JANE TELL

This puffy-eyed woman with a bluish dewlap used to order three mugs of coffee at a time every weekday morning at the Highland Park Denny’s. When servers gave her looks or told her that refills were free and unlimited, she’d answer at a volume that begged overhearing, “I have trouble waiting.” One time I was seated in the booth beside hers and I noticed a white, rectangular pill lying on its side next to one of the mugs. I was all but certain it was a bar of Xanax, a top-three favorite, but I couldn’t read the markings. The woman caught me squinting, and I could see by the way that she pinkened and slouched that she thought I was judging her. What did I care? I guess I cared a little. I said, “Is that a Xanax bar?” Then she started talking fast. She didn’t love Xanax. It allowed her to sleep well and made her less anxious, but the trade-off was fogginess and boring thoughts, and her boredom made her sad, so she’d chug down coffee till her brain started firing, but then she’d get anxious all over again and require more Xanax. “Unfixable,” she said. I nodded sympathetically and looked her in the eyes and, before I’d even gotten the French toast I’d ordered, she’d said she’d gladly trade half her sixty-count bottle for a quarter ounce of weed to anyone who’d take it.

My cost on a quarter was just thirty dollars, and Xanax bars, at that time, went for six apiece, minimum. It was nonetheless dim to consider the offer—I didn’t know her—but middle-aged women seemed harmless to me, and I’d been selling marijuana since my freshman year of high school without any trouble.

We settled our bills and went to her minivan. The bull’s-eye on the SuperTarget sign across the strip mall flickered, and the woman, eyes averted, digging around in her purse for her keys, asked me, “Can I feel your muscle?”

She had to be fifty-five, sixty years old. I bent my arm and felt stupid about it. Her fingers, which she’d managed to get into my jacket and under the sleeve of my T-shirt, were icy. “You’re strong,” she said. “Do you want to smoke with me?”

“No,” I told her.

Whenever I smoked marijuana, I’d stare, and whatever I’d stare at would seem important. All images became imagery, sophomoric imagery, the symbolic meaning of the non-symbolic things on which my eyes fixed wholly independent of their actual functions. Cigars not just cocks, but primal cocks—the primal cocks of the patriarchs. The last time I’d smoked pot was a year before; a girlfriend had convinced me I could like it again, like I’d used to in high school. When I woke at my desk a few hours later, the new scrolling message on my monitor read IMAGISTIC METAPHORS HEMORRHAGE ANALOGIES WITHIN THE CLUTCHES OF MY HEAVY HANDS. Before I could delete it, the girlfriend saw it, took hold of my shoulders, and told me, “That’s trippy plus also creative,” then detailed the ways it was trippy and creative, and I counted off a week before breaking up with her. In short, marijuana made me hate everything, but I’d long since quit explaining even that to anyone. Most people, when you tell them you’re not into their vice, they either assume you’re afraid or don’t like them. If you’re selling them the vice, they know you’re not afraid. Those few who do take what you say at face value see you’re different from them, which undermines trust. And my bags were light—I made ten “eighths” of every ounce. If someone ever pulled out a scale, I’d be fucked.

Still, I could have said more to the puffy-eyed woman to nice up my “No,” and normally I would have—I’d have said I had an exam in an hour, or was heading to my parents’ house to drive them to the airport—but I didn’t feel like lying. That muscle-squeeze had siphoned off my will to accommodate. Nice wasn’t in me.

“Really?” said the woman.

“Really,” I said.

A throaty, clogged sound joggled her dewlap. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s really okay. I understand I’m disgusting. I’m old. I disgust you.” Tears cut trails through her blush and powder. She did disgust me. Her weeping was cunning. She was cueing me to tell her she was young and attractive. What she wasn’t doing, though, was backing out of the deal.

The summer I’d worked for him, cold-calling prospects, my father, an insurance man, had more than once warned me, “Brusqueness doesn’t help anyone’s sales.” About that he was right, but the distinction between not helping and hurting was, I was thinking there in the Denny’s lot, a pretty big one, at least when it came to selling drugs.

The flesh-colored tears clung to some fuzz along the woman’s jawline, then trembled, elongated, and splatted on the pavement. After three or four splats, she saw she’d failed to cue me.

“You’re cruel,” she said. “A cruel person,” she said.

I watched the wet spot widen on the pavement.

“A cruel person,” she echoed. She had had this conversation before. The big distinction between then and now, apart from my being an entirely different human being, was that the last guy had insisted he was not a cruel person. She couldn’t figure out what to say to him at the time, but as she’d driven away from him (I could see her chewing her waxy lower lip, jerking her head in tiny, neck-cramping nods), she’d come up with a retort that she’d hoped to use the next time—this time. But I’d fucked it all up for her by failing to protest against the accusation, and now she was stuck repeating herself. “A very cruel person,” she said. “You’re cruel.” By the seventh repetition—by then she was whispering—I started, despite my disgust, to feel bad for her, guilty for repelling whatever small victory she needed to save the face she’d lost the last time.

“Hey, look,” I said. “I’ll have a cigarette with you.”

“Only because you feel sorry for me.” She said it through her teeth.

“Do the cruel,” I said, “feel sorry for the crying?”

“No,” she said. “I guess they don’t.” All at once, she stopped her crying. “You’re a strange kid,” she said. “You’re clever,” she said, and, tagging my shoulder with a friendly open palm, she told me, “Have your ciggy while I roll up a j-bird.”

Her minivan’s interior smelled of scented kleenex. She pulled a sleeve of papers from a cassette slot in the console and slipped her body sideways through the space between the seats, her forehead smearing across my jaw as she ducked and contorted toward the bench in the back, where the windows were tinted. “Sorry,” she said. I stayed shotgun and pulled two “eighths” from my jacket. I emptied one baggie into the other and handed both back to her. She rolled a small joint and licked it shut, her tongue long and coffee-stained, and fired up her lighter. She said, “Should I call you when I get the refill?” I told her my number and she repeated it back to me while writing it down, then continued to write, singsonging, “For wee-eed.” Once she’d finished her joint, she tapped thirty pills from an amber bottle into the empty baggie I’d given her, and drove me to my car, ten spaces away. Just like that, I’d made a hundred and fifty dollars.

Fifteen minutes later, traffic-stopped for something, the dunce got arrested for possession. The next day, detectives came by with a search warrant (quiet suburb, bored police force). I’d been waiting for a pizza to be delivered, and I opened the door without checking the peephole. My drugs were stored in my box of comics and there was no way to flush them—I was made to sit in plain view on the couch—and there was no way the cops would fail to check the box, so I told them where to look, thinking my willing cooperation might minimize damages. I told them that, too.

“In your dreams,” one said. “This ain’t some movie. We don’t like you, and that haircut.”

“It’s a real stupid haircut,” another one said.

They trashed my beanbag, sifted the styrofoam filling for pills. Then they dumped my comics out of their dust bags, ripping the covers off both my mint-condition Lobo #1s—my first investments. At age twelve, I’d bought two so I could eventually sell one and still have my cake. The purchase occasioned a fight between me and my father. He didn’t like the idea that I saw comics as an investment in anything other than my “imagination.” From then on, I had to use my allowance to buy them, and my collecting behavior ended pretty quickly, and all for the better—my father’d been right. Lobo #1 was a huge bestseller. There were thousands of them in plastic dust bags with cardboard backings, in cardboard boxes in closets. The last I’d checked, they were worth less than half the price on their covers.

The cops found the Xanax and three “eighth” bags—luckily all I had at the time. The lawyer my father hired—old friend, deep discount—had me check into a six-week outpatient rehab program at a clinic in Highwood. They all knew I was faking, except the psychiatrist, Dr. Manx. I’d had Manx as a professor during the previous semester—Behaviorist Methodologies: An Introduction—and he liked me. He told me it was clear to him that I was angry, and that I suffered from chronic stress. In court eight weeks later, I pled guilty to misdemeanor possession, the lawyer argued I was a benzo and marijuana addict, and Manx said I used drugs in order to manage my anger and my stress.

I was a “self-medicator,” Manx told the judge, but I was twenty years old, my whole life ahead of me, and now I was clean.

I was fined $2,500 and given three years probation and a one-year prison sentence suspended on the condition I underwent weekly urinalyses and attended a twice-weekly anger-management group at the locale of my choice. I picked Highland Park Hospital. It was nearby and I could piss in their cup on my way out. Plus, the brochures said it was behavior-focused, and I liked B. F. Skinner. I’d been reading him steadily ever since the Manx class.

At the start of the first meeting, Jane Tell sat across the group circle from me. She kept her eyes on her knees, her hands in her lap, and her parted red hair fell thick past her shoulders. She scratched at her palms nonstop. Anyone else so slumped and ticky would have read timid, but Tell seemed spring-loaded, extra-alive. It was impossible not to watch her.

The therapist, in his homemade sweater, spoke the stilted-mushy English of a Martian diplomat. He told us the meetings were broken in two. The first hour was experiential, meaning topics weren’t scheduled and we would talk to one another about whatever was on our minds. The second hour was instructional. “Not that I am some kind of pedagogical heavy,” he said, “but if you will be patient with me, I think I can teach you one or two things.”

Aside from Tell and me, there were two women and three men, squint-eyed office workers in their mid-to-late thirties. They had imitation-leather day-planners and adenoidal difficulties. Their sense of humor was desperate, their jokes delivered in the voices they suppressed during staff meetings. They fell apart for the spoken italic. Indignant up-talking left them in stitches: the just… okay? punchline; the biting sarcasm of the yeah, right!? The last one of them to self-introduce to the group closed with the phrase, “And kicking the fucking copy machine when no one’s fucking looking, I’ll tell you what,” and they all laughed wildly at the enunciation of the second curse’s first syllable, the fluorescent overheads splotching oily patches on their over-pink faces, high shine in the spit-creeks of their off-white teeth.

Tell said she was nineteen and had dropped out of art school. She lived in Deerfield with her mother and stepfather. She called her mother “Peggy” and her stepdad “the Otter.” She fought with them viciously, and they had threatened to kick her out if she didn’t get treatment.

I told them I was a junior in college and I’d go to prison if I didn’t show up. A few of the office workers expressed discomfort. The therapist praised them for their openness and referred to me as a “mandated client.”

“Mandated clients,” he said, “tend to be resistant to the group process. Helping them to feel a part of the group is one of the activities that can make the group stronger and more helpful to all its members. We welcome you, Ben.”

During the break, Tell approached me at the refreshments table. She bugged her eyes out and nodded me toward her.

“I’m Ben,” I said.

She said, “I know your name. Don’t be such a Steve.”

“What’s a Steve?” I said.

“No,” Tell said. “Ask something braver.”

“You want to hang out?”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“Elsewhere,” I said. “In the future. On a ‘date.’”

“Don’t do it with air-quotes.”

“On a date,” I said.

“I’ve never been on a date.”

“Few have,” I said. “Let alone with me.”

“Where would we go?”

“Denny’s,” I said. “Or the railroad tracks. Maybe even Denny’s and then the railroad tracks.”

“That’s some fancy date.”

“You…”

“What?”

“I’m a…”

“What?”

“I’m trying to come up with something to make you laugh, but we keep saying ‘date,’ and I’m a mandated client, and I’m spending all this energy resisting the reflex to shoot for a pun.”

“‘Let me take you on a really manly date,’ or something.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You deserve a lot better.”

“That’s nice,” Tell said. “It’s a nice thing to say. Probably you can just skip all the funny now and offer me a smoke.”

The designated area, on the parking-lot sidewalk, was a bus-stop shelter with columnar ashtrays. I sat on the bench and handed up a Marlboro—Tell remained standing. She bent toward my lighter, hair tucked behind her ears, cigarette lipped. She touched her fingers to my knuckles to guide the fire. Free from the dinge of those overhead fluorescents, I could see she was perfect, except for a round, red scrape on her cheek. Before I had a chance to say anything, she was standing up straight again, offering her hand. I took it, held on. She said, “It was nice to meet you, Ben.”

I said, “It was nice to meet you, too, Tell.”

She started off toward the parking-lot exit and then she returned to me. “We should try that again,” she said, “with eye contact.” She grasped my hand, said my name a second time, and looked at my eyes. Then she walked away, but not back inside.

Back inside, all the chairs were rearranged to face the wall. In front of the wall was a sketch-pad mounted on a tripod easel. In front of the pad stood the therapist. He said, “It’s time to begin the instructional portion of group. I think we’re still waiting for someone?”

They’d all seen us walk out together and now they were staring at me like I’d done something to her.

“Tell got sick,” I said. “She said she’d be back on Thursday and that she looked forward to it and hoped that none of you would feel insulted by her leaving early.”

“Actually,” one of the men toward the other end of the chair-line said, “I do feel a little insulted. In fact, very insulted.”

“That’s pretty fucken ridiculous,” I said.

The therapist clapped his hands once and said, “This is a perfect opportunity to learn some anger-management skills.” He removed a pink marker from its slot along the bottom of the easel and uncapped it. He wrote:

      JAKE: Actually, I do feel a little bit insulted. In fact, very insulted.

      BEN: That’s pretty effing ridiculous!

“We’ll come back to this exchange later,” said the therapist. “For now, while it’s still fresh in our minds, can we agree the transcription is accurate?”

I said, “I didn’t say it with an exclamation point.”

“Regardless of how you said it,” said the therapist, “that’s how it sounded. The third word you used signifies aggression. It’s important to know that—”

“Signify sniveling for Jake, then,” I said. “I think we can all agree Jake sniveled.”

A group shrug.

“That’s a very subjective analysis, Ben,” said the therapist, “and we’ll explore it later.”

I said, “It’s a context-based analysis. And that’s the only kind Skinner allows for. I just read about it in Verbal Behavior. Isn’t this a behavioral therapy group?”

“It’s a cognitive-behavioral therapy group, stress on the cognitive, and you shouldn’t be reading Skinner,” said the therapist. “Skinner’s wrong-minded.”

“Skinner’s a monster,” said one of the women. “He tried to make factories where you brought him your children and he turned your children into various types of professionals.”

“Skinner’s an ingrate,” the man next to me said. “The guy just has no respect for the subconscious. He thinks we don’t have minds. And we do have minds and our minds are like computers.”

“But really good computers,” the woman said.

“The best computers ever,” the therapist said.

“The problem,” Jake said, “is Skinner thinks thinking doesn’t matter. And that’s ugly, man. That’s truly ugly. Maybe it’s Skinner who makes you feel so angry all the time, Ben. Because, like, what happens to free will if thinking doesn’t matter? Because what’s will, you know? It’s free thinking. And, frankly, I freely think Skinner’s worldview is an insult to my humanity. For one thing, he should’ve quit making those rats salivate to buzzers, because it was cruel to do it to those animals. And he definitely should have kept his dumb ideas to himself. He’s harmful, actually.”

“You’re a genius,” I said.

The therapist wrote it down like this:

      JAKE: B. F. Skinner’s philosophy of human psychology is not only disempowering, but dehumanizing.

      BEN: You’re a (real effing) genius!

After the meeting, I found Tell waiting in the bus-stop shelter. She took my hand and walked us to her truck in the lot by the cancer ward.

“You missed the instructional portion of group,” I said.

She kissed me—pressed me against the front of her pickup and kissed my neck fast, once, with licked lips. Then she tugged on my belt loops and kicked at my insteps. I was thinking: It is not as dark outside as you expected, summer is coming. I was thinking: This is the first time you’ve ever been kissed first.

I had my hands in her hair, then on her arms, her hips. She squeezed the back of my neck and bit my mouth. Everything about us felt clean and susceptible. Her skin was warm—even hot—beneath my hands, but her face cooled mine like a hotel pillowcase.

Soon she pulled my stupid hair and I opened my eyes. “We’re scratching the hood,” she said. “You want to see inside? I rebuilt the engine with my uncle.”

She popped the hood and showed me some things. I don’t know what she showed me.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said. “In yours. I want to drive it.”

Tell grabbed a Johnny Cash tape from the deck in her truck and we took my car to Denny’s. She put the tape in and drove fast. The first song was “Long Black Veil.” So was the second. She asked, “Why’d you decide to buy an auto-tranny?”

I didn’t know what that meant. Then I knew, but it took a second: tranny was transmission. My car’s was automatic. She wanted to know if I could drive stick. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t. “You prefer a standard transmission?” I said, with that heavy stress on the standard transmission to suggest that what had stalled my response was pleasant surprise, not incomprehension, much less calculation.

Tell said, “See, now, that’s why I like you. When you act like a Steve, it’s cause you’re being sweet and you don’t even know it—you think you’re working something. I’m gonna cut all your nappy hair off and make you famous. Do you have a little Jewish sister who looks just like you?”

“Leah,” I said.

“I bet she’s a knockout.”

“I don’t remember ‘Long Black Veil’ being this long,” I said.

“It’s my favorite.”

Tell parked us at the far end of the lot, facing the Ford dealership. Before we got out of the car, she started kissing me again. Then we reclined our seats and the tape switched sides and “Long Black Veil” started up again and ended and started up again. We listened to it one more time, then walked to the restaurant.

A few steps outside the entrance, Tell stopped. She said, “I know this’ll sound weird, but I want you to do something for me.”

“Name it.”

She said, “I want you to pick me up by the ankles and swing me face-first into the side of that dumpster.”

“Ha! Fuck that,” I said, laughing.

“Don’t curse at me,” she said. “If you think I’m too heavy, I’ll stay on my feet and you can swing me by a wrist.” At her waist she balled her hands like they were cuffed. “Pick a wrist.”

“Quit it,” I said.

She said, “I’m serious. I want you to.”

I continued to refuse and she continued to ask me. I was crouching beside her, trying to light a pair of cigarettes—it had gotten windy and my lighter was dying—when a semi-truck pulled into the lot. A tall, pale man stepped out of the cab and walked in our direction. He offered me a friendly half-nod in greeting and met Tell’s face—she was winking at him—with a closed fist on the chin. Moaning, she fell back into the wall. I dropped the lighter and went forward to attack. I don’t know how to fight. I thought I’d punch the middle of the back of his neck. To make that happen, though, I’d have had to jump higher. I missed his neck entirely, barely grazed his shoulder. He spun around and whammed me a fast one to the jaw. The unlit cigarettes popped from my lips, and I sat where I’d stood, like any clown out of Hemingway.

Pointing his finger too close to my eyes, he said, “Sometimes they like it.”

“Thank you,” Tell told him. “Get away from us now.”

He went inside the restaurant. My jaw only tingled. It hadn’t started hurting yet. I lay on my back and listened to the highway, the Doppler-shifting buzzings of passing cars. I didn’t have a thought. I could have fallen asleep. “Ben,” Tell said, and I opened my eyes. Her face was upside down over my own. Blood from her chin dripped into my hair.

“You’re bleeding,” I said. “He was wearing a ring.”

“We’re fine,” she said. “Just punched. Get up.”

She pressed her lips to my swelling jaw and led me through diesel fumes across two parking lots. It did occur to me that Tell’s offhandedness was worthy of alarm, likely indicative of something bad, something wrong, but I didn’t feel even slightly alarmed. Her nonchalance detached me from my own observations, turned me academic. It felt almost as if I were reading about her, as if the person pulling on my hand were only describing Jane Tell to me.

I was slow from getting hit and, just as I was summing words to form a question that would address the matter—one no more complicated than “What just happened?”—Tell edged us between the wall of the SuperTarget and the dollar-ride carousel next to the door where we fucked sitting up with our clothes on. That was the only time I got hit and it was the only time that fucking Tell, or fucking anyone, ever felt entirely right. What would normally have struck me as haunting seemed merely striking. Like when you first learn your body is made of cells, or your emotions chemicals. The first time you cheer for a gangster in a movie. Before you realize what you’re accepting.

Afterward, I had the sense the sex implicated me in something. I assumed rightly that it was love and asked her to marry me.

I drove Tell to the hospital to get her truck. On the way, I kept thinking I saw my thermostat needle creeping to the right, but then we’d get to a stop, and I’d look a little closer and see it was smack in the middle—it was fine. Tell’s truck, on the other hand, refused to start, so I drove us to her mother’s.

My jaw was swollen by the time we arrived. Tell’s mother, giving it a squint and a head-tilt, said, “What a pleasure to meet you, Ben, now please leave my home,” and Tell ripped the fresh scab off the gash on her chin and bled on the rug.

She said, “I’m moving in with him, and then we’re getting married.”

“Like hell you are,” her mom said.

The stepdad, watching Leno and eating baby carrots from a cereal bowl, spoke the word guffaw and slapped his knee. “Guffaw,” he said. “Guffaw, guffaw.”

Tell handed me her scab. “Smoke a cigarette with my mother while I pack up my stuff.”

I held out my pack and her mom took two. She tossed one to the stepdad.

Tipping his head back, he leaned forward and caught it, filter-first, in his mouth. Then he clapped.

“She’s done this before,” Tell’s mother said. I lit her cigarette. “You’re just the newest nice guy.”

“Amen,” said the stepdad. “Hey. How about a light, Peggy?”

“How about give me half a second, Steve.”

“Your name’s Steve?” I said.

“Stephen, actually. With a p h,” he said. “Steve means something else.”

I took a look around the living room, a normal-looking living room: leather couch, reclining chair, steel-and-glass coffee table. A knickknack tray on an oldish-looking bureau. Framed photos in a line on a squat redwood bench. I found a clay ashtray on a speaker behind me, next to the television. Everything looked normal. I don’t know what I was expecting.

“Look at me,” Tell’s mom said. “See the resemblance?” I looked. She was normal-looking, too. I didn’t see much of a resemblance, though. Maybe something around the eyes.

She grabbed the meat of her gut and shook it. She tucked her head and pointed at the second chin. “This is what happens if you get her pregnant, boy-o. And you will. And then you get another one just like her, no matter how sure she is it’ll be a son. Shit. And then she leaves you because you’re not who you say you are and she goes and gets another one like him.” She thumbed the air in the stepdad’s direction. “And then that’s it. Two, three more lives wasted and another stupid kid walking around, spreading her legs for any guy who’ll listen to her sad stories and say it’s not her fault. It’s wretched. It’s wretched and it’s inevitable.”

“That sounds rehearsed,” I said.

She said, “I told you. You’re not the first one.”

Tell returned with a duffel, a telescopic easel, and an expandable plastic box containing paints and brushes. She set the easel and the box at my feet. “I should grab a pillow,” she said. “I like a lot of pillows.”

“You don’t own a pillow,” said the stepdad. “I own the pillows.”

“I’ve got pillows,” I said.

“I hope that’s everything,” said Peggy. “Because we’re changing the locks tomorrow.”

Tell said, “I still have some stuff in my room I want to get. My truck’s broken down, though.” She opened my fist and took the scab back. She held it out to her mom. “You can keep this until I can get back here for my stereo and clothes,” she said. “And then you can change the locks.”

“Why are you so disturbed?” her mom said.

“Just please, Mom?” Tell dangled the scab for a second, then reached around her mother to set it on the edge of the coffee table.

“Please!” her mom said. “We eat here.” She seized the scab between her pink fingernails and dropped it in the ashtray.

Tell drew a set of scissors from a drawer in the bureau.

“Those are mine,” said the Steve.

The truck driver was a fluke. According to Tell, the beating he’d dealt her was cosmic evidence that everything was right between us.

“I’ve never gotten Ricked in the suburbs,” she said. “Not in public, anyway.”

I was sitting on the edge of my bathtub, my feet in the basin, my face between my knees. Tell stood behind me, working the clippers in single strokes from the back of my neck to the front of my head. She wasn’t using a guard, and the metal kept warming. Blood was throbbing inside of my ears. The hair she’d used the scissors on lay in a pile in the tub beneath my eyes and I watched it get sprinkled with dead flakes of scalp and thousands of shorter hairs, hard, like wire.

I said, “Can I sit up for a minute? I’m about to pass out.”

She turned off the clippers.

There was a burning cigarette on the edge of the sink. I nodded at it and she handed it over.

I told her, “I don’t think I want that to happen again. I don’t like it. The idea of it… I think it’s bad for you.”

“It’s fine,” she said. “And you do like it. You just don’t know it yet. It takes some time.”

I said, “I don’t think you’d be into it if your mom wasn’t so… I mean, if you hadn’t, when you were a kid or something, suffered some kind of fucked-up—”

She held the little cutting machine in her fist and struck the front of her head with it.

“Hey!” I said.

She did it again. I took it away from her. “Don’t start playing with my mind,” she said. “I enjoy getting Ricked because it feels good. Don’t be jealous.”

“It’s not jealousy, Tell. It’s guilt.”

“That’s worse than jealousy.”

“It makes me fucken scared,” I said.

“It, it, it,” she said. “Fuck fuck fuck. Enough with all the curses and pronouns,” she said.

“You fucken know what I mean by fucken context,” I said.

She gave me a laugh and kissed me on the cheek. She said, “Don’t be scared.”

“What if you get killed?”

“That’s sweet,” she said. “There’s no need to worry, though. They don’t want to kill me. They just want to Rick me.”

She flipped the clippers back on and I lowered my head.

A couple days later, Tell answered my phone. “Hello?” she said. “Jane Tell,” she said. “Well, it’s nice to hear your voice, too. One second.” She handed me the receiver. “Your father,” she said.

He said, “Jane Tell, eh? This explains a lot. We’ve missed you, been worried, haven’t seen you since the trial. We were starting to think you were avoiding us. We are no longer worried about that, or you. At least I’m no longer worried, and your mom won’t be either, once I tell her we’ve spoken. We wrote down a list of things to say to you, though. We worked on it for two afternoons. Ready? Okay.

“One: don’t be ashamed about the drugs. Two: we love you. Three: you’re either our first- or second-favorite person in the world, depending on the day, because sometimes we like Leah better. Four: we’re glad you’re not in prison, glad that you’re safe, and we trust you not to put us through anything like you’ve put us through ever again. Five: things like that happen once, and it’s excusable, colon: you’re young and this is the first time. A mistake was made. You made it. But everyone makes mistakes.”

I said, “You’re giddy. What’s up?”

“What’s up? What’s up is I just sold a ten-million-dollar term-life policy to an eighty-year-old woman. Biggest single premium I’ve seen in two years. It fell into my lap, and the world seems like a lucky place today, boychic.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you, but I didn’t call to brag about that, though I might have, had we been on normal, or even semi-normal terms. There are still other things I have to say to you, things that aren’t bulleted, things your mom and I decided I wouldn’t say to you if you were sad when I called. Now that I’ve heard your voice, the ease in your phone manner, I’m guessing you’re involved with this Jane Tell, the evidence being that she answered your telephone—she has a pretty contented-sounding voice, herself, by the way—and so now I’m thinking you aren’t sad. I’m thinking you might even be in love, or falling therein. So. Are you ready to hear what you need to hear? I’m saying you’re as ready as you’ll ever be, and I’m starting.

“You fucked up,” he said. “Know that you’re someone who fucked up. But know that doesn’t make you a fuckup. The difference is a matter of repetition. We will always love you. That is out of our hands. But if you repeat your mistake, we will know you have become a fuckup, and we will not respect you, and not respecting you will be painful for us, more painful than you can possibly imagine, and our pain will be on your head all the way. One hundred percent. Okay?” he said. “Okay,” he said.

“So I started reading Verbal Behavior,” he said, “and I know this Skinner is your new guiding light, and I really do want to understand what you find so intriguing about his work, nor am I saying that I think the book was anything other than an excellent birthday gift for a father to receive from his only son, but I just can’t read it anymore. All those terms! Not that they don’t make sense. They do. So far, at least, the book makes a lot of sense. It does. But it also gives me a headache and makes me feel a little powerless, which I guess most truths about the world do, right? Maybe that’s how we get the sense that they’re true? Because they hurt? Because despite our desire to deny or ignore them, they’re compelling and we can’t look away from them or something? Listen to me yammer! What do I know? I’m just a humble salesman who loves his wife. How’s the car running?”

“Car’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about the book. I’m glad you gave it a shot.”

“Good. That’s what I wanted you to say about the book, but you probably knew that. It was a disguised mand, right? Is that what he calls it? Yes. I elicited your approval without asking for it directly. See? I know what a disguised mand is. I’m your father, after all. We share DNA and I’m smart like you. Like a genius. But listen. We love you. Don’t be afraid of us. Don’t be ashamed. Just don’t fuck up again. We’re going to give you back to your new girlfriend now. And you know the two of you are welcome in our home, which is your home, any time you want to come by. Okay? Good. Enjoy yourself, sonnyboy.” Then he hung up.

I said, “That was my dad.”

“He sounds like a nice man,” Tell said. She kissed my hand.

We did not again fuck as well as we had at SuperTarget, but there were two more Ricks in as many weeks. One was the AAA guy who towed Tell’s truck from the hospital lot to mine. He didn’t hit her. He held her by the throat and dug in his nails. I didn’t know it was happening. She leaned in through the window on the passenger side and I thought she was tipping him. Once she hopped off the running board, though, I saw her neck—the five blood-beaded crescents, a black smear of grease—and hurled a chunk of gravel at the receding rear windshield. It bounced right off. The Rick stopped and got out.

He said, “You got a problem, guy?”

“You’re an ape is my problem! Why don’t you—”

“What!”

“He doesn’t have a problem,” Tell said. “Go away now.” The guy did as he was told. Tell grabbed me through the fabric of my shorts—I was hard. She pulled me toward my car, got in, and we fucked. The backseat velour was grimed with old coffee spills and rubbed-in ashes that glommed on my skin and stank like a punk-squat. When we finished, our knees and elbows were gray.

Then Tell wanted ice cream, and we got in front to drive to the mini-mart. I turned the key and the engine turned over, and the thermostat needle was leaning, though it wasn’t. I knew that it wasn’t, but every time I looked away from it, I sensed it creeping rightward. I laughed a little. Tell said, “What?” I said it was nothing and put the car in drive, and Tell said I was weird and I laughed a little more, and she said I was crazy, and I wondered if maybe that was true, if, more specifically, I was being driven crazy by a tumor in my brain, which seemed highly unlikely, though certainly a lot more likely than usual—why else would I continue to sense the needle leaning? And how could I even “sense” it was leaning if my eyes weren’t on it? I couldn’t, yet I did. I looked through the windshield and “sensed” the needle leaning, then looked at the needle and saw it wasn’t leaning, and then I thought that maybe I was having a premonition; maybe I kept “sensing” the needle leaning because some hidden part of my consciousness, some part that having sex with Tell had unlocked, “sensed” that the car one day—maybe one day soon, even that very evening—that the car would overheat and… what? Blow up? Overheat and blow up.

Right about then’s when I noticed I was panicking, that I had been panicking, that my heart was in my ears and my stomach my neck. I remembered I didn’t believe in premonitions, and I didn’t believe any “hidden parts of consciousness” could be “unlocked” (I was a good Skinnerian). And it occurred to me that my “sense” the needle had leaned hadn’t caused my panic. Neither had my fears of having a tumor or my death premonition. Those things were only symptoms of my panic. The panic preceded them.

The needle wasn’t leaning, my brain wasn’t tumored, the car was not about to explode—it just seemed they were because I was panicking.

These thoughts, which took only seconds to think, didn’t make me feel better, though. They seemed to actually make me feel worse. My breath was too audible. The seat-smell too sharp. The grime on my knees and elbows too… grimy. I was nauseated, pounding-hearted. I put the car in park.

“What’s up?” Tell said.

“I’m tired,” I said.

“Let me drive,” she said.

We climbed over each other.

Riding shotgun was better. My pulse slowed a little, and though my chest was still swimmy, I knew it wouldn’t get worse—I knew that I wouldn’t actually be sick.

The members of the anger-management group were angry at Tell, who had not returned after the first meeting. They said they felt rejected. They said they felt deeply scarred by the rejected feeling they felt and powerless to do anything about their feelings of rejection since she wasn’t there to be confronted. I kept as quiet as I could for three straight meetings and, at the fourth, they began talking about how they felt rejected by me and my silence.

The therapist smelled progress. He encouraged them to express. They expressed. They didn’t like that I smoked alone during the break. They didn’t like that I didn’t address them by their names when we greeted one another at the start of group. They felt like they didn’t know me, like they were spilling their angry secrets to an uncaring stranger. Sally, the woman who’d called Skinner a monster at the first meeting, complained that I hadn’t seemed happy when she complimented me on my haircut at the second meeting. She said, “It made me feel like I shouldn’t have said anything at all. Like in being nice, and showing you that I noticed something about you, I had somehow crossed a line.”

“Notice,” said the therapist, “that you just said, ‘It made me feel like I shouldn’t have said anything at all.’ Does anyone see anything confusing about that statement?”

Jake said, “It’s not a feeling. It’s a thought. You can’t feel like you shouldn’t have said something. You can think you shouldn’t have said something, though, and then feel sad or mad or glad, or any of the other ones there.” He pointed at a new poster depicting forty cartoon faces, each a circle, each expressing a distinct emotion, with a label beneath it, like

“Exactly,” the therapist said. “And I want to expand on that: it is truly positive to unpack the sorts of thoughts and feelings that Sally just unpacked. If we don’t unpack the thoughts, we soon forget we have them, and all we notice are the feelings, and the feelings make our negative attitudes stronger, only we can’t challenge them and make ourselves better people, because we can’t point at them and say, ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I shouldn’t have felt sad.’ Because we can’t argue rationally with feelings. Because feelings aren’t subject to rationality. Feelings come after thoughts, which are subject to rationality. And the good news, of course, is that we can argue rationally with our thoughts. We can say to ourselves: ‘Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I didn’t cross a line. Maybe Ben was having a bad day when I told him that I liked his haircut. Maybe it even made his day better that I told him I liked his haircut, but he was unable to express. I should explore this further. I will explore this further. There are so many possibilities.’ And by doing that, we can argue ourselves out of feeling sad. We can make our negative attitudes that much weaker! And that’s good news.” He nodded his head.

Everybody agreed it was good news. They nodded their heads.

The other Rick I met was a sales clerk at Pep Boys, where we’d gone to buy whatever part it was Tell thought she needed to replace to get her truck running. He wore his glasses on a chain around his neck. I was in the seat-cover aisle when I saw her follow him to the garage at the other end of the store. I ran after them and, as I came through the swinging doors, I saw him palm-strike her chest. Tell crumpled into the wall behind her and slid to the floor. The guy turned and saw me. He was shrugging.

I swung on him so hard. When I missed, I fell.

He said, “It’s alright, buddy. Just take it easy.”

He walked back into the shop proper, rubbing the lenses of his glasses with a handkerchief. Tell brought me to the employee bathroom and lifted her skirt in the grease-smudged sink.

“I hate this,” I said in her ear.

She said, “It doesn’t feel like you hate it.”

Still, after that, Tell quit getting Ricked in front of me.

The school year ended and I got a job washing windows and cleaning gutters on the North Shore with a small crew run by the son of a friend of my father’s. They were good guys. They didn’t try to make me talk a lot. The job paid twenty-five an hour and it tired me out. If it wasn’t raining, they’d pick me up at six in the morning in an old Jetta with a ladder bungeed to the roof and drop me back at home around four. I started eating three full meals a day and I came to appreciate sleep. Tell mourned the scrapes and then the calluses on my hands.

In the week or so after the Pep Boys Ricking, I’d panicked in my car another three or four times. I didn’t “sense” leaning needles, think I had a tumor, or imagine I’d explode, though. Rather, I’d fear I’d have a panic attack, and my fear of an attack would itself trigger one. I determined pretty quickly that I had become motorphobic, and I knew that the origins of my motorphobia—the automotive-related occupations of the Ricks I’d met and the close proximity of cars to the Rickings I’d witnessed—were nothing more than what Skinner would call “accidental contingencies” of my behavioral shaping. I knew, without a doubt, that cars were not connected in any relevant, causative way to Tell’s getting Ricked or my post-Ricking sex with her, and I told myself so whenever I got near a car, but it didn’t really help. The panic’s irrationality was a fact the way that death is a fact: the more able I was to accept it, the more convinced I became that it wouldn’t go away, and, soon enough, as any behaviorist could have predicted, the act of noting the irrationality became, itself, a trigger of the panic.

One morning I would walk toward my boss’s Jetta, and five steps away I’d start thinking, “There’s nothing to fear, go make your money,” and the next morning I’d have to start from six steps away, and seven the morning after that. Overall, though, the Jetta was manageable; the panic was low-grade. Riding in the back of it wasn’t any worse than sitting shotgun in my car had been on the night we’d gone for ice cream. Once we started rolling, I’d get a little dizzy and have to crack the window and think about fucking to distract myself from the sickness in my chest, but I wouldn’t throw up or pass out or anything.

My own car, however, was much, much worse, and the panic it incited was anything but low-grade, especially when I rode with Tell—the attacks were at least as intense as the first one, and their increasing frequency lowered my tolerance. I panicked in the backseat, thinking about sitting shotgun where the last time I’d panicked while thinking about driving, and I fled the car in under a minute. Then I panicked outside the open car-door, thinking about sitting in the backseat where the last time I’d panicked while thinking about sitting shotgun, and I fled the car in under thirty seconds.

Within two weeks of the Ricking at Pep Boys, I’d quit the thing entirely.

Tell couldn’t fix her truck herself, and even though I was making more money than I had when I was selling pot—more than enough to buy scores of new books I was too tired to read and a cell phone when there was no one I wanted to call—I didn’t offer her any money to pay for a mechanic. I wanted to help her out, but the thought of a mechanic got my heart banging and I’d hyperventilate.

She took a minimum-wage job at an art-supply store a couple miles from the apartment. She’d drive my car there on mornings she was running late. Otherwise she’d walk to work and I’d walk to meet her halfway at the tracks or the park at half past seven in the evening.

Sometimes I’d notice she had a new bruise or cut. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was new or reopened. The first few times, she’d say who’d done it to her: a bank teller, a sculptor, a plumber, a guy who contracted faux-finishing crews out to restaurants and hotels. I’d ask her to stop telling me about it. Then one evening by the tracks she showed up with a new gash on her shoulder she didn’t speak of and I asked her who did it.

“I thought you didn’t want to know,” she said.

I said, “I want to know it’s not happening.”

“You want me to lie to you.”

“I want you to stop,” I said.

She said, “I’m there when you come. I see you.”

“That’s what you always say, but I still feel guilty, Tell. I can’t help it.”

She looked around for something to hurt herself with, and when she couldn’t find anything, she let her legs go out beneath her and landed on the rail, hard, on her tailbone.

I didn’t move. I said, “I’m gonna leave you if you don’t stop.”

“You won’t,” she said.

She was right. “Then I won’t fuck you anymore,” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

It wasn’t all bad. In the evenings, before bed, I’d come out of the shower and she’d sit behind me on the couch, wrap her legs around my waist, rub cold hand lotion into the skin of my knuckles. On Thursdays we had the day off together. Tell would paint small pictures in the living room on the canvas snippets she took home for free from the art store, and I’d smoke at my desk, examining the spines and covers of the books I’d bought. Sometimes I’d re-read bits of Skinner. When the sunlight faded, we’d go for a walk to the tracks or the park. If there was rain forecast for Friday morning, my boss would cancel work, and Tell and I would walk to Denny’s after midnight.

At the start of the instructional portion of meeting number thirty, the therapist maniacally flipped through the tear-away pad and said, “This evening, I’m going to let you in on the secret to everything.” He stepped aside and pointed to the pad, on which was written:

      JAKE: Actually, I do feel a little bit insulted. In fact, very insulted.

      BEN: That’s pretty effing ridiculous!

Sally raised her hand and held it in the air to get the therapist’s attention. The therapist didn’t call on her. Sally’s hand stayed elevated until the first time he used the word constancy.

According to Skinner, the way to extinguish an undesirable behavior is to stop reinforcing it.

The therapist said, “People act in order to make the world predictable. To maintain constancy. To keep to the simplest and most readable patterns. People don’t move toward what we often call pleasure. They often do not move in the direction of what is best for them. It’s constancy.” Here, the therapist paused to take a sip from a styrofoam cup of water.

Sally’s hand shot up into the air again, and she waved it back and forth until the therapist said the word whom. Skinner found that before a behavior became extinct, it would increase in either frequency or intensity or both. Take a pigeon conditioned with food pellets to lift its left wing and peck the bolt on the door of its cage. If you stop reinforcing it with food pellets, you eventually extinguish the wing-lifting, bolt-pecking behavior. Before the behavior becomes extinct, though, the pigeon will frantically wing-lift and/or bolt-peck.

The therapist said, “Evidence? How about something extreme? How about take a look at the children of abusive parents. Is being sexually molested what’s best for them? Is being beaten something they enjoy? Come on. Of course not. Nonetheless, when we try to get them away from their abusive parents, they cling. They don’t want to go, guys. They want to stay with their abusers. Why? I’ll tell you why: constancy. Predictability. A world in which they know when and by whom they’ll get beaten and sexually molested is less scary to them than a world in which they have no idea about what could happen next.” His face smiled. He took a breath.

Sally raised her hand again and waved it furiously, along with her head. Some of her hair came out of its barrette. She started tapping her foot and the thing was this: it doesn’t matter what kind of pigeon it is. It doesn’t matter if the pigeon has a soul or not. It doesn’t matter if I love the pigeon or if the pigeon loves me. If I give it food for pecking the bolt with its wing up, it will peck the bolt with its wing up. If I quit giving it food, it will eventually quit pecking the bolt with its wing up. It doesn’t matter if it knows why it has stopped pecking the bolt with its wing up or if it knows why it ever started pecking the bolt with its wing up. And once it stops, I can get it to start again by conditioning it with food pellets.

“They act to stay with their abusers, these kids. Because why? Because constancy. Constancy constancy constancy. Constancy is based on experience. Without constancy, we fear that the foundations of our individual worlds could crumble. Without constancy we face the unknown. So we repeat. We pattern. To maintain constancy.

“How can we apply this knowledge? Well, judging by the interaction between Jake and Ben that we see here on the tear-away pad, I would guess that Ben comes from a background in which honest statements of feelings, e.g.”—the therapist pointed to the tear-away pad—“‘I do feel insulted,’ have been regularly met with abject cruelty. What does this mean to Ben? This means that if Ben had not acted in an abjectly cruel manner when he responded to Jake’s honest statement of feelings, Ben’s world could have crumbled! Or so Ben would think. Of course it’s not true. That’s the good news. That’s the miracle. It wouldn’t have crumbled! Can you see that, Ben? Of course you can’t. Not yet. But that’s why we’re all here.”

The therapist’s eyebrows climbed to his hairline and he panned his expectant gaze across the six of us. Sally dropped her hand in her lap and left it there.

The troubling thing, for me, about Skinner was this: while the behaviorist is shaping the behavior of his pigeon, the pigeon is shaping the behavior of its behaviorist. Place two video cameras in the lab: one over the shoulder of the behaviorist outside the cage, and one inside the cage over the shoulder of the pigeon. On the first screen you’ll see a pigeon doing tricks for food, and on the second a man doling food out for tricks. For the pigeon to receive food, it has to do a trick, that’s true, but for the man to receive a trick, he has to dole out food—that’s equally true. Granted, there’s a cage, and the cage is the man’s—he controls the condition called “cage”—so you can accurately see that the behavior of the pigeon is under the man’s influence to a much greater degree than the man’s behavior is under the pigeon’s. That’s all in a lab between a man and a bird, though. In the larger world, between human beings, it isn’t so easy to know whose cage you’re in, or who’s in yours. It’s hard enough to determine which side of the bars you’re on. Maybe you don’t even see the bars.

Jake raised his hand.

“Jake?” said the therapist.

“I have something to say to Ben,” Jake said to the therapist. “I’m not very patient,” he said to me. “When we first met, I should have been more compassionate. I wasn’t trying to foul up your constancy, Ben. I was trying to maintain my own. I guess I just get insulted when people walk out of meetings like that girl did.”

“Well-said,” said the therapist. “Ben?”

I said, “That’s ridiculous.”

The therapist pointed at the tear-away pad and made some noise. He made the noise “But constancy.” He made the noise “And the good news.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

And the therapist pointed at the tear-away pad and made some more noise. He made the noise “But constancy. Constancy.” Then he made the noise “And the good news and the good news,” and I made the noise “Ridiculous.”

We kept going like that for a while, until I felt cruel or exhausted or beaten or trapped or guilty and I made the noise “Constancy.”

“Well said,” said the therapist.

I didn’t know whether Tell would quit getting Ricked if I quit having sex with her after she’d been Ricked, but I knew that she would continue getting Ricked if I continued having sex with her after she’d been Ricked. And I continued having sex with her after she’d been Ricked, and as the summer began to come to an end, I started to wonder if I had it all reversed, if it wasn’t so much that she continued getting Ricked because I continued having sex with her as that I continued having sex with her because she continued getting Ricked. And I started to wonder about every guy I saw. The guys I washed windows with. The fools in the group. The therapist himself. Guys on television. Koppel. Jerry Seinfeld. Ricks? All of them? It was possible. And then it was women I wondered about. Not just which ones were Tells—if there were any other ones—but if they thought I was a Steve. I was pretty sure they didn’t think I was a Rick. I didn’t know what Tell thought. and I was scared to find out and certain that I wouldn’t trust her answer if I asked her; she’d say whatever she thought would hurt me least. And what would hurt me least? I didn’t know that either. I didn’t completely understand the terms. I’d assumed for awhile that there was a continuum: Ricks at one extreme, Steves at the other, me somewhere in the middle. But maybe there were just Ricks and Steves and then an entirely different scale for everyone else. Then again, maybe Ricks and Steves weren’t mutually exclusive: maybe certain Steves were also Ricks in certain contexts, and certain Ricks Steves. Were Steves just Ricks who were too afraid to Rick? Was that the only difference? Was I just too afraid? I kept on fucking her after she’d been Ricked, and kept on thinking I shouldn’t keep fucking her. Was that the way of a Steve or a Rick? I didn’t know what I was made of.

One day in mid-August, it was raining, and my sister dropped by my place. Tell was at work. Leah pointed at my bald head and asked me, “When’d you do that?”

“A couple months ago,” I said. I watched a spider crawl out of a crack in the baseboard between us.

Leah said, “It looks good. I have a boyfriend now, and—” and she saw the spider.

She froze in mid-gesture for a second, then jumped over it and got behind me. “Fuck!” she said. “Fuck fuck fuck.”

I put it out with my hand.

“Jesus,” she said. “Not even a paper towel?”

I made like I was confused and then I wiped my hand on my head. It was the first joke I’d cracked in weeks.

“You’re so gross,” she said. “Wash your head. I can’t talk to you like that.”

I went into the kitchen and washed my head in the sink.

“So I have a new boyfriend,” she said.

“Is he a Rick or a Steve?” I said.

“His name’s Aaron, weirdo.”

I said, “How’s Dad? You guys are cool, right? You’ve always been tight.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she said. I came back into the living room. She was jacking around with the equipment in my window-washing bucket. She peeled the foam handle off my chrome-plated squeegee.

“Stop messing with my stuff.”

“Jeez,” she said. “Who made these pictures? That girl Dad talked to on the phone?”

“No one,” I said. I was being a dick to my little sister like some Steve in a sitcom.

“They gave me money and I’m supposed to take you out for pancakes and tell you about my new boyfriend.”

“Okay, but let’s walk,” I said.

She said, “It’s ninety-five degrees outside. And pouring.”

“I’m not letting you drive me anywhere,” I said.

“Then you drive.”

I said, “I don’t want to drive. Do you know how much I have to drive for work? I hate driving.”

“I thought you only said you were an addict to get pity from the judge.”

“I did.”

“Then quit acting like a dry drunk. They send their love and say they miss you. Dad especially. He keeps telling us you’re becoming a man. ‘He’s growing up. He just wants space.’ It’s sad. They think you don’t like us anymore. And you should really start calling them back.” Then she left and I was glad and didn’t want to be.

We sat on the tracks that night, smoking cigarettes. Jane Tell had a swelling eye. Blood at the corners of her mouth. I was staring hard, wanting to touch her. When I turned away, the string of dormant freight cars across the ditch looked small as a train-set. I had to throw a rock and fall short to get my eyes straight. We finished our cigarettes and I lit two more, handed one over.

“You’re a gentleman,” she said. She wiped blood from her mouth with her sleeve, her thumb pushed through a tear in the seam of her cuff. “I think I bit my tongue,” she said.

I didn’t respond, continued to smoke.

She pulled her knees to her chest and worried the drawstrings of her hood. “I’m sick of the tracks,” she said. “Let’s walk to the park behind the high school.”

Tell stood first and pulled me up. We headed toward the school. The moon was orange and the stars were blue and the sky was black. There were slugs in the grass of the outfield. They shined up at us like new dimes, their antennae eyes bent sideways, placidly, stupidly, daring us to put them out beneath our feet. They reminded me of a vacation I’d been on with my father. We’d flown to L.A. and were taking a week to get to Portland in a rented Mustang—a convertible—that he let me drive on Highway 1, even though, at fourteen, I was still months away from getting my permit. “Don’t speed,” he told me. “If you get in trouble, I get in trouble. We’re both breaking laws. Don’t get us in trouble.” I didn’t. We ate good fresh food and saw a couple movies and stayed at motels with cement patios outside their sliding-glass doors that I would go out onto to smoke.

One time I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted a cigarette, but I didn’t want to wake my dad, so I kept the light off on the patio. I’d gone out without a shirt, just boxers and Chucks, and I grew cold and I paced. The ocean was washing against the beach across the motel lawn. From under my shoes came other sounds, crackling and squeaking. Something like the screams of pot-dropped lobsters, but in short bursts and pleasant to listen to. I watched the water move and I thought loosely that I was stepping on wet seashells or unripe berries. To make more of the sounds, I ground my feet against the cement with each step. When I finished smoking, I dropped my cigarette on the patio, and there was another sound, a sizzle. I knew something was wrong.

I crouched down and lit my lighter and saw scores of dead snails, their shells in shards that punctured their skin, some of them torn in half, inside out, wet with that substance that trails them. I’d killed spiders before, and silverfish. I had set fire to anthills. I’d won my only fight in grade school by raking the other boy’s face over playground gravel. I had done those things to be cruel. This was different. I got sick. The next morning, my father went out to smoke on the patio. He said, “What the fuck is this? You were sick? Are you better? Are you sick? Were you drinking?”

“The snails,” I said. “It was an accident. I feel dirty. I really don’t want to talk about it.”

He said, “You sound like your sister with her spiders, boychic. They’re just slugs.” They weren’t—they were snails. Slugs don’t have shells.

The ones in the field lacked shells—they were slugs. Tell hooked her arm in mine. “They catch the moon like bullet casings,” she said. “These slugs look like bullets. Don’t I pun so cleverly? Aren’t I delightful?”

“Stop it,” I said.

Our arms came unhooked. She said, “Do you want to hurt somebody, Ben? We could find somebody,” she said, “and we could hurt them.” She tackled me and put her mouth on my neck. “We could kill them,” she said. We rolled around for a little while. At home, later, I’d find blood on my shirt collar and wonder whose it was.

Tell sat up. Her hood was off and some of her hair had come out of its rubberband. Static held it up in front. “I think we’re sitting in wet,” she said.

“It’s the ground,” I said. “It’s just colder than your body.”

“You’re so smart,” she said. “But if you’re so smart, why aren’t we plotting the perfect murder?” She had the edge in her voice that meant I wasn’t playing well.

“Who hit you?” I said.

“I fell.”

“You’re a liar, Tell.”

“Why won’t you fuck me?”

“Because someone hit you.”

“Listen to you,” she said. “Listen to that. You and all that power in your voice. You won’t fuck me because someone hit me? You won’t drive your car because you fuck me when someone hits me.”

This was the point in the fight-routine at which I could either make her cry by shutting down or fix it up by showing some novel form of affection. I didn’t want her to cry. I put a slug on her knee.

“Hi there, gross cutie,” she said to the slug.

“I want you to meet my family.”

“Let’s get the car and go.”

“We don’t need the car,” I said. The house was across the street.

I let us in through the side door. I could hear them making noises with dishes. We stopped at the threshold between the hallway and the kitchen. My mom and dad were at the table, eating ice cream. Tell stood behind me.

My mom saw me first. “Ben!” she said. “Come here!”

We walked over to the table. “This is Jane Tell,” I said. “We’re getting married.”

I don’t know if it was because they hadn’t seen me in so long or because I shocked them with the marriage bit or because she’d pulled her hood back on, but neither of my parents really saw Tell until after we’d sat down and I’d been kissed by both of them.

Then it registered. “Oh my God!” my mom said. “What happened to your face, baby? Ben, what happened to her?”

“I just fell down some stairs,” Tell said.

“You fell down some stairs?” my dad said. He looked a wish away from flattening me.

“We need to clean those wounds,” my mom said. She was frantic. She made for the bathroom down the hall. “I’ll be right back,” she said.

I said, “I’ll come with you.”

Tell said, “Don’t go, Ben.”

I left with my mother. I sat on the second step of the stairway, just outside the entrance to the kitchen, waiting while she made noise with the cabinets in the half-bathroom.

I watched the kitchen through the spaces between the bars supporting the banister. I could see my father’s back and Tell’s face. She was crying, and through her tears she winked at him. I didn’t know if she knew that she did it or why she did it and I couldn’t see what she saw. My father’s shoulders moved and I couldn’t see what he was doing with his arms, and, for a second, everything seemed possible, and the horror of that, of unlimited potential, made me feel so strong, almost as if I were bodiless, and I knew the feeling had less to do with body than with law, that it was lawlessness, and I would have remained lawless had Tell’s face not right then been obscured by my father’s hairy hand, shaking out the fold of a white cotton handkerchief. She took it, and, rather than putting it to her cheek, she folded it back up and held it in her lap to have something to look at.

“Listen,” my father said softly, “I know you don’t know us, but we’re good people and we would never hurt you. We need to ask if Ben—”

“He didn’t,” she said.

“If he did,” my father said, “it’s okay to tell us. We won’t harm you. We’ll make sure you’re safe. You can stay here if you need to.”

She shook her head.

“You really fell down the stairs?” he said.

“No,” she said. “But Ben didn’t hit me.”

“Someone else hit you?”

“Could we talk about something else? I’m sorry, I just—”

“Hey,” my father. “Hey hey. It’s fine. We’ll talk about something else. How about… Well, the engagement. I mean, my son’s a great kid, but I’m fairly certain he put every last penny he had to his name toward buying you that obscenely lavish invisible ring you’re wearing. I mean, do you really think it’s good idea to get married before he finishes college and gets a real job?”

Tell laughed for him. She said, “Ben was just kidding about the getting married thing. He likes to exaggerate.”

“Well, look,” my dad said. “I know you’d rather not talk about it, and I’m trying not to, but I just—I’m a parent, and I feel like I have to tell you that whatever’s going on, whatever happened, Jane, you don’t deserve to get hurt.”

My mother rushed past me with a first-aid box and Tell looked up on hearing her. She spotted me sitting there. I ducked back, reflexively, like I’d been caught at something. I didn’t know exactly what.

I stayed on the stairway for a little while. My mom turned a brown bottle onto a ball of cotton and pressed the cotton to Tell’s bottom lip. My dad offered her some ice cream. Tell declined. My mom told him to get her some anyway. Tell asked her what kind of accent she had and my mom started talking about immigration.

While my dad was getting a bowl together for Tell, he said, “Where’s Ben?” and I crept outside to smoke on the driveway and figure out how to say that I loved her so it meant something better than I accept you.

By the time Tell came out front, it had been raining for at least twenty minutes and I was on my third cigarette, pacing carefully to avoid stepping on the worms that had come up onto the pavement.

“You wanted to see if he’d Rick me,” she said.

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“You know, you could have just asked me if he’d do it, instead of testing me out like a fucking lab rat. I feel like such a piece of shit now. It’s your fault this time. Feel guilty.”

“I don’t think I was testing you out,” I said.

“You don’t think you were?” she said.

“Quit it,” I said.

“Quit it and stop it and cut it out,” she said. “Smoke. Walk. Park. Tracks. Denny’s. All we do is repeat, you know that? Like an error message. Like a beeping fucking circuit board.”

I couldn’t tell if she was crying or if it was anger cracking her voice.

“Everything repeats,” I said.

“Look at these worms,” she said. “They think they’ve saved themselves from drowning in the grass.”

Anger.

I said, “Quit analyzing the imagery, Tell. It’s manipulative.”

“Listen to you!” she said. “It can’t be that manipulative if you know to call it imagery.” She slammed me on the nose. It broke. “If I was so manipulative,” she said, kicking my legs out from under me, “you’d be manipulated by now.”

Coughing, my face flat on a dead red worm, I said, “I was jealous.”

“You just figured that out?” She made for the street. “I’m moving out,” she said.

“Wait,” I said, “I’ll drive you.”

Soaked and bleeding and limping beside her, I felt romantic, like I could prove something simple.

Then we were standing next to my car.

“Take me to my mom’s,” she said. “I’ll come back for my stuff tomorrow when you’re gone.”

I got in the car and started it. I hadn’t driven in months and all the dread came on. I closed my eyes and there they were: the trucker and the tow-trucker and the sales clerk with his glasses. Manx. The therapist. A soldier. A café owner. Any number of cops and vice principals. Every man whose face I could remember but for me and my father. They waited in line to leave their impression and Tell told me it was okay, take it easy, she liked it. I opened the door and got sick in the lot.

“I’ll drive,” she said. “You sit shotgun and by the time we get there, you’ll be used to the car. You’ll be able to get yourself home.”

I kept my mouth shut. I did what she told me.

I tried escaping the panic by thinking of fucking, but every time I closed my eyes I’d see all the men lined up in front of her.

After we’d driven a couple of miles, I covered up my closed eyes with my hands, thinking irrationally—however deliberately—that it might be possible to blot out the images appearing on my eyelids by shielding them against the backlight of the streetlamps. Instead I saw Jane’s body bruising, breaking, deforming, her bloodstained hair in a flat-knuckled fist that dragged her along the shoulder of a highway, one swollen eye winking, the other turned to look placidly skyward.

The car struck a pothole. Both my hands slipped, jarred my nose at the break. What had been a redundant, dull, throbbing pain became so suddenly sharp and brutal that I didn’t care about anything else. I could only see white.

Soon enough, though, the pain died down and I knew where I was.

I wiggled the bridge of my nose with my thumbs and returned to that state of excruciating relief. When it disappeared, I wiggled my nose again, but it didn’t hurt as badly as it had the first time, and the relief wasn’t total. I proceeded to squeeze, and then to tap, and then to frantically flick at my nose until those methods became ineffective.

Through all of that, Jane Tell said nothing—either she hadn’t seen what I was doing or she’d chosen to ignore it—and she continued saying nothing till I struck my nose with the back of my fist, and she yelled at me to stop. “Just stop!” she yelled.

Blinded, I leaned against my window and bled.

When the relief wore off, I used my fist again.

And Tell again yelled out for me to stop. And again I was blind and leaning on my window. And when I could see again, I could see that Tell wasn’t looking at the road, but looking at me, and the car was about to collide with something black. It was too late to stop.

The collision was quiet, a clop without resonance. The thumping of the anti-lock brakes was louder.

We ran to the gasping animal and knelt. It lay on its side on the yellow line, trying to bark, trying to growl, coughing and squealing. “It’s breathing,” Tell said. Its spine was severed, even I could see that. “There’s an all-night vet on Willow,” she said.

I called the vet. They didn’t have an ambulance.

I called the cops. They told me an hour.

“But it’s breathing,” I told them.

They told me an hour.

“Help me,” Jane said. She was trying to lift it. It made awful, human sounds. Moaning, pleading sounds.

“Let go of it.”

“It’s a dog.”

“You’re hurting it, Jane.”

I got into the car.

“Just help me,” she said.

“Fucken move,” I told her, and turned the key. She got out of the way.

Reader, I ended it.