Werewolves in Their Youth
Michael Chabon

Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Werewolves in Their Youth

House Hunting

Son of the Wolfman

Green’s Book

Mrs. Box

Spikes

The Harris Fetko Story

That Was We

In the Black Will

Praise

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the publisher

To Ayelet

Werewolves in Their Youth

I had known him as a bulldozer, as a samurai, as an android programmed to kill, as Plastic Man and Titanium Man and Matter-Eater Lad, as a Buick Electra, as a Peterbilt truck, and even, for a week, as the Mackinac Bridge, but it was as a werewolf that Timothy Stokes finally went too far. I wasn’t there when it happened. I was down in the ravine at the edge of the schoolyard, founding a capital for an empire of ants. “Now, of course, this right here, this lovely structure, is the Temple of El-bok,” I explained to the ants, adopting the tone my mother employed to ease newlyweds through the emptied-out rooms of the depressed housing market in which she spent her days. I pointed to a pyramid of red clay at the center of a plaza paved with the crazy cross-hatching of my handprints. “And this, naturally, is the Palace of the Ant Emperor. But, ha ha, you knew that, of course. Okay, and over here” – I pointed to a sort of circular corral I’d formed by poking a row of sharpened twigs into the ground – “all of this is for keeping your ant slaves. Isn’t that nice? And over here’s where you milk your little aphids.” On the heights above my city stood the mound of an ordinary antville. All around me the cold red earth was stitched with a black embroidery of ants. By dint of forced transport and at the cost of not a few severed abdomens and thoraxes I succeeded in getting some of the ants to follow the Imperial Formic Highway, a broad groove in the clay running out the main gates of the city, up the steep slope of the ravine, and thence out into the tremendousness of the world. With my store of snapped-off ant body parts I pearled the black eyes of El-bok the Pitiless, an ant-shaped idol molded into the apex of the pyramid. I had just begun to describe, to myself and to the ants, the complicated rites sacred to the god whose worship I was imposing on them when I heard the first screams from the playground.

“Oh, no,” I said, rising to my feet. “Timothy Stokes.” The girls screamed at Timothy the same way every time he came after them – in unison and with a trill that sounded almost like delight, as if they were watching the family cat trot past with something bloody in its jaws. I scrambled up the side of the ravine and emerged as Timothy, shoulders hunched, arms outstretched, growled realistically and declared that he was hungry for the throats of puny humans. Timothy said this or something like it every time he turned into a werewolf, and I would not have been too concerned if, in the course of his last transformation, he hadn’t actually gone and bitten Virginia Pease on the neck. It was common knowledge around school that Virginia’s parents had since written a letter to the principal, and that the next time Timothy Stokes hurt somebody he was going to be expelled. Timothy was, in our teacher Mrs. Gladfelter’s words, one strike away from an out, and there was a widespread if unarticulated hope among his classmates, their parents, and all of the teachers at Copland Fork Elementary that one day soon he would provide the authorities with the excuse they needed to pack him off to Special School. I stood there awhile, above my little city, rolling a particle of ant between my fingers, watching Timothy pursue a snarling, lupine course along the hopscotch crosses. I knew that someone ought to do something to calm him down, but I was the only person in our school who could have any reason to want to save Timothy Stokes from expulsion, and I hated him with all my heart.

“I have been cursed for three hundred years!” he declaimed. He was wearing his standard uniform of white dungarees and a plain white undershirt, even though it was a chilly afternoon in October and all the rest of us had long since been bundled up for autumn in corduroy and down. Among the odd traits of the alien race from which Timothy Stokes was popularly supposed to have sprung was an apparent imperviousness to cold; in the midst of a February snowstorm he would show up on your doorstep, replying to your mother’s questions only when she addressed him as Untivak, full of plans to build igloos and drink seal blood and chew raw blubber, wearing only the usual white jeans and T-shirt, plus a pair of giant black hip boots that must have belonged to his father – an undiscussed victim of the war in Vietnam. Timothy had just turned eleven, but he was already as tall as Mrs. Gladfelter and his bodily strength was famous; earlier that year, in the course of a two-week period during which Timothy believed himself to be an electromagnetic crane, we had on several occasions seen him swing an iron manhole cover straight up over his head.

“I have been cursed to stalk the night through all eternity,” he went on, his voice orotund, carrying all across the playground. When it came to such favorite subjects as lycanthropy and rotary-wing aircraft, he used big words, and had facts and figures accurately memorized, and sounded like the Brainiac some took him for, but I knew he was not as intelligent as his serious manner and heavy black spectacles led people to believe. His grades were always among the lowest in the class. “I have been searching for prey as lovely as you!”

He lunged toward the nearest wall of the cage of girls around him. The girls peeled away from him as though sprayed with a hose, bumped shoulders, clung shrieking to each other’s sleeves. Some of them were singing the song we sang about Timothy Stokes,

Timothy Stokes,

Timothy Stokes,

You’re going to the home

for crazy folks,

and the one singing the loudest was Virginia Pease herself, in her furry black coat and her bright red tights. She was standing screened by Sheila and Siobhan Fahey, her best friends, dangling one skinny red leg toward Timothy and then jerking it away again when Timothy swiped at it with one of his werewolf paws. Virginia had blond hair, and she was the only girl in the fifth grade with pierced ears and painted fingernails, and Timothy Stokes was in love with her. I knew this because the Stokeses lived next door to us and I was privy to all kinds of secrets about Timothy that I had absolutely no desire to know. I forbade myself, with an almost religious severity, to show Timothy any kindness or regard. I would never let him sit beside me, at lunch or in class, and if he tried to talk to me on the playground I ignored him; it was bad enough that I had to live next door to him.

It was toward Virginia that Timothy now advanced, a rattling growl in his throat. She drew back behind her girlfriends, and their screaming now grew less melodious, less purely formal. Timothy crouched down on all fours. He rolled his wild white eyes and took a last look around him. That was when he saw me, halfway across the yellow distance of the soccer field. He was looking at me, I thought, as though he hoped I might have something I wanted to tell him. Instantly I dropped flat on my belly, my heart pounding the way it did when I was spotted trying to spy on a baseball game or a birthday party. I slid down into the ravine backward, doing considerable damage to the ramparts of my city, flattening one wing of the imperial palace. All through the ten minutes of growling and alarums that followed I lay there, without moving. I lay with my cheek in the dirt. At first I could hear the girls shouting for Mrs. Gladfelter, and then I heard Mrs. Gladfelter herself, sounding very angry, and then I thought I could hear the voice of Mr. Albert, the P.E. teacher, who always stepped in to break up fights when it was too late, and some bully had already knocked the glasses from your face and sent your books spinning away across the floor of the gym. Then the bell sounded the end of recess, and everything got very quiet, but I just stayed there in the ravine, at the gates of the city of the ants.

As I tried to repair the damage I had done to its walls, I told myself that I didn’t feel sorry at all for stupid old Timothy Stokes, but then I would remember the confused look in his eyes as I had abandoned him to his fate, to all the unimaginable things that would be done to him in the fabulous corridors of the Special School. I kept recalling something that I had heard Timothy’s mother say to mine, just a couple of days earlier. I should explain that at this point in my childhood I had acquired the shameful habit of eavesdropping on the conversations of adults, particularly my parents, and, worse, of snooping in their drawers – a pastime or compulsion that in recent months had led me to discover nude photographs of my mother taken with my father’s Polaroid; school documents and physicians’ reports detailing my own learning disability, juvenile obesity, hyperactivity, and loneliness; and, most recently, a letter from my mother’s attorney cheerily explaining that if my father persisted in his current pattern of violent behavior he could be restrained from coming anywhere near my mother ever again – a development for which I had on certain bad evenings prayed to God with desperation, but which, now that it had become an actual possibility, struck me as the most miraculous of all the awful wonders set loose upon the world in the course of the past year. There had been no mention in the lawyer’s letter of whether my father would be allowed to come near me. At any rate, I had been hanging over the banister of the hall stairs the other morning, listening in, when Mrs. Stokes – her name was Althea – came over to retrieve a two-hundred-dollar pair of Zeiss binoculars Timothy had given me the day before in exchange for three tattered Mister Miracle comic books and a 1794 one-dollar coin that he believed to be genuine but that I knew perfectly well to have been a premium my father received several years before on subscribing to American Heritage.

“You know,” Althea Stokes had told my mother, in that big, sad donkey voice of hers, “your little Paul is Timothy’s only friend.”

I decided to spend the afternoon in the ravine. The sun started down behind the embankment, and the moon, rising early, emerged from the rooftops of the houses somebody was putting up in front of the school – brand-new split-level houses my mother and her company were having a hard time selling. The moon, I noticed, was not quite full. As I worked to rebuild the ghost town I had made, I felt keenly that my failure to help Timothy was really only the latest chapter in a lifelong history of inadequacy and powerlessness. The very last line of that letter I’d found among my mother’s papers was “I think we should be able to have this thing wrapped up by November fifteenth.” If this was true, then I had less than one month in which to effect a reconciliation between my parents – a goal that, apart from, wishing for, I had done nothing at all to bring about. Now it appeared that my father would not even be allowed to come home anymore. My fingers grew stiff and caked with clay, and my nose ran, and I cried for a while and then stopped crying, and still it seemed that my absence from the classroom went unnoticed. I was feeling pretty sorry for myself. After a while I gave up on my city building and just lay there on my back, gazing up at the moon. I didn’t hear the scrape of footsteps until they were just above my head.

“Paul?” said Mrs. Gladfelter, leaning over the lip of the ravine, hands against her thighs. “Paul Kovel, what on earth are you doing out here?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I didn’t hear the bell.”

“Paul,” she said. “Now, listen to me. Paul, I need your help.”

“With what?” I didn’t think she looked angry, but her face was upside down and it was hard to tell.

“Well, with Timothy, Paul. I guess he’s just very wound up right now. You know. Well, he’s pretending he’s a werewolf today, and even though that’s fine, and we all know how Timothy is sometimes, we have serious things to discuss with him, and we’d like him to stop pretending for just a little while.”

“But what if he isn’t pretending, Mrs. Gladfelter?” I said. “What if he really is a werewolf?”

“Well, maybe he is, Paul, but if you would just come inside and talk to him for a little bit, I think we might be able to persuade him to change back into Timothy. You’re his friend, Paul. I asked him if he’d like to talk to you, and he said yes.”

“I’m not his friend, Mrs. Gladfelter. I swear to God. I can’t do anything.”

“Couldn’t you try?”

I shook my head. I hoped that I didn’t start crying again.

“Paul, Timothy is in trouble.” All at once her voice grew sharp. “He needs your help, and I need your help, too. Now if you come right this minute, and get up out of that dirt, then I’ll forget that you didn’t come in from recess. If you don’t come back inside, I’ll have to speak to your mother.” She held out her hand. “Now, come on, Paul. Please.”

And so I took her hand, and let her pull me out of the ravine and across the deserted playground, aware that in doing so I was merely proving the unspoken corollary that my mother had left hanging, the other morning, in the air between her and Mrs. Stokes. There was a song about me, too, I’m afraid – a popular little number that went

What’s that smell-o?

Paul Kovel-o

He’s a big fat hippo Jell-O

He’s a snoop

He smells like poop

He smells like tomato beef

Alphabet soup

because at some point in my career I had acquired the reputation, inexplicable to me, for exuding an odor of Campbell’s tomato soup – a reputation that no amount of bathing or studied avoidance of all the brands and varieties of canned soup ever rid me of. As if this were not bad enough, I had to go around with a thick wad of electrician’s tape on the hinge of my eyeglasses and a huge Western-style tooled-leather belt stuffed one and a half times around the loops of my trousers. It had been my father’s belt, and bore his name, Melvin, stamped along its length, in big yellow capital letters set amid bright green cacti, like a cheery frontier invitation for all to come and yank my underpants up into my crack. I sat alone at lunch under an invisible and mysterious hood of tomato smell – a scent dangerously similar to the acrid tang of vomit – walked myself home from school, and figured in all the dramas, ceremonials, and epic struggles of my classmates only in the unlikely but mythologically requisite role of King of the Retards. Timothy Stokes, I knew, as I followed Mrs. Gladfelter down the long, silent hallway to the office, hating him more and more with each step, was my only friend.

He was sitting in a corner of the office, trapped in an orange vinyl armchair. There was a roman numeral three scratched into his left cheek and his brilliant white shirt and trousers were patterned with a camouflage of grass and dirt and asphalt. His chest swelled and then subsided deeply, swelled and subsided. Mr. Buterbaugh, the principal, was standing over him, arms folded across his chest. He was watching Timothy, looking amazed and skeptical and somehow offended. Mrs. Maloney, the school secretary, who a dozen times a month typed the cruel words “tomato soup” onto the cafeteria menus that my mother cruelly affixed with a magnet to our refrigerator, rose from behind her desk when we came in, and gathered up her purse and sweater.

“I finally reached Timothy’s mother, Mrs. Gladfelter,” she said. “She was at work, but she said she would be here as soon as she could.” She lowered her voice. “And we called Dr. Schachter, too. His office said he’d call back.” She cleared her throat. “So I’m going to take my break now.”

At two o’clock every day, I knew, Mrs. Maloney sneaked around to the windowless side of the school building and stood behind the power transformer, smoking an Eve cigarette. I turned, with a sinking heart, and looked at the clock over the door to Mr. Buterbaugh’s office. I hadn’t missed the whole afternoon, after all, lying there in the ditch for what had seemed to me like many hours. There was still another ninety minutes to be gotten through.

“Well, now, Timothy.” Mrs. Gladfelter took me by the shoulders and maneuvered me around her. “Look who I found,” she said.

“Hey, Timothy,” I said.

Timothy didn’t look up. Mrs. Gladfelter gave me a gentle push toward him, in the small of my back.

“Why don’t you sit down, Paul?”

“No.” I stiffened, and pushed the other way.

“Please sit down, Paul,” said Mr. Buterbaugh, showing me his teeth. Although his last name forced him to adopt a somewhat remote and disciplinarian manner with the other kids at Copland, Mr. Buterbaugh always took pains with me. He made me swap high fives with him and kept up with my grades. At first I had attributed his kindness to the fact that he was a little heavy and had probably been a fat kid, too, but then I kept hearing from my mother about how she had run into Bob Buterbaugh at this singles’ bar or that party and he had said the nicest things about me. I stopped pushing against Mrs. Gladfelter and let myself be steered toward the row of orange chairs. “That’s the way. Sit down and wait with Timothy until his mother gets here.”

“Mr. B. and I will be sitting right inside his office, Paul.”

“No!” I didn’t want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matching orange chairs.

“That’s enough now, Paul,” said Mr. Buterbaugh, his friendly smile looking more false than usual. I could see that he was very angry. “Sit down.”

“It’s all right,” said Mrs. Gladfelter. “You see what you can do about helping Timothy turn back into Timothy. We’re just going to give you a little privacy.” She followed Mr. Buterbaugh into his office and then poked her head back around the door. “I’m going to leave this door open, in case you need us. All right?”

“This much,” I said, holding my hands six inches apart.

There were three chairs next to Timothy’s. I took the farthest, and showed him my back, so that anyone passing by the windows of the office would not be able to conclude that he and I were engaged in any sort of conversation at all.

“Are you expelled?” I said. There was no reply. “Are you, Timothy?” Again he said nothing, and I couldn’t stop myself from turning around to look at him. “Timothy, are you expelled?”

“I’m not Timothy, Professor,” said Timothy, gravely but not without a certain air of satisfaction. He didn’t look at me. “I’m afraid your precious antidote didn’t work.”

“Come on, Timothy,” I said. “Cut it out. The moon’s not even full today.”

Now he turned the werewolf glint of his regard toward me. “Where were you?” he said. “I was looking for you.”

“I was in the ditch.”

“With the ants?”

I nodded.

“I heard you talking to them before.”

“So?”

“So, are you Ant-Man?”

“No, dummy.”

“Why not?”

“Because, I’m not anybody. You’re not anybody, either.”

We fell silent for a while and just sat there, not looking at each other, kicking at the legs of our chairs. I could hear Mrs. Gladfelter and Mr. Buterbaugh talking softly in his office; Mr. Buterbaugh called her Elizabeth. The telephone rang. A light flashed twice on Mrs. Maloney’s phone, then held steady.

“Thanks for calling back, Joel,” I heard Mr. Buterbaugh say. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“I went to see Dr. Schachter a couple times,” I said. “He had Micronauts and the Fembots.”

“He has Stretch Armstrong, too.”

“I know.”

“Why did you go see him? Did your mother make you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How come?”

“I don’t know. She said I was having problems. With my anger, or I don’t know.” Actually, she had said – and at first Dr. Schachter had concurred – that I needed to learn to “manage” my anger. This was a diagnosis that I never understood, since it seemed to me that I had no problems at all managing my anger. It was my judgment that I managed it much better than my parents managed theirs, and even Dr. Schachter had to agree with that. In fact, the last time I saw him, he suggested that I try to stop managing my anger quite so well. “I don’t know,” I said to Timothy. “I guess I was mad about my dad and things.”

“He had to go to jail.”

“Just for one night.”

“How come?”

“He had too much to drink,” I said, with a disingenuous shrug. My father was not much of a drinker, and when he crashed the party my mother had thrown last weekend to celebrate the closing of her first really big sale, he broke a window, knocked over a chafing dish, which set fire to a batik picture of Jerusalem, and raised a bloody blue plum under my mother’s right eye. People had tended to blame the unaccustomed effects of the fifth of Gilbey’s that was later found in the glove compartment of his car. Only my mother and I knew that he was secretly a madman.

“Did you visit him in jail?”

“No, stupid. God! You’re such a retard! You belong in Special School, Timothy. I hope they make you eat special food and wear a special helmet or something.” I heard the distant slam of the school’s front door, and then a pair of hard shoes knocking along the hall. “Here comes your retard mother,” I said.

“What kind of special helmet?” said Timothy. It was never very easy to hurt his feelings. “Ant-Man wears a helmet.”

Mrs. Stokes entered the office. She was a tall, thin woman, much older than my mother, with long gray hair and red, veiny hands. She wore clogs with white kneesocks, and in the evenings after dinner she went onto her deck and smoked a pipe. Every morning she made Timothy pancakes for his breakfast, which sounded okay until you found out that she put things in them like carrots and leftover pieces of corn.

“Oh, hello, Paul,” she said, in her Eeyore voice.

“Mrs. Stokes,” said Mrs. Gladfelter, coming out of the principal’s office. She smiled. “It’s been kind of a long afternoon for Timothy, I’m afraid.”

“How is Virginia?” said Mrs. Stokes. She still hadn’t looked at Timothy.

“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Mr. Buterbaugh said. “Just a little shaken up. We sent her home early. Of course,” he added, “her parents are going to want to speak to you.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Stokes. I saw that she was still wearing her white apron and her photo name tag from her job. She worked at the bone factory out in the Huxley Industrial Park, where they made plastic skulls and skeletons for medical schools. It was her job to string together all the delicate beadwork of the hands and feet. “I’m ready to do whatever you think would be best for Timothy.”

“I’m not Timothy,” said Timothy.

“Oh, please, Timmy, stop this nonsense for once.”

“I’m cursed.” He leaned over and brought his face very close to mine. “Tell them about the curse, Professor.”

I looked at Timothy, and for the first time saw that a thin, dark down of wolfish hair had grown upon his cheek. Then I looked at Mr. Buterbaugh, and found that he was watching me with an air of earnest expectancy, as though he honestly thought there might be an eternal black-magical curse on Timothy and was more than willing to listen to anything I might have to say on the subject. I shrugged.

“Are you going to make him go to Special School?” I said.

“All right, Paul, thank you,” said Mrs. Gladfelter. “You may go back to class now. We’re watching a movie with Mrs. Hampt’s class this afternoon.”

Mrs. Maloney had reappeared in the doorway, her cheeks flushed, her lipstick fresh, smelling of cigarette.

“I’ll see that he gets there,” she said – uncharitably, I thought.

“See you later, Timothy,” I said. He didn’t answer me; he had started to growl again. As I followed Mrs. Maloney out of the office I looked back and saw Mr. Buterbaugh and Mrs. Gladfelter and poor old Mrs. Stokes standing in a hopeless circle around Timothy. I thought for a second, and then I turned back toward them and raised an imaginary rifle to my shoulder.

“This is a dart gun,” I announced. Everyone looked at me, but I was talking to Timothy now. I was almost but not quite embarrassed. “It’s filled with darts of my special antidote, and I made it stronger than it used to be, and it’s going to work this time. And also, um, there’s a tranquilizer mixed in.”

Timothy looked up, and bared his teeth at me, and I took aim right between his eyes. I jerked my hands twice, and went fwup! fwup! Timothy’s head snapped back, and his eyelids fluttered. He shook himself all over. He swallowed, once. Then he held his hands out before him, as if wondering at their hairless pallor.

“It seems to have worked,” he said, his voice cool and reasonable and fine. Anyone could see he was still playing his endless game, but all the grown-ups, Mr. Buterbaugh in particular, looked very pleased with both of us.

“Thank you very much, Paul.” Mr. Buterbaugh gave me a pat on the head. “Remember to say hello to your mother for me.”

“I’m not Paul,” I said, and everybody laughed but Timothy Stokes.

When I got home from school my mother was down in the basement, at my father’s workbench, dressed in the paint-spattered blue jeans and hooded sweatshirt she put on whenever it was time to do dirty work. She had pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail. Normally I would have been glad to see her home from work already and dressed this way. One of the sources of friction between us, and among the various angers that I had supposedly been attempting to manage, was my dislike of the way she looked as she went off to work in the morning, in her plaid suit jackets, her tan stockings, her blouses with their little silk bow ties, her cabasset of hairsprayed hair. In the days before she went back to work my mother had been a genuine hippie – bushy-headed, legs unshaven, dressed in vast dresses with Indian patterns; she was there to fix bowls of hot whole-grain cereal in the morning and to give me a snack of dried pineapple and milk in the kitchen when I came home. Now, every morning, I fixed myself a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee, and when I got home I generally turned on the television and ate the box of Yodels that I purchased at High’s every day on my way back from school. But my pleasure at the sight of her in her old, ruined jeans, patched with a scrap of a genuine Mao jacket she had bought as a student at McGill, was diminished when I saw that she was dressed this way so that she could stand at my father’s workbench and toss all the delicate furniture of his home laboratory into an assortment of battered liquor cartons.

“But, Mom,” I said, watching as she backhanded into a box an entire S-shaped rack of stoppered test tubes. The glass, in shattering, made a festive tinkle, as of little bells, and the dank basement air was quickly suffused with a harsh chemical stink of bananas and mold and burnt matches. “Those are his experiments.”

“I know it,” said my mother, looking grave, her voice filled with vandalistic glee. My father was a research chemist for the Food and Drug Administration. He was a small man with a scraggly gray beard and thick spectacles. He wore plaid sports jackets with patches on the elbows, carried his pens in a plastic pocket liner, and went to services every Saturday morning. He held a national ranking in chess (173) and a Canadian patent for a culture medium still widely used in that country, where he had been born and raised. “And he worked very hard on them all.” She hefted the heavy black binder in which my father kept his lab notes and dropped it into a box that had once contained bottles of Captain Morgan rum; there was a leering picture of a pirate on the side. “For years.” The laboratory notebook landed with a crunch of glass, breaking the throats of a dozen Erlenmeyer flasks beneath it. “I’ve asked him many, many times to come over here and pick up his things, Paulie. You know that. He’s had his chance.”

“I know.” On his departure from our house, my father had taken only a plaid valise full of summer clothing and my grandfather’s Russian chess set, whose black pieces had once been fingered by Alexander Alekhine.

“It’s been months now, Paulie,” my mother said. “I’ve got to conclude that he just doesn’t want any of his stuff.”

“I know,” I said.

She surveyed the wreckage of my father’s home laboratory –a little ruefully now, I thought – and then looked at me. “I guess it must seem to you like I’m being kind of mean,” she said. “Eh?”

I didn’t say anything. She held out her hand to me. I grabbed it and tugged her to her feet. She lifted the Captain Morgan carton and stacked it atop a Smirnoff carton filled with commercially prepared reagents in their bottles and jars; there was a further crunch of glass as the upper box settled into the lower. She hoisted the stacked boxes to her hip and jogged them once to get a better grip. One carton remained on the floor beside the workbench. We both looked at it.

“I’ll come back for that one,” my mother said, after a pause. She turned, and started slowly up the stairs.

For a minute I stood there with my hands jammed into my pockets, staring down into the box at my father’s crucible tongs, at his coils of clear plastic tubing, at his stirrers, pipettes, and stopcocks wrapped like taffy in stiff white paper. I knelt down and wrapped my arms around the carton and lowered my face into it and inhaled a clean, rubbery smell like that of a new Band-Aid. Then I lifted the carton and carried it upstairs, through the laundry room, and out into the garage, trying to fight off an unsettling feeling that I was throwing my father away. The rear hatch of our Datsun was raised, and the backseats had been folded forward.

“Thank you, sweetie,” said my mother, gently, as I handed her the last carton. “Now I just have to load up a few more things, and then I’m going to run all this stuff over to Mr. Kappelman’s office.” Mr. Kappelman was my father’s lawyer; my mother’s lawyer was a woman she called Deirdre. “You can just stay here, okay? You don’t have to help me anymore.”

“There’s no room for me anyway,” I said.

Most of the space in the car was already taken up by packed liquor boxes. I could see the fuzzy sleeve of my father’s green angora sweater poking out of one carton, and, through the finger holes in the side of another, I could make out the cracked black spines of his college chemistry texts. Stuffed into the spaces among the boxes and into odd nooks of the car’s interior were my father’s bicycle helmet, his clarinet case, his bust of Paul Morphy, his brass wall barometer, his shoeshine kit, his vaporizer, the panama hat he liked to wear at the beach, the beige plastic bedpan that had come home from the hospital with him after his deviated-septum operation and now held all his razors and combs and the panoply of gleaming instruments he employed to trim the hair that grew from the various features of his face, a grocery bag full of his shoe trees, the Montreal Junior Chess Championship trophy he had won in 1953, his tie rack, his earmuffs, and one Earth shoe. There was barely enough room left in the car for the three boxes my mother and I had dragged up from the basement. I helped her squeeze them into place, audibly doing more damage to their rank-smelling contents, and then my mother put her hands on the edge of the hatch and got ready to slam it.

She said, “Stand clear.” I flinched. I guess I must have shut my eyes; after a second or two I realized that she hadn’t closed the door yet, and when I looked at her again her eyes were scanning my face, darting very quickly back and forth, the way they did when she thought I might have a fever.

“Paul,” she said, “how was school today?”

“Fine.”

“How’s your asthma?”

“Good.”

She took her hands off the lip of the hatch and crouched down in front of me. Her face, I saw, was still buried under the thick layer of beige frosting that she applied to it every morning.

“Paul,” she said. “What’s the matter, honey?”

“Nothing,” I said, turning from her unrecognizable face. “I’ll be right back.” I started away from her.

“Paul –” She took hold of my arm.

“I have to go to the bathroom!” I said, twisting free of her. “You look ugly,” I added as I ran back into the house.

I went to the telephone and dialed my father’s number at work. The departmental secretary said that he was down the hall. I said that I would wait. I carried the phone over to the couch, where I had thrown my parka, and took my daily box of Yodels from its hiding place inside the torn orange lining. By the time my father took me off hold I had eaten three of them. This didn’t require all that much time, to be honest.

“Dr. Kovel,” said my father as he came clattering onto the line.

“Dad?”

“Paul. Where are you?”

“Dad, I’m at home. Guess what, Dad? I got expelled from school today.”

“What? What’s this?”

“Yeah, um, I got really mad, and I thought I was a werewolf, and I, um, I bit this girl, you know – Virginia Pease? On the neck. I didn’t break the skin, though,” I added. “And so they expelled me. Can you come over?”

“Paul, I’m at work.”

“I know.”

“What is all this?” His breath blew heavy through the line and made an irritated rattle in the receiver at my ear. “All right, listen, I’ll be there as soon as I can get away, eh?” Now his voice grew thick, as though on the other end of the line, while he held the receiver in the middle of his blank little office in Rockville, Maryland, his face had gone red with embarrassment. “Is your mother there?”

I told him to hold on, and went back out to the garage.

“Mom,” I said, “Dad’s on the phone.” I said these words in a voice so normal and cheerful that it hurt my heart to hear them. “He wants to talk to you.” I smiled the conspiratorial little smile I had so often seen her use on her clients as she hinted that the seller just might be willing to come down. “I think he wants to apologize.”

“Did you call him?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Yes. I had to,” I said, remembering my story. “Because I got expelled from school. I have to go to Special School now. Starting tomorrow, probably.”

My mother put down the hoe she had been trying to squeeze into the back of her car and went, rather unwillingly, I thought, to the phone. Before she stepped into the house she looked back at me with a doubtful smile. I looked away. I stood there, behind her car, gazing in at all my father’s belongings. My mother had said that she planned to take them over to his lawyer’s office, but I didn’t believe her. I believed that she meant to take them to the dump. I hesitated for an instant, then reached in for my father’s laboratory notebook. He had always been more than willing to show me parts of it, whenever I asked him to; and naturally I had taken many furtive looks at its innermost pages when he wasn’t around. But I had never really comprehended its contents, nor the tenor of the experiments he’d been performing down there in our basement over the years, although I had a general sense of disappointment about them, as I did about his whole interest, professional and avocational, in the chemistry of mildews and molds. Yet even if there was nothing of interest in his notes – a likelihood that I still could not fully accept – I nonetheless felt a sudden urge to possess the notebook itself. Perhaps someday I would be able to decipher its cryptic formulae and crabbed script, and thence derive all manner of marvelous pastes of invisibility and mind-control dusts, unheard-of vitamins and deadly fungal poisons and powders that repelled gravity. I reached for the notebook and then decided also to take two of the boxes of laboratory equipment. I knew who would keep them safe for me; I hoped, as I never had before, that he would still want to be my friend.

I peered around the side of the garage, to make sure that my mother wasn’t watching from the front windows, then ran as quickly as I could toward the stand of young maples and pricker bushes that separated us from the Stokeses. The boxes were very heavy, and the shards of glass within them jingled like change. It was dinnertime, and nearly dark, but none of the lights were on in Timothy’s house. I supposed that he had been taken to see Dr. Schachter, and all at once I worried that he would never come home again, that they would just send Timothy straight off to Special School that day. Some people claimed that the little yellow van that sometimes passed us when we were on our way to school in the morning, its windows filled with the blank, cheerful faces of strange boys none of us knew, was the daily bus to Special School; but other people said that you had to go live there forever, like reform school or prison, and get visits from your parents on the weekends.

My mother was calling me. “Pau-aul!” she cried. She was one of those women who have a hard time raising their voices; it always came out sounding hoarse and friendless whenever she called me home. “Pau-lie!”

I hid in the brambles and studied the dark face of Timothy’s house, trying to decide what to do with my father’s things. My arms were growing tired, and I needed to go to the bathroom, and for now, I decided, I would leave the boxes at the basement door. I would come back later to ask Timothy, who on occasion appeared in the avatar of the faithful robot from Lost in Space, to guard them for me. Timothy slept in the basement of the Stokeses’ house, under a wall hung from floor to ceiling with his vast arsenal of toy swords and firearms, in a room strewn with dismembered telephones and the bones of imitation skeletons. I tiptoed around the side of the Stokeses’ house and into their weedy backyard. The moon was high and brilliant in the sky by now, and I thought that, after all, it was pretty nearly full. I approached the basement door, keeping an uneasy eye on the shadows in the trees, and the shadows under the Stokeses’ deck, and the shadows gathered on the swings of the creaking jungle gym. Since my last visit, I saw, Timothy had marked the entrance to his labyrinth with two neat pyramids of plastic skulls. My mother’s raspy voice fell silent, and there was only the sound of cars out on the country road, and the ghostly squeak of the swing set and the forlorn crooning of a blind Dalmatian that lived at the bottom of our street. Carelessly I dropped the boxes on the step, between the grinning pyramids, and ran back through the trees toward my house, heart pounding, tearing my clothes on the teeth of the underbrush, certain that something quick and terrible was following me every step of the way.

“I’m home!” I said, coming into the brightness and warmth of our hall. “Here I am.”

“There you are,” said my mother, though she didn’t look all that happy to see me. She laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. It smelled of butyric acid and dextrorotatory sucrose and also very faintly of Canoe. “I just got off the phone with Bob Buterbaugh, Paul. He told me what really happened at school today.” She had yanked her hair free of its ponytail and now it shot out in ragged arcs around her head, tangled like the vanes of a wrecked umbrella. “Do you want to explain yourself to me? Why did you lie?”

“Is Dad coming over?”

“Well, yes, he is, Paul –”

“Great.”

“– because he feels that he really needs to see you, tonight. But the two of you will have to sit outside in the car and talk, or go somewhere else. I’m not going to let him in the house.”

I was astonished. “Why not?”

“Because, Paul, your dad – you know as well as I do – he’s become, well, you know how he’s been lately. I don’t have to tell you.” As if she were angry, she folded her arms, and clenched her jaw. But I could see that she was trying to keep herself from crying. “I have to set some limits.”

“You mean he can’t come over to our house anymore? Ever again?”

There were tears in her eyes. “Ever again,” she said. Once more she crouched before me, and I let her take me in her arms, but I did not return her embrace. In the picture window at the end of the hall I watched her reflection hugging mine. I didn’t want to be comforted on the impending loss of my father. I wanted him not to be lost, and it seemed to me that it would be her fault if he was.

“He said he’s going to collect his things. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get rid of them, eh?” She gave me a poke in the ribs. “He must want them after all. Hey,” she said. “What is it? What’s the matter?” She followed my gaze toward the picture window, where our embracing reflections looked back at us with startled expressions.

“Nothing,” I said. A light had just come on in the Stokeses’ house. “I – I have to go over to Timothy’s. I left something there.”

“What?”

“My Luger,” I said, remembering a toy I had lent to Timothy sometime last summer. “The pink one that squirts.”

“Well, it’s time to eat,” said my mother. “You can go after.”

“But what if Dad comes?”

“Well, what if he does? You can go over to Timothy’s tomorrow. He’s probably not allowed to see anyone anyway.”

In five minutes I bolted my dinner – one of those bizarre conglomerations of bottled tomato sauces, casseroles-in-boxes, and leftover Chinese lunches that were then the national dishes of our disordered and temporizing homeland – and ran out the front door into the night. I was sure that Timothy had found the cartons by now. What if he thought I had meant them for a present and refused to give them back? My father was going to be angry enough about my mother’s treatment of his chemistry things, but it would be worse when he found out that most of them, including his notebook, were missing. I sprinted across our yard as quickly as I could, considering my asthma, and went crashing through the maple trees toward the Stokeses’ house. There was a burst of red light as a thin branch slapped against my left eye, and I cried out, and covered my face, and ran headlong into Timothy Stokes. My chin struck his chest and I sat down hard.

He smiled, and knelt beside me. “Are you all right, Professor?” he said. He was wearing the same pair of white jeans and stained T-shirt, under an unbuttoned jacket that was too large for him and that bore over the breast pocket his own last name, printed in block letters on a strip of cloth. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. The beam threw eerie shadows across his cheeks and forehead, and his little brown eyes were alight behind his glasses. I saw at once that the antidote I’d administered to him that afternoon had worn off, and he showed no sign of having been subjected to any weird therapies or electroshock helmets. His face looked as solemn and stupid as ever. He wore a rifle strapped across his back and a plastic commando knife in his boot, and three Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos hand grenades poked through the web belt of his canteen, and in his right hand he was carrying, as though it were another weapon, the thick, black, case-bound notebook.

“That’s my father’s,” I said. “You can’t have it.”

“I already photographed all of its contents with my spy camera,” he explained. “I have every page on microfilm. Plus I ran an extensive computer analysis on them.” He lowered his voice. “Your father is a very dangerous man. Look here.” He opened the notebook and shone the flashlight on a page where my father had written, “Myco. K. P889, L. 443, Tr. 23,” and then a date from three years earlier. The rest of the page was an illegible mishmash of numbers and abbreviations, some of them connected by sharp forceful arrows. The entry went on for several pages in the same fashion, cramped by haste and marginalia. I had seen plenty like it before, and I had no doubt that it described a process that could be used to get rid of something that grew between the tiles of your bathroom, or on the skin of your pears.

“Did you see?” said Timothy.

“See what?” I said.

“Your father is Ant-Man,” he said gravely. “I’ve suspected it for a long time.” He unhooked the canteen from his belt. It was covered in green canvas and it sloshed as he waved it around. “This is the antidote.”

He clamped the notebook under one arm and with his freed hand unscrewed the cap. I inclined my face slightly toward the mouth of the canteen, extended my fingers, and wafted the air above it toward my nostrils, delicately, as my father had shown me. I detected no odor this way, however. So he stuck it right under my nose.

“It smells like Coke,” I said. “You put salt in it.” Timothy didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw disappointment flicker across his flashlit face. “What would happen if I drank it?” I added quickly, not wanting to let him down. There was something about the way Timothy played his game, the thoroughness with which he imagined, that never failed to entrance me.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” said Timothy. “What if it said in this book, here, that your father has been giving you the secret formula to drink, like one drop at a time in your cereal, ever since you were a little baby? And what if that’s why you can talk to ants, too?”

“What if,” I said. I had always felt sorry for Ant-Man, a superhero whose powers condemned him to the disappointing comradeship of bugs. “Timothy, what happened to you today? What did they say? Are you expelled?”

“Shh,” said Timothy. The notebook went flapping to the ground as he reached for me, and drew me to him, and covered my mouth with his hand. His voice fell to a harsh whisper. “Someone’s coming.”

I heard the sound of a car climbing the hill. A pair of headlights splashed light across the front of my house. I yanked my head free of his grasp.

“It’s my dad!” I said. “Timothy, I need to get his stuff back – now!”

“Quiet.” Timothy loosened his hold on me and brought the canteen up to my lips. I took a step away from him. “Quick,” he said. “Swallow this antidote. We don’t have time to test it. You’ll just have to take the risk.” He patted the dull black barrel of his rifle. “I’ve already loaded this baby with antidote darts.”

From the distant front porch of our house I could hear our front door squeal on its hinges, and then the separate voices of my parents, saying hello. I tried to make sense of their murmurings, but we were too far away. After a while there was another long squeal of hinges, and the door slammed shut, and then our house creaked and resounded with the passage of feet along its hallway.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I think she let him go inside.”

“Come on,” said Timothy. “Drink this.”

“I’m not drinking that stuff,” I said.

“All right, then,” he said. “I’ll drink it.” He threw back his head and took a long swallow. Then he handed the canteen to me, and I drank down the rest of the antidote. It was sweet and sharp tasting, and bitter through and through. I felt pretty sure that it was just Coca-Cola mixed with good old sodium chloride, but then, after I got it down, I realized there must have been something else mixed into it – something that burned.

“Take this,” he said, handing me the plastic commando knife. He said that it was in case something went wrong; the rifle was only for delivering the antidote. He said, “Stay down.”

He led me out of the trees, across our moonlit back-yard, and up the short, grassy slope that rose to the back of our house – a silvery gray shape loping along in a sort of crouched-over commando half-trot. The sleeves of my parka whispered against my sides as I ran. I belched up a fiery blast of his formula, and then laughed a tipsy little laugh. Timothy stepped up onto our patio and unslung the rifle from his shoulder. A radiant cloud of light from our living room came pouring out through the sliding-glass door, illuminating the trees and the lawn chairs and the grill, and the crown of Timothy’s close-cropped head as he knelt down, raised the rifle, and waited for me to catch up to him. When I got there he was peering in, his face looking blank and amazed behind the luminous disks of his spectacles, his breath coming regular and heavy.

“Can you feel it?” I said, kneeling beside him. “Is it working?”

He didn’t say anything. I looked. My father and my mother were sitting on the sofa. He was holding her in his arms. Her face was red and streaked with tears, and her mouth was fastened against his. Her sweatshirt was hiked up around her throat, and one of her breasts hung loose and shaking and astonishingly white. The other breast my father held, roughly, in his hairy hand, as if he were trying to crush it.

“What are they doing?” Timothy whispered. He set the rifle down on the patio. “Are those your parents?”

I tried to think of something to say. I was dizzy with surprise, and the formula we had swallowed was making me feel like I was going to be sick. I sat there for a minute or so beside Timothy, watching the struggle of those two people, who had been transformed forever by a real and powerful curse, the very least of whose magical effects was me. I felt as though I had been spying on them for my entire life, to no profit at all. After a moment I had to look away. Timothy’s gun was lying on the ground beside me. I reached for it, and held it in my grip, and found that it weighed far more than I had expected. Its breechblock was steely and cool.

“Timothy, is this real?” I said, but I knew he would never be able to answer me.

I stood up, my head spinning, and stumbled off the patio, onto the frost-bright grass. Timothy lingered for a moment longer, then came hurtling away from the window, passing me on our way into the woods. Under the maple trees we threw up whatever it was that he had given us to drink. He seemed to lose some of his enthusiasm for our game after that, and when I told him to go home and leave me alone he did.

Later on that night, my father and I fetched his notebook from the pile of dead leaves in the woods where Timothy had dropped it, and went over together to the Stokeses’ house to retrieve all the pieces of his shattered laboratory. My father’s arm lay heavy around my neck. I told Althea Stokes about the rifle, and Timothy was forced to produce it and surrender it to her. It had been, she said, his father’s. I helped my father carry the cartons out to his car, and then in silence we and my mother removed all of his other belongings, one by one, from her hatchback, and loaded them into the trunk of our big old Chevrolet Impala. Then my father drove away.

The next morning at eight, a little yellow bus full of unknown boys pulled up in front of the Stokeses’ house, and sounded its angry horn, and Timothy went out to meet it.

House Hunting

The house was all wrong for them. An ivy-covered Norman country manor with an eccentric roofline, a fat, pointed tower, and latticed mullions in the downstairs windows, it sat perched on the northwest shoulder of Lake Washington, a few blocks to the east of the house in which Christy had grown up. The neighborhood was subject to regular invasion by armies of gardeners, landscape contractors, and installers of genuine Umbrian granite paving stone, but nevertheless it was obvious the house had been got up to be sold. The blue paint on the shutters looked slick and wet, fresh black mulch churned around the pansies by the driveway, and the immense front lawn had been polished to a hard shine. The listing agent’s sign was a discreet red-and-white escutcheon, on a black iron stake, that read simply, “Herman Silk,” with a telephone number, in an elegant sans serif type.

“This?” Daniel Diamond said, his heart sinking in a kind of giddy fizz within him. Although they had all the windows open, Mr. Hogue’s car was choked with the smell of his cologne, a harsh extract of wintergreen and brine which the realtor had been emitting more fiercely, like flop sweat, the nearer they got to the house. It was aggravating Daniel’s allergies, and he wished he’d thought to pop a Claritin before leaving the apartment that morning. “This is the one?”

“That’s the one,” Hogue said, sounding weary, as though he had spent the entire day dragging them around town in his ancient Mercedes sedan, showing them one perfectly good house after another, each of which they had rejected with the most arbitrary and picayune of rationales. In fact, it was only ten o’clock in the morning, and this was the very first place he’d brought them to see. Bob Hogue was a leathery man of indefinite middle age, wearing a green polo shirt, tan chinos, and a madras blazer in the palette favored by manufacturers of the cellophane grass that goes into Easter baskets. His rectilinear wrinkles, his crew cut, his chin like a couple of knuckles, his nose lettered with minute red script, gave him the look of a jet pilot gone to seed. “What’s the matter with it? Not good enough for you?”

Daniel and his wife, Christy Kite, looked at each other across the back of Christy’s seat – Christy could never ride in the rear of any vehicle without experiencing acute motion sickness.

“Well, it’s awfully big, Mr. Hogue,” she said, tentatively, leaning to look past the realtor at the house. Christy had gone to college in Palo Alto, where she studied French and led cheers for a football team that lost all the big games. She had the Stanford graduate’s aggressive nice manners, and the eyes of a cheerleader atop a struggling pyramid of girls. She had been the Apple Queen of Roosevelt High. From her mother, she had learned to try very hard to arrange everything in life with the flawlessness of a photograph in a house-and-garden magazine, and then to take it just as hard when the black plums went uneaten in the red McCoy bowl and filled the kitchen with a stink of garbage, or when the dazzling white masses of Shasta daisies in the backyard were eaten by aphids.

“Yeah, I don’t know, Mr. Hogue,” Daniel said. “I think –”

“Oh, but it is beautiful,” Christy said. She furrowed her brow and narrowed her eyes. She poked her tongue gamely from a corner of her mouth. She was trying her hardest, Daniel could see, to imagine living in that house with him. House hunting, like all their efforts to improve things between them – the counseling, the long walks, the watching of a movie called Spanking Brittany Blue – had been her idea. But after a moment her face went slack, and her eyes sought Daniel’s, and in them he saw, for the first time since their wedding the summer before last, the luster of real despair, as if she feared they would find no home for their marriage, not in Seattle or anywhere in the world. Then she shrugged and reached up to retie her scarf, a sheer white piece of Italian silk patterned with lemons and limes. She opened her door, and started to get out of the car.

“Just a minute, you,” Hogue said, taking her arm. She fell back into the car at once, and favored Hogue with her calmest and most obliging Apple Queen smile, but Daniel could see her nostrils flaring like a rabbit’s. “Don’t be in such a rush,” Hogue went on irritably. “You’re always running off half-cocked.” He leaned over to open the glove compartment and rummaged around inside it until he found a package of Pall Malls. He pushed in the cigarette lighter and tapped one end of a wrinkled cigarette against the dashboard. “You can’t rush into a thing like this. It could turn out to be a terrible mistake.”

At once, like people trapped in an empty bus station with a fanatical pamphleteer, Daniel and Christy agreed with Hogue.

“We’re careful people,” Christy said. Carefully, she averted her face from Hogue’s gaze, and gave her husband a brief grimace of not quite mock alarm.

“Careful people with limited resources,” Daniel said. He hadn’t decided whether to tell Christy that, two days earlier, her father had taken him to lunch at the University Club and offered to make a present of any reasonably priced house they might choose. After the war, Mr. Kite had founded an industrial advertising agency, landed the accounts of several major suppliers to Boeing, and then, at the age of sixty-two, sold his company for enough money to buy a condominium on the ninth hole at Salishan and a little cabaña down on the beach at Cabo San Lucas. Daniel, a graduate student in astronomy at U.W., where Christy taught psychology, didn’t have any money of his own. Neither, for that matter, did his father, who, in the years of Mr. Kite’s prosperity, had run two liquor stores, a printshop, and a five-and-dime into the ground, and now lived with Daniel’s mother amid the coconut palms and peeling white stucco of an internment camp for impoverished old people not far from Delray Beach. “Maybe we ought to just –”

Christy cut him off with a sharp look. The lighter popped out, and Hogue reached for it, and they watched in uncomfortable silence as, hands shaking, he tried to light his cigarette. After several seconds and a great deal of fearsome wheezing, the few frayed strands of tobacco he had succeeded in getting lit fell out of the end of the cigarette, landed in his lap, and began to burn his chinos. He slapped at his thigh, scowling all the while at the house, as if it, or its occupants, were somehow responsible for his ignition.

“Maybe we ought to take a look at it, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said.

Mr. Hogue looked back over at the house. He took a deep breath.

“I guess we’d better,” he said. He opened his door and got out of the car, eyeing the house warily.

Daniel and Christy lingered a moment by the Mercedes, whispering.

“He looks like he’s seen a ghost,” Christy observed, buttoning the top button of her white cardigan. “He looks awful.”

“Did he look better at our wedding?”

Daniel understood that Bob Hogue had been among the guests at their wedding, the summer before last, but his recollection of that remote afternoon had grown vague. In fact, the great event itself had, at the time, unfolded around him at a certain vague remove. He had felt not like the star attraction, along with Christy, of a moderately lavish civil ceremony held on the slope of a Laurelhurst lawn so much as like a tourist, lost in a foreign country, who had turned in to an unfamiliar street and found himself swallowed up in the clamor of a parade marking the feast day of some silken and barbarous religion. He remembered this Bob Hogue and his handsome wife, Monica, no better than he remembered Bill and Sylvia Bond, Roger and Evelyn Holsapple, Ralph and Betsy Lindstrom, or any of the three hundred other handsome old friends of his in-laws who had made up the bulk of the wedding guests. He knew that Hogue was a college chum and occasional golfing partner of his father-in-law’s, and he was aware that an acrid ribbon of bad news was sent curling toward the ceiling of any room in which Bob Hogue’s name was brought up, though he could never keep straight whether Hogue had married the lush, or fathered the Scientologist, or lost a piece of his left lung to cancer.

“To tell you the truth,” Christy said, “I don’t remember him at our wedding. I don’t really know the Hogues very well. I just kind of remember how he looked when I was little.”

“Well, no wonder he looks awful, then.” He stepped back to admire her in her smart green Vittadini dress. Her bare legs were new-shaven, so smooth that they glinted in the sun, and through the gaps in her open-toed flats you could see a couple of slender toes, nails painted pink. “You, however, look very nice.”

She smiled, and her pupils dilated, flooding her eyes with a darkness. “I liked what we did last night.”

“So did I,” Daniel said at once. Last night they had lain on top of their down comforter, with their heads at opposite ends of their bed, and massaged each other’s feet with fragrant oil, by candlelight, while Al Green cooed to them in the background. This was an activity recommended to them by their couples therapist as a means of generating a nonthreatening sense of physical closeness between them. Daniel blushed now at this recollection, which he found painful and sad. To his great regret there was nothing even remotely erotic to him about feet, his wife’s or anyone’s. You might have permitted him to anoint the graceful foot of Semiramis or Hedy Lamarr, and he would not have popped a boner. He slid a hand up under the hem of Christy’s dress and tried to skate his index and middle fingers up the smooth, hard surface of her right thigh, but she moved, and somehow Daniel’s entire hand ended up thrust between her legs, as though he were attempting to hold open the doors of an elevator.

“Ouch,” said Christy. “You don’t have to be so rough.”

“Sorry,” said Daniel.

They started up the driveway after Mr. Hogue.

“Who’s Herman Silk?” Daniel said, as they passed the discreet little sign.

“Who’s Herman Silk?” Hogue wove a puzzling thread of bitterness into the question. “That’s a good one.” Daniel wondered if he should recognize the name from some local real-estate scandal or recent round of litigation in the neighborhood. He tried to keep track of such mainstays of Kite-family conversation, but it was hard, in particular since they were generally served up, in the Kite house, with liberal amounts of Canadian Club and soda. “That’s very funny,” said Hogue.

When they got to the front door, Mr. Hogue could not seem to work the combination of the lockbox there. He tried several different permutations of what he thought was the code and then, in a display of bafflement at once childish and elderly, reached into his pocket and attempted to stick one of his own keys in the lock.

“Funny,” he muttered, as this hopeless stratagem in due course failed. “Herman Silk. Ha.”

Christy looked at Daniel, her eyes filled with apology for having led them into this intensifying disaster. Daniel smiled and gave his shoulders an attenuated shrug, characteristic of him, that did not quite absolve her of blame.

“Uh, why don’t you tell me the combination, Mr. Hogue?” Christy suggested, yanking the lockbox out of his hands. She, who was willing to lie for hours listening to Reverend Al while Daniel worked over her oiled foot like a desperate man trying to summon a djinn, was finally losing patience. Daniel’s heart was stirred by a wan hope that very soon now they would have to give up on old Mr. Hogue, on buying a house, on Christy’s entire project of addressing and finding solutions for their problem. Now that things were starting to go so wrong, he hoped they could just return to their apartment on Queen Anne Hill and resume ignoring their problem, the strategy he preferred.

Hogue fed Christy the combination one digit at a time, and she worked the tumblers. She gave a sharp tug on the lockbox. It held firm.

“Are you sure that’s the right number?” she said.

“Of course it’s the right number,” Hogue snapped. All at once his face had turned as red as the wrapper of his Pall Malls. One would have said that he was furious with Christy and Daniel, that he had had his fill of the unreasonable demands and the cruel hectoring to which they had subjected him over the last forty years. “Why are you always pestering me like that? Don’t you know I’m doing my best?”

Daniel and Christy looked at each other. Christy bit her lip, and Daniel saw that she had been afraid something like this might happen. A sudden clear memory of Mr. Hogue at the wedding returned to him. There had been a series of toasts after dinner, and Mr. Hogue had risen to say a few words. His face had gone full of blood and he looked unsteady on his feet. The woman sitting beside him, Monica Hogue – slender, youthful, with red spectacles and a cute gray bob – had given his elbow a discreet tug. For a moment the air under the great white tent had grown still and sour, and the guests had looked down at their plates.

“Well, sure we do, Mr. Hogue,” Christy said. “We know you’ve been doing a great job for us, and we really appreciate it. Don’t we, Daniel?”

“Well, yeah. We really do.”

The blood went out of Hogue’s face.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I – I’m sorry, you kids. I’m not feeling very well today.” He ran a hand across the close-cropped top of his head. “Here. Let me see something. There used to be –” He backed down the steps and, half crouched, hands on his knees, scanned the ground under the long rhododendron hedges that flanked the door. He moved crabwise along the row of shrubbery until he disappeared around the corner of the house.

“I remember him now,” said Daniel.

Christy laughed, through her nose, and then sadly shook her head.

“I hope he’s all right.”

“I think he just needs a drink.”

“Hush, Daniel, please.”

“Do you remember the toast he gave at the wedding?”

“Did he make a toast?”

“It was ‘To our wives and lovers, may they never meet.’”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Pretty fucking appropriate wedding-toast material, I thought.”

“Daniel.”

“This is a waste.”

“Daniel, please don’t say that. We’re going to work this all out.”

“Christy,” Daniel said. “Please don’t say that.”

“What else can I say?”

“Nothing,” Daniel said. “I don’t think you know how to say anything else.”

“Found it!” Hogue came back around the house toward them, favoring the young couple with his realtor’s smile – the smile of someone who knows that he has been discussed unfavorably in his absence. He was brandishing a medium-sized, mottled gray stone, and for a wild instant Daniel thought he intended somehow to smash his way in. But Hogue only turned the stone over, slid aside a small plastic panel that was attached to it, and pulled from its interior a shiny gold key. Then he slipped the false stone into the hip pocket of his jacket.

“Neat little things,” he said. He slid the key into the lock without difficulty, and let them into the house. “Don’t worry, it’s quite all right,” he added, when he saw how they were looking at him. “I’ll just have to call about the lockbox. Happens all the time. Come on in.”

They found themselves in a small foyer with plaster walls that were streaked like thick cake frosting, fir floors, and a built-in hatstand festooned with all manner of hats. Hogue hitched up the back of his trousers and stood looking around, blinking, mouth pinched, expression gone blank. The profusion of hats on the hatstand – three berets in the colors of sherbets, a tweedy homburg, a new-looking Stetson with a snakeskin band, several billed golf caps bearing the crest of Mr. Kite’s club – seemed to bewilder him. He cleared his throat, and the young people waited for him to begin his spiel. But Hogue said nothing. Without gesturing for them to follow, he shuffled off into the living room.

It was like a page out of one of Mrs. Kite’s magazines, furnished with a crewel love seat, two old-fashioned easy chairs that had been re-covered with pieces of a Persian kilim, a low Moroccan table with a hammered-brass top, an old blue Chinese Deco rug, and a small collection of art books and local Indian basketry, arranged with mock haphazardness on the built-in shelves. The desired effect was doubtless an eclectic yet contemporary spareness, but the room was very large, and to Daniel it just looked emptied.

“Are you all right, Mr. Hogue?” Christy said, elbowing Daniel.

Mr. Hogue stood on the Chinese rug, surveying the living room with his eyes wide and his mouth open, a hand pressed to his midsection as though he had been sandbagged.

“Eh? Oh, why, yes, it’s just – they just – they changed things around a little bit,” he said. “Since the last time I was here.”

From his astonished expression it was hard to believe that Hogue had ever seen the place before. Daniel wondered if Hogue hadn’t simply plucked it at random out of a listing book and driven them over here to satisfy some sense of obligation to Christy’s parents. Clearly the owners had not been expecting anyone to come through this morning; there was an old knit afghan lying twisted on the love seat, a splayed magazine on one of the chairs, and a half-empty glass of tomato juice on the brass table.

“Mr. Hogue?” said Christy. “Are you sure this is okay?”

“Fine,” said Hogue. He pointed to a pair of French doors at the far end of the living room. “I believe you’ll find the dining room through there.” Daniel followed Christy into the dining room, which was cool and shady and furnished with whitewashed birch chairs and a birchwood table with an immense glass top. In the center of the table sat a small black lacquer bowl in which a gardenia floated, its petals scorched at the edges by decay.

“Nice,” Daniel said, although he always misgave at the odor of gardenias, which tempted with a promise of apples and vanilla beans but finished in a bitter blast of vitamins and burnt wire.

“Come on, Daniel. We can’t afford this.”

“Did I say we could?”

“Please don’t be a bastard.”

“Was I being a bastard?”

Christy sighed and looked back toward the living room. Hogue hadn’t joined them yet; he seemed to have disappeared. He was probably back in the foyer, Daniel thought, looking around for the fact sheet on the house, so that he could pretend to be knowledgeable about it. Christy lowered her voice and spoke into Daniel’s ear. Her breath played across the inner hairs of his ear and raised gooseflesh all down his forearms.

“Do you think he’s not supposed to be doing this anymore?”

“What do you mean?” Daniel said, taking an involuntary step away from her. Her scarf had come loose at the back, allowing a thick lank strand of her unwashed dark hair to dangle alongside her face. It was not healthy to overwash the hair – that was why she was wearing the jazzy scarf – and Daniel imagined he could still smell smoke on it from the Astronomy Department barbecue they had attended the night before.

“I mean, with the lockbox, and all – do you think he’s been disbarred? Or whatever they do to realtors?”

“They make them unreal,” Daniel suggested. He reached up and took hold of her scarf, and teased it loose. All of her smoky hair spilled down around her head.

“Why did you do that?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. He handed her the scarf, and she bound up her hair once more. “I’ll go check on Mr. Hogue.”

He went through the French doors back into the living room. Hogue was standing at the far end, where it opened onto the foyer, with his back to Daniel. There were built-in shelves on this side of the room, also, peopled with a sparse collection of small objets and half a dozen framed photographs of infants and graduates and an Irish setter in an orange life preserver. As Daniel came in, Hogue was fingering something small and glittering, a piece of crystal or a glass animal. He picked it up, examined it, and then slipped it into the right hip pocket of his jacket.

“Coming,” he said, after Daniel, rendered speechless, managed to clear his throat in alarm. Hogue turned, and for an instant, before his face resumed its habitual clenchjawed jet-pilot tautness, he looked grimly, mysteriously pleased with himself, like a man who had just exacted a small and glittering measure of revenge. Then he accompanied Daniel into the dining room, and Daniel tried to think of something plausible to ask him. What did normal husbands say to normal real-estate agents at this stage of the game? It occurred to him that Hogue had not yet mentioned the asking price of the house.

“So what do they want, anyway, Mr. Hogue?” he tried.

“God only knows,” Hogue said. He reached down toward the black lacquer bowl and picked up the gardenia, holding it by the clipped, dripping stem underneath. He brought it to his nose, took a deep draft of it, and then let out a long artificial sigh of delight. With Daniel looking right at him, he slipped the flower into the pocket of his jacket, too. “Let’s have a look at that kitchen, shall we?”

So Daniel followed him into the kitchen, where Christy was exclaiming with a purely formal enthusiasm over the alderwood cabinets, the ceramic stove burners, the wavering light off the lake.

“What a waste, eh?” Hogue said. A dark patch of dampness was spreading across the fabric of his pocket. “They put I don’t know how many thousands of dollars into it.” He reached over to a sliding rheostat on the wall and made the track lighting bloom and dwindle and bloom. He shook his head. “Now then, this way to the family room. TV room. It amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?”

He slid a louvered door aside and went into the next room. Christy gestured to Daniel to come and stand beside her. Daniel looked back at the dining room. A lone leaf spun on the surface of the water in the lacquer bowl.

“Daniel, are you coming?” said Christy.

“There’s something weird about this house,” said Daniel.

“I wonder what,” Christy said, giving her eyes a theatrical roll toward the family room and Mr. Hogue. As he passed through the kitchen, Daniel looked around, trying to see if anything portable was missing – a paradoxical exercise, given that he had never laid eyes on the room before. Sugar bowl, saltshaker, pepper mill, tea tongs trailing a winding rusty ribbon of dried tea. On the kitchen counter, under the telephone, lay a neat pile of letters and envelopes, and Daniel thought Hogue might have grabbed some of these, but they had been rubberbanded together and they looked undisturbed. A business card was affixed with a paper clip to the uppermost letter, printed with the name and telephone number of a Sergeant Matt Reedy of the Domestic Violence Unit of the Seattle Police Department. Daniel peeled back the pleat of the letter it was clipped to – it was out of its envelope – and peeked at its salutation, typed on an old typewriter that dropped its O’s.

“DEAR BITCH,” he read. “ARE YOU AND HERMAN HAPPY NOW, YOU –”

“Daniel! What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Daniel said, letting the letter fall shut again. “They, uh, they seem to be having some problems, the people who live in this house.”

“Nothing that’s our business, Daniel,” Christy said, with what seemed to him excessive primness, taking hold of his hand.

Daniel yanked his hand free. He could hear Mr. Hogue muttering to himself in the other room.

“Ouch!” said Christy, bringing her fingers to her lips to kiss the joints he’d wrenched. She eyed the pile of letters on the counter. “What did it say?”

“It said maybe they ought to try rubbing each other’s feet a little more often.”

Now Christy really looked hurt.

“If you didn’t want to do it, Daniel, I wish –”

“What’s going on in here?” said Mr. Hogue, returning from the family room.

“We’re just coming now,” Daniel said. “Sorry. It’s just – man, this kitchen is incredible.”

Hogue gave a sour nod, lips pressed together. There was an obvious bulge in his right hip pocket now, and what appeared to be a table-tennis paddle protruding from the left one.

“Incredible,” he agreed.

In the family room, when they joined him there, Hogue stole a well-thumbed paperback copy of Donald Trump’s autobiography which was lying out on the coffee table, and in the small, tobacco-stained den off the foyer he took a little brass paperweight in the shape of a reclining pasha with curled slippers. When they went out to the garage, where, along with a long, slender automobile hidden under a canvas cover, there was a well-stocked workbench, he filched a box of nails, a Lufkin tape measure, and something else that Daniel couldn’t quite determine the nature of. The thefts were blatant and apparently unself-conscious, and by the time they got upstairs to the second guest bedroom, Christy, too, was watching in a kind of jolly dread as Mr. Hogue worked the place over. He took a souvenir Space Needle, and a rubber coin purse, and a package of deodorizing shoe inserts. When he led the young couple at last into the master bedroom, his pockets were jangling.

He stopped short as he entered the room, so that Daniel and Christy nearly collided with him. He looked around at the big four-poster bed, the heavy Eastlake dresser and wardrobe, the walls covered in an unusual dark paper the red of old leather books. Once again Hogue marveled, in the same openmouthed, oddly crestfallen manner, as if the bedroom’s decor, like the living room’s, came to him, somehow, as a blow. As in the living room, there was no indication that the sellers had been expecting anyone to come through. The bed was unmade, and there were some ruffled white blouses and several bras and pairs of women’s underpants heaped on the floor by the door. Hogue crossed the dark red room to a door opposite, which appeared to give onto a screened-in sleeping porch. Windows on either side of the door let in some of the bright September light pouring through the outer windows of the porch.

“I’d sure like to lie down in that hammock out there,” Hogue said, with surprising wistfulness. He gave the knob an experimental twist. It was locked. He pressed his face to the glass. “God, I’m tired.”

He reached into his breast pocket for a cigarette and found nothing there. He looked back and smiled thinly at Daniel and Christy, as if they had played a cruel trick on him, hiding the only solace of a weary and overworked man. Then he patted down all his clattering pockets until he came up with a tattered Pall Mall. He went over to a marble-topped nightstand beside the bed and pulled open its drawer. He scrabbled around inside until he found a book of matches. His hands were shaking so badly now that he dropped the cigarette. Then he dropped the burning match. At last he succeeded in getting the thing lit. He blew a plume of smoke toward the pillows of the big, disorderly bed.

“You’ll get the sun almost all day long in this room,” he said, dreamily. “It’s a shame to paper it over so dark.” Then he flicked ashes onto the polished fir floor.

“All right, Mr. Hogue,” said Christy, with all the sharpness of tone she was capable of mustering. “I guess we’ve seen enough.”

“All right,” said Hogue, though he didn’t move. He just stood there, looking out at the canvas hammock that was hung between two pillars of the sleeping porch.

“We’ll meet you downstairs, how about?” Daniel said. “How about you just give us a minute to talk things over between ourselves. You know. Look around one more time. You can’t rush into something like this, right?”

Hogue swallowed, and some of the old flush of anger seemed to return now to the tips of his ears and to the skin at the back of his neck. Daniel could see that it was Hogue who wanted to be left alone here, in this bedroom, contemplating all his untold mistakes and whatever it was that was eating at him. He wanted them out of there. Christy sidled up to Daniel and pressed herself against him, hip to his thigh, cheek against his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and pressed his fingers against the slight bulge of skin under the strap of her bra.

“You know how important the bedroom is,” Christy said, in a strangled voice.

Hogue took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette, eyeing them. Then, as before, the fire seemed to go out of him, and he nodded.

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” he said. “You kids take all the time you want.”

He went out of the room, but before he did so, he stopped by the pile of laundry, picked up a rather large pair of lobelia blue panties with a lace waistband, and stuffed them into his pocket with the rest of his loot. They heard his tread on the stairs, and then, a moment later, the sound of a cabinet door squealing open on its hinges.

“He’s going for the silver,” Daniel said.

“Daniel, what are we going to do?”

Daniel shrugged. He sat down on the unmade bed, beside the nightstand that Hogue had rifled for matches.

“Maybe I should call my parents,” Christy said. “They know Bob. Maybe they know what to do when he gets this way.”

“I think it’s a little too late for us to snub him,” said Daniel.

Christy looked at him, angry and puzzled by the persistence of his nastiness toward her.

“That’s not fair,” she said. “God! Just because my parents –”

“Check this out.” Daniel had been rummaging around in the nightstand drawer, where he had found, in addition to a bag of Ricola cough drops, a silver police whistle, and a small plastic vial of a popular genital lubricant, a greeting card, in a pink envelope that was laconically addressed “Monkey.” He pulled out the card, on the cover of which Greta Garbo and John Gilbert were locked in a passionate black-and-white embrace. The greeting was handwritten: “I have tripped and fallen in love with you. Herman.” After a moment Daniel looked up, feeling a little confused, and handed it to Christy. She took it with a disapproving frown.

“Herman,” she read. “Herman Silk?”

“I guess it’s a little extra service he provides.”

“He must be selling his own house.” She sat down on the bed beside him. “Do they do that?”

“Why not?” Daniel said. “Plenty of people sell their own houses.”

“True.”

He showed her the vial of lubricant.

“Maybe he should have said, ‘I have slipped and fallen.’”

“Daniel, put that back. I mean it.” She gestured downstairs. “Just because he’s doing it doesn’t mean you should.” She snatched the little plastic bottle out of his hand, tossed it and the greeting card into the drawer, and then slammed the drawer shut. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here.”

They glared at each other, and then Daniel stood up. He felt a strong desire for his wife. He wanted to push her down onto the bed and pound her until his bones hurt and the smell of smoke from her hair filled the bedroom. But he would never do anything like that. And neither would she. Not in someone else’s house, in someone else’s bed. They were, both of them, hypochondriacs and low rollers, habitual occupants of the right lane on freeways, inveterate savers of receipts, subscribers to Consumer Reports, filterers of tap water, wearers of helmets and goggles and kneepads. And yet their prudence – prudence itself, it now seemed to Daniel, watching Christy’s freckled breast fall and rise and fall – was an illusion, a thin padded blanket they drew around themselves to cushion the impact from the string of bad decisions each of them had made. For all their apparent caution, they had nonetheless married each other, willingly and without material compulsion, in the presence of the three hundred people. Christy had agreed to join herself in perpetuity to a man whose touch left her vagina as dry as a fist, and Daniel had consigned himself to a life spent as a hundred and sixty-two pounds of hair in her mouth and elbows in her rib cage and hot breath in her nostrils.

“I hate you,” he said.

For a moment she looked very surprised by this admission. Then she stuck out her jaw and narrowed her eyes.

“Well, I hate you, too,” she said.

Daniel fell on top of her. He was a little self-conscious at first about the animal sounds he heard them making and the way they were biting and tearing at each other’s clothes. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of a key scene in Spanking Brittany Blue. Then some spasm sent Christy’s hand flying, and she smacked Daniel in the eye. Inside his skull a bright red star flared and then winked out. After that, he forgot to pay attention to what they were doing. The bed underneath them smelled of its right occupants, of the night sweat and the aftershave and the skin lotion of Herman Silk and his Monkey. A loose board in the old fir floor rhythmically creaked. When the proper time came, Daniel reached into the drawer for Herman’s little bottle of lubricant. He turned Christy over on her belly, and spread her legs with his knee, and greased her freely with the cold, clear stuff. His entry into her was, for the first time, effortless and quick.

“That was fun,” Christy said, when it was over. She stretched her limbs across the wrecked bed as if to embrace it, and rolled, like a cat, back and forth, until it was smeared with the manifold compound of their lovemaking.

“Still hate me?” said Daniel.

She nodded, and that was when Daniel saw the mistake that they had made. Although sex was something they both regarded as perilous, marriage had, by contrast, seemed safe – a safe house in a world of danger; the ultimate haven of two solitary, fearful souls. When you were single, this was what everyone who was already married was always telling you. Daniel himself had said it to his unmarried friends. It was, however, a lie. Sex had everything to do with violence, that was true, and marriage was at once a container for the madness between men and women and a fragile hedge against it, as religion was to death, and the laws of physics to the immense quantity of utter emptiness of which the universe was made. But there was nothing at all safe about marriage. It was a doubtful enterprise, a voyage in an untested craft, across a hostile ocean, with a map that was a forgery and with no particular destination but the grave.

“I had lunch with your father the other day,” he began.

“Shh!” Christy said.

He lay beside her, listening. From downstairs they could hear the sound of raised voices. A man and a woman were shouting at each other. The man was Mr. Hogue.

“I’m going to call the police, Bob,” the woman said.

Daniel and Christy looked at each other. They stood up and scrambled to reassemble their clothes. Daniel slipped the vial of lubricant into his pocket. Then they went downstairs.

When they came into the kitchen, Mr. Hogue was lying on the floor, amid hundreds and hundreds of spilt threepenny nails, cupping his chin in his hands. Blood leaked out between his fingers and drizzled down his neck into the plaid of his madras jacket. The reclining brass pasha, the Ping-Pong paddle, Space Needle, and all the other things he had stolen lay scattered on the floor around him. A handsome woman with red spectacles, whom Daniel recognized as Mrs. Hogue, was kneeling beside him, tears on her face, wiping at the cut on his chin with a paper towel.

“Christy,” she said. “Hello, Daniel.”

She smiled ruefully and looked down at Mr. Hogue, moaning and whispering curses on the terra-cotta floor.

“Is he okay?” Daniel said, pointing to the realtor, who was, he saw now, no stranger to these troubled rooms.

“I certainly hope not. I hit him as hard as I could.” Mrs. Hogue dabbed tenderly at the cut with the paper towel, then looked around at the kitchen she had renovated at such great expense. “So,” she said, “what do you two think of the house?”

Daniel looked at Christy. She had lost her scarf sometime in the course of their struggle upstairs. Her face was a blur of smeared lipstick and streaked mascara and the radiant blood in her cheeks.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

Son of the Wolfman

When the man charged with being the so-called Reservoir Rapist was brought to justice, several of the women who had been his victims came forward and identified themselves in the newspapers. The suspect, eventually convicted and sentenced to fifteen years at Pelican Bay, was a popular coach and math instructor at a high school in the Valley. He had won a state award for excellence in teaching. Two dozen present and former students and players, as well as the principal of his school, offered to testify in behalf of his good character at his trial. It was the man’s solid position in the community, and the mishandling of a key piece of evidence, that led some of his victims to feel obliged to surrender the traditional veil of anonymity which the LAPD and the newspapers had granted them, and tell their painful stories not merely to a jury but to the world at large. The second of the Reservoir Rapist’s eight victims, however, was not among these women. She had been attacked on August 7, 1995, as she jogged at dusk around Lake Hollywood. This was the perpetrator’s preferred time of day, and one of three locations he favored in committing his attacks, the other two being the Stone Canyon and Franklin Reservoirs; such regular habits led in the end to his capture, on August 29. A day before the arrest, the faint pink proof of a cross, fixed in the developing fluid of her urine, informed the Reservoir Rapist’s second victim, Cara Glanzman, that she was pregnant.

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