“You quarrel with your sickness,” Thomas said calmly. “Everyone has a sickness. It should be cared for but not cured.”
“What?” Pearl said dully. She wished that he would pour more wine. Thomas’ way of talking made her dizzy.
“I said, each of us has a sickness. It is not something that should be cured. To eradicate the sickness would be to eradicate the self.”
She was in Seattle, at the bookstore across from the university, with the high windows and the wooden chairs and the microphone that lent a floating electric quality to her voice, and The Age of Girls and Boys kept creaking as she flexed its spine, and her mouth was shedding a raw white light that sharpened to a knifepoint every time her lips came together, and she could see that she had wrested the audience’s attention, their genuine attention, though whether they were listening to her or watching the light show was anyone’s guess, and there in the second row, sitting with his tousled hair and his loose-necked posture, was the man who had approached her the night before, at the event in Bellingham, to sign a galley proof of Off-Campus Apartments, her sad sunken ship of a first novel. She could hear him reacting to the story she was reading, making half-voiced subliminal noises of agreement or fascination, chuckling when she mentioned the widow’s inexplicable accent, and nodding vigorously, gymnastically, as if choosing sides in a debate, at “the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together.” Was he experiencing his feelings or merely demonstrating them? She couldn’t decide. Afterward, he made sure to claim the last spot in line, mothing away to investigate the new releases, when a woman with a tote bag fell into place behind him, then drifting back over to the procession. She had already autographed twenty or thirty books by the time he reached her.
He took a copy of Girls and Boys from the stack and said, “Hi there again. I was at that thing you did last night. Remember? The guy who said you were his favorite writer?”
She tried her best to smile without using her mouth—to express a smile—but even that was difficult. The ulcer on her lower lip was stinging, stinging terribly. She felt as if someone had taken the flesh, right there where her incisors met, and run it through a sewing machine: zt-zt-zt-zt-zt.
Before she could steel herself to answer, he hurried on: “Anyway, what I neglected to tell you yesterday is that I absolutely love this collection. Love. It. Especially ‘Small Bitter Seeds.’ That one’s my favorite. I read it in the Pushcart, and afterward I ordered all your books. Everything.”
To talk meant to suffer, as it had for much of the last four years, and she had become practiced at finding the most efficient path through a conversation. Usually she could touch all the major landmarks so glancingly and yet so deftly that the average person failed to notice she was even taking a shortcut. “Thank you. I knew you looked familiar. That was actually the title story until my editor told me no one would buy a book called Small Bitter Seeds. Now how would you like me to sign this?”
“Oh, this one’s for my father. Write, ‘To Jon Catau.’ That’s J-o-no h-n, and then Ka-too: C-a-t-a-u.”
After she finished the inscription and shut the book, she found him staring over her shoulder. The windows crowning the poetry shelves were filtering the light so that the trees outside, the lampposts, the buildings, all seemed to swim in blue Easter egg dye, but that wasn’t what had caught his attention. He was examining his reflection in the glass, and specifically the incandescent bruise on his arm. Gaze too long at your wounds, she had discovered, and your eyes would fill with phantom colors, like a sunbather drowsing on a beach towel.
One of the booksellers was repeating her name. “Ms. Poggione? Excuse me. Ms. Poggione?”
“Mm-hmm?”
“We were hoping you would sign some stock before you leave. And also we have this guest album with a page for all our authors. Would you mind writing something in it for us? Nothing fancy—just a few words will do.”
He slid the books across the table one by one, like a line cook prepping burgers, marking each title page with the jacket flap so that all she had to do was take a copy from his hand, cross through her name, and replace it with her signature. In the guest album she wrote, “Thanks for hosting me on this, the final leg of the great spring Age of Girls and Boys tour.” She added a doodle of a girl boosting a boy over her head like a circus strongman. The man with the bruise on his arm had withdrawn to the sanctuary of the employee recommendations shelf, but when she began gathering up her purse and jacket, he came loping back over to the table. With a sudden sweeping feeling of magnification she intuited that he was going to ask her to dinner, and in fact he did, forcing himself to meet her eye, then saying something that began, “I hope you don’t mind,” and ended, “a great little seafood place, the best in Seattle.” He was certainly sweet enough—a sweet, brave kid, and starstruck, by her, of all people—but the truth was that it hurt too much to talk, and she just wanted to return to her room and lie in bed with a mouthful of hydrogen peroxide foaming up over her gums.
“That’s very nice, but I’m afraid I’m not feeling well.”
“Oh. All right. I understand completely.” Meekly he asked, “So at least can I give you a ride back to your hotel?” Maybe it was the way his voice seemed to slip through the center of itself and form a knot, so like Wallace’s when he thought he had embarrassed himself, but she realized all at once that she could not disappoint him again. She resigned herself to another ten minutes of conversation and nodded fine, okay.
“Great! I’m parked out back.”
He led her down the staircase and across the ground floor, past circular racks stuffed with purple and gold sweatshirts, shelves stuffed with pennants and soda cozies, and out into the evening, which was not blue at all but a soft, waning pink. The floorboards of his car were littered with textbooks and old CD cases, the carpets gritty with road salt. As he drove her across the bay, he spun an excitable little monologue, telling her about the inlet they were passing, where his friends Coop and Mia kept their catamaran, and the neighborhood off to the right, where his favorite coffee shop was located, and not far away, near the arboretum, was the unpainted furniture store where he had worked after high school for eighteen months, while he “decompressed,” he said, “and figured the whole thing out,” and there up ahead you could see the car wash with the elephant sign, a smiling neon behemoth hosing itself down with its trunk, which was his very favorite car wash—easily, no contest.
It took an effort of will to interrupt him. “You live in a wide world of favorites, don’t you?”
“That’s what Coop says. I guess I do.”
“So how did you hurt your arm?”
He searched the sagging cloth of the ceiling for an answer. “You know, I honestly can’t remember. Bumped into a doorway. Got punched.”
He slid into the turning lane at a red light and leveled his gaze at her. “But that,” he said, and he tugged his lip down to display the tissue, a healthy rose color, unlit by trauma or disease, “must hurt like all hell.”
Impulsively she grazed the ragged fringe of her sore with her tongue. It flashed the way a shard of glass does when it’s struck by the sun. “Mm-hmm. Like all hell.”
“Yeah, I can totally tell. You know, I really respect you. My football coach—don’t worry, I’m not one of those football guys. I quit when I was in eighth grade. But what my coach used to say is that you’ve got to play through the pain. And that’s what you do. It must be hard to get up in front of an audience and talk when your mouth is like it is.”
And that was her situation exactly. There were entire weeks when she did everything she could to avoid speaking to other people: letting her voice mail take her phone calls, using the self-service lane at the grocery store, waiting for the UPS truck to drive away before she collected her packages. The problem began shortly after the Illumination, when she punctured her soft palate with a tortilla chip. With fascination and disgust, she watched over the next few days as the mark sank into her skin and filled with a luminous fluid. It took nearly two weeks for it to heal, by which time she had generated another by jabbing her gums while brushing her teeth. After that the wounds came in clusters, appearing whenever she bit the inside of her mouth or ate something too salty or spicy, but just as often for no reason whatsoever, or at least none she could determine. At first she thought the problem was only temporary, but four years had passed since then, and she had not gotten any better. Four years of withdrawing from her friends, her son, her parents, of declining to go on dates because she couldn’t bear to pretend she was all right. Four years of pinprick-size cavities on her lips and her gums, her cheeks and the roof of her mouth, on the tender border of her tongue, tiny inflamed holes that expanded slowly and clotted at their edges, then whitened, distended, and lost all form. Some of the sores grew as large as nickels, flooding her face with light even when her lips were clamped shut. No sooner did one vanish than another would appear. Often, when things were at their worst—when she came into morning thinking she might have healed while she slept and gave the spot where one of her ulcers had been an experimental tap and felt so ill with pain that her hands tightened and the wells beneath her eyes grew damp—she would find herself repeating, Why me, why do I have to be sick all the time, what possible purpose could it serve? And why this sickness, why this pain, why not some other? Take my eyes so that I cannot see. Take my legs so that I cannot run. Anything, anything, but my mouth so that I cannot speak, my mouth so that I cannot eat, my mouth so that I cannot kiss, my mouth so that I cannot smile. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Make me better. Or at least make me better tomorrow than I am today, make me better next week than I’ve been this one. This was the voice in her head, a veritable Niagara of words, pouring over one another in their own immense cloud of turbulence and spindrift, but trailing alongside it was her other voice, her speaking voice, the one her ulcers had forced her to adopt, which employed as little motion as possible, so that she wound up rejecting even the shortest words in favor of easier ones, saying mm-hmm for yes and mm-mmm for no, and obliged her to take great care with every sentence she uttered so that avoiding her lesions would not distort her pronunciation. She was afraid that the voice she used in public would change the voice she used in the privacy of her thoughts, that fluid, unfearing voice with which she had once written her books. Presuming, of course, that it had not already. Your mind was not free of your body. That was the lesson.
“Well, this is it, Ms. Poggione,” the boy said, and she realized they had reached the hotel.
“Thanks. What’s your name now?”
“John Catau.”
“I thought that was your father’s name.”
“It is. I’m a junior, or unofficially I am. My dad is Jon Catau: J-o-no h-n. I’m John Catau: J-o-with an h-n.”
“Well, John-with-an-h, you can call me Nina.”
“Nina.” He took her wrist, rubbing his thumb along the pulse point as if he were calming an injured animal, and she understood what she should have all along: that he was hitting on her. His touch was warmer and more muscular than she had supposed it would be. “Are you sure I can’t buy you a drink?” he said.
She risked stretching her mouth to smile at him. “Some other time.” And she opened the door and went into the hotel.
Upstairs, standing at her bathroom mirror, she drew her lower lip cautiously away from her teeth. The flesh sent out a spike of pain, shimmering as she exposed it to the open air. She had ruptured some fragile seal over the sore, and blood came brimming from the threadlike crack, spilling into the pocket of her gums. Though the edges of the canker had softened, she knew from experience that it would get worse before it got better.
She sat on the ledge of the tub and made her ritual evening phone call. Wallace didn’t answer, so she left him a message. Each time her lips came together or her teeth bit into a letter, she had that terrible sewing-needle sensation. She tried to conceal her discomfort, but the effort gave her voice an oddly convulsive sedative quality, as if her limbs were twitching while she slept: “Hey, honey. I know you have play rehearsal tonight, but I’m wiped out, and I’m going to sleep, so I’m calling early. Your momma loves you. I hope you had a perfect day. Don’t burn the house down. Remember, the Stegalls are right next door if you can’t reach me and there’s an emergency.”
She hung up. For the thousandth time, she reflected that she should write a story that used no b’s, f’s, m’s, p’s, or v’s, one she could deliver without aggravating her mouth. “A Story to Combat the Pain,” she would call it.
But what if it wasn’t her lips that were ulcerated?
She would have to write a second story to avoid her hard palate, one without any c’s, d’s, g’s, h’s—oh so many letters.
And a third that would let the tip of her tongue lie still, a story that was all vowels and labials, unspooling with a long underwater sound.
So then: “Three Stories to Combat the Pain.”
She washed her face and brushed her teeth, all but the bottom incisors, then changed into her pajamas and slipped into bed. Four more days of readings, she thought. Four more airplanes to four more cities. She wondered how Wallace was doing without her. Had he remembered to lock the door? Was he eating the food she had Tupperwared? He was the kind of boy who would nibble at a hot dog, offering half of it to a stray animal, and consider himself fed for the day—but he was fourteen, and old enough now, they had decided, to stay home alone while she was on tour.
Fourteen! In another year, unless she recovered as mysteriously as she had fallen ill, she would have been this strange sick creature for fully one-third of his life.
She yawned, and her mouth flickered at the boundary of her vision, as if a distant ship were sending out signals in Morse code.
Once there was a country where no one addressed the dead except in writing. Whenever people felt the urge to speak to someone they had outlived, they would take a pen and set their thoughts down on paper: You should have seen the sun coloring the puddles this morning, or Things were so much easier when you were alive, so much happier, or I wanted to tell you I got all A’s on my report card, plus a C in algebra. Then they would place the message atop the others they had written, in a basket or a folder, until the summer arrived and they could be delivered.
In this country it rained for most of the year. The landscape was lush with the kinds of trees and ivies that flourish in wet weather, their leaves the closest green to black. The creeks and pools swam with armies of tiny brown frogs. Usually, though, in the first or second week of June, the clouds would thin from the air little by little, in hundreds of parallel threads, as if someone were sweeping the sky clean with a broom, and the drought would set in. This did not happen every summer, but most. Between the glassy river to the west of the country and the fold of hills to the east, the grass withered and vanished, the puddles dried up, and the earth separated into countless oddly shaped plates. Deep rifts formed in the dirt. It was through these rifts that people slipped the letters they had written. The dead were buried underground, and tradition held that they were waiting there to collect each sheet of paper, from the most heartfelt expression of grief to the most trivial piece of gossip:
You won’t believe it, but Ellie is finally leaving that boyfriend of hers.
What I want to know is whether you think I should take the teaching job.
The crazy thing is, when the phone rang last night, I was absolutely sure it was you.
Do you remember that time you dropped your earring in the pond and it surprised that fish?
I just don’t know what I’m doing these days.
So it was that people surrendered the notes they had saved with a feeling of relief and accomplishment, letting them fall through the cracks one by one, then returned home, satisfied that they had been received.
This was the way it had always been, for who knows how long, with the dead turning their hands to the surface of the earth, and no orphans praying out loud to their parents, and no widows chitchatting with the ghosts of their husbands, and all the wish-it-weres and might-have-beens of the living oriented around a simple stack of paper and a cupful of pens. Then something very strange happened.
In Portland the bookstore was a labyrinth of aisles and staircases, with shelves that stretched to the rafters and let out the sugary smell of old paper, columns that shone with textured gold paint, and the floor was a worn industrial concrete that resembled a pond abounding with gray-green silt, and as she walked through the stacks she could see the vague form of her reflection passing underneath her, vanishing and reemerging in the grit and gloss of the stone, and on the store’s top level, where she gave her reading, the art books stood directly behind the audience in a long panorama of faces, so that Ms. Erin Colvin from Hillsdale and Mr. Jim Fristoe from the Pearl District seemed to sit alongside Andy Warhol and Mona Lisa and one of Modigliani’s radiant, blank-eyed women, and when it came time for Nina to take questions and someone asked her how she developed her titles, she gave her usual answer, comparing the title to a target toward which she shot the arrow of a story and confessing that she had never been able to write so much as the first sentence until she had taken careful aim. In the case of the story she had just presented, she said, a fairy tale of sorts, she had tried “A Fable Beginning with a Glimpse of Blue Sky,” “A Fable Ending in a Thunderclap and a Rain Shower,” and “A Fable Occurring Between Two Thunderstorms” before she hit upon “A Fable from the Living to the Dead,” after which followed a dozen variations on that one idea—“A Fable to the Dead,” “A Fable for the Dead,” “A Fable for the Living from the Dead,” “A Fable from the Dead to the Living”—until at last she settled upon “A Fable for the Living.”
A Fable.
A fable.
A fable.
Her ulcer had begun pussing out, which meant that it was healing, but meant, too, that if she kept her lips closed for even half a second, the discharge would glue them together and pulling them apart would transfix her jaw with light. It was shameful, her pain, appalling. She hated to exhibit it, hated the attention it brought her. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it, couldn’t stop trying to justify or understand it. Most of the people who gathered to collect her signature were too young and fit to display more than a few minor sports injuries and shaving rashes, along with the occasional gleaming cincture of a hangover headache, but there were others in line, too, the sick and the insulted, her people. The teenage girl confined to a wheelchair by cancer or arthritis, hip dysplasia or osteonecrosis, her pelvis a shining cameo of bones. The old man whose heart was failing, pulsing the way a star pulses. The woman nursing a glowing thyroid, surreptitiously pressing a hand to her neck. The doctor in her hospital scrubs, who seemed so healthy as she stood facing Nina but turned to hobble away with her spine iridescing through her shirt like a string of frightful pearls. Nina looked at them, and something softened inside her. She wondered if her face showed what she was thinking: Yes. That’s it. I understand. You don’t have to tell me.
Capping off the procession was a college student who wanted Nina to “sign this note” certifying that he had “gone to this reading.” As soon as she scratched her name on the page, he whisked it away from her, zipping it into his backpack as if it were some wild creature trying to buck its way out of his grasp.
Now it was only Nina and one of the booksellers. She fell silent as she autographed the remaining stock, fifteen copies of her new collection and twice that many of her most recent novel, Twin Souls, a sort of parable in the guise of a love story, about a world in which there were two of everybody and it was forbidden to interact with your other self—the first book of hers that had sold well enough, miracle of miracles, to earn out its advance. Her signature slowly changed beneath her fingers, rearranging itself, purifying itself, plunge by plunge and bend by bend until it was no longer a set of letters at all but a curious abstract design. It was like the pattern she had once watched a moth draw with its wings in the condensation on her bathroom mirror. She remembered switching off the lights and opening the window so that it would fly away and then, when it did, calling Wallace in to see the strange hieroglyph of sweeps and flickers it had left behind.
“I bet it was trying to communicate with you,” he mused. “Maybe it was my dad, reincarnated as a moth, and the only way he knew how to get in touch with us was to write something with his wings.” He looked more carefully at the mark. “Except he’s illiterate.”
Wallace, her wonderful, brilliant Wallace, was the product of a fling she had allowed herself one night when she was drunk and twenty-two with a man whose name and face had abandoned her the moment he put on his clothing. Nearly five years passed before she found his business card behind her dresser and in a flash remembered who he was—his fingernails with their clean white crescents, a banker’s nails, and the way he bathed her thighs with kisses, stopping just short of her pubic mound as though he had encountered a brick wall. How, she wondered, would she ever work up the courage to tell the man what their one sodden hour of sex had engendered? The question, as it turned out, was academic, since a Web search informed her that not long after Wallace was born his father had been killed in a speedboat accident, “age 28, survived by his wife and childhood sweetheart, Tammy.” Wallace knew little more than that his father had died a long time ago and the two of them had never married.
When the last book was signed and the “Thank you so much, Ms. Poggione” came, Nina said good-bye with a handshake and collected her possessions. It wasn’t until she was on her way to the staircase that she noticed him standing at the first-editions shelf, John-with-an-h Catau, running his fingers over the covers as if he were fascinated, absolutely fascinated, by the various Gail Godwins and Curtis Sittenfelds in their clear plastic sleeves.
She stopped short. “What on earth are you doing here?”
“Why, of all the places to run into each other,” he joked. Clearly he had been rehearsing what to say, but he made it only midway through the sentence before his voice tightened in a plexus of timidity and self-doubt, the same slipknot effect she had noticed the day before. “I’m sorry,” he continued. “Is this too much? This is too much, isn’t it? It’s not a long drive from Seattle to Portland. Two and a half hours. It was just that you said ‘some other time,’ so I thought maybe… well… tonight.”
For some reason she could not work up any anger toward him, or even any distrust. He was so obviously harmless—and not harmless in the thin-veneer way of countless serial killer movies, but truly harmless. He wore the fixed expression of a child caught filling the saltshaker with sugar. If only she weren’t so exhausted.
“I’m sick.” She said it once for herself and a second time for him. “I’m sick, John. And your attention is flattering, and if things were different, I would be happy to get a drink with you somewhere, but every minute I’m not holed away in my hotel room, alone, is hard for me. Do you understand?”
He grinned. “You remembered my name.”
“Bye, John.”
“Look, how about some coffee? There’s a coffee shop right downstairs. And then you can go back to your hotel and get some sleep and maybe tomorrow you’ll feel better than you do today.”
Make me better tomorrow than I am today. Make me better next week than I’ve been this one.
She was the type of person who never read her horoscope, never saved the slips from her fortune cookies, and yet there were times when she was all too willing to be guided by coincidence and intimation, those fleeting signals that flagged the air like torches and suggested the universe had lit a trail for her. Which was why, she supposed, she agreed to have a cup of coffee—one cup—with him. She ordered a small vanilla latte, iced, so that she could conduct it to the corner of her lip with a straw. Did she want something to eat? A scone?
“God no.”
She missed the days of dining out with her friends and lovers, indulging her appetite for lobster or curry, pad Thai or seasoned French fries, before she knew how much would be taken from her, and how quickly. Occasionally, in the stillness of a taxi or an airplane, she would catalog the pleasures she had lost. Cigarettes. Chewing gum. Strong mint toothpaste. Any food with hard edges or sharp corners that could pierce or abrade the inside of her mouth: potato chips, croutons, crunchy peanut butter. Any food that was more than infinitesimally, protozoically, spicy or tangy or salty or acidic: pesto or Worcestershire sauce, wasabi or anchovies, tomato juice or movie-theater popcorn. Certain pamphlets and magazines whose paper carried a caustic wafting chemical scent she could taste as she turned the pages. Perfume. Incense. Library books. Long hours of easy conversation. The ability to lick an envelope without worrying that the glue had irritated her mouth. The knowledge that if she heard a song she liked, she could sing along to it in all her dreadful jubilant tunelessness. The faith that if she bit her tongue, she would soon feel better rather than worse. The coltish rising feeling of sex or masturbation, and the way, as it gripped her, she no longer stood between herself and her senses. The problem was that the more aroused she grew, the dryer her mouth became, so that she could never reach culmination without experiencing that awful germinating sensation she felt before an ulcer erupted, like a weed spreading just under her skin. She no longer knew when she was being sensible, when overcautious. She was tired, very tired, and she hurt. Writing about it did not make it better.
She and John Catau took an empty table in the center of the shop and sat across from each other sipping their drinks. While he spoke, she covered her mouth with her palm, trying to usher the coffee past her lips without visibly wincing. He was offering another one of his meandering narratives, about a rock concert where the crowd was “so raucous” that it spilled out onto the sidewalk and he had traded jackets with the guitarist. Every so often she would punctuate the story with an mm-hmm or a right, thinking Make me better, Take me home, while he nodded and stroked the stubble on his chin. He must have been talking for nearly fifteen minutes when he made a remark that caused him to laugh, a quiet little two-beat arrangement, as if he were exhaling once through each nostril. “You know, like in ‘Sunset Studies,’ ” he continued. “Remember, that bit you wrote about the door hinges flapping loose from the house like butterflies?”
“Where would you have seen ‘Sunset Studies’?”
“The Lifted Brow began archiving its old issues online.”
“Hmm.” A group of teenagers in crowlike black clothing had stationed themselves by the graphic novels, their faces irradiated with patches of cruel red acne. “This place”—she gestured at the stiltlike columns, the vista of windows—“it reminds me of a bead shop I used to visit in college. Not that I had any interest in beads. I went because it reminded me of this art gallery where my friends and I spent all our time in high school. Freestanding counters everywhere. Polished white pine floors. It made me feel like I was reliving my past.”
“Mm-hmm. Very esque-ish.”
“What?”
“Esque-ish. It’s a word me and Coop came up with. First esque and then ish. Something that reminds you of something that reminds you of something.”
“That’s good. I like that.”
“Yeah? You think it will catch on?”
“John, how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-three. And a half.”
She made the mistake of smiling. One of her teeth snagged her lip, and there it was, that unsparing light, a spasm of pain that spread across her mouth as if a metal barb had punched through the skin, tugging it outward so that a living pink tent rose up from the tissue.
“Jesus H.,” said John Catau. “I absolutely did not realize. I’m so sorry.”
She waited until she was sure she could speak. “It’s okay. I app—I app—I thank you for your concern.”
“Will you show it to me? Your ulcer?”
“No. No. John. God. It’s not pretty. You don’t want to see it.”
But the look he gave her was full of such humble curiosity, with his eyes lingering on her mouth and his hair dangling over his creased forehead, that she placed her fingers on either side of the sore and slowly everted her lip for him. He inhaled sharply. In the space of that breath, between one second and the next, he understood. She didn’t have to tell him, didn’t have to explain or apologize. She didn’t have to combat the impression that she was undergoing some kind of joke ailment, like a hangnail or an ingrown hair, the kind of thing that could be remedied with tweezers or a topical cream. A canker sore, yes. I had one of those myself a few years back, people liked to say. Grin and bear it, that’s my motto, and they would clap her shoulder and wait for her to chuckle along with them at the human body and all its darling haplessness. And now here was this boy, this ridiculous boy, and he seemed to know everything about her. Make me better. His fingertips and the base of his palm were resting lightly on the table, creating a shadowy little hidden cove, and she found herself resisting the impulse to slide her hand into it.
“I’m so sorry,” he said a second time. “That’s terrible. Terrible. You really don’t want to be here at all, do you?” And then, before she could answer, he added, “You know, I read that there are more nerve endings on the lips and the tongue than anywhere else in the body. Were you aware of that? Genitals included. Which means that your mouth is the most sensitive place you’ve got when it comes to things like hot and cold and pleasure and pain.”
“Mm-hmm. I know.”
“Okay. I’m going to drive you back to your hotel now.”
“No. Please. It’s not far. I can walk.”
“Right,” he said, “I understand,” and she believed he did somehow. “Nina? How long before you’re better, do you think?”
“I wish I knew. Not tomorrow. Two days, I hope.”
“Two days.” He made it sound like a fact he was memorizing for a quiz. “Listen, this bruise on my arm, on my biceps?” He notched the contusion with his thumbnail. “I got it from punching myself after your Bellingham reading. I kept saying, ‘Catau, you’re going to ask this woman to dinner.’ I was mad at myself for chickening out. That’s all. I was just embarrassed to tell you before.”
And then his hand was on top of hers, and he was saying goodbye, and she felt that old carnal tightening in her knees, that flush of heat in her chest, and suddenly, in her imagination, she was sinking into bed with him and his caresses were covering her body in babyskin. How long had it been since she was well enough to unbutton someone’s shirt and dot his stomach with kisses? And did she have to be well enough? Maybe she was sick and despondent, broken into a thousand pieces by an illness that would not go away, but so what? Couldn’t she pretend she was whole for just one night? How much of yourself could you manufacture out of the fragments and the spare parts?
In her hotel room, she cried and then set her clothing out for the next day, turned her blanket down, and called Wallace. For half an hour, she lay in bed debriding her mouth with hydrogen peroxide, letting the watery chlorine taste spread down her tongue and into her throat as she wondered what had happened.
She switched on the TV. A sitcom was starting, the image sharp and true on the plasma screen. She tried to pay attention to the story rather than the play of shapes and colors, but it was nothing special, a show like every other, where all the people were assembled from light, and their problems made them lovable, and their smallest gestures set off waves of swirling photons.
There was a woman, not quite old but not quite young, whose fiancé had died unexpectedly. It was barely a month into their engagement and the two of them were attending a chamber music concert when he began coughing into his sleeve and excused himself from his seat. Because they had quarreled earlier over the cost of the wedding, she did not worry about him when he failed to return. Instead, with exasperation, she thought, What could possibly be keeping him?, little realizing that what was keeping him was death.
When she went to the foyer to look for him, she found a ring of ushers clustered around his body as if he were a spill for which no one wanted to accept responsibility. She would never forget the sight of his tongue pressed to his teeth, struggling to form some word he had just missed his chance of saying.
More than a year had gone by since then, a terrible year of ill health, sleeplessness, and rainy days that layered themselves over her like blankets. Who was she? Who had she become? Her skin was paler than it used to be, her hair grayer. Recently she had noticed creases lingering around her eyes in the morning, and also across her forehead, as if she had spent the night squinting into a harsh light. The lines did not go away when she rubbed them, vanishing only gradually as the hours wore on, and she could foresee a time when the mask of age that grief had placed over her face would simply be her face. She missed her fiancé terribly. Sometimes it seemed to her that he was only a beautiful story she had told herself, so quickly had she fallen in love with him and so quickly had he left her. It was hard to believe that that man who refused to button his collar, whose kisses began so shyly and ended so fervidly, who never once looked at her as if she were foolish or tiresome or even ordinary, was the same man she had found splayed across the theater’s staircase like an animal pinned to a board.
Frequently she had the feeling that he was standing just behind her, his breath tickling her ear like it used to when he came prowling over to seize her waist while she was cooking. All the same she did not speak to him.
Instead, like everyone, she accumulated letters that would never be answered. I don’t understand how this can be my life, she wrote, and What am I going to do? and occasionally, late at night, when she could not sleep, something longer such as Do you know what it feels like? Shall I describe it for you? It feels like the two of us got on a boat together, and the deck tossed me into the water, and you went sailing away without me. Thrown overboard—that’s how it feels. So I want you to tell me, because I really need to know, why did I spend my whole life waiting to fall in love with just the right person if you were just going to leave and it would all be for nothing?
That first summer, immediately after he died, she had barely been able to pick up a pen, but by the time the earth split open a year later, she had amassed three heavy baskets of letters. One afternoon, she went to the parched field where the fair sat in the autumn and the soccer team practiced in the spring and dropped them into the deepest opening she could find. The ground swallowed them as neatly as a pay phone accepting coins, except for the last page, which continued to show through the dirt until gravity gave it a tug and it slipped out of sight. That was where her heart was, she thought, cradled underground with the roots and the bones.
As she stood in the dust listening to the insects buzz, she dashed off one last note and let it go: Are you even out there?
The next morning, she received her answer.
The streets seemed to quiver and spark in the rain, and water cascaded from the roofs of the old Victorians, and the gray ash of the sky made the inside of the bookstore appear lustrous and unfamiliar, saturated with color, like a movie theater where the film has snapped and the seats have been engulfed in light, and in the bathroom, where Nina went to disinfect her mouth with Listerine, the walls were covered with photos of third-tier pop stars in unflattering poses, bizarre headlines clipped from tabloid newspapers, and when she stepped back into the store, she saw that the Newbery displays had been taken down and replaced with chairs and a microphone, and to the seven people who had braved the San Francisco weather to hear her read, she presented “A Fable for the Living,” coaxing each syllable carefully past her open sore, which was even worse than it had been in Portland. Every time someone entered the building, she could hear the storm drumming and resonating on Haight Street. Then the door swung shut, and the noise softened to a rustle, and once again they were all sealed together in their bright and cozy den. She kept waiting for John Catau to come slouching out from behind the survival guides, wearing a sly look of guilty satisfaction, as if by following her across three states he had allowed her to defeat him in some subtle contest of expectations, but it soon became obvious that he was not there. She was not prepared to feel so disappointed.
Though the audience was small, the weather must have put them at their ease, because they posed an uncommon number of questions: “Do you go into an office every day? A coffee shop? Or do you write from home?”
“I have a spare room with a desk and a computer. That’s where I do most of my work. Except the revisions—those I finish by hand, usually at the kitchen table.”
“Are there any words you feel you overuse?”
“Strange, great, little—I heard an interview with an editor who was asked about her pet peeves, and she named those three words, I suppose because of the way they adjust a phrase’s rhythm without actually changing its meaning. And soul probably. Terrible. And also lambent, but I love that one.”
“Do you read your work out loud when you’re writing?”
“No. Never. The truth is I’m embarrassed by the sound my voice makes in an empty room, that grand pronouncement effect. And there’s something else”—and it hurts, it hurts—“which is that, in my experience, and this might sound completely absurd, but stories have a certain power the first time they’re read out loud, don’t they? An energy, or an honesty. The way the words cut through the air. And it seems a shame to squander that power when there’s no one else around to hear it.”
“This isn’t a question. I just want to say that I enjoy listening to you read, the care you take with your pronunciation. Have you ever considered reading your own audiobooks?”
“Thanks, and no, but nobody ever suggested I should until now.”
“If Twin Souls were made into a movie, who would you cast as Mary Ruth?”
“I get people wondering that all the time, but I never know how to answer. Why, did you have someone in mind?”
In a theatrical, almost moony, tone of voice, the girl who had asked the question said, “I think Julia Krukowski would be perfect,” which made the friend sitting next to her stifle a smile. Nina nodded as if at the essential rightness of the idea, though she had never heard of Julie Krikowski. She suspected the name might be invented—if not, in fact, the girl’s own. More and more, though, she found that she was required to take the stardom of certain people on faith. The world presented an endless sequence of celebrities replacing celebrities replacing celebrities, like cheap wooden nesting dolls, each bearing a tinier and less persuasive likeness than the one that had come before. It exhausted her.
“My son says it would make a good anime film. So are there any more—” She felt an itch in her sinuses and turned her head. A sneeze tore at her lips with a startling photographic flash. She gasped and closed her eyes, waiting for the pangs of light to subside, for the blood to stop beating in her jaw. Make me better. Maybe if she never ate or drank or spoke or laughed or smiled or kissed anyone ever again—maybe then she would be all right. “Are there any more questions?”
The audience took pity on her. She thanked everyone for coming, signed a few books, and phoned for a taxi. Before she left, the manager gave her one of the trading cards he had printed to publicize the event, number 1,972 in the series, with her photo on the front and a description of the book on the back: “In The Age of Girls and Boys, Nina Poggione has crafted an elegant collection of love stories and fantasies, unique, lyrical, and haunting. Whether in the award-winning ‘Small Bitter Seeds,’ with its gifted physician struggling to retain his practice after losing his voice to cancer, or in the daring title story, in which the children of a world sinking into infertility attempt to transcend the circumstances of their lives, she evokes the souls of her characters with compassion and an exquisite clarity.”
She relied on the cabdriver to find her hotel, a narrow brick and stone structure, latticed with balconies, that she recognized from her Twin Souls tour the instant she saw the waxed wooden floor that stretched across the lobby in a sunburst of multiple browns. She had gone directly from the airport to the bookstore, so she had to check in at the front desk before she could ride the elevator to the third floor, unlock her room, and open her night-stand. It held a phone book and a Gideon’s Bible, but was otherwise empty. Two years before, in the same hotel—though not, surely, the same suite—she was searching for a stationery pad in her bedside drawer when she discovered a journal someone had left behind. The cloth had been razed from the cover, revealing a kidney-shaped patch of gray board, and a buckle ran through the first thirty pages or so, as if they had been dipped in water. It was filled with handwritten love notes, she discovered, page after page of them, I love thises and I love thats stacked tight as bricks against one another. I love the “bloop” sound you make whenever you drop something. I love remembering the evening we sat on the roof at your parents’ and watched the sunset reflecting off the windows of that old church. I love your silver chimneysweep charm, the one you wear around your neck for good luck. That night, she lay in bed and read the whole thing. Slowly a pair of personalities emerged from the sentences, taking on mass and texture. The man’s name was Jason, the woman’s Patricia, and at first Nina felt like a spy, eavesdropping as he turned the most quotidian details of their life into endearments, but after a while she might have been their closest friend, sitting between them as he cupped his hand to Nina’s ear and whispered all the beautiful things he wished her to relay to his wife. Maybe the words weren’t meant for Nina, but they were wonderful all the same, if not I love you then at least Somebody loves somebody.
The next morning, before she left, she asked the concierge if there was a Jason Williford registered at the hotel. He tapped on his keyboard. “No, I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“A Patricia?”
“No. No Patricia Williford either. Perhaps they’ve already departed?”
“Maybe so. Could you find out for me?”
“No Jason or Patricia Williford for the last… six months, at least. I’m sorry.”
So she kept the journal, taking it home with her, and one day, when she was running a fever from the cluster of sores under her tongue, five or six of them scattered along the midline, and the shining vitric crater of an ulcer on her hard palate, she took a Stanley knife and excised a page from the book. Immediately, she felt ashamed. What was she thinking? Why had she done it? Rather than tape the page back in place, though, she folded it in quarters so that she could carry it in her pocketbook.
And now, as she did every so often, she took it out and read it:
I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun striking you through the philodendron leaves. I love that game where you draw a picture on my back with your finger and I try to guess what it is. I love those blue jeans with the sunflowers on the pockets, the ones that hug the curves of your waist. I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns. I love the joke you told at Eli and Abbey’s wedding reception. I love how easily you cry when you’re happy. I love your question marks that look like backwards s’s, your periods that look like bird’s beaks. I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the ChapStick from your lips. I love how you laugh with your mouth open wide, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do. I love to think of you as that bored little girl designing adventures for herself, riding your sleeping bag down the staircase, or taking a running leap along the hallway and trying to flip the light switch in midair, or walking from your bedroom to the far side of the kitchen without stepping in the sunlight, or else you would die. I love how your eyes grow wet whenever you talk about your grandfather. I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail. I love planning vacations with you. I love how good you are to me when I’m not feeling well. I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited or even heard of, that you use when you’re trying to sound Italian. I love the bull story. I love helping you shave that tricky spot behind your knees. I love the way your hair fritzes out in all directions when you work up a sweat. I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine. I love that perfect little cluster of moles on your wrist. I love the yellow tights you wear when you’re feeling—how you say?—sparky. I love every—
There the page ended.
She had not yet shut her curtains, and when a bright light swept across the window, she saw a million raindrops speckling the glass, a column of white beads tilting through them with a minute quiver as the drops along the border vacillated and were swallowed into the center.
Her phone buzzed. She read her home number on the display. It was Wallace, calling to ask if he could have some friends over for Cities in Dust, the role-playing game he moderated. “Do you mind? Tomorrow’s Friday, so there’s no school afterward. We’ll order a pizza, and everyone’ll probably spend the night. It’ll be me and Conrad and Nathan and a few others.”
“Are any of these ‘few others’ girls? You know you can’t have Camarie spend the night if I’m not around.”
“But Camarie is our Forged One!”
“Forged One or no, I’m not comfortable with it. Tell me, has Camarie asked her parents what they think about your great coed, unsupervised role-playing extravaganza?”
He changed tacks. “Camarie is only twelve, you know, Mom. I wouldn’t do anything with her. It would break the Creep Equation.” This was the lesson his algebra teacher had used the first day of eighth grade to demonstrate the practical value of higher math: you took your age, divided it by two, and added seven, “and that’s your dating boundary,” Wallace had explained to her, hunched over a cherry Danish at the kitchen table. “Any younger than that, and it’s creepy. I’m fourteen, which means I can only date someone my own age, since fourteen divided by two is seven, plus seven is fourteen.”
She had overheard enough heedless mid-game snack-break conversations to know how he and his friends really interpreted the equation. And that’s your fucking boundary. Which means I can only fuck someone my own age. She also knew that, like most eighth-graders—or at least the science fiction kids, the British comedy kids—they were all talk, all roostering, their lasciviousness just another role-playing game, a way of trying on their manhood and simultaneously mocking it.
She cleared her throat. “Be that as it may.”
She managed to lay a stress on the last word without making her discomfort audible. Or so she thought. But after four years, Wallace could derive her condition from her voice with some authority. “Your lip?” he asked.
“Mm-hmm. It’s at that hurts-to-talk stage.”
“Would you like to talk about it?”
“Ha ha.”
“All right, listen, no Camarie. But everybody else is g——eah? Hey, there’s another call coming in. I’m gonna take it, Mom, okay? See you Sunday.”
“Sunday. Be good.”
She returned her phone to her purse, then lay back and gazed at the window, waiting for another car to breast the hill, its headlights taking just the right angle to send a field of stars Big Banging over the glass.
37 ÷ 2 = 18, or thereabouts, and 18 + 7 = 25, so a certain overzealous someone who had punctuated her dreams last night by kissing her neck, disquietingly, like a lover, was too creepy for her by one year.
And a half.
A bit of tissue had come loose from between her molars. She tried to dislodge it with her tongue, and a prickle of light appeared where she had scraped the papillae. Damn. Damn damn damn. It was yet another tiny injury, almost too small to notice, and yet she worried that, like so many others, it would rupture and lose all shape, growing more and more indistinct as the pain took hold. She brought her travel kit to the bathroom, prepared a capful of hydrogen peroxide, and tipped it into her mouth. She had to be so careful with herself. And here was the question: Was it worth what it cost?
Her house was built like all the others, with its roof projecting over the front door to keep it from opening directly into the rain, and it was her pleasure upon waking in the morning to step out onto the porch and take stock of the day. This particular morning arrived hot and bright, with the sky that oddly whitened blue it became when there was no moisture in the air. She was surprised to find a fissure interrupting her lawn. She kept the grass carefully trimmed and watered, and she was sure she would have seen the rift if it had been there the day before. It ran as straight as a line on a map. She traced it with her eyes, following it across her neighbor’s yard and a few others before it vanished into the woods at the end of the block, and then back again until it dead-ended at her front steps.
But that was not the strange part. No, the strange part was the sheet of paper that was protruding from it. She picked it up and unfolded it.
Of course I am, it read.
The handwriting was familiar to her, with its walking-stick r and its o’s that didn’t quite close at the top. But it took her a moment to figure out where she recognized it from.
She spent the next few hours twisting her engagement ring around and around her knuckle. A potato chip bag was dipping and spinning in the middle of the road, and she watched it ride the breeze until a boy rode by and flattened it beneath his bicycle.
Finally, on a blank sheet of paper, she wrote, If you are who I believe you are, tell me something only you would know about me.
She was unaccountably nervous. She knelt on the porch, closing her eyes as she slipped the note into the fissure. Something deep within the ground seemed to wrest it from her fingers like a fish plucking a cricket from a hook.
For the rest of the day, every time she went outside, she expected to see a flash of white paper waiting for her in the grass. But it was not until the next morning that she found one: I love your gray coat with the circles like cloud-covered suns.
She stared closely at the breach in her lawn. If she followed it on foot, she calculated, she would eventually reach the scorched field where she had gone to deposit her letters.
On a fresh sheet of paper, she replied, Everyone we know has seen me in that coat. It doesn’t prove a thing.
Early that afternoon, an answer arrived: I love how you laugh with your mouth wide open, and how you snort sometimes, and how embarrassed it makes you when you do.
She wrote, Well, yes, that’s definitely me.
I love the joke you told at Zach and Christina’s wedding reception.
She wrote, If this is a trick… this had better not be a trick. Is it?
I love how easily you cry when you’re happy.
So the correspondence went on, hour after hour and day after day, pushing across the distance of the soil. All his letters were love letters, delivered while she was sleeping or mopping the kitchen, weeding the garden or out buying milk. When she held them up to the sunlight, the faded marks of earlier messages emerged through the stationery: Bailey had two kittens last week, and I named the first one Bowtie, and the second one Mike! I hope you’re better now, I truly do, because I am, I tell you, I am. I think there’s something terribly wrong with me. They came in a variety of hands and were often hard to decipher. She presumed he had salvaged the pages from under the ground, a few dozen among the many hundreds of thousands that had rained down over the generations of the dead.
I love the way you stand at the mirror in the morning picking the lip balm from your lips.
I love the inexplicable accent, from nowhere anyone has ever visited, you use when you’re trying to sound French.
I love that first moment, at night, when you trace the curve of my ear with your fingernail.
Soon the situation no longer seemed strange to her. It was as if the two of them were kneeling on opposite sides of the bedroom door, sliding notes to each other along the floor. Then it was as if the door had vanished, vanished entirely, and they were simply sitting in the bedroom together. When she had crossed the threshold she could not say, only that she had. He was her fiancé—she did not doubt it—but what had brought him back to her?
It was one of those peaceful mid-April evenings with a coral sky the uniform hue of a paint sample, and from the hills of Los Angeles came the shick-shack of insects, and from the highways came the gusting sound of traffic, and because of a broken stoplight at Sunset and Laurel Canyon, she was fifteen minutes late to the bookstore, so one of the cashiers escorted her directly to the reading annex, a dimly lit room lined with shelf after shelf of remainders, where twenty or thirty people sat in poses of quiet thought or conversation, their shoulders touching as they swiveled around in their chairs, and he was not there, or at least she did not see him, and Once there was a country where no one addressed the dead except in writing, and Who was she? Who had she become? and She sensed that every word had demanded some mysterious payment from him, a fee that could only be understood by those who had already been laid to rest, and by the time she finished presenting the story, reaching the ever and the after, her eyes had adjusted to the darkness and she knew for certain—he had given up on her. It was just as well. The ulcer on her lip was still stinging, but a seal had begun to form over it, a clear bandage of skin with the texture of overlapping threads. She was recovering in spite of herself. She gave her mouth a quick investigation with her tongue. Deep in the pocket of her gums was the firm polyp of a sore, like an unpopped kernel of popcorn, that had developed without ever quite breaking the skin. On one of her cheeks was a minuscule dimpled lesion, and on her tongue itself was the same small scuff she had noticed the night before. None of them had become painful yet, though. If, after the reading, she spoke as little as possible, there was the slim possibility they would die away without getting any worse, and the ulcer on her lip would heal, and she would be graced with a few days of well-being before the next outbreak began.
She would bake a pizza—or better yet: a lasagna—and eat until she was stuffed.
She would have a long conversation with Wallace about his father.
She would find someone to fuck and she would fuck him.
A woman in the front row asked, “So that part where the dead begin to glow—is that supposed to be because they’re in pain? Because they don’t seem to be in pain. Are they?”
Well, there was physical pain, Nina answered, and there was emotional pain. This particular story offered little evidence of the former, maybe, but abundant evidence of the latter. Ever since she was a child, she answered. English Lit, she answered, with a minor in biology. No, she answered, not yet. She was afraid that as soon as she decided to incorporate it into her stories, the phenomenon would end as mysteriously as it had begun, and everything she had written would be cemented to a particular time and place. Now, she supposed. Now and here. (What else could she mean?) Constantly, she answered. At least two or three books a week. In fact, it was reading that was truly at the center of her life—experiencing stories, not making them. She was sure most other writers would say the same. No, she answered. Usually, she answered. Once or twice, she answered. Certainly she had changed since then, in innumerable ways. With her first book she had seen the world as a narrative, seen human lives as narratives. Now, instead, she saw them as stories. She wasn’t sure what had happened. Maybe she had experienced too much sickness. Maybe her sickness had made her less intelligent. Maybe her sickness had made her more sentimental. Maybe her sickness had returned her to the simple receptiveness of her childhood, when fitting people together seemed more important than taking them apart. No, it wasn’t that, she answered. She was just as interested in characters as she had ever been. But somehow she’d come to believe that characters were made up of their ideas and perceptions rather than their actions. A mistake, perhaps. She couldn’t argue with that. Yes, exactly, she answered. The traveling, she answered. The fact that she could go to work in a T-shirt and shorts, she answered, along with the privilege of participating in other people’s dreams, and most of all the thrill she got, the feeling of wondrous correctness, when a handful of words she had been organizing and reorganizing suddenly fastened themselves together, forming a chain that seemed to tug at the page from some distant, less provisional place, as if through an accidental pattern of sounds, rhythms, and insinuations she had linked herself to the beginning of the world, a time when words were inseparable from what they named and you could not mention a thing without establishing it in front of your eyes. It was the same feeling, she was convinced, that painters experienced through color, dancers through movement, photographers through light. The same feeling that mathematicians experienced through equations and actors experienced through emotion.
The sun had fallen behind the audience. In the deepening shade of the room, it was easy to see their wounds and contagions: the wrenched backs and sciatic hips, the legs cramped with heat lightning, a glittering pathology of sprains, rashes, and carcinomas. Nina sat at the table by the lectern and signed the books she was handed—a half-dozen Girls and Boys and twice that many Twin Souls, plus a mint-edition copy of her ancient small-press poetry chapbook, Why the House Loves the Fire, preserved in an acetate sleeve for the store’s first-editions case.
She had spent too much time talking and had worn the seal off her ulcer. She could feel it shining through her lips. You’ve been stung by a bee or a wasp before, haven’t you? she answered. You know how at first it’s only a faint irritation, and you can almost disregard it, but then the venom spreads and suddenly, in the smallest division of a second, the injury blossoms open and becomes alarmingly, almost hyperphysically, bright? Well, it was like that blossoming-open moment, continually renewing itself, for days and days. Yes, she answered, she had seen a doctor about it. The problem was that nobody knew what caused them. Rumors, she answered. Rumors and folk remedies. Flaxseed oil. L-lysine. Hydrogen peroxide. Warm saltwater. For a while she had tried burning them closed with a sulfuric acid compound that left a cap of white crust over the top, but every time she used it her mouth filled with the sickening taste of aluminum foil, and often the sores would keep expanding underneath the cauterant and absorb it anyway. All the time, she answered. Because words on paper didn’t hurt. No, she answered. No. They had made a ruin of everything she cared about. She didn’t want adulation anymore. She didn’t want love. She only wanted to carve a small path of painlessness and blunted feeling through her life until she came out the other side.
Back at the hotel, before she phoned Wallace, she stood at the mirror practicing her diction. “Hello. Hello. Make me better. Make me better. This is your mother. Mother. Mother.” She would wait for him to ask her how she was doing, and “I’m better,” she would say. Which was true, or very nearly. She would be better soon. She was sure of it. The trick was to speak deliberately enough to rid her consonants of that lunging electric quality that gave her condition away, but not so deliberately that it sounded unnatural or calculated. Even the slightest measure of strain in her voice, and Wallace would pick up on it. He was like a hero in a classic detective novel: Father Brown, Hercule Poirot. She worried sometimes that she had passed her syndrome along to him, that one day in his mid-thirties he would wake to discover that his immune system had broken apart inside him like a crossette, bursting open in an eruption of pus and cankers, and everything he loved had become difficult. She hoped the thought would never occur to him. She didn’t want him to dread growing up.
She called her home number. Someone answered on the first ring, speaking with the heavy gravel of a smoker or a barroom blues singer. She thought she heard him ask, “Who am I, and how can I help you?” but in the initial air pocket of the connection, she might have been mistaken.
“I’m sorry?”
There was a whispered flurry of dudes, and then the man said, “This is the wrong number. Say good-bye. Hang up,” and the line went silent.
She stared at the phone. After a few seconds, the LCD became dim from inactivity, and her face peered back at her with the blank puzzlement of a prisoner in a cage. She pressed redial. Her home number marched across the screen, appearing digit by digit beneath the phone icon transmitting its telepathy waves.
This time Wallace answered. “Hello?”
“Wallace. What is going on?”
“Hey, Mom. Nothing. Just me and the campaigners are taking a break. What’s up?”
“Who was that man who answered our phone?”
“Man?”
“Wallace, I just called you, and a man just picked up.”
She could always tell when he was lying by the seesawing quality of his voice, as if some hidden athletic force were propelling his sentences up and then catching them as they fell back down. “I don’t know. You must have dialed the wrong number or something.”
“I pressed redial.” In the background the same deep voice that had spoken to her earlier said something like wonder who or hundred and two before the others hushed him. “Him. That man.”
Wallace paused. “Okay. Listen,” he said. “Don’t freak out. There’s this guy we met. He sells books from a blanket over by that Chinese place. Mom, I’m telling you, he had a first-edition Cities in Dust manual, still in the wooden box, with both the Twelve Nations supplement and the original Gazetteer. We’re negotiating the price down, that’s all.”
“Out! Get him out of our house!”
“Give us just a… second… more,” Wallace told her, “and we’ll be—”
She heard someone say, “All right, man. You can have that one and one other. But that’s it.”
“—almost—”
“Kendall Wallace Poggione!”
“Finished,” Wallace concluded.
“Now!”
“Okay, okay, we’re done. Jesus! Problem solved. He’s leaving.” The front door opened and closed, its damaged hinge clacking against the frame. With a cavernous sigh her son declared, “You know, Mom, just because your life frightens you doesn’t mean my life has to frighten me.”
The next day, a message came while she was sitting on her front steps. She glanced away for a moment, and there it was, nestled in the thick fringe of grass around the fissure, like a mushroom springing up after a thunderstorm. I love you, it read, and I want you to join me. I want us to be together again, my jewel, my apple. Whatever the cost, I want it, I want it. And I don’t want to wait until you die, because God knows how long that will be.
It was his longest letter yet. She sensed that every word had demanded some mysterious payment from him, a fee that could be understood only by those who had already been laid to rest. What was he asking? That she end her life? That she suspend it? Or something else altogether, something she could hardly imagine?
For the next few days he left no love notes in her yard, no entreaties, only a single question that appeared late one night on the back of a chewing gum wrapper: Hello?
He was giving her time to think. He was waiting for her belowground—she knew it, she knew it. Every day the crack by her porch grew a little larger. At first it was only a chink in the dirt, no wider than the slot where she dropped her mail at the post office, but gradually it stretched open until it was as big as an ice chest, and then a steamer trunk, and then a gulf into which she could easily have fit her entire body. She wondered what it would be like if she accepted his invitation. She began to dream that she was living beneath the field on the far side of the woods, moving through a long procession of rooms and hallways where the dead milled around like guests at a trade convention. Throughout the day, at various angles, the sun pierced the hills and the pastures, sending bright silver needles through the ceiling of the earth, so that it was never completely dark, and at night, when the land was soaked in shadows, the people around her glowed with a strange heat. She watched them flare and shimmer through their skin, their bones going off like bombs, every limb a magnificent firework of carbon, phosphorus, and calcium. It seemed that the surface of the world had two sides: on one were the bereaved spouses, the outcast teenagers, the old men and women who had no one left to reminisce with, and on the other were the lovers and friends and parents they had outlived—all of them, whether above or below, aching for those who were gone; all of them, whether above or below, pressing their fingers to the soil. Her eyes flickered in her face, and her teeth shone in her mouth, and when she woke, before the dream had lost its color, she felt that she was recalling some earlier existence, like a house she had lived in as a child, familiar down to its last curved faucet and last chipped floorboard.
The truth was that the thread connecting her to the world was as thin as could be. A sunrise here or there, the feel of suede against her skin, the aroma of strong coffee in the morning, and a few moments of forgetful well-being—that was it, that was all she had, and she knew that it could snap at any moment. She had always believed that one day someone would come along and love her and she would understand how to live. Maybe the idea was juvenile, but she had carried it with her all her life, like an ember smoldering in a pouch of green leaves. It was only the past awful year that had forced her to give it up. And now here it was again, the hope that she had finally found him, the man who would wrench her into the world, the good and beautiful world, where people got married and had children and slowly grew old together.
One afternoon, as she was standing at the kitchen counter eating a turkey-and-diced-olive sandwich, she realized that she had made up her mind. She swept the bread crumbs into her palm and brushed them gently, caressingly, into the sink, as if she were stroking a cat. Then she went outside and knelt at the edge of the crevice. Her neighbor was grilling a steak in his backyard. A forsythia bush rustled in the wind.
There she was, and then there she wasn’t, and two large, pale ants were exploring the impression her knees had left in the grass.
It was the last the world would see of her, or at least the last the sun would, the last the sky.
I am here to tell you what happened next.
In Phoenix the streets ran flat and straight, and the jacaranda blossoms made strange ghosts in the slipstreams of the cars, and even at seven, after the sun had set, when the hotel’s valet motioned one of the taxis over for her, the city was clothed with a lustrous violet sky that seemed to have the full force of the day shining inside it, and her driver asked her why she was in town, and, “No kidding. Have you ever read those Stainless Steel Rat books?” and, “Tempe Square, d’ya say?” and she kept flattening her tongue against the sleek patch where her sore had been, reassuring herself that it scarcely hurt anymore, though her tongue itself was already perforated where she had rasped it against her teeth, and it felt as if she were balancing a seed, a small bitter seed, on the tip, and she knew it would be only a day or two before the tiny pock spilled out of itself and ulcerated, but for tonight at least she was better, she was better, and the bookstore smelled of bread and coffee from the bakery next door, and there was something about the way the microphone dislocated her speech, taking her Annie Lennox contralto and the slightly too-long hiss she gave her s’s and making them gigantic, directionless, that she was still unpracticed enough to find amusing, as if she were nothing but a voice, a big spectral voice, and she could lose herself in it, forgetting all the people who sat before her with their tics and abscesses, their blisters and swollen glands, the intestinal disorders that floated in their abdomens like foxfire, the conjunctivitis infections that made their eyes gleam and shimmer, gathered in their chairs between the podium and the horror shelves, and when she reached the end of the story, someone raised his hand and asked, “What’s wrong with your people?” and then, “Don’t mistake what I’m saying. I liked that. I really did. But you write these stories about characters who have great sectors of what one would ordinarily regard as the common human experience entirely unavailable to them. I mean, they don’t seem to realize it, but they do. I’m just trying to understand why,” and the only answer she could think to give was that she had spent the last four years doing exactly the same, trying to understand why, and then there arrived the usual questions about her favorite books and her writing schedule and her teaching philosophy and her cover designs, and after she was finished responding to them, when she had thanked the audience for attending and signed the bookstore’s stock, one of the managers gave her a T-shirt with the words FICTIONAL CHARACTER printed on the front, and the bandage on the inside of his arm held a single brilliant point of silver that reminded her of the picture on an old cathode ray tube, collapsing to a starlike remnant of itself as the power was switched off, and the arches along the back of the store were crowned with paintings of mountains and houses, and the gold pillars were washed in light and shadow, and she was getting ready to leave when there he came, him, striding past the magazine racks, giving her his funny, bashful, enthusiastic smile, and he said, “Two days, you told me. Well, it’s been two days. It took me almost that long to drive here. I was wondering if—” and she interrupted him by gripping his wrist and stroking it with her thumb, slowly lifting her hand free until her fingers were barely skimming the risen tips of the hairs, and she asked him if he would mind too much, too terribly much—“John. John-with-an-h Catau”—if he would mind driving her back to her hotel, and she wondered if she had lost her senses, but she felt only the slightest nettling of pressure on her lip, and all she had was this one night, and he only had to look at her to see her.
Soon after the woman went to join her fiancé, as the final sweltering days of summer came to a close, an unusual event took place. Late one night, while everyone was sleeping, something shifted beneath the brown pastures and the dry creek beds, and a hundred thousand fissures spread across the landscape, leading to a hundred thousand front doors. Shortly after the sun rose, in one house after another, the lights went on, and people showered and got dressed, and then they stepped outside to go to work. Earlier that week, a mass of clouds had been seen at the horizon, which meant that it was almost time for the rains to begin again, but this particular day had dawned hard and clear. The heat rang out like a coin. The grass twitched and straightened in the morning air. And the lawns—they were split down the center, and from every rift projected a sheet of paper:
I love that perfect little cluster of freckles on your wrist.
I love the way your hair curls when you work up a sweat.
I love how good you were to me when I got sick.
I love watching you sit at your desk, the sun shining on you through the philodendron leaves.
I love your many doomed attempts to give up caffeine.
Once there was a country where it rained for most of the year, and everyone resided underground, and no one was quite sure who was dead and who was living. But it did not matter because they were happy. And they were ever. And they were after.