“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said. She laughed. “I’m not Nancy Kincaid—what does that mean? Who am I then? Am I supposed to guess?”

But the black woman in the doorway did not laugh. She was not even smiling anymore. She simply stood there, poised and stylish. Her folder under her arm. Her hip jutting a little in her red dress. Her gaze still empty, still unfathomable. Nancy (because she was sure that she was, in fact, Nancy Kincaid) found herself shifting nervously under that gaze. Her weight went from foot to foot. Her hand flicked to her hair.

“Come on,” she said. “Seriously. What is the problem here?”

The black woman raised one hand: a mature, professional gesture. “Look,” she said. “You can’t be in here without permission. All right? That’s all I know. If you want to wait outside in the reception area, maybe when Nancy comes in you can discuss it with her, otherwise—”

“But I am Nancy. This is my office. Christ. I mean, I think I know who I am.”

“Well—I’m sorry. But whoever you are, you can’t stay in here.” The black woman did not waver. Her gaze did not waver. “You’ll have to go out into the waiting room. Please.”

“I can’t believe this.” Open-mouthed, Nancy looked around for support. Through the glass partitions, she could see down the row of offices. She could see an older woman hanging up her coat on a stand. A man in shirtsleeves opening his briefcase on his desk. People were going about their business, getting down to work. Only she, of all God’s children, was being persecuted here by the Demon Secretary of Warren Street. She turned back to the black woman. “You know,” she said, as the idea dawned on her, “I don’t think I know you. Do you work here?”

“Miss, I don’t have time for this right now. If you want to—”

“Do you work here?” Nancy said. “I mean, this is ridiculous. Why are you bothering me?”

“Albert.” The woman had turned, had called the name down the corridor. Nancy glanced to her left and saw the man in shirtsleeves look up at the call. He was a young man with coiffed brown hair. He was wearing a blue-striped shirt with a red tie and jolly red suspenders.

“Is that you calling, Martha, my love?” he said.

“Albert, could you come in here for a moment?”

Jesus. This woman won’t give up, Nancy thought. But she was annoyed to feel a little clutch of fear in her stomach. As if she were a high school kid standing up to a teacher. “Look, can I just get to work now please?” she said, a little desperately. “I mean, this is ridiculous. I would like to have my office to my—”

“Albert.” The young man had joined the black woman in the doorway. The black woman—Martha—was indicating Nancy with one red fingernail.

“Yes, oh entrancing one,” Albert said.

“This woman has come in here without permission.”

“Horrors!”

“She says she’s Nancy.”

“What?” To Nancy’s dismay, the young man, this Albert, looked up at her and let out a surprised little laugh. “She says she’s Nancy?”

“Nancy Kincaid?” Nancy said. She felt the blood rushing to her cheeks. “Fernando Woodlawn’s personal assistant? Jesus, you guys! I don’t know what’s going on here but …” Then, as Martha and Albert gazed at her, she stopped. Two other people had come up behind them. A tall woman with tinted hair. A doughy blob of a man in a gray suit. They were standing on their toes, looking in at her over Martha’s and Albert’s shoulders. Nancy looked from one to the other, from one stare to the other. Her mouth was still open on her last word as the whole thing became clear to her. “Oh,” she said finally, drawing out the syllable. “Oh. Oh, very, very funny. Very funny, people.” And her cheeks really did turn scarlet now. She felt as if her whole body was blushing and she thought: Damn him! “All right,” she said. “Where is he? Where’s Fernando? What is this, like, some kind of trick he pulls every year at Halloween or something? Break in the new girl? Is he hiding under the desk or recording this or something? Come on. You got me. I’m humiliated, hooray. Enough is enough.”

She was trying hard to keep her composure, not to show how irritated and embarrassed she was. But this was something that truly bugged her about her ever-lovin’ boss. This sixteen-year-old jockstrap humor of his. The fact that she was an overprotected Catholic girl was just the big joke of the world to him. It was just so, so funny. Practically every day, he went out of his way to mention some bodily function or other in front of her. As if she’d never heard of it before. Then he’d shout out to everyone, “Look. Catholic School is blushing.” And, of course, that would make her blush. And then she was always supposed to laugh and roll her eyes and demonstrate that she could take a joke.

“You’ve had your fun,” she said now, controlling her voice. She was feeling hotter, more ridiculous, more annoyed by the moment. “You can all go back to Fernando and tell him I blushed and looked stupid, okay? Now I have a lot of work to do this morning, so if you don’t mind …”

But the people standing in the doorway said nothing. They answered her, all four of them, only with those gazes. Empty and unfathomable stares; stares in a waxwork; unwavering. Nancy felt herself tighten as it went on and on. She felt her whole body tighten with the frustration of it. The frustration—and something else. That clutch of fear again, that cold contraction in her stomach.

It all seems wrong somehow …

She swallowed. She put her hands on her hips. She was aware of the silence lengthening. She was aware of the whisper of traffic in the room. The faint Warren Street patter and shush coming in through the open window behind her. She was aware that she was just standing there, jutting her chin at the four of them as they confronted her. She could not think of anything else to say.

“What’s going on here?”

The voice broke the moment. It was a loud voice, deep and authoritative. The cluster of people at the door slowly gave way. A new arrival shouldered his way into the room between Martha and Albert.

Nancy cried out at the sight of him: “Oh!” She felt a great warm bath of relief. “Henry! Thank heavens!”

Henry Goldstein, the firm’s junior partner, was now standing just within the office. He was a short man, but broad-shouldered; well formed in his gray suit. He had a full head of silver hair and chiseled good looks that went with his voice: a look of authority. He was searching around him for an explanation. He turned to Nancy.

“Listen, Henry,” she said at once, “would you please get the Fernando Brigade here to curtail the sidesplitting hilarity and let me get to work? We’ve got the community meeting later today and Fernando’s gonna kill me if I don’t have his charts put together before lunchtime.”

She checked herself, kept herself from babbling on. She waited. Henry Goldstein lowered his brows at her. He cocked his head. “I’m sorry?” he said. Uncertainly, he glanced over his shoulder at Martha.

“She keeps saying she’s Nancy Kincaid,” said the black woman with a shrug. “She came in here without permission and now she says she’s Nancy and this is her office. She says she won’t leave.”

Slowly, Goldstein inclined his proud chin, as if to say: Ah, I see; I understand everything. He turned back to Nancy. She caught her breath as she saw the caution, the wariness that had now entered his hazel eyes.

“Henry …?” she started to say.

“Just take it easy, Miss,” Goldstein answered her. He held out his hands toward her.

To calm me! she thought. He’s trying to keep me calm!

“No one wants to hurt you,” he went on.

Nancy’s mouth fell open. She backed away from him. From all of them. All of them just kept staring at her. Martha with her blank brown eyes. Young Albert with his alert features. The tint-haired woman and the roly-poly man—their curious glares on her like spotlights.

What the hell is this?

She took another step back and felt the cool air from the window against her calves.

“No one wants to hurt you,” Goldstein repeated. “All we want is for you to step outside into the reception area. We can talk about everything out there. Okay?”

Nancy shook her head. “I don’t … I don’t … understand. I mean …” That muzziness—the feverish haze that had been with her all morning—it was rising inside her again. She felt as if her head were expanding. She blinked as her thoughts clouded. “I … I mean … Don’t you know me? Don’t, uh, don’t you know who I am?”

The stocky little Goldstein took a small step toward her. His hand stayed in front of him, to ward her off now too. “We can talk about all that right outside, Miss. Right outside in the waiting room. Okay? We’ll all talk about it together and figure it all out. No one wants to hurt you.”

Nancy put her hand to her forehead, trying to clear it.

“We’re all your friends,” Goldstein said.

Well, she thought wildly, that’s certainly reassuring.

Now Albert was coming forward also. He took a long, vigorous step around the far side of the gunmetal desk. “Watch out behind you now,” he said. “Don’t get too close to that window.”

“Look … Look, I’m a little confused, I … I don’t know what’s going on … I came in here, I … I mean …” She shook her head. The fog was filling her mind. She couldn’t stop it. I’m babbling, she thought. Stop babbling. “Look, I just, I’m feeling a little sick today or something … if you could just let me … If you could just …” She didn’t finish.

“No one’s going to hurt you,” said Goldstein, sliding toward her. “We’ll just take you outside.”

“Look, if you could just … I mean, I am Nancy Kincaid!” she said weakly.

Somehow, someone had moved right up beside her. She heard his voice, a new voice, a soft, warm voice, right at her elbow. “Hey,” he said, “this is ridiculous. Why don’t you just shoot him?”

Startled, she swung around to face him. “What do you mean, shoot him? I’m not just going to shoot him, how can I …?”

She stopped. No one was there. No one was standing there at all. There was only the file cabinet in the corner. The open window. The ledge out over Warren Street. The faint plash of traffic. The faint clatter of falling leaves in the park on Broadway. And no one …

Nancy stood where she was. For a long, long moment, she just stood: half turned; her mouth open. She stared at the file cabinet, at the window. Her eyes darted from one to the other, and to the wall, and to the floor, trying to find someone, anyone, anything, that might have just spoken to her.

A voice? The thought blinked in her mind like neon as she stared. A voice telling me to shoot him? Did I hear that? Oh shit. Oh, that is not good. That is not a good thing at all.

“Martha,” Goldstein said. She heard him speaking to the secretary in slow, authoritative tones. “Martha, I want you to call the police. From my office. Right now. Right away.”

“Right.”

Slowly—still staring, still wide-eyed—Nancy (She was Nancy, damn it. Wasn’t she?) turned to face them again. Goldstein was closer to her now. Creeping up on the near side of her well-groomed desk. Albert was coming around the far side, edging toward her. There were more people in the doorway too and some out in the corridor, a whole audience of them. And there was Martha in her red dress. She was just turning to push her way into the crowd. Just tearing her fearful gaze away from Nancy and turning to push her way to the phone in Goldstein’s office. To call the police.

“That—That won’t be necessary,” Nancy heard herself whisper. She could barely squeeze the words out past the stricture in her throat. Her head had begun to throb again. All her thoughts seemed to have dissolved into a thick mist that hung over her mind, over everything. She swallowed hard, but her throat was dry. Her lips were dry and stiff. “That’s not necessary,” she said, a little louder.

Martha paused. She glanced doubtfully at Mr. Goldstein.

“I’ll … I’ll just go,” Nancy said quickly. She had to get out. She had to get some air, clear her thoughts. What the hell … What the hell …? “I’ll just … I’ll go, okay? Just let me go.” Shoot him?

Goldstein lifted a hand toward her. “Are you sure you don’t want us to call someone for you? I think you could use some help, Miss.”

Shoot him? “No, no, I’m …” She bit her lip, fighting back the tears. “I’m fine,” she said. She could not look at him. She looked at the desktop in front of her. She could not look at any of them, could not meet their eyes. “I’m just not feeling very well right now, I’m … I’m sorry. I … I don’t feel well.”

They were all looking at her. She knew they were all looking, staring at her. She felt naked in front of them. God! she thought. God, I mean … I mean: God! She reached out quickly, snatched her purse off the desktop. She clutched it to her chest as if for protection. “I’m just not feeling very well,” she said. “I’ll just go. That’s all. Please.”

She scuttled forward quickly. The crowd parted in front of her. Hell, they jumped out of her way, jumped to either side. They couldn’t leave the path clear fast enough. She hurried through them. She was vaguely aware that Goldstein was following her. That he and Albert had come around just behind her, on either side of her. They flanked her as she hurried out of the office. They escorted her down the corridor. Past the dingy offices behind their glass partitions. Past the photo of Fernando framed by the city. Out again through the low gate, through the reception area. With everyone behind her, everyone staring at her, watching her go.

What …? she kept thinking, as she hurried to the elevator, as she stared at the floor in front of her, as she clutched her purse. What …? What …?

Mr. Goldstein pressed the elevator button for her. She stood in front of the door, clutching her purse, her head bowed, like a supplicant with hat in hand. It took an unbearably long time for the elevator to arrive, and she thought, What …? What is it? What is happening here?

When the door finally slipped open, Nancy charged inside. She spun around, her back against the steel wall. They were all still there, just through the elevator door. They were all in the reception area and beyond it, behind the low gate. Goldstein and Albert and Martha in her red dress. They were all gazing at her as she cowered in her box. Those empty waxwork gazes fixed her. And she clutched her purse, praying that the door would close.

Then the door closed. Clapped shut. And Nancy’s knees buckled. She sagged, sticking her tongue out as her stomach roiled. She slid halfway to the floor. Then she crouched there, grimacing, staring into space and gritting her teeth as her eyes brimmed over with tears.

The elevator started down to the ground.

“What?” she whispered.

Then she coughed once, and started to cry.

Perkins staggered to the toilet. He grabbed the light-string next to him and yanked it. The bathroom’s bare bulb went on. Naked, Perkins stood above the toilet bowl. He squinted sleepily at his penis, waiting for the piss.

The bottom of the toilet bowl was covered with some sort of brown crud. It darkened the toilet water, so he could see his face reflected in it. The light from the bulb behind his head threw the reflected face into silhouette. Beams of light-bulb light radiated from the silhouette in a golden halo. His reflection looked Christlike, the beams fanning out from his shaggy hair.

Look, Ma, Perkins thought, I’m a demigod.

Then the piss broke from him. It splattered in the toilet water. The reflection was obliterated.

Perkins gave a soft snort as the stream of piss ran. He smiled with one corner of his mouth. Even through the haze of his hangover, he could see the poem in this: the reflected Christ-self pissed into oblivion. Even though his brain had turned to sand, he could tell the poem was good. He could feel it rising in him as he stared down into the bowl. Just a wordless rhythm, at first. Not a poem yet, just the sound, the beat of a poem. He felt it mushrooming up out of his chest as he pissed. He felt how white it was. He felt how it was spreading itself within him, spreading like wings, rising up out of him. He felt the words starting to clamber aboard, the rhythms becoming syllables.

There … he thought. There …

But already, the poem had begun to falter. It was dissolving. The wings were atomizing. The solid white of it was melting away.

And the stream of piss was faltering too. It pattered in the water loudly. Perkins tried to hold on to his poem, but it was no good. It plummeted. Dropped off the edge of him into nothingness. All of a sudden, it was just gone. He was empty inside. He sprayed the toilet water with a few last squirts.

Oh well, he thought casually. No more good poems for you, sonny boy.

But the truth was, it made him feel black and lonesome. Standing there naked on the mossy bathroom tile, his poem gone. It made him feel a huge, yearning, vasty lonesomeness. As if he were standing at the bottom of a canyon, searching amid the rocks for another soul on earth.

He took his dick in his hand and waggled a drop off it. From behind, he released some of the hangover gas twisting in his gut.

There had been no good poems for two years now, he thought. Two full years this month. There had been nothing worth publishing since the river house. Since Julia and the October evenings.

He reached down to flush the toilet. The water gushed away, though the weird brown stuff remained. He sighed. There were still some days when he thought it was kind of romantic to be a dissolute Village poet. Then there were days like this one: when he thought he was going to vomit until his ears bled. He twitched the string to turn off the bathroom bulb. Then, tugging one more bit of dribble off his pud, he stalked back into the other room.

Avis Best was there. She was just climbing in through the window, her baby under her arm. Perkins waved to her wearily, his eyes half closed. He made his way to the mattress on the floor. He flopped down on it with a groan.

By that time, Avis was standing by the window. She was staring around the room, her mouth open. Behind her, a line of blue sky showed through the bars of the fire escape. She held her baby on her hip. The baby played with her face as she stood there gaping.

“Jesus Christ, Perkins,” she said.

Perkins rolled onto his back on the bare mattress. He flung his arm over his eyes. He felt black and lonely and dry, his whole body stuffed with gritty sand. “Oh, Avis,” he said pitifully. His head hurt too and he was beginning to feel nauseous.

“Oh, really,” Avis said. “Do you mind telling me what you’re trying to do to yourself?”

He shook his head slightly. “I don’t remember. But it must be something really awful.”

“Sure looks like it.”

“I just hope I don’t deserve it.”

“Pah! Pah! Pah!” the baby cried out. He had noticed the naked figure on the bed. He was twisting in his mother’s arms, straining toward the man, reaching out.

“All right.” Avis let out a breath. She started picking her way to the mattress through the mess. “Look at this place.” Even in the dim western light from the window, she could see it was a disaster.

It was just a studio, just the one large room. A subway map taped to the wall. A framed drawing of Whitman. A poster from the Keats House one of his girlfriends had brought him from Rome. There was a writing desk with a Spartan wooden chair. A dresser. A few canvas chairs, a couple of standing lamps. There was the mattress, bare on the floor.

But mostly, there were books. There were books everywhere, gray and dusty. Piles of them lined the walls, two deep, three deep, four. Stacks of them rose up at random in the center of the room like stalagmites. Books covered the desk and all the chairs. Even the bookshelf—Avis thought she remembered a small bookshelf here somewhere once—was buried now under the books.

And then there was the rest of it. His bedcovers splayed everywhere. His jeans over a chair back, his sweater over a tumbled mound of Dostoevskys. His underpants tied around a lamp.

Gimme a break, Avis thought sourly.

And bottles of Sam Adams beer lying in the gaps all around. Empty bottles made of brown glass: Wherever she looked, her eye fell on one. She bumped one with her toe as she reached the mattress, sent it rolling with a clink into an illustrated Quixote.

She lowered herself to the mattress, sat down next to Perkins. Perkins dropped his arm and gazed up at her pitiably. She tried to keep from glancing down at his nakedness, but she couldn’t help it. He was a sturdily built man with a hairy barrel chest and muscular arms. He wore his black hair long and had an angular face, pouched and lined at thirty-one. She found his eyes—his brown eyes—seductively miserable.

She placed the baby on his chest. He held the chunky little kid steady. The baby gave a big smile and pawed him. Perkins suddenly blew up his cheeks and the baby looked up at his mother in surprise and laughed.

Avis smiled. She touched Perkins’s forehead, brushed his hair with her fingers. “How bad is it?” she said softly.

“Oh …” He wrinkled his nose at the baby. “‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.’ How’s by you?”

“Okay, I guess. So-so.”

“Baga baga baga, pah, pah, pah,” said the baby. He slapped Perkins’s chest. Perkins gave a grunt and lifted him into the air. The baby squealed and wriggled.

Perkins lowered the baby and kissed his neck. He was comforted a little by the softness of the baby’s skin and hair, and by the fact that the kid liked him. With a great effort, he propped himself up so he could set the baby on the floor beside the bed. Then he let go and the baby started crawling away.

“Stick to the classics,” Perkins said, “and don’t put your fingers in a socket.”

The baby babbled his farewells and crawled off among the books.

“My advice to the generations,” said Perkins. He lay back heavily on the mattress. He took Avis’s hand. He looked up at her. The small features of the valentine-shaped face, hovering over him, soothing. She brushed at his forehead again, smiling down at him. He felt his cock stir at her cool touch.

“Your Nana called,” she told him gently.

He closed his eyes. “Oh boy.”

“She says she couldn’t reach you. She says your phone is off the hook.”

“Jesus. I don’t even know where it is. Was it urgent?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You know Nana. It’s a catastrophe.”

“Oh no.”

“I told her you’d be over there in an hour.”

Perkins kept his eyes closed. He felt her cool fingertips. “Maybe I should call her,” he murmured. “Maybe I can find the phone.”

“No, her nurse was just coming. She wants you to come over.”

“Okay,” he said. It was barely audible. His mind was drifting now. He was thinking now about Avis. He was picturing her: the way she had been on the one night he had had her. He remembered her lying facedown on his mattress, sobbing into the pillow. He had stood over her, breathless and helpless. He had just finished dealing with her husband. His knuckles were pouring blood. After a long time, he had knelt down next to her. He wanted her to stop crying, and he wanted her, and he did not know what else to do. His breath caught when she lifted her hips to let him work her leggings down. She had parted her legs too when he stretched out on top of her. All the while he was rocking in and out of her, she had held his hand in front of her and sucked the blood off his fingers. He had murmured to her, and he thought he heard her whisper something. He didn’t catch it though. She would never tell him what it was …

The memory was giving him an erection. He opened his eyes. He saw Avis steal another glance down him. She nearly smiled, but then she took her hands away. She stood up quickly. Grabbed his bedsheet off the floor and dropped it over him.

“You could get dressed, you know,” she said. “You could pretend that I was here.”

“I know you’re here,” he said. The light was bad, but he thought he saw her cheeks color. Anyway, she hurried across the room to the baby, who was stretched across The Idiot now, chewing on Perkins’s sweater. She got the sweater from him. Draped it over her arm.

“You do this too much, Perkins,” she said.

“I got carried away. Don’t clean up.”

“You get carried away too much.” She lifted his jeans while the baby watched her. “It’s like every night, every other night.”

“It’s not every night. Avis … Don’t clean up. I’m telling you.” He tried to get up, but the movement shifted the sand in his head. He could only sit on the edge of the mattress, his feet on the floor. He covered his face with his hands. “Oh man!”

“I’m telling you, Oliver,” Avis said. “It’s getting to be a real habit.”

He forced himself to look up at her. She was placing his clothes on top of the dresser now. Then she was tugging the laundry bag out from underneath the dresser, stuffing in his underwear.

“Avis, would you not do this, please.”

“Well, look at this place, Ollie.”

His shoulders sagged. He shook his head dismally. He turned and squinted dismally at the window, at the strip of blue sky. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “I gave a reading at the café last night.”

“Well, that’s no excuse.” She had moved across the room to pry her son’s fingers from the base of a standing lamp. “Everyone always … oof! … loves your readings.”

“Yeah.” He grunted at her. “All those old poems. The same ones over and over. I had to wash away the taste of them. I could feel them stuck in my throat.”

“Oh, Oliver, come on.”

“Two years, Avis. Two years this month since I wrote my last good one.”

“And getting tanked every night is going to help a lot.”

He sighed. Sat silently.

“Shit,” Avis muttered. He glanced at her. She had been restacking a toppled pile of Greek histories and had come up with something. She examined it a moment, turning it in her fingers. “I guess someone lost this,” she said. She tossed it across the room to him.

He caught it in his cupped hands. An earring. Turquoise on hand-hammered silver. Something bought on the street in the East Village probably. “Not one of yours, huh?”

“You know it’s not.” She showed him her back, walking toward the kitchenette.

Perkins gazed down at the earring, trying to remember. He had a vague flash of the café. The black microphone in his face. The cool neck of the beer bottle in his fist. Candlelight in the white wine at the tables. Faces at the tables, young men, young women’s faces; the grizzled chins of the old Village denizens; the candlelight in their eyes.

Avis flicked on the light in the kitchenette. “I hope it’s a girl’s, that’s all,” she said darkly.

“There was someone.” He studied the earring.

“You said you weren’t going to do boys anymore. It’s dangerous—especially when you’re too drunk to think.”

“Cindy,” he said. “Or Mindy. Maybe it was Mindy …” He looked up then and saw her in the kitchenette. He flinched. A dolmen of encrusted pots and dishes rose out of the sink. Avis was sponging some red slime off the countertop. A roach was scuttling for a crack in the caulking.

“Well, I’m sure she was a nice girl,” she was saying. “She probably just had to get back to school in time for recess.”

“Avis,” said Perkins. “Would you put down the fucking sponge.”

“You want eggs?”

“Oh, don’t make me breakfast. God, Avis, don’t take care of me. I mean it. This is your whole problem.”

“I’ll get a psychiatrist first thing tomorrow. You want them scrambled?”

Perkins let out his breath, dejected. His chin fell to his chest. There was the baby. Crawling over a Sam Adams to get to his foot. Smiling up at him from his hairy toes, waiting for some attention.

Perkins reached down and picked the baby up. The baby put his arms around the poet’s neck. “Yeah,” Perkins said quietly. “Scrambled is fine.”

He lay down with the baby on top of him. He blew out his cheeks again to make the baby laugh. But now the kid had noticed the buttons on the mattress. He was climbing down off Perkins to see if he could get some to eat.

Abandoned, Perkins lay where he was, staring up at the ceiling. He licked his lips, picking up the faint taste of dried vomit. He listened to the running water in the kitchenette. The clattering of pots as Avis cleared them. He listened to the baby gurgling. The loneliness settled down over him like a blanket.

Two years, he thought. Not since the river house. He had sat on the porch there in the evenings and watched the view. The green Catskills rising against the pale and darkening sky. The beaver pond lying in the meadow just below, a black oval in the high grasses. He could see Julia floating on her back down there. Her long body white beneath the black water, her breasts breaking the surface of it. Her white thighs lifting and falling lazily as she kicked along. Sometimes he heard an explosive whap! as a beaver slapped its tail against the water to warn the others she was coming. More often, the creatures swam right over to her. He could see their V-shaped wakes, the domes of their heads. They would bump their black noses against her side and make her smile.

And Perkins would sit on the porch, balancing a pad on his lap, twirling a pen in his hand. Soon, the evening star would shine dimly in the big sky above them. Other stars would show through the tendrils of mountain mist. Raccoons would waddle to the pond’s edge and drink while Julia floated with the beavers. And deer too would sometimes step from the grass and bow their heads gracefully to lap the water. There had seemed to him a luxury of life and death, night coming like that. And just as the light was almost gone, he would begin writing.

This is the animal hour.

The slow October flies, despairing on the porch chairs,

blink into the shards of the sun they see setting.

Blue and then a deeper blue ease into the air,

and bats suddenly dive and butterfly up out of the trees …

His last good poem. The last poem in the collection.

“Christ.” He groaned, his head going back and forth on the pillow. He rubbed his eyes with both hands. He yawned. “So what did Nana want anyway?” he said.

“What?” Avis was at the sink, the water running. She glanced over her shoulder, holding a pot under the stream.

“I said, What did my grandmother want?” Perkins called. “What was the big catastrophe?”

“Oh,” Avis called back. “It’s your kid brother again.”

“Zachary?” Perkins came up slowly onto his elbow. “What the hell’s the matter with Zach?”

Avis shrugged. “You know how Nana is.”

“What?” he called. He couldn’t hear her over the water.

“I say you know how Nana is,” Avis shouted back to him.

“Agga agga agga,” said the baby, climbing up Perkins’s back.

Avis placed the clean pot in the drainer. She shouted: “Apparently, he’s disappeared.”