what you yourself had been feeling? Did you see him again?”

“Heavens no,” she said. “Why would he say such things to me? His former teacher. I had no desire to spend the rest of the afternoon at a glorious outdoor café by the Danube or any time or any place, being lectured by him about how I should live.”

“But, Andra, was he not being sincere and caring and relating to you, just as you wanted. Just as we all want?”

She looked at me as if I was talking gibberish.

“I don’t know what we all want, and don’t think you or he know either. I toldhim that what he was suggesting to me was, by implication, impertinent and glaringly inappropriate. I am an educated, aware, and accomplished person. Thoroughly cognizant of my own mortality, and that, as a path to gain authenticity in life that I should engage in some theatrical trick is in any way superior to, say, just waking up each day, having a cup of coffee, breathing in some fresh air and saying, ‘fuck it, let’s see what happens today.”

Her watch beeped. She checked and moved to stand up.

“I am tired now. I am exhausted, and I am going home to sleep. I have come home from a situation which no longer worked for me. And tomorrow I will undoubtedly awaken, say ‘fuck it,’ perhaps out loud, and feel boundlessly better.”

I started to say something when she stood up. She waved me not to, thanked the waiter, gathered up her package of leftovers, and said, “This has been fabulous,” and, pointing to the check, she said to me ,“I have only a few Euros in my pocket. Please be a dear, will you?”

And then she was gone. Her footsteps clacked on the concrete steps up to Mott Street.

The Shape We’re In

I tell you this story from the vantage point of having lived through several presidential administrations which I thought at the time were the worst that ever could be, only to be judged wrong by a new one which was exponentially more terrible. The current administration may be the absolute bottom of that rancid barrel, and possibly so bad that it could conceivably be the last one we see. Though of course, I might be wrong.

A week before Christmas 1988, in the darkest hours of the year, I made gingerbread cookies.

I rolled flat the ball of cold dough I had made on the floured cutting board. I was listening to The Band. Levon Helm.

The Weight. The Shape I’m In. His voice was a muddy truck on a rough upstate road. His dirt farmer voice pushing through the roadside brambles. Singing how he felt. How I felt. How we all felt. The shape we were in.

It had snowed three inches that week, and by that time forty thousand eight hundred forty-nine men women and children in the country had died of HIV/AIDS in the six years since we’d recognized that an epidemic had begun.

I set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and peeled each figure apart and laying them flat and brown on the baking sheets. Dozens of them. Arms and legs outstretched.

With the edge of a spoon, I drew eyes and a smile into each face. A Greek chorus, now, of eager Athenians bearing citizen witness to the events to come.

The number of deaths, their constancy, the relentless procession of them, had become the landscape. The gestalt. The number itself was benumbing. A monochrome veil over your vision while you could still clearly see and feel the enormity of each passing; each life’s loss.

The constant cloud of death hung about us; about all of those I worked with. The dread of it stitched onto the edges of everything, even in the campy, offhand-sounding humor. We cared for the sick and scared, studied the data and the pathology, the science and medicine and the hopeful rumors of unlikely cures.

Reagan had long since shown himself to be the devil. He surely knew better. His friends were dying around him. Nevertheless, he acted as if he was simply callously clueless, when he was, demonstrably heartlessly uncaring and cruel.

Regan’s willful ignorance and inaction were incomprehensible. To what end, six years in, would he not lead the mobilization of medical care, research and compassion?

The gingerbread cookies would be my Christmas gift this year for our work group. We all made cookies to share. Tiny pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse. We had no holiday party. There was no holiday. We’d exchange the boxes and bags and jars before leaving work on Christmas eve and be back the next day.

I took a step away from the counter and looked at the figures. Each one of them. Arms and legs outstretched. Their smiling faces.

A smile came to my own face, and grew slowly, and I began to laugh. It became a big, head-tipped-back, body laugh, reaching out to the corners of the kitchen .

It upwelled from deep within me. I was work- and world-weary and sleep-deprived and the laugh did me good.

Rolling out another ball of dough, I cut the next batch of figures and found myself pressing a downward frown into each of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made me laugh, I felt a wave of sadness wash over me.

Tears filled my eyes, overflowing my cheeks and I cried as I could never remember doing. He cried for myself, and everyone and everything. For all of us. Our frustration and fear. Our sadness, our rebellion, and anger and our helplessness.

A skin-prickling sadness, not only for myself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and all the Johns and James and Emilys, and every other one of the friends we had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces I’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia or a other diseases that ravaged them. And those for whom AZT promised a cure but only made the dying harder.

Friends I knew and did not know, younger than me, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed. All of them who had not had the care they needed, the research they demanded, the recognition as humans in need which they deserved, because the president of the country they lived in could not abide helping them or funding the research that might save them, and could not, even as men and women he knew, died all around him, Reagan could not even speak the name of the disease they had.

When all the cookies were done, the smiling and the frowning, I bundled them, warm, together and wrapped them in white tissue paper and tied green and red ribbons around their waists. The house was quiet. I was exhausted. I was drained, and I most needed to sleep.

That was over forty years ago. We lived every day with the consequences of the government’s lack of action and human compassion, and its willingness, born out of ignorance, to discriminate and marginalize people based upon its own politics. It resulted in an early and painful death by an infectious disease for many thousands in the U.S. and millions worldwide.

Our experience with the COVID pandemic was taken from the same disastrous playbook. Politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, and willful ignorance of public health practices resulted again in the death of  tens of hundreds of thousands of men women and children.

Now, once more, politics, marginalization, discrimination, racism, willful ignorance, lack of human compassion, and a blatant disregard and disdain for the Constitution and the rule of law, is unfolding daily in full view. We can not yet know how many lives have been, and will be, sent into turmoil, hardship, disappearance, torture, illness, and possible death by a government sworn to follow the constitution and other laws, acting rightfully and impartially for the sake of the citizens and the society.

A Hole in the Bucket

Somewhere in this story there is a point. I’m not sure yet what it is, though it may be revealed in the task of my telling it.

I’ll begin here in the middle, with when I left the Yankee tour bus in the parking lot at Queechee Gorge and got into the car service I had arranged to have meet me.

I had agreed with the driver on the general directions and the cost, and after a brief and conversation, he looked in his mirror and said, – So, is this on your bucket list?

– Sort of, I said. A very short one. I told him I had some health issues and needed to get away to someplace quiet and less stressful. That was not quite true, but not entirely false, either.

– I hear you, man, he said. Bummer. You doin’ okay, though?

I told him I was and thanked him for asking.

– You bet, he answered.

Two or three weeks ago I first told Liza about I how needed leave the country, to go to Canada.

– Why on earth do you want to do that? Are you in trouble? she said.

– No, it’s not like that. It’s just every day, now, the relentless not knowing what will come next. Tariffs, Medicare, FEMA, deportations, DEI, the stock market, IRAs, firings, threats, trashing the constitution and our lives. I  just can’t ignore what’s going on.

– Nor can I, she said. But I don’t think about it all day the way you do. Thinking like that is right where they want  you. Making you feel powerless and vulnerable when I know you are  neither.

– But I feel that way. I’m frightened and depleted. I don’t want to live like this, not here, not now, and not for four more years.

We talked for days. I won’t go into it all now, but you can easily see how that was going and where it eventually led, given that there I was in a car service heading north with nothing more of a plan than an inchoate need to get away.

Liza is a wise woman, way wiser than I am, and I didn’t listen to her.

I had found a place on Google maps along Halls Stream Road in Vermont, upstream from Beecher’s Falls, where the stream and road bend close to the border with Quebec. The stream there is wide, and seemed likely to be slow, shallow, and hidden beneath trees. A spot where the farmhouses on the Canadian side seemed so close you could hit the bright white side of one with a baseball.

We drove north on I-91, then on two-lane roads over streams that shifted from one side of the road the other. It was all so green. The tension began seeping out of my bones. Granite cliffs with plumes of water plunging through the cracks and tumbling white and hard to the side of the road.

We turned onto more narrow roads with gabled houses on both sides and large front porches and stacks of cord wood under the windows.

My eyes grew heavy, and I dozed though, without the scenery to distract me, I did not rest. Lisa and our argument spun on a loop, snippets morphing into a city street, alone, I didn’t know where I was, or how I could get home and not even knowing where home was. Asking for help from unresponsive passersby.

I was then suddenly startled, as if I’d been shaken awake.

– We’re coming up to three hours now, the driver said. How much further?  

Where were we? I had lost track of the miles and the minutes. The houses on both sides had crept closer, encroaching on the rutted road. A fluttering of Trump flags in yards on the Vermont side, Buy Canadian and No US dollars Wanted on the other. The dark and ominous Sharpee lines so thickly drawn at home had been traced this far north. This was neither peaceful nor woodsy and welcoming.

I had envisioned getting out of the car at a quiet, deserted spot, stepping into the stream and walking south with the current. Finding a safe spot to climb onto dry land in Canada. I’d find a small town café with place to sit, blow steam across a hot cup of Tim Hortons and nod to folks in flannel shirts.

I was, instead, thrown off balance, tossed roughly aside by my own foolish self-centeredness. I was ashamed to have ignored Liza, her feelings, discounting her. Leaving her alone where I myself did not want to be. What I had envisioned was a selfish adolescent fantasy. In leaving I had lost what had been the most stable and reassuring place I had ever been. I felt a fool. I had betrayed her. I had betrayed myself. I had chosen to leave only because I could while others could not. To let them deal with whatever would come next. I am not fleeing gang violence or drug cartels or anything near that, as so many others are. Not even close. I’m a privileged opportunist playing political runaway.

– What are we doing here, Bud? the driver said.

He was right. What was I doing here? This was not where I wanted or needed to be, away from Liza, from reality, however grim I felt it to be.

– Oh, I’m sorry, I told him. I lost track of where we were going. Pull over for a moment, please. I don’t feel well. I need to…

– You bet, he said, and he got out of the car, walked away, and lit a cigarette.

Did I know what I needed to do?  Yes.

I paid the driver what I owed him and asked him to take me down to Montpelier. To the Amtrak station.

I now have ticket in my pocket for the train that leaves tomorrow morning at 10:25 AM which gets me back home by 6:09 PM. I will call Liza and get a room at a hotel.

It will all work out ok, I am certain, as it likely would have if I had simply listened more and heeded Liza’s advice.

But I will say one more thing that has come to me, two actually: 1) A bucket is no place to carry anything other than water and, 2) A list is not where the life that you want and which makes you most happy should reside.

The Song We Would Sing

Our children were quite young. We were living in the walk-up in Brooklyn, near the park, when, Sonja, my older sister who I spoke with sporadically over the past few years, called. We were in the bustle of dressing and feeding them, cleaning the kitchen, and dressing ourselves.

“Your father,” she said, “died this morning.” She may have said, ‘Daddy died,’ but I don’t recall that clearly.

“I’m sorry,” I am sure I said.

A graveside service was planned for the next afternoon. We arranged for a hotel room and a rental car.

Driving across the Brooklyn Bridge that evening. The lights of lower Manhattan. Chinatown, the East River bridges, the medical centers. All of it both so spectacular and so routine. I was sad to leave, if only for a day or two.

At the grave side, beside my mother’s, Sonja brought us around to say hello to family. The resemblance among my relatives was unmistakable. People I had not seen in ten years and more. Some not since I was young. Familiar faces. Names. Familiar smiles. Some, too, I had never seen nor heard of before.

How had so many years had passed. Why?

I know the how of what happened. The why was the real issue. I’d moved away after college. Long before cell phones and email. We’d never shared numbers or addresses. I lost track of family.

All those years, benignly estranged. No arguments. Disputes. Nasty words. Just nothing.

“You remember Aunt Minnie and Uncle Fred?”

“Yes,” I said. “The dentist?”

“Well, this is Janice, their great granddaughter.”

“And you remember Ruthie? Ethel’s, granddaughter?

“Yes.”

“This is Rebecca, her daughter’s youngest child.”

“Hello,” I said. “This is Bess and these are our children.” It was so good to feel a connection there with them.

On it went. New people, children of children of aunts and uncles I knew. Cousins of cousins. Generations of births and birthdays and illnesses and new jobs. Lost. Lost to me. An old novel with chapters that kept being written after I had put it down. I wanted now to read those unread pages, though I knew it was not possible. The gaps were inaccessible to me.

We drove back home the next day. Listening to Waze. The radio. My mind present, and also wandering in the distant past.

I had moved away. Never once thinking of the consequences. Caring for only my need to be away.

The kids were asleep in the back.

“What happened?” Bess asked.

“What?” I said.

“How did you lose track of all those people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ever think about them? Ask about them?”

“Sonja would tell me things once in a while, but I never thought more about it. For a while all the names had faces but then they became only names.”

“Doesn’t it make you sad?”

“It does. I feel terrible. I let it happen. Not once thinking about them. As if I left and they disappeared.”

“But, it was you who disappeared. Not them.”

“But my parents never…”

“Never what?”

“Never let me know what was happening.”

“And you never asked them?”

“No.”

“My parents and I didn’t talk much and then they were in nursing homes. And with their dementia it became impossible.”

“That’s not really an excuse, and you know it. There clearly were others.”

“No. Not an excuse really. An explanation. Maybe.”

“Maybe, but let’s never do that to our children, please,” Bess said. “Let’s keep them connected. Show them how important family is. What it is to be part of a family. Making family the most important thing.”

“I didn’t grow up with that.”

“But you did. You remembered your Aunt Minnie, Aunt Ethel. Harold. But then you let them all drop away.”

“I did,” I said. “I only see that now.”

Back home, we returned the car and stopped at the market on Eighth Avenue and 12th Street to pick up milk and bread. Bess put the kids to bed.

I stood by the stove heating water for tea. Mesmerized by the bubbles twisting upward. The larger ones roiling the surface. The warmth on my face. Drifting into another space.

Seeing all those others, how they were with each other. Embracing one another. How easily they embraced me as they did when I was so young.

But feeling, in that mindless space, what I had never said to myself before. I don’t think that my parents loved me. Feeling that so clearly should have wrenched at my heart, but it didn’t. It was, instead, a relief, a validation of, growing up, how lonely I was. Lost. Alone. An observer at some close remove. Awkward. Feeling as though I never had the right or reliable answer to any question. In school. At home. Anywhere. Nothing felt unjudged. Nothing felt safe. Though I can’t ever remember being aware then in those terms. As if the wrong response would be punished by further isolation.

The kettle must have been boiling for a while. Bess came up behind me. She lay her hand on my shoulder, and turned off the burner.

“How are you doing?” She said.

“I’m okay,”

“You sure? Will you tell me what you’re thinking?”

“I was watching the water boiling” I told her. “My mind drifting to yesterday. The past. Not happy thoughts though. Thinking about what it was like for me growing up. But then a song came to me, as if from the rhythm of the bubbles. One we used to sing in the car when we drove from our apartment in the Bronx to my father’s relatives in Brooklyn. The windows down, my father smoking a pipe, my mother on the front passenger side. And, she would begin to sing ‘Merrily we roll along’ and I would join in, and we would sing it a few times until we tired of it, and she would start our favorite one. The one I loved. ‘You are my… sunshine’ she would sing, and I would join in, ‘… my only sunshine…,’ and we would sing the whole song, over, and over again, ‘You make me happy when skies are gray,’ until our cheeks hurt from smiling. And then she would nod to me and slow the tempo down and we’d both deepen our voices, for this last time, the last line, ‘Please… don’t… take… my… sunshine… away.’”

Bess listened to me while she made the tea and set the cups down on the kitchen table.

“I love you,” she said.

Angie Vito Concetta

After dinner, Vito clears the table and places the dishes in the sink, plugging the drain and running warm water over them with a few drops of detergent. The water soothes his hands as he looks out into the back yard. Though they eat early in winter, the sky is full dark now. The tree trunks are lit only by the light from the window.

When he finishes the dishes, he dries his hands, puts on his reading glasses and sits at the table with the newspaper open in front of him.

Angie is on the phone in their bedroom.

He looks up from the paper. The cabinets, the appliances on the counters. The radio. He feels distant, distracted, touching his palm to his chest where the ache has been. If anyone were to ask, he’d say he doesn’t dwell on things. Angie does, he knows, but that is something he would not tell another soul.

Despite the short winter daylight hours, the days feel long now. Longer than they had been when was working. When he’d been up at four and at the Hunt’s Point market by five and then to their store on Tenth Avenue by 6:00 and opening the doors by 6:30, folding the boxes and stacking the crates, while the women with their mesh bags start to come in, looking over and touching the fruits and vegetables. All fresh this morning he’d tell them.

None of that fills his days anymore. After he sold the business to the Koreans, neither his mind nor his body have adjusted to the change. He still wakes at same time. Doses off soon after dinner. His body aches in ways now it never seemed to before. His mind wanders with nowhere to go.

You should read a book, Angie tells him. Go for a walk.

They had married right after high school. Lived with her parents in Bensonhurst and moved to President Street near Carroll Street Park when they needed more room. That was the best place, he felt. Families  strollers, dogs, people who could tell the town your family came from just by looking at your face.

It was familiar. As familiar as this street now is unfamiliar, with three cars in the driveways and closed windows and doors.  

It’s been ten years since they moved here, when people were beginning to move out of the city. Because of the schools. The cost of everything. Real estate. Before the bubble popped.

But the move was not what he expected. Not that he’s said a word about it to Angie. He doesn’t know how she feels. Maybe she has friends here. He knew the kids once did.

The uneasy quiet lasts all day now. How could Angie have tolerated this day after day, year after year? After the kids left. With no car. She never learned to drive. Only her cousin Marie in Larchmont to give her a ride when she needed one.

The Koreans gave him two-thirds of what he’d asked for in cash. He still owns the building. They pay him the rest in monthly installments plus rent. It seemed like a good deal. They had no lawyers. He thought that was best. The brokers and the lawyers take too much. And, for what?

Angie is on the phone in the bedroom with her sister Concetta. He hears her consoling voice. Concetta’s Salvatore is gone now a year. He’d left her something but not enough. Maybe it once seemed like enough. And then the COVID. The Espositos, the Santarpias, and the Ingoglias. All gone. Died or moved. Only the church is there for her. Morning and evening mass. Thank God, Concetta always says. That and her women’s group on Wednesday afternoons.

He gets up and moves closer to the bedroom door. Angie’s soft voice, Yes, I know, she says, Maybe it will get better, Con. God willing. You never know.

Hearing her voice, the caring in it, he thinks, She is all I have. All that matters. All he needs.

He should tell her that. And that there is nothing for him here. For them. They should move back to the city. Sell the house. Sublet an apartment. Cobble Hill. Carroll Gardens. Not a big place. Maybe with a back garden. Near Concetta. Maybe stay with her till they find a place. Sell the car. Who needs a car in the city?

They would have Saint Cecilia’s and the park. He would have places to walk. The smell of the bakeries. The pizzerias. Kind faces. People to talk to. The city. The constant sounds of mothers and children. Rhythmic life. He could find work part-time. Somebody could always use someone with experience.

And then of course, he thinks, when the time might come, Concetta would be there for Angie after he’s gone. Not so soon, God willing, but sometime.

Angie is quiet now. He imagines her sitting on the side of the bed. Her fingers touching her forehead. Her eyes closed. Her sister on her mind. Heavy.

He goes to the sink. Finishes the dishes. Scrubs the pots. Dries them all, stacks  and arranges them in cabinet. Pats his shirt for his cigarettes. His pants. An old habit.

This time he will ask Angie to help. She has a clear head. She wouldn’t rush into anything. She would have handled the Koreans differently. He knows that now. She’s never said that to him, but he knows. She wouldn’t bring it up. He wishes she would.

Angie comes up behind him, Vito, she says, Concetta told me the city has changed. You wouldn’t recognize Court Street now. She says the Chinese are buying up stores and the brownstones. The prices are crazy, and the Moroccans and Yemenis are moving in. Why can’t they stay on Atlantic Avenue? I told her maybe she should sell her place and move up here and live with us. You know, get out of the city. Wouldn’t that be good?”

Angie wraps her arms around Vito’s shoulders, kisses the back of his neck as she always does, and holds him tight.

The Witnesses

Schreiber and I are having breakfast together. In a coffee shop overlooking the harbor. At another table, closer to the kitchen, a group of other men are talking.

Schreiber has brought his knapsack.

“What did you bring to show me today?” I ask.

“A book. I’ll show you. Let’s order something first.”

I look at the menu as does he and we order. Egg sandwiches. Mine with cheese and spinach. His with sausage. He orders two, one to bring home to Lorraine.

“Before you show me the book,” I say, “I have to ask you, did you see Swalwell’s post on Instagram last night?”

“Yes,” he says, “and that’s just what I want to talk about.”

We pause for a moment when our order is brought to the table. He lifts the book from his bag and reads me the title. “I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933 -1941, by Victor Klemperer.”  He hands it across to me. A hard cover. It must weigh four pounds.

“Have you read it?” I ask, opening it. He has underlined some sentences and written notes in the margins with pencil.

“I’ve started it,” he says. “It’s from a diary he kept. It was only printed a few years ago. There are two more volumes, 1941 to 1945, and one more but I haven’t gotten either of them yet. I read a dozen or so pages every night. I hate to put it down. It’s the most important book I’ve ever read.”

“Tell me.”

“I will but…,”  and removes another item from the bag. A daily calendar. I lay the Klemperer down on the table as he opens the calendar, turning it toward me. His handwritten notes in black ink. Smooth, even, rounded script, in tight lines filling the pages.

“I have begun to write my own diary,” he says. Once I started this one,” tapping his finger on the Klemperer. “And you should too. We must do this now, each day so that in the years to come there will be a record, a personal one, that tells people what is happening here. In our country. To all of us. The threats. The intimidation. The chaotic new rants each day. The silence and complicity of people who know better and should do better. I wake up and I write down what I am thinking and feeling. Not full sentences. What new angry idiocy I have heard he has said yesterday and overnight. Listen to this,” he says, taking his notebook back, opening it to the last written page. “Trump fired the FBI agents. Tariffs on Mexico and China. He’s crazy. It’s all bullying. Vendettas. Today I will get cash,” he reads, looks up at me, and then turns back the calendar. “I get cash now. A little each day. While I can. Chuck Todd and Jim Acosta are leaving MSNBC and CNN. Planes crash over DC. Trump blames DEI.”

He looks again at me. “That was yesterday. All that in one day. And this very morning I go to order the second volume, and I click on payment, and what do I see?… access denied in bold red letters. Do you know how I felt? I will find out why at the bank later, but still…”

I don’t know what to say to him. The look in his eyes.

He puts down the calendar and picks up the Klemperer book.

Opening it, “Listen to this,” he says. “This is from 1933… March 10, Friday evening…” He closes the book on his index finger and looks again at me. “Hitler was elected Chancellor on January 30 of 1933, and now it’s March 10, a month and a half, and he is writing, … ‘I called January 30 terror, but that was a mild prelude, the business of 1918 is being repeated, only under another sign, the swastika. It’s astounding how quickly everything collapses.’”

He looks up for a moment and then back to the page, lower down, “’Day after day, commissioners appointed, buildings taken over, newspapers banned, flags raised by order of the Nazi Party,’ are you hearing this?” he says to me.

“Yes,” I say, looking at him for an instant and then averting my eyes.

“And here, March 17, ‘No one dares saying anything, everyone is afraid. March 20 … every new government decree, announcement, etc. is more shameful than the previous one.’”

“Michael, …” I say.

“One more, one more, and then I’ll stop, … April 20 to 25, “’… trembling and slavish fear all around… ‘they are expert at advertising… ‘everyone knuckles under,’” he runs his finger swiftly along the line and then down to another… ‘all the same conversations, the same despair… catastrophe is imminent.’”

He looks at me. I feel he is wholly there in that past moment in that past place. And then, now, he is here, and he still feels the same. The same pleading look in his eyes. “Do you hear these words?” he says to me. “This was from April 1933, mind you, not 1938 or 1941. This is before the SA men start rounding up people, or the SS and the pogroms and the camps, before the killings started. 1933,” he repeats.

He has not touched a bite. Nor have I. The waiter comes with two coffee pots. One decaf, one regular. “Can I warm them up for you?”

“Yes, thanks,” I tell him. “Regular.”

“Decaf for me,” says Schreiber.

“You want those wrapped up?”

“No thanks.”

The men at the other table have left.

“Schreiber,” I say, “the book can’t be all like that, can it.? He must also write about family, regular everyday things, his work.”

“No, you’re right. He does. He does. His teaching, his writing, his wife, friends, movies, just like we do. You and I.”

“And that’s the point though isn’t it,” I say. “You’re saying he’s seeing everything sane and normal and good is being broken apart, soon likely to be lost and…”

“… And,..” Schreiber cuts in, “still, he might be having egg sandwiches with a friend in coffee shop by the water, despite what the future might bring. Right?”

“Yes,” I say. “And we know what his future did bring. Don’t we.”

Slow Dancing

Henderson awoke this morning, as he had on some other mornings lately, with a fog-bound sense of dread.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head to the day for a moment, and then turned away, closing his eyes against the light coming in through the window.

“Lena,” he said, “I just need a few more minutes.”

It had been, in truth, more than just a few mornings.

They came with a vague, unfocused, sense of foreboding.

Lena was, and always had been, an energetic early riser. He had been like that too when he was a bit younger. And even now, on some mornings, if he had a task to do, somewhere he needed to be, or someone he’d promised to help in some way, he had no trouble opening his eyes minutes before the alarm would ring and he’d be up shaving, showering and having a cup of coffee. He’d be alive with energy. Alive with purpose. Alive with relevance. A relevance which was invigorating. An invigoration that he savored, however fleetingly.

The sense of dread was shapeless. Not like as a young boy when he had awoken with terror in the middle of the night. That would wake him suddenly, gripping him with a sense of his disappearing into a vast and endless universe of death and obliteration. Of confronting his own inevitable return to nothingness, unable to calm himself by thinking the feeling would pass, or with rational thoughts of that earlier time of timeless nothingness, before he had been born. Before he had a consciousness. That was of no use. Try as he might to think thoughts of a pleasant ignorant time of non-being, he failed.

No, this dread was a filled with a shifting sense of hopelessness. Of being edged aside. Of being inconsequential. Of being overburdened by a life that traveled too fast and with a no longer discernable purpose. The purpose once being, or so he thought, of making a difference in the world. Of course, that was unrealistic and wholly unrealizable, even in a modest, local, and narrow sense. His mother, he clearly remembered, told him once or, more likely, many times, “Don’t think, Henry,” she’d said, “that you can change the world. Nobody can.” Of course, he’d not believe a word of that then. How else, he thought, was the world ever changed? Not by chance. Certainly not through divine intervention. People were the engines of change in the world. For good and for bad. For good and, more often, horribly for the worse.

“Are you sick?” Lena would say on some of those mornings.

“My stomach doesn’t feel right,” he might say. Or more likely, “No, I’m okay. I’ll be up in a minute.”

That sense of being pushed aside, that sense of not counting, of being irrelevant, was at times exacerbated by his hearing and his dependence on hearing aids. They worked. They worked okay most of the time but not when he was in groups of three or four or five and where there was crosstalk. He would  turn his head one way and then back and then in another, hoping to catch the thread of a conversation, any conversation, that he could follow and hold on to. Often, he’d find something else to focus on or he’d just step back. And then that feeling of self-enforced separation would tarnish him. He loved being alone but not under those circumstances.

He’d read a book once many years ago: Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler. The future, Toffler had written, in 1970, was rushing at us so fast we had too little time to adjust. And not only that. It would continue to accelerate faster and faster as technology and communications built on one another. Soon, where we were and what we were about would become beyond unfamiliar, too disturbingly unrecognizable. Henderson had not felt that then. He was young.

That was it, he realized. He was slowly being rushed at by life at twice or three times faster than he felt comfortable with. His own obsolescence bearing down upon him. There was an expectation that he would adjust; should adjust; as well as his expectation that he would be able to understand the new jargon, or the old words used in new and unclear ways, or how new devices came out before he could figure out the current ones, and how, of course, the new versions quickly became the new currency of belonging, however temporarily. His inability to use a simple phone/camera/email/internet search device had become the marker of his own loss of personal relevance and agency.

No, that too was only symptomatic. It was not the heart of the matter for him. It was deeper, more pervasive. The world around him at times, the world he read about, watched, and heard about, the world others seemed to constantly talk and obsess about, the world of the blurring of right and wrong and truth, of buy-this-now, of scams, of shootings in once-safe places, of widening inequality, of ignoring the common good and do-unto-others, of the worship of GDPs, profits, AI, and all things crypto-meme-celebrity, or of neglecting the earth and all of its inhabitants for some personal gain, and all of that life-diminishing world, was rushing at him like a vast slate-gray tornadic wall.

The world of slow but sure progress, of peace, of comity, of consideration, of righting wrongs, had long filled him with a sense of pleasure. The rightness-sounding Obama “hopie-changie” world Sarah Palin disparaged. A world of hope guiding action. Of patience and planting bulbs in the fall. That world seemed already to be burning, flooding, starving, withering, and dying around him. This was no entertainment or topic of idle conversation. It was deadly serious reality.

The dread he woke with lasted all day on some days. Not all of them, but on those days, he could not read or work. He wanted to curl up in a closet. He only wanted to close his eyes, to make peace with it all in some way. To wake later up with hopefulness. Or not wake up at all.

And then, another day would come, perhaps the next day, when the dread disappears. When he makes a to-do list of his own choosing, crossing off items he’d noted as he’d taken care of them… feeling whole again after planting the mums, baking a pie, reading a book he wanted to read, talking to a trusted friend, or, more often, feeling Lena’s gentle touch and holding her close, dancing slow with her like they’d once done at their wedding.  

The Dance

You want to go where?

To the prom.

You’re fourteen, Malachi. Who goes to a prom at fourteen? Fifteen maybe but not fourteen.

It’s the junior-junior prom. It’s kind of like a prom but only for the ninth graders. None of the younger kids can come.

They call that a prom?

That’s what they call it, Ma.

I never heard of such a thing.

I think it’s new this year.

Will they do it on zoom?

Maaa! No not on Zoom. What would be the point of that?

It would make me feel better if it was on zoom. Are you going with anyone?

Yes.

Gregory?

No, Ma. Not Gregory.

Then who?

A girl.

A girl? A girl who?

Sandy.

Sandy what?

Sandy Celestino. She’s nice.

Nice? What’s so nice about her?

She’s smart. She’s in my algebra and Spanish classes.

Anything else nice?

She has really nice eyes and her hair is pretty and dark brown, almost black. Sometimes she wears it pulled back like you do. And she has nice teeth.

Nice teeth?

Yes, and has a nice smile and she laughs like Aunt Minnie. And when she laughs, it makes me laugh too.

So, this Sandy person, is she Jewish?

I don’t know. I think she’s Italian. So maybe she could be a Jewish Italian.

Like who, for instance?

Primo Levi.

Anyone else?

That’s the only one I know. No, Laura Fermi too.

Who was she?

Enrico Fermi’s wife.

Where do you get this information?

I google it.

Is Sandy’s mother Jewish? You know that if her mother is Jewish she could legally be Jewish.

Ma, you mean there are legal Jews and illegal Jews?

Don’t be such a shmegegi. You know what I mean!

… Or real and fake Jews.

Stop, Malachi.

… Or counterfeit Jews? Pretend Jews? Or just ‘maybe’ Jews? Half-way ones? Leaning toward thinking about becoming Jews?

Okay. You’re a comedian now? So, tell me aren’t there any Jewish girls in your school?

Some.

Any real ones? I’m kidding. So, what’s wrong with them.

Nothing.

Then why not one of them?

I don’t know.

Well, I know why. And you know too.

Why? How can you know. You don’t even know who she is.

Well, I’ll tell you.

What?

Her chest. Those Italian girls get bosoms early. Before a lot of other girls. It’s a fact. They do. The Latin blood. But when they get older… you ever see this girl’s mother?

Once.

So, you know.

Ma, stop. That’s not nice. I’m just going to a dance. I’m not getting married. I just like her and she’s my friend and I asked her, that’s all. You’re making me embarrassed.

Okay, I’m sorry, but I’m telling you, Malachi, you start up with one of them and then they get expectations. That is if they even let you in the front door in the first place. You know the older ones, the grandparents, think we have horns like that statue. But the kids, probably not. But if they do, it’s not their fault. It’s just what the parents teach them.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ma.

No? Listen to me. It’s never far away. The Jew thing, with them. Everything is going along fine, you’re happy, things are good, and then when one day something goes wrong, you say something wrong, look the wrong way and, boom, you know what? All of a sudden, then you’re a dirty Jew. Ask your father. He knows. No. Don’t ask your father. I won’t say anything more about that. Don’t you say anything either.

Mama, please, people aren’t like that anymore. Not like in the olden days. You sound like grandma used to. My friends are not like that. Their parents aren’t like that.

No? Maybe not. I hope not. Maybe I should get out of the house more. Mingle. So, when is this dance?

Friday night.

Who has a dance on a Friday night? It’s Shabbos. But at least your father won’t know. He’ll be at the temple all night.

Then how could I get there?

I could call an Uber for you.

So… I can go?

Of course, you can go. What am I, prejudiced? And it’s a good thing too. If it was on a Thursday, your father would want to drive you and then he’d know she wasn’t Jewish. He’d make a big magilla out of it. But he’d take one look at her and he’d know. He’d see right away.

See what?

The bosoms.

Wednesday Morning White Boy Blues

“Get up,” she says.

“Get up!”

“What?”

“Your phone is buzzing.”

“Is there any coffee?”

“I’ll ask Higgins to bring you some. Answer your phone.”

“Who’s Higgins?”

“Yeah, who’s Higgins, you got that right, just answer the damn phone.”

“Hello?” He fumbles on the night table for the joint he started and let burn out last night. He puts his glasses on and clicks on his phone. Holds it loosely to his ear.

“Hey, Home boy, where you at? What up, my man? You coming in today? I got something I want you to do for me.”

He moves the phone closer to his ear, covers the phone, and speaks into it . “Nothing, man. Just chillin’ here. Sure, I’ll be there.” He motions for his wife to leave.

“Who is that?” she says. He waves her away. She sits on the side of the bed.

“Nothing, No one. No, not you man. I was talking to somebody else. It’s okay, man. It’s cool. Look can I call you right back?”

Word, dude! she hears before he clicks off.

“That was Benny,” he says.

“Benny Wadsworth, our boss?”

“Yeah.”

“And he talks like that? And what kind of big thing does he want you to do?”

“No, no. It’s nothing. I don’t know. That’s just his way sometimes. You know, he acts easy, chill. That’s all. Just one of the boys.”

“Just one of the boys? Which boys? Are you one of the boys? That’s silly question. Isn’t it? Because he was just talking to you that way. Does he talk to clients like that?”

“No, I don’t know. Some, maybe.”

“He’s a grown man. He runs a business worth hundreds of millions of dollars or more, and he talks like he’s fifteen years old wannabe with his orange pants hanging down below his ass, holding onto his crotch, waiting in line in a lunchroom upstate for a juvee he says he didn’t commit? And what kind ”

“Come on, Essie, give me a break.”

“You talk like that?”

“No.”

“But you condone it?”

“He’s my boss. I don’t condone anything. I do what I have to do. Put up with what I have to. I’m nothing without him. He calls all the shots.”

“Well, you better give that whole idea a little more thought, like what kind of shots. And you think you’re nothing? You think I like to hear that? What am I then? How am I supposed to feel when you say that? How do you think I feel when you say she’s ‘just somebody else?’ Maybe you should take a good look at all of this. We’re in this together. For your sake and mine.”

He gets his clothes on and leaves for work. He takes the subway across the river, getting off at Rector Street. He buys a coffee and a bagel from the vendor on the corner and brings it up to his desk. He connects his computer into the VPN, logs in, and he sits.

He looks around the room.

It’s seven fifteen a.m. Twenty-five other white boys like him in clean, white Succession-looking shirts and royal-blue ties, headphones over their neat razor cuts, staring at three screens lit up in front of them. Smiling false smiles and making pencil marks on yellow note pads. Following the rules. Putting in the time. Keeping in line. Doing what’s needed to do to make a dime.

Who the hell am I? What the hell am I doing?

 I pull down two hundred and fifty K and I still have to suck up to anyone one step up and two steps ahead of me just to keep that going. It’s like they own a piece of me and they do. Sometimes I feel like a shit for doing that, but my boss makes ten times that and gets good seats in Nobu, free tickets to  the U.S. Open and a season pass to the Nets and Giants every year and I wait around and treat him like he can do no wrong and see if he’ll ask me along one day.  I mean why does he get the free tickets and shit? In what world does that make sense. He makes millions and they give him free shit. I have to pay for everything. He screws anyone one he can for an extra buck. And what, he gets the free ride? And I get what?

Everything I have, the home, the car, nice clothes, kids in a good school, could be gone with one bad week. One bad day. One mistake. One slip. Gone. No one is going to care about me or what happens to me. Security walks me to the elevator. Then what do I do? I’m out on the street and who would give a rat’s ass for me?

I have bills up the ass and my marriage is desiccating. I know that. My kids think I’m old and ask me why I’m tired all the time.

I work hard. I work hard for what I have. For what we have. I take the subway every day. I’m not ignorant. I know lots of people have it worse off than me. I see that. I feel bad for them. But what? Does that make me feel any better? It doesn’t.

And assholes like Benny just make it all worse for guys like me. Because they act like misogynists and ignorant know-nothings who think they know everything, and keep others down, I get treated just like one of them when I walk into a room. No one even waits to hear what I’m going to say. Like I’m wrong before I say a word. Just for the way I look.

I feel squeezed all the time. I’m in the middle. The people on top get anything they want and the people on the bottom want to take what I have. Does that sound fair to you? I mean, I’m squeezed. No one gives me anything. And then what? I have to watch what I say, how I look. I’m white, I get that. Do I have any control over that?

And in the meantime, I get treated like I’m always the bad guy. I’m the white guy in the room with a little money so what do I know. I know history. I know inequality. But I’m a human person like everyone else. Don’t write me off and just give me the smirk and roll your eyes routine because I’m white and a man. I mean, how does that feel fair? I always give people a seat on the subway, but even then, even this morning for crap sake, I get the smirk, like I’m only doing that because of what people might think, not because I think it’s the right thing. Or I’m condescending or just performing. You think any of these other shithead grunts around me care about anything or anyone except themselves? Not chance. Make it now, they think. Screw everything else and everyone in your way.

Shit! Why me? Everyone leave me alone. Sometimes I feel like I should just quit. Leave. Go away. Pack us all up and go someplace. Far away. Start over. Take some cash and disappear. Get out of this city. Open a grocery store someplace. Shit. I don’t know. Just leave me alone for Christ’s sake.

Thermodynamics of a Decision

Not all decisions, when made, seem to be decisions.

Some go unnoticed. Unacknowledged. Inconsequential.

No decisions are small.

All decisions have consequences.

‘No decision’ is a decision.

All decisions are subject to alteration by later decisions.
 
A turn in the road. A turn of the head. The application sent. The one not sent, and the one sent too late. The job taken. The call you made. The street you crossed. A step to the left. The word you chose. The tie you wore. The breath you took. 
 
The course. The class. The test. The house. The car. The vacation. The stairs or the elevator. The scam. The man. The plan. The un-plan. The tone of voice. Sugar or no sugar. A stop sign. Recycle? Reuse? Reduce? Cheetos.
 
Decisions momentarily defy the Brownian Movement of the universe.

All decisions are subject to the conservation of energy.

Entropy.                

 
Every action has a reaction, whether equal seeming or not. Every action is the cause, and the effect, of another action.

No action is without consequences.

A match once lit cannot be unburnt.

The light and heat it gives, the sound it makes. The feather of smoke and the soft scent it leaves which lingers on your fingers and which drifts in the air into an adjacent room and out of an open window. The dog on the couch lifting and turning its head. The curled charred match rests in the saucer beside the empty coffee cup. 
 
We were on vacation. It was in Maine. We stayed for a day or two in a small house. A cottage. A furnished cottage on an unpaved road. A furnished cottage on an unpaved road on the top of a hill. The sun came through every window, east, south, west. It was July. Bar Harbor though maybe not.
 
We lay, our heads propped up on pillows against the headboard in the morning. We may have had coffee. Do you want to get married one of us said. I had thought so and so I said yes. Though maybe she said it first.
 
She turned her eyes to look at me. I want to have children she said. 
 
I don’t think I do. I don’t think I can.
 
I do, she said. I want to get married, and I want to have children. If you don’t want children, I can’t marry you.
 
The sun passed behind a cloud. Or so it seemed.
 
We lay there still. Each thinking of a life ahead and of the next moment, and perhaps the moment following that. The next words. The days ahead. The years ahead. The years and years ahead. 

The moment had been altered. The day had been cast in uncertainty as all days are cast in uncertainty. A broader, deeper, uncertainty.
 
I could end the story telling now. And leave it at that. But the story didn’t end there. At least not that story. This story. It could have. And then different story would start. A new one.
 
I wanted that story to continue. Not a new story. Not a different story.
 
The room kept its quiet.
 
Some time passed. A minute. It could have been more than that.

I want to be with you, I said. I love you. I have preloved a child with you.
 
And so? she might have said.
 
I want to marry you. 
 
So do I.
 

Noodle Soup

Malachi had not seen his parents in over two weeks. In that time, he had started grad school, moved to an apartment in Morningside Heights, and started driving for Lyft.

His parents live in the South Slope in Brooklyn. A middle class neighborhood wedged in between high-end gentrification, low-income row houses, Salvadoran and Cambodian immigrant communities, two hospitals, and a sprinkling of cheap, trending rundown artist lofts.

His mother was in the kitchen.

Sit, Malachi, sit… I made noodle soup. You want?

No thanks, Ma, I ate already in the cafeteria.

You ate already? You can still have soup, no?

Ma…please.

Only a small bowl. You want some sriracha in it?

Sriracha? In noodle soup?

It’s miso brown rice ramen soup with vegan dumplings and organic greens. Your sister sent me her recipe from Mississippi. No more chicken for me. No more. You know what they do to those chickens? No? Well, don’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. You shouldn’t know from such things.

Ma… I have decided not to go to the Cousins’ Club anymore.

And that is why?

Because I have no time and they’re a bunch of self-absorbed, uninformed, ultra-privileged, dolts.

What?  All of them? My sisters’ children? They have, all of a sudden, become a bunch of uninteresting, uninformed dolts?

Not all of a sudden. And no sriracha please.

Yes, okay, no sriracha. So, if not all of a sudden, then was it just slowly? Or was it at different rates? Maybe only one at a time? The boys first and then the girls? In size or in age order? Or just by IQ in descending order?

Ma… stop.

And you? By some benevolent narrowly focused gravitational wave of dark matter from deep in the ancient universe, you happily find yourself, through no effort of your own, to be singularly immune to this unexplained affliction of acquired familial self-absorbed ignorance?

Ma. I’m serious and you’re making fun of me.

I know I am, but I’m not doing it to hurt you. You are my boy, and I love you, and I love all of them too. I am making fun seriously.

Seriously?

Yes. Tell me one thing you feel they are so ignorant about.

It’s not one thing. It’s lots of things. I want to talk about Israel and Gaza. And nobody else wants to. That’s totally off limits. And it’s not just that I want to talk about it, I think we should do something to stop sending arms to fuel the war. That’s the most important thing, but it’s the same for other things: eroding democracy, immigration reform, affordable housing, inequality, microplastics, fascism, creeping autocracy, and the list goes on. And they want to talk about kimchi, Oscar nominations, Jon Stewart, or complaining about which is better, an EV or a hybrid or plug-ins that cost over 50 grand, which none of them could afford anyway. That is the entire depth and breadth of their conversations. They’re my cousins but…

But  what, they should organize an anti-war microplastics clean-up day in the Gowanus Canal?

Well, no. Not that but ignoring any responsibility for what any of us can to do to stop the world from falling apart. If we don’t do it, no one else will. There is no one else.

And you know they don’t want to talk about these things?

No. I don’t know, for sure. Maybe they do. I don’t know.

Hah! So, how can you be so sure you don’t want a little sriracha in the soup? One drop?

No, thank you.

I know how you’re feeling, Malachi. When I was a kid, we couldn’t talk about money, politics, or religion. That was the way it was. Maybe that’s what’s going on with them. I think you want your cousins who you have known all your life, and who you share your mitochondria and protoplasm with, to also want to think and talk about what you feel is so important. And you want them to do this all on their own and not because you tell them to, or you expect them to. Is that it?

I guess so.

Maybe what you want is asking too much of them.

Ma…stop. You’re making it sound like this is more about me than about them.

And you don’t see it that way?

I don’t think so.

It’s like when you were in junior high and you liked Rosemarie Stellutti, and you wanted her to know that without you having to tell her, and you also wanted her to tell you that she liked you too, taking a risk that you wouldn’t take, and you blamed her for it.

What are you talking about? I didn’t blame her. I just felt bad.

You want them to know what you are interested in, even though you won’t give them even the littlest of hints, or the tiniest of nudges to show them. Like sort of a little peck on the cheek you should have given Rosemarie before she started going out with Frankie Todaro. Am I wrong?

I don’t know.

Well, Malachi, I want you should try some sriracha in the noodle soup but imagine if I didn’t say anything and I just left it in the cupboard and just thought to myself about how much I wish you, all on your own, would want some. Right?

Yeah?

… and then if you left without trying it, I could think to myself, ‘what’s wrong with him that he hasn’t asked me if I have any sriracha to add to this delicious soup? How could he be such an uninformed dolt about how good sriracha can make the soup taste? He should know these things. What else doesn’t he know? And here I thought I knew him so well. I thought he was so much better than that.’ You see what I’m saying?

I guess. I know. It makes sense, but…

But what, eat the soup any way you want it.

… but Ma, you’re not listening to me. I’m not blaming them or anyone. I just don’t want to have to spend two hours every other Thursday night with them anymore! I just wanted to tell you how I feel. I just wanted you to listen. No lecture. I didn’t ask for that or for any of this. You hear something and you talk but you don’t listen. I don’t want soup. And no Dr. Phil high school quiz show psychoanalysis, no jokey stories, and no sriracha. I have to go. And, no, I don’t want any soup to take home with me on the subway.

No?

No.

Okay, nicht ist nicht. no is no. Come here give me a kiss.

The Dreamer from the Dream

Between the end of his first and the approach of his soon-to-be second marriage, Arnold Bregman lived a quiet and peacefully life. Cooking what pleased him. Cleaning his tiny walk-up apartment. Shopping at a corner market after work. Most evenings making a modest meal, reading for a while, going to bed and sleeping well.

In time, though, his pleasant dreams, which had always been vivid, turned dark, leaking out of his sleep into his waking hours. He was terrified by them. In them, he’d been involved in a murder. A brutal murder, the details of which he could not remember. The murder of a man he might have known, whose name he could not recall, and whose disappearance would soon become apparent.

The certainty that this had actually happened, no matter how implausible, would not loosen its grip on him. Following such dreams, he was consumed with crushing guilt. Fear of being found out and of the looming horror of punishment.

Distraught, with no one he felt he could talk to, he consulted a psychiatrist referred by a friend. After a few sessions, the psychiatrist, a man named Ostrove, found no signs of psychosis, no signs of an aggressive, psychopathic, sociopathic, or dangerously disturbed personality. He was, Dr. Ostrove told him, a man living with ominous guilt, but it was not for the crime he believed he had committed.  

But why then, Bregman asked, would I have such horrible thoughts, and why can I not rid them from my mind?

Bregman was not an unintelligent man. He should have anticipated the response, being familiar with how psychiatrists worked, but he was nevertheless surprised when Ostrove said, neatly crossing his legs, his face as straight as the crease in his trousers, “Why do you think that is so?”

I don’t know. Why would I be here if I knew, Bregman replied.

“That’s a good question,” said Ostrove, shifting in his chair.

Bregman increasingly doubted the value of continuing with therapy. Ostrove seemed unconcerned about the depths of his despair, yawning, nodding off at times while Bregman was speaking. Bregman could not bring it up to the psychiatrist, feeling he must be a terrible bore and unworthy of the man’s attention. At two hundred dollars per session, which Bregman could ill afford, he would soon have to stop.

But perhaps, Bregman thought, Ostrove was being quite shrewd. Merely playing at nodding off just to test him. To see if Bregman could be pushed to react to being so badly treated. Goading him to the point that his true, typically male, belligerent nature would erupt.

As he approached Ostrove’s office, he decided to announce that he was going to stop coming. To try to work things out on his own but before he had the chance to speak up, Ostrove suggested that Bregman might agree to hypnosis as a possible and more productive approach to therapy and they agreed that the at next session Bregman would submit to what Ostrove described as light hypnosis.

The night before the hypnosis was to take place, Bregman once again entered the dream as if it were a present reality. He was standing with two men in a dank, cramped, basement.

It was cold and dark. The granite walls were damp and dimly lit. In the center of the dirt floor was a round iron plate beneath which Bregman knew was a narrow pit with the crumpled remains of the murdered man, his bloody clothes still clinging to his body.

They had come to move the body that evening, suspecting that someone, as absurd as that was, had told the police about the crime.

Bregman was stiff with terror. The police would imminently break in, find them and the body. He knew that he and he alone would be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to certain death.

They hurriedly placed the bloodied man’s remains into a leather duffel and dragged it out into a shadowed alley. He was filthy with grime and blood. Gagging on the ferrous odor. He stood with the others in a light drizzle. They looked to Bregman for direction, but he was unable to move.  

The next morning, Bregman was unable to discern the dream from reality. That he might have murdered someone seemed a palpable reality which he had effectively blocked from his consciousness. Surely, he could not allow himself to be hypnotized. He couldn’t go to the appointment, unsure of what was real and what he might say. But then, if he didn’t show up, and he were in fact guilty what might Ostrove do? Break confidentiality and report him? Had Ostrove presented the lure of cure by hypnosis as trap, a clever psychological ruse?

At Ostrove’s office door, he hesitated, tempted to leave, but he did not. He was not truly a murderer. Of course not. He would go in. Ostrove would hypnotize him and reveal a simple, plausible, explanation for his dreams. Some unresolved deep Oedipal feelings they would work on together. In truth, that was all he wanted.

Was it not uncommon, at the very cusp of a therapeutic turning point, for one to resist the prospect of change. Was not the known present better than the unknown future?

As he stood outside of Ostrove’s office, the woman who had the appointment before him emerged from inside. The faint smell of her cologne reminded him of a woman he once knew. Their relationship had ended badly. After they’d split, she haunted him, came to where he  worked, called him at all hours of the day and night. “I loved you and you left me like what remains after the vultures have finished eating,” she told him. He’d killed, she said, every loving cell in her body, and he would have to live with that on his conscience for the rest of his life.

The woman leaving Ostrove’s office smiled, nodded, and went on her way. Though they had never spoken, each time he had seen her over the past several months, he felt increasingly more attracted to her. Each time, smiling, she averted her eyes as she passed him on her way down the stairs. Just as she had now done.

He turned, intending to follow her. But then quickly stopping himself, What am I doing? This is absurd, he thought. Who am I? What a sad demented creature, chasing after a woman I don’t know. What could possibly be the outcome of that?

No, he thought, better for me to go in and tell Ostrove all about this. This may be the breakthrough I’ve been seeking and avoiding. The revelation of reality. The salvation.

Tormented with indecision, he leaned his head back against the wall, slowly sliding his back down the wall until his hands reached the soft edge of the matted green carpet. He closed his eyes, and there he sat, unable to imagine whatever might happen next.

Laying (Some) Matters to Rest

On a clear afternoon in June, Otto Gruber met his two sisters for lunch at Gennaro’s in White Plains. Their father, Otto, Sr. passed at seven that morning in a nursing home in Greenburg. A decision they had made not to resuscitate in his third, recurring, intractable bout of aspirational pneumonia. They had been there with him when died.

They sat in a booth. Elke and Marta, both of whom were much younger than he, sat on one side, Otto on the other. While he waited when they went to wash up, he looked at the family photos of successive Gennaro generations. Each one smiling. All in front of the restaurant just as it is now.

Simple, sincere, faces of old men and women holding babies. Can families really be like that? As a child, he’d never been hungry, never been beaten, or abused. His parents were neither alcoholics nor drug users. There were books to read. Clean clothes. His parents were civil to one another. They never had much money. They were Roosevelt Democrats and voted for Stevenson in ’52 and ’56. Was he happy, though? No, he’d say. He wished he could say differently.

When his sisters returned, the owner, a woman named Maria-Vita, came out of the kitchen, wiped her hands on a towel. “Give me a few minutes, hon, and I’ll get you folks started. I just made some rollatini di melanzane.”

She set down three glasses of water and handed the menus to Elke.

Otto said, “Well, I guess that’s it. It’s over.”

“Thank God,” said Elke.

I mean,” he said, “when your parents die, you’re really, finally on your own. There’s no more mama and papa. You’re alone. You look back and wonder, ‘Was any of that worth it?’”

“What kind of a way is that to look at it. This is the time to get closer. You’re not alone. You have us. Of course, it all wasn’t so smooth sailing. No family is, but they tried. We all tried. ”

Marta said, “I’m getting some wine. You want some?”

“Get a Barolo and I’ll have some,” said Elke. “Are you having any?”

“No, not for me,” he said.

Maria-Vita returned with the wine and glasses. “You’re the brother,” she said. “Nice to meet you. I love your sister.”

“Yes, I’m the brother.” he said. “Yeah, Elke, she’s great.”

“Look, give me back those menus. I’m bringing you fresh bread from Viglioti’s, a tomato salad, and the rollatini I made. You have enough on your minds.”

“I hope she’s quick, I have to get going.”

“Oh, please, Otto, that’s enough.” Your father died four hours ago, you could at least have a little heart. Take a few minutes and say something nice and kind about him. Not just, move along, the shows over, he’s dead and gone and, guess what, nobody cared, anyway.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right,” he said. “Let’s each say something nice. You go first, Marta.”

“Do you remember the time, he…,” said Marta.

“He, what?”

“Don’t interrupt her.”

“… he…”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re going to say, but the happy little family you both lived in was not the one I did,” he said.

Maria-Vita brought the bread, three ample white bowls and a platter of steaming rollatini in red sauce with fresh cheese on top. “Eat,” she said.

They spooned rollatini from the platter into their bowls, broke off pieces of bread and dipped them into the sauce. They ate quietly.

“Look, I’m not complaining,” he said. “I just had a different life than you both did. Not horrible. It just wasn’t all that good. I was a kid. I just wasn’t a happy kid.”

“But they loved you. They must have. Mom did. I know that. She thought you were like a god,” said Elke.

“That may be true. I think she did. She was distracted. Fragile. Like she might do or say something wrong. Worrying about everything. Afraid one night he might not make it home.”

“Well, he did that to her. His parents were like that, too. Stiff. Old school. Not very affectionate. Never smiling. That must have affected him.”

“I know. I see that. But you’re saying treating people badly because of how you grew up is just okay? And I shouldn’t complain. Just forgive and forget. Let go. Put it all behind me.”

“I guess, yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Do you remember it being like that?” Elke said to Marta.

“No. I was happy. They got me a dog after you moved out.”

“I heard about the dog, and how did that work out?”

“Not so good,” Marta said.”

“No, not great,” he said. “And why? I’ll tell you why. Because neither of them liked dogs and your mother was terrified of them. He knew that and yet he bought you a dog for which he had to build a cage in the basement, and it barked all day long driving her crazy, right? You had a good time with that?”

“No. That was horrible.”

“It must have been. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for you and for the dog and for them. But it wasn’t the dog’s fault. You don’t blame the dog for complaining. Something was wrong but he just didn’t know what.”

“So, you’re saying…what? You were treated like a dog?”

 “No. I’m saying, I don’t know. I never told anyone this but, he never once said, ‘I love you’ to me, never once put his arm around me. For a kid, that’s pretty devastating.”

“I’m sorry for you.”

“Me, too.”

“Me too. I’m sorry for myself. But I have to go. Please tell Maria the eggplant was the best! No shit, that’s worth remembering fondly.”

He left, got into his car, put his hands on the steering wheel and sat there. The sky was still clear. The faint white face of the moon. He sat there until a knock on the side window startled him.

“Marta,” he said. Her cheeks were smudged. He lowered the window.

“You’re right,” she said. “You did live in a different family. I’m sorry. I don’t remember it being that bad for you. But when you left, it was like the lights went back on after a thunderstorm at four in the morning. The air was suddenly easier to breathe! Your story isn’t the only story. It’s not. It’s only yours. Don’t try to make it mine or make me feel bad because it wasn’t.”

She turned away and walked back toward the restaurant.

Then she stopped, turned, came back to the car.

“And, one last thing,” Marta said, “it is not lost on me, nor should it be on you, that you are a male, you are older, you make more money than I do and, in general, you have more power than I do. You dominated that whole conversation in there. You intimidated us and, instead of remembering the still-warm body that was, and still is your father, you talked only about you. If you ever want to have a conversation with me about my life, how I feel, how it was all like for me, what I think, let me know. I’ll be there. And while you’re sitting here feeling sorry for yourself, take a good long look in the mirror.

A Life in the Rearview

David Bellingham nodded to the usher as he passed by and he took a seat in a pew by the open window. It was in the last row on the righthand side as you faced the front of the sanctuary. The back of the pew pressed hard against his spine. He was prone to slouching and straight-backed seats like this one were uncomfortable for him.

He wondered, did people choose seats on one side or another at a funeral as you did at a wedding. More likely as not, one did, he thought. Families and friends being what they were. They were no different at funerals than they were at weddings were they. Maybe, he thought, there was an even greater cause for internecine animus at a funeral.

Nonetheless, he sat where he sat and that was that. Besides, would where he sat make any difference? Make him feel any less like an interloper of sorts? Any more than he was already feeling?

He knew next to no one there, and, of course, that was to be expected. The people he knew or who knew him were dwindling, were they not?

Outside the window, the tops of trees down the hill, across the lake, rustled in the breeze. The sound they might have been making didn’t reach him, though the breeze through the window brushed across his skin. His mind wandered. Drifted.

When they called his name, he touched his hand to his jacket pocket. His notes. An Ativan. A Clif Bar. His water bottle. He got up and walked up the side aisle and negotiated the short flight of stairs to the microphone. He tapped it. God, he thought, must everyone in the world do that?

Hear cleared his throat. “We met,” he began, “in September of ‘57. The year the Dodgers left New York for LA. He was new. It was junior high and everyone that year was new. We all came from different parts of town. But he was from a different town.

“I remember that he looked lost. Maybe not lost, but he had this solitary look about him. The way he looked around. The concavity of his expression. He looked, I think, like I was feeling.

“You have bike?” I asked him. He shook his head. You play basketball? ‘Yeah,’ he said.

“In Phys Ed, we shot baskets at one of the nets on the side of the gym by the bleachers. He would shoot these jump shots from the corner. He’d say, ‘Fall back, baby!’ when he hit one. Those were not high percentage shots but that’s what he liked. We’d go to the outdoor courts after school and shoot around and then we’d play one-on-one.

“And there was this one day. I remember it was cloudy. I don’t know why I remember that but, we were playing, and I thought he was going to take one of those corner jumpers, but he didn’t. He drove straight at me, and I had my hands up, my arms up, my hip into his, and he went to the hoop for a layup. He didn’t stop. Just banged into me and, and I can feel him coming into me at this moment as I stand here, and his shoulder slammed into me, right under my arm, and it snapped his shoulder. He just crumpled. He fell down, and some old guy came over and he yanked on his arm, and I could hear the bone pop back into the socket. I was shaking. Felt sick. He was sweating like crazy, and I thought he was going to faint, but he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ll take the foul.’

“His mother made us good sandwiches and he had a nice sister. One day after school he told me that Miss Bergman, the English teacher, who he thought had a crush on him, told him he was an iconoclast. I didn’t know what that meant.”

“One year, this was the year before we graduated, we went to see a Chiffons concert in the city together, and after the show he said to me that one of them, the one on the left, the really cute one, was looking at him the whole entire show. I told him I thought she was looking at me. ‘You believe what you want to believe,’ he said.’

“Then the next year, after we graduated, it was May or June, he called me on a pay phone from upstate. He said, ‘Can you pick me up at the AmTrak station?’

“Why?”

“I flunked out,” he said.

“Sure.”

“I was sorry, I told him, but I was really glad to have him home. I didn’t say so. So, we went straight to Roberta’s in the Bronx for pizza and a beer.

“We went to Knicks games. Bradley, Frazier, Monroe and Willis Reed. He was my best man, and I was his. We were both crazy young. Too young and too crazy to know we were too young and too crazy.”

“One year, it was ’69, he called me, ‘Come over and we’ll watch the moon landing together. The four of us did. We sat on the floor in his living room and ate tacos. And afterwards he said, ‘You think that whole thing was for real?’

“Yeah, why?”

“’No reason. Just saying, I guess.’” That was exactly the kind of thing he would say.”

“We used to talk about the kids. Vacations. Work. Where the country was heading. Where the world was heading. We still do. Talk about kids and vacations and the country. Not still, I mean, but you know what I mean. It was always grounded in the here and now. The present. Covid shots. Hearing aids. Knee replacements. Shingles.

“A few years ago, he started talking about how old we were getting. It was like, aches and pains and surgeries. And he’d always say how he could see us one day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, wearing hats and overcoats and looking out at the water. Sort of like the Simon and Garfunkel song. And he’d always say that we’d be mumbling things indistinctly in one another’s direction and we’d be nodding our heads like we heard and understood.

“But, you know, we never really talked about the rest of it. The ‘what happens after the mumbling stops’ kind of thing. Other than joking about being euphemistically ‘gone.’ I don’t know what he believed. I mean really. I think we had different ideas, but I’m not so sure about that. I never really asked him, in just those same words.”

He paused speaking.

“Oh, yes, and one last thing that he would say to me, ‘You know, David, I’ve been down so long, it is beginning to look like up to me.” I always thought he made that one up. I was sure of it. Anyway, I liked thinking that. Besides maybe Richard Farina was the one who stole it from him. That’s possible.”

He looked out at all the faces of all. There were mostly smiles all around. People he didn’t know or didn’t recognize. You could see he figured that that was as good a time as any to stop.

So, he walked back down the steps. Back to the pew at the end of the aisle, near the open window and he watched the trees across the lake rustling without saying anything and he could feel the breeze brush against his skin.

The Way Things Work Out

When Bix was young and newly married, before he had a child of his own, when he knew all he needed to know about pretty much everything; most everything that mattered; most everything that mattered to him; he knew a couple who had a young child, an infant. Brown-eyed like her father. Soft black hair. A pinched chin like her mother. He was sure that with a pencil, a piece of paper, a Punnett square, and a few minutes he could suss out all the probabilities of that combination happening. It was just dominants and recessives. Like heads and tails. That was what he knew, what most people knew then; dominants, recessives, and probabilities. Probabilities ruled.

He’d been in college with Vincent, the father of the young child. A philosophy major. The mother had been a teacher where Bix taught high school Bio. So, they were all friends. Not close, but friends. People he knew. Not that well. But none of that really matters. They were just two people he knew who had a child. A girl. Maybe two or three weeks old, maybe six months. He didn’t pay too much attention to other people’s children then.

What he knew then about children was that, if things worked out, most of the time, probably, when you had one, there’d be a few months of listening to their soft breathing in the dark room next door, lifting your head to the sound of a call or a cough, holding your breath until another cough came, or a swallow, a cry, or the rustling of a shoulder finding a new resting place by the side of the crib. And you’d turn your head back to the hollow of your pillow and fall back to sleep while someone else fed it or changed its diaper.

That’s if things worked out.

He and his wife had visited them, the couple, once, on an unusually warm November evening. The child was named Clair. Clair de lune. He could see her rounded face from across the room, resting in the angle of her mother’s arm, partially hidden by a thin flannel cover.

After the child had been put to bed and quieted, they all sat in the living room.

The couple kept the door to the child’s room ajar and would take turns getting up to bring drinks, clear plates or whatever, and stopping to listen at the child’s door in the lighted hallway. They’d then come back and sit on the couch for a few minutes.

After a while, Bix’s wife said, “We should go now and let you two get some sleep while you can.”

“No, no,” said Vincent, his friend, the philosophy major.

“Oh, my goodness, are you sure? I wish you could stay longer,” said the child’s mother, Lindy, or Lorraine, he couldn’t recall which, and she went into their bedroom coming back with their coats.

On the drive home he thought, they fuss so much. Worry too much. He’d said so to his wife. She turned from looking out the window to look at him.

And then he and Mara had children. Twins.

He found himself thinking of Vincent and Lindy. And of himself back then, when he knew so much about so little and so little about so much. How little he knew then of wakeful nights when every sound in the dark comes freighted with ancient, existential, fear, alerted to every nuance of sound, nerves as taut as a mousetrap in a kitchen cupboard, and of gratefulness in the morning after a peaceful, uneventful, night believing, hoping, that things would work out as they had done last night. The way probability says it should work out, the way it should work out in a well-ordered, teleological, universe. The right way.

For Vincent and Lindy, and their little girl, Clair, it did not work out so well.

A few short weeks after Bix and Mara had put on their coats and said good night, and after they drove home thinking about what they would or would not do when they had children, and then about work and other things and other people, they heard the sad news about the child. About how the child had died in bed during the night; one night, not that night, but a different night. Another night of listening to the silence through the child’s open door.

And, somehow, even then, he shoved that into the recycling bin of his thoughts … because things usually work out well, don’t they? But deep down knowing that the improbable is not the impossible. Else, why read horror stories or watch Stephen King films to attest to your own invulnerability?

And then, for Bix, the years of parental basal-metabolic worry came and went; listening to soft breathing and mashing bananas to silky sweet smoothness evolved into cutting grapes in half, and blowing across hot bowls of vegetarian vegetable soup, sitting on edge on the edge of a sandbox in the park, and figuring out how to remove a square piece of cut carrot from deep in a squirming nostril. Saving growth charts and Crayola drawings of Mommy, a calendar of milestones, and progress reports and SAT scores.  He  heard his own voice say, “Did you do your homework?” “Who’s driving tonight?” “No matter what you have done or what time it is, call me and I’ll be there in five minutes to pick you up,” and “Because I said so.”

And so, having traveled that far, like Bix, you figure things will all work out okay.

Then your kids get married and move away, or just move away, just as you had hoped would happen, knew would happen, feared would happen, and you wait for texts or phone calls. Track them on Find My Friends. And maybe they come back after a rough breakup or needing space to figure out what they really want to do or who they really are. And when they go again you say our door is always open. And even when they call you with biopsy results, you say, because you believe it, as he had come to believe it, that things will work out okay though you know that only sometimes they do. And sometimes they don’t. And you suffer when they don’t and fret when they do.

And so, if it all works out, as it did for Bix, one day they do come back, and tell their own kids to sit quietly, and they stand by the door to your bedroom with a tissue in one hand and a glass in the other. And they listen to your breathing, and read to you, and kiss your forehead at midnight, and ask, “Are you warm enough?” “Can I get you water or anything?” And then they will all go to sit in the living room and talk quietly among themselves and wait for you to fall asleep.

The Long Orderly Life of Morrison G. Heffermann

Morrison Heffermann awoke to footsteps scuffing on the wooden stairs up to his bedroom.

Morse?

A familiar voice. His father’s voice? His bed is wet. Shivering in the cold. His father will find him once again soaked in his own pee. Wet sheets wrapped tight round his knees and ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse?”

The bedroom door is knocked and rattled and banged and pushed open.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here.

Morse?”

“It must be a hundred.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Syd, open a window and put the A/C on.”

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Syd, can you get him up?”

“Don’t turn it on!”

“We have to. Have you had anything to drink today? Get him some water.”

“It’s me, May, Morse. Can you sit up? Let Syd help you up.”

“May?”

“Go get him some water. I’ll help him up.”

“I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

“Yes… give me my robe, please.”

“Get him his robe. And turn the AC on for God’s sake.”

“Don’t turn it on. It uses up too much electricity. It’s old and won’t last long.”

“But it’s so damn hot in here. You won’t last as long as it will if you don’t let us turn it on.”

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Syd will help you. Let Syd help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“Can you get up?”

“Help me. I can’t get my balance. Not under that shoulder.”

“I’ll get you something to eat, okay?”

“Close the door, Syd. Just help me get my damn shorts down so I can sit down and get that pad on.”

“May, call 911. He’s fainting.”

“Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I’m not leaving my house.  I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Dammit. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.”

August had been oppressive. Not under one hundred for eight days. Nineties at night.

Morse Heffermann was a Navy man, he joined right out of high school. After Pearl Harbor. Air crewman. Pacific coast patrol bombers.

After the war, he met Margret. In two months’ time they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the Drottningholm, and then by bus to Stockholm. They stayed with her parents a week.

In Boston, they both took whatever jobs they could find. They were happy. They had a daughter.

He started a business and kept it for forty years, working the phone out of his home selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death. Just what was right to do.

Margret died young and the daughter left home. For fifty-five years he kept the old house.

He paid the bills on time, read books on the war and every book by David McCullough, Goodwin, Tuchman, Caro, and Mantel. He remembered each one. He kept the Saab they’d shipped home from Stockholm running. Saved every nickel, trusted few people, and had fewer friends. He was kind, quiet, and thoughtful to a fault. He sent birthday, holiday, anniversary, and thank-you cards. Never spoke ill of another person. Kept a tidy home and scrupulous records. Lit the lights only when he needed one and shut them off when he didn’t. He wrote reminder notes to himself. He paid attention to the details. When he could no longer cook, he made toaster waffles and heated up Swanson’s dinners in the oven. When he could no longer play, he watched golf on TV every Sunday.

One afternoon, he slipped on ice on the back stairs carrying the trash out. He broke his shoulder, bruised his forehead, and lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw the kitchen light on at a quarter-past eight. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked the neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You keep to yourself, keep your affairs in order, prepare well, make plans, and stick to them. That’s all you need.

He handwrote his will, leaving the house to his son-in-law, Syd. The one who had married Agatha, his daughter. His only daughter. And then she too died, young and fresh like her mother had.

He had files and note cards for everything. “Do not touch” labels in uniform squared blue ink caps taped to light switches, the radio, bookcases, file cabinets, the stove, and cupboards.

He catalogued photographs in boxes of envelopes by month and year, with names, places, and dates on the backs of each one. There were none of himself save for a newspaper clipping of him at a table at the Swedish Lodge Julfest in town with a plate of Nisu bread, pickled herring, and a hot coffee in front of him.

After Syd and May got him down in the stair chair, he ate an egg, a cup of coffee, and then fell asleep at the table.

He’d told May that he’d had nothing to eat or drink for days. He’d ridden the stair chair up to his room and lay down a few days ago when it got real hot. How many days, he didn’t know. He had asked her to bring him back up there after he finished eating and told her to call no one else and to shut the door and lock it when she left.

When she could not waken him the next morning, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the County hospital. You can’t make me leave my own house! He refused treatment on the gurney. They moved him from the ER to a room. He took no food. No drink. He accepted only pain medication. Nothing more.

“We can’t let him do that, May!”

“We can. What else are we going to do, Syd? Have them tie him down and shove a PEG tube in his gut, stick an IV drip in his arm, and a Foley up his tiny you know what? We have no right to do that. No one does.”

“We’re his only family, May. We can’t let him die like that?”

“We can, Syd. Because we are the only family he has. It’s his life, not yours or mine. We need to let him live the last days he has the way he has lived every other day in his whole life. Let him be who he is. Please, just let him be.”

Border Crossing at Halls Stream Road

He found a place on the map just west of Halls Stream Road, upstream from Beecher’s Falls, where the road bends left and the stream bends right and the border lies just west of both of them. Where the stream is wide and shallow, hidden in the trees, and you can see the farms in Canada so clear and near you could high arc a baseball and hit the bright white side of the closest one.

His pack holds his passport, chlorine tabs, matches, phone, tarp, and Clifbars. A flashlight. Water bottle and meds for a week. He considered packing his father’s fixed-blade Hunter knife, though he had no coherent picture of why, or how, he might use it if the need arose, nor what that need might be. What if he was stopped by a patrol and they found it?

He’d once before felt the need to leave. In Nixon’s War. In the draft. Quakers handed out pamphlets from platforms and wished him well. The fear to him was visceral. In his gut and the options were to him like trees in fog. The language of 4-F, 2-S, and 1-A made it seem that way. So too, the muddily ill-defined illegality of it. As was, he thought, the war itself. The moral dilemmas. Was there honor or safety anywhere. He waited, considered what would happen to him at the border, so he never left. He aged out in ‘69. No decision being the decision.

The waves of dread and worries came with the seasons. Daily, almost. Diffuse, becoming sharper. Oppressive. Accreting like rust and corrosion. Kent State. Reagan. Bush. Bush. Iran Contra. Iraq. Iran. Afghanistan. Columbine. Sandy Hook. “How’s that hopey changing thing working out for you?” Tea Party Two. McConnell. Proud Boys. Q. Trump’s odd inchoate internecine war. The great carbon bootprint. All that is solid undermining all that had once seemed so certain, so solid. Marx, vilified unheeded: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…”

“Why are you doing this?” she said to him. “We’re okay here. There’s no danger. Is there?”

I worry every day, he told her. January 6, new-breed warriors. Waiting for Kristallnacht. “That won’t happen here,” she said.

Then January 6, again, he said.

But, it’s more than that. He told her, I don’t want to live anymore in a country like this. The oily grasping. Condoned. Encouraged by corrupting militaristic capital. They own it all and still want more. We bleed debt and blood in the streets. No one cares for long enough to do anything. I want to feel free. I don’t want to die never knowing better.  

He left a note. Wait to hear from me.

In Queechee, in the parking lot near the gorge, he met a man with a car. I’ll give you half now, he offered. They drove north beneath an August-green awning.

Stop here, he said. The stream there was slow and shallow. The white-sided farm across the way. Quiet, like a softcover children’s book.

He paid the driver the other half. He lets the car turn and leave.

This is not El Paso. He knows that. He is no Nicaraguan. He is only who he is.

It is all relative in degree. He could no longer live the American life. Dumbed-down, consumer capital-driven life, politically oligarchic corporate greed. A duplicitous mythical monopoly game of liberty and justice for none, where people go hungry, unhoused, profiled, drugged and hopeless.

In the stream up to his knees. He walked with the current, along the slow edge.

A mile or two. Then south along the Canadian side of the road. Vermont over there to the left. He was free. Sort of. He tipped up a sip of water in the shade. Alert for what or who might be lurking. Following.

Let them stop me, he thought. No one did.

He pressed open the door of the first café he saw. The first town. Ordered a Tim Horton’s and a roll. Took a seat by a wide window. Watched people come and go. He’d planned nothing further along than this. No more than sitting right there. Passing unmeasured minutes. Unbothered. Maybe this is how it will be. He doesn’t know. He will soon gather his things, step outside. Call home.

Ronald Reagan’s Christmas Cookies

Greg Molson followed the recipe for gingerbread cookies he’d found in his sloppy, falling-apart, copy of The Joy of Cooking, page 662:

Beat softened butter and sugar until creamy. Beat in molasses. Add the dry mixture to the butter mixture in three parts, alternating with the water. On a floured surface, roll the dough to your preferred thickness.

His copy was the one bought years ago for his wife, before they’d gotten married. The one he’d wrapped and carried in his suitcase on their trip to the Sha-wan-ga Lodge Resort and Conference Center, where they stayed for a three-day, four-night honeymoon in the sweltering Catskill Mountains, among waves of shrill families, clouds of mosquitos, a tight circle of faux-log cabins, six varieties of flapjacks and canned fruit cocktail at each meal, and a deep green lake with unseen slimy, slithery, scaled things that rubbed up against his bare legs like a school of subaquatic feral cats.

“Just so you know, Greg,” Marsha said, on the ride home from the Catskills to their new apartment in Yonkers, holding a cigarette tipped toward the open car window, “Just so you’re not surprised, when we get back, I don’t cook.” 

When she moved out, leaving him after seven slow years of increasingly insurmountable, unavoidable, and seemingly irreconcilable, differences between them, Joy was the one book Marsha left behind for him on the kitchen counter.

Of course, she ate. Certainly, she ate. She ate with relish and gusto. That was something, in fact, that Molson liked so much about her. She loved food. All food. Italian, French, Chinese, burgers, shrimp scampi, pizza, mac and cheese, chow fun, and noodle kugle. Her mother cooked for her. Her grandmother cooked. Her brother-in-law cooked. Her friends cooked. But, in their overheated Hertz rental with the windows down, heading south on the Taconic Parkway, she told him clearly, emphatically, resolutely, and in no uncertain terms, that she did not, could not, and would not cook.

He was disappointed to hear her say that. He didn’t say so in so many words.

“Oh,” he said.

So, by dint of circumstance and dedication, never having cooked a meal before in his life, he found himself going into markets, filling shopping carts and brown bags with handles with what he needed. He stocked the cupboards, drawers, refrigerator, and breadbox. He learned to cook. He learned to love it. He found rest and refuge in it.

Joy became his bible.

And, so, when Marsha and he went their separate ways, he made, ate, and served to others what made him happy. He worked hard. And he came home each evening to a kitchen of respite and re-charge.

The idea for gingerbread cookies came from the need to bake something Christmassy to give to the people he worked with. They made, boxed, and ribboned packages of miniature pecan pies, peppermint bark, buckeyes, and pfeffernüsse, which they handed out with big grins at the holiday party. Gingerbread cookies seemed to be just the right thing.

He mixed, cooled, and rolled the dough. Set the oven at three-fifty, pressed a cookie cutter into the dough and separated out the gingerbread figures. They lay flat and brown on the parchment paper, looking up at him.

And standing at the counter with his floured fingers, he felt moved somehow at that moment, an irresistible urge to draw a gentle, curved, line of a mouth into each figure. A thin, up-turned, simulacrum of a smile.

He took one step back and looked at them. Their arms and legs outstretched. Their dotted eyes. Their smiling faces.

A slow smile came to his lips. It grew and broadened. And he began to laugh. A big, loud, head-tipped-back, open-mouthed, laugh. A nothing-held-back, totally uninhibited, burst of child-like laughter. He was overtaken, carried away by his own laughter echoing in his empty kitchen.

He felt an expansive release from deep within. His body, weary and sleep-deprived, let loose an anthem of inchoate joy. A feeling so surprising and foreign to him that he could find no word to give it.

He laughed in wonderment and deep awareness. How, almost out of the blue, had a bunch of corny cookie faces which, just a moment before, had been blank, and on which, with the tip of a fork and the curved edge of a spoon, he had drawn a simple smile, had looked up at him and had done this to him?

And so, with intention and only a moment’s pause, he turned the spoon around and he pressed a narrow furrow of a frown into one of the remaining cookie faces. And, by the same magic that made him laugh, he felt a sadness grip him, and he began to cry.

Tears welled in his eyes and overflowed his cheeks. Crying as he could not ever remember doing in his entire life other than the day his mother had left him at the door of his kindergarten class on the very first day of school and turned away from him leaving him in the doorway in the firm grip of the tall sharp-faced, Mrs. Howell, and closed the door behind her.

He cried without trying to stifle it. Unselfconsciously. Without covering his eyes. Crying. Letting go, he felt, of days, and months, and years of submerged, un-cried sadness.

A sadness, only then at that very moment, so clearly to him that his skin prickled with gooseflesh, that he knew it was not for himself but for John and James, and Emily, Kim, Rosario, and Jonathan, and every other one of the friends he had lost. The faces of those he would never see again. The faces he’d seen for the last time, only days or weeks before, in a hospital bed or covered in soft blankets on their mother’s long couches, or settees in their own dark living rooms. Faces of those who died, as they seemed to do almost daily then, of cryptosporidiosis, or sarcoma, cryptococcal meningitis, wasting, fever, or pneumocystis pneumonia.

Men and women, younger than him, who’d relentlessly suffered and too-soon lost everything they had and loved and had surely dreamed.

And then he laid all of the cookies, smiling and frowning, in careful rows on the baking sheet and he cried and laughed as he looked from one of them to another and, when he felt ready, he opened the oven door, and wiped his eyes. Grateful, in a way, that he had known each and every one of them.

In the Last Days There Will Come Times of Difficulty (2 Timothy: 1-2)

Morse Sheffield lay alone in his bed in the late heat of August. Shades pulled down against the sun, darkening the room. The air, close and heavy. A thin sheet over him. He is dreaming his unpleasant dreams.

Someone on the stairs. Two of them. His father. Leave the cat alone. Do your homework. His mother. Come take your bath. Morse? Morrison? You hear me? Cold and wet. Dust in the air and in his mouth. Knocking on the door. Go away. I’m not dressed. He’d wet the bed again. His legs would not move. Tangled sheets around his ankles.

“Morse?”

“Morse? Are you here?”

A hand pushes against the door.

“He’s in here,” one of them, a young woman, says.

“Oh my God, Morse. It’s like an oven in here. Morse? Morse?”

“It must be a hundred in here.”

“Morse? Can you get up? Simon, open that window. Morse?

“Morse, why is air conditioner off? Can you get up?”

“It’s Didi, Sigrid’s daughter, Morse. Can you sit up? Do you need help?”

Didi.

“Do you have any water? Simon, go get him some water. Help him up.”

I need to go to the bathroom. What time is it?

“It’s two o’clock. Do you need help to get up?”

Yes. Can you give me my robe?

“Get him his robe. And turn on the air conditioner.”

“Don’t turn it on. Leave it. I don’t want it on.”

“But it’s so hot in here, you’ll die. Get him some water. Do you want some water?”

I need to go to the bathroom.

“Simon will help you. Morse, Simon will help you. Get him his robe so he can go to the bathroom.”

“It’s Simon, Morse, can you get up? Morse, lean over this way.”

I can’t. Don’t touch that shoulder.

Simon walks with Morse into the bathroom, helps him turn and eases back him down on the toilet seat.

“Are you okay in there?”

Don’t come in. Just help me get my shorts down.

“Ask him if he wants something to eat. Should I call 911?”

Don’t call anyone. I won’t let them in. I will not go. I’ve told them before. I’m staying here. Just help me pee. Please. I’ll eat something. Don’t call anyone.

For over a week, the heat had been oppressive. Over ninety each day. The nights unbearable.

Sigrid, who came in to clean once a month, is the one who had found him. She knocked on the bedroom door. He told her to leave. To go away. She called the brother. The one with the house by the water. The only family of his she knew. No answer. She called her daughter Didi.

“You have to come to Mr. Sheffield’s house. He’s in his bedroom with the door closed and it’s a hundred and ten up here. He won’t let me go in.

Morse Sheffield had been a Navy man. He joined right out of high school. 1944. An air crewman, flying patrol bombers on the Pacific coast.

He met Margret in college. In ’55 they sailed from New York to Gothenburg on the freighter Drottningholm to meet her parents in Stockholm. They married there and, after Oslo, Paris, and London, they made a home back on the east coast, in the town where his grandfather and his grandfather’s father had grown up.  

He had no trouble finding work. Enjoyed working, no matter the job. He was gregarious. They liked his attitude.

He and Margret were together. They had a daughter. Life had no end.

Then Margret died and, soon after, Agatha got married and moved away.

He stayed in their small dark house on the corner of a quiet street up the hill from the center of town. His sadness weighed him down.

One winter he’d fallen down the back stairs carrying a bucket of trash out to the garage and he lay on the ice in the cold till a neighbor saw him. When the ambulance came, he told them to go away. He thanked his neighbor and told the police officer he would not be taken from his home against his will.

You have no right to take me anywhere. This is my home. Getting old is not a crime. I want to stay in my home. This is my home, and you have no right to take me from it. Living alone is not a crime.

The officer helped him back up the stairs, made a note in his notepad and said, “Mr. Sheffield, you’d better get someone to put a railing up along the stairs there for you.”

Thirty-five more years he lived there. Went working in an office in a nearby town, keeping house, paying the bills on time, reading books on the war, Lincoln, the depression. All the presidents. He kept his Saab running, saved his money, trusted few people, had fewer friends. Year after year. Solitary. Thoughtful. Kind. Carefully generous. Never speaking ill of another. Keeping things in order. Was he happy? It was not a question anyone would think to ask him.

He started his own business and kept it going for a few years, working out of his home, selling insurance for a company in Hartford, never taking out a policy of his own. He never talked about illness, infirmity, or death.

He’d say that keeping your affairs in order, preparing and planning, not being a burden, was what mattered. He wrote a will. Leaving the house to his son-in-law. The one who had married Agatha. His only child. His only daughter, who died young and fresh, just like her mother had.

He turned the lights off when he left a room. Wrote reminder notes to himself and thank-you and birthday cards to others. He cooked when he was able and ate what he made, and then later, when he couldn’t manage the pots and pans, heated up the Swanson’s pot pies and frozen dinners in the microwave. He didn’t renew his tickets to the symphony. He had to stop walking to the beach and the market and the bookstore.

He wrote notes with detailed instructions in uniform capital letters and taped them up on everything. “Unplug when not in use” over light switches. “Do not touch” on bookshelves, file cabinets, the stove, cupboards.

He catalogued boxes of 35 mm prints, names, dates, and places on the back. Made notes of thoughts and quotes and left them folded in the books he’d read. David McCullough. Goodwin. Tuchman. Caro. The Bible.

Didi waited at the bottom of the stairs. Simon had helped Morse fit himself into the stairlift. He rode down holding on to the armrests, in his slippers and his robe.

She had opened the back door and the window above the sink. He ate the eggs and sausage and sipped the tea she prepared for him, eating without speaking, and when he’d had enough, he asked Simon to help him go back upstairs.

You’re both kind, he told them. I don’t want you to call anyone, and please shut the door when you leave.

In the evening, Didi returned with a small dinner she prepared. When she could not waken him, she called the police. The ambulance came and took him to the local hospital. He refused treatment and was moved to a bed near a window in the nursing home nextdoor. He took no food. He accepted only pain medications he could take with a sip of water.

Morse Sheffield passed away in bed in a quiet room near a window. Neither in the bed of his dreams nor in the one or in the manner of his own choosing.

It’s Life. Period. Goodbye

Jake Greenfield brought in the mail. Careful not to let his cats out.

Among the bills and flyers was a green square envelope.

He shut the door firmly and ran his finger under the envelope flap. He removed a note card.

“Dear Jake, My dearest brother Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.” No further details, except that a memorial was planned at Sam’s home in Essex on the coming Sunday afternoon.

It was signed “Rebecca, Sam’s Sister, PS, I would love to hear from you.”

Jake sat on a chair beside the kitchen table. He took a long slow breath. Holding the card in his lap.

“Sam,” he said.

In high school they called Sam “the Russian.” He was not Russian. His last name was Rudski. So, they called him the Russian. His family was Polish. Maybe. Maybe Slovak. Maybe Latvian. Nobody knew or cared. Neither did he.

He was quick to smile. Quick to say, “Do what you guys want, I’m going home,” and the only one who saw no reason not to eat the last slice of pizza. 

There were three of them back then. Jake, Bob, and Sam, who hung out together. Played ball together. Driver’s licenses. First legal beers. College.

When Kennedy was shot, they watched the TV together. Then Oswald. Jack Ruby raising his right arm straight out from his shoulder, with the Dallas police and the reporters in black felt fedoras standing around, and he shot Oswald square in the belly with a pistol he’d pulled out of his overcoat pocket. Oswald winced.

They drove down to DC in Sam’s VW and waited in the dark cold wind outside of the Capitol to walk past the quiet coffin and then over to Lafayette Park, to sit on a blanket under the trees on the curb across from the White House. They watched Bobby, Jackie, Caroline, and John John walk behind the casket.

What they were seeing was unfathomable. They were nineteen. It was something never to be forgotten.

Sam was the first among them to fall in love. The girl lived up in White Plains. He sent her flowers and after he paid for them, he called Jake to say, “alea iacta est,” like Caesar crossing the Rubicon. The die was cast, he said.

Everything they did or said back then was concrete, momentous, consequential, black and white, final, irrevocable. Neither good nor bad. It just was. They never gave a thought to any time beyond the present. Who they were was who they’d always be. There were no thoughts of the future beyond which shirt you would put on in the morning or which classes you had the next day.

Then there were weddings. First jobs. Children. They each moved away. None of them went to Vietnam. They grew beards and long hair. Bob worked for a big Pharma company. Jake got teaching job. Sam got a job working for Anaconda Copper right out of Fordham.

One day he showed up at Jake’s house. “I quit,” he said. “They are just fucking up Chile, paying people shit wages, mining the crap out of the ground. Capitalist shitheads,” he said. “They don’t give a shit about anything other than screwing people for profits. I can’t do that anymore.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I got a teaching job in Roxbury.”

“Where’s that?”

“Boston,” he said.

“A good job?”

“Boston’s all fucked up. Desegregation. Bussing. Crazy racists attacking school buses. Throwing rocks and bottles at kids. Retrenchment. Poverty. I’ll teach in one of the schools.”

“Oh.” Jake knew nothing about Boston or Roxbury. He was teaching in the Bronx. The South Bronx. High school biology. Things were not good there either.

They all moved around again. Grad schools. New jobs. Not necessarily better jobs but jobs they liked to think were better.

After another move, Jake got a call from Sam. “I moved to Essex. I found your number in the phone book.” They went out for burgers and beer at a place called the Farm or the Barn and talked about work and their new hearing aids.

When Jake got laid off in 2008, he started doing freelance work. Writing. Sam became a psychologist and stopped selling sandwiches and DVDs. They kept in touch.

One afternoon, Sam rode his new Yamaha 500 over to Jake’s. They sat in folding chairs on his back porch. They wore warm jackets and drank hot coffee.

“You look sad,” Sam said.

“Sad? I don’t know. You know I had a heart attack a year ago.”

“You told me.”

“I did?”

“Yeah, and you said you were doing fine.”

“I was.  I still am. A lot of stuff going on. I’m okay.”

“Listen, Jake,” said Sam. “I see patients all day long, and they say, ‘yeah, I’m okay,’ and I look at them and I know they’re not. We both know they’re not. I look at them. They look at me. Their eyes. The way they sit all folded up, looking out the window. They start talking and in three minutes tops, I get the whole picture. I’d love to say to them, ‘Look, we can drag this on for a few months or years and neither of us wants to do that. So, give me the word and I can tell you right now exactly what your problem ia and what you can do to change it. Period. Goodbye.’”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying. I know you. You lost your job, and you had a heart thing, and you have a hearing problem. It’s life. You had a lousy marriage and that’s over, and now you have great one. Something’s bothering you but it’s not the job or money or your heart, or your hearing. You think I don’t have shit going on? You think the guy next door doesn’t? Look around. See the trees. You have food in the refrigerator. You have a woman who loves you. I’ll tell you right now, what your problem is. You haven’t told her how you’re feeling. You’re holding it all in. Like your father. Go in there and tell her what’s going on, how you’re feeling, what you’re worried about. And twenty minutes from now, guaranteed, she’s going to grab you and hug you and the sun will come out and light up your sorry-ass face like high noon on the goddamn equator.”

That day on the porch was the last time Jake saw Sam.

The letter surprised him. He never expected, never thought, that one day he’d be sitting in a chair by his kitchen table holding a letter saying, “Dear Jake, My dearest brother, Sam, passed away suddenly last Tuesday.”

Just like that.

“Jake,” he could hear Sam saying, “it’s life. There is no secret. Nothing to figure out. It’s life. Period. Goodbye.”