1

It was a wet February in Pittsburgh, spring, early and without warning, and twice in one week UFOs had been spotted hovering over Mount Washington. Well, people said, that’s not exactly the strangest thing you’ll see on Mount Washington, which was just one of the ways that we said bullshit, but by the end of the following week there were so many eyewitnesses and cell phone pics and videos and even a sudden and suddenly popular blog called Alieyinz.com dedicated to these and other sightings around the city and the rural counties south and east that the mayor’s office called a press conference To Address the Speculation. The early part of that year had been rough for the mayor. A lingering and byzantine dispute with the head of the Economic Development Council blew up when the director of the EDC publicly resigned, citing a culture of intimidation, corruption, favor-trading, and recrimination in a widely published letter. Then the papers reported that the mayor himself was under investigation for appropriating a Homeland Security grant and using the expensive new surveillance equipment to spy on his not-yet-ex-wife and her attorney. So the mayor didn’t actually show up to the flying saucer press conference; his chief of staff Jonah Kantsky came instead, which was just as well, since everyone said that Kantsky was the Svengali behind the young mayor or, since it had been pointed out that such phrasing might be a little bit anti-Semitic, that he was the Richelieu behind the child king. When the woman from Channel 4 asked him why the mayor wasn’t at the presser, Kantsky said, Gail, the mayor is busy cooperating with investigators, which made the reporters laugh. Anyway, Kantsky said something to the effect of we’re cooperating with DOD and DHS and the National Weather Service and the Air Force reserve wing out at the airport and all relevant state and local and federal authorities including the Pittsburgh FBI office etc. etc. etc. and I can assure you that while clearly something was seen last week there is no probative or dispositive evidence or indication that it was anything other than a meteorological phenomenon, in fact I have been convincingly assured through these consultations that it was an example of a rare phenomenon called ball lightning, the result of warm or cold air masses or vectors or something.

Then a huge bald black guy in a dark suit and a yellow yarmulke who’d been standing quietly in the back lost his shit and started screaming, You want to live in a dreamworld forever? And he had to be hauled out by a pair of police officers barely as tall as his shoulders. That effectively ended the press conference, except that a live mic caught Kantsky muttering something about a fruitcake to an aide, and the next day the story was neither the UFOs nor the outburst by the man, who turned out to be Rebbe Mustafah Elijah, the high priest and sole proprietor of a local sect called the Universal Synagogue of the Antinomian Demiurge, a weird millennial cult based out of the back room of Elijah’s Africana store in East Liberty, but rather a subsequent press conference hastily arranged by City Councilwoman Mary Tremone, a presumptive mayoral challenger in next year’s contest, who cited Kantsky’s overheard comment as just one more indication of a heedless and uncaring administration displaying a shocking disregard for the feelings and emotional well-being of the city’s LGBTQ communities, especially its youth, who faced bullying every day, and who were The Future of Our City. And so by the first week in March the whole thing became a diversity imbroglio.

Once more down the memory hole, said my buddy Johnny Robertson, waving a fry at my face over the table in our booth at the diner.

This place is shit, I said. Why do we come here?

Did you ever meet the rabbi? Johnny asked me.

Who?

Mustafah Elijah. Did I ever introduce you? No? That guy is awesome. He ate the fry. The thing is, my friend said, the thing is that there’s a fourth river, you know, under the city. So if you take the aerial view of the city and you have the Allegheny and the Mon coming together at the Point to form the Ohio, if you take the Ohio and sort of extend that axis through the point and onward between the other two rivers, what you get, ta-dah, is basically the peace sign, which of course is just an inversion of a satanic symbol representing the Baphomet, which is in turn just a reproduction of an even more ancient sigil related to Ba’al worship and suchlike. So basically the Point represents a node or a nexus of intense magical convergence, an axis mundi, if you will, wherein vast telluric currents and pranic energies roil just beyond the liminal boundaries between the phenomenal and the numinous branes of existence, and obviously this whole UFO what-have-you is a manifestation of that, not some fucking ball lightning or whatever. Jesus, ball lightning? Fucking fifty years after Roswell and a century after Tunguska, and that’s the best they can come up with? I was born at night, but not last night.

Uh-huh, I said.

You gonna eat the rest of those eggs, brother? Johnny asked me. Oh, and can I owe you? I’m a little short today.

2

I was halfheartedly dating a girl named Lauren Sara at the time, or she halfheartedly dating me. Ours was the sort of object in motion that, unacted-upon by an external force, remains in motion. But isn’t that true of all objects, and all relationships? Johnny hated her. You’re a classic gay misogynist, I told him. He objected. I don’t hate all women, or even most women. Just every woman you’ve ever dated. Do I need to draw you the Venn diagram? The common denominator is not the vagina.

We’d met, Lauren Sara and me, the past summer in a popular bar on Penn Avenue on a day so hot and insistently humid that the sunlight turned green. It was the sort of day when thunder keeps grumbling in the distance but rain never quite seems to arrive. I’d played softball with some of the guys down at Baldy McGrady Field before a real team with real equipment and a real reservation chased us off, and I was cooling off with a beer, unsuccessfully, because even on Sunday afternoon the bar was hot and crowded. Can’t they turn on the fucking air? I said to no one in particular. My friend Derek said, Hipsters hate air-conditioning. Do they? I said, and he shrugged. It seems like they would.

From behind, Lauren Sara looked like another friend of mine, and she was talking to a girl I thought I might have known, and when I went over and tapped her on the shoulder and said, Hey, and realized, when she turned around, that she was someone else, I said, Oh, sorry; I thought you were someone else.

And she sipped her whiskey through the little stirrer straw and lifted her eyes and shrugged and said, I am. She paused. Someone else. Derek, who was on his way to take a piss, heard this, and I heard him mutter, Oh Jesus Christ. I later found out that he’d dated Lauren Sara. A good time, he said, was not had by all.

So what’s your name again? I asked, even though I hadn’t yet asked her for her name.

Lauren Sara, she said, but someone had just then turned up the music and I leaned closer and said, Laura?

Lauren Sara, she said again. I fucking hate when people call me Laura.

Lauren Sara, I said. That’s two names.

Two too many, she said.

What? I asked.

I don’t know, she said. What’s your name?

Peter, I said.

Can I call you Pete?

No.

She grinned, and she said, See?

We walked back to her studio. She was a graduate student at CMU, a sculptor or something, who made things or assemblages or whatever that looked like chairs to me. It had finally rained briefly and hard while we were in the bar, and the sycamores drooped over the cemetery wall. Her studio, which she shared with another artist, whom she called the Greek, was on the second floor above a closed auto body shop on Penn Avenue; you walked up a narrow concrete staircase and pushed aside a steel fire door that clanged like something in a medieval dungeon and walked into an expanse of concrete and cracked windows and piles of industrial junk.

Why do you call her the Greek? I asked.

Because, Lauren Sara answered, she’s Greek.

Like Greek Greek? I said.

Like Zeus. Like ruins. Like a spinach pie. Do you smoke weed?

I watched her while she dug around for a piece or papers. She was prettier than the women I usually dated, who tended to look more like Lauren Sara’s futurist constructs than like Lauren Sara: severe, planar, composed in straight lines and angles. Johnny said I only dated women who looked like little boys. You’re a classic ephebophile, he said. Please, I told him. You think everyone is gay. He sighed. Not gay. Gay is an artifact of the binary twentieth century mind. What’s gay? You’re gay, I told him. I, Johnny said, and you have to understand that he was a big, barrel-chested beast of a man who was just then wearing a pair of hiking boots, cargo shorts, and a Laibach T-shirt, am queer. You sure are, I said.

Anyway, Lauren Sara had a round face and a body that, if slight, could by no reasonable standard be called boyish. She had blue eyes, but the blue was never much more than a soft halo around big black pupils, forever dilated because she smoked too much weed. She wore sundresses over spandex shorts and she rode a bike everywhere. She was in a phase of feigned poverty; she never did introduce me to her parents, and she was always vague about their backgrounds, but I figured out that her dad was an attorney or something and her mom was the head or principal or director of some kind of vaguely Catholic private school in Philly, and once during the winter we were together, when she’d claimed to be unable to hang out for a few days due to some pressing school projects, I’d been driving through Shadyside and had spotted her outside of a restaurant, ducking abashedly, or so I imagined, into the back seat of a big Mercedes with a handsome, sixtyish couple already in the front seats.

Well, that all came later. We got a little stoned and drank a little more warm whiskey from a bottle she snatched from the Greek’s drafting table, and she made me look at some of her sculptures and asked what I thought about them. I said I liked them and they looked like chairs. Cool, she said. I’d soon discover that it was the most prevalent word in her vocabulary, closely trailed by yeah, both of them pronounced as lilting bisyllables, coo-ool, yeah-ah, and a doubled nod of the head like a pigeon when it walks. Yeah, she said, they’re more like about the idea of a chair.

I laughed and said something dumb like, So I shouldn’t sit on one, and she looked at me like I was a little bit nuts and said, You can totally sit on one.

What time is it? I wondered.

After lunch, Lauren Sara told me. Before dinner.

What should we do?

Do? she said, almost puzzled. She wasn’t the sort of person who moved through life from plan to plan; she rarely determined through any recognizable process of deliberation what task or thought or appointment came next; it was a trait that made me want her, then annoyed me, then made me want her again in an alternating pattern from that first day until the end. I don’t know, man. It might be cool to have sex and then maybe get something to eat?

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily call our first attempt at lovemaking languid. Actually, I probably wouldn’t call it lovemaking. But it did move at its own pace, and it also moved from moment to moment without planning or deliberation, without any sense that either of us was exactly willing it into action. We were on a plaid couch that smelled, not all that unpleasantly, like bread. At one point I realized that a radio was playing, quietly, somewhere across the room; the music had stopped and a baritone voice was asking us to please support classical radio. Then Lauren Sara lifted my face from her salty neck and held it between her hands just above her own and asked me if I was going to come. Slightly surprised—I was used to something a little more feverish—I said, No. Not yet. What about you? Are you close?

Even there, underneath me, with her hands still on my jaw, she managed something like a shrug, and she said, Yeah, it’s cool. I’m not super into orgasms.

We untangled ourselves, dried off with a stiff towel, walked back to my car, and drove to Bloomfield to get some Thai food, which we later marked by mutual consent as our first date.

3

So I was the manager of customer analytics and spend processes, which meant about as much to me as it does to you, at a company called Global Solutions, whose remarkable slogan was, Solutions for a Global World. Actually, I was one of many managers of customer analytics and spend processes, and while this bothered some of my more, uh, career-oriented colleagues, I figured it was for the best, since it meant that I didn’t have to manage anything. Look, people will tell you that corporate America is an insatiable elder god, an implacable, amoral Mammon into whose gaping, bestial jaws flows the life and blood and spirit and dreams and democratic aspirations and so on and so forth of everyone and everything on this not-so-good and no-longer-so-green earth, but let me tell you, if what you really want is to read blogs all day and occasionally take the back stairs down to the largely vacant twenty-third floor to take long, private shits in a single, lockable handicapped restroom and to get paid, like, sixty-five grand for the trouble, then good God, there is no more perfect job.

No, I am serious: the office only crushes your soul if you’re dumb enough to bring it to work. I saw this affliction of the soul take too many of my coworkers. They brought their souls to work with the same foolish trust that impelled them to bring snacks and a bagged lunch. Fuckers will only steal that shit from the shared refrigerator. You’ve been warned.

I liked my job, and it wasn’t even exactly true to say I never worked; I worked, sometimes; I just wasn’t working on Tuesday when Johnny called my office phone and said, Are you working? Let me read you something.

I don’t know, Johnny, I said. I’m about to go into a meeting. When Johnny said, Let me read you something, it never meant, Let me read you this brief and compelling excerpt, this epigram, this interesting quotation, this passage, this page; it meant, Let me read you from here, page thirty-seven, halfway down the page, through page fifty-one; no, you know what, let me start on thirty-four, to give you the fuller context, and go through fifty-eight, which is where the chapter ends. And when he got started, you couldn’t interrupt; there was no, Well, buddy, I’ve actually got to go; once, when we were in college, he’d called me across the country and read to me for an hour and a half from a history of the Merovingian dynasty, so impervious to my attempts to get off the line that I’d eventually just hung up on him, and he’d just called me back and kept going. Which is to say, it was best to head him off before he got started.

But he just said, What meeting? When have you ever gone to a meeting? and started reading:

Dad was military, OSS during the war. Your basic blue-blood type, too, like all the Intelligence boys back then, a Connecticuter, a standard-model Yalie Bonesman. He came to Pittsburgh in the early 1950s to oversee a new office called Industrial Production Planning, or IPP, which was a front for the CIA.

I myself was born in 1949 and, and for much of my life, I’d have told you I had the most ordinary Pittsburgh childhood. Grew up on Linden St., went to St. Bede’s and then Central Catholic, played on a lousy Little League team, gate-jumped at Forbes Field, etc. It was a hell of a city in the day, a great dynamo: the greatest fires stoked in the whole history of the world running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, like the forge of Hephaestus.

Well, as the saying went, it was “hell with the lid off.” Here is the essential point: you cannot burn that hot without releasing some manner of Luciferian energy into the ether.

And that was no accident. Pittsburgh is the one city in the world that perfectly fits the conditions of the prophesied site of the commencement of the Mayan world-end.

Now, what if I were to tell you that the Deep Government of the United States has long known this fact to be true?

I was entirely unaware of this history until 1999, even though I participated in it. My father saw to that. Were it not for certain unique abilities that I was able to conceal from him even at the height of my participation in the Project, this history would have likely remained concealed to this very day.

Through years of ritualized and chemicalized psychic abuse, based on a variety of satanic and priestly indigenous American vision practices, my father split my personality into a set of independent and mutually unaware personality forms. However, my core personality was able to conceal itself behind a subconscious wall-division subconsciously generated by certain psychic abilities, which later assisted in the reintegration of my multiple self-constructs.

What was my father working on? What was this Project?

It was manifold, but it represented over many decades a vast magical working, perhaps unmatched in all human history, a spell enacted by the fire of industry above this most metaphysically significant of landscapes, culminating in two great ritual ceremonies.

First: the linking of two long-sundered Scottish Freemasonic Illuminated Lines, those of Carnegie and Mellon, the line of World Industry and the line of Global Finance, through the merging of the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in 1967—wherein my own matriculation as a freshman at the new Carnegie Mellon University was in fact the practical cover for the dark working that joined the institutional progeny of the two families and consecrated me, or, that is to say, one of my mind-division self-constructs, as the ritual child-form of that union.

Second: the completion, in 1974, of the great fountain at Point State Park, the magical runic symbol at the convergence of the three superficial and one subterranean rivers, the latter brought to the surface in the fountain itself.

Is it any wonder at all that at that very moment, with the water aspect brought forth through those immense pumps, the fire-aspect of industry was quenched and went into decline?

It is no coincidence at all.

Johnny took a breath. What did I tell you? he said.

Well, I answered as I took a sip from the mug of cold coffee on my desk, that certainly does, uh, seem to bear out your thesis.

Winston Pringle, he said.

What’s a Winston Pringle?

He’s an author. He’s the author.

He sounds British, I said. He sounds like a wanker.

Are you wanking off over there? said Marcy, who worked in the next cubicle.

Totally, I told her. Don’t tell Karla. Karla was in HR.

Who are you talking to? asked Johnny.

Marcy, I said. The lovely occupant of Workstation six-fourteen.

Whoa, Johnny said. They number your work-holes? That’s so satanic. Is your number six-thirteen? That number has extreme significance in Gematria.

Johnny, I really have to go.

So you’re not at six-thirteen?

No, I am. But seriously.

So this book is called Fourth River, Fifth Dimension. Apparently Dr. Pringle lives somewhere around here, too. I think we ought to find him. Given recent events. Recent occurrences.

We, I said.

You’ve got eight hours a day and a good Internet connection, Johnny said. Tell Darcy she can help.

Marcy. And I don’t think she’s interested in the long-sundered branches of Freemasonry or whatever. And anyway, I can’t just sit here all day looking up your current crackpot fetish. I have a job. I have shit to do.

Morrison, Johnny said—alone among my friends he called me by my last name—Morrison, you’re fucking nuts. By the way, do you want to be my date to the Jergen Steinman opening thing this weekend? I’m a little hard up in re: the matter of purchasing a ticket, and I figure your grandmother is one of the big Jews at the museum and can get us tickets.

Lauren Sara and I are going. I can totally get you a ticket, though.

Why is she going?

She’s my girlfriend. And she’s an artist. And cetera.

An artist. Misplaced affection has misplaced your critical faculties, brother. She is to an artist as Goodwill is to haute couture.

You are gay, I said.

Fuck off, Johnny said. I don’t want to go anyway. Museums are just massive institutions designed to provide scholar-backed social capital to the notion of art-as-commodity and to reify the artist as a separate caste rather than art as a fundamental human activity. I’d rather not. But seriously, the Pringle thing. Think about it.

What’s the thing again? I asked, but he was already gone.

4

Did you hear? Marcy asked me later that week.

Hear what?

We’re being bought out.

By we, I said, you mean Global Solutions Solutions for a Global World?

None other.

Bought out by whom?

Some European company. Danish, maybe? Pandu didn’t have the details.

Pandu told you? Pandu was a math guy who did something in finance that no one understood; in particular, none of us understood why a guy that smart worked for Global Solutions. What is he, like, Hari Seldon now?

He’s Hindu, I think.

No, what? No, forget it. Europeans? Are we going to get fired?

Probably, Marcy said. Or it could be worse. They might make us work.

5

This thought roiled my brain all week; I had a sweet gig, and the thought that it might be sullied by something that measured out my hours and compensation in deliverables and metrics and benchmarking and the rest of that infernal vocabulary kept me more distracted than usual. That Wednesday over dinner Lauren Sara reminded me that I was supposed to score a pair of tickets to the big art opening. I’d completely forgotten. Do you even want to go? I asked her. Whatever, she said. It’s, like, cool either way. What she meant by this was something like, Fuck you, you moron, I ask you for this one thing, and. Not to say that her voice or demeanor betrayed the slightest hint of it, but you get to know a person. As surely as she’d tried to keep her own background half concealed behind a scrim of shrugs and misdirection, Lauren Sara had set about ferreting out my own relative standing on the social and economic ladder, and if there was one thing that she expected of me, one medium of exchange in our otherwise casual, anarchic relationship, it was that I get us—and her friends, and her roommates—into the good openings and parties, whenever and wherever they occurred.

So I had to call my grandmother, Nanette, to ask if she could get us into the opening reception. She answered on the first ring, but there was a horrible noise in the background, the sound of screams and machinery. Nana, I found myself shouting. It’s Peter.

Who?

It’s Peter!

Peter?

Nana, what’s that noise?

Just a moment, just a moment. The sound faded. Peter? She was back on the line.

Jesus, Nana, I said. What was that?

Oh, some movie or other, she said.

It sounded like a slaughterhouse.

Everything is so violent these days, she replied. Honestly, who watches these things?

Well, you do, apparently.

Oh, I don’t watch. I just like the noise when I’m reading.

Okay, Nana. So what’s new?

What’s new? she said. She was of an age and class that made her sound like a demented Hepburn. What would possibly be new?

I really just meant how are you doing?

Just terribly, but not unusually so. Have you talked to your parents lately? If you do, tell them that I’m wonderful. Tell your mother I’m in a new bloom of youth. Every damn time I tell them how I’m really doing, your mother starts taking my medical history. Needless to say, when I tell her what my own doctors say, she accuses me of lying and drug addiction. Honestly, why your father married that woman.

She’s my mother, Nana.

Well, I certainly don’t blame you for that, my dear. Now, what is new with you? She managed to make it sound like an accusation.

Nothing, I said. Work, the usual.

I hope you’re saving.

Yes, Nana, I’m saving.

For God’s sake, make sure you sock it away, or you’ll wake up one day and find yourself as penurious as me.

I don’t think you’re penurious.

Well, I’m sorry, Peter, but there won’t be one red cent for you when you die.

Uh-huh, I said. Had she misspoken? I didn’t want to get into it. Listen, Nana, I said, I wonder if you could do me a favor.

I may as well, she said. After all, I’m not very long for this world.

6

On Saturday night, while I waited for Lauren Sara to arrive so that we can go to the museum to watch a Swiss-German artist reenact the aesthetics of atrocity or something, I called my mother. Strictly speaking, I got a little stoned and poured myself a few fingers of bourbon and called my mother. Don’t misunderstand me. I liked my mother, loved her, even, but it was always best to talk to her with one’s psychic armor on or, if that wasn’t combat-ready, with a strong dose of one’s psychic anesthetic.

I lived on the third floor of a converted Victorian near Friendship Avenue. The rest of the poor house, like all the other defiled old houses on my street, had long since given up its grace to cheap drywall and particleboard kitchens. An endless stream of undergraduates and itinerant hipsters and drag queens and the occasional medical residents, lured by the online promise of unbelievable (really, unbelievable) rent and a few photographs of the admittedly charming exterior as well as the wide blond floorboards and arched dormer windows that were, in fact, in my apartment alone and in no way representative of any of the others, signed leases sight unseen, arrived, and swiftly departed, paying the neat penalty of three months’ rent (security deposit, first and last month) to get the fuck out of those shitholes. The third floor where I lived had been the old servant quarters, and if to nineteenth century sensibilities it had seemed appropriately plain, to our time it may as well have been a palace—real wood, real tile, built-ins with little doors of paned glass. The building was owned by Bill Morrison, a cousin to some degree or other of my dad’s. Like all self-respecting minor relatives of old Pittsburgh families, he’d bought a bunch of shitty houses, long since underoccupied, fixed them up—I mean, he made them even shittier—and became a slumlord. Because the houses in my neighborhood had better-preserved exteriors than most, he could charge a modest premium, as well as running the Craigslist scam, in which I suppose I was an accomplice—at least, I knew about it and said nothing. It wasn’t family loyalty. Bill was the worst, a self-styled grotesque, deliberately unbecoming, a weird WASP version of a third-rate movie gangster. He drove an immense black SUV that looked like it belonged in either a federal motorcade or a Mexican drug lord’s garage; he wore shirts unbuttoned halfway down his chest and gold chains and a pinkie ring, all confounded by the fact that he was not a gangster and not a drug lord, but a pink, hairless man with tiny little hands; he reminded me of a toe.

But it was a great apartment.

So I was in the kitchen watching my squirrel jump from the overhanging branches of the big buckeye out front onto my windowsill where I left him, or her, but I thought of him as a him, little snacks. I’d called my mother’s cell, but my father answered.

Dad, I said, where’s Mom?

Ah, your mother, he said contemplatively, which was, along with mumbling, his main mode of speech. You know, I’m not entirely certain. And I heard him take the phone away from his mouth and yell, Suzanne? Suzanne?—or not yell, really, because he never yelled, nor really ever raised his voice at all; he just sort of mumbled her name into a middle distance, then brought the phone back to his face and said, Well, she’s not answering.

Is she home?

You know, I’m not sure. She never does tell me when she’s going out. Which is fine, of course. She used to tell me, and I said, Suzanne, you don’t need to tell me all your comings and goings, believe me. And she said, Well, Peter, what if you need to reach me? And I said, Well, why would I need to reach you? Which she took very badly; you know how women can be. Although I suppose I can see in retrospect how, taken in a certain way, well, it could be taken in a certain way. Anyway, I guess she’s not here now. How are you doing, then, kiddo?

I’m good. She’s definitely there. She wouldn’t leave her phone.

Now, that’s a very good point. She is awfully attached to it. They’re handy pieces of technology, there’s no doubt about that, but I like to forget mine from time to time.

She’s a doctor, Dad. I imagine people need to get ahold of her.

Oh, they call at all hours. How’s work going?

It’s super-busy right now. Really busy.

You’re always so busy. It must be such an interesting job. I’m sure they appreciate you.

I just try to do my part.

So many meetings. It’s a wonder you get anything done.

That’s just the way things work now. All companies are like that.

Well, you would know. The business world has certainly changed. Such rapid change. Very different from when I was in the trenches, so to speak. Of course, we hadn’t the foggiest idea what was coming, with the computers and whatnot. Well, if I could go back, I’d certainly tell myself a thing or two. Oh, here’s your mother. There was the rustling sound of a phone being handed over and the sound of my mother’s voice saying something that sounded remonstrative, which was, come to think of it, her main mode of address.

Hello.

Hey, Mom.

I was in the garden. The fucking deer out here, really. I’m going to have to get a gun.

You have a gun.

A handgun, honey. That’s for protection. I mean a shotgun.

Protection from what?

Really, sweetheart, I will not be drawn into a political debate. I think it is perfectly appropriate that you retain your liberal views until you turn thirty, and you, likewise, can respect mine.

I’m a libertarian, and I’m already twenty-nine.

Libertarians are just liberals without student debt. We paid for everything, and so you’re not interested in redistributive schemes. When you turn thirty, you’ll find yourself still fiscally conservative; meanwhile, you’ll find that the libertine permissiveness that attracts you to your current philosophy is less attractive than it was when you were a horny twenty-something.

Mom! Jesus.

It’s a fact. If you were an anarchist or something, I’d worry, Lord knows. But a libertarian I can handle. How’s work?

Busy. Super-busy.

Good. And how is Laura?

Lauren Sara. And she’s fine.

Is that a thing now, having two names? Do you make your friends call you by your middle name?

My middle name is Jackson.

And?

Never mind. No. Listen, is everything okay with Nana? That’s actually why I called.

Did you ask your father? What do you mean by is everything okay?

No, I didn’t ask Dad. You know how he is. And I mean, I don’t know, like, okay. Is she okay?

Why do you ask?

Because when I called her to get tickets to this museum thing tonight, she seemed a little off.

Off as in off her rocker or as in off the wagon?

Was she ever on the wagon? The former.

She’s just a little pickled, sweetie. I wouldn’t worry. She’s eighty-five. She’s entitled to be a little batty.

Yeah, but she was complaining about how little money she has left, which, I know, is normal, but then she said, And I’m sorry, Peter, but there won’t be anything left for you after you die.

After she dies, you mean, Mom said.

No, I said. That’s the thing. She distinctly said, after you die. You meaning me.

Philosophically speaking, she may be correct.

Mom.

I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. Keep me posted.

Keep you posted?

Yes, keep me posted. By the way, we have extra tickets to the opera next week. Would you like to come? You can even bring Sarah.

Now you’re doing it on purpose. And she’s not an opera fan. But I’ll probably come.

No, she doesn’t strike me as such. No hurry. Just let me know. Love you. Bye-bye.

7

I was not a libertarian. I wasn’t anything, and I didn’t vote or much care, but the other thing was easier to explain to my mother.

8

The museum party started at seven, so I’d told Lauren Sara six, and she clicked into the apartment in her bicycle shoes at twenty to eight. I think she was on to me. She tossed her messenger bag onto the floor with a metallic thud. Careful, I said. Jesus, what’s in there?

Engine parts, she said. I need a shower.

We’re so late already.

She shrugged. That’s cool. I can go like this. She was in a pair of dungarees cuffed to just below the knee and a sleeveless T-shirt that read EAST END ORGANIC URBAN FARMSTEAD with a cartoon lion and a cartoon lamb both giving the peace sign.

Did you know that the peace sign is an inversion of a satanic sigil that represented Ba’al worship? I said.

Cool, she said.

Go ahead and get ready, I said. I’ll wait.

She said, Cool.

I drank some more bourbon, then poured her one and brought it to her in the bathroom. She liked to drink in the shower. I used to think it was an affectation, but I was beginning to suspect that maybe she was just an alcoholic. And it may be terrible to admit it, but I didn’t entirely mind. The women I’d dated before her had in common not only a certain angular aesthetic, but also attitudes of exquisite control; they weren’t the sort of girls, or women, or whatever, who drank bourbon in the shower or asked questions like, Should I shave my pits? Shit, no woman I’d ever dated would have admitted to having to shave her pits. It may have been that Lauren Sara and I drifted accidentally into each other’s orbit, but you could say the same about the moon and the earth, and I once read something that said the presence of that pale satellite gave us evolution in addition to the tides.

Oh yeah, she said, go check in my bag. I brought you a present.

I don’t need any engine parts.

The small pocket, she said.

I went back to the kitchen, but before I picked up her bag I grabbed her cell phone and looked through her text messages. A few, from an ex, with whom she was supposedly, ahem, still friends, so be cool, be cool, were innocuous enough; one, from her friend Tom, an awful fag we’d surely see at the museum, because he worked there, referred to me as The Asshole—he’d gone to the trouble of capitalizing it. I played racquetball sometimes with Tom’s boyfriend Julian at the downtown Y, and I made a mental note to imply strongly that Julian had gotten jerked off in the steam room by some twink dancer from Point Park. A text from her mom said, Check your balance. I put the phone down and checked the small pocket in her bag. Oh, Christ. A bag of mushrooms.

Psychedelics didn’t agree with me. Actually, I hated them, hated the pretension that they represented some kind of contemporary shamanism, that they expanded the mind rather than just messing with it, that they made you more a part of the cosmic consciousness and not merely a butt of its ongoing and infinite joke. I hated the feeling of departing myself; it was like waking up on the departure date for a long trip, you’ll pardon the expression, and realizing that you’d forgotten to pack. I hated, most of all, the weird exhibitionism of doing that sort of drug and going out in public, the artifice of it: turning yourself into a nut and then parading in front of other people and then laughing at them later for being uncool enough to have actually thought you a fucking lunatic.

No, thanks, I said to Lauren Sara when she’d showered and mostly dressed. Her feet were still bare. She came into the kitchen, where I was drinking and smoking one of the secret cigarettes I kept stashed in the freezer; she placed her hand on my neck; it was still warm from the water, and I kissed it lightly. We’d been together long enough by then for these little affections to pass into the kingdom of habit.

She took a drag of my smoke. Cool, she said. More for me.

You can’t eat all of those. You’ll fall through the fucking stargate.

Yeah. Totally.

So I did some as well. You know, just a few caps. A palmful. To keep it interesting.

But we hit traffic on the way to the museum. An ambulance had struck a bicyclist on the Bloomfield Bridge, and we weren’t moving. To our left, beside and below the bridge, the little lit houses descended down the hillside toward the edge of the ravine, where the light abruptly stopped and the dark woods dropped down toward the railroad tracks. Cars floated by in the other direction. Oh shit, I said. I’m starting to come up.

Cool, said Lauren Sara.

They cleared the accident and we made it to Oakland, parking on a side street a few blocks from the museum near the Cathedral of Learning, or, as Johnny put it, the Phallus of Yearning, a gothic skyscraper in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus, as if some drunk god had grabbed the top of a squat medieval monastery and yanked it heavenward like a piece of saltwater taffy, ornate and kitschy and very slightly fascist in its fidelity-by-pastiche to an imaginary past. Ironically, the Cathedral of Learning was just across the street from the Carnegie Software Institute, a dour and actually fascist building, all outscaled marble columns still half stained from sixty years of soot and exhaust, in whose basement, according to Winston Pringle, his father and a group of German émigré scientists first succeeded, in 1949, in opening a microscopic doorway between our quantum reality and the next one over. On the green between the two was Heinz Chapel, another goofy bit of architectural homage, a near-replica of the Saint-Chapelle in Paris, although Johnny once told me that it was exactly fifty-seven paces from the cathedral to the chapel and fifty-seven paces from the chapel to the institute. Well, that makes sense, I guess, I said. Like Heinz 57. Yeah, Johnny said in a scoff. Sure. You do know that fifty-seven is the number of times the moon is mentioned in the Bible, right? Forty-seven in the Old and ten in the new. And that Ba’al was actually a moon god who served as an early model for Lucifer, and that the Heinz family were notable Satanists who built the chapel as a place to conduct black masses? Jesus fucking Christ, dude, Alumni Hall is fifty-seven paces in the other direction, perpendicular, and it’s the old goddamn Masonic Temple. Are you that naïve? Where do you get this shit? I said. Dude, he said, didn’t I lend you Sacred Marks and Texture? It’s Pringle’s little architectural survey. With Dr. Wilhelm Zollen.

I found myself having trouble distinguishing between sounds and colors, and I found that the squares of concrete that made up the sidewalk were expanding away from me in every direction at an accelerating rate, like the universe.

Um, I said to Lauren Sara.

Be cool, she told me.

How many paces have we walked? I asked her, but she ignored me. I glanced back at the Cathedral, which was dark, but it seemed to me that either light or the sound of chanting was rising up from the steep roof of the chapel.

I feel nauseous, I told Lauren Sara.

Yeah, she said.

She was wearing a red fur coat that had belonged to my grandmother and then to Katherine, my ex. It looked like the costume of a doomed tsarina fleeing on a doomed train. Who knows where Nana had gotten it; I imagined she’d had lovers, and I imagined one of them had given it to her, because it wasn’t the sort of thing that any of my rich, cheapskate relatives ever would have bought for anyone, least of all his own wife. Nana had given it to Katherine; they all thought I was going to marry Katherine; I thought I was going to marry Katherine: Katherine from Montreal, an inch taller than me, a body as carefully designed and perfectly balanced as a set of German knives, studying environmental law, crazy about fashion; well, I know, how bourgeois can you get?—how predictably of your own class and background?—how dull and how foolish, really, to pursue something that’s destined to fail by its own appropriateness?

Well, very. But I did. And then, about a year and a half before I met Lauren Sara, she stomped into my apartment, and keep in mind, Katherine didn’t stomp, ever, and accused me of cheating on her. Now, I had cheated on her, but I was pretty sure that she didn’t really know that I’d cheated on her; I denied it so extravagantly and convincingly that I made myself cry a little bit; then she cried, not because I was crying, but because something about the fact that I’d convinced myself in that moment of the truth of my own denials confirmed for her the very thing that I was denying; then she said something embarrassing like, Wasn’t I good enough for you? And I think I said, like, No, baby, I think maybe it’s that you were too good for me, which was simultaneously true and the dumbest thing that I have ever said in my life, before or since. (In fact, it hadn’t had a thing to do with her; I’d been drunk one night at Gooski’s, and a girl with an apartment across the street had invited me up to smoke a joint after they closed, and I’d come home super-late thinking I only smelled of weed and beer and cigarettes. I’d assured myself she hadn’t noticed.) Then she said something in French that I didn’t quite catch. Comment? I said. Fuck you, she said. In English. Then she left the apartment and went down the stairs with me blubbering and apologizing to the back of her head all the way down. Then she stalked down the icy walk to her car. It was the last winter anyone could remember when it had really snowed in Pittsburgh, and the last thing she’d done before she ducked into her car and drove away was to shrug off the coat and drop it unceremoniously into the dirty snow along the curb.

We’d defriended each other, of course, and quickly passed out of each other’s electronic lives, but sometime afterward, when a change in privacy policy had left all of our everything temporarily exposed to everyone else on the whole of the Internet, I’d actually stumbled across her page: she’d never finished law school, but had gone back to biology; there were photos of her, tan, a little more muscled, dressed like a college girl, on a beach somewhere with a lot of other bright-toothed assholes, tagging birds or something, including one pic that briefly stopped my heart: Katherine smiling at some Indian guy, a huge, beautiful, almond man with the arms of a Vedic warrior and perfect long hair drawn into a tight bun on top of his head; he was smiling at her as well, and his hand was on her bare knee.

What’s up, honey? said Lauren Sara.

I’m thinking about my ex, I thought.

You look great in that coat, I said.

9

Of course Tom was the first person we saw in the museum. We came up to the bright back entrance to the contemporary galleries, a stepped sculpture garden surrounded by glass and fronted by a little turnaround driveway where loud valets hustled silent, expensive cars to and from departing and arriving guests. I suppose we saw other people first, but he was the first with whom we interacted, and of course the first words out of his mouth were, Oh My God Are You Two High?

Your boyfriend fucks dudes at the Y, I answered.

What? he said.

Only a little, Lauren Sara said.

Don’t worry, I said. My grandmother’s a big Jew around here. An older couple on their way out overheard and gave us all a killer look.

You’re really high, Lauren Sara told me.

I’m the unitary consciousness, the world matrix, I told her.

Okay, let’s maybe get you a snack.

You guys are assholes, Tom told us as we headed into the party.

Assholes are like opinions, I said. Everyone’s got one, and everyone’s is just his opinion.

We’d missed the art, or the performance, or whatever it was; it occurred to me that I should not have said Jew in proximity, physical or temporal, to a happening or enactment or deconstruction or whatever it was by a dude whose work consisted, as I understood it, of dressing up in Nazi fetish gear and, well, doing something. On the other hand, I was a cultivated philistine; if art was just another commodity, then an original sensibility required deploring it. In any event, I wasn’t in any state to enjoy a performance, less yet to enjoy not enjoying it. I need a drink, I said.

10

Someone once said that the way to enjoy a Russian novel is to treat it like a party, to stop fretting over the interminable parade of unfamiliar names and just enjoy the interaction, content in the knowledge that after a few introductions the important, recurring characters will stick. I found that advice quite useless, because I found parties to be like nothing so much as long foreign novels, interminable scenes of interactions between interchangeable personages with whom I was just familiar enough to be aware that I’d forgotten them. And at least no one in Dostoyevsky ever remembered me or knew my parents or called me Pete.

A dozen handshakes and half as many Petes and we were at the bar. I ordered a beer, figuring with the idiot logic native to all intoxicated people everywhere that the combination of high calories and low alcohol content would set me straight. Lauren Sara got a gin and tonic, which, given the state I was in, smelled like a newly disinfected bathroom.

This party sucks, I said.

We just got here.

Be that as it may.

It was your idea!

You made us miss the Nazi.

She rolled her eyes at me. He’s not a Nazi. He’s very important.

The one doesn’t preclude the other, I said, but it sounded less clever than I’d intended it to sound.

The hall was two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide and three stories tall. We ended up at a high-top at the end farthest from the entrance. On our right, the wall of windows looked out over the courtyard and down to the entrance. The courtyard was full of stunted locust trees. There was a crowd around the bar that thinned toward the edges of the room. A DJ was playing music that would appeal only to twenty-year-olds, and, to be fair, there were a few of those interspersed among the generally older crowd.

Lauren Sara asked me why I was always so mean to Tom, and I replied that he was a horse-faced faggot, and Lauren Sara said that just because my best friend was gay or whatever, that didn’t give me the right to talk like that. I laughed; she wasn’t exactly the type to take offense at a racist joke or to be bothered if you made fun of fat people, but she lived in a big, tumbledown house at the edge of Bloomfield, a graying structure on the precarious edge of a precipitous hillside, whose residents were an un-census-able menagerie of boys and girls and trannies and boyfriends and girlfriends and Differently Gendered Other Amorous Individuals and their occasional dogs and cats and reptiles and their stupid fixie bikes forever clogging the front hall and the porch, and she took offense, through some bizarre transitive property of group identification and moral sensibility, to anything that smelled like homophobia; imitate black women on the bus all you like, in other words, but don’t say fag.

I didn’t really have anything against Tom. I only thought he was annoying. He was Lauren Sara’s age and a curatorial assistant at the museum; they’d been friends since college, having met in some art class or other; he viewed everything and everyone as inferior. He had grown a mighty tree of cultured resentment from a mustard seed of rural Pennsylvanian gay angst. A little gay boy from Wilkes-Barre, he thought the whole world was déclassé. How he ever managed to trick Julian into dating him was beyond me, Julian, who looked like an Olympic swimmer and did something vague and highly remunerative for PNC Bank—a dummy, yes, hardly more than a grown-up frat boy, but by our standards rich and by anyone’s standards hot.

Lauren Sara said it was because Tom had a huge dick. I said that might be so, but given what I knew about Julian, that seemed like a sundry detail. She told me that I didn’t know shit about fags and that the muscle dude was always the bottom. I later put the question to Johnny, who told me that it was the first time any woman I’d ever dated had been right about anything.

Later I’d had another beer and the effect of the mushrooms had faded to nothing more than some strange colors around the edges of my field of vision and we were talking to Tom and Julian and Tom’s boss, Arlene Arnovich. Arelene was a small woman with a bob of high-gloss black hair who seemed taller than she was. She was friends, of a sort, with my grandmother. She had asked what we’d thought of Steinman’s performance; I said it had been very challenging, which was something my grandmother had taught me. Never say interesting, she said. Say challenging.

Oh yeah, how so? Tom said.

It just challenged, you know, I said. It had a lot of challenging notions. Lauren Sara cracked up and had to spit some of her drink back into her cup, and Arlene smiled thinly, thinking, I suspected, that I was somehow making fun of Tom, whom she regarded with the amused and irritated expression that you see in people who own small dogs, and Julian stared after one of the caterers; Tom noticed, and clutched his arm proprietarily.

Personally, I thought it was shit. We turned.

Oh, Mark, said Arlene.

He was tall, and his girlfriend reminded me of Katherine, only more so. He had wavy black hair that swooped from his forehead and around his ears and to the nape of his neck. His nose was a little too big for his face, but it gave him a martial quality, aquiline, like a Roman. In her high, very high, heels she was of equal height, also a little birdlike, or at least very aerodynamic, her dress hardly more than a slip, her thin neck held by a strand of pearls that were so proper compared to her dress that they seemed all the more obscene. She stood like a dancer, back arched and a little splay-footed, simultaneously graceful and awkward, formal, a pose you’d praise as natural in a sculpture, but in a real human a little weird. Like him, she had long hair, although hers was drawn severely back and done up in a tight and elaborate knot in the back of her head. It was the color of corn silk, although her eyes were very dark, and when we were introduced, she held me in her gaze a little longer than necessary, until I dropped my head. Then she laughed; it wasn’t audible to anyone but me; it could have been my mother laughing at something foolish I’d done when I was a little boy, which is to say: that one soft, brief sound carried the possibility of a hidden wellspring of affection, and right away I had a crush. She glanced at a thin, expensive watch on her wrist and touched her nose with the back of a long finger. He was wearing a thin black suit and a gray tie—almost the same outfit as my own, but of such obviously finer quality that the difference was more pronounced than if I’d been in a T-shirt and dirty jeans.

Arlene, Mark said. Then he glanced at us as if surprised to discover that we hadn’t scattered at the sight of him. Maybe he smirked. Everyone else, he said.

They introduced themselves. Mark and Helen. He caught my eye and held it briefly with his own, and I swear I saw something flicker across it, like a nictitating membrane, like a bird of prey, like a crocodile.

So you don’t like my show, Mark, said Arlene.

Mark doesn’t believe in art, said Helen.

I believe in it. I just don’t approve of it.

What about artists? asked Lauren Sara.

They should all be destroyed, Mark replied.

I laughed.

What’s so funny? Tom said.

Nothing, I said. Well, it’s from Jurassic Park.

Tom snorted.

What’s your name? Mark asked me.

Peter.

You and I, Pete, we’re definitely going to be friends. It sounded like a threat.

You disapprove of art, Arlene said, and yet here you are.

One has to observe the proper forms. This is a very important institution.

Whose very purpose you reject.

Well. He shrugged. I like the dinosaurs.

Yeah, said Lauren Sara. The dinosaurs are cool.

I’m sorry, Mark said. I didn’t catch your name.

Lauren Sara.

That’s two names, said Helen.

Tom was doing his best to make it clear to Arlene that he found Mark repugnant. So what would you do instead? he asked.

Instead of what?

You’re in charge of the museum. What’s the first thing you do?

And Mark looked at me again, winked, vertically this time, and then said to the group, so plainly and forthrightly, so casually and without hesitation that it was impossible to believe he didn’t really mean it: I’d burn it to the ground.

11

Helen laughed. He was joking. We all thought, Oh, thank God. We all laughed. Mark laughed.

But look, he said, it’s true, also, that I find all of this—here he gestured broadly, perhaps at Jergen Steinman, just then putting a crab cake into his mouth and bending his head to listen to something Mildred Gold, an ancient photographer whom my grandmother referred to as the Dowager Artist, was saying to him, or perhaps he meant to encompass the whole museum, the galleries and halls of sculpture, the courtyard and the café—more than a little tedious. Then he was off. The problem, he said, was that at some point artists abandoned any real attempt at crafting arresting images and sought instead to turn art itself into a kind of social and political and philosophical commentary that had theretofore been more in the realm of literature and the theater. And wasn’t that really part of the problem, the comparative intellectual poverty of the so-called visual arts, including their laughable bastard brother, performance art, when you compared them to writing and theater. Anyway, look at an artist like this Steinman character, Mark said. It’s all very clever, but any second-rate nonfiction normative history of the Second World War had more profound insights into the nature of fascism than some clown in a costume-shop SS outfit prancing around a museum and declaiming a bunch of puerile nonsense that he just ripped off from Adorno. I mean, Mark said, I read one of his little manifestos, and it’s basically a barely literate recapitulation of the whole No Poetry After Auschwitz thing, which is hardly even interesting as an aphorism, let alone as some kind of thesis on which to base an entire performative persona. What could be more ridiculous? It would be like saying there can be no rock-and-roll after My Lai, no, I don’t know, no fine dining after 9/11. What is the relationship of these things, the one to the other? The problem is that these artists, coming as they do from a fine-art academic background, studying as they did mostly in what are effectively conservatories, came up among a pack of basically undereducated art world hangers-on as well as a few scam artists whose principal interest is merely making these things into salable commodities. What they lack is any kind of analytic and philosophical framework within which they can make any kind of meaningful commentary on the you’ll-pardon-the-expression way we live now, less yet a sufficient historical reach and grasp to speak meaningfully about the enormities of the twentieth century, or about neocolonial American foreign policy, or about man’s relationship to nature, or about the soul . . . the wider the focus, the more profoundly self-regarding is their work; meanwhile, even Hollywood is more insightful; the latest giant robot movie a work of infinitely greater complexity and ambition than anything you are likely to encounter in a museum; the biggest summer superhero flick more spiritually profound than anything you’ll find in the New York galleries. The artifacts of contemporary culture are as fake as the Native American beadwork you buy by the road in New Mexico. The museums, he said, might as well be casinos.

12

Toward the evening’s end, I found my grandmother sipping wine at a low table. She was in a wheelchair. Nana! I said. Why are you in a wheelchair?

Junior, she said, which was what she’d often call me, since my father was also Peter. I detected a subtle reproach in the nickname; our family had never had a tradition of naming sons after their fathers, and I think she disapproved of my parents for what she perceived as their egotism. Give me a kiss. I bent to kiss her cheek and sat down across from her. It’s my toe, she told me, gesturing at her one elevated foot.

What’s wrong with your toe?

They say it’s broken, she answered in a tone of patrician skepticism that implied that they, the doctors, presumably, were putting one over on her. She was both addicted to and disbelieving of modern medicine; she availed herself of an immense network of doctors and had specialists for every part of her body; she couldn’t sneeze without a consultation; but her principal joy was in doubting their diagnoses and complaining about their bills.

Well, is it broken? I asked.

I haven’t the slightest idea. The X-ray was inconclusive. I’ve asked for an MRI. Of course they agreed. Do you know doctors are paid by the procedure? Ask your mother about it. It’s the reason health care is so expensive.

I laughed and said, But would you have preferred that they refused the MRI?

They might have tried to dissuade me. I think it’s a conspiracy. Do you know my ophthalmologist told me I shouldn’t drive? I told him in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t be a prisoner in my own home. Now this toe business. Of course, I went to the orthopod for it. I may go to Dr. Patel, who’s the podiatrist. I’ve always found her to be very accommodating.

Maybe you shouldn’t drive if your ophthalmologist thinks your eyesight is going.

He’s overly cautious. I have no trouble seeing large moving objects.

Right, but I think maybe he’s more concerned about, you know, small moving objects.

She waved her ring-encumbered hand. Like what, squirrels? Kitty cats? Pigeons?

Well, children, I said.

Children, she repeated, as if hearing the word for the first time. No, I doubt it. It’s not like when your father was a little boy. I don’t think they’re allowed out anymore, due to the pedophiles. Nana was particularly concerned with pedophiles; for a woman of her age, she was remarkably adept with the computer, and hardly a day went by without her forwarding some link or article to me about the latest depredations of some priest or schoolteacher or coach.

Why don’t you just hire a car service? I said. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about it.

I could never afford it. This horrible museum has taken all of my money. I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t spend it on all this contemporary trash. And you know I’m not some awful old matron, either. Your grandfather and I once had lunch with Warhol. After he was famous, no less. He was trying to sell us something. Your grandfather asked why on earth we’d want a picture of a car crash, which is what it was, I think. Warhol said, Because it’s going to be worth a lot of money. The two of them got on famously, but then Jack found out that he was a homosexual and backed out. I tried to tell him that all artists are homosexual, but as you know, your grandfather was very traditionally Catholic. There haven’t been any good Catholic artists since the Renaissance, which is why we never accumulated a decent art collection.

Nana, you’re hysterical. Wasn’t Warhol Catholic? And you should meet this guy I just met. He doesn’t like art, either. Anyway, I’m sure Mom and Dad would pay for the car service if you needed it.

Well, where would I go?

This was the sort of thing that infuriated my mother. Dad was either so accustomed to it or so oblivious to the behavior of others in general that he didn’t notice. Nana had been a formidably intelligent woman, much smarter than any of the men in the family, either her Ivy League husband or his brothers or any of their sons, but after she turned eighty, all of her intellect seemed to turn toward an endless game of always finding a reason to disagree with something that she herself had just said. She may just have been bored, all the original thoughts that she’d ever think already thought; all the conversations exhausted; her friends either dead or preserved under the Florida or Phoenix sun. She may not have known she was doing it, although I detected an element of glee in her voice and bearing when she pulled the trick on Mom, with whom she’d always had an odd relationship, more like the rivalry between sisters that between a mother and her daughter-in-law. Not to suggest any kind of crackpot Freudianism. It was hard to imagine that Nana worried about Mom taking Dad away from her. Dad was so blissfully abstracted that he’d never belonged to anyone anyway. He enjoyed wine, opera, baseball, Yale, and the stock market in roughly descending order. He loved us—I was sure of that—but his love was so matter-of-fact and inevitable that it felt mostly like a product of nature and instinct, an adaptive evolution of human sentiment that our biology was as yet simply too primitive to explain.

Alone among my family, I thought Nana’s circumlocutory games were fun, and I usually egged her on, but Lauren Sara, who’d drifted off for a while with Tom and a gaggle of upscale fags, had found me, and I had to introduce her.

I’d hoped to escape the party without their meeting but now saw how absurd that hope had been. To be fair, I’d always tried, unsuccessfully, to keep Lauren Sara apart from my friends and family, had always failed, and felt that they all viewed her with something like embarrassment on my behalf. That my own ridiculous, furtive behavior might have been the largest part of this reception did not, at the time, occur to me. The conclusions you’ll naturally draw about my character aren’t very flattering. And actually, I’ve exaggerated slightly. She and my father got along just fine; the few times they’d met, they’d found common topics of interest in metallurgy and materials science and welding and suchlike—Dad had trained as an engineer before becoming, ahem, a management consultant, and Lauren Sara knew her way around a shop. Johnny, of course, told me that I wasn’t afraid of my family’s disapproval at all, but of their approval. They loved Katherine, he told me, and you fucked that up. So obviously the whole thing is a subconscious act of superstitious, self-imposed distancing. I thought this was all rather pat. The truth was that she was just so not a Morrison. I’d taken her to one doomed dinner with my family where she’d tried to explain her current veganism to my mother, telling her she didn’t eat anything with a face. Mom gave me a significant look, then offered to order her a plain cheese pizza.

Nana, I said, this is my girlfriend, Lauren Sara. Lauren Sara, this is my grandmother, Nanette.

My grandmother offered her hand and said, Lauren Sara. Isn’t that two names?

My best friend when I was a kid was named Lauren, too. So she was always Lauren Nicole and I was always Lauren Sara.

Well, Nana said, that seems fully rational. Peter is named after his father. His parents toyed with the idea of calling him PJ, but I convinced them otherwise. I said that he’d end up an unsuccessful radio sports announcer if he were to reach adulthood known only by his initials. How long have you two been seeing each other?

About six months, I said.

Seven, said Lauren Sara.

Well, be prepared, Nana said. The true tests of relationships occur at eight months, three years, and seven years. The last one is famous but less consequential, because by then you’re too exhausted to care. How long did you date Katherine, Junior?

Three years, I said.

Well, there, you see. Empirical confirmation. Oh dear, here comes Mildred. I abhor her. You’d both better run off before she gets here. Don’t worry, you have plenty of time. She drags herself around like a walrus with that walker. Have you seen Arlene? Good Lord, this show. You know, there was a time, before the war of course, when you could meet real, live fascists. Half your grandfather’s graduating class at Yale, for God’s sake. I have to suspect they’d be embarrassed by this whole charade. The Nazis deserve something more substantial than a game of dress-up, if you’d like my opinion. In any case, if you run into Arlene again, tell her that I think her show is a triumph . . . of the will.

13

Your grandmother’s a trip, Lauren Sara said.

We were smoking in the courtyard. The party was winding down. Arlene and a gaggle of curators and museum administrators and other people in important geometric glasses had bundled Steinman off to a private dinner party. Tom and Julian and the art fags had gone off to the same bar where Lauren Sara and I had first met, which was a popular post-dinner stop-off for the curators and their visiting artists owing to its collection of works by local artists and carefully designed tumbledown chic, and this was, not coincidentally, why Tom and his gang had gone there; not having been invited to the dinner, they hoped to head Steinman et al. off at the pass, so to speak, hoping to offer up the few moments of public sycophancy that they believed to be their natural and inalienable right as minor vassals in the little feudal country of Art. Julian, whose preferred topics of conversation ranged from an expensive new squash racket to the weight savings of the expensive new components on his expensive road bike, would not enjoy himself, and Tom, seeing that Julian wasn’t enjoying himself, would get angry and sulk, because as he saw it, before he’d met Julian, or Julian him, his boyfriend’s life had been a dull and effectively meaningless existence, days at the office followed by hard workouts, tasteless expensive dinners at pricey but inferior restaurants, and the heroic intake of beer and scotch, to be compensated for by more and harder workouts, all of it surrounded by and fueled by and bathed in money—Julian was no Internet millionaire or New York finance wunderkind, but he made the sort of money that I associated with my parents and their friends; Tom, of course, was poor; I doubted the museum paid him more than thirty thousand a year, if that, but he considered himself glamorous; before him, Julian had gone to steakhouses and trashy gay house parties where everyone took off their shirts or swam naked in the pool; now he went to openings and galas and met artists and similar subspecies. These things were so self-evidently superior to Tom that he couldn’t see how wasted they were on Julian, and he attributed Julian’s sour moods to ungratefulness. In his version of things, his inversion of things, Tom incredibly played the role of the older, wealthier man, and Julian was the kept woman chafing against the very comforts she’d originally sought. It might have occurred to me that this said something about the way we all misapprehend our relationships, but it did not.

14

My grandmother is nuts, I said.

She seems super-rich.

Not really, I said. I guess maybe she used to be. Nobody talks about it, and I used to think there was, like, a dark secret or something. But then I figured out that after my grandfather died she gave a bunch away. Ill-advisedly, as my dad says. And then she lost a bunch in the stock market. No one ever talked about it because there wasn’t anything to talk about. It’s actually a very boring story.

What’s a boring story?

Jesus! I yelped. Mark and Helen had appeared behind us again.

Sorry, said Helen. Mark is always sneaking up on people. It’s how we met. I was so startled that I accidentally agreed to go out with him.

Cool, said Lauren Sara.

Smokers, said Mark. I like you guys even more. Can we steal cigarettes from you? Neither of us smokes unless someone else gives us cigarettes.

We all stood for a while watching the end of the party queuing up at valet.

So what’s this boring story? Mark asked.

Oh, nothing. We were talking about my grandmother.

And who’s your grandmother?

It was an odd question, so I laughed, but he seemed to want an answer, so I said, No one. An old lady who may or may not have squandered her fortune.

That doesn’t sound boring, said Helen.

Trust me.

I don’t, said Mark. It sounds like an English novel. The Life and Times of . . .

He trailed off. I didn’t say anything. Lauren Sara said, Nanette Morrison.

Nanette? said Helen.

That’s her name, said Lauren Sara.

No shit, said Mark. We know your grandma. How about that?

How do you know my grandmother?

She bought a piece from Helen.

Oh, cool! said Lauren Sara.

A piece? I said.

Of art, Helen answered. I was an artist.

15

I have to warn you, Mark said.

Warn me?

Helen is going to stuff your girlfriend’s nose full of coke.

She’s not really into coke.

No offense, Mark said, but she looks a little get-along, go-along.

You might be right.

They’d gone off to the bathroom together, and I’d made some lame comment about women going to the bathroom together. Mark had asked for another cigarette. So, I said, you don’t really think all artists should be shot.

He shrugged and grinned and inhaled and exhaled.

Seeing, I said, as your girlfriend is an artist.

Mark said, She’s the exception that proves the rule.

It’s funny that you know my grandmother.

All coincidences converge on the inevitable, he said.

I’m sorry? I said.

So what do you do, Pete? he asked as if he hadn’t heard me.

Corporate shill, I said. Fake money and contracts and stuff. I work for a big company downtown, although no one’s ever heard of it. What about you?

Sort of a lawyer.

What’s a sort-of lawyer?

I don’t practice. I’m a bit of a corporate shill myself. I used to work at a company called Dynamix.

Sounds like a breakfast cereal.

That’s funny, he said. That was actually a joke around the office. It was a consulting firm, whatever that means. Anyway, then I did some private consulting and equity stuff for a while, and now I’m working for a big Dutch NV that’s gobbling up some shitty American companies for reasons that only the Übermenschen in Rotterdam comprehend.

Oh shit, I said.

He smiled—not a grin, not a smirk, not a guarded display of approval or pleasure, but an actual unmediated expression of joy. Really? He said, and then he laughed, and his laughter, too, was disturbingly genuine. Global Solutions Solutions for a Global World?

16

This, more or less, was how we ended up crushed in the back seat of Mark’s little fast car on our way to what Mark called Our Club. New friendships require less bargaining than old ones, less planning, fewer points to settle and details to iron out; for instance, I’d left my car on a side street in Oakland; if it had been Tom or Derek or even Johnny (not that the issue would have come up with Johnny, who didn’t have a car and did not, to the best of my knowledge, know how to drive), I’d have worried about that part—for no good reason, but nevertheless. But that evening it had seemed immaterial. The valets had brought Mark’s silver teardrop around, and we were off.

We whistled down Fifth Avenue, past the university and the hospitals, a pile of immense, mismatched buildings that climbed the hillside to our right like a stepped bastard ziggurat and from whose satanic bowels there emitted a constant Luciferian thrum. Packs of students crowded across the intersections. A helicopter passed overhead. We ran a red light. Honey, Helen said, red means stop.

It was yellow.

It may have been yellow at one time.

Don’t worry. If I kill someone, we’re by the hospital.

Again, Helen said, a timing issue.

Beyond the hospital the road dropped in a steep S-curve toward the cantilevered highways that clung to the cliffs between the high bluff of the Hill District and the Monongahela. Across the river, lights stepped across the Flats and up the Slopes, and it struck me, not for the first, more like for the thousandth time, just what a preposterous place it was for a city, what a precarious topography. We crossed the Birmingham Bridge in a tight single lane between traffic cones. Whole lanes and great portions of the high arch and suspension cables were blocked and swathed in sheets of translucent plastic, which were illuminated from within by powerful work floodlights, revealing the silhouetted work of the tiny men within—tent caterpillars, ten million years hence, our successors.

We were on Carson Street briefly. A girl in tight pants vomited. Young men stood in gaggles outside of bars, simultaneously sinister and preposterous in their puffy jackets. I hate the South Side, I said.

Doesn’t Johnny live above Margaritaville? Lauren Sara had seemed to be sleeping before she spoke, her head canted back against the seat.

Yeah, I said. I keep telling him to get out of that shithole. We should stop and say hello.

Who’s Johnny? Mark asked.

My best friend.

Your only friend, said Lauren Sara, not cruelly, and anyway, I reflected, it was awfully close to being true.

We turned onto Eighteenth Street and wound our way up the Slopes. In the daylight, these were lovely neighborhoods, if a little run-down. The houses sat at odd angles to the streets, and the streets ran in switchbacks crosswise to the hills, and the whole thing was reminiscent of an Adriatic hill town, suggestive of a militarily defensible poverty, or else, not in the least because of all the little Slovak churches, of a winding stations of the cross, but there, at night, with the stands of houses suddenly replaced by bare sagging trees, with the occasional howl of a distant dog, with the old, orange streetlights buzzing and the intermittent creepy pickup truck rattling in the other direction with a slight few inches between sideview mirrors, with—was it me, or did everyone sense it?—something vague, insubstantial, and yet still threatening among the stands of weedy woods, something misty, something that, even if it didn’t have the material form to drag you down into a ravine and have its murky way with you, might just have the power to compel you to wander off on your own into the weeds, well, the point I’m making is that on a strange road in a strange car with people who were, after all, still strangers to us, there was something odd about that drive, something unsettling, something that strongly suggested no good would come of it.

But then, quite suddenly, we were above the city. We’d stopped climbing several minutes before and were winding through an unfamiliar neighborhood when we burst out onto Grandview. The city, at night, was like a strange ship, like a sharp barge splitting a larger river; the black tower of the Steel Building like a crow’s nest; the filaments of bridges like gangplanks, and you could almost imagine the whole thing plowing right on down the Ohio, hanging that gentle left onto the Mississippi at Cairo, and floating toward the Gulf; you could imagine waking one day to find yourself on an urban island, surrounded by water; or, anyway, I could imagine it, Atlantis, or thereabouts.

We ended up somewhere just off Grandview in a little commercial district with an Italian grocery, a storefront pharmacy advertising diabetic socks, and a few square cement-block buildings that might have been plumbers or repair shops. Mark parked along the curb across from the largest of them. Here were are, he said.

There was light coming through the glass door. There was an unilluminated sign on the wall above it. THE FRATERNAL ORDER OF THE OWLS, it read. NEST #93. And underneath, painted right onto the blocks: A “PLACE” FOR “FAMILY.”

17

It was a sort of social hall, smoky and too brightly lit, the bar populated by very fat old men and very skinny young ones with a few girlfriends and wives scattered among them, the former in tight jeans and little T-shirts that squeezed their bellies and accentuated their tits, the wives in high-waisted jeans and Steelers sweatshirts and sensible hair. Everyone was drinking beer; some were backed up with watery-looking scotch; one girl with a huge purse was drinking something pink and laughing too loudly and attracting some eye-rolling. That’s Alyssa, Mark said. She’s a regular. She gets all tooted up, and then she gets loud.

This place is cool, said Lauren Sara.

I have to tell you, I told Mark, that when you said we were going to your club, this isn’t exactly what I imagined.

You thought we were going to drink brandy in the library? I’m a proud Owl. It’s an important service organization.

I glanced around. There were pool tables in the back. There was an unattended karaoke station. There were two bartenders, a pretty black-haired girl who looked no older than fifteen, and a thirtyish dude with a high-and-tight haircut and a twice-or-so-broken nose. No one was paying us the slightest attention. I feel conspicuous, I said.

Why? You think you’re the first suit that ever wandered in looking for something? Go grab us a pool table. I’ll get some beers. He strode toward the bar and snapped his finger toward the bartender and his voice and demeanor changed into something very nearly close to almost authentically Pittsburgh: Joey, you dick, he said.

My man, said Joey.

18

Mark and I played a game of pool while the ladies “used the restroom,” so to speak, and then they returned, glassy-eyed, and a small fold of glossy paper passed between Helen and Mark when she kissed him on the cheek. Then Mark led me down a flight of stairs, but instead of going into the bathroom we walked through a blank door at the end of the hall and into a portion of unfinished basement that was filled with broken artificial Christmas trees and light-up Santa Clauses. This is the stuff of nightmares, I said. I’ll never sleep again.

Sleep is a human weakness, Mark said. He’d latched the door behind us. There was a glass table with a couple of chairs near an old slop sink, and the purpose of this room, and of our visit to it, if it had not yet been obvious to me, became so. Do you know that dolphins sleep by shutting off one hemisphere of their brain at a time, so they’re always active and aware? That’s my goal. I’m training in that direction.

Chemically? I grinned.

By any means necessary, he answered.

You should meet my friend Johnny. He could probably tell you about sinister yogis or something who can already do it. Or a government conspiracy. CIA mind control. Military psyops. Jesus, those are serious.

Your friend sounds right up my alley. I’m into anything sinister. And as for all this, we ought to get while the getting is good. My darling Helen tends to have little mishaps in which the stuff [he drew quotation marks in the air] tends to fall into the toilet. He drew them again. I’ve strictly forbidden her from purchasing any more from our friendly bartender, and since I know that’s useless, I’ve also forbidden Shawna from selling her any.

I sniffled and handed back the bill. Shawna?

The bartendress, I should say. The Owlette. The brains of the operation.

19

The following occurred:

(1) Did cocaine. (2) Took a piss. (3) Returned to the pool table. (4) Played doubles: Mark and Helen vs. Peter and Lauren Sara. Lost. Mark and Peter vs. Helen and Lauren Sara. Lost. (5) More beers appeared. Several shots of whiskey appeared. (6) Peter and Helen vs. Mark and Lauren Sara. Won. (7) Rematch. Won again. (8) Girls wandered off again. (9) Mark said something like, Just you wait and you’ll see what I was talking about. (10) Asked him what was the real story with my company. Your company? he said. Never confuse service and ownership, he told me. (11) Felt a slight pounding behind my eyes. Concluded I should not have mixed quite so carelessly. Decided another beer would do the trick. (12) Girls returned. (13) Honey, Helen said, you’re not going to believe what happened. I believe everything, Mark said. I dropped the stuff in the toilet, Helen said. Incroyable, Mark said. I don’t believe it. You’re making fun of me. I’d never. Asshole. Couldn’t tell if they were fighting or not. (14) Felt a thin current of hate as if near a lightning strike. (15) Got the feeling from the placement of their bodies, however, the cant of their hips toward each other, the tilt of Mark’s head toward hers, the way they drew into closer proximity as they fought or pretended to fight or flirted by means of fighting, that there was an intense and frightening physical attraction between the two, something stronger than magnetism, as in the bonds of an atomic nucleus, which, if broken, would explode. (16) Felt self-conscious staring and tried to talk to Lauren Sara. Found her tap-tap-tapping on her phone. Who ya textin’? I asked. Tom. Fuck Tom; what’s up with Tom? He says there is a party in the apartment where Steinman is staying. It sounds terrible. I want to go. We just got here. No, we’ve been here, like, an hour, and it’s boring. It’s not boring. You’re just staring at that fucking girl; it’s boring; I’m gonna go to the party. We don’t have a car. Tom said he’ll pick me up. Whatever, I said. Do what you like. (17) Felt bad twenty minutes later when she left. (18) Ran out behind her and said, Listen, stay at my place tonight. Yeah. She shrugged. Okay. Cool. (19) Realized that she hadn’t been half as angry as I’d imagined her to be and found myself infuriated by her nonchalance, as it suggested something inadequate about us, something not quite fully felt. (20) Went back inside. (21) Found Mark and Helen playing pool. (22) Realized how very good they both were. (23) Realized that I hadn’t sunk a shot in either game that Helen and I had won. (24) Listened to them circle and taunt each other. You’re always behind the eight ball, Helen said. That’s funny, Mark said, coming from you. (25) Zoned out for a bit. (26) Came to and heard Helen say something like, Fuck your new friend. (27) Heard Mark say something like, Just don’t talk about it on Facebook this time. (28) Saw Helen throw her cue onto the table and stalk up to the bar. (29) Tried to appear as if I hadn’t been listening. Didn’t fool Mark. (30) Nevertheless, Mark said, So, Global Solutions. You know I’m going to fuck you. You’re going to fuck me? Not kindly, not lovingly, without compassion or quarter. That sounds terrible. Fair warning; get out while you can. Eh, if you lay me off, I can get unemployment. You don’t seem like the type. I shrugged and said, All scams are essentially the same, something Johnny had once said to me in another context entirely. It seemed to impress Mark; at least, he smiled. (31) Mark said, Where’d your girlfriend go? Her friend got her; she went to a party. We bored her. She’s not excitable. You stayed. You guys are more interesting, and I hate her friends. That’s a recipe for disaster, Mark said; you can neither like nor dislike each other’s friends; all outside affections are doomed, or else yours is. So I shouldn’t have any friends? I asked. (32) He shrugged. We don’t, he said.

20

The drugs, or, more accurately, the baby laxatives and other miscellaneous and sundry substances with which they’d been adulterated, had found their way to my beer- and hors d’oeuvres-soggy gut, and I had to dash to the bathroom. It was not clean. While I sat there, I felt the first nibble of conscience, the first stage whisper of what would several hours hence crescendo into the next day’s regret, the sense, strange but familiar, that I could hear my own future self whispering to me across all the hours between us. Asshole, he was saying. I didn’t do drugs, nor drink heavily, nor abandon my girlfriend in favor of strangers I’d only just met; well, not habitually—plainly I did do these things, when pressed, or when sufficiently tempted, or, anyway, I had done them, at least once, that night.

Conscience is a strange thing. I didn’t believe that drugs or drinking heavily or staying out late were bad or morally suspect; I wasn’t especially worried about Lauren Sara, who, I was sure, I would find later that evening in my bed, or who would find me there, depending only on which of us escaped our respective parties first; we might have sex, or might not; we weren’t that kind of couple; I might hold her, or might not; it was warm enough that whichever of us was first into the apartment would open the windows in the bedroom; there would be the distant sounds of hospitals, which were ubiquitous in the city, and ambulances and late-night traffic and the strange, feral children whom we never saw, and who seemed to play only at night. In the morning, one of us would make coffee; Lauren Sara would get on her bike and ride off to do whatever it was she did when I wasn’t around; I sometimes thought that she proved the crackpot science that said the world is created by observation and those things not observed at a given moment cannot with any certainty be said to exist. I would putter around the house, make more coffee, call my parents, check my email, chat with Johnny online or on the phone, consider dinner, run to the gym to play racquetball or swim a few laps once my hangover had become manageable; meet Derek or someone at a bar and have a beer and watch the Pens for a period or two; go home early to Lauren Sara or not to Lauren Sara; sleep well, get up, and get on with it.

Nevertheless, I knew that I’d be nagged, rationally or not, in proportion to the night’s excesses or out of proportion thereto, by that second self, the creature of habit and indoctrination and acculturation that lives in all of us and delights in nothing so much as picking at the scabs of our venial wounds.

When I’d emptied my bowels and small intestines and pride and dignity into the dingy toilet and cleaned myself and made it back to the bar, I found myself in the middle of an altercation. A hairy Sasquatch in a sleeveless T-shirt and a hat that read HOMESTEAD HARLEYS had Mark in a sleeper hold. I blinked. Not a Sasquatch, but a man of Sasquatchian stature. I knew I shouldn’t have done those fucking mushrooms. He kept saying, Easy now, easy now. The bartender, Joey, was trying to reason with Mark. I didn’t see Helen anywhere. Mark, buddy, he said. Come on. I sidled up to the girl with the bright drink; whatever she’d moved on to, it was now as blue as something out of Star Trek. What the fuck? I said.

Aw, no, she said, and her voice was every Pittsburgh accent blended, distilled, and evaporated into a little bouillon cube of swallowed vowels and nasal consonants. He was beatin’ on his girl.

Easy now, easy now, said Bigfoot.

Mark? I said. That guy?

Naw, Billy, she said.

Who?

The dude who gawt him in the sleeper hold. Yeah, of course Mark.

Get off me. Get the fuck off me, Mark was yelling

No one else was paying much attention; they’d seen this shit before. Shawna was leaning on the bar with her chin in her hands, watching the struggle with the look of a businessman eating alone in an airport restaurant.

He hit her? I asked.

The girl shrugged. He snatched her up n’at, she said.

He snatched her up? I repeated.

Yeah. She looked at me as if we were speaking a related but mutually unintelligible language. He snatched her up.

Mark told the big man, I’m warning you.

Come on, dude, said Joey. Let’s call it a night.

What did she do? I asked.

Who?

Helen. His girlfriend.

Aw, she slapped the fuck outta him and took off.

I saw Mark take a deep, three-part breath. He closed his eyes for a full second. He stopped struggling and his body went slack. He opened his eyes. He took another breath. All right, he said. Sorry. He opened his palms as much as he was able in that yeti’s absurd grip. It’s cool.

All right, then, said the yeti, all right. And he set Mark down.

Mark turned his head and looked straight at me. Mark, I said. The fuck?

Then I thought I saw him flash another reptilian wink. Then he wheeled around and sucker-punched the poor fat fucker right in the nose. It made a sound like someone opening a bag of chips. The bigfoot stumbled back, hand to his nose, tripped on a barstool, and sprawled on the dirty floor. His hat fell off and sat sadly on the floor behind him. His nose might have been broken; anyway, it was bleeding. There had been a few screams as it happened, well, anyway brief yips of surprise or dismay. Joey took a step backward. Shawna now had the surprised look of a woman who never expects to be surprised. Mark straightened his tie, turned to Joey. The poor bigfoot on the floor was sitting up and gripping his damaged snout. Mark seemed about to say something; I waited for him to deliver some sort of terrifying and deadly ultimatum, but he just made a sound between a snort and a laugh and rolled his eyes and turned and walked out.

Then I somehow found the presence of mind to dash back to the pool table and grab Mark’s jacket, which he’d left slung over a chair, before I scurried out after him.

21

Oh, thanks, he said. He reached into the inner breast pocket and pulled out his wallet. I thought I’d lost this. He extracted two twenties, paused, and added a third. He pushed the money into my hand. I stared at it. Listen, he said. Sorry. She gets a little crazy. I’ve got to go find her. She’ll try to walk home and end up in a ditch. Cab’s on me. Sorry for the whatnot. Listen, we’ll have lunch or something next week. I owe you.

Then he walked across the street.

Then he got into his car.

Then I said, mostly to myself, But you can’t get a cab on Mount Washington, but he was already pulling away.

Joey the bartender and Homestead Harley, who had a wad of brown institutional paper towel over his nose, came out onto the sidewalk. Your friend’s a real piece of work, Joey said.

A real piece of shit, Bigfoot said. I think my nose is broke.

Sorry, I said. He’s not my friend. I just met him.

He leave you up here? Joey said.

I shrugged. Gave me cab fare, I said.

What the fuck, Joey said. You can’t get no cabs in Pittsburgh.

Yeah, I said. Whatever. I’ve got a friend who lives down on the South Side. I’m just going to walk to his place to crash.

Well, said Joey, you might as well tie one on for the road, since you’re not driving.

Oh man, well, I’d feel a little awkward after the, uh, the whatnot.

Aw, shit, said the yeti, and he gave me a brotherly clap on the shoulder that reverberated through my spine. You can’t hold nobody accountable just because his buddy’s a douche. Anyways, he just caught me off guards is all.

So I had another beer, and maybe Shawna gave me a little bump for the road on my way out.

22

The Mount was a mystery to anyone who didn’t live there, and although I was sure there were shorter and better routes down its face to Johnny’s street, I only knew to take the McArdle Roadway, which ran crosswise to the hill from Grandview down to Carson Street on the Flats four hundred feet below. It took me a few drunken minutes to get my bearings and find my way back to Grandview; then I turned left and walked along the scenic overlook toward McArdle, the bright city across the river to my right, a half mile distant but seemingly so close that I might, with a running start, leap from here to there. I’d texted Johnny and told him I was en route; he’d replied: my r not we out late. It’s a long story, I typed. U can pay for breakfast, he replied.

As I neared one of the small overlook balconies perched off the roadway, weird modern toadstools sprouted on concrete stems from the cliff below, I noted a solitary figure, and a few steps later saw that it was Helen, and I thought that Mark must not have been looking very hard, because here she was in the most obvious place you could imagine.

Helen, I said.

Oh. She only glanced at me before turning back to the view. You.

Me, I said. Are you okay?

How’re you doing? How about this weather we’re having? What about those Pens, think they’ll win the Cup?

Yeah, I said. Sorry. Habit. Reflex. Are you cold?

I’m pissed.

I’d offer you a ride, I said.

Now she turned, and she smiled in spite of herself, the sad smile of someone who knew pretty well what was coming. I think you may be missing an important component of that offer.

True, I said. Does Mark know you’re here?

No. Yes. I texted him and told him I got lost in Allentown to flip him out. You know, delicate white woman amongst the etc. in the middle of the night. I guess I ought to tell him where I really am.

That seems wise.

Wise, she repeated. You’re funny.

I’ve been accused of worse.

She tilted her head. Are you trying to flirt with me? she said.

I flushed. No.

You should be warned, she told me. I flirt back. She took her phone out of her purse and spent a few seconds composing a text. A moment later, it rang. She answered. Yeah, she said. I’m here. Yes. Yes. No. Yes, we seem to have bumped into each other. She covered the receiver with her hand in the old-fashioned gesture. He wants to know, she said to me, if you’ll wait with me until he arrives. Yes, I said. Yes, she said, bringing the phone back to her mouth. All right. All right. Okay.

She put the phone back into her bag. She leaned on the rail and looked at the city. I let myself look at her again now that we were alone, and it seemed to me that, while Mark was slightly less than human, she looked, if you can imagine, almost too much so.

Lovely view, she said.

Struck by the incongruity, I didn’t reply, but leaned on the rail beside her and looked at the skyscrapers across the way for some period of time.

Then she touched my chin with her hand, and when I turned, she looked as if she were about to kiss me, so I kissed her, meaning it to be serious but brief, getting something more than I’d anticipated in return.

Whoa, I said. Um.

Your girlfriend is very pretty, Helen said. A bit of a space cadet. You ought to pay more attention to her. She smiled. She likes you, I think. And we all need attention, one way or another. It’s our worst quality as a species. We’ll take what we can get.

Then Mark pulled up and hopped out of the car and strode across the grass and sidewalk to where we were standing. He looked at me, gratitude mixed with calculation, then at her, and he said, Honey, you scared the shit out of me. Jesus.

I know, she said. Punishment.

Mea culpa and so forth. Let me take you home.

You know I will.

Yes, he said.

Um, guys, I said. Because behind them, between us and the city, hovering, silent, mirrors so perfect that I could see my own face reflected even at a distance and even in the dark, were three silver disks, twenty or so feet in diameter, rounded at the edges, humming distantly, watching us, or so it seemed to me, as we watched them, before they moved, or seemed to move, at an impossible speed in a vertical line and became nonexistent somewhere above the few thinly visible clouds.