JIM LEWIS
Why the Tree Loves the Axe

Dedication

For Jack and Juliet, and Grace And their parents

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Sugartown

New York

Upstate

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

Sugartown

Why don’t you just begin?

I WAS TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS OLD AND I HAD LOST MY WAY. I FOUND myself driving on an unlit highway through the middle of a black summer night: it wasn’t where I’d intended to be. Somewhere an hour or so back I’d missed a turnoff that I should have taken, or taken one that I should have missed, and I was hurrying through the Texas hills toward the next town, where I would stop and check my map. Ahead of me there was a great big truck, barreling through the darkness like a factory on a thousand wheels, burning its fuel and spoiling the stars. For ten miles or more I’d been following behind the thing, growing more and more impatient, until at last I decided to pass it. I remember looking down at the green glowing speedometer, and I remember the numbers, but I never did see how fast I was going: I pulled into the next lane, the road turned slightly and dropped suddenly, my car complained, the truck bellowed and vanished, and a sign that said

SUGARTOWN NEXT 3 EXITS

appeared out of the mist. There were high beams in my face, the asphalt was lit up with spotlights, road, shoulder, railing, sky … It was very quiet, and for a moment I thought that I’d driven onto the set of a film … Then the car left the ground and I was piloting breathlessly in the blackness, with the bright asteroids pricking my feet and the wheel turning freely in my hands. I knew right away that nothing I did would do anything. Nothing at all … I heard a voice on the radio, it wasn’t a man’s or a woman’s, it just spoke: Well, well, well, it said, and as soon as it was done we all went up and over …

A couple of books that had been in the backseat began flapping violently around my ears, or else a pair of angry birds had gotten in through the window and were trying to get out again; for a second I saw my face turning in the glass, wearing an expression that suggested I found it all a little frustrating, this commotion and this sudden buoyancy. So I didn’t want to fly; I wasn’t really driving, either. I was along for the ride. The voice on the radio said, You are going to go to heaven now. But instead of rising, the car was falling, and the difference was disturbing.

There were people standing over me, wearing costumes and waxy, blank-eyed tragedy masks; their mouths were round and red with lipstick, and they moved very slowly, swaying one way and then the other in the observance of some formality that was lost on me. A chorus: they shook their heads sternly from side to side, and I just lay there, caressing the ground with my hands. Young lady, look what you’ve done. This is very bad; the car won’t work at all, now. There were thousands of glimmering stars, like bits of safety glass scattered in the grass, which were like stars. I said to myself, Caroline, Caroline. Oh, you really fucked up this time.

For a long time I sat cross-legged by the side of the road, listening with my skin. A trickle of cold blood was making its way down my calf, but it didn’t seem to be bothering me very much; I was getting very comfortable, and really, I didn’t mind sitting there. I watched a line of red and white lights along the road, flashing like a clock ticking that tells no time, and I took two or three deep breaths. An airplane went by overhead, so far above the earth that it was silent and invisible. A woman came over to me; she was wearing an iridescent pearl grey shirt, then a pale blue shirt. Is there anyone else? she asked.

I thought she was testing me, to see how selfish I’d become. I wanted her to like me, but where was I supposed to begin? There were people all over the place. Well, for example, there’s the mailman, I replied.

She turned her head. Help! she said to someone else, and then she turned to me again. Was he driving?

No, no, no. I was driving.

Is he still in the car?

In the car? The idea that he was in the car seemed to be upsetting her, and I thought I could ease her mind. No, no, no, I said. He delivers mail. Where is the car?

There was a man standing by the side of a police cruiser with its lights on and its doors open. He walked over and addressed the woman: Hello, Fay, he said in a lighthearted voice. How’s she doing? I wondered why he didn’t just ask me; instead, he bent down so he could look in my eyes, then reached into his jacket pocket and removed a piece of cloth, which he used to wipe my forehead. By the time he was done the lights in the road had softened into blurry astral splinters. I thought he’d purposely tried to blind me so I wouldn’t know where I was. It didn’t seem very fair to me and I started to stand up and protest, but he put his hand on my shoulder and gently guided me down again. You just stay there, sitting on the ground, he said. Is there anyone we can call?

I said, No. I was in the hospital, and I saw a pair of twins staring at me, one boy and one girl, children. It’s not your fault, I said. I don’t know what I said. The nurse looked down at me in a curious, concerned way, her head bent slightly, her brow compressed. Over her shoulder I could see a long parade of infirm women shuffling up the hallway; then she shot me with something, in the same place on my upper arm where a boy I had known a long time previously used to punch me when he wanted to get my attention. A red-haired boy. What was his name? Brown-haired.—She told me I was going to be all right, and within a second or two, sure enough, I began to feel all right. That was strange. I was going to thank her, but before I could find the words a woman doctor came to me and started strumming on some sewing thread that was strung through the skin of my face, smiling nicely all the while. It was very fine cloth, I thought, but the doll was stuffed with sand, and the sand sifted, shifted, and the figure went to sleep.

When I woke I was lying in a blue hospital room, with my battered black suitcase on the floor beside my bed, and a pale pink nurse standing over me. A curtain had been pulled around us both; through it drifted light from beyond, a picture window, a television, but there was no sound. I looked up at the nurse’s face; she wore an expression of perfect candor and forgiveness, as if she knew exactly what I was feeling. So I thought I could trust her, and I asked her, Did I die?

She frowned. Die? she said softly, her voice full of wonder. Not at all. She bent down, attached a blood pressure cuff around my upper arm, and began to inflate it.

Oh. That’s nice, I said. My tongue was stubborn and slow.

Well, you’re very lucky, she said as she slowly let the air out again, read the dial, and wrote down the results. From what I heard, that was a terrible accident you had. And here you are, pretty much all right. She tucked in a loose corner of my sheets … Not without a scratch, mind you, she went on. Because you cut your forehead, and you bruised your knee, and you broke your nose just a little. But I don’t know, that’s almost nothing for what you went through. She spoke to me as if she’d known me since I was a little girl, and wanted me to understand that my wounds were just a few more of life’s rough spots. For a while at least, she was my favorite person, and I was going to ask her to stay with me, but I was afraid she’d say no. She gave me pills for the pain and some magazines to read, and just before she left she smiled down on me and stroked my forehead. But the doctor who came to see me an hour or so later was less tender: he looked me over quickly and then told me that I was going to have to stay in the hospital for another day or two, just in case something else went wrong.

As soon as he was gone I got up from my bed and limped on over to the mirror above my sink, to stare at myself and see what I’d become; and what I saw was a woman, poor, pale, and tired, who looked the way I would have looked, if I’d been hurt. Lucky? I didn’t look very lucky. My hair was still dark blond, my forehead still high, my eyes hazel, my mouth wide, but I had two black eyes, and beneath a small strip of white tape I could see that my nose was forever bent, just a tiny bit: the bone took a slight turn at its bridge, lending my face an out-of-kilter aspect. My features were a little bit battered, like a girl who’s gotten around. What a landing. I turned to one side and then the other, I watched myself from the corner of my eye, and I was unnerved. My looks had never been perfect, but they were mine, after all, I was used to them, I’d counted on them, and now they were changed. I reached up to touch my cheekbone and the reflection reached up to touch hers, staring intently back at me with an expression that I didn’t recognize, somewhere between shock and fascination; my own face was a rebus, and I stood there for a while trying to solve it. In time it became too much for me and I turned away, but later that afternoon I went down to the drug-store in the lobby and bought a compact, which I took out a dozen times that evening when I thought no one was around, pretending nonetheless to check my makeup, when in fact I was studying my face, like some broken Narcissus perpetually gazing into a portable pond.

My sleep that night was occupied by a dull dream of a dark highway; the next day dissolved in an endless succession of even duller dramas on the television. All afternoon the doctors and nurses trespassed on me with needles and tubes, soaked my skin with cotton pads, pricked me, tapped me, touched me with their hands, and came to me with their questions. And what’s your address? the pink nurse asked gently. And how should we bill you? I didn’t know, and I wished she wouldn’t ask; I had no insurance, the total was more money than I would have to spare in a decade, and even the payments were equal to a month’s rent and then some.

Out my darkening window that evening the streetlights came on, first some, then others and others, spattering across the city as it got ready for the night; and money was passing from one pocket to another, cars were being started, kisses granted, drinks lifted, windows opened to invite the evening in. I was a stranger there, anxious and impatient in my hospital bed, with no other soul to keep me; and I was too far away from the town to touch it. I thought everything that would ever count as my past was already behind me in time. Of course I was wrong, but how was I supposed to know that?

Two mornings later the pink nurse put me in a wheelchair and pushed me to the front door of the hospital. I signed some papers, and I was discharged.

So I found myself in Sugartown. To the rest of America, the city was just someplace south, a name found in a high school history book, because it was near a battlefield from the War with Mexico, or the birthplace of some half-forgotten Plains hero. Its reputation barely reached beyond the surrounding counties; God knows it had never reached me. I knew roughly where it was, I knew that three or four hundred thousand people lived there, but from the vantage of my own annals it was just Faraway, an equal remove from the town in California where I was raised and my ex-husband in New York City, and as distant from them both as I could be without leaving the country entirely.

I’d already been everywhere else: for three years I’d been looking for another place to live, I tried cities the way some women try lovers, but I hadn’t found the right one yet. One town was too clean, and another was too big; I didn’t like the weather in another, it never poured down rain; I didn’t like the people in a fourth, they were all white giants, and they walked the streets with dumb looks posted on their faces, buying bland trash in tasteless stores. Still, I’d tried to fit in each place: I cut my hair and changed what I ate, I adopted accents, I tried to live by local poetry, memorizing legends and visiting famous graves. I was studying how to want things, where to want them, and who to be.

My name was Caroline Harrison, but the name didn’t mean anything yet. I’d carried my days from city to city in a bucket with a hole at the bottom, and nothing had collected but a few inches of dirty water. It was just same water, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Oh, I’d learned a few things: I knew how to make rice and beans, and I could dance to almost any music; I could work a crossword puzzle, and I knew how to smile when I said No. I could tell a lie, and keep telling it until it was true. But that wasn’t anywhere near enough to grow old on.

It was the end of the century, and I was alone. All across the heavens the constellations were coming apart, all across the ground there were fences that no one could maintain. The crest of the millennium was approaching, but somehow it seemed to be a private affair; no one would talk about it, no one had my hopes; where I saw opportunity, if only for escape from disappointment, they saw nothing but a big bright party followed by another decade. But I was ambitious and I dreamed I was better: I wanted china skin and a reputation for the ages, I wanted a revolution in my kitchen, I wanted my decisions to double the world’s qualities, absolutely. So I was vainglorious: I was young. I had little enough sense of myself to be vain about, and the glories I was looking for weren’t small. Every night I stared out my window, waiting for the bandit to come down from the mountains, the light in the clock tower, listening for the sound of the trumpet; every day I went out with the word Sure waiting on my lips.

There was no turn: I’d kept trying, and I’d moved again. At last I’d settled in Dallas, where I went to work for the Welfare Board, signed up for a few classes at SMU, and watched everyone carefully. As far as they were concerned, I was just another white woman trying to get by in the City of Hate: they didn’t know, but I was preparing myself, one more time, for some glamorous struggle. But one more time it wasn’t like that: my hands became as pale and dry as the pile of papers on my desk; the students in my sections believed in original sin and drank Diet Dr Pepper with their boyfriends on weekends; I got in the habit of guessing what everyone was going to say before they said it, and I was right almost all the time; and I couldn’t eat; and the land was so flat you could see a man coming with a smile on his face from miles away. After about nine months I began to feel that familiar combination of annoyance and distress, a sense that I was on the wrong side of the island, lonely and digging for laughing treasure in empty sand. I was tired of the sensation of tears running down my cheeks, so I quit my job, packed my things, and started for the Gulf of Mexico, with no one to answer to, and years to go. I was in the hills of south-central Texas when my car left the road, throwing me and my things in a ditch outside of town.

Sugartown. The isolation of the place meant a lot to me, and so did its name. My arrival there had been an accident, but I didn’t really believe in accidents. So that was where I began, before anything else, O.K. I thought it might be the city known as Home-for-simple-hearts, and I decided to stay. The day after I was discharged from the hospital I rented a cheap studio apartment in a building called Four Roses, near a mall that had been converted from a train station long ago. A few days after that I went to find a job.

I put on a dress and I walked down to an employment agency in one of the office buildings in the center of town. By then my black eyes had faded to faint charcoal-colored semicircles, and I wore my hair down over my forehead to hide my stitches as best I could. I was looking for work, I went with a department-store blush and a Cadillac smile.

There was a pale man in a brown suit sitting at the reception desk: he handed me a form and asked me to fill it out before I met with a counselor, and I took it back across the carpeting and sat on a green couch that seemed to have been stuffed with sawdust. Just one sheet of paper, they weren’t asking for much: they wanted to know what education I’d had, my skills, last few jobs, my references. But the printing was so neat, the lines were so straight, the pen they lent me wrote in such a boring blue. I don’t have any other excuse. The questions were so slow, and my heart began to itch.

—So I perjured myself all over the page: from the top to the bottom I filled in someone else’s story, sucking liar’s carbon from the tip of the pencil in between inspirations. I made up an entire life, right there in that shabby little office, in that strange little city: a better and more suitable life, one I thought they wanted. I said that I went to Catholic college in Chicago and worked in an office called Acme Prosthetics on the weekends, as a volunteer at a community center—pause, my breath quickened, I was becoming euphoric and I thought about the pink nurse—as an orderly in St. Sebastian Hospital the summer after I graduated. I listed references: a fictional professor in whose class I’d flourished and a project coordinator with an unpronounceable last name. The only truth I told was my name, my age, and my new phone number, and when I was done I held the paper in my lap as if it were the family Bible.

Cold air from a vent in a corner of the ceiling ruffled the posters on the wall. I crossed my legs and listened to the fluorescent light fixtures buzzing overhead. An imposing woman in a powder blue skirt and a white blouse with a big bow at the throat came through a door across the room; she stopped for a moment to gaze out the window, then came and stood above me. All right then, come on, she said, giving me a smile that barely made it past her coral-colored lipstick. Everything about her was enormous: her bare arms ballooned from her sleeves and her hips were as wide as the trunk of an oak; only her feet were small, and as we walked back toward her cubicle I wondered how she could stand a day’s worth of the pain she must have suffered from her cheap blue shoes. She lowered herself into an office chair; it seemed to sink into the carpeting. Well, you look employable, she said as she lifted her great, gaping purse off of a second chair and motioned for me to sit down beside her. We can be thankful for that. She peered over at me. But honey, I’ve got to ask you, before we even begin.—She gestured at my forehead. What happened?

For a moment I was startled; then I settled slowly back in my seat and gave up one more tall tale. It was the only thing I could do. Once upon a time … I started, pulling my hair back. The counselor gave me a get-out look … I was the Bride of Frankenstein, I concluded.

She paused, then let loose with a high-pitched giggle and said, Shit, honey, weren’t we all.

I had a little accident with my car, I said resignedly, and she nodded.

Well. Her hands were pink, her nails were crimson. She turned up the first sheet of my application, stared down at something I had written on the page below, and spoke without looking up. Well, O.K. I’m glad you came in. Most people we get in here can’t do anything at all, and if they can, then no one is going to trust them to do it. So what kind of thing are you looking for?

I had already decided and I didn’t hesitate. What else was there for me to do, in a world of blindness and injury? I want to work in the field of health care, I said.

The field of health care? Doesn’t that sound nice. I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic, even when she said it a second time. The field of health care. She glanced down at my application again. You have some experience here …

I gestured toward Illinois. I studied nursing up north, I said. I never finished, but I interned in the hospital for a year, and when I was in high school I was a candy striper.

All right, then. She pulled a few tan-colored files out of a drawer by her side and began to flip through them, shaking her head. No, she said, and then stopped just long enough to stare at a sheet of paper that puzzled her. No. There’s a hospital—are you union?

I never had time to join, I replied.

No, she said. Well, then, you can go downtown and sign up, and wait three weeks for it to process through, and then I’ll have something for you. Or … Here she tempted me. Such a sympathetic woman, I never would have guessed she was working, from whatever distance, for the devil. There’s some nonunion work, she said, if you’re willing to be an orderly.

I’d like to start as soon as possible.

Of course you would, she said, and dug through her files some more. There’s this, Eden View. Can you work with old people? It’s just cleaning up, mostly, but it’s work.

I said that was fine, and she wrote out the name and address on a square of purple paper that she removed from a multicolored stack on the corner of her desk. If you can get out there this afternoon, I’ll call them.

I’ll go, I said. And I went, thinking nothing, just like a pebble that’s been dropped down a well.

Eden View: right away I decided it was a terrible name, it was insulting and embarrassing. No one was going to believe that you could see paradise from there, just because someone else said you could. They called it a rest home, a community. They would have called rape Love-in-springtime, and slander Legend. I thank God I won’t have to die in that kind of place.

It was an asylum for old people; I found it in a neighborhood of clapboard houses on the eastern edge of town, where the city began to thin out into tired and odd-shaped public parks that never received visitors, an area so homely and forgotten that as far as I ever knew, it had no name. At one in the afternoon, I arrived outside the front door.

The building was red brick, three stories high, with a white roof on top, and it was surrounded by small, neat grounds with benches placed here and there. I walked in from the midsummer heat to a shadowy, cool reception area. At the front desk a nurse was talking on the telephone, absently twisting the line around her index finger as she spoke. When I showed her my appointment slip, she took it, examined it, and wrote down a room number on the top margin, all the while listening to the voice in the receiver and occasionally saying, Yes it is … Yes it is.

I was interviewed by an old man in worn blue jeans and a cowboy shirt, and the entire hour was absurd: when I first found his open door and saw him standing awkwardly beside his bare desk, he seemed so helpless and out of place that I thought he was a patient under the delusion that he could hire me. I’m sorry, I said, and started to leave again, but he took hold of my arm high up by my shoulder, welcomed me in, and said he was Personnel. He asked me to sit and I took a hard wooden schoolhouse chair next to the door. There was a moment while he searched his desk drawers for a pencil, which turned out to be on the floor by his foot; with a groan he stooped down to retrieve it, and returned pallid and trembling from the effort. He was a puppet, and he made me feel bashful for having more blood than I could use. Now, he said. All right, then. He studied my application. I see you lived in Chicago.

That’s right, I said.

I’ve got a grandson living there. I guess he’s still in school.

He looked at me hopefully, but all I could do was nod and say, How nice.

Studying, what do you call it? The electric, the wires, and the … He made a motion with his hands as if he was threading a needle.

Yes, I said, and looked out the doorway at a nurse who was passing by.

He was quiet for a second, and then he abruptly sat down behind his desk and began to ask me a string of questions. They were dull, but I was honest, and he must have been just who he had claimed to be, because when the hour was done, he offered me a job, and when I went down to the nurses’ office to fill out some forms, the big brusque administrator just looked me up and down a few times and told me I could start on Monday of the following week.

But I want to tell you about Bonnie, because Bonnie is where everything begins: my beautiful lie, my borrowed habits, my grief, and my rebirth. When it’s kingdom come and time to tally my debts, first I’ll owe her a hundred thousand miles, and then I’ll owe her twenty years. So this is Bonnie.

The Friday before I started at Eden View I went back to the hospital for one last visit. Just a checkup, the doctor had said on the phone. Take the stitches out. Just another two hundred dollars, I thought, but I went. When I got to the waiting room there was a woman sitting in a chair against the wall, leaning forward with one leg tucked up under her while the other swung above the floor. She was rocking back and forth and humming a little bit, and when I sat down she looked right at me, rocking still; but she stopped humming and colored slightly, and after a moment she unfolded her leg and lowered it to the floor. Sorry, she said. I always do that when I’m nervous.

That’s all right; I play with my hair, I said, and to reassure her I reached up and tucked a strand behind my ear.

She had a high forehead and hazel eyes, and her hair was about the same shade of blond as mine was; she was short-nosed and round-faced, and in the chemical light of the windowless room her skin was almost blue and her lips were almost purple. It had been raining on and off all day, and a pair of glossy yellow calf-high galoshes with the top buckles undone were dangling loosely from her dangling feet. I watched and waited for one of them to drop, and I was going to say something to her about it, but just as I started to speak the door opened and an attendant came out. Ms. Harrison? she said, and handed me a brown clipboard with some forms on it. The woman on the couch said, Got mine all done, and turned them over to the attendant, who took them without speaking and disappeared through the door again.

When she was gone, the other woman said, God, I hate this. She smiled. I’m Bonnie Moore. She held out her hand from across the room and waved it a little when she realized that we’d never meet that way.

Caroline Harrison, I said.

What are you doing here?

I just, this is my last time back. I was in a car accident and they’re following up on it all.

Car crash? Oh, how glamorous. Nothing like that ever happens to me. I just get women’s things. This time it was an ectopic pregnancy, the egg caught up there. Here. She rested her fingers on her abdomen. So they had to go up and get it out. She frowned and played with her hair for a second. Now they want to make sure it’s all gone, which they didn’t tell me in the first place it might not be.

The attendant reemerged from behind the door, swiftly at first; then she hesitated, looked at me, made a gesture, and looked at Bonnie. You, she said to me, are Ms. Moore?—No. She changed her mind just before I shook my head. I’m sorry, you. She glanced at Bonnie again. You can come in now. Bonnie got up and made a here-we-go expression with her eyes, and then just as she passed through the door she turned to look at me again. We were both thinking the same thing, and knew it; it was a charming, comely moment in conspiracy against the attendant: What was that about? Did we look alike? We didn’t, really. Maybe. A little, it didn’t amount to very much. Funny. And then she was gone.

Another ten minutes went by before the door opened again, and the attendant stuck her head out. Harrison? she said. Will you come this way?

There was a doctor waiting in a tiny examining room; I’d never seen him before, but I could tell right away that he enjoyed his job and was good at it. He had the air of a man who had long ago come to love everything that he could understand, and to admire everything he still found mysterious. Hi, how are you feeling? he asked as he felt in the breast pocket of his lab coat for his penlight. You can just hop up on the table. All right? He touched his cool, clean hands to my face. Look right here, he said, and held one finger up. His breath was shallow as he bent forward to stare into my eyes, moving the light from one to the other and then back again. I could feel my pupils helplessly constricting and dilating, I could hear my own blood. Good, he said. Good. Everything looks fine … He backed away and nodded. They told me what happened to your car. He smiled slightly. Maybe you were blessed, he murmured, half to himself … Blessed be Caroline, who will survive her tribulations …

I was tempted to believe him because he was a doctor, and anyway, it was what I wanted to hear. But was he allowed to say that kind of thing? The license on his wall didn’t give him permission to prophesy.

You have the number here, he said brightly. I nodded. If something goes wrong, you can call, or just come on in. But I think you’re O.K.

I can go?

You can go, he agreed.

The parking lot was scattered with black puddles and the weather weighed a ton. As I walked across the asphalt I saw Bonnie standing beside a car some distance away, the lower part of her legs reflected in a mirror of water at her feet; she was unlocking the door and she didn’t see me, but when it was open she hesitated as if she’d been struck by an uncanny thought, and then looked directly my way. I waved. Hey! she shouted, and motioned me toward her. Caroline, right? I’m going to guess that you don’t have a car, she said when I was close enough. I can give you a ride. Where are you going? Well, wherever you’re going, I can give you a ride.

Home to Old Station.

Do you have to? she said. I mean, is there something you have to do there? We could go get lunch or a drink or something, instead.

I looked at her; it would have taken a dozen doctors to get down to the source of her soreness, but I figured a companion could find it alone. Who was I to turn her down? So I went with her.

The car rolled out of the lot like a caravan leaving the last city; there was that silence at the start as we settled in. At last she said, Ha. I’m all right, it turns out. Are you all right?

As far as I can tell, I said. The doctor just told me I was—blessed, I think, was what he said.

She took her eyes off the road to look me up and down; she wanted to know if I really thought like that, and as soon as she saw that I might, she said, I’ll bet he’s right. But with me, it’s the opposite, my insides are all tangled up. There’s always something wrong in there. I’m telling you, I mean. Always always. The eggs are always either bubbling up and going everywhere, or else they aren’t there at all, or else I’m cramping. I looked over at her; she was peering through her windshield as she carefully steered down the street, wearing a look of mild surprise on her face, as if she’d never gotten used to the fact that her car moved forward at such an even rate, and changed direction when she turned the wheel. She saw me looking at her and made a gesture that I didn’t understand; she could tell that I hadn’t understood it, but she let it lie.

In time we came to a brown building with a neon sign outside that said Ollie’s Lounge. Inside there was a dark bar with a kitchen in the back and a few tables covered with plastic-coated gingham tablecloths; overhead, the grey-brown blades of a greasy ceiling fan slowly turned. Bonnie ordered a baked potato and a glass of iced tea, and then said, Um, um, and absentmindedly tapped her knife on her napkin. When she finally spoke, it was in a tone of voice that suggested that nothing mattered much, but her eyes were wide and she sat slightly forward and bent over in her seat, as if she wanted to protect herself by protecting the table.

You just moved here, yeah and I know what you’re going through, I think, she said. I came down here on a bus from Oklahoma City, about six months after my mom died, that was a couple of years ago. My father was long gone, like twenty years, and there wasn’t anyone else.—She reached across and drew a packet of sugar out of the holder in the middle of the table, tore off the top, and casually emptied the contents into her mouth. The truth is, though, is that I was following a man who wanted to marry me, and he got a job down here with the phone company. Then we split up and he moved away, somewhere, and I was just too lazy to go anywhere else, so. She thought for a moment about the day he moved. I don’t know. That was my crash, I’m still here, this is my city.

Through the plate-glass window at the front of the bar I could see people hurrying to and fro in the sunlight, such busy fish, such a bright fishbowl. Do you like it here?

Sugartown? she replied. Sure. She nodded, I love it here, I wish I’d grown up here. It’s where nice buildings go when they die. You’ll love it here, too, I can tell. She said this not because she was trying to convince me, but because it was gospel, just a song she knew and believed. Have you found a job? she asked.

I’m just about to start, I told her. I’m going to be changing bedsheets at an old-age home.

Is it good? she said.

I don’t know yet, I said.

I’d like to do something like that, she said. Help out. Now I’m tending bar, but I’m not going to do it for the rest of my life. It’s O.K., but I’m going to get out.

She was playing with a ring of keys, twisting them in and out of her fingers, humming very softly, not a song but sheer want of better work; she was quietly levitating just an inch or so above her seat. Do you want to conquer distant lands? Do you want to bring back spices, silk cloth, and silver? Do you want to be carried in through the gates of the city on an ivory chair? Someone dropped a glass in the kitchen and swore as it shattered. She took a sip from her soda and smiled. Soon as I pay my doctor, she said.

We rose to leave and she reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled twenty-dollar bill; when I started to open my bag, she said, I’ve got this, let me, and she touched my wrist. No, come on, I said.—Just let me, she replied. So I put my money away; but as we were walking out the door I turned back for a moment and watched as the waitress put her hand over the banknote and transferred it into the pocket of her apron without looking at it.

Out in the street, Bonnie seemed to burn a little bit, like an ember in the sun. A black dog lay sleeping on the sidewalk across the street. On a passing car radio a singer was crooning, Have you seen my baby? It was a consummate moment, everything seemed to fit into one faultless composition: calm, proportionate, meaningful. Bonnie was standing beside me; and I knew at once that I wanted her there all the time. Call it love at first sight, or sudden beatitude, or just one of those things, I don’t care. She drove me home and we traded phone numbers; we stood on the sidewalk and said a thousand last things quickly, as if a whole new conversation was trying to fit itself into the time we had left. Twice she took one step toward her car; twice she gave up and took the distance back. At last she laughed and said, Good-bye. Call me. So it was that she became the first best friend I’d had since I was in high school. I watched her taillights glowing madly as she braked at the corner, like some strange little spaceship trying to force its way into the traffic on the main road.

At nine the following Monday morning I arrived at Eden View; by nine-thirty the administrator had started me on a tour, and for the next few hours she led me up and down the hallways. In all that time I never heard a sound louder than our heels on the floor: the residents roamed noiselessly through the place, shuffling in their bare feet, creeping along behind shiny steel walkers, wheeling inch by inch, drifting in and out of the rooms, through the foyers and down the halls, while the staff moved among them, more quickly but just as quietly. The atmosphere was at once exact and inane: each thing had its place, was named and counted and put away in a closet, each resident had a file in the office and a chart in the nurses’ station, and every event and activity was scheduled to the quarter hour. But none of it made any difference. I could see right away that the years had driven the old folks deeper and deeper into disorder; their lives were shaped like hourglasses, and as they neared the far end all the natural laws that had held them together were coming undone; right before my eyes, they were returning to the original chaos from which they’d fallen.

Here we have the Nutritional Counseling Office, said the administrator. In a wheelchair outside the door sat a woman so aged that she looked like a wormwood tree. Hello, Mrs. Chapman. The woman raised her eyes and opened her mouth, but she said nothing, and we walked on.

Cafeteria. Nurses’ station. Supply room. Staff lounge. In the residents’ recreation room we came upon a group of old men sitting around a round table playing cards, while a thin black man dressed all in yellow played aimlessly on an upright piano that sat a few feet away from the rear wall. Andre, snapped the administrator. Can you come here? He hit three more notes and left the rest of the song hanging. For a moment he stared at the air before his eyes, as if he were watching the music disappear; then he produced a final, silent flourish of his hands, quit his bench, and came across the room.

Yes, ma’am? he said.

This is Caroline Harrison, said the administrator.

He reached out and shook my hand; his fingers were so long that they extended to my wrist. Welcome, he said.

Caroline is our newest orderly. I’m giving her to you. Will you show her where to change and get her started?

He nodded seriously and watched her back as she passed out the door. For a full thirty seconds he waited, one hand held up to quiet me, while I wondered if he was going to be good to me. At last he smiled. Come on, then, he said, and led me from the room.

The sunlight on the windows was ancient and brittle, the hallway was dark, the air smelled of ammonia. This way, this way, said André, and he set off down the hall in the opposite direction from the administrator. Shhh, he said.—But as soon as we’d rounded the first corner, he began to prate. I’ve been here three years, he said. Almost four years. Every two weeks I get my paycheck and send half of it home, go down to Western Union. I’m still here, the big lady can yell at me, but I’m still here. She doesn’t like anyone but the doctors—ha!—but the doctors don’t like her. They have her for blood trouble, they yell at her and she goes in her room. I put my ear to the door and booo … booo, she’s crying. So I know. I know.—And he went on, and he never let up: for the next two hours I trailed him through the place and listened to his pitch: he gossiped, he joked and flirted, he ran down the nurses and mimicked the doctors. I caught no more than half of what he had to say—somewhere along the line it came out that he was from Kingston, and his accent was so strong that every other sentence was lost to me. He didn’t notice, he laughed and talked, he sang little verses of songs, he said, Right? Yes? Right? I nodded and laughed along with him, and followed him to the next station.

The end of the day came earlier than I expected. So this was twenty-seven, I thought. These are my people, so soon; a sleep of snow and ashes. I was exhausted, I had too much to remember, and I wanted so badly for my masquerade to be successful. I wondered. In the women’s bathroom I changed back into my street clothes, and the face I saw in the mirror wore a determined expression. An orderly—yes—in an old-age home—yes—in Sugartown, Texas. It was a new life: I didn’t know what to expect, I really didn’t know. I had no idea.

As I walked out the door, I found André waiting for me. A pair of men in dirty white uniforms passed between us with furtive looks on their faces. As soon as they were out of sight, André scowled. Custodians, he said, and clicked his tongue. Don’t bother with them. They have no names: they come to here, they sit around like stones, and as soon as they steal enough drugs, they leave.

I nodded. O.K., I said. Well, O.K. Good night, and thank you so much. I’ll see you tomorrow. Last words, I started to leave, but he suddenly grabbed my hand, tugging it slightly to bring me closer. He bent his head, and for a second I saw the smell of his skin. Yes, but now you listen, he said. Everyone here is very nice. Except for Billy, you keep your eyes out for him.

Who’s that? I asked. Billy?

This old man, a bad man, you take my advice and watch out for him.

I started to ask him more, but he shook his head; he had already warned me, and that was all he would say.

I came home and found a message from Bonnie. Caroline? she said. Hi, it’s Bonnie, we met last Friday? Hi, I just wanted to say hello. I know you started work today and so, good luck and all that. I have to work tonight too—nights all this week. But look, if you have time, why don’t you come and visit me? It’s this place called Uncle Carl’s, on Route 36. You go out past the zoo about a mile, and it’s on the right. O.K.? So come out some night. O.K. Bye.

As soon as I heard her voice I wanted to see her, but I didn’t have the time right away, I didn’t have the energy. We left messages for each other every few days: that was all I could manage, at the start. But I grew used to hearing her recorded voice on the phone, tentative and near, telling me, yes, she’d heard the last thing I’d said. She was waiting for me, she was thinking of me.

I went to work whenever I was scheduled to go, five days a week, eight hours a shift, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night. As soon as I got home again, no matter what time it was, I’d take a shower and fall asleep right away; there was nothing else I could do, and soon my days were divided so irregularly that I could hardly tell dawn from dusk, and the only forms of consciousness I could recognize were other people’s fear and my own sleep.

There was no place on earth so filled with terrified people as Eden View. It was a death row populated by the innocent, they had long since exhausted every appeal, all they had left was waiting. So they waited, some for judgment, some for extinction, some just to know what they were waiting for. The idleness made them feel as if the waiting itself was all they were ever going to experience; it was punishment by eternal apprehension, which grew until they couldn’t stand it any longer, and then grew some more. Some of them screamed and some of them shook until I thought their bones would come apart; some complained to children who had long since left them and some cried without shedding any tears. It didn’t help them at all. Death was coming for them in pieces, taking their hair, their teeth, their organs, their memories, leaving them dazed, fatless, and compliant. And they were wrinkled, they were filthy, they smelled strange, and they frightened me. I tried very hard to love them all, each for what each was losing, but I’d be lying if I said I always succeeded.

There was Judith, with ninety years out of her mother and a meantime spent God knows where, she crooned to gone ghosts in a language no one could understand; she had long ago stopped eating, she lived on cups of air and the mysterious syllables of her singular vernacular. Bart, a retired businessman, who had lost his entire family in a burning house and was always trying to explain how tired he was. A colonel named Farley, a quiet man in a black shirt and a bolo tie, who would go for days without doing much more than coughing and saying, Ah! now and again, releasing a little puff of being that drifted lazily up to the ceiling. Colonel, it’s time to go to sleep, please. For God’s sake.—Cough. Ah! Cough. All right. Please.

I was putting the Colonel to bed one night when an old man I hadn’t seen before came striding down the hall. He had enormous pale pink ears, from which tufts of reddish white hair grew, and that was all the hair he had; his nose was fleshy and hooked and his eyes were nearly black. He was wearing a dapper dark blue suit and a white shirt that was yellow with age, and he was strutting along without shoes or socks. When he was close by me, he stopped and held up his foot so that I could see the dust that had blackened its thick underside. See this? he said. See this, all this dirt? This is a slovenly place. Aren’t any of you working? Look at this.—I looked. I want my money back, he said. Give me my fucking money, or I’ll set the dogs on you.

I stared at him. What?

Who the fuck are you, anyway? he demanded.

I froze.

Come on, he said.

… Caroline, I said. I’m new … Where did you come from? Where is your room?

Ah! he said, and dismissed me with a wave of his long ivory fingers. Get out of my way. And before I could react he disappeared down around the corner, muttering something vicious, and that was how I met Billy.

The doctors believed that he was dying, and when he waved away their recommendations they told him so, softly but insistently. Still, they never said what was killing him, and in fact he was never at all weakened. He would spend hours in the rec room, banging a basketball against the wall and catching it again with one hand. The noise drove the doctors crazy and they would send orderlies to make him stop; instead, he would pick fistfights with them, and they would have to restrain him by pinning his arms behind his back while he struggled to free himself and called them all cocksuckers and cunts.

Billy had been at Eden View longer than anyone else; in fact, he’d outlasted all of the staff, and there was no one there who remembered when he’d arrived. Once I checked his file in the main office and found that he’d been admitted about twelve years earlier, but he used to insist, sometimes that he’d just arrived, and other times that he’d been there forever. In any case, he’d managed to get himself moved into the best of the residents’ rooms, a large single in a corner of the third floor, with a tiny balcony from which he could look out on the whole of Sugartown, the hills behind it and the sky above. On clear evenings he would sit outside with a penknife and carve pieces of wood into fantastic shapes, a guitar, a woman, a rosebush complete with delicate buds, which he would pass off on the staff, always warning them in a low voice that the things were hexed and might kill them if they weren’t careful. Later still, he would lock himself in his room, turn his desk light on, and take out a canvas bag. Inside of it there was a rolled-up piece of cloth, and inside of that there were dozens of delicate implements—they looked liked dentist’s tools—which he would use to meticulously engrave on something about the size of an envelope. No one ever saw what he was working on; if someone came to his door, he would hide it in his lap and hold it there until he was left alone again.

The orderlies said that he was the Devil’s servant and he was never going to die. André told me that flowers withered and turned brown when he breathed on them, that he could light a match just by looking at it, that he had wings on his back and wore his suits to cover them, that he hid bottles of codeine in his room and had pornographic magazines delivered by mail, that he kept five thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills rolled up in a sock in his dresser drawer. I’m telling you, Eden View ran with gossip like blood runs with sugar. But I began to watch old Billy, just out of curiosity; I couldn’t help myself, the rumors were an itch. I hung by his room, playing temptation and waiting to see what he would do. I made excuses to be there: I had his pills, I needed to change his sheets, I wanted to be sure his room was not too warm.

I tried to get him into one of the games that the other orderlies played with their favorites, brief rituals that meant nothing, fair questions and simple tests. Do you know what day today is?

Do I know what day today is? Of course I do. Today is the twenty-seventy-seventh of Pestember. I don’t care for a second what day it is.

What day of the week.

If it isn’t Sunday, I don’t know. I know it isn’t Sunday.

Is it Thursday?

I don’t know.

It’s Thursday, yeah.

Well, shit, he said in a tone of utter disgust at my dumbness. What difference does that make?

Never mind, I said brusquely, and tried to dismiss him with a blank expression. But my cheeks were hot; I was betrayed by my face and Billy noticed it right away. Caroline is angry, he said in a schoolyard singsong voice. I don’t give a shit. Caroline doesn’t think it’s fair that I should be so mean to her, when she’s trying to make nice with an old man. She wants to be all over me, like a mood. She wants to go through my pockets, she wants what I’ve got. And who knows? She may be right, maybe I can help her, maybe I can use her. But—he wagged a finger at me—is she smart enough? Brave enough? Confident enough? Oh, I know I’m not supposed to ask anything like that. Because you people … Take a look at these, he said, holding out a pair of small pale green pills in his palm. They give me these to sleep, so I’ll dream, so I won’t remember what they’ve said to me, so every day we can start all over again at the beginning. Take them, go on, try them, you’ll see.

Billy, these are yours.

I don’t want them, he said. I’m giving them to you. You take them.

I put them in the breast pocket of my uniform, where I found them again a few days later, dissolved into dust and crumbs that clung to my fingertips, and as I hurried to the bathroom to wash my hands I spoke under my breath to an imaginary inquiry. I don’t know what they are, I said. I don’t know where they came from.

One afternoon I went to invite him to a game of bingo in the cafeteria and found him sitting cross-legged on his bed, staring down at something that was lying in his lap. For a long moment he didn’t move, just watched the thing; then he sighed and lifted it before him and I saw a chrome pistol in his hands, staring steadily back at him like a snake. He turned it, brought it to his face, and peered through the chambers, and as I watched he blew forcefully into one of the holes and then checked it again. Then he reached down to the bed and began to load it from a pile of shiny brass shells, one by one by one. I stood speechless on the floor. Beautiful, he said when he was done, and I began to back out the door, but before I could get away he spoke up. Go on and tell. Go on and be a snitch, be another disappointment. It won’t help you sleep one bit.—Only then did he look up at me. Because you didn’t sleep last night, did you? I know. Poor little princess. You got out of bed at about two in the morning and went to sit at your kitchen table, buck naked, but you didn’t care. You made tea and read magazines, and wondered what your next man is going to look like.

He was exactly right about that, and at first I thought he’d been spying on me; but he couldn’t have been, my shades had been down against the streetlights, and anyway, he hadn’t left Eden View in years. It was just that he’d suddenly laid me open, and he was watching my thoughts right through my forehead. I felt him where he shouldn’t have been and I panicked; but in a moment I’d collected myself and concentrated on a hell I conceived for him. Can you hear me now? I thought. Just mind your own business. I turned on my heel, walked out of the room, and carefully shut his door behind me; but I never told a soul about the gun.

At last I had a free night and a little self-possession, and I took a bus out to visit Bonnie at her bar. I found her watching over an empty room; it took her a moment to recognize me. Caroline? she said. That’s you, right? She laughed with delight, and I was delighted to hear her. I’m so glad you made it, finally. No one’s coming out: they’re all at home with their families. Behind her the bottles stood, with their cool glass, caramel colors, and invocations of the country, each one topped by a plastic spout. Come on, keep me company. Let me make you one of those fancy drinks, I never get a chance to make them.

We started talking and we didn’t stop. We went on, the girl and I, gently and carelessly, drinking our drinks and mentioning this and that. This trip down to Padre Island, that neighbor’s barking dog in the backyard. I can’t sleep, said Bonnie. Or if I do, all I dream about is dogs. Does that ever happen to you? When you dream the same thing over and over again?

Only when I’m awake, I said, and she laughed before I did.

Another drink, a sound in my ears. Slowly the world was reducing to just we two, our faces, our small questions and confessions. I lied to my doctor, I said to her. I lied to him, I don’t even know why. He asked me if I’d ever been hospitalized before, and I said, Yes, once, for pneumonia. Which I never was. But I didn’t want him to think I was … inexperienced.

Of course not, said Bonnie. Because otherwise he wouldn’t respect you.

Was there another drink? Some time later I stood, stretched, and looked around the room. I’ll be right back, I said. The bathroom was cold, and I was quick. When I was finished I studied my face in the dark mirror under the dim blue junkie lights, my skin perfectly clear, smooth and glowing, my eyes hidden in shadows.

Do you have any brothers or sisters? asked Bonnie when I returned.

Not really, I said. I was the only baby born to my mother alive: she had one miscarriage before me, and another after, so there I was. She didn’t talk about it, but there I was.—I held my hands out on the table as if I were cupping an invisible infant.

She sipped and stared at the bartop. I have some stepbrothers somewhere, she said, but I never see them. My mother’s dead, and my father could be anywhere, you know, so I don’t know a soul except for you. Even though I’m sort of very social. Sociable. But just to a point. I don’t really know a single person, except for the people that I see in here, and I only see them here. And you. Does that make you uncomfortable?

I said, No, not at all. I was playing brave and everclear, but in fact the moment was painful; the debut of a friend was so great a moment that I could hardly stand to consider its consequences. No new lover with his hand on my naked ass could have gotten close to me so quickly.

She was embarrassed, she looked down and nodded. Looked up. Without flinching she rose from the table and went to make us each another drink, and I walked over to the jukebox, played five songs, and forgot right away what they were. We met at the table again. We were too good for anybody.—Boo! to the bosses, to the rude ones and the tattletales. I like that shirt, said Bonnie. It was loose and black. I like the buttons.

Later, she talked a little bit about mothers who ran their boys in gangs, and I answered her with a brief elegy on child brides, rooming-house whores, and after-hours abortionists. She told me a story that began with a description of a piece of one-hundred-year-old lace, and another that ended with the sentence, I had to change all the locks on my fucking doors, which cost me about two hundred dollars that I didn’t have. I told her a few things I had learned about landlords, which led me to a remark on the saleswomen at makeup counters, and another on table manners. I added some thoughts on the smell of burning hair. She made a point about skin, and the nerves beneath the skin, all the while gently stroking the inside of her wrist with the index finger of her other hand.

I was married, I said, out of nowhere.

Tell me, tell me.

His name was Roy. I met him in New York, he worked for the City. So what happened … I fell in love with him, and then I married him. I took his name.—I took his name. We lasted about a year.

How was it? she asked.

It was perfect until it ended, I said, and then it was a perfect tragedy. Bonnie pursed her lips and lowered her eyes, and I gave her a moment … I married him, O.K., and I was faithful to him, but I couldn’t stay married. I left, and when I left I didn’t take anything, but that didn’t make it any better. Well … that was long ago and far away …

A middle-aged man walked through the front door of the bar, looked around at the room, and found it deserted but for the two of us. We stared at him. He hesitated for a moment, and then said, Sorry, and left again.

I changed the subject, I didn’t really want to talk about New York. I have this fear of heights, I said. I’ve had it all my life. I get it when I’m on a balcony or near a high window, or when I’m looking down a stairwell from a few stories up. But it’s not that I’m afraid I’m going to fall, or someone’s going to push me. It’s that I’m afraid I’m going to jump. I start to hear this voice in my head, and the voice is me. Go on, I say to myself. Just go on, just jump.

Bonnie nodded. When I was younger, she said—and then she started laughing and couldn’t stop, and I laughed along with her without knowing what was funny. She began again. When I was younger, I used to fake not having orgasms.

Not having orgasms, I said.

Right. I would just stare at the ceiling, even when I was getting all ganged up inside, trying not to show it. It was a lot of work. But I didn’t want some guy to know he’d made me lose control, so I’d lie there going—she made a noise like a matron trying to suppress a cough. I had this one, poor little skinny boy, who thought it was his fault and went down on me for about an hour, and never even knew how many times I busted.—She exploded with laughter, so violently that she had to wipe her chin. Oh God, she said. Oh fucking God. Who told me I was nothing but a place to put things?

I went to the jukebox again, she went behind the bar to mix us another round. When she returned, she sat the glasses down on the table and immediately lifted one of them up again. What time is it? I asked.

She pointed to a clock behind the bar that read eleven-thirty. About eleven, she said, and sighed. I’m drunk, she went on. I’m dry and I’m drunk. She interlaced her fingers and turned her palms out so that her knuckles cracked loudly. I’m dry, and I’m drunk, she said again. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to start paying more attention to things. I’m not going to go around in my little daze anymore. You’re so much smarter than me, more thoughtful, right? You always try to know what’s going on. I bet you don’t get caught at things the way I do.

I’m going to finish everything I start, I insisted. You have far more self-control than I do, I can tell, you don’t give up as easily. So I won’t write letters that I never send; I won’t put the book down on page ninety-two; I won’t leave food on my plate.

When we had finished pledging our improvements, we shook hands across the murky table. It’s a deal, said Bonnie. Done.

Early the next morning I was at Eden View; I was tired, my neck ached, my eyes itched. As I walked through the lobby I passed one of the janitors mopping down the floor, and the smell of the cleaning fluid got right to me and made me dizzy and irritated. DID YOU REMEMBER TO SMILE? said a discolored sign in the staff lounge; I couldn’t remember where I had left my work shoes. The fibers of my ugly yellow uniform were making fun of me. André came in and found me half-reclined on the couch. You look like you’ve been poisoned, he said, shaking his head with exaggerated disapproval. Come on, pretty Caroline. He handed me a Styrofoam cup: Have some coffee. If the big lady comes in, you’re going to get in trouble.

I wasn’t scared of the administrator, but I drank the coffee and when I was done I went on my rounds. The clocks in the hallways kept stopping and starting again, and the sun shining through the windows was sharp enough to slit my throat.

I went to the assignment board to see what test was waiting for me, and there it was: I was supposed to give Judith a bath. She was waiting in the patients’ lounge.—No, she wasn’t waiting, but she was there, sitting in her wheelchair with a single playing card clutched in her hand, while a few of the other residents played rummy with the remaining fifty-one cards at a table across the room. Do you want to take a bath? Do you want a bath? It’s time. She looked up at me expectantly as I rolled her out the door and down the hall. In the washroom that she shared with four other residents I pushed her to the edge of the tub. Upsy daisy, I said, and helped her step slowly into the water. With her nightgown removed, she was naked; her tiny back was pale and curved away from her protruding spine like the dorsum of an ancient dolphin. A bleached, dying dolphin. She leaned back, showing her flattened breasts, her belly, her loose and balding sex … to be so old, in a body that had become so exhausted and discouraged, to be so brittle and unable. If I asked her and she understood me, what would she say she had been, before she became this phenomenon? What history had brought her here? Was it something like mine? The idea made me wince, and to keep from dwelling on it I began to wash her gently. Under my hands she was even smaller than she looked, I stroked her shoulders, and she began to make an unconscious rhythmic sound, a moaning, a singing that she couldn’t hear herself; it was as if some siren living deep inside her were calling the dead to come get her. I lifted her arm to wash beneath it and her voice rose, her tune became more urgent, and all of a sudden it seemed to me that they were on their way: I could feel their footsteps on the floor outside: I could hear their heavy breathing. I didn’t want them to find me so I quickly finished cleaning her, dried her down and hastily dressed her, and then wheeled her to her room and left her alone.

I spent the next half an hour wandering along the halls, hating myself and looking for a place to hide, but there was nowhere safe. From behind the clouded window of the Therapy Room I heard the sound of a man laughing; in the cafeteria I saw two janitors sitting together at a table, hunched over a box of glass ampules filled with amber fluid that they were carefully dividing between them. At last I came to Billy’s room, and without thinking I knocked on his door.

Who’s that? he demanded, and I heard three or four footsteps and the sound of a drawer being shut.

Me. Can I come in?

No answer, but more noises. Then the door jerked open. What is it?

… I need to strip your bedding.

He hesitated for a moment, and then said, About fucking time, and stood aside. I crossed the room and began to pull the sheets from his mattress; the bed was cold. He stood restlessly in the corner, and when I turned back to look at him he just cocked his eyebrow and shifted his weight impatiently. At length his silence became too much for me. Billy? I said while I pulled his pillowcases from his pillows.

He made a noise.

Where did you come from?

Where did I come from? he asked back, and at once his temper was in gorgeous flower. I was born about ten thousand years ago! he said.

Shhh, I said, stepping backward.

My father was a big black bear! My mother was the fucking moon! I left home when I was three years old. I left home, and I never looked back!

Don’t shout, I said. Where did you go?

I went everywhere and I did everything.—Again his voice rose. I made a million dollars a hundred times! I promoted bum boxers who fell down, I hawked houses built on fault lines, I stole songs from their composers! I buried a thousand men, I betrayed a thousand women, I sold children into slavery! He paused. William Mahoney, they called me Dollar Bill. Except once when I captured a river and held it hostage for ransom; then they used my middle name, Misery. What the fuck do you want?

From the floor below came the sound of André on the piano playing Let’s Get Lost. What do I want?

What do you want from me? What do you want? I see you coming around here like I’m payday. I know you want something. What is it?

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to know him, to sit at his feet and study with him. I wanted him to tell me stories and dirty jokes, I wanted to get into everything with him, I thought maybe he was my escape; but I wasn’t going to confess all that. I was afraid he’d laugh at me. I don’t want anything, I said.

Don’t you lie to me, he said softly. You can lie to everyone else, but don’t you dare lie to me.

He thought he had me trapped and bare, but I’d learned the right response when I was just a little girl; it had been taught to me along with my earliest manners. Well, I said, just as softly. If you don’t already know what I want, you’re never going to find out.

He hesitated. Bitch! he said, but by then I was already slipping away, laughing to myself, because I knew it was a compliment, and it meant that I was still alive.

I want to know more about this city:

where you were, what it was like.

WELL, I’LL TELL YOU: YOU CAN TALK ABOUT THIS LOVE AND THAT love: the minister loves his congregation and the banker loves his bank. Tristram loves Isolde, and Isolde loves her song. You can say that love defies prediction, but Bonnie was right: as I settled in I found myself falling in love with Sugartown, and every day I was seduced a little further. I felt as if I was an explorer who had stumbled onto the place over some uncharted mountain range, becoming the first outsider to discover that particular landscape, peopled with those shopkeepers and police, those office workers strolling through the downtown plazas, the Mexican lawn crews, the ranch hands who came into town on weekends to dance and fight, the lowriders who tooled down the Strip on Saturday nights—all of whom had been living there in isolation, rendered characters in a shimmering society.

It was still a relatively new city; Spanish settlers had founded it centuries earlier, but it had remained an outpost until the late 1800s, when the great ranches started springing up nearby; then it became a way station for cattle on their way to market. It had grown gradually since then, left unaffected by the oil booms and busts that had staggered the growth of the rest of the state. No one had moved there without long consideration and good reason, and nothing had been built there before it was needed.

Sugartown: there were several stories to explain how it had come by its name. Some said it was because cane from Florida and Louisiana passed through on its way to California, others that it was because the water in Green River was so sweet, still others that it was a corruption of the name Saugers, he being one of the first white men to grow rich there. There were days when I walked the city all by myself, lost and gazing lustfully. I loved the place: I loved the icehouses that showed up on corner lots, where for a few dollars you could sit on a picnic bench and drink beer from dusk to dark; I loved the stadium that sat in the middle of town, a squat domed structure that was just as ugly as it could be; I loved the local stone that they used for the municipal buildings, a blue-white marble from a quarry a few hundred miles away, the handsome, rich mansion bricks made from some nearby clay, and the Spanish clichés of stucco and scalloped red roof tiles. I bought a guidebook, and I loved the stories it told, the madness of the early settlers, the wealthy, upright families, the cheating wives and cowboy murders, the hidden alleys and locked doors. I loved the years that I found written on the historical markers, telling the date when some building had gone up. I would stop and think the time all the way through: Who was then alive, who was now dead?

And my senses: the American blue sky; the smell of the trees, and the river, and the dank hallways of Four Roses; and the screeching of the birds that collected in the trees in Police Plaza. Every time I turned on the radio they were playing a song that I wanted to hear; every time I passed near a schoolyard there was the sound of boys shooting basketball. I would melt eggs spiced with jalapeños in my mouth every morning; in the evening I would sip cranberry soda at my window and think of the fields facing away from the city as they raced in their sleep down to the Rio Grande, the thousand-mile-long wind, the fine men and women cakewalking along the sidewalks, the sound of starting cars, accordion music. I used to walk to Eden View, and one night a man in an old brown panel van pulled over to the curb and asked me if I knew how to get to a famous old barbecue restaurant on the south end of town; and I was so pleased that he would mistake me for a local, and so proud to be able to give him the directions and set him on his way, that I smiled for an hour afterward. You see, I was so happy there, I was charmed, I felt safe and satisfied: I thought I was never going to leave.

Some nights Bonnie and I would just drive the streets, while she acted as my guide through the specific heights and depths of town. This coming up is Silverado, she said as we turned onto a wide and barely lit avenue, on either side of which broad lawns rose toward shadowy estates screened by tall, ancient trees. There were no sidewalks. Overhead a three-quarters moon was illuminating a layer of pale dappling clouds, so that the sky seemed to be made of faintly glowing marble. Hang on, Bonnie pulled the car to the side of the road and turned off the motor. She lowered her window and the hot sweet night wended its way in against the air conditioning. Smell that, she said. That’s what heaven’s going to smell like.

At the end of the avenue we went left and rolled through a neighborhood of neat little family houses; round and round we rode, past a public park softly turning to steam in the darkness, across an empty boulevard. We went over a narrow river lined with trees; on the embankment below I saw a pair of lovers kissing, the man tall and dark, the woman small and blond. Here the houses had windows with wooden shutters, and balconies were adorned with ornate wrought-iron railings.

In time we came to a bent white building. That’s the oldest building in town, said Bonnie. See how the foundation’s sunk at one side? It’s this restaurant, now, and all the rooms inside are crooked. If you put a pen on the table, it’ll roll right off. We bumped slowly over a set of railroad tracks, the road turned. An expensive blue sedan glided past us. This is all whores and drugs, said Bonnie, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. Drugs and whores. Isn’t it pretty, though?

In Sugartown, the poor people lived in a neighborhood called Green River, in rows of tract houses and shotgun shacks penned in by cyclone fencing; there were Mexicans on one side of the railroad tracks, and blacks on the other. If there was a porch, it sagged, and fading color flyers from the local supermarket accumulated by the bottom stair. Outside it was inside again, familial and tough, hanging out. You could see them; they parked their pickups on their hard lawns and washed them down endlessly with rags and buckets of soapy water. At night, the orange arc lights burnished the metal and made the rest monochrome; in the morning, the dew fed the rust. Because it was summertime all the teenagers were out of school, in a world without labor. The boys would gather in circles in Bundini Park and joke at one another. The girls would watch from the bleachers, many of them holding even smaller girls on their laps; I figured they were sisters, but I wondered if they were daughters, and I’d try to imagine what it would have been like, to have been a mother so young.

If I walked back home from Eden View, I passed through Green River on my way to Old Station. I tried to take a different route every day, and once I came to a crossroads. On one corner there was an old hotel, a shabby once-blue building several stories higher than those that surrounded it, with dark windows and an unlit neon sign that read THE PIONEER. A red-and-green billboard showed a tin of chewing tobacco with a bucking stallion on the lid. Two men were leaning against the wall in the heat outside, one with a straw hat pulled down on his forehead, and the other shirtless and drinking a can of beer. They were in their early twenties and they had their eyes on me.

As I passed, the shirtless one began to sing in a high, clear voice:

Jole blon

From Louisiana

On the bayou

In the moonlight

I didn’t look back, although I wanted to; I knew that if I did, I would see him standing there, with his arms open wide and a look of devotion on his face. I turned the corner like she-to-whom-all-praise-is-insufficient: I could feel my steps swaying, I could hear him following me. When I was about halfway down the block he started singing again.

Don’t leave me

Don’t deceive me

Stay beside me

Make me happy

What a pretty melody. What a sentiment to sing on a sunny afternoon, in this sad part of town. At last I glanced back and saw him ambling up the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his elbows out at his side, so that his entire being was fanned out behind him like the harlequin tail of a peacock. His voice was beautiful, and his pride was a sight, but at the last moment I thought of the word pussy, and I turned away.

Oh, come on, he said. Don’t be like that.

But I just kept on walking.

The way from the bus stop to Eden View the following night. The weather was so hot and humid that it was impossible to tell if the sky was overcast or clear; the air was thick, the light was slow, in the privacy beneath my clothes I was perspiring. I walked down the middle of the empty street, watching the voodoo music that hung down from the canopy of trees overhead. When I reached the parking lot, I found it empty, the windows of the place were dark, no birds did sing.

In the door, then, and walking down the main hall. A few of the residents were out of their rooms, slumped over in their wheelchairs and staring down at their bare, bedsore legs, like images from old paintings of the sufferings of man. The walls were hung with grandchildren’s drawings, their bright lettering laughing in the half darkness; the air smelled of weak medicine and cleaning solution, the slight sound of voices drifted out of the lounge. Someone was trying to convince someone else, softly, so softly, that there was no way to tell the words.

Judith and Bart were playing cards in the game room, or rather, they sat with a deck of cards between them and talked in low voices, thin lips to great ears. He bet her that she was an alien from outer space, and she went through the deck and named the cards, numbers and suits, to try to dissuade him; but her words came out in unearthly syllables. See, Bart said. You’re a Martian, just like I said, maybe from Neptune, maybe, I don’t know. They should have been put to bed an hour earlier, and I went in to gather them up. Together they rose and followed me down the hall toward their rooms—Judith’s was first, and she went in without a word. Bart said, Humph, yes. Are there mountains beneath the sea? I nodded, and he made his way across the floor to his bed, moving his mouth softly.

Down the bare halls I saw darkness coming out of the rooms, a coffin-shaped stretch of shadow that reached through the door of each one. Good night, good night. Old folks in bed. Good night. There were dusky moons on the hallway ceiling and a grey penumbra down at the end, a mirage that had settled in before the door of the dining room. Good night. There was no more sound.

Billy came fully dressed out of his door, shut it softly behind him, and started down the hall into the unlit lounge. When he saw me he stopped and shouted, Hey! You there! Girl!

Billy, I whispered. Shhh. He scowled and retreated back into his room, where I found him standing stiffly beside his impeccably made bed. On his night table I saw a gold watch and an uncapped silver pen. Caroline-the-Candle! he announced. Do please sit down—he gestured to his windowsill—and we can get started. He had become very polite, but I couldn’t decide whether it was because he felt polite or because he was mocking me. I went automatically to turn down his sheets. Don’t, he said, and instead of lying down, he began pacing the distance from the head of the bed to the foot and back again. I took the chair by his desk. He stopped and smiled, in his unsmiling way. Out the window I could see the lights of Texas, spread like steady, pale orange stars along the floor of the valley.

So tell me, how are you? he asked.

All right, I replied.

What did you do today?

Not much.

No, goddamnit, he said, instantly glaring at me. So he had been mocking me, or else he had changed his mind. What exactly did you do today?

I ran a few errands, mostly, I said. Then I went home and read for a little while, and then I took a shower and got dressed. Talked to Bonnie on the phone.

Where did you go, on your errands? What did you read? Who is Bonnie?

I didn’t want to play, but I didn’t feel like fighting, so I played along: To the bank to deposit a check, I said. To the drug-store to get some soap and shampoo, to the hardware store to get lightbulbs. I read a magazine. Bonnie is my friend.

Caroline-the-Candle! he said again. And … Bonnie-the-Bottle. How did you meet her?

In the hospital, I said. And before he could ask: I was in the hospital because I had a car crash. That’s how I wound up here, with you.

Who knows you’re here? he asked.

In Sugartown? In Eden View? I don’t know. No one.

No family?

No.

Children?

No.

No boyfriend?

No.

Caroline has no one but her friend Bonnie. I’d like to meet this Bonnie.

Maybe someday, I said.

Well, all right. Do you want to know what I did today?

Sure.

While you were reading magazines and doing nothing, I was out, he said. I have been roaming all over the country. I have been practicing my arts. I have had a very busy day indeed. First I went to Kentucky and I collapsed a coal mine; and don’t you know, they’re still trying to dig the poor men out. Then I spread my wings and flew up to Detroit, where I started a small fire, I did. And when I was sure it was burning to beat the band, I went down to San Francisco and knocked over a building or two; and then I went on my way to Kansas City, and when I got there I stopped in a church and set a priest to suffering for sex, so that he … well, you’ll be able to read all about it in a couple of weeks.

He stopped to consider the damage he’d done. It was a lot of work, he said. I’m tired out. So you may ask, Why do I do it? Well, I’ll tell you. I like the colors. I like the sound it makes. I like the smell. I like what it makes me think. I’m the Adversary, he said, adjusting his tie and smoothing down the front of his shirt with his hands. I’m an appalling old man. He stopped and made a stage gesture of defiance. No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the king himself. He fixed me with a delighted look…

I was just sitting there listening to the old man go on about his aged dreams of revenge and mayhem; of course I didn’t believe for a second that he had done all he claimed, I didn’t believe in him. But he didn’t care and he wasn’t done. As for you, he went on, and before I could prepare myself, he was talking about me. I see you coming around, he said. I can smell you under your clothes, I can hear your heart bumping against your chest. Forty years ago I would have fucked you. I know what you want…

There was mist sneaking against the window. I didn’t believe him, but my skin began to freeze, my mouth was full, and I could feel my tongue search for a place to rest. I thought, forty years ago I would have let you. Billy went on: You want more of everything. More love. More fun. He was daring me to resist him, dangling feathers of fire before my face, I could feel their flames. Fame! Sex! Beauty! Billy said. I flinched and blinked. Confess, he demanded. You’re greedy. For a long moment I couldn’t remember how to start a sentence, I couldn’t answer, and he smiled. That’s good enough, he said. A glutton. Good. I can help you rise up. Now what can you do for me?

I was about to answer him when an alarm began to sound softly in the hallway, a high beeping noise that was meant to alert the staff without waking the residents. I got dumbly to my feet and for a moment we stood there, Billy and I, far away on our cold half-lit planet. But the summons went on, and at last I broke from his gaze.

Stay, he said, his voice at once commanding, tempting, and plaintive. We’re just getting started. Don’t go.

I have to go.

Don’t go, he said again, and the tone of supplication was much clearer. She’s dead.

I stared into his face to see what he wanted. He wanted to live forever, and failing that, he wanted me to obey him. I wanted to study him, but I had to go see what the alarm was about.

It was Judith, her heart had suddenly stopped. When I reached her room I found two nurses and Dr. Selzer, who looked up at me briefly and blindly and then went back to massaging her chest. Her flesh was as colorless, soft, and smooth as dough, and it put up no resistance to his pushing; his hands had no spark, there was no life, and his breath came more and more violently. His face began to redden, and after a few minutes had passed he stopped, abruptly started again, and stopped, dropping his hands to his sides and gasping for air. He wouldn’t look at anyone, and when he spoke it was to an audience of numinous peers. All right, he said softly, and he pushed his glasses up on his nose, backed away from the bed, and walked out of the room, leaving the nurses and myself to rearrange the woman’s nightgown and raise the rumpled sheets over her face.

Everything in Eden View was still. Either there was peace in the valley, or a fear so deep as to quiet all motion. I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was ashamed of myself, and I worked hard and kept my eyes lowered for the remainder of the night. Already I missed Judith, without even trying; I missed her body, I missed her tuneless and unfathomable voice, and when my shift was over I discovered that I didn’t want to go home after all; I suppose I hoped that if I stayed it would be sign enough to someone that I hated Death, so I sat in the staff lounge and read a copy of the afternoon newspaper that had been left on one of the tables.

On the front page there was a picture of a young dark-skinned man, a graduation photograph from one of the local high schools. He was gazing out at the city, his eyes glazed with defiant tears. Everyone called him Domino, because he was so good at the game; and everyone was looking for him. The police said that he’d been dealing drugs, but they hadn’t found a way to arrest him until he’d shot a pair of his competitors dead. They wanted him for that, so they gathered themselves together and surrounded the building where he lived; then they sneaked up the stairwell and broke through his door. He was waiting in the bedroom, and in the battle that followed he fired four bullets, hit three policemen, and then vanished down a fire escape. Below the article there was a diagram of the apartment, marked with star-shaped explosions where his shots had hit, and an arrow out the window where he’d left, wearing only sweatpants and a pair of sneakers. No one knew how he’d gotten away; the mayor was angry, and the police were embarrassed.

They believed that he was hiding somewhere in Green River, but they had no idea where. They’d sent people to bully his relatives, they’d raided bars and nightclubs, but they hadn’t found him. They were going door to door; there were cruisers on every corner and helicopters constantly cutting in the hot sky; they were taking people right off the streets. There was talk of a curfew. A minister from the Baptist church called a press conference to complain, and the police chief held his own to ask for cooperation from the community.

I sat in the lounge and thought the night was all wrong; and I stretched out on the couch and slept fitfully until dawn the next day, when the administrator found me, woke me, and made me go home.

Bonnie knew a man from her bar, a regular named Adam, whom I’d met very briefly one night when I’d gone by to sit with her. He was getting married and she arranged it so that I was invited. I didn’t know him very well, I didn’t know his bride at all, and I didn’t want to go to a wedding. A wedding! I didn’t want to go. But Bonnie said, Come on, it could be fun. You don’t have to meet anyone, you don’t have to talk to anyone. You just need to wear some nice clothes. When was the last time you put on a nice dress and made up your face? I made a skeptical noise. She squinched her features and said, Do it for me? I don’t want to go alone.

I don’t have anything to wear, I said. I lost all my good clothes in the crash.

I have a dress, if you want, she insisted. I’ll come over. It’ll fit. It’s a beautiful thing. All right?

I could think of a thousand better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon, but I knew she was relying on me to keep her company. O.K., I said.

She was right about the dress: It was an emerald green raw silk shift, a simple sleeveless thing with a scooped neck, but the whole of art was lying in it, cherubs in the shadows and chambermaids looking on. I stood before her mirror and smoothed it down my waist, and glimmers of light flushed down the front. You wear some sling-back sandals, said Bonnie, and you’ll look perfect.—And here. She held out four little pills in her hand; two were small and white, one was white and larger, and one was pale blue. Take these; they’ll make the whole afternoon a lot better. Water. Where do you keep the cups? She went rummaging through the shelves above my kitchen sink.

Where do they come from? I asked.

This guy came in the bar with them, traded me for a few drinks.

Do you know what they do?

I don’t know exactly what they are, but he looked like he was having a good time. She turned her face away and gulped the pills down. I wanted to follow her, so I felt mine in my mouth for a second or two and then tipped my head back and let them fall into the back of my mouth; and just as I felt them pass down my throat, I saw a white flash of light. Oh, God, I thought, that was quick. But when I lowered my head again I saw Bonnie holding her camera in her hands, looking at it quizzically as the motor advanced the film.

By the time I was done with my makeup, I could feel the wedding coming on like a high, an airy burning in the hollow of my stomach, and a high coming on from the pills. The future, which until then had been a single uniform field, began to collapse into a variety of irregular shapes, like the paths through a concrete garden. My hair was sitting strangely on my head, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Bonnie took my chin in her hand and stared into my eyes. I knew exactly what she was thinking. Beautiful, she said. Green is your color.

The ceremony was in a Catholic church in a part of town that I’d never visited before; on the ride over there Bonnie sang Froggy Went A-Courtin’, all the way through. The sun was curled up in a ball in the heavens outside the window; I could see one or two planets, hovering and ducking into the clouds. Saturn, broad daylight. On the street, people were trying very hard not to stare at us. You never checked to see what those things were?

It’ll get better as it settles, said Bonnie. You know, Adam is such a nice man, I’m so happy for him. He used to come in the bar just to sit nice, and drink some, and talk. In the distance I could see hills, they were the earth’s own joke. Do this, she said, taking her hands off the wheel for a moment and holding them in an attitude of prayer. I did that. We hope he stays married forever.

In the church everyone was smiling, especially the preacher, who grinned so widely and constantly that I thought his head was going to come right off and float upward toward the sky beyond the steeple. At the front, just before the pulpit, there were two stands about waist-high: on each of them there was a large, shallow pot, and in each pot there was an arrangement of flowers. Between them stood the groom, tall, handsome, strong. The preacher was at a podium a few feet back, and behind him there was an organist. Several young saints were leaning modestly against the rear wall. They were all waiting for the bride, and the bride was waiting for the music. Her name was Marie.

Bonnie and I slid into a pew near the back and sat down; she smiled at someone she recognized, and then leaned back and sighed nervously. I picked up a hymnal from the seat beside me, but I didn’t open it; I just held it in my hands, caressing the dimpled cover and weaving the thin purple ribbon in and out of my fingers.

Roy and I were married in a dingy beige room at the city courthouse on a Wednesday afternoon, just behind a Cuban woman and her silent fiancé, and just ahead of two city sanitation workers who had their entire families along as witnesses. And did I believe that the flowers of paradise had descended upon us? I wasn’t looking at him when he said, I do. Everything seemed just right to me, and yet not quite right, somehow. What did I know? Afterward I exhaled hugely, and spent a very innocent night with my husband, whose skin under the dusky banner of our wedlock was somehow smoother and more polished, and whose shallow respiring, as he slept, was as steady and ceremonial as a command at sea. It had been two, three, four years since I’d lain down next to him and heard him breathe, but I remembered, and I remembered how much I’d loved the sound.

The organist leaned forward and a few syrupy chords came down over the congregation; we all turned around in our seats to watch with open, expectant faces. The bride appeared at the door, a dark-skinned woman wearing a long lacy white dress and a white veil, arm in arm with her father. When I glanced back toward the altar I saw three or four other men ranged behind the groom, presenting him as one of their own. The preacher was one of them, too, but the bride was different, she was all alone, a precious and powerful little vial of perfume. When she reached the front she stopped; the music stopped and there was a hush in the room. The preacher said a few lines in a loud, hollow voice about the sacredness of the marriage bond; I didn’t think he really meant what the words said, but I knew there was something he meant very deeply by saying them. The bride and groom answered by promising that they would never give up what they had right there. Then she kissed him, and the kiss was long. I thought she was going to vanish, but when they were finished she was still standing by his side. It was a miracle, right there in the church, and I wasn’t the only one who noticed it; everyone was talking about how wonderful it had been, that she had been so suddenly transformed without coming apart.

Afterward there were smiling faces bobbing in the vestibule of the church, holy expressions on the angels above the door, a few flashes of a photographer’s bulb on the front steps, some birds in the trees on the lawn. Bonnie checked her purse for the directions to the hall where the reception was to be held, and couldn’t find them. I know where they are, she said. They’re on my dresser at home. Hang on. She went over to a tall, dark man and spoke to him for a moment, and when she came back she was leading him with her hand around his wrist. This is Charlie, she said. He has the directions, so we’re going to give him a ride. This is my friend Caroline.

Charlie had a smile like a handful of candy, and a low, slightly hoarse voice. He sat in the back and hung his head over the backrest that separated us. I wanted to touch his hair, his straight black hair, just to see what it felt like. I’ve never been down here before, he said. Adam moved down here, to Texas. It’s just like the movies, isn’t it? I came down from New York—he said the city’s name without blushing.—Oh, I think you have to take a right up at the intersection here, so you better get over. Do you want to just take this? He handed up the sheet of paper and as he leaned in I caught the smell of him for a moment, the heat of his clothes, skin, mouth: it went right down the front of my dress like the memory of a man’s hand, and I flushed, shifted slightly, and cracked the window.

Bonnie pursed her lips and turned half around. Can you get down there, or move over, so I can see out the back?

Of course. I’m sorry, he said, and the smell went with him.

What are you doing out there? she asked, and then turned to me and gave me a smile.

I’m just working for the government.

A spy? said Bonnie hopefully.

In the mayor’s office.

At that my throat closed, and I looked at my legs so that I’d have something to see that wasn’t going to show my face back. Bonnie drove innocently through a stop sign. Hm, she said. So what’s the mayor’s office like?

It’s all right, Charlie said. Great, actually, it’s disgusting. I love it, it’s great.

I turned around in my seat to look at him, and he smiled at me, but his eyes were dark. I had no idea why: he was a big man and I wasn’t prepared for him to start getting complicated, too. As for me, I felt doomed: my skin had become a composition of hot and cold layers, which were shifting against each other and making me red. Bonnie said, VFW, right? This must be it.

The room was large and high-ceilinged, and the floor was swept wood scarred with a thousand heel marks. We were late and the place was already full of milling guests. High blood, each right hand holding a glass of ruby wine, a wedding.—Of course, Charlie was saying to Bonnie, and then the bridge collapsed from the weight of all those people. Don’t drink anything, she said to me, and she squeezed my arm to mark the thought. Not with what I gave you. I didn’t want to embarrass myself, so I sat for a while in my green dress.

A little later I saw Bonnie in a circle on the other side of the room, looking up into the faces around her, her small smile a star to wish on. Inside its vaporous halo I could vaguely see Roy, the divorced man, sitting at a desk in a government office down on Park Row, his narrow shoulders bent as he leaned over a stack of papers in front of him. He wasn’t thinking about me.

Are you all right over here? Charlie asked. He was sitting back in the chair next to me, with the side of his knee very gently pressed against mine. If he was flirting with me, I was impressed; if he wasn’t, I wasn’t going to show a thing.

Yes, fine, I said. Then, and very deliberately, I set my face into a casual mask and tested the effect. What made you move to New York? I asked. It seemed to work well, and I was so pleased with myself that I smiled and missed his answer. I pressed on. I knew a man who worked in the mayor’s office, I said. His name was Roy Harrison.

Charlie looked surprised, and at first I was afraid that I’d made some mistake—had I already told him?—and my hand trembled as I reached for a glass of wine. I only met him once or twice, but I heard a lot about him, he said, I don’t know how much of it is true. Anyway, I haven’t seen him in a while; I think they let him go.

Oh, he was one of my cousins, I said, realizing just a moment too late that he hadn’t asked. I caught myself and smiled. What was he fired for?

I don’t know. He studied my face as if he thought he were going to take me with his gaze.

What had he done? I asked. I knew there had to be another way ’round.

He shrugged and looked up. It could have been anything, he said to Bonnie, who was standing in front of us.

Are you going to come sit down? said Bonnie. It’s time to eat. You two sitting over here all by yourselves, anyway, everyone’s talking about it. Come on, it’s time.

Around the room the guests were settling. Bonnie took me by the arm, led me over to a table and sat me down; on the white tablecloth in front of me there was a white card with my name written on it. I wanted very badly to remember what was bothering me, but I kept losing track of it: there was one loud man on my left and one dull woman on my right, and I ate cellophane food and drank two glasses of wine before Bonnie noticed my sipping and kicked me under the table, and then dipped her index finger in a glass of water and waggled it at me. There was a series of toasts, cheering and laughter. Charlie had pulled up a chair just behind me and to my right, and he was reaching over my shoulder to fill a flute with champagne. Together we watched the bride and groom dance the first dance. Have you ever been married? he asked.

I lied. No, I said. Never. Never. Bonnie was out on the floor and he had his hand on my arm, but I shook him off; I didn’t want to have to maintain such a complicated balance, I felt full of food and I didn’t like the song, which had changed to another song that I didn’t like.

I need to go, I said. We were in a cab, Charlie and I. We were in a diner, sitting and drinking coffee. He had taken off his tie and the top button of his shirt was undone. Between us there was an old-fashioned tin bowl of sugar on the table; he opened the lid, raised up a small spoonful of the stuff, and slowly let its contents fall back. I don’t know, he was saying; all of a sudden he’d become very sincere. It was an accident. She forgot her earrings by the side of my bed, and my girlfriend found them when she came home that evening. Boom. That was that.

I laughed. Oh you poor naïve man. Forgot? Like it was an accident? No woman ever does anything by accident, I told him. Unless she’s crazy. Never, never does anything by accident, don’t you know that yet? Didn’t anyone teach you? A girl is a deliberate thing. Some time back, I couldn’t remember when, I had decided that I liked him, and what he wanted from me. From my purse I drew my lipstick; I was going to be casual and reapply it at the table, but when I opened the thing I discovered that the tip was mashed, so I capped it again, excused myself, and took it to the bathroom. Harlot was the name of the color; I blew a kiss at the distant mirror. As I was sitting down at the table again, I saw a flash of green in the window, which I assumed was money, but a minute or so later turned out to be me.

Now, your man Roy was with a woman for a while, said Charlie. And she was crazy.

When was this? I asked quickly.

Maybe about two years ago.

I was in Dallas.

He looked at me curiously. I was in D.C., he replied. He didn’t know anything about me; he didn’t know I stole stories about my ex-husband. He looked around for the waitress.

Finish what you were saying, I insisted.

That’s all there is. I think she wrecked the place they were living in. There was something else, but I can’t remember what it was … He glanced sideways as he tried to think of it; the entire recollection had suddenly become a problem, and it interested him deeply. As for me, I assumed that the answer was going to change the night into winter. A long moment passed while he tried to clear his mind for the missing memory to come home; I was right in there with him.—Anyway, he said abruptly, I can’t remember. We were still in the diner, a beautiful bright red tow truck went by outside. After she left he got strange, he continued. There was a rumor he was drinking a lot, but I don’t know if it was true.

So what happened to him?

He shrugged. I don’t remember. He wasn’t in my department, this is just what I heard, he said. He seemed like a nice enough guy to me. Don’t look so sad.

Don’t tell me what to do, I said shortly, and luckily for him he laughed. Who was she?

Who was who?

The woman.

I don’t know. Someone. Ask someone. I never talked to him about it. Actually, I never really talked to him at all. He was getting bored by the subject; it was life, breath and blood to me. We’re done, he said. We’re going now.

On the street the warm wind was blowing, I had forgotten everything again, and I was in the mood to break faith. I wanted to make the night as complicated as I could. There were no stars, but streetlights: we were south of everyone else. My mouth was very dry. If I could only taste something, I thought, I would feel so, so much better. Later, Charlie held me with his hands grasping me by my hips, his long fingers almost meeting at the base of my spine. He kissed me violently; I kissed him like a butterfly banging against a window, and pressed my hips against his. He was solid all the way through; it was one of those perfect proportions of weight and mass that one wants to keep nearby, like a book, or a good dog. His tie and collar were undone, and the skin at his throat was stippled with tiny red shaving bumps. I left a little kiss there: Tell me another story. He smelled so wonderful, his warm skin, some soap and talcum powder, lust, liquor, and bed. Maybe maybe. Then we were in a taxi, legs entwined as we watched Sugartown turn by outside.

I stood before him as he sat on the edge of the bed in his bland hotel room, so that I wanted to jump up a ways and come down in his arms. I took his feverish head against my stomach and put my mouth on the bitter-tasting crown of his hair; and as I held him he reached up my back for the zipper on my dress and slowly tugged it down. I do think that I was with him only because I wanted to watch him take the thing off of me; nevertheless, I was sorry to see it go. It hit the floor with a slow emerald splash, but I was the only thing that got wet.

Without his suit he had no job, he was just muscle and skin and bone; I tipped him back and put my hand on the slab of his chest, he narrowed his eyes; I took his tiny nipple in my mouth, without waiting I reached down and gently weighed his balls with my fingers, and then dragged up across his bobbing erection and through his pubic hair to his belly. I bit his chest and he drew a short breath. Kiss, on the mouth, is that better? Baby? It was a trick I made up on the spot. I was having a good time.

I was on my back on the bed, his hands were around my ankles, tugging my legs apart. He leaned slowly over me and dragged his lips down my abdomen; they passed across my skin without catching on anything, until his head sank between my thighs and settled there, face to face with my wet sex. He put his hands under my ass, I reached down and touched his head as he began to kiss me, outside and then inside; his wise mouth and my glutted lips, reflecting each other’s damp and shining purpose back and forth and back again, kissing until it was impossible to tell which was the original and which the double, while between them a tiny bright red bud grew, half mine and half his tongue; it was so young and tender that I wanted to weep; and then a fresh shoot burst from its tip and I began to tremble.

He was over me, his mouth glistening and swollen; there was no resistance—and with one exorbitant motion he slid inside me, gently swore, and began to fuck me. Some moments the sensation was so keen that I thought I was going to faint; some moments I could hardly feel a thing. I opened my eyes and saw his face above me, his own eyes tightly closed; just as he opened his, I shut mine again. A few seconds later he abruptly pulled out of me, and I wondered if I’d offended him. There was the soft sound of sex escaping from me as I lay there, borne up by nothing but the bed. I looked down the length of my body at him; he was kneeling between my legs, gazing up at me insistently.

Turn over, he said. Turn over.

If he’d said it again I would have refused, but he just watched me; so I rolled over as if it was a game called Sacrifice. I could smell myself on the sheets, the scent was a welcome thing, impolite. He took my calves in his hands and started to draw me back toward him, until I was up on my knees in the dark like a three-legged stool, my hands clasped behind my neck, my forehead pressed against the mattress. I breathed shallowly to calm a sudden flush of embarrassment that threatened to drive me off of the bed and out of the room; bold, big, I felt a breeze on the back of my thighs; for a moment I thought he was going to spank me, I wondered if he did that to every woman he managed to get naked beside him, I tensed and put my senses behind me. Instead, he gripped my upper thighs: then he took his finger and gently, delicately split me with it: I jerked forward involuntarily, but I didn’t get far: he followed with his hips, at first hesitantly and then smoothly, and all of a sudden, there he was, really, in me all the way—and he stopped. I could hear him breathing heavily, his hand pressing gently on my back, as if he was trying to decide whether to push me down. He didn’t move, so I didn’t move … I was following his lead … balanced like that, but then he left and I began to chase him, to chase myself backward, bang bang bang. I would have done it all night, but I couldn’t get away, and sooner than I expected my whole body gave up, my voice came out, and that great strong gushing thing broke all through me.

I’ll tell you it’s strange and it makes me wonder, how sometimes in that occult forest, when no one is looking, the ax loves the tree: and it’s stranger still that the tree should love the ax.

I woke up the next day in bed with a dead man; he was just lying there on his stomach, sighing deeply, his brain shut down. Bright eleven o’clock: out the window the sun was shining, and I was young and purblind from the pall of my unfamiliar past; it was the first thing I thought about, there like some perfume I’d spilled on the bedclothes the night before. So the sleeping man wasn’t my ex-husband, but he had seen him and spoken to him, and that was close enough to make me wobble on the dull point of my sad remembrance. All that time had passed and still the impression my marriage had made was deep and clear. I got up and put on my dirty dress while Charlie mumbled in his sleep. Well, he was sweet and sexy, but I never should have slept with him. And these rumors; was time, too, going to steal from me? For four years I’d had a reliable Roy fixed in my past, but the memories had become ailing leaves, and when I touched them they fell away, revealing a spray of grotesque and unfamiliar flowers. Had he grown so strangely in the intervening years? Then what was I? Another woman. He had fallen in love with another woman, I couldn’t begin to imagine why. Still, I thought I knew what she looked like: she had brown shoulder-length hair and perfect skin; she wore blue jeans, men’s shirts, and black bras; I couldn’t see her face very clearly, but she was smiling, and she had a mean smile. Charlie didn’t know what he’d done to me; he was still sleeping.

I was just about to slip out the door when he stirred and woke without taking his head from the pillow. Wait, he said sideways. I want to … And then he stopped, too exhausted to continue.

I went to the edge of the bed and stood above him, gazing down on his sprawled frame. I have to go to work, I said softly. A lie, but it would have been impossible for me to stay more than a minute longer.

He was trying to come up with something to say, but I couldn’t help him; I hadn’t been with him in his slumber. I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep again, when he spoke. Sugartown … he murmured. What time is it? My plane leaves at … Stay.

I think it’s around eleven, I said. I have to be at work by twelve. I have to go. He suddenly seemed very dangerous to me and I wanted to distance myself from him as quickly as possible.

… I had a dream about Roy Harrison, he said with a puzzled look. Because you … made me dream about it.

And there I was, cornered by my curiosity all over again. Tell me.

I don’t know, it was nothing. He rolled over onto his back and then slowly raised himself up until he was sitting against the headboard. You’re really going to go. O.K. Will you leave me your number?

I found a sheet of hotel stationery and a pen in the desk drawer and scribbled some numbers on it, not mine; then I crossed the room to kiss him, glanced at him briefly, and started to leave. Good-bye, Caroline, he said tenderly as I was opening the door.—Oh. I turned, with the door open and the hallway behind me. But I remembered, he said. About Roy …

This is your dream?

This is the real … I heard he had a kid with this woman, the one I was telling you about, and they were all set to get married. Then she walked out, just took the baby with her and disappeared. That was the last part of the story. I don’t know. That was the end.

And I stood there for a moment, shocked and nodding stupidly, while something in me sang in pain … Be gone, you devils, you’ve got me, you’ve skinned me … Thank you, I said at last, and then I quickly crossed the threshold and walked away down the silent hall.

It was Sunday morning and I felt dizzy, a column of thick, turning smoke, turning through the lobby of a hotel in which I wasn’t registered. Outside the revolving door the new sun was shining brightly and the walk across the front lawn was lonely, a tour through a sketchy garden suffused with air shot through with exhaust fumes from the road. By the time I reached the sidewalk any pretense of a better realm had ended. The bus stop was a half mile up the street, past the candy store, past the corporate center, past the strip mall. Already the sky was hot as a griddle. I waited on the bench with a newspaper I’d bought on the corner, tasted the yeast on my tongue, and suffered in the sun.

It was a fault of mine always to remember the past, and a twist in my vice to be most nostalgic and sentimental about those times when I’d been most unhappy, to want this season of misery or that month of boredom more sharply by far than any fond moment. God, how unhappy I was then, I’ll say to myself: I wish I was there now.—And that was how it was that day. My marriage had been a mistake, I knew; nothing I had ever done had made me feel so weak; but I missed it badly. In the tree above my head a pair of birds were bickering, and it was all I could do to keep from crying in public, because it seemed to me that they didn’t have anything to complain about. I hated the birds and read the paper, but the paper was just as bad.

Every article was directed at me; each was a parable that had been sent my way, and my task was to find the proper meaning and apply it to the city around me. I knew that my fate depended on discovering what was hidden within the stories, but I couldn’t make sense out of any of them; I was too tired, too simple and stupid.

The police were waiting in the bus and train terminals, but they thought Domino was still in town. He had sent a letter to the newspaper written in neat letters on a sheet of school notebook paper, and they had printed a reproduction of it:

I am a master of the Game, but I didn’t do this. Ask anyone. The bags were evidence that they stole from the House. They called themselves Officer Oregon, Officer Florida, and Officer Ohio. They told me to sell them, and then they tried to take more from me than I got. I told them I had enough, I didn’t want to do any more, and they said Nigger you are going to die. Because my father was a black man they said that. So they framed me, but they won’t ever find me. May God have mercy on you and your families.

Where was my sweet city? On the outskirts of town, a factory full of jobs had shut down; it made engine parts; the owners had disappeared. Four hundred men and women were out of work. Above the article there was a picture that showed a long, low brick building beside an empty parking lot, with a taller building rising behind it. A few men in jeans and work shirts stood outside the fence, staring at the camera with no expression at all.

And there was no nature or high thinking to console them. But what did that mean? What subtle lesson was I meant to learn? To have pity, to be angry? To quit what home I had and run? I thought it was my fault that I didn’t understand.

By the time the bus came there was nothing left to read; I took my seat and stared at the floor. The backs of my thighs were raw in a kindly sort of way, and my tongue was sore and tasted of Charlie’s mouth. The dress was a little bit rumpled and it no longer fit so closely, but it still had its shimmer. When a short bald man in a black silk shirt boarded the bus and sat in the seat next to mine, I was afraid he could smell the night before on me, so I pulled my hem down, shifted away from him, and turned my face to the window. A bright corner went by, and with it a revolving tableau: a car was stopped at an angle to the curb, and next to it I saw a police cruiser with its doors still open and its lights beating lazily against the noontime sun. There were two young black men facedown on the sidewalk with their arms stretched out on the pavement, while two policemen stood above them, one talking into his radio while the other was staring at something in his hand.

Old Station was crowded with Sunday shoppers, strolling in a sun so bright that I couldn’t see. It was a breezy day, and the pennants that hung from the buildings were flapping loudly; a woman went by with one hand clutching her jacket closed, and another woman at my side stopped suddenly, turned around, and grabbed to get a better hold on the bag she was carrying. What had happened the night before was a secret; I wasn’t going to share it with any of them, it would be a mystery to my fans and followers.

After I’d showered and changed I went out to see Bonnie at work. The place was empty and dark, and she was standing behind the bar, sipping a glass of soda water and watching a black-and-white movie on a television that was perched on the ice machine at the end of the bar. When I walked through the door, she stared at me for a moment and then put her hand up to shade her eyes. Who is that?

It’s Caroline, I said.

Oh. She smiled. It’s so dark in here that when you stand in the sun I can’t see anything. Hello, honey. You took that guy home last night, didn’t you? I saw you get into a taxi together.

I put my bag up on the bartop. We went to his hotel room, I said. I don’t remember how it happened.

How was it?

It was strange, said a woman on the television. It was strange, I said. Kind of nice. I can still smell the stuff he puts in his hair.

I thought he was beautiful, said Bonnie. Was he beautiful? Do you want something to drink?

No thanks, I said. No, all right, tequila. She brought a tall glass out, set it before me, and poured a shot from the bottle. He was definitely smart about me. He was very …

Say when, she said as she was stopping. Is that enough?

Fine. My legs are sore. And my neck, for some reason, I have this kind of lump in my throat. She laughed, I went on. The odd part was that he knew my ex-husband in New York, and he started telling me these things about him. Bonnie was gazing at me steadily, the bottle still slightly cocked in her hand; the night before was coming back like an hour of weather. I didn’t let on who he was to me.

What did he say?

He told me a lot of stories, they can’t possibly all be true. That after we got divorced, he was going to marry another woman, but she left him just before the wedding. And she ran off with their baby? She had a baby, and she ran off with it? I don’t know what I should do. I looked away, and without my even thinking, hot tears crept into my eyes.

She put the tequila back on the shelf and came back with a few lime slices on a napkin. What could you do? she said softly.

I shook my head; I stared at my own hands. She started to make herself a vodka and cranberry juice. That’s not funny, said the woman on the television. I can’t understand it, I said.

The drink Bonnie was pouring overflowed its glass, leaving a small puddle beneath. She reached along the bar for a white paper napkin and dropped it on the spill, and together we watched as a dark red stain appeared on it and swiftly spread—then slowed, and finally stopped just before it reached the edges. Maybe it isn’t true, she said as she wiped the counter off and threw the napkin away. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe he deserves it. Maybe he’s lost his mind. A man will do that, I’ve seen it.

Maybe. The hard part is …

I know, she said. But listen, why don’t you come over and have dinner tonight?

I’m working the night shift, I said. Tomorrow, we said in unison.

I was supposed to be supervising Mrs. Adcock’s eighty-fifth birthday party that evening, but when I went down to the dining room, André was already there, standing in the bright, bright yellow light that was tumbling through the windows from the last of the setting sun. He was giggling about something as the residents filed through the door; the mirth had taken his face and made a comedy mask of it. Oh, come on in, you. Come on, come on. It’s a party. Now, who all of you can guess—can guess, who can guess how old I am? That’s right, he went on, although no one had answered him. I’m thirty-one years old. You can sit there, or you can sit there. We’re going to sing this afternoon. You can sing, or you can just listen. That’s right. He looked over at me and started laughing again. Caroline, are you going to help me keep these people in line? he said. We’ve got games, guess what year it is; we got races, wheelchairs against walkers. No, you go on and get some coffee or something. I’ve got this under control.

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