THE TREE CUTTERS RIDE by Dustin M. Hoffman

Donovan climbed trees every day, massive ones that poked at the sun, but the 250-foot Skytower ride pained his groin – a plunging tug on not one but both nuts. He ascended over the amusement park, the city, over both the Carolinas. The park was built straddling the state borders, like it couldn’t make up its mind. He turned to his friend Yan to say, “I’ll climb the tallest tree you got, but I don’t like this having no control.”
Yan nodded toward the acne-pocked teenager operating the ride’s controls. “And we’re the dummies trusting this kid not to drop us. How many shits you think he gives?” He said this as he held his sixyear-old son’s ears. Donovan hadn’t thought about freaking out Yan’s kid until now, which probably made him an asshole, as much as his own dad had been. Once Yan uncupped his kid’s ears, he nudged him toward the curved window. “Take a look down, kid. See your whole world.”
Donovan kept the back of his head glued to the wall. His body tingled at the sight of his home state made miniature, at the corpselike lump of Kings Mountain, at the endless trees Donovan could hack away if only he was steady on the ground, armed with his chainsaw. On the next Skytower rotation, the setting sun caught Charlotte’s skyscrapers and glared. From here, they resembled cutter teeth on his saw chain, all lit up as if sparking like in the nightmare he had where he was buzzing off branches at work. They dropped toward his dead daddy who was resurrected only to drunkenly stumble under Donovan’s murderous branches.
“How long they gonna spin us around up here?” Donovan asked.
The Skytower continued rotating, and Charlotte’s twinkling buildings disappeared. The roller coasters now plummeted in front of him, soulless silhouettes flailing from the cars. He’d rather fall out of a thirty-foot loblolly than go on one of those. If Yan asked him, though, he might have to do it. A guy can’t say no to another man’s dare, can’t risk looking like a pussy, and that goes double if they work together. What if Yan told the other guys? They hated Yan anyway, talked about him sneaking across the wall from Mexico to steal their jobs. He’d only started last month, and Donovan felt bad for him, which is why he’d said yes when Yan asked if he wanted to join him at Carowinds. He’d thought maybe Yan would be bringing his wife, but, no, turned out he didn’t have one. Just this kid. Just the kid and two guys, and people had already been staring at them, probably imagining who got top and who got bottom.
Yan’s kid was smushing his face against the glass, and Yan yelled at him to “stop licking everything all the dang time.” Donovan was goddamn grateful for this forty-seven-inch tagalong, too short for any serious rollercoastering.
“Kid is gonna catch Ebola licking everything like that,” Yan said.
The kid pressed his whole body against the thin glass, and it made Donovan’s insides start twirling again. He couldn’t help imagining, and then couldn’t stop from blurting it. “If he fell out, little guy’s guts would splatter thirty feet across the concrete.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Yan said, covering his kid’s ears too late.
Donovan waved an apology toward the kid without risking moving his body from the seat. “Sorry. I’m just saying.”
“That’s dumb, man. That’s impossible.”
But people probably died all the time on these rides. Why all the seatbelts and bars and guardrails and signs warning off pregnant ladies and weak hearts? That’s why his chainsaw wore a slew of stickers and had a manual warning about lifting the saw above your shoulders, about never touching the chain without pulling the sparkplug, about safety glasses. When a tree cutter stopped worrying about buzzing off three fingers or catching a splinter through the eyeball – that’s when he’d hurt himself. Fear was a protectant. Fear kept a man’s various viscera stowed in the skin casings where they belonged. He’d never witnessed a bad accident. But he had seen his crew messing with Yan’s harness. Donovan had laughed along with them, all those assholes he worked with who’d tightened the harness so small it must’ve strangled Yan’s scrotum. If he would’ve warned him, he might not have felt guilty enough to say yes to the amusement park.
The Skytower lurched into its slow, steady descent. It was a good feeling to have the ground in your future. He even allowed himself, in the last fifty feet, to unstick his sweaty scalp from the wall so he could glimpse the parking lot in miniature. The ride landed, and the passengers turned toward the exit. He was happy to join his fellow survivors, and he even scruffed Yan’s kid’s hair to celebrate the confidence recalibrated to his groin.
“What next?” Yan said as they stood on the concrete, the park crowd swirling around them in currents of human traffic. “We should ride a coaster, right?”
“Doubt they’ll let your little guy on.” Donovan cracked his knuckles. “Too bad.”
“Freak that. Let’s go check,” Yan said. “What do you say, little macho man?”
The kid ran ahead, and the two men had to break into a jog to keep up. He zoomed past the Dale Earnhardt coaster, the Nighthawk, the Southern Star, all of which he was too small for.
“Well, what the hell can we do here?” Yan asked the teenager holding a measuring stick outside the Carolina Goldrusher.
“Maybe try Camp Snoopy?” the kid said, wincing, because Yan’s fists were balled, and Donovan admired that about his coworker, his buddy, how he scared this stranger without hardly trying. His muscles flexed in neat scoops that showed through his Johnny Cash T-shirt.
“We’re not here for some wimpy cartoon stuff. Give us a real ride. I paid a half-day’s work for me and my kid and my man to get in here.”
The kid eyed Donovan, and he wished he could explain that it was just a language flub to call a friend “my man.”
“Maybe, like, the water park might be more fun, um, sir,” the kid said.
Donovan hadn’t brought swim trunks. He and Yan and his son would have to strip down to their cutoffs. Three guys splashing each other in the wave pool, their bodies bobbing, bumping, everyone watching as Yan slapped Donovan’s nude back.
“Or, if not the water park, maybe try a spinning ride or something. You and your family would love those, I bet,” the worker kid said, and Donovan’s face burned.
“Point me at a spinny ride then.” He smiled and punched the kid in the shoulder.
So they headed in the direction of the teenager’s finger, a ride called the Rock ‘N’ Roller. Donovan studied the ride and was pleased to see it stayed at ground level. No lifts. No drops. Just a frenzied spin, the buckets slicing the air like the teeth of his chainsaw. Fast he could handle. As they lingered in line, Donovan felt the crowd watching them again, kids mostly, a few man-wife couples. Their eyes seared. That teenager had called them a family, and anyone could’ve heard that. He imagined shouting to them all, We’re friends from work. Just two dudes hanging out, because he needs a friend, you know. But that explanation jammed in his head. He revised it to leave no room for questioning. He’d shout: I like vaginas, and so does my friend. And for good measure: He’s barely my friend. Just a guy I work with.
Donovan realized then that he was staring at an old man’s mouth, a white beard stained yellow probably by years of chain-smoking Winstons. The old man sneered, mouthed a silent, bit-lip fuck you. His daddy would’ve been that old, that angry, if another man tried staring at him. His daddy had once gotten into a shoving match with Donovan’s shop teacher at a bar for being a “lippy faggot.” Donovan had liked that shop teacher, who trusted him to run the lathe, to run any saw he liked, said he had the sharpest eye for angles of any kid in class. Donovan had been proud, but maybe that, too, had been a gay thing. His daddy had kicked out three of the shop teacher’s front teeth in the bar parking lot.
The line moved, and they were ushered through a gate to pick their seats. The three of them popped into a single car. Yan in first, then his boy, then Donovan. Yan pulled the seatbelt, slapped it into Donovan’s hand, as if they were at work, prepping the mini excavator bearing its fanged bucket. The kid stayed silent as Donovan closed the door, locked it, and Yan secured the grab bar over their bodies.
“Kid goes in the inside, dudes.” Another ride worker stood above them wearing opaque sunglasses and slicked black hair, his sleeves rolled like a ’50s greaser.
“He is inside,” Donovan said.
“All the way in is the rules. Just read your car.” The worker kid snapped his fingers at the car’s safety door, where a sticker printed with red letters indeed proclaimed: “Smaller passengers must sit on the inside.”
“Sure, yeah, we got it,” Donovan said, because he could tell Yan was ready to make a scene again. The three of them reshuffled until Donovan’s hips pressed against Yan’s. Donovan scanned the other cars to see who was watching. He could feel the warmth of Yan’s legs through their jeans. The seatbelt pressed into his thighs, threatened to slice through him.
The ride started moving at a slow, loping speed. Yan’s kid looked worried, and Yan looked bored. Outside their car, eyes swirled around them. Couples giggled and whispered in each other’s ears. A car full of boys cackled, and young girls giggled somewhere behind them. As the ride picked up speed, Donovan spotted the stained-beard grandpa, who scowled, who stared so hard a hole felt bored through his forehead. Faster and faster, the faces blurred. Elvis Presley moaned about shoes on the speakers as Yan and his boy slid against the centrifugal force, their body weight sloshing into Donovan. By top speed, Yan was practically on top of him. He hooted and his boy shrieked in joy, and Donovan reminded himself to smile. You were supposed to smile on rides. That’s what normal people did. Yan’s shoulder rammed into his pectorals, mashed his nipple. Their knuckles merged along the grab bar, and Donovan tucked his hand to his side but ended up sandwiching his fingers between his and Yan’s thighs. The blurry stares tornadoed around, churning into a thousand-strong whir of pale, wet eyeballs. Yan shouted frick yeah into his ear, shouted it again, so close he could feel his hot breath, taste the funnel cake Yan had eaten. Yeah, yeah, yeah, fricking yeah. Their hips squeezed together, fused, Donovan’s hand trapped touching. His jeans pulled under him, pinched at his crotch. The ride wouldn’t stop whirling his body against Yan’s, and everyone watched.
So Donovan punched Yan in the nose. Instantly, blood sprayed. The people behind him were screaming. Yan clutched his nose, his body folding against Donovan. The ride slowed finally. Yan’s kid gawked at his bleeding dad and started whimpering. Now, surely, all eyes were fixed on them. Yan’s blood had speckled the white cars behind them, and the riders shouted. Donovan’s legs surged with the electric desire to flee, sprint all the way home, where he’d drink himself into a stupor until work on Monday, when he’d tell the guys they’d been right not to trust Yan. But the grab bar locked him in. No escape as Yan’s head lolled against Donovan’s chest.
“I’m sorry, man,” Donovan said to the back of Yan’s head. “I didn’t mean to.”
The ride worker, still sporting the blackened shades, was rushing to unlock the bloodied passengers. He slammed up bars to free them. He moved so fast that his sunglasses fell to the ground, and he didn’t notice when he stepped on them, crunched the plastic into shards.
Fuck this, Donovan thought and heaved at the bar as hard as he could. Surely eight years lugging chainsaws up tree trunks could grant him the ability to escape a kid’s ride. He pushed harder and pushed so hard a fart ripped through his jeans like a gunshot.
“You just fart?” Yan was finally lifting his head. “That’s messed up. We’re trapped here, man.”
The kid quieted, soothed to see his dad move. Yan lifted his head and blood drained in fat drops from his nostril. He studied the blood on his fingers, smiled at his kid. The crowd of blood-speckled passengers ogled him. “Good news, folks,” he announced. “I got the cleanest blood in the Carolinas.”
Someone laughed, and a din of chatter crashed the silence like a felled oak.
But Donovan waited in hell for the worker kid to unlatch him – trapped, hip to hip, next to the man he’d just punched. If Yan would just punch him back, they could be done with the thing. Instead, Yan wiped his nose with his shirt and soaked it in the last gush of blood escaping his nose. Then he reached a blood-stained hand behind Donovan and clenched his shoulder.
“You could’ve just said you weren’t into me,” he said.
Yan’s hand pressed heavier than that blur of a thousand eyes, heavier than a tipping tree trunk. He could smell his sickly sweet funnel cake breath again, practically taste the copper of his blood. Across the circle of cars, the greaser worker tugged at stuck bars. There were a dozen more cars before he got to theirs, and here Yan was admitting he was gay, that he’d tricked Donovan into a date. Or maybe Yan was just fucking with him about being gay. How often had all the guys at work mimed thrusting with the chainsaw at their crotches while winking at each other? Donovan performed that joke weekly. It was the same reason they cried wolf. Screaming Good fucking God, I just sliced off my thumb, which made the chance of dying by blade seem silly.
The greaser kid finally reached their car. He’d donned blue rubber gloves hastily enough to have missed a finger that flopped flaccid and broken looking. “Shit, shit, shit,” he said, fumbling at the lock. “Oh shit, sorry for saying shit in front of the kid.” He jerked at the bolt, and Donovan prayed to the amusement park gods to give this kid the strength of one hundred workers to free him.
Yan reached around Donovan and grasped the kid’s floppy blue hand. “It’s okay, man. No rush. I’m not dying.”
The bar released, giving like a sawn tree limb. Donovan hopped out of the car and had the urge to run again, but he waited for Yan and the kid to sidle out of their seat.
They left the ride and made it as far as the Do-Si-Do, its red wheel whipping above them, before Yan gave his kid a twenty and told him to buy them all a treat. The kid lumbered off slowly. Donovan would’ve gladly hopped on the Dale Earnhart rollercoaster to avoid being alone with Yan. It was as if the chainsaw belt had snapped, flinging its rakers and teeth into flesh.
Yan patted Donovan’s cheek, and Donovan winced. Yan said, “Think I’m gonna punch you or something?”
“I deserve it. I can handle it.” As Donovan said it, he heard how stupid it sounded.
“We don’t go places much.” Yan was looking over his shoulder at his poor kid who’d never be able to enjoy a carnival ride again. “I wanted you to meet him. He doesn’t know too many other good adults. No grandparents or aunts or uncles around here. Just me.”
“He’s a nice kid,” Donovan said. But he was thinking about his own father who’d hated rides. The one time he’d coaxed his drunk dad to get on the Gravitron at the local carnival that sprang up in the vacant lot near the cemetery, he’d afterward vomited into Donovan’s cotton candy bag. He could still feel the weight of it bulging inside the thin plastic. “But why me?”
Yan rubbed a knuckle against the dried streaks of blood under his nose. “When you know as few people as we know, you just want your kid around people. Kids need people, as many as you can get. One guy can cut down a big maple with root rot, but it’s faster and safer if you got five guys on it, right?” He sucked his knuckle now, and Donovan imagined the coppery taste on his tongue. “Hell, at least one more to help. My kid deserves that.”
Donovan didn’t say anything. He was thinking about how the best Daddy memory he could conjure was him drunk driving Donovan to the carnival. His mother had called the cops on his daddy when she’d found out. But he never stopped being drunk. Couple years later, his daddy had ruined shop class. After the bar fight his teacher wouldn’t let Donovan near even the drop saw. If Donovan ever had kids of his own, he’d teach them how to run every kind of saw. Blades were so much safer than daddies.
“Doesn’t he?”
“Doesn’t what?”
“My kid. He deserves people. He’s better than a big rotten maple.”
“Yeah, Yan,” Donovan said. “He’s better than a maple.”
The kid returned, and, of course, he carried a bag of cotton candy. Donovan hadn’t even dared to whiff that burned sugar smell for years, and now the kid was stuffing pink fistfuls into his mouth with no pleasure. Just shoveling. No smile. Yan’s kid was too sincere, too stoic. In that way, Donovan supposed, he was pretty similar to a big fucking maple. Sometimes you just had to prune some diseased branches or poison the pests, not topple the whole thing.
“Get yourself a good batch there?” Yan asked.
“Yeah,” the kid said through a mouth gummed up with pink. “It’s pretty good.”
Yan dipped in his blood-stained hand, came up with a pink fist. His smile bit in. “It’s still warm,” Yan said. “Offer some to Donovan.” The kid aimed the opened bag his way.
Somewhere, the old man with the stained white beard might’ve been watching, sickened by these men and this boy. Yan’s blood from the ride would be drying into his white beard, a new stain, pink as the cotton candy. Maybe others watched them, too – the whispering, kissing couples, the kids, his coworkers spying from the treetops. Donovan reached into the bag, fingered a big fluff, tore it free. He let the cotton candy melt on his tongue.

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Dustin M. Hoffman is the author of the story collections One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), No Good for Digging (Word West Press, 2019), and Such a Good Man (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025). His stories have appeared in New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, The Threepenny Review, Witness, and One Story.

THE WRESTLER by Christie Hodgen

The last time I saw my brother was in the spring of ’96, down in New Orleans, the week after Mardi Gras. He had summoned me with a letter, addressed in a script so lazily drawn I was amazed anyone had been able to read it. The envelope was wrinkled and scuffed, as if it had been dropped on the floor of a bus station and trampled by the masses before it was finally picked up and deposited in a mailbox by some unseen, benevolent hand. Holding the envelope, I had the feeling, as I always did where Jude was concerned, that the contact we had managed to make was something close to a miracle, or a whole series of miracles: that he had thought to write in the first place, that he had found a sheet of paper and an envelope and a pen and even a stamp, not to mention the letter’s safe passage through the many hands of the US Postal Service. And in fact something of this theory proved true when I read the letter and found that several weeks had passed between the time Jude had written it, and the time it arrived. “I wonder if maybe you might want to come down for Mardi Gras,” it read, though we were already well into Lent. “Your average day is like a party here, so I’m kind of curious to find out what happens when they really throw one.” The letter went on to describe Jude’s situation: the room he rented, the crawfish restaurant he worked at in the French Quarter. “I’m clean and making enough money to live on and have a few friends,” he wrote, which was the best he’d had to say for himself in the eight years since he’d left home. Jude continued for two pages about NOLA, as he called it, the people and places that had caught his eye. What he liked most, he concluded, the thing that kept him tied to the city – he’d been there nine months already, the longest he’d spent anywhere since leaving home – was the music. “There’s no better city in the world for music. Any given moment you might encounter a full brass band just walking down the street. ‘When the Saints Go Marching In,’ that type of thing. O, Glory,” he wrote. “Glory fucking hallelujah.”
I stood reading this letter in the foyer of my fraternity house, in a sort of trance. All around me, young men I’d been encouraged to think of as my brothers were rushing past, in and out. It was a Friday morning, and they were all getting ready to leave for spring break, for the shores of Cancun and Fort Lauderdale, where they planned to get wasted and lure wasted girls to have sex with them on the beach. One brother, a rugby player and part-time male model whom I’d long hated, bumped me with a duffel bag so big it almost knocked me over, but I didn’t care. I only got a letter from Jude once or twice a year, and whenever one arrived, I read it over and over, carried it around with me, thought of little else besides his new life in whatever place he’d landed. Usually I started composing a reply right away, but this time was different – this was the first time he’d ever suggested I come visit him. My head was spinning with plans, how I’d get down to New Orleans, how to find Jude when I got there. I drifted away from the foyer and walked up two flights of stairs to my room, staring at the letter, no longer reading it, really, but keeping an eye on it.
Upstairs my roommate, Schmidt, was doing pushups in his underwear, grunting and counting. He devoted nearly every free moment of his life to building what he liked to call the temple of his body. Schmidt was short, like me, and had been chubby when we met – he looked uncannily like Big Boy, the fat-faced mascot with the crested wave of dark hair and the hamburger platter raised high over his head – but unlike me he’d spent the last four years weight training and was now short, but absurdly muscled. He was always carrying around a plastic tumbler, gulping down protein shakes; much of his conversation was dedicated to reenacting his sessions at the gym, miming how he struggled under a bar loaded with weights, his arms shaking, until someone spotted him at the last second before his muscles failed. He talked a lot about his performance and what was stopping him from leveling up. Periodically he’d quit drinking for a few weeks, claiming his muscles needed to purify themselves before they could grow again, but then he’d fall off the wagon and drink until he passed out. Junior year he’d woken up one morning with a tattoo of Porky Pig on his back, which he claimed to have no memory of getting. It was sometimes hard to take Schmidt seriously, knowing the things I knew about him, especially with the pig on his shoulder, wearing a jacket and no pants. But then again I was sort of afraid of him, afraid of the person he might become and the power he might one day wield. Schmidt had a single goal in life and that goal was to be a US Senator.
I started walking around him, picking clothes off the floor and stuffing them in a backpack.
“Dude,” he said. “Wanna hit the gym?” He was always trying to get me to go to the gym with him. The last time we’d gone, we played squash for about fifteen minutes until a ball hit me so hard in the throat I fell over and puked.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m heading out of town.”
“Oh,” he said. He stopped with his pushups and sat up. “You taking Weezy?” He referred to the stuffed dog I’d brought with me to college, a football-sized, rust-colored terrier with matted fur that had once been Jude’s. I’d been careful to keep her in a suitcase under my bed so no one would see her, but one day I’d come home to find Schmidt asleep with Weezy’s snout tucked under his chin, his arms tight around her. I’d ripped the dog out from under him, but by the way he looked at me I could tell he had developed, even in his brief time with her, a genuine affection for Weezy – it pained him to have her taken away. “Mind if I,” he asked now, “you know, take care of her for you?”
The dog was a secret between us. When either one of us was downcast, or unsure about the future, which was pretty much every day at that point in our lives, we took her out of the suitcase and lay in bed with her, and moments later, we felt, she had lifted our sorrows. We believed she had a supernatural power to absorb the kinds of dark thoughts that clouded other people’s minds – self-doubt and insecurity, guilt, fear – and that this power would help set us apart from the rest of our brothers, our classmates, in fact the rest of our generation. Beyond our room, we were two ambitious young men – we were both at the top of our class, had both aced the LSAT, were both heading to law school. But in this small room at the end of the hallway of our fraternity house, we recognized in one another the same weakness.
“I’m just saying I could use, you know,” Schmidt said, “I’m having kind of a hard time.”
I thought about it. Schmidt was one of the few kids in our school who didn’t come from money – he was from West Virginia, descended from hill people, as he called them – and this had always endeared him to me. Though he was working toward ridding himself of the traces of his upbringing, he retained a slight hillbilly accent, saying “ah” instead of “I,” and he responded too quickly to all that was going on around him, like a prairie dog popping out of its hole, turning this way and that, nervous, defensive; he didn’t yet know how money behaved, that it made its own rules and kept its own leisurely pace, that it answered to no one. I decided I could be merciful and let him keep Weezy for a few days. It was Jude who I believed was the source of Weezy’s power, and I was driving to see him, so I didn’t really need the dog.
“Don’t take her out of the room,” I said.
“Except on walks,” he said.
“And lay off the cologne.” Part of my belief system regarding Weezy was that she had a smell I associated with Jude, bits of skin and sweat and soul rubbed off him during all the nights he’d slept with her as a kid, and I didn’t want Schmidt covering it over with his Polo.
“Sure thing, brother.”
I packed up my bag and made my way out to my car, trying to calculate how long the trip would take, not only the actual mileage but also the time I would spend on the side of the road with the hood propped open. My car had belonged to my father back when he was in college, at the very school I was attending now, and was in the final days of its useful life. It was prone to overheating and shuddered as it approached the speed limit on highways. I supposed the odds of the car making it to New Orleans weren’t great. On top of that, I had only the vaguest notion of where I was going – Highway 59 would take me there, was all I knew – and just shy of one hundred dollars in cash stuffed in the pocket of my jeans. That was pretty much all I had in the world, the sum total of insurance I had against whatever accident or misfortune I might encounter. But I was young and didn’t worry too much about these things.
On the way out of town I passed the Sunshine Motel, where I had planned to spend the break isolated in a room, as a subject in a flu study – something I’d done every spring break since the start of college. It was a ritual I had almost come to enjoy, reporting to this sad motel alongside the two-lane highway that wound through the mountains to our campus, standing in a long line of all the relatively poor kids – or in my case, rich kids whose fathers refused, in the name of character-building, to give them any sort of allowance – at our incredibly rich school, each of us hunched under the weight of our backpacks, stuffed to the brink with the school work we needed to catch up on, clutching our pillows to our stomachs, waiting for our turn to be infected with the virus. I suppose one of the things I liked about the flu study was that nobody cared what you looked like, no one was even trying anymore. We were all still in pajamas, fleece pants with cartoon characters printed on them, sweatshirts with the name of our college emblazoned across the chest. Our college was special, it was always telling us in its promotional materials, and we were special for going there, but any kind of pretention or ambition fell apart in the flu line. We were all silent, watching the front of the line, as each subject stepped forward and signed a long contract they hadn’t read. I’d skimmed it once – my father was a lawyer – and noted that it absolved the study of any wrongdoing in the event I developed any illness at all, but specifically brain or kidney cancer. After we signed our contracts we lay on our backs on a hospital bed, right in front of everyone, and submitted to transmission, which involved a nurse standing over us and dropping a foot-long vial of red liquid slowly down our noses. I suppose for our benefit, an absurd amount of care was taken to make the whole thing seem professional. The nurses were dressed in old-fashioned white uniforms, with white hosiery and white clogs, even peaked white hats. Behind the nurses, someone from middle management, usually a stout woman in an illfitting pantsuit, stood making notes on a clipboard. We were given a key and sent to our rooms, which we weren’t allowed to leave for six days, and then we suffered. Twice a day a nurse arrived to take our vitals and deliver us a sampling of bright capsules in pleated paper cups. The nurse would watch as we took our pills – they were purple and kidney-shaped one year, I remember – then ask us to lift our tongues to prove we’d swallowed them. One year a nurse who came to check my temperature, which was 104, stroked my forehead and said, “You remind me of my son. I wish you wouldn’t do these kinds of things to yourself, it’s not really worth it.” Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was the fever talking, some dream of the way I hoped to be treated by a mother. In any event, I did this each year for the sum of five hundred dollars, a fortune at the time.
What I was hoping to do with my week at the motel was to figure out what I should do with my life. I was set to graduate in two months, and was trying to decide whether to go to law school, or whether to throw away my future, as my father would have phrased it, to roam for a few years, to see if I might have some sort of higher calling. It was the classic battle between responsibility and curiosity, between security and the path less traveled, pugilists that had been battling in my mind for the last year. As far as my parents and teachers knew, my plan was to attend law school at the same university from which I was about to graduate, which would put me on exactly the same path my father had trod thirty years prior. Like him I would clerk for two judges during two consecutive summers, and like him I would work for the law review. Then I’d take a job at his firm in Philadelphia, first as an apprentice in white-collar criminal defense, then a junior partner, and finally partner, making close to a million dollars a year defending CEOs and gangsters. But within the last year, I had begun to consider the possibility that I might walk away from it all. At the tail end of our house’s parties, when we were all sitting around, stunned by alcohol, revealing what we thought were our innermost secrets, I spoke of roaming the country by rail, all my belongings tied up in a rag at the end of a stick, living like a monk, renouncing my inheritance like St. Francis. I would write a book, I thought, about the people I encountered, their habits and voices so keenly observed it would be the next great work of sociological observation, like Studs Turkel’s Working but for people who were out of work; Unemployed was the title I had planned. Mornings, when I woke from these drunken ramblings, I saw clearly that this was all a ruse, a foolish dream that would never materialize. But then again, the vision of a different life kept visiting me, dogged in its persistence, the closest thing to a spiritual calling I had ever experienced. My mother, who had briefly been a nun before marrying my father, was always talking about saints floating down from on high to guide people on their knees from grief or uncertainty. Visitations, she called them. I didn’t believe any of this, not really, but sometimes as I lay in bed, clutching Weezy, something like a vision would appear in my mind, a vision of myself walking through a field with a mountain range in the distance, and I could never say where it came from.
As I passed the Sunshine Motel it occurred to me that I was heading toward Jude and that, once reunited with him, I might never leave him – I might never come back to this town, even to graduate. As I regarded the motel’s sign – a bright square depicting a group of conifer trees with a yellow sun rising above them, a blue river unfurling between them – I felt as if I had crossed some sort of Rubicon. I was no longer a member of the system I’d been born into, was no longer bound by its rules. I was free.

I only wound up on the side of the road once, waiting for the engine to cool, and I used my time well, studying the map of the US my father kept in the glove compartment. The map was old, probably older than I was, and its ink was faded at the creases – entire cities had disappeared in the folds. A few hours later, when the city finally came into view, I saw it was much bigger than I had imagined, with highways looping and crossing every which way. I panicked but soon found there were signs directing traffic to the French Quarter – of course there were. If you drove slowly, which I couldn’t help but do, it wasn’t hard to get there.
I found my way to the right neighborhood and parked where I could, locked the car with a bit of trepidation. I always felt bad whenever I left my car on the street, like I was abandoning a wounded animal to defend itself. The car was so shitty, it almost seemed to invite abuse – someone would smash its windows, I thought, just because it was so ugly. The rusted paint, the bald tires, the not one but two missing hubcaps, the back fender that had partially separated from the body of the car. And then there was the inside – if you bothered to look through the window, you’d see that the vinyl seats were split in several places, with yellow foam springing out. A car like that was a bad omen, something people didn’t want on their street. Move along, you thought to yourself, when you saw a mess like that. Move along, now.
Then I was lost for a while on the streets of New Orleans. Bourbon Street was long, cross-hatched by a dozen or so side-streets, and I realized only then that a restaurant just off Bourbon, as Jude had described it, could be blocks down any one of them. I formed a system where I started at the east end of Bourbon, and walked two blocks south down one of its cross streets, then north for a few blocks up the next, and so on. People were wandering in groups, talking and laughing, and it occurred to me a few times to ask someone for help but I was, back then, governed by ideas of the way things ought to be done – ideas that had been formed by Hollywood movies in which men, through some combination of luck and virtue, made their own way in the world. In this particular scene, as I saw it, I would be walking down a street, casually, my hands stuffed in the pockets of my jeans, my backpack slung over one shoulder, and then would come a shining moment when I jerked my head back to swing the hair out of my eyes, and in looking up at just the right angle, I’d see the restaurant sign. I believed that finding Jude, without having known where I was going, was a test I could pass, that it would affirm my role in our brotherhood.
I became aware that it was getting later, well past the time when people would be eating dinner, and I began to wonder when restaurants closed for the night. Eventually, when I passed a phone booth, I had the idea to consult its directory – which compromised my sensibilities a bit but then again, it was getting late. I flipped through the restaurant section and confirmed within seconds that the crawfish restaurant Jude had mentioned, Chaplin’s, wasn’t in the directory. It probably didn’t even exist. Jude was fucking with me, I thought. He had probably sent me a letter just to be able to say he sent it, to slough off whatever guilt he might have been feeling at the moment. He’d probably been coming down from a high, feeling wistful, and I’d crossed his mind. But that was weeks ago. It was possible he wasn’t even living in New Orleans anymore. Any time he got low, any time he sensed the fun was over, he moved on.
A reel ran through my head of all the times my father had warned me about Jude. My father was a stern and unlikeable man, and it had always been painful for me to admit when he was right. But the truth was that Jude was a drug addict, and according to my father drug addicts said and did all kinds of things when they were desperate. They swore they were clean and wanted to see you, though what they really wanted was your money. They always needed money just this one last time, for groceries, for bus fare home, for bail, and they would lure you and trap you with their need. They claimed to love you, but they were incapable of loving anyone, because they were only out for themselves. If I was smart, my father told me, I’d stay away from Jude. I wouldn’t visit him, and if he ever came to visit me, I would shut the door in his face, because he wouldn’t be there to see me, he’d be there to rob me blind. I don’t know how many times my father had told me this, standing in the stereotypical posture of a man scolding a dog, one hand rooted at the hip, the other hand with a finger extended, pointing at me. It was the Nicene Creed of his individual church, a long prayer I’d memorized without even trying, simply by having sat in a room listening to it so often. He kept preaching it, I suppose, because he knew Jude was my weakness. I thought of what my father would say now: What did I tell you? How many times do I have to tell you?
I slouched out of the phone booth and realized I couldn’t quite figure out where I was in relation to my car – and worse, I hadn’t taken note of the street I’d parked on. I started walking halfheartedly in the direction I thought I’d come from. Overhead, people leaned from wrought-iron balconies, and their voices and laughter drifted over me. I’d been raised not only by a white-collar criminal defense attorney who suspected wrongdoing everywhere, but also a mother who was convinced that the power of collective prayer was the only thing offsetting the triumph of evil in the world – prayer and vigilance against sin. To my mother’s mind, sin was everywhere in our house, lurking beneath the beds, curled up in the cupboards and closets, waiting to pounce. And so everything in our house was ritually rummaged through, turned inside out and scoured. It occurred to me that New Orleans was the place where everything, every mote and scrap and crumb, had floated off to after it had been evicted from our household. Everything bright and colorful, everything fecund, everything fertile. All of the life that had been swept up and taken by the wind had settled here. A familiar feeling came over me, in fact the feeling that had defined my entire childhood: that all the fun in life was for other people.
I was in a dark mood, angry for being so stupid, driving all this way to find Jude, whose invitation – maybe you might want to come down for Mardi Gras – was so vague it obviously wasn’t even real, Jude whose most salient characteristic was that he didn’t want to be found, at least not by us, not his family. I started wondering if I could find the car and then stay awake long enough to make it back to Tennessee, and if I showed up at the motel for the flu study at dawn, bedraggled, repentant, whether they’d let me in. I could still make five hundred dollars. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to crawl into that queen bed with its floral coverlet made from the same stiff material as an oven mitt. I wanted to sleep there, fitfully, for a whole week, and when my fever finally broke I would be burnished, clear-eyed, a man devoted to his own making.
It wasn’t long after this moment, which I considered to be an epiphany, that some instinct compelled me to look to my right, down a dark alley, and just as I’d imagined, I saw a neon sign depicting a top hat and a cane, with the name Chaplin’s arched over them. I renounced everything I had just concluded about Jude and myself, and in fact reversed it; I saw now that I was only steps away from Jude, who was a beautiful soul, brave in his wanderings, willing to take his chances so as to live life fully, really live it, without the security of a profession, wandering around in search of the people and stories and music that moved him, a loner, an artist, the greatest person I had ever known. If there was a single person I could launch into space as a representative of our species, I thought, it would be Jude, handsome and powerful, tragic, but with a quiet dignity, my brother. I wanted to be just like him. I wanted to leave my former life behind, to toil in the kitchen beside Jude, to smell and hear and taste and touch everything he did.

I couldn’t figure out where I was, exactly, in terms of the aesthetics of Chaplin’s. It looked a little like a movie whose set had been designed by a handful of cinematographers fighting one another for supremacy. One of them wanted Chaplin’s to look like a medieval fortress, with a heavy wooden door with a rounded top that pulled open only with an uncomfortable amount of effort. Another director was after something like Arnold’s from Happy Days, with woodpaneled walls and a jukebox in the corner, rimmed in red neon. But because of a third director, the jukebox was playing Hank Williams and there was a bison head hanging on the wall, a man sitting alone at a table wearing a cowboy hat. And finally, in a far corner, apparently styled by some pornographer, a waitress was bent over a table, wiping it down, her white t-shirt cinched in a knot at her back, her cutoff jeans so short half her ass was hanging out. A red lace thong rode up above her shorts. I looked away. I was under the impression then that seeing a person’s underwear was an accidental breach of privacy we should all politely turn away from. That’s how young and stupid I was – I didn’t realize people did these things on purpose.
I chose a stool at the middle of the bar so that I could see through the small window behind it into the kitchen, where men were rushing around. I had a view of a giant stove topped with several pots of boiling water, tended to by a skinny man wearing a white t-shirt and white jeans and a long white apron. I watched him work, which gave me a bad feeling. I had never had a job like that and already knew I probably never would.
The bartender, who had her back to me and was wiping down the counter below the taps, asked me, without turning around, what I wanted to drink. I didn’t know what to say. “Is there like, a menu?” I asked. That’s when she turned around. “What you see is what you get,” she said. And jerked her head to indicate the taps and bottles lined behind them. She was an older woman who wore her long, silver hair in braids. She was wearing a white t-shirt with a suede vest over it, and generally gave off the impression of someone who ran a kitchen feeding cowboys. I could tell she was a person who didn’t tolerate bullshit, which was the type of person who scared me the most. All I had going for me was bullshit.
“Can I think about it?” I asked.
“Take your time,” she said. She turned away and started mixing a drink. I considered what to order as if on some kind of game show with a ticking clock – I had to come up with the right answer or I was going to be sent home. But I didn’t know much about drinking. My father drank a single Miller Lite on Friday evenings and had occasionally let me taste it, and in college, if I bought a drink, I drank that. But I couldn’t order a Miller Lite here because if Jude was in the kitchen, and happened to look out through the window and see me drinking what our father always drank, he would be disappointed. It would be the wrong note to strike.
The bartender turned and set a drink in front of me. “While you decide,” she said. The drink was a tumbler of pink bubbles with two cherries floating at the top, a Shirley Temple. I realized this was some sort of joke, a joke having to do with what I was wearing – jeans and a pink dress shirt, a blue blazer with brass buttons, loafers – and also having to do with my haircut, neatly shorn in back but grown out into a sort of blond wing that fell over my left eye. The drink was a joke, but the thing was, I loved Shirley Temples. I took a sip and set it down, then took another. I cupped it between my hands and stared into it. I wanted to eat the cherry but had a rule about saving it for the end, and another rule about not drinking anything too quickly. But then again I wanted to eat the cherry. I was lost in this sort of rapture, working out the problem of the Shirley Temple and how I was going to approach it, when the wrestler showed up and sat down next to me.
I still remember that first moment when, even before I saw him, I sensed the wrestler. It was one of those moments that reminds you that you’re an animal, a creature with basic instincts burrowed down beneath the scaffolding of your intellect and personality – burrowed but at the ready to run or pounce. When the wrestler approached from behind and reached to pull out the stool next to mine, I felt as if a cloud had passed over the sun, like some force of nature had swept in and changed the very climate of the room. At first it was just his arm, encased in a black leather sleeve, fringed. It didn’t quite brush against me, but still I could feel its power. It wasn’t a normal arm but rather, in length and circumference, closer to a leg, and something scrambled in my brain, trying to make sense of it, working out the calculus of what-sized body this arm might be attached to. When, still without quite looking at him, I perceived the basic outline of the rest of his frame, a chill went through me. Though he was only taking his seat, his girth was such that when he set his arms on the bar it felt like an act of aggression, an annexation of neutral territory.
“If you would be so good as to set me up with one of your finest hurricanes,” he said to the bartender. His voice was hoarse but his tone was light, a bit mocking, as if he were speaking in italics. The way he spoke made it clear that he was aware of a certain irony, that a giant ordering a hurricane in a crawfish restaurant in the manner of an Englishman speaking to a butler had an element of the absurd about it.
The bartender turned to face a machine behind her that was swirling with orange liquid. She pulled a lever and the drink dropped in plunks into a giant plastic cup. When she set it in front of the wrestler he wriggled his fingers. “A perfect specimen,” he said. Still with the voice. He took a sip, then started drumming his fingers on the bar. He regarded the TV for a moment, a ball game between the Celtics and Lakers, playing out on a small set next to the hurricane machine. He plucked a peanut out of a little bowl in front of us and crushed it between his teeth. Then, still staring at the TV, he said, “Boston vs. LA.” This was his regular voice. His speech was plodding, and he had an accent I couldn’t place. In fact I wasn’t sure if it was an accent at all, or if his tongue was just too big for his mouth and he had trouble forming words. Maybe he was Austrian.
A moment later he said, “How’s it going, Shirley?”
It took a beat before I realized he was talking to me. “Okay,” I said. “How’s it, how’s it going with you?” I turned my head toward him and got a better look. His hair was bleached and appeared to be painstakingly crimped, falling past his shoulders in petrified waves. He had a broad, pink face and a nose that looked like it had been smashed flat one too many times. His eyes were pale blue and bloodshot. He looked like a man wearing a costume, one of those rubber heads you could pull on over your real head.
“It takes a real man,” he said, “to sit confidently in front of a Shirley Temple.”
“I’ve been training for years,” I said, and adjusted my glasses. It was a gesture I had worked up as part of a repertoire of self-mockery, a survival mechanism I understood myself to be in need of. I was short and wore tortoise-shell glasses and had a large, slanted nose, and the combination of these things – being relatively small and weak and set askew – tended to make a certain type of man want to punch me. My only shot in life was to make money, or to make people laugh. I knew this already.
“Give this kid a hurricane,” said the wrestler. “On me.”
“Thanks, man,” I said.
“Don’t get too full of yourself,” said the bartender, when she set the drink in front of me. “The Vampire himself just bought you a drink.”
“Oh,” I said. It dawned on me that I didn’t like sitting in bars. Everything had to be decoded. “Is that right,” I said to the wrestler, “you’re in, you’re in the vampire business?”
“I was,” he said.
“I always wondered how that worked,” I said. “The physics of it.”
“The physics of it,” he said, and laughed. “The physics of it I don’t think you’d understand.” He moved his arms and his jacket groaned.
“I just mean, like, how you can shrivel up and pack yourself into a bat.”
“He was a wrestler,” the bartender informed me. “That was his nom de plume, The Vampire.”
“It was my character,” he said.
“Remember?” she asked. “WWF?”
“He wouldn’t remember,” said the wrestler, softly. A shyness had come over him.
I opened my mouth to say something, I think I remember, but faltered – the wrestler wasn’t someone to bullshit, the bartender even less so.
“Remember Randy Savage?” he asked.
I nodded, though I think it was clear I didn’t. My face was blank.
“You mean to tell me,” the wrestler said, “you never heard of The Macho Man?”
“I have, I have,” I said. Though I couldn’t picture him. The only wrestler I could call to mind was Hulk Hogan, who had somehow transcended the cultural barriers of wrestling. I could picture his insanely tan and muscled body, his wide shoulders funneling to a slim waist, those yellow satin briefs, the bleached hair hanging limp from above his ears, his long blond mustache, and most of all his expression – the bulging eyes that conveyed a combination of anger and surprise. I could see all of this clearly, but other wrestlers were a blur to me.
“You’re sitting next to someone who was personally in the ring with The Macho Man,” the bartender said.
“I’m from Delaware,” I said. My logic was that most people didn’t know anything about Delaware – it was small and almost never in the news. So if people scanned their brains for something, anything about Delaware, they would come up empty, and by some sort of transitive property they would conclude that, just as they knew nothing of Delaware, people in Delaware knew nothing outside their own borders. At college in Tennessee, I had explained away my lack of knowledge on many subjects this way, and never had any trouble.
But it turned out the wrestler wasn’t so easy to fool. “They don’t have television in Delaware?”
“They do,” I said. “But there’s just one and we all have to share it.”
He let out a single note resembling a laugh. “This kid,” he said.
Then none of us knew what to say. I had a feeling that I was representing the youth of today, and that my lack of knowledge about wrestling confirmed some dark suspicion in the wrestler’s mind – he was washed up and not only that, faded from memory. The air was filled with disappointment.
I sipped my drink. My eyes kept going between the TV and the little window behind the bar. There was a great clanging from the kitchen. I could see only one slice of it, the giant pot of boiling water and the man standing in front of it. I watched as over and over again the man dumped a metal basket full of crawfish into the pot, then dug them out. This seemed to be his entire job. When he dumped in a basket of fish, steam rose up and overtook his whole head. I had the idea that he could make money off of rich white women by telling them a crawfish facial was beneficial for their skin – he could make them do his job for him, and charge money. He could make millions and not have to stand over a boiling pot for the rest of his life. I was always trying to think of ways people could make millions of dollars and stop doing whatever it was they were doing. I had scenes like this built up for all kinds of complete strangers, ways they could escape the lives they were trapped in, though I couldn’t imagine the same thing for myself with any kind of convincing detail. In my vision of the future, the future I might live if I walked away from law school, I was just lumbering down the side of a road, with nothing particular in sight.
The ballgame cut to commercial, and the wrestler asked me who I was rooting for.
“I don’t really know,” I said. “I guess if I’m being honest, I’d like it if they both lost.”
He laughed again. “Jesus,” he said. “For a kid your size, you’re kind of a ballbuster.” He held out his hand and I shook it. He could have crushed my fingers, but he was careful not to.
“What’s your name?” he asked, and I told him. I never liked telling anyone my name, which was so old fashioned it suggested I was a person whose only hope was tradition, the kind that protected the rich and excluded everyone else, which happened to be true.
“Bernard?” he asked. “That’s a tough draw.”
I shrugged.
“Do you go by a nickname?”
“Bernie, I guess?” I said.
“That kind of makes it worse,” he said.
“I know.”
“Your parents stick you with that for, like, family reasons?”
“Sort of,” I said. “In a way. I’m named after Saint Bernard.” It was hard to explain to an outsider how Saint Bernard was a family member. But Bernard was my mother’s favorite saint, a Benedictine with a balls-to-the-wall quality about him – he was a big fan of the Crusades. Even though he lived in the 12th century, he was like family to my mother. The saints were more alive to her than most people she could see and touch.
“You’re named after a Saint Bernard?” said the wrestler.
“Not the dog,” I clarified.
“Hey, Sally,” he said to the bartender. “Can we hook this kid up with a little,” he gestured at his throat. “A little barrel of whiskey?”
They both started laughing, and couldn’t stop. As soon as they collected themselves, they’d take one look at me and start laughing again.
“Sorry,” said the wrestler, wiping tears from his eyes. “It’s just a good image.”
“Understood,” I said.
“If you were a different type of person, it wouldn’t be so funny.”
“I know,” I said.
“So, what do you do back there in Delaware?” He was trying to be nice because he felt bad for laughing at me, but he couldn’t quite collect himself. “I mean, when you’re not rescuing people stranded by an avalanche.”
“I don’t live there anymore,” I said. “Not really. I’m in college.”
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s the right move for someone like you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“What are you studying?”
“Pre-law,” I said. “I think that’s, I think that’s the direction I’d like to go in.”
“You already look like a lawyer.”
“I was born wearing this blazer,” I said. “I didn’t really have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” he said, suddenly serious. “You think I grew up wanting to be a wrestler? Or a bodyguard, which is what I do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, maybe?” He was so huge nothing else made sense. I tried to picture him as a museum docent. When someone got too close to a sculpture he’d split his blazer like The Hulk, rage around, accidentally bump paintings off the walls.
“I was in the army,” he said. “But to tell you the truth, I’m a pacifist.”
“It’s true,” said the bartender. She was always listening, I was starting to figure out, even if she didn’t seem to be, even as she tended to the other customers who came and went, or set up a tray for the waitress with the thong. “I’d trust him with a baby,” she added. I tried to imagine that, too, but it didn’t go anywhere good. I imagined him picking up a bundle in a blanket and popping it like bubble wrap.
“The army,” he said, “everything’s defined for you. There’s no art to it. You’re just part of a machine.”
I nodded as if I knew
“They tell you to shoot something and you shoot it. There’s no discretion. There’s no humanity.”
“Makes sense,” I said.
“That’s why I prefer martial arts. Any kind of martial art, even wrestling, it’s more about mind than body. It’s about how nimble your mind is,” he mused. “In my opinion, everyone should practice wrestling. Because it trains you in a certain way of thinking.” His voice was so strained, and he spoke with such effort, it was like someone was strangling him as he talked. I wondered if his larynx had been crushed in the ring, or his brain damaged, or both. “You have to know how to turn a situation around to your favor. You’re moving, yes, but you’re always thinking.” He tapped his temple. “You have to think on your feet.”
“Working behind a bar,” said the bartender, “does the same thing.”
“That’s right,” the wrestler said. “Because you’re in the real world here. The real world is an arena, a battlefield, but you know how to handle it.”
“But the ring,” I said, venturing too far, I supposed, “the wrestling ring isn’t exactly, I mean the whole point is, it’s cordoned off from the real world, it’s like, elevated on a stage and glorified and surrounded with ropes, it’s like an arranged conflict.” I was trying to avoid saying wrestling was fake, even though that was basically what I was saying. I was excited, suddenly.
“Have you ever taken a vertical suplex?” the wrestler asked. “Have you ever personally had a man slingshot you over his head onto your back?”
“Well, no,” I said.
“Do you think you could come within an inch of snapping your neck, and afterwards say it was an arranged conflict?” He had a look in his eye I’d only seen once before, when my mother had slapped Jude for saying Jesus wasn’t the son of God, but a regular man, a cult leader.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “Exactly.”
“It’s choreographed, surely,” he said. “But every man in that ring, you must believe me, every man in that ring knows he could walk in on his own feet and ten minutes later be carried out on a stretcher.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“There’s an amount of finesse involved.”
I sort of winced.
“Do you know what you need?” he asked.
“I don’t, I don’t think I do.”
“I’m very serious, I think this might help you in your legal endeavors.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “what?”
“What you need is a little repertoire.” I wondered what kind of repertoire the wrestler had in mind, and a second later he showed me – he stood up and put me in a headlock. My neck fit underneath his armpit as if it had been born and bred only for that purpose. My face was squashed against him. I could smell the leather of his jacket and underneath that, his cologne, which smelled like a forest fire. Then he shifted me so that his elbow was tucked under my chin and he yanked up on it. “What is your move, kid?” he said. I thought he was going to break my neck.
“I don’t know,” I choked out. “Bribery?” I crouched down, my legs sort of sliding out underneath me – I suppose I was trying to shrivel down until he couldn’t keep hold of me anymore.
“Suppose you can’t reason with your opponent?” he said. “Suppose they don’t want anything you have to offer. What are you going to do then?”
“Take it easy on him,” said the bartender. My face was probably red.
“What is your move?” he said.
“I don’t know!” I cried. I started imagining the newspaper article describing my death. Future Lawyer Killed in NOLA Bar Fight. Then I imagined the wrestler being cleared of charges due to his unwieldy girth and stupidity, neither of which were really his fault. I could hear him testifying on the stand. “I didn’t mean it! I was just trying to help him! He was so puny!”
“Punch me in the groin,” he said. “It’s right there, just go after it.” I swung my arm and hit him somewhere in the hip girdle. It was like punching an encyclopedia.
“Wrap your other arm around my head,” he said. “Grab whatever, go for the eyes, the face, the hair, don’t be afraid to pull a man’s hair.”
My left arm started flailing up toward his head, but didn’t land anywhere. What had been theoretical only a moment ago, an event laid out in a column in a newspaper, was suddenly real – I was going to die like this. A desperation came over me and I lost all concern for my dignity. I went crazy. I made a claw of my hand and started scraping at his jacket. With my other arm I was slapping at his groin. He had me turned in such a way that I could see that everyone in the restaurant was looking at us, but I observed this without words; my brain was taking in information only as it related to my survival, like a dog. My vision was clouded with blue spots and my hearing was off. All of this was unfolding in muffled darkness, as if underwater.
“Good,” the wrestler said, “you’re doing well now.” I didn’t so much hear this as translate the vibrations through my body. “Now, while I’m distracted, kick out my leg.”
I swung a leg wildly, and fell over, and the wrestler fell on top of me, releasing my neck. My hearing came back. Suddenly I heard all the commotion, people yelling Whoa, whoa, whoa, man, back off, let him go, you’re going to kill him. I sat up. The wrestler sat next to me and draped his arm over me in what he probably intended as a friendly gesture, though his arm was so heavy it felt oppressive. “You did okay, kid,” he said. I couldn’t answer him because I was panting and disoriented. “You got out of it, and that’s all you needed to do.”
In the commotion, with the wild cries coming from the people at the tables, the kitchen staff had come spilling out into the dining room, wanting to see a fight. I was half listening to the wrestler, half staring at one of the cooks, who hung back a few feet from the rest. He was tall and lanky, dressed in white jeans and a white t-shirt, a white apron tied across his waist, smeared with orange stains. His face had the angular severity of a Puritanical preacher, but his black hair, which was overgrown, softened him, along with his expression. There was – how else can I say this? – a twinkle in his eye, and half of his mouth was turned up in a smirk, as if he’d just won a bet. Our eyes met, and we nodded at each other. It was Jude.

It occurs to me that before I go any further with this story, the story of the last time I saw my brother, I should try to explain who he was. I say this knowing I won’t get it right. I’ve been trying my whole life and have never gotten near it.
In my younger years, I spent a lot of time talking about Jude. First because I thought having that kind of brother – a drifter, an addict – might make me more interesting, might signal to my fraternity brothers and the girls I tried to date that I was different, that I might have something of Jude’s nature in me, too, if only better concealed. And later, as I made my way through law school and eventually my firm, as I got to know people, people who inevitably asked where I came from and what my family life was like as a child, I revealed Jude when I wanted to suggest a certain depth to my personality, an emotional complexity that made me more sensitive or thoughtful than the average practitioner of the law. I had a brother, I found myself saying. And that shift into the past tense gave me a strange power I liked to luxuriate in. It unsettled whoever I was speaking to. They paused, settled back in their seats, gave up the reins of the conversation. They wanted to listen, to hear more. They wanted to know what happened.
I had a brother.
When I was younger I would fashion Jude in terms of whatever cultural icons came nearest to his brand of cool indifference – he was James Dean, basically, one of those kids who set himself against whatever was expected of him, and whose defiance looked so good it converted all but the most priggish hearts to its cause. Picture a kid smoking a cigarette while leaning against a brick wall by the dumpsters behind the high school cafeteria. Picture this kid out in the cold wearing nothing but a t-shirt and jeans. And when a teacher opens the door and leans out to tell him to put out his cigarette and come back inside, picture this kid taking one last, long drag, all the while staring down the teacher, a middle-aged and pudgy calculus teacher in a short sleeve button-down and brown slacks. Picture Jude dropping his cigarette on the ground and crushing it under his Chuck Taylors. Slowly. Because in the end he would usually do what he was told – but not before he made you wait.
Now imagine me, Bernard Weatherbee, coming along four years later, the glasses-wearing little brother at the top of his class, polo shirts and khakis, cable knit sweaters, my papers crisp, my penmanship orderly, my locker a shining example of spotless organization. President of the Student Council, Debate Team captain, aspiring valedictorian. Weatherbee, my teachers would say, you aren’t by any chance related to Jude, are you? And I’d tell them he was my brother. There’d be a moment of flustered confusion. That’s funny, they’d say, feeling some sort of obligation to explain to me what I already knew. It’s just that, well, you’re so different. You don’t look like brothers.
What the teachers didn’t know was that they were putting into words the most interesting thing about my family, which was that Jude wasn’t really my brother, wasn’t my parents’ child. My mother had been in her novitiate year at a Benedictine convent when she’d received a call that her derelict little sister had gone missing – had given birth to a boy and then fled the hospital, but not before leaving a note identifying my mother as the baby’s chosen caretaker. And so my mother, her hair cropped short to her head, a gold band on her finger – I was married to Jesus, she always said – had a choice to make. Whether to remain in the convent, far removed from the troubles of the world, engaged in the life of prayer and single-minded devotion she had felt since childhood was her destiny, or whether to do the work that needed to be done in the world. “I wish to stay,” she had told her abbess, after a night’s reflection, but the abbess had come to the opposite conclusion. “You must go. You must go out into the world and do what you are called to do.”
In those days, and perhaps still for all I know, the Catholic church made efforts to introduce its adult parishioners to eligible mates, and so when my mother took a job teaching kindergarten at the local Catholic school, leaving Jude with the retired nuns during the school day, it wasn’t long before her cause was taken up by the ladies of her church. Time and again she was strategically placed in the proximity of my father, who was then paying his dues at his law firm in Philadelphia and whose only social foray was to Sunday morning Mass, and the donut fellowship afterwards. Back then it was a lot to ask of a man to take an interest in a single mother, particularly a mother raising a son who wasn’t her own, but then again my mother was pure, and had a pleasant face and a spirited but ultimately deferential nature – she was Maria from The Sound of Music, basically – not to mention she was the only woman my father had the time to get to know – by noon on Sundays he was usually back at the office. And so it worked. Within a year they had decided to marry, and a few years later they had me and moved to the suburbs. The church ladies congratulated themselves on making something whole of the broken parts in front of them.
But you could also say it didn’t work, not really. Jude was different from the rest of the family, so dramatically that I think we would have guessed his story even if we’d never been told. My parents and I were unremarkable in every way, to the point it was hard to describe us: we were of average height and weight, with brown eyes and neatly kept, light brown hair; our faces were plain; we dressed ourselves in the type of clothes found in catalogs, beige slacks and polo shirts, loafers – in fact my father could have stood in for a shirt model, in the sense that he was always wearing a blue button-down and standing strangely erect, and often had his face angled away from view. By comparison, Jude was striking, all of his features exaggerated. He was exceptionally tall for his age, and slender. His eyes were a startling blue, his hair black and wispy and grown longer than, in my father’s view, it should have been allowed to grow. In our annual Christmas photos, Jude looked increasingly unlike the rest of us. Even his expression was different. My father and mother and I were always smiling in these pictures, looking straight at the camera, dutifully following the directions we’d been given, whereas Jude’s expression was one of tried patience, and his gaze was always slightly off, seemingly directed at the door he planned to escape through.
It was probably more difficult to be Jude, the black sheep, but it was hard for us, too. From a young age, Jude expressed a restless dissatisfaction with almost everything we did and surrounded ourselves with, which left us with a wounded feeling: What was wrong with us, why weren’t we good enough? I was content with whatever was put in front of me, and couldn’t understand why Jude wasn’t. I wore the clothes my mother purchased in advance of each school year, was content to watch the shows she allowed us to watch on television, The Golden Girls, Alf, Diff’rent Strokes. I liked whatever music I happened to hear in the grocery store – The Doobie Brothers, Huey Lewis and the News, Roy Orbison, Linda Ronstadt – and I even liked the records my mother sometimes played, religious orchestral and choir music and, at Christmas, The Nutcracker Suite. But Jude hated all of that, hated it so much that he mowed lawns and shoveled driveways and delivered newspapers to make the money he needed to surround himself with other things. He had a long list of things he wanted: comic books, issues of MAD magazine, a radio for his room, then a record player, then a Walkman and an endless series of tapes to play on it; a guitar; a jean jacket and buttons to pin on it, band t-shirts, Chuck Taylors, a leather jacket; a black trench coat. He was always asking to watch things on television we weren’t allowed to, and whenever we had a free evening, when our mother was off volunteering at one of the many Catholic organizations she pledged her life to, he’d sit cross-legged in front of the TV, consuming everything he was forbidden – The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum P.I., Miami Vice, and yes, wrestling, he loved wrestling – as if a patient receiving a transfusion. Towards the end of his time living with us, he wanted cigarettes and beer and hard liquor and eventually pot, and put all of his money toward that. Almost all of these pursuits took Jude away from us, in the sense that he spent much of his free time making the money to buy them, and the rest of it shut away in his room, enjoying them. My father was particularly vexed by all of this, wanting to punish Jude, to confiscate his belongings, and he sometimes swept into Jude’s room and piled up his books and magazines and music. When Jude protested, asked what he’d done wrong, my father could never quite explain. “You spend too much time alone,” was what he settled on. But the time Jude spent with us as his punishment, playing Parcheesi and Sorry!, listening to my mother read from books – she read us every book C. S. Lewis ever wrote – had a pall cast over it, some kind of radiation ticking off Jude you could almost see, until finally the awkwardness of it became too much, and he was allowed to retreat again. We let him go. We left him to his things.
Then he left us for real, packing a bag and striking out on his own the day he turned eighteen. He neither told us where he was going, nor contacted us when he got there. Weeks went by, months, before he finally sent word that he was working in a fancy restaurant in Dallas. By this time, my parents were so exasperated with him they were able to tell themselves that it might be for the best. He would face challenges out in the world that would diminish him, then teach him; God would show him the right path and eventually lead him home. But I couldn’t stand the thought of Jude alone in the world, couldn’t stand that he had left us. I spent hours in his room, writing him earnest letters that detailed every boring endeavor of my eighth-grade life. I read his books and played his records, so I could write to him about those, too. I lay on his bed with Weezy and thought of him, as if conducting some kind of séance, convinced that if I sat and closed my eyes and thought about him enough, he would sense it, and return like a homing pigeon. I didn’t know yet that we were not home, to him, that he would never come home.
Whenever I told someone about Jude I always landed on the same image – an image of his feet, in the red wool socks our mother used to make for us, sticking out from behind the Christmas tree. For several years in a row, perhaps when he was between the ages of seven and twelve, as soon as the tree was put up in the living room, Jude’s favorite thing to do was to hide himself behind it with a book, reading in its light. All through the stretch from Thanksgiving through the new year, you could barely tell he was in the house. All you could see were those red socks, just visible under the brim of the tree. I remember wanting to join him – to be allowed to share in his space, to read what he was reading – but I also knew that he wanted to be alone, and hardly dared. “That’s why I never put up a tree,” I told people later – partners who had confided something in me and wanted a similar disclosure in return, or girls I was hoping to seduce. “It’s too painful.”
These were the kinds of stories I told when I talked about Jude, because they worked in a kind of shorthand, in absolutes: we loved him, he didn’t love us. But there was more to him than that, context I often left out, perhaps because it was easier or perhaps because I didn’t like to think about it. The truth was, Jude wasn’t always so aloof – in fact when he was in the mood, he was warmer and more loving than the rest of us. He loved Weezy, for example, in a devoted way that I was never able to replicate with any of the animals I was given – he carried her everywhere, couldn’t sleep without her. And when the mood struck, he could be interested in people. On a good day, when that calculus teacher called Jude away from his cigarette to come back inside, Jude would be more likely to strike up a conversation with him than not: Calculus, right? What hooked you on math? I tended to remember Jude as withdrawn, but there were also times when he brought me into his room to show me something in a book, or play a record for me. There were times, I would have to admit, that Jude not only allowed me to join him behind that Christmas tree but asked me to, waved me over. One night he read me three comic books in a row, and even offered me Weezy so I could rest my head on her, and I lay there wondering how long it would last, how long my older brother, who I loved and longed to be with, would tolerate me. I remember the sound of his voice, which was still boyish but had just begun to deepen, the faint smell of pine needles, the glow of the yellow Christmas tree lights against the olive-green shag carpet. He didn’t do it often, but when he turned his attention on you, there was nothing else like it.
I suppose what I want to know now is whether it was our family who failed Jude, or the other way around. Of course it was both, but some part of me wants to assign blame, to go back to the beginning and see who started it. And if on any given day one of us practiced the indifference characteristic of long-term rivals, if on any given day one of us turned the other away, not knowing it was the last chance we would have to reconcile, what I want to know is, can we be blamed? Must we spend the rest of our days thinking about those final hours, what we might have done differently? Can we be forgiven?

I’d like to believe that every person, at least once in his life, has the experience of the world seeming to align itself just for him. As if on a lonely night, having travelled a dark forest for many miles, this person comes around a bend and sees a clearing, a cottage lit up and glowing, and someone is holding a door open, beckoning him into a brightly-lit room, out from which drifts laughter, and when he crosses the threshold every head turns to greet him, and great cries of welcome and affection rise up at the sight of him. I think Jude, because he was so good-looking, because there was some kind of magic on him, had this experience quite a few times in his life, but for me it was just the once, this night in New Orleans with Jude. I sometimes think this will be the night I think about at the end, when death is near and I want to recall whatever lightness I can. In many ways it was, before it took a strange turn, the best night of my life.
What I remember of the evening I remember in fragments, short scenes that play out in my mind. I couldn’t say exactly which order they came in, but I can arrange them well enough to hold together. First was the moment right after I saw Jude, while the commotion of the wrestler nearly strangling me was still in the air. I stood up and made my way to Jude, who embraced me, and not only that, held me close for longer than I would have expected, slapping me heartily on the back. I could sense even without looking that everyone was watching us and trying to figure out how we knew each other, what kind of reunion they were witnessing. I remember the overwhelming smell of boiled crawfish on Jude’s neck, the damp feel – it was as if working in the kitchen had nearly boiled him and his skin was letting off steam. I remember bits of dialogue. “Long time, long time,” he said, and I said, “I know, I know.” “I missed you, man,” he said, and all I could say was, “Me too, man.” I could only return what he said to me. I was overwhelmed.
I guess you could say Jude looked the same as he did at eighteen, though there was a slight difference, like he’d been sharpened somehow. He was still young, only twenty-six, but he had weathered a bit. There was nothing soft left on him. You could tell that he’d seen things, he’d lived.
I remember the bartender asking Jude, “You know this kid?” And the wrestler coming over, trying to put the pieces together. ”This kid is your little brother? Holy shit, you never told me you had a brother.” This line I remember particularly: “If I knew he was your baby brother I wouldn’t have strangled him!”
“I invited him down for Mardi Gras but he’s late,” Jude said. His arm was flung around my neck. “He probably had a bunch of important college stuff to do.”
I protested as if injured. “I just got your letter like this morning! I literally got in the car within an hour of getting it!” My voice was probably high, my face red.
“It’s alright, it’s alright, you have better things going on.” He rubbed his palm roughly over the top of my head, back and forth. This is when I first noticed the tattoo that ran up the length of his left forearm. It was a flame, an intricate collection of yellow and red and blue licks laid over one another. This is one of the moments I remember most vividly, seeing those flames so clearly. How close we were.
I remember, too, that while Jude had my head inclined toward the television I heard Marv Albert’s voice calling the game between Boston and LA. Just then one of the Celtics players did something spectacular – a breakaway down the length of the court, then a leap toward the basket, a perfect layup – and Albert cried out: Yes! Marv Albert was a person I felt a shameful kinship to, because he was short and not very good-looking so had no place in the world of basketball or television, but had snuck his way in and was pretending to belong there, and in this way in fact had come to belong there. “Unbelievable!” he cried. Just then I felt the same ease and certainty, like I could fly if I wanted. That’s how being around Jude made you feel.
Then it was as if we all collectively decided the restaurant was closed for the evening. We pulled tables together and the bartender brought more hurricanes over and we sat around. Only one of the cooks went back to the kitchen, and even at that it was to retrieve four baskets of crawfish, which he set out in front of us. Everyone was talking all at once for a while, but when one of the cooks turned his attention to me, the others quieted. “Tell us everything,” he said to me. It was the skinny man who had been standing over the pot, dressed all in white but for the red kerchief bandana tied around his head. “Tell us about this character we’ve been working with all this time we hardly know nothing about.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen him in years. You tell me.”
“You wanna know what I know?” he said. “I can tell you everything I know in thirty seconds.” He held up a finger, leaned forward as if sharing a secret. “I know he shows up when he’s supposed to show up and he does whatever it is he’s supposed to do.”
“Fries,” said another cook from the kitchen. They were both wearing the same whites and red bandanas, and were sitting next to each other.
“He keeps those fries coming. And the whole time he keeps his mouth shut,” said the first cook.
“True,” said the other.
“But it’s like the whole time, you can tell he’s thinking about something. His mind is working on something.”
“We call him the philosopher,” the bartender added.
“I think therefore I am,” said the cook.
“I fry therefore I am,” said the other cook.
They laughed for a minute, each turning their heads to each other and slapping their thighs in exactly the same way. They must have been brothers.
“And then, then, when the kitchen closes he comes out and has a drink with this giant mother.” The cook jerked his thumb toward the wrestler. “And he sits and listens to all his stories, he just sits there listening, all the patience in the world, when ain’t nobody else left with any patience for this man’s stories, he’s been coming here for years and we heard them all before a million times.”
“But it’s like he’s not just listening,” said his brother, “he’s storing up all these stories for something. It’s like he’s like recording them.”
“Like he’s here from another planet collecting data.”
“Or from the FBI.”
I knew what they were talking about. Jude had always written things down in a notebook, which he kept under his bed. It wasn’t exactly a diary – there was no record of what he thought or felt about anything. But you could piece together what interested him by compiling everything he’d taken note of. Things he’d seen from the window of our mother’s car on the way to school. Ordinary things, or things just slightly out of the ordinary – a man walking a dog with three legs, an accident on the side of the road where one car slid into another, a woman standing next to the wrecked car holding a baby. He’d write down things he heard at work, when he started working in the meat department of the local grocery store. Funny lines from the butchers: “When I win the lottery I’m gonna fuck the daylights out of a bunch of hookers.” I’m ashamed to admit I used to sneak into his room and read these things.
“Maybe he wants to write The Vampire’s autobiography,” said the first cook. “Maybe the only reason he applied for a job here was because he knew this was The Vampire’s spot and he wanted to get close to him.”
“All this time he’s been working on one of those where are they now type of books.”
“Whatever happened to.”
“Exactly. Whatever happened to The Vampire?”
“Is he still alive?”
“Does he still wrestle?”
“Did he settle down and have kids?”
“Well, would you believe he’s currently employed as a bodyguard for a famous writer?”
“A famous writer who, ironically I might add, writes about vampires?”
“Who’s out of town so much on European vacations he just sits around on his ass in New Orleans doing practically nothing for months on end?”
“Nothing but boring to tears the helpless waitstaff of a crawfish joint in the Quarter?”
The cooks went on like this, laughing, egging each other on. I couldn’t tell how the wrestler felt about being made fun of. The whole time, he was sitting next to me dismembering what looked like a basket of tiny red demons with beady black eyes. He’d pick one up with his giant hand and snap off its tail, then slurp at the body cavity, set the body down, pull the meat from its tail with his teeth. He had two piles going, one for the whole crawfish, one for their crushed remains. He was splitting and sucking in a frenzy, as if in some sort of contest. There was something comical about the difference between the size of his hands and the size of the fish. He was so big he would have made a regular lobster look like a crawfish; the actual crawfish looked, in his hands, like crickets.
“So tell us, what was he like when he was young?” the bartender asked me. “Was he always this mysterious?”
“You could say that,” I said, looking toward Jude, a bit nervous. I didn’t want to betray him. I offered what I thought was an innocuous story, about him hiding behind the Christmas tree, but I could tell he didn’t like it – he didn’t want even this much known.
I suppose this is where the evening started to take a downward turn. Up until then the jukebox had been playing upbeat music, mostly jazz and funk, which kept things lively, but right after I finished talking about Jude and the Christmas tree, James Brown’s “Try Me” came on, and everyone fell silent for a moment. It was as if we had all come to an agreement to regret our current lives and ponder what we could have done differently.
When the song was almost over the wrestler said to Jude, “I bet you can’t tell me the B side of this single.” He had finally finished eating and was sitting back in his chair, his palms pressed against his thighs. It looked like it was an effort to keep himself upright. “This is some old stuff,” the wrestler said, “some obscure stuff, from before you were born.”
“I used to have the 45,” Jude said.
“Give it your best shot.”
“I can see it,” Jude said. He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands. “Give me a second.”
“Take all the time you need.”
I suppose it was here I began to realize the wrestler and Jude were not just acquainted, but friends, and I started seeing things differently. The evening I was taking part in, and thought I’d been starring in, wasn’t the story of two brothers reuniting, but an ongoing story between my brother and the wrestler. I was only a member of the audience, a functionary, someone to bear witness to the kind of friendship I’d always wanted to forge with Jude but couldn’t, because we were incompatible. I didn’t know the B side to “Try Me,” or to any single ever released in the history of music. It would have never occurred to me to ask.
Jude uncovered his face. “‘Tell Me What I Did Wrong,’” he said. “Damn,” the wrestler said. “How does a kid your age know something like that?”
“Years of quiet devotion,” said Jude.
I sat back in my chair and sulked, looked around the room. It was then that I first noticed the furtive glances the waitress was casting toward us. She was busy closing up, getting the last of the customers out the door, loading up trays with the ketchup and mustard bottles and salt and pepper shakers from the tables, spraying down the red and white checked vinyl tablecloths and wiping them in angry circles with a rag, and all the while she kept looking, looking, wanting to see if Jude had noticed her, had taken even a moment’s interest. I knew what she was going through. The agony of wanting to appear not to be thinking about him. The bitter certainty that he wasn’t thinking of you, and yet the persistent hope that he was. It was embarrassing to watch another person held in the same thrall in which I’d been suspended my entire life. I felt a pang of tenderness for the waitress. But then again she was so pathetic, slamming the bottles and shakers onto her tray in an attempt to draw our attention, bending over in such a way that she exposed her breasts as she wiped the tables. She hadn’t mastered the art of concealing her desires or intentions. In this way, she reminded me of Schmidt – and it was important to me to conduct myself more honorably than Schmidt. I resolved to collect myself.
The wrestler was telling a story about a trip he and Jude had taken a few days before, to his boss’s cabin at Lake Pontchartrain. “We were high as fucking kites,” he said, standing up to illustrate. “I mean, we could hardly stand up.” He wobbled. “So naturally we decide this is a good time to go out on the boat.” The story continued on about how neither of them had ever operated a boat and only backed it out from the dock by the grace of God, but how, once out on the open water, which was black but streaked with moonlight, which the wrestler described as splendorous, they gained confidence, too much, and before they knew it they were cruising so fast the boat was slapping down on the water, creating a fearsome wake. Jude betrayed little emotion, as usual, but a corner of his mouth was turned up, indicating some sort of secret pleasure, either because he was remembering this episode fondly or, I feared, because his association with the wrestler was something he was proud of, something he valued.
The wrestler was bobbing up and down to indicate their motion on the water. “And then out of nowhere,” he said, “it’s the police. I’m being pulled over in the middle of a fucking lake. Where does one even pull over?” he said. “I’m not a lake person. I don’t know these things.”
People were laughing, sensing how the story was about to tip over. “So we sort of drift to a stop and the police boat pulls up next to us and it says on the side of their boat, I swear to God, it says SHERIFF. Like there’s a sheriff of the lake. Did anyone here know there was such a thing? This country!”
The wrestler continued, describing the Bullshit Lake Sheriff, as he called him – the huge gut that cascaded over his belt, his voluminous, frowning moustache – and the dread that began to sink in as the sheriff mounted their boat, discovering one infraction after another: that the wrestler had no boating license, no registration, not to mention the prominent cooler of beer, with two containers open. “The sheriff keeps tacking on money and jail time,” the wrestler said, “until we’re looking at serving out the rest of our lives, practically, the rest of our goddamned lives for going for a ride on a boat.”
“All I can show him is my regular driver’s license,” he continued, “and when he sees my name, as dumb luck and the grace of God would have it, he’s a wrestling fan! ‘Eugene Delacroix,’ he says, ‘as in, The Vampire?’ And I sort of raise up my arms slowly the way I used to in the ring, with the cape making it look like bat wings. ‘You were my favorite!’ he says. ‘I swear to God, I was your biggest fan. I thought it was you. I wasn’t sure but I thought.’ He was like a small child, such was his love of wrestling. But a second later you could see his obligation to the law was weighing on him, and he was wondering what he should do. That’s when this one,” said the wrestler, jerking his thumb toward Jude, “this one steps in. ‘We’re sorry, Officer,’ he says, ‘we don’t know our way around. We’re just here for a birthday party. People sometimes hire Eugene to come to their child’s birthday. He picks up all the kids and spins them around.’” The wrestler raised his arms above his head and spun slowly. “Which was a lie,” he emphasized, “but such a good one. It made me seem so pathetic, even more pathetic than I actually am. And you can tell the cop was thinking, ‘What kind of man do I want to be? Do I want to be the kind of man who hauls in Eugene Delacroix, fallen from grace, reduced to entertaining children at parties, broken and pathetic? Or do I want to be merciful?’ He was on the fence, but in the end, he just couldn’t do it.”
Suddenly the wrestler appeared tired, out of breath even, and he sat down and put his hand on Jude’s thigh. “He made up that little story and I’m telling you, he saved me. He is like my brother. I owe him a debt. I must follow him to the ends of the Earth until he is repaid. I would have lost my position, I would have been fired. Then where would I be?”
“It was all you,” said Jude. “I didn’t do anything.”
“No, no,” said the wrestler. “It was all to your credit. As soon as you added that detail about the parties, his heart softened. I can tell these things.”
Jude was fully smiling now. It occurred to me that the whole time he was living in our house, stifled by its rules and order and expectations, this was all he had ever wanted. Something wild, something ridiculous. Something bigger than us.
“Of course I couldn’t even pick up a child these days, if you want the truth,” the wrestler said. “All my joints are collapsing. I couldn’t pick up any one of you, not one.”
“Except maybe Bernie,” Jude said, which got a laugh.
The waitress, who had at last completed her work, pushed her way into the circle and sat right in Jude’s lap, draped her arm around him. Her arm was glistening with some kind of glittering lotion, and she smelled like she had just now doused herself in perfume, something musky. She was staring right at me. She was beautiful, with the same coloring as Jude – dark hair and light blue eyes – but she had put so much work into her appearance she had altered herself to the point of no longer looking quite human. There was a thick layer of makeup over her entire face, with an orange cast to it, and her lips and eyes and nails were all painted in sparkling pastels. She had curled and teased her hair so that it lifted straight off her scalp for several inches before falling in stiffened waves. I’d once seen a KISS doll for sale in a toy store window, its arms held up, beckoning, and this is what the waitress reminded me of.
No sooner had the waitress joined the group when it began to disperse, the bartender going back behind the bar, stocking glasses underneath, the cooks drifting off to the kitchen. The waitress looked injured, like maybe this wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, like people had long tired of her. Jude was tired of her, I could tell, how he leaned away from her, didn’t meet her eye. She tried to brush his hair back from his face but he shook her off.
The waitress turned her attention to me, asking me where I went to school, what I was studying, what I planned to do after graduation. I told her as much as I knew, that I was staying at the same school in Tennessee, though would be a law student in the fall and three years after that, a lawyer. When I passed the bar I’d probably go to work at my father’s firm back home. “Or maybe I just won’t go back,” I added. “I might just stay here.”
While I talked the waitress wound a tendril of her hair around a finger and kept her mouth slightly parted, like flirtation was her only currency, and she couldn’t turn it off. “I just can’t believe you’re Jude’s brother,” she said. “You look so different. You look really, like, useful. Like if we ever need any legal advice, we can call you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“You’re so cute.” She was speaking in a voice that sounded like a child’s. I had never understood this brand of seduction – women making themselves out to sound like children so as to activate some urge to fuck them. I didn’t understand why women did it, or why men responded to it. In this case, I didn’t understand why my brother’s girlfriend was talking to me like that while she was sitting on his lap and, with her hand slipped underneath his shirt now, rubbing his back. What did she want, for the whole world to love her, even her boyfriend’s little brother? Did she want us to fight over her?
“You know my one problem with Jude?” she said. “He never tells me nothing. I didn’t even know he had a brother.”
I shrugged.
“I don’t even know where he grew up or like, what his childhood was like or anything like that.”
“That’s because we grew up in Delaware,” I said. “Which is like growing up in the capital of nowhere.”
This time it worked – she nodded like it made perfect sense. “Yeah,” she said. “Totally.”
This whole time, the wrestler was cleaning off the tables in front of us, stacking up plastic cups, then brushing crumbs off the table into the stack of cups. He was considerate, in his way. When he had finished cleaning the tables as best he could he straightened up and wriggled his fingers, like a child squirming in anticipation of opening a present. “Shall we continue this gathering at my place?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” Jude said. He sort of smacked the waitress on the butt and pushed her off him.
“Can we just go home?” she said. “I’m tired. I just want to go to bed.”
“My brother’s here,” he said.
“You never even said you had one,” she said, as if this were an argument she could win by submitting transcripts of conversations she’d had with Jude in the past.
“My brother’s here,” he said. And even though he was making a point in my favor, I felt bad for the waitress. She was on thin ice. One wrong move and she’d never see Jude again. He put his arm around me and we walked out into the night.

To save my life I couldn’t recreate the twists and turns we took walking down the streets that night. It had rained, and the streets were wet, reflecting the moonlight. I remember thinking that something interesting was finally happening to me. I was with my brother at last, as well as a waitress and a giant, and although it wasn’t quite what I had predicted, it felt like a Hollywood scene. I was lost in it. Schmidt, our school, the Sunshine Motel, my parents, my future – I would have said all of this seemed far away if any of them had crossed my mind.
Slowly I gathered the impression that we were walking toward a better part of town. I had a sense for these things, as anyone does who grows up with money, and I remember registering some sort of surprise – I understood that we were going back to the wrestler’s, but hadn’t expected the real estate to improve. The houses were massive, plantation-like, with long, wide lawns. I could see all of this because the grounds of the houses were rife with spotlights, the way houses appear in the opening scenes of sitcoms.
I was surprised when the wrestler, who was walking just a bit ahead of us, turned up the walkway of what had to be the biggest residence I had ever seen in person. I say residence here, though really that is misleading – it was a brick fortress stretching for half a block in length and width. It looked like a museum or hospital, or perhaps an apartment complex.
“Home sweet home,” the wrestler said. He stopped at the door – painted a glossy black, with a gold fox head as a knocker – and fumbled in the pockets of his jacket, first the outside pockets, then the inside.
I must have been making a face because Jude told me it wasn’t really the wrestler’s house. Rather, it belonged to the woman he worked for, who was so famous she needed a bodyguard. He named a writer I’d never heard of. “Doesn’t ring a bell,” I said.
The wrestler stopped his fumbling and looked down at me. “You’ve never heard of her? She’s like the most famous writer in the world.”
“Oh,” I said.
“She writes about vampires?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Okay.”
“There’s movies?” he said. “You know, number one box office movies?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I felt like we were building up to another lesson.
In a second I’d be in a headlock.
“Have you ever heard of Tom Fucking Cruise?” he asked.
“Well, yeah,” I said.
“Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.” He reached in the pocket of his pants and pulled out a key, a single key dangling from a paperclip. The door swung open into a foyer and we all stepped up and stood there for a moment, taking in the scope of the place. Long hallways extended to the left and right. “This is like a museum,” said the waitress.
The wrestler corrected her. “It was a convent. This place used to be crawling with nuns.”
“Huh,” said the waitress. “I can kind of feel their spirits or whatever. It’s kind of peaceful and kind of creepy.” We were all drifting to the right, down a hallway lined with dining chairs made of dark wood, with green velvet seat cushions. The chairs were all identical, and receded for what seemed like a hundred yards. “It freaks me out when there’s, like, a hundred of the same thing in a row,” said the waitress. “You know what I mean?” I did, but didn’t want to admit it. None of us felt we owed the waitress even the courtesy of a response. This was inexcusably rude, but then again, what were we supposed to do? If we agreed with something she said, then we were complicit with the rest of her, and the rest of her seemed to have been born and bred in Daytona Beach.
The hallway finally came to an end and the wrestler commenced a bit of a tour, walking backwards and sweeping his arm towards certain rooms, like a Price Is Right model displaying a series of prizes. “The ballroom,” he said, gesturing toward a giant open room with parquet floors and a chandelier that would have killed anyone it fell on. One room was empty, though its walls were lined floor to ceiling with built-in bookcases, filled with leatherbound volumes, all the same burgundy color. I remember thinking that they couldn’t possibly be real books – there were too many of them to be anything other than decorative. “The library,” the wrestler said. At the end of another hallway we came to a door that opened into an industriallooking staircase, with cement steps and iron railings. We ascended to the top floor, and pushed through a door into a giant open room with a pitched ceiling, and two long rows of white metal beds lined in the middle. There were probably fifty beds altogether. Tucked into each bed, propped on a pillow, was a doll. The dolls differed one to the next, but they were all about the same size, maybe eighteen inches tall, and had porcelain faces and carefully curled ringlets. We walked up and down the rows, staring at their faces. All of their eyes were open. Their arms were positioned at their sides with the palms turned up, as if they were waiting to receive something.
No one said anything for a minute, until the waitress said what we were all thinking, which was, “Whoa, this is creepy.”
“Do you know what this room was used for?” the wrestler asked.
“No,” she said.
“Nun sleepover parties,” said Jude. “All of them in footie pajamas and stocking caps. Pillow fights, Go Fish, leapfrog, games of telephone.” He must have been thinking of our mother, it occurred to me, the utter lack of joy in her heart. She had never played a game with us in our lives. He hated her, too, though not as much as our father.
“Close,” said the wrestler, “but no cigar. Back when this was a convent, there was a flu epidemic. And people were dropping like flies. This was where the nuns kept the children who were sick, the kids whose parents were dead and had no one else to care for them.” All of a sudden the dolls in the beds were even creepier than before. I considered all the real children who had suffered and died in the room and thought, for a few seconds, I felt the weight of their spirits. Which was something the waitress would have said, or my mother.
“I don’t like this,” the waitress said. She pulled on Jude’s arm. “Come on, let’s go home. I’m so tired.”
He sort of pushed her off him again. She was annoying me, too, but I was starting to feel bad for her and didn’t think he should treat her this way. “I feel sick,” she said. She walked out of the room and one by one we followed. I was glad to get out of there.
The wrestler descended the stairs to the basement, which was damp and musty and lit only by a single bulb in the middle, as well as the orange light emerging from a room in one corner, walled off with rough planks, from which emerged a low roar. It was probably just a boiler room, but it was a strange night, and I’d had a lot to drink, so it occurred to me that it was a room where sinners were fed to the devil. I pictured myself pulling back the door and stepping inside, a nun ushering me into a sort of flaming cauldron.
The wrestler led us past this room, which was a relief, and behind it, through a dark, narrow passageway. At some point I realized the waitress was behind me but couldn’t figure out how she had gotten there. We emerged from the passageway into a room identical to the first, with another room walled off in the corner. The wrestler crossed to it and opened its door and pulled on a string, revealing his living quarters – nothing more than three iron cots pushed together to make a bed, a wooden chair, and a small bureau with a cheap gold trophy on top. “My chamber,” he announced. He sat in the chair and Jude and the waitress sat on the bed. I stood there looking at everything. Aside from the trophy, which depicted a strongman holding the earth over his head, the room had few adornments. Taped above the bed was an 8x10 picture of the wrestler and Randy Savage – I recognized him now, the wild hair, the beard, the plastic neon sunglasses with the slats – both smiling at the camera, their arms around each other. And next to that, taped at a sloppy angle, a promotional poster of the wrestler and a woman in a tortured embrace. She was dressed in a sleeveless black leotard and was leaning into the wrestler, clutching at his chest with her red fingernails. A thick vein ran across her bulging bicep. Her mouth was open in a sort of growl. Her canines had been augmented to give her the approximate bite of a wolf.
“Who’s that?” asked the waitress.
“My wife,” said the wrestler. “Vampirina. Whenever she pinned someone, she sunk her teeth into their necks. That part of the show was real. She had these fangs affixed to her teeth – they were bonded by a dentist, they didn’t come off unless you filed them down. Everyone is always talking about wrestling being fake but let me tell you, she took a few bites out of a few people, for real. When she was in it, she was in it. My baby.” He faltered for a moment, on the verge of tears. “She was all the way.”
On the floor were scattered perhaps a dozen copies of old People magazines. One of the covers featured the wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and her eighth husband, Larry Fortensky, at Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Liz stood in the center of the picture in a tiered white dress, with her husband to her left, and Michael Jackson to her right, dressed all in black, in one of those military-style jackets he used to wear. They looked happy, though of course everything was about to come crashing down on all of them.
“Oh my God,” said the waitress. “I love Elizabeth Taylor. I want to be Elizabeth Taylor. Everyone always tells me that’s who I look like, but I don’t know.” She looked around to see if anyone was going to reassure her. “She’s way more beautiful.”
“Is this what you jerk off to?” Jude asked.
The wrestler looked wounded. “No,” he said. “But I’d marry her in a fucking heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?”
“I’d marry Liz Taylor from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, maybe,” said Jude.
“Anyone would,” the wrestler said. “Though you can’t beat Butterfield 8.”
“I’d marry her,” Jude said, “maybe through Cleopatra, but not after that.”
“Anyone would,” the wrestler said again. “But I’d go all the way. Virginia Woolf, all that shit with Michael Jackson, marrying that junkie. For a woman like that, you see it through.”
I was sort of touched by what seemed to me to be the wrestler’s faithfulness to Liz Taylor. It was somewhat complicated by the fact that we fell under the gaze of his vampire wife, but we lived in an imperfect world.
I was flipping through an issue of People, mesmerized, and didn’t notice that the wrestler had rummaged through one of the bureau drawers and pulled out a prescription bottle, though when I heard the clatter of pills it took me out of my reverie. The wrestler poured a few pills out onto the bureau top and then, with the base of the trophy, crushed them. He brushed the powder onto the back of his hand and snorted it. Then he motioned to Jude, who came over and did the same. I’d never actually seen Jude take drugs before. I suppose he was his usual self, slow and cool about it, but there was a slight delay in his movements – something I would later recognize as the mark of a person who was working hard to appear calm, but was in fact excited and full of longing. He snorted what was on his hand and then brushed some more onto it. He sat back on the bed and offered his hand to the waitress, who gave him an incredulous look. “No thank you,” she said, very deliberately, as if speaking in some sort of code. Jude shrugged and took the powder for himself. As an afterthought, he looked at me and said, “This isn’t good for you.”
“Thanks anyway,” I said. “I’m trying to, you know, keep it copacetic.” This was what Schmidt said when declining to party, as our brothers called it. I added the fact that I was talking like Schmidt to my growing list of concerns.
I can’t say that I knew enough at the time to understand what was going on with Jude. Like everyone else my age, I’d seen the ads about drugs, the egg crackling in a frying pan, and I knew they could kill you, knew that Len Bias, on the same day he was drafted by the Celtics, died from cocaine, that his heart literally exploded – but I also knew that different rules seemed to apply to different people, and that while some people were punished, others got away with things. And if anyone was immune to the laws that governed most of us, surely it was Jude, I figured, surely he was fine. That was my thinking, at the time.
As I worked out this calculation, the wrestler was waxing rhapsodic about Randy Savage and Elizabeth Hulette, the first couple of wrestling. He was reciting what sounded like a thesis he’d rehearsed and delivered many times. The truth was, he explained to the waitress, Randy and Elizabeth were married in real life, but for a while the WWF made it look like she was just his manager. They developed various plotlines wherein Randy seemed to be falling for Miss Elizabeth, as they called her, and ultimately they married in the ring. “Even though they were already married in real life,” he said. “But the thing is, what nobody understands, is that they weren’t really the first, they got the whole idea from me and Vampirina.” He nodded toward the picture of himself and his vampire girlfriend. “We were the first. I was the first wrestler to bring my girlfriend into the ring. We were the first true love story.”
“Oh really?” said the waitress. “True love?”
“It was,” he said.
“True love?” said the waitress. She was pushing back the cuticles of her nails with her thumb. “Okay so like, where is she now?”
“Biloxi,” said the wrestler. “With her family.” He was suddenly so downcast the waitress looked sorry. She’d been trying to hurt him and had, but now she regretted it.
“She left me,” he said. “Because I was falling apart.”
“Oh,” said the waitress. “I’m sorry. But if it’s true love, she’ll come back, right?”
“Maybe,” he said.
That’s when Jude fell backwards on the bed. It was fairly dramatic. He landed with one arm flung out, like a Victorian maiden who had passed out from shock.
“Jesus,” I said.
“He’s fine,” said the wrestler. “This happens all the time.”
“He’s so skinny,” said the waitress. She brushed back a tendril of his hair that was curled over his eye. “There’s no fat on him. He can’t take the same as you,” she said to the wrestler. “You need to be more careful.”
“He’s fine,” said the wrestler. Then, after a beat, “I know him better than you do.”
“Not in some ways,” she said.
They both regarded Jude and I could tell by the way they looked at him that they loved him. We were all addicted to the same thing, but I suppose none of us could say why.
“He just needs some sleep,” said the wrestler. “He doesn’t sleep well.”
“I’m the one who deals with it,” the waitress said.
The wrestler turned away from Jude and seemed to notice me for the first time. “Where are my manners?” he said. “You’re sitting on the floor.” He stood up and waved at me to follow him. “We’ll leave him be for a little while,” he said. “We’ll go up to the den and stretch out. It’s about time for my program.”
The waitress and I followed him upstairs and down a few long hallways, to a part of the residence we hadn’t seen before – a part that looked like an actual home. He led us into a room lined with bookshelves and crammed with overstuffed, comfortable furniture arranged around a giant, wood-paneled television. The wrestler bent in front of the TV and pushed a series of buttons. Entertainment Tonight sprang up and Mary Hart’s voice filled the room at such a startling volume I put my hand to my heart.
“Sorry it’s so loud,” said the wrestler. It occurred to me again that he was a very considerate person. “Most of my hearing got knocked out of me in the ring.” He lifted his hair and tilted his head so I could see his ear. It was so fat and swollen it looked like an embryo.
The wrestler stretched out across the length of the couch, and the waitress and I took up posts in the armchairs on either side. We watched a commercial for a Toyota Tercel, then for Diet Coke, then for McDonald’s. The wrestler sang along with all of their slogans and I realized something about him: he was the target demographic for every commercial on TV. He had taken in all the advertising that America had to offer in good faith. He had memorized the salient qualities and slogans of each product that he encountered in daily life, and could recite them at will. He was a true believer. “Snickers really satisfies,” he said. And a bit later: “With a name like Smucker’s, it has to be good.”
We sat there for a long time, watching all the news unfolding in Hollywood. I thought we were all relaxed, even happy, but then the waitress burst out with an angry inquiry. “How long does he usually take to wake up?” She was sitting up straight with her arms crossed over her chest and her leg was bouncing. She had been upset this whole time, but I was just now noticing.
“Couple hours,” said the wrestler. “Although sometimes he sleeps through.”
“He doesn’t do that shit when he’s with me,” she said. She shot the wrestler a vicious look, but he wasn’t paying attention.
“Nobody forced him,” he said.
“But if it wasn’t around, he wouldn’t do it,” she said. She was right, but we didn’t want to hear it, or at least not from her. Her voice was too high and too loud, and the blue of her eyes, which was mesmerizing in a certain light, had grown cold with anger, and sent a chill through me.
“It has a bad effect on him,” she continued. “I mean, did you see that? He just offered me drugs, and I’m pregnant. He knows I’m pregnant. What kind of person does that?”
I didn’t say anything. I suppose I was trying and failing to make the most basic of calculations. The waitress seemed to be my brother’s girlfriend. And now she was saying she was pregnant. It was a simple math problem, a plus b, but I couldn’t bring myself to complete it.
“Whose is it?” the wrestler asked. He looked just as stunned as I was.
“Jude’s,” she said. “Jesus. You know that. We’re living together.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to assume. I didn’t know if you were necessarily exclusive.”
“Maybe he isn’t,” she said. “But I certainly am.”
“I just figured he would have told me,” said the wrestler. He looked crestfallen. I thought how a day ago I had been fine, but now everything was awful. The room spun. I felt like I might throw up.
“I should just get an abortion,” the waitress said.
It sat there between the three of us for a moment. I felt as if she’d read my mind, like she wanted to cancel whatever transaction we were in the middle of.
“There’s no way I can have a baby with him,” she continued. “With anyone, who am I kidding.” She sniffled, then rubbed her nose with the heel of her palm. Then she put her palms under her eyes and started rubbing. She was the picture of despair.
I thought about offering the waitress money, but I didn’t have any – I’d forfeited the money I was expecting to make in order to come down here. I scrambled to think of something. I could sell plasma, send her installments. I wanted this all to go away.
I was still calculating when the waitress straightened up, already done with the moment of pity she was having for herself, which was well deserved and might have reasonably gone on longer. “I’m tired of waiting around,” she said. She stood and arranged her purse on her shoulder, made her way out of the room, then turned and waved to us. “Nice meeting you, Bernard,” she said.
“You too,” I said. “Nice to, nice to make your acquaintance.” I didn’t even stand to wish her goodbye.
The wrestler pushed himself off the couch and escorted her to the door. “I can walk you home,” he said.
“No thanks,” she said. She walked out and closed the door gently behind her and the thing is – we let her go. We let her walk through the streets of New Orleans, pregnant and alone, at two o’clock in the morning. God knows where she lived, how far she had to walk and through what neighborhoods. Carrying my brother’s baby, all that would remain of him, if it remained at all.
Then it was as if the wrestler and I were helpless, like family members in the waiting room at a hospital. He stretched back out on the couch and I remained slumped in my chair. “Jesus,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“He’s not going to want anything to do with that,” said the wrestler.
“I’m surprised he hasn’t left already.”
“No wonder he’s been hanging around so much. No wonder he doesn’t want to go home to her.”
“I feel so bad,” I said. By this point I was leaning forward and holding my head in my hands.
“We can help him out of it,” said the wrestler. “I can find the money
“I feel so bad for her,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. And then, after a beat, “Maybe you wouldn’t if you knew her better. She’s trouble. Nothing but trouble.”
“Still,” I said.
“She’s not the one for him,” he said. “I know. I know because my wife was the one for me and I’ve had that experience. I know it when I see it.”
I nodded. Then, even though it felt dangerous, I ventured further. “What happened?”
“She left me,” he said. As if that explained it.
“But how come?” I asked.
He didn’t say anything at first. We both stared at the television for a moment, which by now was airing reruns of The Dick Cavett Show. Richard Burton was talking about his father’s disapproval of his profession, and utter disbelief at his salary of $150,000 per film. “What for?” the father asked. As in: What in the name of God are they paying you for? The audience laughed, finding some sort of relief in the story. Even the great Richard Burton was made to feel useless by his father.
“For the sake of getting right to the point,” the wrestler said, “let’s just say women don’t like it when you love them too much.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You need to let them visit their mothers when they want to visit their mothers. And they need a little freedom with money.”
“Okay.”
“You can’t stand outside a bathroom door waiting for them in a restaurant. You probably shouldn’t follow them when they say they’re going out with their girlfriends.”
“Got it,” I said. His wife probably had a restraining order against him. She had probably had to move back in with her parents because of him.
“I thought I was protecting her,” he said. “That’s what it felt like to me.”
The show cut to commercial and we continued watching with the same dutiful attention we’d paid to Richard Burton. “Oh, what a feeling,” the wrestler sang, weakly. “Toyota.” A moment later he was breathing heavily, each breath slower and slower, until he was asleep.
I wandered around the house for a while, thinking that I was in the house of a famous writer, and had just learned something terrible about my brother, and listened to a giant wrestler mourn his lost wife, and would one day want to tell people about all of it. I wanted to feel something, to conjure a sense of grandeur, though what I really felt was exhausted, and full of regret – I wished I’d never shown up in New Orleans. I reached the end of a hall and pushed through a door to one of the staircases and took it down to the basement. I found the wrestler’s room and opened the door, which creaked, and saw Jude still passed out on the bed, breathing through his open mouth. I stood over him. His right hand was curled atop his chest, as if clutching something, and his left arm was still flung to the side. I looked at the tattoo of flames and realized what it was – the tongue of flame depicted above the heads of the apostles in their many artistic renderings. I remembered the one in our house, which I had probably spent hours staring at. Instead of placing pictures of us on the mantel, which would have placed us in the path of pride and vanity, my mother had placed portraits of the saints Jude and I were named after. Jude was pictured holding the instrument of his torture and death, a club, with a giant, multicolored flame floating above his head. By comparison, Bernard, having died peacefully, was a boring subject, pictured in a hooded white robe with a golden halo behind him; the only interesting aspect of his photo was that, because he was famous for exorcisms, he was pictured with a small black demon clutching at the hem of his robe, trying to gain purchase.
I don’t know how long I stared at Jude. My instinct here is to say that I knew this was the last time I would ever see him – though perhaps it was more of a question in my mind than a certainty. Still, I looked at him for longer than seemed reasonable, thinking about the predicament of his life – that he had been born to a mother who had abandoned him, and raised in our stifling household, that he had freed himself from us but made little so far of his life, that he apparently was facing the prospect of having or abandoning his own child with a woman he clearly didn’t love. For a moment I was angry with him. He’d left home for this, a washed-up wrestler and a cheap waitress, working in a kitchen, passing out on cots? Wasn’t he tired of it all? Wasn’t he maybe a little bit of an asshole, in fact, entirely an asshole? But then, as was always the case with Jude, I talked myself out of it. It’s not his fault, I remember thinking, as if arguing for his soul. Given where he started, what else could he have done? What did you expect?

I suppose what I was thinking about then, though I couldn’t quite articulate it, was the problem of genetics. What had become of Jude seemed to me to be a continuation of a storyline conceived and set in motion long before he was even born. We knew almost nothing of Jude’s mother, Ruth, except what our mother told us, which wasn’t much, just enough to suggest that Jude had inherited a dubious legacy, one that was responsible for his current condition. What we knew was that Ruth had been a good girl, a God-fearing girl, until her teenage years, when she had fallen under the influence of a group of friends who had led her astray. She had run away from home and joined a community in western Pennsylvania, where a group of people lived together all under one roof, and intermingled themselves – I remember specifically my mother using the word intermingled – without concern for the laws of God or man. Because they were always high on drugs, our mother continued, they couldn’t work to earn money, and so they had to grow all their own food. Whatever else they had was begged for or stolen. I hardly knew what any of this meant, and suspect my mother hardly knew, either.
Apart from this basic outline, there was only the occasional remark that would crop up whenever Jude did something that reminded our mother of Ruth. “My sister loved animals,” she told us once, as we were leaving the nature center, a place we sometimes visited on Saturdays. That day, one of the caretakers had taken a wounded owl out of its cage for us to see. The owl was perched on the caretaker’s leather glove, and Jude had bent down to look at it, and they’d stared at each other, their gaze unbroken, for more than a minute. It was a small brown owl with yellow eyes, and it seemed to have a soul – that is, it seemed to be looking at Jude with understanding. I felt like I was witnessing some kind of formal ceremony. “It was almost as if she could communicate with animals,” my mother said afterwards. “Like those princesses in movies, as if birds would land on her shoulder and she could talk to them.” I wondered if this was why my mother didn’t allow pets in our home, despite the fact that Jude and I both badly wanted a dog. “We always said her name should have been Frances,” she added. I remember the way Jude took this all in, as if something finally made sense.
Another time, seemingly out of nowhere, when my mother was flipping through a magazine and saw an advertisement for cigarettes, she raised her head and told Jude that he needed to be careful. “This is where it all started for my sister,” she said, showing him the picture of the Marlboro man with a saddle propped on one shoulder, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “First it was cigarettes,” my mother said, “then alcohol, then drugs, and then we lost her.” Our mother always spoke of Ruth’s defection from the family as if some kind of alien abduction. “They stole her in the night,” she added. I imagined a group of hippies coming to her bedroom window, crawling in and taking her from her bed. I still imagine it that way.
What we heard the most, though, concerning Ruth, was that she had been spoiled. “She was very beautiful,” my mother would say, a bit bitterly, it seemed to me. “Everyone loved her for her beauty, her golden hair. She started to understand that she could break the rules and be forgiven, simply because, well, it’s hard to describe, but there was a kind of light coming from her that people liked to be around. She grew bolder and started to take advantage of people. She always got out of her chores, one way or another. And she was given permission to go more places and stay out later than I ever did. She was given more freedom and she took it, she took off with it and kept running. She never looked back to see what kind of mess she’d made.” On some level, we understood that now my mother was cleaning up the catastrophic mess of raising Ruth’s child, a child who seemed to possess the same magnetism and wanderlust. It was our mother’s job to train this inheritance out of him, a long chore.
During my high school years, when Jude was gone and I was often home alone, I would sometimes go into my mother’s closet and pull down a shoebox from the shelf above her hanging clothes. This is where she kept her correspondence with the nuns she had lived with before Jude was born, and also with a man named Father Michael. There were dozens of letters from Father Michael, who had moved around quite a bit over the years and was lately stationed in Boston. His letters were long and weirdly intimate, responding to things my mother had obviously told him – often discussing the visions my mother had experienced in her dreams. “I’m glad you sensed me there with you when Joan appeared in a blaze of fire,” he said. “I am always with you, of course, whether you sense me or not, but I am glad my spirit was there to give you comfort in what must have been a terrifying, if awesome, moment. We all know Joan to be fearsome. She can only appear to deliver difficult news. I hope you will soon be able to decipher what she is calling you to do.”
In rifling through these letters I came to understand something of my own inheritance – that my mother was insane, in her way, and that I ought to be wary of her belief systems. But it was also in this shoebox that I encountered the only picture of Ruth I had ever seen, a black-and-white photo with a scalloped white border. Ruth was pictured sitting on a blanket in a park, wearing a white dress, her legs tucked beneath her. She wore her hair long and parted down the center, and had a flower tucked behind one ear. She was indeed beautiful, enchanting. It was mostly in her smile, which was the same as Jude’s. One corner of her mouth was upturned, as if she had a secret she wasn’t going to tell, though she wanted you to know she had it. There was something wild in her eye, a spark, something I also recognized from Jude. She was about to do something daring and wanted you to watch. On the back, in my mother’s sensible handwriting, was written Ruth, 1966. The picture must have been taken shortly before she left home, and so Ruth’s secret must have been this: she was about to go off the rails.
I suppose this explains why my parents reacted so harshly when Jude started drinking and smoking pot. This was during his junior year, when he started working in the meat department of the grocery store. Everyone he worked with there had fallen from grace in one way or another – one of the butchers had been to jail, convicted of manslaughter for a drunk driving accident, and another was a Vietnam veteran whose wife had left him for domestic abuse. To break up the bleak, eight-hour stretches in the cold, the butchers would stand out on the dock where trucks backed up to deliver meat, and smoke a joint. It was harmless, Jude thought. In fact, you could even say it was helpful – it helped the day go by.
I learned all of this from reading Jude’s notebook, but my father first came to know it from the smell. One Saturday he picked up Jude after his shift and there was no denying it – Jude was bleary-eyed and stinking. At home there was a terrible scene. My father stripped Jude’s room of his every possession, and in the process discovered a bottle of cheap vodka – something I had missed in my regular visitations to his room. “Just tell me,” my father kept saying, “just tell me where your drugs are. Just admit it.” Jude finally confessed. Yes, he’d tried it, but only at work. He didn’t have anything in the house. He was crying by then. I hadn’t seen him cry since he was a child.
I had thought that after our father cleared Jude’s room, leaving him with nothing but his bed, that his punishment would be over. We were always told this was how it worked – that those who confessed would be granted mercy – but instead my father arranged for Jude to spend the summer in a rehab camp for teenagers. He was to live in the woods for eight weeks with other troubled teens, without any electricity or plumbing, and would spend his days performing manual labor, repairing the cabins already on site, and building additional cabins to house the troubled teens of the future. Jude begged not to go, and was demure for the first time in his life, crying on multiple occasions, even writing my father an earnest letter promising many acts of thoughtfulness and redemption. But my father was merciless. He drove Jude a hundred miles northwest and left him there, and all through the summer we received no word. I wondered sometimes if Jude was even alive. I pictured the day when the phone would ring, and my mother would answer it, then fall to the floor screaming. In the end we really did lose him, though not how I’d imagined.
When Jude returned home, all of his things were back in place, which my father considered a peace offering. But there was no peace to be made. Whatever horrors Jude had experienced at camp – the camp was later closed for mistreating its residents – he held against our father, and I can honestly say I don’t think Jude ever spoke another word to him. He would respond to my mother’s questions, and would sometimes talk to me, but he refused to speak to or even look at our father, and in turn, our father refused to speak to him. This went on for two months or so. Then, the day Jude turned 18, he left home, sneaking out in the morning before anyone woke. My mother kept calling him down to breakfast – she had made him pancakes for his birthday – but he didn’t emerge from his room. Finally she sent me upstairs to retrieve him, and when I pushed open his door I saw his bed was neatly made, with Weezy sitting on top, a note tucked under one of her paws: Bernie, Take care of her for me, okay? I stood there for a couple of minutes, staring at the note, holding Weezy under one arm, knowing that when I went downstairs to deliver the news, all of it would become real, and a new, painful part of our family life would begin.
Sometimes it seemed to me that no one could have helped what happened. That addiction was built into Jude’s DNA and he fell prey to it as a matter of destiny, and that my father responded in the only way he knew how, in the way he believed was the only way that would work – by trying to break Jude. We are who we are, I thought in those moments, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Other times, I thought how easily all of this could have been avoided. If Jude had practiced any amount of discretion. If my father had allowed his will to be bent, even a little. Maybe none of this would have happened.

I suppose I knew where I was going when I wandered upstairs, past the library, down the long hallway lined with chairs, past the grand ballroom with its giant chandelier, then up the staircase to the attic. I felt drawn there, summoned by the ghosts whose presence I’d felt just a few hours before. There was enough moonlight streaming through the windows that I could see more or less perfectly. I walked up and down the rows of beds until I found a doll I could handle sleeping with. She was propped against the pillow, and had some kind of yellow velvet suit on, some type of onesie with a hood attached that was pulled up over her head, covering her hair – just a few wisps of red hair were peeking out. She was smiling, but her eyes were cast downward and to the side, like the smile of a villain. It was as if she was imagining the downfall of her enemies. I picked her up, pulled down the sheet, laid myself in bed, placed the doll on top of my chest. Only then did it occur to me that I was sleeping in a room where hundreds of children had died from the flu, when I was supposed to be in a motel room suffering from the flu, myself. I couldn’t decide if I’d come up in the world, or taken some kind of wrong turn. There would be no $500 check at the end of this, which was bad, but then again, I wasn’t sick. And I’d seen my brother, and remembered once again why he was a difficult person to love. I’d learned something.
I fell asleep with my back turned to the windows and the covers pulled over my head, clutching the devious baby against my chest. When I woke, a few hours later, I was clutching the baby so hard my elbows ached. I got up and pulled the covers back in place, but not the baby – I took her with me, carried her by one arm. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was doing beyond the fact that I had the feeling I couldn’t let go of her. Her eyes clinked open and shut as I went down the stairs. She was the first thing I had ever stolen and would also be the last.
Down in the library, the TV was running, but there was no sign of the wrestler or Jude. I went down to the basement and looked into the wrestler’s room again, which was empty, although still somehow haunted, with Liz Taylor’s purple eyes gazing up from the floor, and all three wrestlers staring me down. I wandered back upstairs, made a loop of the first floor. The baby’s eyelids blinked open and closed as I walked, as I came to terms with the obvious – they were gone. They had left me. I couldn’t believe it.
I stopped on the first floor to use a small bathroom, which was papered in leopard print. There was a taxidermy head of a dog, maybe a Rottweiler, positioned to face the toilet. It seemed to be looking at me the whole time I was sitting there. His teeth were bared. “Give me a break,” I told him. I held my head in my hands. I was on the verge of tears. I sat there for a long time.
This was what life was like before cell phones. In a situation where you were lost or unsure what to do, you had to wait around in a space of not knowing. And in that space of not knowing, several possibilities would occur to you, explanations for what might have gone wrong. A person you were supposed to meet was stuck in traffic, or was having car trouble, or simply forgot your appointment or possibly even forgot you existed. But then again, maybe the person was going to appear at any moment. Maybe they’d gone out to do something thoughtful, they were about to show up with breakfast or coffee. Maybe they’d been called away to run a quick errand or lend a hand to a neighbor. You tried to just wait. In my case, I wandered out to the den and sat in front of the television and watched golfers putt on a green. Of all the things I could be doing in the world, I thought, I was watching golf. I despaired. Over an hour passed.
Eventually in these situations, either your best or worst instincts guided you forward, which revealed your personality. My personality was based on fear and resentment, so after careful consideration, I decided I’d been abandoned, that Jude and the wrestler were off having fun without me and hadn’t even bothered to leave a note.
I got up and walked out, pulled the door closed behind me. The sky was white with cloud cover but it was still insanely bright. I was squinting and even holding a hand in front of my face. With the other hand, I realized, I was still holding the doll. I wandered for probably an hour. Finally I heard laughter and groups of people talking and knew I was approaching Bourbon Street, full of life even at an early hour. I turned down a street toward the noise. It looked residential, mostly row houses, but there was a neon sign hanging above the door of one of them – a palm outlined in hot pink. I was drawn to it, as if a character hypnotized in a cartoon. I drifted over and examined it. Beneath the flaming pink hand, which looked as if it were raised to take an oath, hung a separate wooden sign:

Eldora
Psychic Tarot Palms

Without even thinking about it I walked up the three porch steps and knocked on the door. And then, when no one answered, pushed the door open and entered. It was as if I was under a spell. I felt as if Eldora would tell me what to do, absolve me, relieve me of my burdens.
I had expected the room to be dark, lit by flickering candles or a lone purple bulb, incense burning in the corner, undulating newwave music drifting from unseen speakers. But instead it was like walking into a regular living room – maybe a rental house in Florida. The walls were painted peach, and the furniture, a puffy couch and round coffee table, was white. On the wall behind the couch hung a pastel painting of two wooden beach chairs facing the ocean. Past the living room was a small dining room with a circular table, also white, with a napkin holder on it stuffed to the brim with an arrangement of paper napkins. There was a paper plate with half a sandwich on it, an open bag of Wise potato chips, and an old aluminum measuring cup being used as a water glass. The only oddity in the room was a painting just inside the door. I recognized it as an El Greco print, though one I hadn’t seen before. It pictured the head and shoulders of a fat friar with a smug expression. His skin was tinged with green. I leaned in for a closer look and saw that the line between his lips was painted with a single brush dipped in vermillion, the color so bright it was almost fluorescent. He looked as if he had just drunk a cup of blood.
An old woman appeared from the back room, wearing a burgundy sweatsuit and white sneakers. Her sweatshirt was tight and I could see the outline of her breasts, which flopped to either side, and hung as low as her navel. She wore black cat glasses, not the type that had made an ironic resurgence as of late, but their predecessor from the sixties. The tops of the frames were fitted with small rhinestones, about half of which had fallen out.
“Come in, come in,” she said. “Come on the hell in. What can I help you with?”
“I was looking for Eldora,” I said.
“Well, you found her.” She put her hands on her hips, a bit defiantly. She was probably tired of people’s disappointment. Anyone walking through a strange door in search of a mystic would be surprised to encounter what looked like their fifth-grade gym teacher. People wanted a wild-haired woman in a flowing kaftan, maybe wearing a turban with a jewel at its center. We wanted a little mystery, a little bullshit.
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I guess I’m just interested in, like, a general outline of my future. Whether I’ll be okay. Also it would be helpful to know where my car is. I’m kind of lost.”
She was looking at me quizzically, with her head tilted, like the RCA dog listening to his master’s voice. “I can probably help you,” she said. “I work through a combination of palms and cards. I can do both readings for twenty.”
“Okay,” I said. I tried to make some calculations. I had only brought one hundred dollars for the entire trip, had spent forty on the road, and still needed maybe forty dollars in gas to get back home. I wouldn’t be able to eat. I pictured myself stealing a candy bar off a display while I paid for gas. I sat down at the table.
“Ask the cards a question,” Eldora said. She had a strong New Jersey accent which made it sound like we were going to shake down this deck of cards for its milk money. We were going to make it squeal.
“Like, what kind of question?” I asked.
“Ask it what you want to know. But don’t say it out loud.” She pointed her finger at me, for emphasis. “Ask it something you’ve always wanted to know about yourself, in the privacy of your heart.”
I floated the question that had been bothering me all year, whether I should go quietly along the path my father had imagined for me, or run away. After the previous night, I pretty much knew the answer – I knew this wasn’t the life for me – but I also thought of giving in to law school as letting go of Jude forever. I guess I was still holding out a bit of hope.
Eldora was swirling the cards around on the table, moving them over and under and across each other. Then she scooped them up and dealt three in front of me. “Past, present, future,” she said, as she set them down. One was a skeleton, one was a figure wearing a dark cloak, one was a man splayed on the ground with swords stuck in his back.
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t like this,” she said.
“What does it mean?” I asked.
“Let’s have a look at your palm.”
“Oh,” I said. “It’s like, that bad?”
“Sometimes we have to leave the cards. They’re not in the mood to be helpful.” She ran her hand over them and swept them up like a Vegas dealer, tapped them on the table, set them down in a pile.
She held out her hand and I placed mine in it. Her face twisted. She asked for my other hand.
“This isn’t giving me much to work with, either,” she said. “You have some abnormalities.”
“My mother was a nun,” I said. I’d always thought that my mother wasn’t really meant to have children, that it went against some fundamental law of nature. And that, as a result, I wasn’t fully formed.
“Well,” Eldora said, “maybe that’s the problem.”
It felt good to hear this.
“Look,” she said. “I don’t usually offer this, but I also have some natural perceptive abilities that don’t fall into any category with a name I’m aware of. ESP is what people usually call it, but I think of it more like being able to look into a person’s soul. I don’t offer it to everybody, but I could probably do it for you. It involves, well, we have to clasp arms and look each other in the eye for a full three minutes.”
Jesus.
“Some people find it uncomfortable,” she added. “But if you get through it, I can tell you anything you want to know about your soul. I can’t see any particulars, like what kind of house you’re going to live in, what job, or anything like that. But I can tell you how it will go with your soul.”
“Okay,” I said. It felt strange to hear someone from New Jersey talk about the soul. I only ever talked to people from New Jersey when I pulled over on the turnpike for gas, or a hot dog.Then the weird part started.
We bent our heads together. She pushed up her sleeves and placed her forearms on the table, palms up, and said for me to place my forearms on top of hers. “Grab my arm just below the elbow,” she said. “And I’ll grab yours.” Her flesh was loose and slid around when I took hold of it. I’d never touched a person that old before.
“Now lean forward,” she said. “We have to press our heads together.”
I did.
“And we have to look at each other,” she reminded me. I had been looking down.
“Okay,” I said. It took everything I had to look her in the eye, but I did. Her eyes were a pale gray color. A red vein had burst in one of her eyeballs and left behind a crazy squiggle.
That three minutes, I can hardly tell you about. I had never looked another person in the eye for that length of time and after about five seconds, I felt myself melting like the witch in The Wizard of Oz, a witch who was otherwise powerful but had a weakness so ordinary something as simple as water caused her to steam and dissolve. The feeling of being seen by another person filled me with shame. It really was as if she could look into my soul, which I knew was defective, because I had not cultivated anything there. I was a person who seemed whole from the outside, but I had no inner resources to speak of. I could memorize facts but couldn’t generate any ideas of my own; I could complete assignments but not conceive of a project; I could smile in a photograph but couldn’t feel joy in my heart; I could recite a prayer without feeling any devotion or sense of hope; I could read a book but not develop any attachment to its characters; I had never cried watching a movie or commercial, never suffered from longing. I had to read other people’s diaries and mail to figure out what kinds of things people worried about and hoped for. I was a blank slate, basically. The only person who had ever stirred any feeling in me was Jude, but it was more of a borrowed feeling than one I had developed on my own. Jude’s feelings were so intense – he desired the world and all of its offerings, all of it, all the time. He wanted to see everything, eat and drink and smell and fuck everything, and a person couldn’t help, standing next to him, to pick up some of that charge. That’s why I had always wanted to be near him, but also why when I was near him, I couldn’t really keep up, couldn’t understand what he was pursuing or why. I was afraid Eldora could see all of this, and cast a terrible judgment on me. I wanted to get away from her, especially her breath, which smelled of loamy soil, but I also wanted to know what my future held. By the last few seconds, I thought I was going to fly apart. I was trembling.
Finally she let go, stared at the table for a moment. She took a deep breath and pushed it out through her mouth. “I’ve only ever seen this once before in all my years,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I could tell it was bad news. “Am I like, going to die soon?”
“No,” she said, matter-of-factly. “It’s not that. You’ll live a long life.”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s just that, usually what I see are lots of paths, and as I go along into the future there are lots of branches off of those paths, and some of them light up and move forward, and the others grow dark and shrivel away.”
She paused. It was like she was trying to think of the most diplomatic way of explaining what she’d seen.
“With you,” she said, “there’s not a lot of paths, and it doesn’t matter which one you take, because none of them are lit up.” In the near future, she went on to explain, something bad would happen that would snuff out all the lights. My life from there would be a long, dark corridor of existence, with nothing animated, nothing treasured to speak of, no art, no music, no life, no love, nothing but work. “There’s maybe a spark here and there,” she said. “But none of them take to flame. I’m sorry. That’s just what I see.”
When she finished delivering my fate I nodded, got up to leave. I hoped I was projecting an air of bravery, like someone nobly accepting a brutal diagnosis from an oncologist.
“Wait,” she said. “Wait.” She unzipped her fanny pack and pulled out the twenty I had given her earlier. I was stunned. “Go ahead and take this back.”
“It’s okay,” I said. I waved it away. I felt like she’d confirmed something I’d always suspected, and it was a relief to know it. She had provided a valuable service.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want it. I hate to see a future like that. It doesn’t please me, I assure you, to see something like that.”
Now my problem was that if I took the money, I would be a person whose soul was so wretched he had been given a refund by the person who had stared into it. “It’s okay,” I said. But she stood and pressed the bill back into my hand. She really didn’t want it. A person who took money from people who wandered in off the street didn’t want my money. “Keep it,” she said. “You’ll need it.” She wanted rid of me. I was fouling her space.
I was crossing the threshold when she called after me. “And your car,” she said, pointing down the road. “I believe if you take a left at the next intersection, it’s just a block up from there.”
A minute down the road I realized I had left the baby doll behind and felt crushed. I thought about going back for her but decided she was probably better off – maybe Eldora’s next client would pick her up and give her a better home than I could. As for Eldora, I tried to dismiss her, thinking of all the ways I could discredit what she’d just told me. Eldora was nothing more than a lunatic in a burgundy jumpsuit, I told myself. She probably wasn’t even a medium. She was maybe the cleaning lady playing a joke, or Eldora’s older sister, in town for the week and in the mood to play a prank. She hadn’t read my cards because she didn’t know what they meant. The ritual with the staring, that was just a load of bullshit she’d invented on the spot. She was wrong about everything.
But then I caught sight of the car, which was exactly where she said it would be, and I had to admit Eldora might have known what she was talking about. The car’s profile was unmistakable. I could tell even when it was fresh off the assembly line it had looked defective, something about the angle at which the roof sloped down into the trunk reminding me of a hunchback. When I got closer I saw that the back window of the Chevy had been smashed. And even though I’d been predicting this very thing for years, when it came down to it, I couldn’t believe it had happened. My father had taken good care of that car. He had saved for it and then cared for it, just so that he could pass it down to me so I could ruin it. I ruined everything.
I didn’t even try to clean out the car – I just left the broken glass scattered across the back seat. I cranked the engine and it started up, which surprised me. I felt my way back toward the highway, then onto it, and never saw New Orleans again, except on the news a decade later after the levees broke, and the neighborhoods I’d walked through were flooded with water, and people were standing on their rooftops waving flags, hoping to be saved, and it was well and truly hell on earth.

When I arrived back at my room Schmidt was lying in bed with Weezy. He was the only brother who had stayed in the house over break and was probably feeling sorry for himself because he never had the money to do the things everyone else did without thinking twice.
He sat up and wiped his eyes – he had been crying. “Here,” he said, and handed Weezy over, but I was so angry at Jude for leaving me, for the mess he’d made of his life, I waved Schmidt off. “Keep her,” I said. I was stunned by what Eldora had told me and didn’t want to drag Weezy with me into the future. At least with Schmidt, she might do some good.
“Really?” he asked.
“I don’t think I can take care of her,” I said. “I have too much to catch up on and I need to focus. I don’t think I can give her the kind of home she deserves.”
“I can,” he said. “I absolutely will.”
“I know you will,” I said. “That’s the only reason I’m giving her to you.”
I never touched Weezy again, even though Schmidt started leaving her out on top of his bed and it would have been easy to pick her up and smell her fur. After graduation I drove Schmidt and all his worldly belongings to the Greyhound station so he could catch his bus up to Yale, where he had secured a summer job working at the university gym. The last glimpse I caught of him was in my rearview. He was standing in the parking lot, surrounded by bags, his hands clasping the straps of his backpack. Weezy was inside it, I knew, and he would probably prop her up against one of the bus windows and rest his head on her all the way to New Haven. I felt a pang of regret, but brushed it away.
I didn’t see Schmidt again for a long time, and when I finally did, we were both middle-aged, and he was on the news. He was running for senator in the state of West Virginia and had made national headlines with one of his campaign ads, in which he was pictured hunting in the West Virginia woods, stopping occasionally to point his rifle at photoshopped images of his opponents. Didn’t this ad cross a line, the reporter wanted to know, didn’t it incite violence at exactly the time people least needed to be encouraged toward political violence? Schmidt looked the same as ever – with his boyish face and upswept wing of dark hair and eager expression. He could hardly wait for the reporter to finish her sentence. “By God, Mandy, I do believe we still live in a free country,” he said. “And as a journalist I know you’re on the side of freedom of expression when it serves you.” He cracked a smile, pleased with himself. “The fact is I’m not worried about this because the good people of West Virginia recognize hypocrisy when they see it, and I just thank God they aren’t quite as dumb as you East Coast media make them out to be, nothing personal there Mandy, I know you’re just doing your job.” Everything he’d worked so hard to rid himself of, the long vowels he’d kept on a short leash up at school, had been let loose and even allowed to proliferate – he sounded like Hank Williams, his phrases drawn out, plaintive and warbling. The news outlet cut to footage of the ad, Schmidt in fatigues and combat boots, traipsing through woods, his rifle over his shoulder. A real dog that looked just like Weezy followed at his heels. A month later, he won the election.

A few weeks after that trip I got a letter from Jude, saying he was on the road again, that things had gotten to be too much in New Orleans. “I had to shake off that waitress,” he wrote. He was heading to Maine, he said, because he’d heard about the kind of seasonal life you could live there in the tourist towns, working in restaurants or hotels all summer, then holing up for the winter in a cabin. He said he’d like to learn how to work on a boat, to spend his days out on the water, hauling up lobsters or maybe even diving for scallops. Then, in winter, he could just drift. Read books. Listen to records. Go for walks in the snowy woods. “There are people who’ll pay you to stay in their summer house through the winter to make sure nothing bad happens to it,” he said. “That seems like the right move for me. I’d like to be by myself for a while. That’s the only way I’ll be able to tell what the right path is.”
Towards the end of the letter he explained that he and the wrestler had gone out for beignets that morning, with the intention of bringing them back to the house for breakfast. “But when we got back, you were gone. I guess I should have left a note. Maybe next time.” He meant we could have beignets at some point in the future, I’m sure, but the way I read it was that he would try to remember to leave a note the next time he left me.
That fall I started law school and threw myself into it. After what had happened in New Orleans, I put away the notions I’d had about leading a different life, and set about the business of turning into my father. I didn’t think too much about it. To my mind, I was just becoming who I was destined to be.
That first semester, on one of the first cold days of the year, the sky covered in fat gray clouds, I arrived home from class and saw a message blinking on my machine. I assumed it was my mother and didn’t play it. Sometimes it took me days to muster the strength to listen to her voice, which managed to convey, even as she left a message of good tidings, a sense of not knowing or even caring in particular who was on the other end of the line – it was as if she was just checking off one of a long list of worldly tasks that dwelled beneath the spiritual realm she preferred to live in. A few days later, the weather having warmed a bit and the sky bright again, I played the message and was surprised to hear a voice I didn’t recognize. It was a woman, a social worker calling from a hospital in Portland. She said she had found my name and old phone number in Jude’s wallet. When my old number failed, the social worker explained, she had taken the extra step of calling information and was given my new number, a series of events that seemed miraculous. She left a number for me to call and when I did, she picked up – another miracle – and told me Jude had overdosed and was in a coma. I had to call my parents. Then make arrangements to miss classes. Then rent a car – the Chevy had finally died – and drive eighteen hours to Portland. By the time I got to the hospital, Jude was dead. My parents had gotten there first, and arranged to take his body back home to Delaware, where they would bury him in the Catholic cemetery – the last place on earth he would have chosen to rest.
This was just the start of what indeed turned out to be a long, dark corridor of time. After Jude’s funeral, about which I remember almost nothing, I busied myself every moment with my studies, and my work at the law review and at legal aid – which I performed not so much because I wanted to help people, but because it would help me land one of the better clerk positions I’d need in order to succeed in my field. I graduated from law school and, even though I had offers at other firms, took a job working with my father and his partners in Philadelphia. Nine months later, as if he had just been waiting for me to replace him, as if he’d been holding up a beam and now that someone else could bear the weight, he could surrender it, my father died one Saturday morning at his desk. I moved in with my mother for a while to help her manage her affairs, and to ease the panic she felt now that she was alone. It turned out she didn’t know how to do anything. She had never written a check except to the grocery store, and didn’t know how to pump her own gas. She knew nothing about insurance, taxes, utility bills. She’d spent all of her time volunteering at the church, running the food pantry and the women’s group, teaching Sunday school. These were the things she knew how to do. But about the management of her own life, she didn’t know a single goddamned thing. She was like a child.
By the time my lease expired on my apartment in the city, I was entrenched in my mother’s household, and decided to keep living there for a while. The life I’d imagined I’d have in the city had never materialized anyway, mostly because I worked eighty hours a week at the firm. I didn’t have any friends, just colleagues and clients, most of whom were criminals and long-time associates of my father. My work always seemed urgent, like I was striving to save a life, or multiple lives. I defended the man who’d orchestrated the entire concept of payday loans with insanely punitive fine print. With the money he’d made he had established a family in a lavish lifestyle, but now he was on the hook to be sent to prison. He wouldn’t be there to raise his children, and his family would be impoverished. Someone had to do something, and that someone was me. This was just one example. There were dozens more, and they were all pretty much the same. My clients had lived their lives recklessly and were facing the consequences; I had lived mine carefully and was sacrificing it in order to save theirs.
One evening I arrived home to find my mother had cooked a formal meal – meatloaf and mashed potatoes, a loaf of bread, even a bottle of wine – which was unusual. Over dinner she told me that she had been praying for a while and had concluded that the best use of her life would be to relocate to a small convent near Pittsburgh, which was in need of a cook and caretaker. My mother had corresponded with them and had arranged to live in the convent, preparing meals for its sisters and cleaning its rooms. In exchange she would be given a small room and a modest weekly salary. She didn’t want to sell the house, as she expected to come back to it someday. She wanted me to continue living in it, she said, to keep our family home alive, though I would be, it would seem, its only remaining member. I resolved then and there to leave. But after my mother left, I was busy as always with work, and it started to seem like a ridiculous expense to maintain a home that no one was living in, not to mention the expensive outlay of time it would cost me to move again, which I couldn’t afford. I didn’t mind the house so much when I was alone in it. So I stayed. For a while I imagined it was temporary, but at some point I stopped thinking about what I would do next, and gave into it.
Then I was a man in his late twenties living in a suburb meant for family men. Usually when I wound through the neighborhood streets on my way home from work, kids were out playing football and soccer in the last light, and when they moved to the side of the road to let me pass, they cast wary and sometimes hateful looks my way. I drove a maroon Buick sedan, my father’s old car, and must have looked like a warning to them, a terrible vision of the future.
For the first year or so I slept in my old room, hardly altered from the years of my former occupancy, but eventually I moved to my parents’ bedroom, wanting to stretch out in a bigger bed, though there were problems – their mattress was so old and soft my back ached in the mornings, and the only bedcover was so hideous it enraged me every time I saw it. It was something my mother had made in the eighties, from a fabric splattered with large flowers, or rather brushstrokes arranged to suggest flowers, dashes of magenta and navy blue, with teal accents. It looked like the art hung in motel rooms, what Monet would have come up with if he’d set up his easel in an American mall in the 1980s, instead of a French garden in the 1880s. I hated it but couldn’t get rid of it. My mother was going to move back someday, she kept saying, and would expect to be greeted by the exact life she’d left behind.
Years passed.
When I was younger I had always marveled at the stunningly boring regularity of my father’s existence. Monday through Saturday, he got up early and went to the office, the only difference being that on Saturdays he didn’t wear a necktie. In the evenings he came home, had a Miller Lite, ate his dinner, then disappeared for a while in the family room, looking at papers. On Sunday morning he was back in a necktie for church, after which he crammed in all of the yardwork and other home and automobile maintenance that needed to be done. In this way he accounted for every waking hour of his life. You wouldn’t think a person could endure this for long – surely he must have harbored buried longings that would eventually claw their way to the surface – but my father lived like this for decades, never wavering, eventually wearing a groove in his days so deep he fell into it and died. He looked like a normal human being. In fact you could say he was an above average specimen, successful and handsome – he really did resemble that shirt model. But eventually you realized that something was wrong with him, deeply wrong. I suppose you could say he lacked a soul.
Now I seemed to be on the same path.
It was only very occasionally that I felt a flicker, a spark of interest in something other than the work in front of me. I’d try to keep it alive, try to build on it. Every now and then, when a funny mood came over me, I’d steal into Jude’s old room and sit cross-legged on the floor in front of his record player, like we used to. One time I found the 45 of “Try Me” that had played in the restaurant and listened to that, then flipped it over and played “Tell Me What I Did Wrong.” It was more upbeat than the A side, and I enjoyed it for a moment, but then the thought of Jude sitting and listening to it seized me, and my chest ached, and I had to leave the room. I could never hold on to any kind of feeling for long. I felt like if I didn’t go back to my work, my heart would explode.
I realize now I could have done any number of things differently. I could have bought a new mattress and bedspread, at least. I could have moved out. I could have quit my job. I could have tried to meet people. Occasionally someone set me up on a date and it would go well enough; I could have kept going out with any one of those women, but when I tried to imagine the future all I saw was the two of us repeating the lives my parents had led. She would be busy raising children, and I would be busy at work. We would produce another round of my own family and then I’d die at my desk. I felt like I already knew everything that would happen. What was the point?
My thirties went by, and then I was in my forties, the whole time buoyed along by my obligations at the firm, which only worsened when I made partner. By the time Covid arrived, which represented the first break in my routine I’d experienced in twenty years, I was forty-five years old.
Those first few weeks, the firm was in lockdown and everyone was working from home. I tried to keep up the same routine, but I soon figured out that during my meetings with judges and clients and the other partners on Zoom, I could get away with wearing a suit jacket and tie with sweatpants underneath. This was the first bit of loosening, and things kept unravelling from there. I had a beer one day at lunch and then kept drinking in the afternoon, which made the work go by faster, so I did it again the next day, and the next. One evening, more drunk than usual, I saw a news story on the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was suddenly relevant again in that it was giving us a sense of how these plagues operated, swelling and receding in waves, until everyone had either developed immunity or died. The news showed photo after photo of the wards that patients had been kept in then – big, open rooms lined with beds – and that’s when my trip to New Orleans came back to me. I remembered the wrestler and looked him up online. Dozens of news articles sprang up from 2012, when he’d been convicted of murdering his former wife, who I immediately recognized as Vampirina. She had been working as a cashier in a grocery store in Biloxi and he’d waited outside one night in the parking lot, security footage showed, then beckoned her to his car as she walked to hers. She’d entered willingly, and they’d sat there for a long time. Then the wrestler had driven away, straight to the police station, where he turned himself in. He had strangled her in the car in a fit of passion. It was an accident, he insisted, when he entered his plea. He was only trying to keep her from leaving. He had only wanted to talk.
I thought about the wrestler for the next several days, read every article I could find about his arrest and trial. He looked truly wretched in his mug shot. His eyes were swollen from crying, his mouth was open. He looked like the saddest man who ever lived.
I looked up his correctional facility and his inmate number, knowing that I was inching down a dangerous road. It was a stupid idea for a criminal defense attorney to contact an incarcerated felon – he would probably consider me a lifeline, try to rope me into a lengthy appeals process. Or if not that, he’d tell his fellow inmates about me, and they’d start writing to me. Then, when I declined to help them, they’d bide their time in jail and come to rob and kill me upon their release – this is what happened to the Clutter family from In Cold Blood. Still, I hadn’t done anything interesting in a long time, and hadn’t felt a connection to Jude in years, so I couldn’t help myself from pursuing it. One afternoon, after I’d had a few Miller Lites, I wrote a short letter and walked to the post office and dropped the letter in a mailbox. I tried to forget about it, but couldn’t. A few weeks passed. Then one day when I went in to the office to pick up my mail, I saw an envelope stamped with the tell-tale markings of a correctional facility. This wasn’t the first time I received a letter from prison – far from it – but this one was from Mississippi. It was from the wrestler.
The wrestler had sent a long tome, written on plain white paper in blue pen. The first few pages were about Jude, how much he’d loved him, how devastated he was when he heard Jude had died. It had sent him into a long depression, he said, the first real depression of his life. Then, perhaps because he had nothing else to do, he wrote out the entire history of his life.
His real name was Euguene Delacroix, he wrote, and he’d grown up outside of Innsbruck, Austria, where he’d led a relatively normal life, until in his late teens it became evident that rather than leveling off, he was still growing. It became impossible for him to wear regular clothing or to keep himself full on what his mother considered to be a reasonable amount of food. In what sounded like nothing more than an attempt to feed himself, Eugene joined the army, where he languished for four years as a vehicle mechanic. Overall the army wasn’t to his liking, and he regretted joining from the first moment, but it was in the army he first started boxing, then wrestling. He wasn’t necessarily skilled or agile, but he soon learned that his size put him at an advantage over any opponent. By this time, he was over seven feet tall. He became known and feared for picking up other soldiers and lifting them over his head, then dropping them back onto the mat. When he left the army he presented himself to the local wrestling ring in Innsbruck, where he was taken up by trainers and promoters and made into Gene the Giant. In his early promotional materials he was pictured clad in a leopard-print loin cloth and carrying a club. Because he could pick up any other wrestler and throw him to the mat, no one on the European circuit could beat him. They started loaning him out for appearances to other circuits, and he eventually made his way to the States. He wrestled Randy Savage, a young Hulk Hogan. He picked them both up and dropped them.
Later, because of the rising success of Andre the Giant, they changed his identity to The Vampire, and he started appearing in promotional posters with fanged teeth, wearing a silky black cape. This didn’t really make sense, he wrote, as vampires were usually pale and thin, with elongated limbs and fingers, and practiced a sort of cold calculation on their victims instead of the raging outbursts common in the ring, but these things didn’t really matter in wrestling promotion. It was out on the circuit, traveling through the south, where he’d met Justine, one of the few female wrestlers trying to make a name for herself. They’d fallen in love and she’d taken on the persona of Vampirina. They became a minor sensation. The promotional poster I’d seen was from the height of their fame.
The wrestler kept growing. The size that had initially given him an advantage over any other wrestler eventually became a burden. His joints ached constantly, and the discs in his back kept bursting out into his spinal column. There was a whole season where he could barely walk. During his final season he was made part of Vampirina’s matches. Whenever Vampirina was losing, The Vampire would slip under the ropes and attack her opponent from behind, picking them up and then dropping them on the mat. He became a villain, a heel. In his final matches, the very same people who had loved him booed him out of the ring. By then Vampirina had left the wrestler in real life, and playing out their love story was agony. In the ring, she looked at him with the same adoration he was used to, and it threw him. At first he thought she was able to manufacture these looks because she still loved him. Then he wondered if she ever had, if it had been fake the whole time. He couldn’t tell what was an act and what was real.
He had written all of this on blank sheets of paper, and his lines, which started out straight, gradually sloped downward. His penmanship bore the marks of a bad tremor. “In any form of entertainment,” he wrote, “everything that makes it to the top was probably stolen from someone at the bottom. The people at the bottom never get their due. You’d think they’d be mad, but what ends up happening is that they take a certain pride in it. All those years watching Randy and Elizabeth on the big screen I got to say: That was my idea. I did it first.”
I wrote back a single page, asking the wrestler if he needed anything, and also asking if he would tell me anything about Jude I might not know. “I remember the story you told about being out on that lake,” I wrote. “Anything like that, I’d appreciate. I’d particularly like to know why he left New Orleans. And if you know what happened with that girlfriend.”
I suppose this was what I was really after when I first wrote to him. A lifeline, a link to Jude. A path I might pursue. Something to track down. But the wrestler didn’t know anything. He wrote back that the girlfriend had left town after that night, had gone back to live with her mother, and he’d never seen her again, never found out what happened. He couldn’t even remember her name.
We continued to write to each other for months, and I came to find the wrestler’s letters to be a pleasant distraction. I never asked him about the crime he’d committed but in his final letter, he confessed that he spent most of his days thinking about his wife, playing out scenes between them, and imagining what might have happened between them if he had been able to win her back. His handwriting was particularly bad in this letter, each letter so shakily drawn I imagined it must have taken him a whole minute to form.
“In my retirement years, I used to drive over to Biloxi once a week or so,” he wrote. “I had heard from old friends she was living a quiet life, taking care of her mother, and working in a grocery store. I’d sit in my car in the dark parking lot so I could watch her work. It was like watching a movie, with the store all lit up in bright yellow lights and me sitting in the dark. I could see her talking with people, laughing. I just wanted to look at her. I learned her schedule, and started driving up more and more. I’d watch her walk to her car, and make sure she was safe. All that time I was trying to build up the courage to talk to her. Then one night, I hadn’t even really planned for it, I didn’t have a speech ready, or flowers, which was how I’d always imagined it, but for some reason I just found myself getting out of my car and approaching her. She didn’t run off. She looked maybe happy to see me.”
He went on to say that they talked for a while in his car, but after that, he didn’t remember. “I wish I could. They say I strangled her. I know it doesn’t make any difference but what I want people to know is that I loved her. I never had anything but love for her. I don’t remember but I know this, even as I killed her, I loved her.”
After that he stopped writing. Three months went by without a word. The thing about corresponding with prisoners was, they always wrote back – there was really only one thing that prevented them. I had a bad feeling. I looked him up and saw that he had died in March, almost 25 years to the day I’d first met him. In his obituary, his career as a wrestler was mentioned, but only as a footnote to the fact that he was incarcerated for murder.
I went back to my routine. The spark I’d been following had led me along for a while, then gone out.
Some weeks later, I received another piece of news in the mail, sent by my mother. It was a copy of a brief article that had been printed from the website of a small newspaper in New Jersey. It was a short column about a seventy-one-year-old Trenton woman who, for unknown reasons, had walked out into the woods behind her apartment building with a can of gas, then doused herself and lit a match. Her remains were so badly damaged she couldn’t be identified until the police launched an investigation. It was Ruth. The picture they ran was from an old license photo, taken a few years prior. She had aged badly. She still wore her hair long and parted down the center, but her face was haggard, hatched with deep lines. Her eyes were heavily lined in black pencil, and had none of the animated light I’d seen in her other photo. She looked like someone who had been following The Grateful Dead for an unhappy eternity. At the time of her death, she was working at Walmart.
My mother had included a note describing how, for the second time in her life, she had received a call at a convent about her sister, about something terrible her sister had done, only this time there was nothing to be salvaged. There was nothing my mother could do to make this whole in the eyes of God. We must pray for her soul, she concluded.
The next time my mother called I went after her before she could 158 cycle through her usual questions about my work and the house. “Why did you send me that?” I asked. “Why the hell did you send that to me?”
“Oh,” she said, and paused. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“No,” I said. More forcefully than I’d ever spoken to her before.
“No, I did not.” By that time, I was more like her parent than child. I usually extended her patience, but not now.
“Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t know why you would send that to me,” I said again. My mother had probably expected to be consoled, but instead I was angry with her. I’d lost Jude, my father was gone, she’d disappeared herself into a convent – and now she had sent word that our last remaining family member had gone up in flames. It was too much. The worst of it was that my mother had scrupulously maintained her innocence all these years, as if none of this was her fault – she was just a poor soul on whom misfortune was visited. But by that time I had realized she could have intervened. She could have compromised her beliefs a little here and there to indulge us – not even with gifts, but with love, affection. She could have hung pictures of us on the walls or carried them in her wallet. She could have allowed us things our father didn’t allow, on occasion, since he was never home anyway. She could have defended Jude all the times our father came down on him. She could have prevented him from being sent away to that camp, which really was the beginning of the end of things. She could have sought him out after he left home and lured him back, at least to visit. She could have sought out her sister and introduced Jude to her. She could have done many things other than what she chose to do, which was pray, which was nothing. It occurred to me suddenly that I hated her, had hated her for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Well, you weren’t,” I said. I hung up the phone. She sent a letter the following week, mentioning at the end her regret at causing me pain, and we never spoke of it again.
After this, I started thinking more about the waitress. I had thought of her occasionally in the twenty-odd years that had passed since that night in New Orleans, though never with any determination or consistency. I’d always assumed she’d gotten an abortion, as she said she would. But in the wake of Ruth’s death, and the wrestler’s, when there was no connection left to Jude on God’s green earth, as my mother would have called it, I began to think, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she’d had a child and raised him – I thought of the child as a boy. He would be in his twenties now, perhaps just developing a curiosity about his father. Maybe the waitress would remember my name and they would look me up. Maybe one day there would come a knock at the door. The idea took hold of me. The waitress and her son came to seem like the only possible solution to the problem of my life, the only means by which the terrible curse Eldora had cast on me – for this was how I thought of it now, that she had cursed me, rather than simply read my fate – might be lifted.
Now I am simply waiting. It is uncomfortable, wanting something that might not even exist, holding out for its arrival, every day wondering if it might happen this day. What I am living in, I reluctantly admit, is a state of faith, something I have never experienced before and never wanted anything to do with. I have always considered faith to be a surrender of control, a desperate, impotent, last-ditch move. I am angry to have been delivered here. I want rid of this state of affairs, but it is all I have. I sometimes wonder if this is how my parents spent their lives, if this is what they felt when they bent their heads in church, and prayed on their knees at night. Was this what they were asking for – to be given another chance, to be afforded some kind of grace, to be transformed?
I would like to be redeemed. But the worst of it is, I know that if the waitress and her son ever do arrive to redeem me, I won’t deserve it. It would be more fitting if I were judged for my failings, and left to suffer. I had thought so little of the waitress – the desperate spectacle of her appearance, how she clung to Jude, how territorial she was, how petty. How she always kept her mouth open, either because she was trying to be seductive, or because she was confused. I had judged her so harshly, treated her so badly. Jude treated her so badly. I wonder now how life could have played such an elaborate trick, placing all of its potential meaning and treasure in the hands of a person I had considered so insignificant, and dismissed. Could it be that all this time, the waitress had been the mother of Jude’s child, the last remaining link to him? Could it be that she had created and cared for the only thing I might have left to value in this life? If so, I couldn’t think of a single reason she would bother to contact me. That night in New Orleans, which might well have been a test for all I know, I failed to offer the waitress the basic kindness I extended to every other human being I’d ever met, even strangers. I never thought to ask her where she came from, what she was interested in, what she hoped to accomplish with her life. I never asked her if she wanted to be a mother, or offered help. I never rose to wish her goodbye. I let her wander off in the night down a dark road, in a dangerous city, alone. I never even asked her name.

---

Christie Hodgen is the author of four books of fiction: A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Hello, I Must Be Going (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006); Elegies for the Brokenhearted (W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); and Boy Meets Girl (New Issues, 2022). She has published short stories and essays in Ploughshares, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

POEMS

THE FABULOUS SZIGETIS by Ira Sadoff

The Fabulous Szigetis play the violin for a living. In every great city, on every boulevard that sidles up to great rivers, in cities with thriving markets of fruits and flowers, in tiny wine shops where obscure Dolcetto d’Albas are savored, you won’t find a single Szigeti. The Szigetis lock themselves in their hotel rooms to practice a Stravinsky melody, if you can call it a melody. You could say they are blessed with a calling, a mission. Oh yes, they are driven, as we sometimes wish we were driven. And their music is so metrical, uplifting, transcendent, it crowds out your dark thoughts, the crudest of your desires, your many shaggy disappointments.

Some might find an entire family playing violins exotic, ethereal, distressing. And we can imagine what disdain discarded Szigetis must suffer. The untalented Szigeti, the rebellious Szigeti, the disabled Szigeti, Szigetis who ring doorbells as Seventh-day Adventists. And the shame for any one of them if a wrong note is played, for then they must proceed as if their performance still had its halo around it.

They might remind a few of Josef Szigeti, the patriarch who fiddled through the last century. But these Szigetis have no ancestors, no attachments: they don’t come from Budapest, they never knew Bartok, they never coughed up blood in a Swiss sanitarium. No Nazis ever chased them to southern California. No, these Szigetis serve no god, savor no recollections: they are unscathed and unwearied.

Whereas we of the laundromat and stacks of paper work, we who open our hearts so foolishly and so often, who are surrounded by car horns, children shrieking, and a few pecking sparrows under the park bench, we who only dream of becoming Szigetis, wouldn’t we miss stumbling upon a blooming amaryllis in a neighbor’s window, attending the funeral of our beloved uncle Phil, falling in love with the wrong person?

---

Ira Sadoff is the author of the novel Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1982), many uncollected stories, and eight collections of poems, most recently Country Living (Alice James, 2020). His poems have appeared widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, Field, The Paris Review, Iowa Review, and American Poetry Review.

RIVER IS ANOTHER WORD FOR PRAYER by Triin Paja

a lynx’s underbelly grows ragged
crossing a field at dawn
when the flora is quarter dew

and wild strawberries grow
where a forest was cut,
as if the earth wants to comfort us.

light falls on hay bales.
I want to look at the light and not speak.

now a line of geese sails above,
known only by sound
for they are so far,
small like eyelashes taken from death.

the river is one field away.

I ask you, as from a beloved,
to come to the river, a place that does not need
to be protected from you,

for you are a beloved
and the river is another word for prayer.
I want us to look at the river and not speak.

now the cranes howl, widening the sky,
and the moon, a simple egg,
lowers into an empty stork nest.

there is no visible cup of life to drink from –
there are wings, wings.

---

Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a chapbook in English, Sleeping in a Field (Wolfson Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Thrush, Rattle, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

PRIMORDIAL by Charlotte Pence

Your first memory is of water
colors. A failed painting.
The red couldn’t be stopped.
The yellow wanted
the blue. And the water
softened the paper into
a hole.
You learned early:
There is never a single cause
for why things go wrong.
Why wouldn’t you fear
the thunder, the night,
the ocean?
After all, a tiny mosquito
is deadlier than a great white.
There exists a jellyfish
that is also a box
and more painful than fangs.
The ways of ruin are everywhere.
When a breakage occurs – a dam
or levee – you notice
how the water,
once contained and named
into assured shapes onto maps,
becomes nameless, amorphous
as it grows. Becomes multiple
names of who it killed. How many.
You cannot paint this,
then or now, so you swirl the water
a hurricane brown. No pure color.
No single cause.
There is, though,
your first memory, fat
as the paintbrush, wanting to be
dipped into the pan of dried color,
ready for transfiguration.

---

Charlotte Pence is the author of two collections of poems from Black Lawrence Press, Many Small Fires (2015) and Code (2020), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Harvard Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry.

LUNA by John Bargowski

In his room looking up
the names of bugs we’d collected
with our long-handled net
in the fields along Ravine Road,
my friend told me about a sister
he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
We’d caught a jar full that day,
all still alive, trying to climb
the glass sides, or flapping wings
against the hole-punched lid
for more air and light as we flipped
through his field guide.
She lived with a bunch of other kids
in a hospital on an island
they crossed a bridge to get to
on Sundays, he whispered, and once,
as they walked through the gate
back to their car he saw
something he’d never seen before
under a floodlight clinging
to the brick wall that surrounded
the grounds, a beauty he wanted
to bring home to show me,
with long pale wings
tinted the color of moonlight
and a fringe of gold powder
that rubbed off onto his palms
when he cupped his hands
and tried to capture it
before it flew away.

---

John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighere, 2012) and American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares.

THE ROUTINE by Michael Mark

I lift what’s left
of the bantam weight champ.
Air Corps, Korea, 1949. Once

from the kitchen linoleum, once
slumping off the couch next to me – once
eyes closed holding the bath towel bar
while the glaucoma drops sink in.

Champ, I call him, and he says,
Of what? and I say, Falling
and he says, Undefeated.

It’s a routine.

Sometimes, when I get him somewhat
steady, we dance. Make light
of his uncharted dips, sags, collapses –

his 96-pound body obeying
malicious gravity.
I am flying back home.

Tomorrow.
Early.
He knows

he can’t come. You wouldn’t want me to,
he said once, when I asked. I didn’t fight.
He can still spot a weak feint. I sweep

his floors, vacuum the carpet’s don’t-ask
where-those-came-from stains, dry
and stack the dishes, dust, leave.

They’ll just keep knocking me down
anyway, he’ll say out of nowhere, reliving
the bouts, each round, blow

after blow. The numbing. His heart
shouting, No! Stay on your feet!
somewhere between falling and dreaming.

---

Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet (The Rattle Foundation, 2022). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily.

A THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY by Owen McLeod

It’s been one year since my mother
was uploaded to the cloud. According
to John Locke, we’re not material bodies
or immaterial souls, but unified streams
of consciousness, which would also mean
I didn’t actually get a new phone last week
if my phone isn’t a physical object but a set
of photos, videos, texts, songs, and apps
that simply migrated to this new device –
sort of like Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
If we preserve her data, maybe my mother
can migrate to a new device. My father
still charges her phone once a week. She
was attached to that phone, particularly
toward the end when she couldn’t garden,
needlepoint, do crossword puzzles, walk,
or speak – but she could text, more or less,
even if it was a just a handful of basic emojis.
Mostly smileys and hearts, but at some point
she shifted to praying hands only. We knew
what she was saying: I want to be uploaded.
Hospice came in, took care of all that,
and her body went out in a bag. My new
device takes amazing pics. I shot some
this morning while walking in the woods
and sent them to my mother’s phone.
She loved walking in the woods, especially
in the snow, so I used an app that adds
realistic-looking snowfall to pics. I’m not
a fool. I know the little hearts attached
to those pics are from my dad. I know
my mother is never coming back.
I just wish it had been real snow.

---

Owen McLeod is author of the poetry collections Dream Kitchen (University of North Texas Press, 2019) and Before After (Saturnalia, 2023). His poems have appeared in Field, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review.

DEPARTMENT STORE ESCALATOR by Jessica Greenbaum

After Szymborska’s “Puddle”

I remember that childhood fear well.

If I stepped on the down escalator

which bowed outward over thin air between floors

to a destination I couldn’t see at my height

and, sadly, would never reach

the moving teeth would casually drop me into space

as it had almost done each time before

while mannequins stood blank-faced in their checked raincoats

a clerk fussed with a clothes rack

gay shoppers passed me rising, looking upward, without a care

this time no different: the tug of my mother’s hand

again, the most shocking.

---

Jessica Greenbaum is the author of three poetry collections: Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998); The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012); and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, Plume, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Poetry.

CARDS by Farah Peterson

It’s all I can do to
keep my peace when

my son announces
he has a good hand I wince

when he lets cards
tip as, well

as carelessly as a child
unschooled

of course I look
I can’t help that

I’m just passing an evening
the way he asked and

don’t I win meekly, with none of that
slapping down hilarity

or even the quiet, cruel collection
with one knuckle snap and a half smile

none of the good old fun that
went with my learning to

keep cards close and
expect dissembling

but the result is, all I have for him
is a muzzled company

and all of the ghosts
they crowd me and crowd me

---

Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Rattle, and Salamander.

LEAP OF FAITH by Richard Spilman

The new age descends like an axe.
There has come a revolution:
rooted things have learned to run,

though the crackling of underbrush
betrays their flight and the blade
descends where the rustling ends.

And you, neither new nor old,
balance at cliff’s edge, future
awash in the whitecaps below.

What lies there may be scree
or rapids or just a soft breech into
the slipstream of the imminent,

but it’s an answer, a way not
so much out as into a now
whose chaos is yours by choice.

You could make your way back,
but to what? Ruin and rubble,
and the stale taste of fear.

Instead, you make a steeple
of your raised hands, tense
and leap. It’s death one way

or another, drowning or rising
to shake your hair and follow
the current wherever it goes.

---

Richard Spilman is the author of the poetry collection In the Night Speaking (Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2009); two chapbooks, Suspension (New American Press, 2006) and Dig (Kelsay Books, 2023); and two story collections, Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990) and The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011).

ALLEGIANCE by Elizabeth Bradfield

Each morning before light, in
season, Billy’s F-150 fires
up, grumbles in his drive,
heads for the pier. I hear it
through the small window above
my bed, and when I’m out,
I watch for him – Billy at the Race,
Billy off the Peaked Hills, Billy steaming
home around the point. Billy. Thick
glasses, accent, hands, wizard
of fiberglass and steam box, torch
and epoxy, whose loft holds all
the tools, any clamp or nail you’d
need, any saw or grinder. Who
coaches us as we fix our skiff in his
garage and doesn’t laugh
in a mean way when we
fuck up. How’s my favorite
whale hugger? calls Billy
as I drive my Prius past his house.
We call him The Boat Fairy. To his face.
He and his wife call us The Girls. We
avoid politics beyond weather
and fish, which we get into
big time, elbows out windows,
idling. We want to make him
a T-shirt, a badge, a sticker
for his truck. We tell him so. Listen:
there are silences between us. We
all know what whispers there. It’s ok
to not speak them here.

---

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of seven books, including Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008); Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019); and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023). She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.

HER SHAME by John Morgan

Mist rolls above the river like a second river
and the piles of snow darken as she drives
toward town and sees an old woman,
dressed in a light vest and no parka, slumped
on the metal railing where the road winds down.

Thinking that the woman might be lost,
maybe senile, she pulls over, opens
the window, and says, “Do you need help?”

But as the woman stands she sees instead
that it’s a man. Short, with shaggy hair
and a stubble beard, he comes to the window
and says, “I’m looking for a ride to town.”

In these rough times it’s her rule
never to pick up strangers, so she says,
“Oh, sorry, I’m not going there just now,”
and pulls away, confused at how
her good intentions went awry,

and at the bottom of the hill
shame overtakes her like a massive truck
looming in the rearview mirror as night comes on.

---

John Morgan is the author of a collection of essays and eight poetry collections, most recently The Hungers of the World: New and Later Collected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Kenyon Review.

NEAR ESTER, ALASKA by Jane Lott

Just under the sternum
there are so many words
for love I discovered
bitter-sweet
in the dictionary
resting on her knee
a solid sense of self
so many words for sea
so many words for bear.
But nowhere a word
for that time
when all that was left of daylight
lay pink and purple across the snow.

---

Jane Lott’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Sonoma Magazine, and in the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.

OBATA AT TENAYA PEAK by Ben Gucciardi

A whole year looking for the mountain
inside the mountain
before he tried to paint it.
And even then,
only when the light
off the granite
was tangible,
and with a brush made of mink
whiskers, the line
so fine it was hardly visible.

---

Ben Gucciardi is the author of West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). He is also the author of the chapbooks I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020) and Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry.

POTTED MAPLES by D.S. Waldman

The moon is a bone the shape of a hole.
She tries explaining this to you –

Boxes, on the ground, of her mother’s things,
a window open
in another part of the house.

Her legs are up the wall.

You are someone, then she sets her glass of water
on the floor,

and you are someone else – breath
let out the nose,

ghost pipe in the wall.

One is red with light bark, the other
a shade, entirely, of what you want to call maroon.

They take water on Sundays.
And in a month or two you’ll need

to put them in the ground.

---

D.S. Waldman’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Narrative, and Copper Nickel.

YELLOWJACKET TRAP ATTRACTANT by Robert Wrigley

You know a sliver of lamb bone with a bit of gristle’s
way better than the cloying sweet commercial stuff
dribbled on a cotton ball. After half a day
the transparent trap’s so full the bastards have to eat their own
to make room for themselves in the death chamber.

May San Francesco and Father Walt forgive you,
but you relish what looks like yellowjacket panic.
From the porch’s other end the engine hum of them dying.
You take a seat and watch them crawl in legions
through the six bottom holes none ever leaves by.

Nor bonhomie among them anywhere. Here’s one
crawling round and round the crowded cylinder,
hauling another’s head and fighting off
the fellows that would seize it. Meanwhile,
among the dead, tiny nuggets, desiccate gristles of lamb.

Upon your bare toes they light and commence
to chiseling away a divot of flesh, having it half
piranhaed off before you feel their sawtooth razory jaws.
Yes, they feed on certain destructive fruit moths
and flies, and they seem almost brilliantly rugged, as they must be.

But eventually you have to empty the traps and rebait,
and always a few have miraculously survived
among hundreds of cadavers – does that surprise you?
Such a fierce life force in carrion eaters. May it never end.
The morning’s dumped survivors, I crush beneath a boot.

---

Robert Wrigley is the author of twelve collections of poems, including Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022); and a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press, 2021).

ONE OF THE LAND MINE BANDS by John Willson

Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia

Named for its likeness to a crocodile’s head,
the zither’s hollow body rested
on two cut sections from a tree trunk.
The fingers of the player’s left hand

pressed ivory frets—
the crocodile’s teeth.
Fronting the band, a low blue table,
a brass bowl holding currency,

a tray with a sign, CD 10$:
at home, I listen to the sweet music,
hand cymbals, gongs, bamboo reeds,
the xylophone’s wood keys, struck brightly.

They performed beside the straight wide path
toward the temple where strangler vines
clutched blocks of stone,
pulled down ancient columns.

Below his knee, the crocodile player’s
left leg was plastic, hollow.
One of his bandmates sawed an upright
fiddle, its body a coconut shell.

He gripped the bow
in the fold between forearm and bicep.

All seven players missed limbs or their sight.
In this photo, blue shade cast by a tarp

suspends them between one chord
and the next,
like the moment each stepped
on something planted that bloomed.

---

John Willson is the author of the poetry collection Call This Room a Station (MoonPath Press, 2020). His poems have also appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Sycamore Review, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Terrain.org.

SONG OF A STORYTELLER by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell

A man will journey the river
in a kayak, armed with magic akutuq1 mother made,
looking for uncle and answers, coming out
of strange happenings in order
for his human way of knowing to understand
that uncle’s bones are planted in the tundra.
He will be seduced by a woman with teeth gnashing between
her legs
and will not be consumed.
He will be pursued by a foolish man made of copper
and will set him afire.
He will catch a mermaid
and become an aŋatkuq2 ,
He will hear the bird speak
and become a prophet.

1 akutuq: [uh-koo-took] “a mixture of fat and berries,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
2 aŋatkuq: [uh-ngut-kook] “shaman,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq

CANNED PEACHES by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell

Dad told you
Opa used to count out
his peas
one
by
one
just so he’d eat vegetables.

Once a year, the barge
came to town
and unloaded a year’s supply of goods.
Auntie said
“whether something was expired or not
before the next barge came, we had to buy it.”

Dehydrated potatoes
Flour
Hard candy
Eggs
Cans
and cans and
cans.

”Your dad doesn’t even
like the taste of frozen veggies now,”
Mom said.

Now you love the softness of pears in a can:
slightly grainy interior,
disintegrating in the mouth,
giving way with each bite.

Canned peaches, on the other hand,
have a slight bite,
a sharp taste of sunshine
coated in syrup.

They were in the small
compartment of your school lunch tray.
Saved for last,
while you made sure
to sit with others of the same gender.

You lost your taste for them
some time after that.
And switched back to pears.

---

“Song of a Storyteller” and “Canned Peaches” are Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell’s debut poetry publications.

TOMATO DIVINATION by Doug Ramspeck

Like a thumb smudging across the wet ink of her mind,
the doctor said. And in the weeks after that,
a cardinal began battering with territorial insistence

at our kitchen window, leaving behind, sometimes,
small offerings of blood. That this was connected
to my mother seemed to me, at age seven, as clear

as the white robes of sky. I pictured what was happening
inside her as like the mute erasure of winter snow,
or I imagined that her voice was now the dead wisteria

at the yard’s edge with its poisonous seedpods, or like
the yellowjackets flying in and out of an open fissure
in the ground. And I remember my mother telling me

once before she lost herself that everything that stank
was holy: the goat droppings and goat urine in her garden,
the rake making prayerful scrapes amid manure.

And last night she returned to me out of the sky’s rain,
knocking on some unseen door inside a dream – knocking
like that cardinal pecking at our window – her voice like concentric

circles inside the yellow kitchen I’d forgotten. And in her palm
was a tomato still clinging to the nub of a vine. And reaching it
toward me, she said, These aren’t store bought . . . taste.

---

Doug Ramspeck is the author of two collections of short stories, a novella, and nine poetry collections, most recently Blur (The Word Works, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review.

LATE FRUIT by Daniel Halpern

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
— William Bronk

I should have foreseen
this defeat of the heart,

but I insisted
on believing that it would beat

forever, and never
cease bearing fruit.

I was a believer.
I thought there was a territory,

a lingua di terra of febrile soil
that survived the harvest,

whose fruit was sweet with a juice
whose color and scent were perennial.

I was a believer. I believed.
I grow older, I bear the weight,

I carry home the sack of that late harvest.

HER DREAM by Daniel Halpern

Susan’s, a found poem

I woke from a dream this morning
We were dating

We weren’t dancing
But there was rhythm

You asked me to live with you
You were so thoughtful

You made a place for me
Where you lived

A collection of my memories
Were placed on three shelves

They remained there
In a kind of permanence

We kissed
I had red lipstick on.

---

Daniel Halpern has written nine books of poetry and edited more than 15 books and anthologies. He founded the National Poetry Series, Antaeus, and the Ecco Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins.

AN OLD FEAR by James Davis May

The snake you saw that was at first just a thick strand
squiggling from the frayed kitchen rug is a problem
because it slid so soundlessly beneath the fridge
before your wife could see it and you both know
what concussions can do, even decades later,
that your brain can make you see what’s not there,
and feel what you shouldn’t, and that’s before
factoring in the illness that lives in it somewhere
like a queen wasp dormant all winter and the medication
that is supposed to save you from yourself
but can also make you act and think “unusually” –
so many chemicals go into the making of reality,
after all – and when you roll the fridge back
and find no snake but see instead the small hole
for the waterline that could have allowed the snake,
if there was a snake, a route to escape, you know
you’ve entered at least a month of ambient terror,
where every room will be a potential haunting
and you won’t know whether to sigh or gasp
when the drawer you open shimmers
with your face patterned over the quivering knives.

---

James Davis May is the author of two poetry collections, both published by Louisiana State University Press: Unquiet Things (2016) and Unusually Grand Ideas (2023). His poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, New England Review, and The Sun.

ETHERIZE by Amber Flora Thomas

My mother says the wrong word.
The place that has held her tongue coasts,
relieves unthinkable territory: space and hollow
under the curds of night, invisible and endless.
She’ll take her old dog there when it’s time.

If we remember,
we know what she means: after the body,
in the cool stretch of stale air in a white room;
put out away from us, not even ash, but a sphere above the flame,

the mind when we step outside and look at the stars
so the dog can do her business, the ear training itself
to listen in the trees for what might be
another creature smelling us on the air,
but farther out.

So, I don’t correct her.
No needles or cremation estimates. Only the ethereal.
Temporary forces between us and floating off into space
when we walk out somewhere.

Farther still.

---

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012); and Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Georgia Review, Colorado Review, ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and Ecotone.

LUNKERS by David Starkey

On the big, once blank wall
of his room in assisted living,
I have mounted his largemouth bass.

The smallest weighed five pounds,
the largest was thirteen,
“Big Mama” he called her,

leaving the chartreuse spinnerbait
hooked in her taxidermied
lip. The centerpiece:

a twenty-pound steelhead
with bright orange paint
for the scar on its flank.

The only time he makes sense
these days is remembering
when and where and how

they were caught. He exaggerates
and changes details with the aplomb
of a politician, but that was ever

his way. Turn the conversation
to the recent past,
however, and his language

quickly falls apart,
like a plastic worm that’s been struck
too often, or a wooden lure

long snagged underwater
then discovered during a drought:
pinch its sides and . . . mush.

Soon, the nurses say, he’ll have to
downsize yet again – no room
in Memory Care for fiberglass fish.

On the day we wheel my father
into his final quarters,
the rest of him will be lost,

like the twenty-pound lunker
he claimed almost
to have netted before the line

snapped and, as he leaned over
the boat’s hull, it vanished

into his wavering reflection.

---

David Starkey is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Cutting It Loose (Pine Row Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review.

WHEN KNOWING IS THE SAME AS LATE WINTER WAITING by W.J. Herbert

Why is the body
still working, if it knows
what’s to come –

isn’t it cowed?
Sometimes, I think the blood
thinks,

the way these robins
must wonder whether the liquid

amber will leaf again
as they sit with their light-bulb
breasts glowing,

orange suns
among skeleton branches,
clots

in the deep-veined tree.
They flutter, as I imagine

my heart does,
just to see if it can feel
itself alive in the quiet

darkness of stiff ribs.
Regreening – that’s what the robins
want

but they can’t know what’s coming.
They wait,

as we do,
deaths tucked into a pocket of sky.

---

W.J. Herbert is the author of Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry.

GRACE by Robin Rosen Chang

The man plunged
into the muddy pond,
cradled the dog’s limp
but still warm body.
On land, he cupped his mouth
over the dog’s snout
and exhaled into it.
Over and over, a man
breathing into a dog,

his humid breath
like a zephyr,
its overblown promise
of a spring that won’t come.

And I think about my mother,
her emaciated body
in her pink nightgown
drowning in the ocean
of her bed, and how
I struggled to hold her hand.

I can’t imagine I’d have the grace
to swaddle another’s mouth
inside mine, offering life
to one whose wind was gone,
filling its lungs
with my trembling breath.

---

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, Cortland Review, American Literary Review, and Verse Daily.

ABECEDARIAN WITH ALS by Martha Silano

A little bit sane (a little bit not).
Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles.
Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers.
Don’t say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock.
Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides?
F*ck a duck!
Glad there’s a joyful edge, though narrower than a Willet’s beak.
Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste:
it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins.
Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next?
Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast,
letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic,
make their turn, because the universe isn’t elegant,
no one’s really going anywhere important,
or running late to spin or vinyasa or
pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus.
Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though
rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona – it happens.
Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation.
Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18.00 glass of
Pinot.
Unbound bound.
Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash.
What was that you assured me – when we die we wake from a dream?
X marks the rear of the theatre – one shove of poison – into a pure realm.
You know we’re all getting off at the same exit, right?
Zooey’s wish: to pray without ceasing.

---

Martha Silano is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Missouri Review.

HORSEHAIR ON HELMETS by Maura Stanton

An old-fashioned wooden storm window
placed across sawhorses in a backyard –
nearby a paint can – but the little girl
crawling under this delightful play space
did not see glass panes, only blue sky
She stood up. She shrieked. I saw it all,
for I was high on the swing set next door,
moving through the air in big swoops
like a flag unfurling in a gust of wind.
Adults rushed from the house, running, shouting,
brushing glitter from the girl’s dark curls,
scolding her, bandaging her forehead,
while I kept swinging, swinging through the sky
An older brother got a rake and raked
sharp shimmery pieces from the grass,
the rake tines dragging out daggers of glass
that might have injured a bare foot, but flew
instead into my memory – for today
slits of sun between some fence rails
crisscrossing the snow like light swords
call up that scene – the broken window,
agitated figures, blood, then clean-up.
I held tight to the chains of the swing,
watching it all from a terrified distance
as if I were driving a team of wild horses
into battle, horsehair streaming from my helmet.

PENELOPE’S CHAIR by Maura Stanton

In Urgent Care the TV’s always turned
to HGTV, and today the House Flippers
chat about house staging as I wait here
with groaning patients, and fidgeting family,
my husband called to an exam room.
The topic’s house staging – the lovely room
flashing across the screen’s an illusion
created by designers. A tall young woman
points out a curved white sectional sofa,
and, she says, “here’s a Penelope chair.”
Penelope’s chair? But I’ve missed it.
The camera’s moved on to the staged bedroom.

What’s a chair? A seat with four legs
and a back for one person, like this chair,
where I’m sitting near other chairs in rows
filled with hunched seniors, or Moms or Dads
rocking children on their laps, jackets
wadded behind them like pillows as they text,
no one watching the cheerful TV folk
as they chatter about their California mansions.
I shift my legs, straighten my aching back,
recalling facts about Penelope’s chair
from The Odyssey. Ikmalios carved it all,
chair and footstool, from one piece of wood.
inlaid it with silver and ivory. At night
her hands aching from a day of weaving,
the suitors still noisily drinking her wine,
Penelope spread a thick fleece over the chair
and sat back. Like me, she was waiting
for her husband. And to pass the time,
on my iPad, I Google “Penelope’s Chair,”
expecting Wikipedia or quotes from Homer,
but instead, bewildering visions of chairs
scroll across the screen – Penelope Chairs! –
each one different, offering style or comfort,
Penelope dining chairs in synthetic leather,
stacking chairs framed in bright chrome tubes
or clear molded acrylic with steel legs.
Penelope’s armchair comes in fleur-de-lis
upholstery with claw-like feet, but there’s
a designer version shaped like a puzzle piece
with a bulbous protrusion for Penelope’s head.
Penelope’s beautiful chair’s ubiquitous –
If you don’t stand, walk, or lie down flat,
you’ve got to sit, so why not choose the best?
Get it in Lucite, satin, or soft grey plush?
And what about this swivel version,
or Penelope’s rattan lounger with matching footstool?

The woman next to me groans and rises
when her name’s called. She grabs her coat.
A sighing bearded man lowers himself
slowly into her place, pulls out his phone.
I roll my coat behind my back, my fleece,
thinking of Penelope on her special chair,
her eyes closed as she dreamed of Odysseus.
Those raucous nights her chair became her boat.
She’d float off through the foam-flecked seas
rowed by invisible gods until she reached
that place beyond the sunset where he lingered.
But every morning she woke up alone.
And then I hear a familiar cough and voice
coming from the desk. It’s my Odysseus
arriving back from that uncertain voyage
clutching his chart, and his new prescription,
grinning at me, ready to come home.

---

Maura Stanton is the author of a novel, three collections of stories, and seven collections of poems including Snow on Snow (Yale University Press, 1975); Cries of Swimmers (University of Utah Press, 1984); Glacier Wine (Carnegie-Mellon, 2001); Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Able Muse.