The Bend of the World

I recall falling asleep on a bench with my arm under my ear. I recall waking during the night because my arm had fallen asleep. I recall peering through one squinting, open eye at one of my cellmates, a skinny boy with knotted hair, and asking about my car. What car, man? he asked. Can you, like, describe the car? I said a little VW, small dent on the front quarterpanel, gray. Oh yeah, he said. Your girl took it. Mm, I said.

The Morrisons of Sewickley, Pennsylvania, had several lawyers, but they were not the sort of lawyers that drove out to Armstrong County to spring you from the lockup, so I called Cousin Bill, the closest thing I knew to a criminal, a man who I knew for a fact had spent a night or two in the tank himself, and as I’d hoped he would he laughed, his squeaky, wheezing little voice trilling with pure delight, and said he was sending Ben David posthaste. He said it as if I should know who Ben David was. Who’s Ben David? I asked. David Ben David, he said. He’s the swingingest-dicked Jew in Pittsburgh, bar none. I thought the mayor’s man was the swingingest-dicked Jew in Pittsburgh, I said. The sheriff’s deputy in the room looked up from his cell phone. I shrugged. He shook his head. Kantsky? said Bill. He’s not Jewish. I mean, maybe his dad was. His mom was Italian. A DiBella, if I remember right. We went to Allderdice together. He’s a goddamn Knight of Columbus. For real? I said. Far as I know, said Bill. Anyway, Ben David is a fucking shark. He’ll chomp chomp chomp those oakie fucks up there. Just don’t mention the Palestinians. Why the fuck would I mention the Palestinians? I’m just saying, said Bill. He’s ex-Mossad. Not. A. Fan. Okay, I said. So I should just sit tight? Exactly, said Bill. By the way, my recommendation is to take a shit, if possible. No one’ll mess with you if they know you just took a shit. Yeah, thanks, I said. Kidding, he said. I’m proud of you, little cuz. Seriously, try not to get fucked in the ass.

I spent a night with some miscellaneous hippies from the party and a few pacing meth heads who may or may not have been from the party. After we’d been unloaded from the van, I’d been hauled one way and Johnny another. We’d passed each other, and he’d offered me a grin so extraordinary and out of place that I thought I must still be hallucinating. Hot dogs, he’d said, and he’d laughed as they dragged him away. He’d never arrived in my cell. Then in the morning I was free. Ben David was waiting for me with my phone and wallet. I looked carefully at my phone. It was undamaged. I checked the contacts. It was definitely mine. He wore a shiny golf shirt, pleated khakis, and suede driving shoes. He had broad shoulders, gray hair that looked as if it belonged to a European orchestra conductor, and the barest suggestion of a paunch behind his braided belt. Peter, he said. His big hand gripped mine. He had the last, ineradicable trace of an Israeli accent. A pleasure to meet you. Bill sends his regards. I told the lawyer I was really grateful. Don’t worry, he said. I know the sheriff up here; I do a lot of drug cases up here. Meth, you know, mostly. A little heroin. Trailed off a lot since the gas companies came in. A good economy is bad for a criminal defense practice. We walked outside. It was a bright, cool morning. Shit, I said. What about my car? Impounded, probably, he said. Sorry. I’m working on that. Seizures—he lowered his voice—are the biggest cop scam of all. I’m seeing what I can do. You know what, I said. Forget it. It isn’t worth anything anyway. Ben David said reverently, Okeir beitoo bo’tsayah bat’sa v’shonay matanot yich’yeh.

I’m sorry? I said. The greedy for gain brings trouble to his home, but he who hates bribes shall live, said Ben David.

That’s an interesting attitude for a lawyer, isn’t it? I said. We walked down a slight incline toward the far parking lot, where Ben David’s long, late-model Cadillac glinted in the sun. Beyond it, a line of trees and a muddy creek. Not at all, said Ben David. Bribes are the province of officials. There are no bribes among criminals. All exchanges among the lawless are legitimate. The law itself is a precondition for corruption. This is why I went into defense. Well, that and the money. He smiled and offered my shoulder an avuncular slap. Everyone is guilty, you see. You’re a Catholic; you should understand. But rarely is anyone guilty of what they’re accused of. Hey, I said. What about Johnny? Ah, said Ben David. Your friend. I inquired. He was transferred to Allegheny this morning. The phrase “other charges” was used. I didn’t press it. Apparently there was a warrant. Since all they had up here was public intox and resisting arrest, they sent him down right away. A warrant? I said. For what? Don’t know, said Ben David. I made some calls. We’ll see. Let me ask you this—we stood beside his car—do you think that he might have been mixed up with this Wilhelm Zollen character? Pringle? I said. Sure, said Ben David. Whatever his name is. Yes, I said. Yes, unfortunately, I do. Well then, Ben David said, he’s probably fucked in the short term. But like I said, I’ll see what I can do. Thanks, I said. We got into the car. Oh, I said. Also, did my cousin mention Helen Witold when he talked to you. Yeah, said Ben David. Is she the artist? He told you she was an artist? No, said Ben David. No. I know her name. One of my partners at the firm has a piece by her. Got it as a part of a payment in a divorce thing for some museum person or other. No shit, I said. Yes shit, he said. Anyway, no, nothing about her. According to the cops, everyone who didn’t get arrested dispersed. Most of them were from Pittsburgh, presumably. I’m sure she got a ride. Hm, I said. I dialed her and went straight to voice mail. Then I realized I didn’t have my keys. Did they have keys with my other shit? I asked. No, he told me. Why? Did you have keys? I must have given them to Helen, I said, although I could not recall having given them to Helen. She must have taken the car. I called her again, and this time I left a message. Helen, I said. I’m going to need my car back.

On the ride home, Ben David asked me, So what do you do exactly? I was watching the trees swing past the highway. A deer looked up as we passed. Exactly? I said. Good question. Bill says you work for Global Solutions. Oh, I said. You’ve heard of us. One of my partners, Ben David said, just started working on a wrongful termination suit. Ah, I said. Well, I guess you could say I wrongfully terminate. Ah, said Ben David. Actually, there is no more Global Solutions. We are now Vandevoort IRCM WorldSolv. As of earlier this month. Jesus, said Ben David. Vandevoort, said Ben David. The Dutch company? They were collaborators, you know. Really? I said. One of the few foreign companies that kept supplying Speer in the last year or so of the war, he said. Huh, I said. Did you learn about it in Mossad? Mossad? said Ben David. He laughed. Who told you that, Bill? He’s a real joker. So you weren’t in Mossad, I said. He didn’t answer, but he shook his head and seemed amused. Instead, he said, So, do you like firing people? No, I said. Bill told me he once asked you to come into the business. That’s true, I said. When I’d first moved into the apartment, he’d asked if I wanted to work with him. I was right out of school and just starting to interview for corporate jobs. I could use a hand, he’d told me. I’ve got three new buildings, and I need someone to keep track of my Mexicans. I’d declined. Well, he said, if you ever change your mind, it beats working. And he’d purred away in his fast Mercedes. Never considered it? Ben David asked. Not really, I said. Why not? he asked. To be honest, I said, I always liked Bill, but he sort of seems like a slumlord. Perhaps, said Ben David. He gave me a sidelong look. His mouth had the suggestion of a grin. I wouldn’t be so quick to grasp at the pejorative. And anyway, doesn’t a slumlord serve an actual and essential function in the world you people are making?

Ben David promised to call me on Monday and let me know what he found out about Johnny. I asked him if I owed him anything. Like what? he said. I don’t know, I said. Like money. He laughed. His fingers tapped the wheel. Gratis, he said. Tell your uncle he owes me one. He’s my cousin, actually, I said. Once removed. Well, tell your cousin, then. And stay out of trouble. I will, I said sincerely. Hell, kid, Ben David said. I was kidding.

I took a long shower. I considered the past twenty-four hours and wondered how exactly I ought to separate the actual from the unreal; what should I believe and what shouldn’t I believe; what was true and what had been false; what, if true, was the true truth, and what its mere facsimile? I remembered the woods with a clarity that was unusual after a serious dissociative trip; the particulars of those experiences—and it had been years since I’d had those trips with anything like regularity—were usually like the particulars of a dream: the more you tried to hold them firmly in your memory, the more swiftly they receded into a general impression, leaving only that impression along with a few disconcertingly precise but seemingly disparate, disconnected details in your mind. Now, of course, it seemed to me that I could match at least some of the experiences to the refraction of a bright, external reality through the weird prism of those drugs, whatever they’d been, and yet it also seemed to me that some of what I remembered had to have, in some way or other, happened. It seemed to me that Pringle must have appeared in the woods, that his minion Mandy must have threatened us, whether or not with an actual gun. But I was sure it had been an actual gun. And I was sure that Pringle had been exactly that grandiose. Or, anyway, I was fairly convinced. I was fairly convinced that he bought into that bullshit just enough really to try to kidnap us, and he might really have tried to kill us, but for the intervention of that UFO, unless that had been the police helicopter—but I had seen identical UFOs before, and they’d not been helicopters. And, also, I was mindful that dissociative drugs didn’t generally cause the mind to manufacture hallucinations; they were confabulatory; they autotuned outside stimuli to the harmonics of a user’s imagination. Or anyway, that was what I thought that I thought. Then the water was cold, and I dried myself and lay down in bed. The windows were open. Had I opened them? It had begun to rain. I had the sense that I had something to do with the rain. No, I thought; that must be an aftereffect. You got that sometimes. I thought about Johnny, who was probably in jail. Then I thought about my dad. I’m not sure why. I thought about him in his study at home, listening to the Pirates on the radio, because, he always said, he preferred it to TV, while my mother read in the other room and waited for some or other call that would send her back to the hospital; I thought of all the years between myself in that moment and him in his moment, and it occurred to me, suddenly and without warning, that my inevitable regret was not for the last night, the night before, or any day or night before that; the memories I regretted were for a remembered future, an intimation of a life that ended up in a similar study in a similar house on a similar street in a similar overmoneyed town; everything I’d ever done to the contrary was an affectation, if not exactly the affectation that Johnny, half jokingly, had always accused me of. Everyone is guilty of something, just not necessarily what they’re accused of, I thought. It occurred to me that, without knowing what it was that I wanted, I wanted something worlds away from what I had.

There are several appendices to Fourth River, Fifth Dimension, and after the last appendix (Appendix F: An Electronics Hobbyist’s Guide to Time Chamber Construction), there is a brief authorial afterward. Of course I can understand, Pringle writes, if you find the preceding material hard to believe. It is full of both what you might call the true truth, which is empirically verifiable with documents and so forth, and the unclear truth, which is the gray area you run into when you begin messing with the time stream. If you prefer to treat it as speculative fiction to increase your enjoyment of the subject matter, I would encourage you to do so. You won’t offend me! My only goal is to open your mind to different modalities of thought and consciousness, although I would also encourage you to dig more deeply into the goings-on in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and even to write your congressman or other government officials to let them know about your concerns. This bit of civic boosterism seems a little bit absurd, but I guess if you believe, why not? Anyway, Pringle goes on to say that political solutions are probably insignificant nevertheless, since they can always be deleted out of the self-editing timelike feedback loop. In the end, I think, the Project is, or was, very sad; being generally godless, I would have wanted flying saucers to be a kind of miracle, not just a red pen applied by our timid descendants to all the flawed self-creations that preceded them.

Mark, I said. I quit. You can’t quit, he said. You’re fired. He produced a document that said as much. It was dated that Monday, and since he already had it, it obviously predated my announcement. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ, I said. He can’t help you, said Mark. No, I said. I suppose not. I would also, Mark said, like to know what you’ve done with my girlfriend. What? I said. Nothing. What do you mean? Look, Mark said, I know you took her to that confab of degenerates. We left separately, I said. Don’t tell me you let her take your car? Mark grinned, that swift, wolfish baring of his canines that I’d come to recognize as the pleasure he took from another’s error. So? I said. She’s probably in flames on the side of a highway, Mark said. Never let Helen drive. I was sort of indisposed at the time, I said. Yes, said Mark. Apparently so. Well, I said. Well, Mark said. He was sitting behind my desk. I was standing just inside of the doorway. Well, look, he said. You were never really cut out for this. I still don’t know what this is, I said. No, said Mark. I don’t imagine you do. You have a tendency to look at things through a frustratingly human lens. Is there another lens? I asked. Mark tapped a pen on the desk, watching me, his eyes moving as if the eyelids were closed and they were tracing the rapid paths of a dream. He sighed. Go see Karla, he said. There will be a modest severance. And Pete, he said. Yes? I said. Keep an eye out.

Mystery Man, said Karla. I guess you didn’t make it after all. I guess I didn’t, I said. You’re better off, she told me. Am I? I said. She smiled, and she shrugged. She fingered one of her big copper earrings. Think about what we do with resources, Mystery Man, she said, and then she explained how our last mutual act, the company’s and mine, would be for them to buy, and me to sell, my silence. I would like to tell you that I said fuck it and threw the money, or the promise of it, back in her face, but I didn’t, and I won’t. Instead, I left the building and tried to have a smoke, but it tasted like a mouthful of dirt, and I couldn’t swallow. I wandered down to a filthy cop-and-lawyer bar near the river and had a couple of shots and beers with some off-duty cops and public defender types. I eavesdropped. So she says, one of the cops was saying, she says, Don’t arrest him. If you arrest him, how’m I gonna kill his ass? Another one laughed. You should’ve let her take a few swings, he said. No way; this was your classic skinny guy/fat girl domestic situation. She’d have killed him for real. Skinny guy/fat girl black, or skinny guy/fat girl white? asked one of the lawyers. White, said the black cop. Ooh, said the lawyer. The worst. Definitely the worst, the cop agreed. You think? Another lawyer. Oh yeah, the cop said. Skinny dude/fat girl black is a sex thing ninety percent of the time. He chuckled. He was pretty skinny himself. You know how we do. But for whites it’s a she-got-fat-after-a-couple-of-babies-and-he-does-a-lot-of-crank thing. Yeah, one of the lawyers said. So listen to this shit, said the other lawyer. He was young, just my age or thereabouts, although his hairline had already retreated into a W across his pale scalp; his suit was too big, and his delicate wrists were too small for his cuffs. Listen to this shit: I got one this morning who says he saved the world. I didn’t look, but tilted my head to hear them better. Oh yeah, a cop said, laughing. What from? The aliens, said the other cop. More or less, said the young lawyer. What’s the charges? asked another cop who’d just then leaned into the conversation. Plagiarism, cracked the other lawyer. They laughed. No, said the skinny lawyer. A bunch of drug shit. Hoofing it for some fat fuck down in the Mon Valley. Winston Pringle, I said. They turned and stared down the bar, their cop eyes and lawyer eyes looking through my suit, which was probably worth more than all the rest of the suits in that bar combined, and finding underneath a man who, by their expressions alone, I could see they assessed as being worth something somewhat less.

The lawyer’s name was Mike Kelly. He wasn’t a public defender, he said. The public defender’s office, he said, is bogged down in seventeen kinds of shit and doesn’t have time for this sort of trial work. Oh Jesus, I said, are they going to prosecute Johnny? I had sketched out, with as little self-implication as possible, what had transpired the weekend past and what I knew about the Pringle gang. They’re going to threaten to, Kelly told me. Christ, I hate prosecutors. Your buddy thinks he’s an expert on Nazis, wait till he meets the asshole assigned to this one. He even looks like a fucking Nazi. Blond and blue-eyed. The works. The Fourth Reich, he said. You and Johnny, I said, are going to get along. Kelly raised an eyebrow. You know, he said, I’m sure we will. Your friend is fucking crazy, but he’s a charmer. That’ll probably be to his advantage. Anyway, look: He’s already indicated his willingness to become a cooperating witness. To, I quote, end Wilhelm Zollen’s reign of evil will and subjugation on this earth forevermore. He cleared his throat. As we move, uh, forward in the process, I am going to suggest to him that all interests might be better served if we dial back on the grandiloquence. Of course, Drake isn’t really inclined to deal too generously, since those incompetent rednecks up in Armstrong lost the girl. The girl? I said. Yeah, said Kelly. The main accomplice. The partner, or whatever. Mandy, I said. Right, Kelly said. Not really her name, but not really relevant. Yeah. Fucking idiot deputies. Once they’d rounded up anyone obviously using or possessing, they just let the rest go. In her case, Jesus Christ. She walks right up to one of them and she says, You guys arrested my asshole boyfriend and he had the keys. Asshole boyfriend. Kelly shook his head. Nice touch, right? So they give her some poor jagoff’s keys, and she fucking splits in his car.

Helen.

Johnny was sitting in something resembling a half lotus when they let me into the little meeting room to see him. He had his index fingers to his thumbs and the backs of his hands resting on his knees. Jesus Christ, Johnny, get off the floor, I said. What are you doing? I’m at peace, he said. You’re in a shitload of trouble, I told him. Brother, he said, you sure are swift to swing to the moral opprobrium. I have achieved my life’s purpose. Getting thrown in the clink? I said. Very funny, he said. No. I’ve set things right. I’ve broken the cycle. I’ve let the tide turn of its own accord. Come on, I said, get up. He did, reluctantly, and I hugged him. He smelled like jail, but I didn’t want to let him go. He held me in his big arms, too. It’s okay, buddy, he said. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to go to prison, I said. We sat down at the plain table. Probably. He shrugged. For a little while, anyway. But that’s part of the plan. The plan? I said. Jesus, Johnny. Don’t worry, Rabbi Mustafah Elijah and I have discussed it extensively. The Universal Synagogue must grow, and I intend to become its chief evangelist on the inside, spreading the gospel of mental discipline, sobriety, and Gnostic self-programming. Oh, Johnny, I said. You met my lawyer, said Johnny. Poor kid. He’s terrified of the prosecutor. Did he tell you who’s prosecuting Pringle? Maybe, I said. I’m not sure. Who? Billy Drake! said Pringle. William, now. Can you fucking believe it? Do you remember that kid? I do, I said. He looks like a goddamn Bel Ami model these days, Johnny said. I told him he ought to quit persecuting poor innocent criminals and go into porn. He didn’t think that was very funny. He claims not to remember me, but I can tell he’s never forgotten our night of passion. Wearing a wedding ring, though, so I’ll play it DL for now. Johnny, I said, you’re incredible. You’re really going to prison? Seriously, kiddo, he said. The tough-guy thing is all an act. He does keep telling poor Mike that I’ve managed to offend all the wrong people. Your blog, I said. Yeah, he said. I guess someone figured it out. I told him I’d offended all the right people, but you know how lawyers think. Johnny, I said, what if I found you a, you know, better lawyer? Aw, said Johnny, I like Mike Kelly. He’s sweet. Could stand to eat a pie or two, but sweet. Yeah, I said, but why don’t you save all that charitable sentiment for your ministry? Hm, said, Johnny. Well, what’s your lawyer’s name? David Ben David, I said. Whoa, said Johnny. Sounds like a big Jew. The biggest, I said. Ex-Mossad.

I can tell you where I was when they found Helen. I was at the gym. I’d been playing racquetball with Julian, who seemed to be the only unincarcerated nonrelative whom I could call. He and Tom had broken up after Accounting had noticed some irregularities in his expense reconciliations and he’d discovered that Tom had spent a few thousand dollars on bars and clothes with Julian’s corporate card. Julian kept making lame jokes about our being two single dudes on the hunt, and I pretended to laugh, because I needed someone to hang out with. It had been a few weeks since Johnny and I had gone into the woods. It had become August; you could see the end of August already. It was still hot during the day, but at night you wanted to open the windows, and the leaves, although they were still green, had started to dry in anticipation of the fall and sounded like paper when the breeze moved them. I’d spent a week doing absolutely nothing, walking aimlessly around the apartment or the neighborhood, watching TV, buying wild ingredients and attempting to cook elaborate meals for myself that kept ending in failure and Chinese. Then Cousin Bill called and said, with no preamble, Peter, Cuz, listen, I’ve got some Mexicans coming by to drywall one of the units. Keep an eye on them for me, will you? I gotta do a thing. What do you mean, keep an eye on them? I said. I mean, he said, point them at 3A and say, Trabayho a key. I can do that, I said, and, in effect, I did.

So somehow these little projects were popping up every couple of days in the neighborhood, and Bill kept calling, and I’d even said to him, I see what you’re trying to do. Thank God, he’d said. I was beginning to think you were as dumb as your old man.

So I was at the gym. Julian had beaten me again, always a step faster, his swing that much harder, his aim that much better. But because he played hard, had no natural inclination to play to anyone’s level but his own, I had no choice but to run harder and faster than I might otherwise be inclined, and while it hurt at the time, it felt, far from frustrating, freeing, renewing, and clean. Then afterward, after we’d showered and changed, after he’d gone back to work—after, by the way, he’d asked me if I’d ever had any interest in finance, because, given my background, he thought he could probably find something right in my wheelhouse, an expression that I found as unbearable and off-putting as an overripe and under-emptied kitchen garbage can, to which I must have reacted visibly in kind, because he grinned and slapped my shoulder companionably and jogged off toward the exit—after all that, I was standing at the stupid hippie juice bar at the gym drinking the sort of concoction that I’d have theretofore scoffed at as the purest sort of bullshit but which, lately, having finally tried, I found that I rather enjoyed—I was standing there with a glass full of greenish liquid in my hand watching the muted TV when something about the local reporter standing beside the big concrete bathtub beside the river with the drizzly sky behind her caught my eye, and then the closed captioning read, I’m Katie Bologna reporting from Lock Number Nine on the Allegheny River just outside of Harmarville, where this morning a local technician discovered a body floating . . . And though the body had not yet been identified, had been in the water for weeks, had bloated and swollen and begun to rot beyond easy recognition, they knew that it was a woman, and I knew, I just knew, that it was Helen, and that the Allegheny and its currents had conspired to bring her body back to us.

It was her. They used dental records. It was reported in the paper. I nearly called Mark, but couldn’t. There was an obit. There would be a funeral and burial in two days, a service at Rodef Shalom, and internment at Homewood Cemetery.

In the immediate aftermath of her death two things happened: she was suddenly a famous artist again, and I was suddenly the last person who’d seen her alive. Two detectives came to my house and asked me a series of leading questions; I broke into a sweat and said I’d better call my lawyer. The detectives exchanged glances. You’re not a suspect, one of them said. We just want to know, Was she distraught? Well, yeah, I said, I guess. Do you know of anyone who’d want to harm her? Yes, I thought. Why? I said. So we can rule out homicide, said the other detective. You think somebody killed her? I asked. No; we think she jumped in the drink. She had more drugs in her than a pharmacy. To rule out, they said. No, I said. No.

An up-and-coming artist. The potential to rescue abstraction from its post-seventies dead end. The best hope for representational painting. A savagely insightful mind that exploded the old categories. A sort of visionary and mystic. A darling of the scene. A favorite of important collectors. A significant force in contemporary painting. An Audubon of the post-natural, post-human age. The Philip K. Dick of visual arts, who’d bridged the gap between science and science fiction and fine art. A major player. A critical darling. An articulate spokeswoman. An articulate spokesperson. A back-to-basics painter. A genius, really. Yes, absolutely. An immense loss to the American art community. A once-in-a-lifetime talent. Always underappreciated by the commercial galleries. No, no, never valued highly enough by the museums and institutional collectors. The next so-and-so. The next this. The next that. And this was just what the Internet had to say. She hadn’t, I knew, had a significant show in years. But the valedictory virus was already multiplying out of control. For whatever reason, it was this more than anything else that made me decide to go to her funeral.

The service and burial were in the evening. I’d tried to call Mark, but he’d never called back. Not that I’d expected otherwise. I woke up early. I’d wrapped myself in the blanket during the night. The window was open. It was cool. It smelled like the fall. The air was dry. I could hear dogs out on morning walks yipping with pleasure after the long summer they’d endured. I heard the beep of a truck backing up. I heard a distant helicopter, an ambulance, the sigh of a passing bus. I made myself coffee and sat in the kitchen for a long time. Then I got dressed and caught a bus downtown and walked through the suits and ties along the glass and brownstone corridor of Grant Street, past the Federal courts and the Federal Reserve and the Steel Building and the Frick Building and the little church tucked between skyscrapers and the courthouse and across the Boulevard of the Allies and down under the rusting frame of the Liberty Bridge approach along Second Avenue past the squat public works building and the bail bondsmen’s offices to the county jail. I stood in line with the wives and girlfriends and the occasional parent and the occasional husband and the many children and the few friends and the lawyers. I forfeited my wallet and phone and sat on a bench for a while. Then I went in to see Johnny. He’d lost some weight over the last few weeks, but he didn’t look sick this time. I almost regret to say that it suited him. His features were more pronounced; his jaw looked stronger; his eyes more deeply set. Morrison, he said. Johnny, I said. How’s Ben David working out for you? I don’t know where you found that guy, brother, said Johnny, but he’s the goddamn moshiach as far as I’m concerned. Well, good, I said. I’m going to be a star witness, he said. He announced it as if he’d said he was starring in a film. That’s great, I said. Pringle is fucked. Well and truly fucked. We’re going to pin his ass to the wall like a fat fucking butterfly. That’s great, I said. Really. Reb Elijah says I shouldn’t take so much pleasure in another man’s downfall, but I have to admit I’m enjoying myself. Uh-huh, I said. So, what about you? What’s the deal? A year, Johnny said. Then probation. The powers that be—he lowered his voice—are highly displeased by this outcome. Oh yeah? I said. Yeah. Apparently, certain insinuations contained on Alieyinz.com hit a little too close to home for a certain elected official. Hm, I said, so the mayor’s really an alien? No, Johnny said, his face drawn and serious. No, a homo. Oh yeah? I said. Apparently, Johnny told me, he and his whole inner circle are a gang of utter pervs. I mean, boy-butt sex orgies at the Duquesne Club, the works. You have this on good authority, I said. Common knowledge on the inside, Johnny told me. Well, I said, I guess that would explain why Kantsky was so pissed about the whole deal. I was joking, but Johnny said, Exactly. Exactly. A classic lady-doth-protest-too-much situation.

We talked for a while longer, and Johnny filled me in on the secret homosexual underground directing the politics of the city of Pittsburgh. I told him it was a shame he’d never been invited to participate. He insinuated that certain, uh, overtures had been made. When were these overtures made? I said. What overtures? Just overtures, he said. I’m afraid that I need to remain hazy on the details, for the safety of all involved. He grinned. I could not tell if he was shitting me. I asked him if he’d really been selling for Pringle. He shrugged. Nah, he said. The sales end never really appealed to me. Mostly, I was helping him out with the Internet. The Internet? I said. For a guy who built the fucking time portal and the psychic chamber and cetera, Johnny said, you’d think he could hook up a wireless router. Are you shitting me? I said. When have I ever shit you? Johnny replied. I gave him that look. Don’t give me that look, he said. I’m not, I said. You are, he told me. On the plus side, he said, I got to see a UFO. I’m pretty sure that was just a helicopter, I said. Fuck, no, he told me. Helicopters can’t make directional changes like that. That was a goddamn UFO. Sirian, by the looks of it. Definitely extraterrestrial. I’d stake my reputation on it.

By the way, I said, do you know about Helen? Ben David told me, he replied. What a fucking shame. And how about fucking Mandy? I can’t believe that bitch took your car. I don’t care about the car, I said. Do you know I think the whole thing is Mark’s fault? What whole thing? asked Johnny. Helen, I said. That thing. That was him on the phone, for sure, texting her and shit. I’m sure it was him when she said she had to make a call. You know she fucking jumped in the river. Whoa, whoa, said Johnny, that’s a pretty wild tale without any evidence. Seriously? I said.

I cried when they took him back to his cell. Not much. But I had to blink it away. I had to touch my face with hand, a thumb beneath one eye, my forefinger beneath the other. Then I went back out under the empty sky.

I caught a different bus home, and on the walk from Liberty Avenue up to my apartment, I passed a neat Queen Anne with a for sale sign. I stopped to look. There were six mailboxes; it was divided into apartments. The roof over the front porch sagged a little, but I could see where a crew could replace some rotted wood and shore it up without tearing the whole thing down. You could replace the buzzer on the front door. You could get rid of those shitty, seventies-era crank casement windows and knock out the original openings in the exterior walls, put sash windows in. The roof needed shingling, but it looked fine structurally. I could not recall when I’d begun to think this way. I pulled out my phone and entered the listing number from the sign on the real estate company’s website. It occurred to me that I had, or I would soon have, enough money to buy the place. Six units, I thought. You could turn that into income. The Mexicans could do the whole thing for twenty, thirty K. And not a shitty job. But still, a reasonable price point. Mid-level. Appropriate for a medical resident or an arts admin or something. An actual and essential function for the world I’d made.

After lunch, I met Julian at his other gym in East Liberty and we played racquetball for an hour. I’d considered canceling; it seemed absurd to play before going to a funeral; but then, phone in hand, finger about to tap Julian’s number, I thought, Well, what the fuck, it would be even weirder to cancel because of a funeral, as if a dead woman could be insulted that your attention was elsewhere and otherwise, as if an as-yet-unascended soul could be fooled by the artifice of grieving in excess of the grief one actually felt, as if, having already spent the morning in a jail and contemplating a future livelihood bought with my blood money bribe, it would be anything less than entirely absurd to sit in my apartment trying to be, of all things, appropriate. So I went, and we played, and I was glad that I went and glad that we played, because the thwack of the ball against the racquets, the thock of the ball against the walls and floor, the whine of our shoes as we sidestepped and pivoted, the drops and then rivulets of sweat, the pulse, the breath—they conspired to take my mind out of itself. I couldn’t remember running quite so fast or swinging quite so hard. I felt, as we went into the third game, the beginning of a strangely familiar separation from myself, a sense of seeing my own body move from the outside, an abiding calmness, a weird pleasure in sensing my own self move in spite of me, a thin figure moving toward the ball as the ball moved toward it, right arm back, left arm angled slightly out, the wrist cocked, the shoulder pivoting, and as my left foot planted and my torso turned slowly toward the little blue onrushing globe, I swear to you I saw my head open up like a flower in the morning; out of the bright cavity erupted a mandala with a thousand petals; then Julian had his hand on my back, and we were both bent over; my hands were on my knees. Finally, he said. Finally what? I said. You won, asshole, he said. About fucking time.

Julian was meeting Tom. I thought you guys broke up, I said. Yeah, we did, but you know, Julian replied. He’s making me go to some funeral, he said. We were getting dressed. Helen’s funeral? I said. I guess, he answered. That artist. Whatever. Did you guys know her? I asked. Not me, said Julian. Tom did. Well, Tom says he did. And he smiled at me, the conspiratorial smile that men share when discussing the women in their lives, which I imagine women also share when discussing their men, and which, in an era and in a scene where half the men date men and the women, women, probably ought to have been a relic but persisted—among some of us, anyway—and said more about those of us who used it than it did about the absent boyfriends and girlfriends. Anyway, I responded in kind. And Julian said, I think she was more someone that Tom thought we ought to know. And I’d like to tell you that it had a profound effect on me, his referring to her in the past tense, but it didn’t, because I suppose I’d always thought of her in the past tense anyway.

Tom was waiting for us at the coffee shop across the parking lot from the gym, looking as always as if something, or everything, were a great inconvenience to him. Lauren Sara was with him. Her hair was shorter. I didn’t think I liked it. Hey, I said. Hey, she said. What’s happenin? Not much, I said. You cut your hair. Patra cut my hair, she said. I hate it. I look like a dyke. A little, I said. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. We’re going to be late, Tom said, ostensibly to Julian. I heard my own voice coming out of his mouth. I looked at Lauren Sara, and she at me, and we both laughed at the same time. What? said Tom. Nothing, I said. Late for what? He sighed, exasperated. Helen Witold’s funeral, he said. Oh, I said. Are you going? Everyone’s going, said Tom. Oh, I said. Everyone. She was an important artist, said Tom. It’s fucking tragic. All coincidences converge on the inevitable, I said. Huh? said Tom. Nothing, I said. Just something someone said to me once. It’s a good definition of tragedy. Hm, said Julian, swinging his bag from one shoulder to the other. I always thought it was just shit that’s sad. Really, Jules, said Tom. Well, I said. I’ve got to go to the whatnot as well, so I’ve got to run home. Are you going? I asked Lauren Sara. Yeah, no, she said. Funerals are weird. Yeah, I said. Well, see you around. Yeah, said Lauren Sara. I’ll be, you know, around.

I thought I’d arrived early, but I was late. The sanctuary was already full, and the temple staff were folding back the rear wall and clanging folding chairs into rows and aisles in the big room beyond.

It occurred to me—it only then occurred to me—that I didn’t know these people. Oh, I mean, I knew some of the guests. I knew Arlene Arnovich, and I knew Tom, who was worming his way toward the front with a sheepish Julian in tow, and I recognized David Hoffman; I recognized some of Nana’s friends and peers; I recognized some people who knew my father; I recognized some Vandevoort and Global Solutions types; I recognized some people from the Warhol Museum and CMU; I saw David Ben David in a bespoke blue suit among the blacks and charcoals, who saw me and raised an eyebrow that said, How about this shit, huh? I saw some artists whom I’d seen around when I’d dated Lauren Sara, and I saw a lot of New York–looking fools looking very deliberately New York; I saw a party planner I knew and a florist everyone knew and I even recognized the rabbi—I do not mean Johnny’s rabbi, for the record—who’d been much in the news protesting transit cuts lately. What I mean is that I couldn’t have told you which of the expensive people in the front few rows were Helen’s relatives, her parents or brothers or sisters or cousins or college friends; I didn’t know if she had living parents or aunts and uncles or siblings or friends; I didn’t know where she’d been born; I’d always assumed New York, but what did I know? I hadn’t even known she was Jewish. I didn’t know how she’d grown up, in what sort of home, with what sort of food served on holidays; which relatives she was close to; which relatives her parents disdained at the dinner table; which real friends of the family; which social acquaintances; where she’d gone to school; where she’d gone to camp; or if not camp, what sports; or if not sports, what instrument; or when she’d learned to paint; or where she’d sold her first piece; or where she’d gotten her undergraduate degree; or what boyfriends she’d had before Mark; nothing; nothing at all. I found a folding chair and sat down. I wondered if I ought to be wearing a yarmulke. All the other men were. I couldn’t worry about it. A piano was playing. The rabbi was walking down the front row shaking hands, kissing a few women on the cheek. I saw Mark for the first time, leaning toward the rabbi, their right hands locked, their left hands on each other’s elbow, saying something into his ear, the rabbi nodding once, then nodding again. The distracting sound of more chairs being unstacked and set up behind me. A phone going off. A disapproving murmur. The piano playing again. The rabbi leading a song in Hebrew whose melody was sad and familiar. The rabbi saying, It is always deeply vexing to think that we must celebrate the life of someone who passed out of it with so much life left. The rabbi reading lines from a Galway Kinnell poem, the one about his dead brother. The sound of a sob. Another song or hymn or whatever. Someone—a relative?—saying a prayer. It was all quite lovely. Then the whole train went right the fuck off the goddamn rails and tumbled down the steep embankment into the river below.

My grandmother once told me that she’d stopped believing in the Church as soon as they started speaking English. I thought, she said, that’s what they’ve been saying all along? It was very disappointing. I remember saying, But Nana, you still go to church. Well, of course I go to church, she’d said. What’s that got to do with anything?

So anyway, it would have been fair to say that the spirit of the thing was already somewhat straining against its earthly form; in the pace and organization, I detected Mark’s influence. He was sitting alone in the front, separated from everyone by the sanctuary’s one conspicuously unoccupied seat. Through the first part of the proceedings, his chin had rested on his thumb, his fingers over his mouth, his elbow on the armrest, his face betraying no human emotion, being instead composed like one single lens behind which some fractal algorithm aggregated and interpreted an infinity of data. You could sense, I thought, in the officiants, a certain inclination toward the freewheeling or the holistic or the organic or what have you that I felt certain Mark would have, and must have, vetoed, and you could sense, or I could, in Mark, despite his preternatural composure, a certain impatience at, for instance, the poetry. So when the rabbi invited Helen’s stepmother up to speak—her stepmother?—I detected a palpable relief among some of the mourners and a twitch, a tremor, a slight quickening of his pulse that I swear to you I could detect from Mark from a hundred feet away. He moved his head from his left to his right hand. A rather florid woman with close black hair and a vaguely Etruscan necklace that sat like a piece of ancient armor on an operatically excessive chest wandered up to the microphone. Her torn black ribbon had been awkwardly pinned in precisely the spot one would expect to find her left nipple. Oh, Helen, she said, and she immediately began to weep. This in and of itself did not strike me as unusual; it’s unfair to generalize based on body type, but she looked like a crier, and the crying seemed natural; but then the crying went on. She stood up on the Bimah gripping the podium in both hands and cried and cried. There was something formulaic about it. She could have been speaking in a monotone with a PowerPoint going in the background. She looked out at the audience, eyes bubbling, chest heaving, and it was as if the crying were itself some form of speech, some otherworldly language like a whale call, a song in an ancient, indecipherable syntax. We all sat politely. If this was the fucking stepmother, I thought, just the stepmother, how many more were in store? She kept on crying. Several minutes had now passed. I glanced toward Mark. His hands now gripped each other, fingers intertwined; his lips were thinly drawn. The rabbi walked to the woman and put his hand on her back, a gentle shepherd’s crook, possibly, to draw her offstage, but she wouldn’t let go of the podium; she didn’t move. The crowd began to rustle. Then someone said, Oh, Jesus Christ, Janet. The voice was so like Helen’s you’d have thought it came from the casket. Janet froze. Blinked her big eyes. We all murmured. Another woman walked to the podium. Helen’s mother. Obviously. The same body. The same face. Her hair drawn severely away from her face. A narrow line of gold around her neck. Diamonds in her ears. Moved purposefully. Put a hand on Janet’s elbow. Go on, she said. Sit down.

They told me, the mother said, to be short, but Helen was my daughter, so I’ll say just as much as I want to. Her voice had slight tremor. It appeared to me that she might be slightly drunk. She had her daughter’s overage of control; her performance had the sound of being sight-read. Helen, she said again, was my daughter. Helen, she said, was my daughter. More movement among the mourners, a shifting in the chairs. None of you, she said, none of you really knew her. She was looking at Mark now. I was surprised to find that he was avoiding her gaze. You saw that she was beautiful, you saw that she was talented, you saw all of those things on the outside. But what did you know? A mother knows. She was never really happy. Even as a little girl. There was something unhappy about her. There was something that saw what a lot of shit it all is. What a lot of shit. She was cynical. We’re not supposed to be cynical. Women aren’t supposed to be cynical. We’re supposed to be, I don’t know. We’re supposed to be optimists. We’re supposed to see the bright side. We’re not supposed to see the shit. She was an artist because she saw the shit. She made such beautiful things, but she was never happy. What I wanted for her more than anything was to live long enough to be happy. It takes your whole life to be happy. I never figured it out, but I wanted for her to figure it out. You all, she said, but she was only talking to Mark, you all didn’t care about her soul. You wondered why she even had a soul. You looked at her and thought, Why would you put a soul in one of those? But she had a soul, and it was better than your soul.

Then the mother sat down. The rabbi looked like a dog-walker who finds he forgot the plastic bags as his dog squats at the edge of the neighbor’s yard. He was halfway between his seat by the ark and the podium. He looked toward Mark, and he looked toward the family. I thought, and felt badly for thinking, that the biggest tragedy was that I couldn’t text Johnny. I eased my phone from my pocket. I texted Lauren Sara: funeral is fucked. She replied right away: where’s tom? up front, I replied. LOL, she said: figurz.

David Hoffman tried to save it. Tried to apply the brake. Tried to step into the breach. I didn’t imagine he was scheduled to speak, but he rose before anyone else could and made his broad-shouldered way to the microphone. He looked like an architect with that buzzed gray hair and those little glasses. He said, I did not know Helen Witold well, but I knew her work. She was that rare artist whose work remained personal even as it became more widely known and admired. Personal is a word that often damns with faint praise in our art world. I say our art world because it belonged to Helen as much as any of us. Personal is a word we use, often when describing a woman’s work, to imply that it lacks some essential ambition. Ambition is a word we use, often when describing a man’s work, that suggests we should forgive its weak grasp because of its broad reach. Don’t look too closely at the trees; we propose a forest. There is nothing wrong, perhaps, with ambition, but our art has become so intently focused on saying something that it has largely stopped being something. I found Helen’s work expressed a purity of being that is largely absent these days. I remember the first time I saw one of her paintings at Daniel’s gallery—he gestured toward a man who must have been the other Arnovich, who, Jesus Christ, raised his hand in reciprocation as if being introduced on a panel of speakers at some convention somewhere—and I said, Daniel, what is that? And Daniel replied, That, he said, is Helen Witold. And I said, Is it any good? (Relieved laughter in the audience. The first joke.) Because I couldn’t tell. It was like seeing poetry in a language you don’t understand. (Oh, come the fuck on, I heard someone mutter a row or two behind me.) And Daniel said, I don’t know, either, but she’s going to be a hit at the parties. (Laughter again, this time less comfortable.) That’s a joke. If there is a human soul—he gestured with an offhanded, patrician magnanimity in the general direction of Helen’s mother—then we need more poets who speak its untranslatable language. (For real? The same mutterer as before.) Yes. Poets of that ineffable dialect. (Throats clearing.) We have lost a poet of the soul, he said.

This all struck me as the purest horseshit, but as it was more within the tradition of an overchoreographed memorial service, it took a little edge off. I texted Lauren Sara: we have lost a poet of the soul. Haha, she said.

And yet it made me sad, the whole thing; it made me wish I could stand up and spout some horseshit myself, find a well of extemporaneous platitude to toss like a beach ball to the expectant, anxious crowd. Her poor, drunk mother had been right, mostly, if a bit, well, infelicitous in her expression of it.

Then Mark went up and recited the Ninety-first Psalm. He was wearing the same suit as the first day I’d met him and Helen, the same gray tie. No disaster will befall you; no calamity will come near your tent, he said. He was holding a copy of the psalm in his hands. His hands were shaking. I construed it as guilt. You will tread down lions and snakes, he said. Young lions and serpents, you will trample them underfoot. His voice was flat. He saw me. I saw him see me. I saw the corners of his mouth move. I tried to stare back at him, but, as had always been the case, I had to look away first. Because he loves me, I will rescue him, he said to me. Because he knows my name, I will protect him. He will call on me, and I will answer him. I will be with him when he is in trouble. I will extricate him and bring him honor. I will satisfy him with long life and show him my salvation.

Helen’s father said, When she was about ten, Helen decided that she was going to be a famous artist, and since most of you know me, you know I told her never take less than 60 percent on a painting. The New Yorkers laughed. Tom laughed loudly enough for them to notice him laughing. Well, my Helen was just getting started. She had a future. A real future. A real future. But it isn’t so real anymore. I wonder, if I could go back in time, would I have made that joke? Or would I have said, Honey, don’t be an artist. Artists die young. The good ones anyway. Oh, hell, I don’t know, he said. He shook his head. I just don’t know. He was short and fat and his hair exploded in every direction. I just don’t know, he said.

Then the rabbi said, O Lord, what is man that You recognize him, the son of a human that You think of him? Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow. In the morning it blossoms and grows, in the evening it fades and withers. Teach us to count our days, and we shall acquire a heart of wisdom. Guard the innocent and watch the upright, for the destiny of man is peace. But God will ransom my soul from the grave, for He will surely take me. My flesh and my heart yearn—rock of my heart and my portion is God, forever. The dust returns to the dust as it was, but the spirit returns to God who gave it. Then he said, El male rachamim. Then we all filed out gratefully to the cool evening to wait for the family, whom we would follow to the cemetery.

I waited with Tom and Julian. Well, I said. Well, Julian said. I thought that David Hoffman was amazing, said Tom. Tom, I said, you are one crass motherfucker. Whatever, said Tom. You didn’t even know her. Come on, Tom, said Julian. No, I said. That’s true. Are you going to the cemetery? asked Tom. I think so, I said. You? Yeah, he said. It’s impolite not to go. Really? I said. According to whom? It just is, said Tom. Well, I said, I’ll need a ride. You can ride with me, said Ben David, who was walking past. Come on. Catch you dudes later, I said, and I followed Ben David. So, he said, you never found your car. We were sitting in his, waiting for the procession. It was stolen, I said. How about all that shit? he said, meaning the funeral. Not precisely what I was expecting, I said. I thought the poor husband, or fiancé or whatever, was going to have a goddamn aneurism, said Ben David. Yeah, I said. Mark. He’s a little, uh, he can be controlling. Well, that sort of freak show will do it. So you knew her pretty well? he asked, and I could sense that he was asking something else, so I answered with a question: What are you doing here, anyway? Technically, he said, I’m part of the chevra kaddisha. Her relatives were all from out of town, and she wasn’t exactly active in the Jewish community. Rabbi Blum called and said, be a good boy, so here I am. As an attorney, I try to do whatever service to HaShem and the congregation that I can fit in around the billable hours. Hedging my bets, and so forth. Anyway, you feel bad for the poor thing. Look at that family! And that goon of a boyfriend. Yeah, I said. He probably killed her. Ben David arched an eyebrow. Oh yeah? he said. Not, like, literally, I said. I actually think she probably killed herself. But it was his fault. Say no more, said Ben David. I know the type. Nifter-shmifter, a leben macht er? my mother, may the Lord keep her away from the telephone, would say, but I never trust these squirrely corporate lawyer types. Hm, I said. How’d you know he’s a lawyer? Oh, hell, just look at him. Spot them a mile away. Corporations only hire lawyers when they want to do something illegal. Well—I smiled—like criminals. No, no, said Ben David. Criminals are charmingly naïve about the whole thing. They hire lawyers after they do something illegal. The corporate guys are the ones who use legal prophylaxis in the whorehouse. Assholes. Anyway, I’m sure that poor little rich girl got hooked up with him and thought he was just great, some young buck on the make. No old-money, fratboy simp; no probably-a-homosexual backslapping Whiffenpoof; a real, honest-to-God Fordham type. Made a bunch of money together, partied all through their twenties, then found herself in her thirties married or close enough to a soulless hatchet man who kept her around for social cred. Am I close here? Shockingly, I said. You can tell that just by looking? I can tell that just by looking, he said. So, what? he said. You took her up to that little shindig. You were fucking her, right? Don’t answer. I don’t need to know. He figures out she’s stepping out on him. It’s a goddamn inconvenience to him in some way or other. He says a bunch of nasty shit. She’s drunk enough or depressed enough to toss herself in the drink. Jesus, I said. Sorry, he said. I tend to look at these things with a clinical eye. Personally, it seems like a goddamn shame. Oh, okay, here we go. We pulled out into the procession of black cars. Anyway, he said, look, I don’t want to get into the sex part, but you’ve got to put her out of your mind. Listen, this is legal advice. Take a moment at the cemetery. Put some dirt on the coffin. Say whatever prayers you pagan Catholics say. Then forget about her. You’ve got a better, closer friend who’s going to go to jail, and you’re sure as rain in Pittsburgh going to get called to testify or at least get deposed at some point or other, and I do not need you showing up with a dead mistress around your neck—and neither does your pal Johnny. Capiche? Yes, I said. I understand.

Speaking of your pal Johnny, Ben David said, any chance you can get him to ease up on the weirdo quotient just for the time being? I’m happy that he’s committed to sobriety or whatever, but he seriously pissed off the wrong people with that idiot blog he was running, and they’re leaning on that faggot prosecutor to drive a hard deal. I’ll do what I can, I said, but I can’t promise anything. Fucking Pittsburgh Democrats, he said. The worst. Yeah, I said. You don’t strike me as a GOP type, though. Ben David snorted. Republican? he said. Not likely. I’m a libertarian. Since before there were Libertarians. I voted for Hospers and Nathan in ’72. Tonie Nathan, he said. Now, that was a woman with balls.

We went through the iron gates and past the gothic gatehouse and through the row of gingkoes that were turning golden already and past the mausoleums of millionaires’ row, the alternatingly reserved and gaudy tombs of all those Fricks and Browns and Benedums and Wilkinses and Morrisons and so on and over the rolling hills and lawns between the sycamores and beeches and horse chestnuts and buckeyes and the few big cedars and the fields of ordinary graves through the several hundred acres until we came to the Jewish section on the far eastern edge where the cemetery turns over a slow hillside into the thick trees of Frick Park. And we all got out of our cars. But there were so many of us that it took quite a while for all the cars to pull up and park and for all the guests and mourners to make their way to the graveside. The sun was getting low in the sky. It really was almost the fall. It was cool. A breeze lifted men’s ties and women’s shawls. I didn’t get too near to the grave. I didn’t want to get too near to Mark. I didn’t want to be there, really. I wanted to go home and pour myself one glass of red wine, to stand in the kitchen at the window and let the night come, to drink that one glass of wine and go to sleep. I wanted to feel the cool night coming through the screens while I fell asleep. I wanted to wrap myself in a blanket against the breeze again. I wanted to dream about Winston Pringle one more time and tell his fat ass to fuck off. I wanted to wake up with nothing to do but determine what it was that I ought to do next. One of the New Yorkers was saying quietly to another, Definitely going to drive up the value, and there’s not that much work to begin with. There was the sound of a distant lawn mower. Tom was whispering something in Julian’s ear. Both Arnoviches were playing indiscreetly with their cell phones on opposite ends of the casket. Beyond the crowd, along the road where the cars were parked, I could have sworn I saw Lauren Sara with a couple of prominent-looking older people beside a long dark Mercedes, but then some people got in the way, and when they moved again, the car was driving off, and she was gone. The rabbi was saying again, O God, full of mercy, Who dwells on high, grant proper rest on the wings of the Divine Presence, in the lofty levels of the holy and the pure ones, who shine like the glow of the firmament, for the soul of Helen Witold, daughter of Joel and Marion Witold, stepdaughter of Barbara Witold, who has gone on to His world. May her resting place be in the Garden of Eden; therefore may the Master of Mercy shelter her in the shelter of His wings for Eternity, and may He bind her soul in the Bond of Life. Adonai is her heritage, and may she repose in peace on her resting place. Now let us say: Amen. Then everyone was pushing forward, a gang of the criminally well dressed, even falling in some cases like fools to their knees in order to get their own handful of turned earth, as if it were in limited supply, as if there weren’t enough dirt to cover every one of us.

I wandered off. I sat in the grass at the edge of the cemetery. The sun was going down behind me. I could hear a few evening birds calling in the woods in the park. I thought, I’d been wrong. We would not end as a ruin. Well, in a thousand years we might. In ten thousand, there wouldn’t be any ruins. There would be trees and birds and insects. A brief heartbeat of the world. Long enough to heal itself of all of us. Let the aliens arrive then, and see how little the sparrows and the earthworms and the squirrels and the field mice care. Then I saw that Mark was standing next to me. You are one sneaky fucker, I said. You said it, he said. Well, I said, condolences and so forth. Yeah, he said. Thanks and back at ya. So, I said. So, he said. He sat in the grass beside me. So what’s so interesting in there? he asked, looking toward the trees. I was just thinking about global solutions, I answered. Oh yeah? he said. Yeah, I said. Long-term, strategic solutions. Your next career, he said. Another life, I said. There is no other life, he said. So I’m told, I told him. How about that funeral? he asked. I let myself look at him. He seemed smaller, softer, as if he’d just shed his skin and hadn’t quite firmed up yet. Can I ask you something? I asked. Other than that? he answered. What did you say to her? I said. When? he said. Over the phone, I said. That night, I said. Nothing she hadn’t heard before, he said. You know, I told him, I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re a real asshole. He stood up. He brushed some grass from his pants. You’ve come to that conclusion? he said. You’ve examined the evidence, arrayed the facts, done the regression analysis. Fuck off, I said. You know, Peter, he said. It was, I think, the first time he’d ever called me Peter. What? I said. Actually, he said. Nothing. Nothing. Yeah, I said. Me, too.

Then he put his hands into his pockets. He whistled tunelessly, a few high notes that seemed intended to answer the whistling birds. It was almost dark. He didn’t look at me. He walked in a straight line through the grass toward the tree line. He paused there briefly, and I thought he might turn around, but he didn’t. He walked right into the woods, right into the shadows between the trees. I stared after him for a while. And then I thought I saw a light in the woods. Something glowing. Something that moved. Maybe I saw it rise toward the treetops. Maybe I saw it fade as it reached the last daylight above them. But you know, if there was something there, then it was not so bright, nor was I so sure that I’d seen it as I’d been six months ago.