Jonas unscrews the burnt-out light bulb carefully, as though it were something he was going to plant and nurture, a tulip, an onion. This is what he does for a living. He works for the Hyatt Regency Hotel, and his sole occupation, the chore that fills his working days with purpose, is replacing darkened bulbs with sparking ones. He brings light. When a Sylvania soft-white reading bulb crackles its final current, it is Jonas who bears the replacement. He lights up itinerant salesmen’s transient lives so they may distinguish brown socks from black; he brightens the shadowy corners of conventioneers’ rooms so they may locate the wayward golf ball, the elusive shoehorn. He usually finds the owner of the spent light shaking it next to his ear like a quiet maraca. And Jonas, examining the gray bulb in the new light, will always say, “This bulb has lit better days.”
When Jonas first began this job, he could not imagine he would be kept so busy. He was surprised at the constant rhythm, the death and renewal of illumination, like the cells of a giant body. Gradually he became skilled at coordinating the darkness so there were only isolated patches of confusion, stubbed toes. Jonas embarked on this career shortly after his daughter’s disappearance five years ago.
It is Monday morning, and Jonas is in his own room on the thirty-first floor. He eats a bowl of cereal and watches the Today Show. He was saddened to see the female anchor, Jane Pauley, replaced. Something about the way she lifted her shoulders when she laughed reminded him of Carmen Miranda, for whom he has always carried a secret torch. He wishes it had been Bryant Gumbel who had been given the boot; he has written to Jane to tell her so.
Jonas is surrounded by many lamps and light fixtures, a gamut of bulbs. In the black and gold speckled art deco lamp with the loosely orbiting shade, there is the three-way bulb that blossoms from a timid forty watts into a glaring one-hundred. Suspended from the ceiling of his living room is a paper and bamboo lantern with its vertigo-inducing blue light. In one corner hangs a fluorescent bug light, clean as a baby’s brain, having had little opportunity to stun and sizzle the brittle bodies of unsuspecting insects. Jonas keeps this one purely for show and comfort. He likes its silver glow and constant hum.
There is a knock on the door. Jonas lets in Dread, the bellhop. Dread is wearing his stiff green uniform with the black piping, gold epaulets, and brass buttons. Dread is pale as milk, and his jutting veins, tiny blue gopher trails, appear to be on the move and creep conspicuously beneath the thin skin of his throat. He has a pierced nostril, whose gold stud he removes during working hours. His head is buzzed to the scalp on one side, flanked on the other by a matted nest of black hair, which he tucks beneath his black cap. Customers frequently tip Dread well. Dread has told Jonas he believes they use him to alleviate their guilt over good fortune, motivated by the misconception that he’s receiving chemotherapy. He is thin as a stick, but Dread admits this is fashion and effect, not destiny.
“Hey, Jonester man, I got something to show you.” Dread begins unbuttoning his coat.
“This new gal just doesn’t do it for me,” Jonas says, gesturing toward the television.
“It’s totally rad, man. You’re going to freak.” Dread removes his coat. He looks down at his chest and smiles. “Well, what do you think?” He begins flicking the tiny gold wires that loop through his red and swollen nipples.
“Doesn’t it hurt?” Jonas touches a nipple gently with his index finger.
“A little bit, but that’s not important. You know some guys get their penis or scrotum pierced to enhance sexual pleasure. There’s this one guy I read about who actually had his penis split in two so he’d have double the sensation. Man, can you imagine? He does other shit like he wears a six-inch belt or sticks metal rods in himself all over the place. Wild shit, man.” Dread licks his fingers and rubs his nipples. “Spiritual.”
“I think all those things would hurt.”
“No. He just psyches himself out, prepares himself so that the pain’s expected and it’s not pain anymore.”
“I saw on a talk show where boys were hanging themselves while they masturbated. I can’t understand that. Said a lot of them had asthma as kids. Something about longing for the paroxysm of not being able to breathe. Craziest thing I ever heard.”
“That’s a whole different trip, Jonas. That’s called autoerotica and only weird fuckers dabble in that. You can fucking kill yourself doing that shit.” Dread puts his coat back on.
Jonas stares at his hands. “I had asthma when I was a boy. It got so bad sometimes I just had to lie there stretched out in bed all day. I watched the neighbors’ horses through my bedroom window. I watched how evenly they breathed and how their muscles moved along their bodies. I tried to breathe with them. They looked wet in the sunlight. And then in winter you could see the breath curling out of their big nostrils like smoke. I don’t miss struggling to breathe, though.”
“You masturbate, Jonas?”
Jonas looks at Dread and pauses before answering, looks at his shoes then back at Dread. “I did when I was younger. At fifty, seems kind of uncalled for.”
“Did I tell you I found out I used to train bears in a circus?”
“What do you mean? Before you worked here?” Jonas raises one brow. “You’re pulling my leg.”
“No, Jonas, way before.” Dread pauses. “In a past life. A previous incarnation? You know, Shirley MacLaine and all that. The transmigration of souls.” Dread hooks his thumbs together and flaps his ascending hands. “Any living thing around you can be anyone who’s not. Anyway, I hope I wasn’t a bastard to those bears. I wish I’d been the tattooed man.”
“You still could be.”
“True. My future aspirations are as yet undetermined. New joke for you, Jonas. How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“Surrealists? Hmm. I can’t even venture a guess. How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb?”
“A fish!” Dread snaps his fingers and smiles. “A fish, Jonas.” Dread grins and walks over to the brass stand holding a covered cage. He lifts the quilted cover and looks under it. “Can I wake Thelonious up?”
“Let him sleep in,” Jonas says. “He was up late last night watching the Tonight Show with me.”
“Hey, Thelonious,” Dread whispers. He drops the cover. “I got to go, Jonas, or Mr. Dickhead will be on my ass.”
“You oughtn’t to call Mr. Pritchard that, Dread. He’s all right once the coffeepot’s dry.”
“Yeah, yeah. See you, Jonas.”
* * *
Jonas watches television and waits for the calls that will tell him where the dark spots are. Next to his recliner is a TV tray with a can of v8 juice, a straight pin, and a telephone. Jonas is watching network television, but the commercials begin to disturb him; he switches to PBS. He is unnerved by how unashamedly cannibalistic some commercials seem. He has noticed lately how some advertisers will take a food product and make it cuddly and human. They turn the product, which is meant to be eaten after all, into something a child would love to sleep with if it were stuffed. You’re asked to develop a sympathetic attachment to something you’re later expected to stuff your gullet with.
There is a commercial for popcorn in which the kernels spend a day at the beach. They don sunglasses and douse themselves in suntan oil. One kernel instructs the others to turn on their stomachs, and then the sun’s heat makes them explode. Jonas gasped out loud the first time he saw it. He actually rooted for the popcorn despite the demise he knew they’d meet. There are the commercials for StarKist tuna, in which the lovable but grade B tuna, Charlie, tries to hoodwink the fishermen into thinking he’s really a prime catch so that he may have the privilege of being eaten under the StarKist label. “Don’t worry,” Jonas said glumly. “Be happy. That’s what they advise these days.” And there are the claymation California Raisins whose rubber replicas can be purchased with a burger and fries. “See? Where would your careers be now if you had aspired only as high as a bowl of bran flakes?” Jonas said, shaking his finger at the television. Jonas regrets that children have to witness such misguided gluttony. He wonders if animal souls are also eligible for transmigration.
Jonas remembers an old commercial for Malt-O-Meal. The sales angle was that Malt-O-Meal sticks with you. It was winter, and a child who had eaten Malt-O-Meal for breakfast got bundled up to go sledding. As he walked out the door, he was followed by a levitating, steaming bowl of Malt-O-Meal. It followed him up and down the hill, trailing just behind the bobbing ball of his hat. Jonas thought it seemed menacing and would not allow his daughter to eat this hot cereal. He wonders if he should have fed her more hot meals.
Jonas sees his daughter’s leaf-green eyes, her tiny nose no bigger than his thumb, her pink mouth showing through the holes in her white, knit ski mask. Emma is laughing and moving the holes to places where there is only skin.
Jonas takes the pin from the TV tray and pushes it into his scarred palm. He cannot feel it. He finds a less worn spot and sticks it with the pin. “I’m thinking about the pain in my hand,” he says. “The pain in my hand. I’m thinking …”
* * *
Jonas’s phone rings. “Hello?”
“There’s a heat lamp out in the bathroom in 1516. Little girl called, and she’s going to be there.”
“Okey doke.”
Jonas opens his walk-in closet. Heat lamps are stacked between the voluptuous mood-glo bulbs and the energy-pincher three-ways. In the basement of the hidden utility core, there is a closet filled with a bevy of assorted bulbs, but Jonas likes to keep the most requested stock on hand to save legwork. Jonas mistrusts elevators, sky trams, ski lifts, and cable cars. He has no faith in cable to carry him through. He was once stuck on a sky tram across the Royal Gorge. He sat with Emma, then eight, dangling over the craggy chasm. And he felt he was being toyed with. He had the unshakable feeling that he was a bauble, a trinket in the hands of some bored higher power, something to help pass endless time. “Do you believe in God, Emma?” he had asked.
“Yes, of course,” she said.
“Is he a nice God, Emma?”
“He’s very, very nice. He has curly yellow hair and shiny black skin and his name is Poodebaugh and he has a beagle dog named George. When I’m twenty-two, he is going to ask me out on a date.”
They passed the time playing scissors, paper, stone, braiding each other’s hair, and singing songs. They sang an echo song that Emma had learned in Vacation Bible School: If you want to get to heaven, If you want to get to heaven, on a pair of skates, on a pair of skates, you’ll roll right past, you’ll roll right past, those pearly gates, those pearly gates …
They had been stalled for nearly four hours when a woman in the car ahead of them began screaming. She crawled out of the car, and the man with her grabbed at her, pleaded with her to get back in. She crawled onto the roof and caught hold of the slightly swinging cable. When she slipped off the car, the screaming and the pleading stopped; there was no sound at all except for the distant crumbling of rocks.
Emma began shaking and twisting her skirt. “She’ll get to spend the night at God’s house tonight. She’ll like it there. He has a very nice swimming pool with rainbow-colored water and a refrigerator with a spout in the door and if you push a button, it gives you chocolate cigarettes, and a pinball machine that you can’t lose at.”
* * *
Jonas knocks on the door of room 1516. A young girl opens the door. “Hi, Chloe. Heard your heat lamp was on the fritz.”
Chloe puts one hand on her hip and thrusts the opposite shoulder forward. She sucks in her cheeks, raises her eyebrows, narrows her eyes to slits. “Do they love me, Max?” she asks. “Who am I?” she whispers through tight lips.
“Why, you’re Norma Desmond.”
“Keep going,” she whispers.
“You used to be big. You used to be in silent pictures.”
“I am big,” she says, “It’s the pictures that got small.” Chloe grabs Jonas’s sleeve and pulls him in the room. “Do you believe in reincarnation, Jonas?”
“I can’t say as I know much about it, Chloe.”
“Dread says that we should all try to get people to believe in reincarnation because maybe if they thought they had to come back, they’d take better care of the planet this time around. Wouldn’t it be awesome if I used to be Gloria Swanson?”
“I think it’s awesome that you’re Chloe,” Jonas says.
“Boring, boring, boring. I have boring eyes, a boring nose, and dreadfully boring hair. The food I eat is boring, the shoes I wear are boring. My life is a snoozefest.” Chloe rolls her eyes back and forth as though she were watching a tennis match on the ceiling.
“I think you’re very interesting. I don’t know anybody else your age who likes the old movies as much as you do, and I don’t know anyone who has hair that is curlier or redder than yours.”
“That is not a perk, Jonas. My mom calls it a mop. ‘Go tame your mop, Glowworm,’ she says. She’s such a big b-word sometimes. I think she needs some romance in her life, don’t you? She desperately needs s-e-x.” Chloe throws herself across the bed. “Hey, you’re an eligible bachelor, aren’t you? Not that it matters much to her.”
Jonas shakes his head as he moves toward the bathroom. “Count me out of your scheming, Chloe. You watch too much I Love Lucy. Your mother would shoot me if she knew we were having this conversation. When’s the house going to be done?” Jonas takes the heat bulb out of its bright red box and looks at the new packaging. Beneath the words Dries, Warms, Soothes stands a grinning woman with horns, a cape, fishnet stockings; she holds a pitchfork.
“Oh, who knows. It will probably melt from global warming or be sucked into the earth for being on top of an Indian burial ground before then anyway.” Chloe sighs.
Jonas hands the bulb to Chloe. “You know, with moderate usage one of these has roughly the same average life span as a trumpeter swan.”
“Wow, what a cool fact! You’re the coolest old guy I know, Jonas. So how come you’re not married? Got any kids?”
Jonas flips the switch in the bathroom. The old heat lamp buzzes on.
“So I lied. It’s so dull down here, Jonas. Is it possible to die of boredom? Sometimes I think I’ll go out of my gourd.” Chloe crosses her eyes.
Jonas takes the bulb and puts it back in the box. “Well, come up and see me. You know I’ve got to stay put during the day for legit calls.”
“Jeez Louise. It’s noon. Can’t they just open their curtains if they need light so bad?”
“Sometimes it’s a call for a bathroom light or it could be a light out in one of the hallways or in the lobby or the kitchen.” Jonas walks toward the door.
“Poop. I have to stay here in case any of the workmen call about the house. If they do, then I have to call Mom and tell her to call them back. She’s really paranoid about them having her number at work. She thinks they’ll call her every ten minutes just to bug her if they do. Like they’ve got nothing better to do than check in with her. She’s such a solipsist.”
Jonas raises his eyebrows. Chloe points to a book on the night-stand: Thirty Days to a Bigger Vocabulary. “At least if I have to talk to myself, I’ll have intelligent conversations,” Chloe says.
“You know what they say about solipsists, don’t you?”
“Who?”
“In general.”
“Oh, a joke. No. What do they say?”
“If you meet one, you better take good care of her since the world revolves ’round her.” Jonas stifles his laugh as he waits for Chloe to respond. Chloe picks up the book and thumbs through it.
“Oh, I get it.” Chloe smiles. “I’ll have to remember that one. Did you get that from Dread? Hey, Jonas, you want to hear my all-time favorite joke?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. This is an audience-participation joke. Twirl your finger in the air like this.” Chloe circles her index finger as if she were spinning a plate on it. Jonas imitates the gesture and Chloe stops. “Okay, keep doing it. Knock, knock?”
“Who’s there?”
“Ya.”
“Ya who?”
Chloe laughs out loud and pounds her fists against the side of the bed. Jonas smiles and shakes his head. “You’re a corker, Chlo.”
“When I told that joke to Dread, he said I was a real cod. That’s what he called me. I go for the easy laughs.”
“I’ll see you later, Chloe.”
“See you, Jonas.” Chloe walks out into the hall. “Guess this swan has a few more years left, hunh.”
Two weeks before Emma disappeared, she showed Jonas a glow-in-the-dark superball. “It’s a ghost’s eyeball,” she said. “If you hold it under the light then take it in the closet, it can see again.”
“Where did you get it, Emma?” Jonas asked.
“Jesus.”
“What?”
“Jesus gave it to me for being good and clean.”
“Did you get it at Sunday school?”
Emma shook her head and rolled the ball between her hands.
“Where did you see Jesus?”
“At the park. He looks like the pictures except there weren’t any thorns or light. He said he’d give me some Fruit Stripe gum next time.”
“Oh, he did?” Jonas smiled and kissed Emma’s nose.
Jonas finds himself remembering the park and the lilt of the swallowtail butterfly, the bobbing black and yellow, the last thing he saw Emma reach for before she disappeared behind bushes. Sometimes he cannot recall the details of Emma’s face without the aid of a photograph, but the image of her tiny, reaching hands, tilted and cupped as though they were holding an invisible bowl, returns to him clearly again and again. In these memories, Emma’s hands are always the same, though the atmosphere surrounding them changes: sometimes it is bright blue, a painted backdrop, and other times it is dark and shadowy and swallows her hands like a giant mouth, but occasionally the hands are backlit as if bearing a beatific secret. Jonas wishes he had held these hands more often. He stares at his own hard palms.
Jonas sets Thelonious on his shoulder. Thelonious is a Monk parakeet, a small breed of parrot. He is green as bluegrass with a striped gray breast and a tan beak. Jonas turns on the TV and presses buttons on the remote control until he finds Newton’s Apple. A ten-banded armadillo in a large glass aquarium scratches at rocks.
“What are you doing?” Thelonious says. Thelonious begins to preen Jonas’s hair.
“Just watching TV. What are you doing? Looking for grubs?”
“What are you doing. Hello. What are you doing. Go potty.”
“Do you have to go potty?” Jonas grabs Thelonious, who chews at his knuckles. He perches Thelonious on his finger and holds him over some newspaper. “Go potty.” Thelonious leans forward, trying to reach Jonas’s shirt. He begins moving up Jonas’s finger. Jonas holds up his thumb so he can’t get past. “You brought it up, so go potty.” Thelonious squats.
“Good bird.” Jonas kisses Thelonious and sets him back on his shoulder. “I’ll have to show Chloe that trick. I bet she’d get a big kick out of it.” Thelonious resumes preening. He begins chewing on Jonas’s ear. Jonas gently raps Thelonious on the beak. “That’s no nit, Thelonious. Desist.”
Armadillos are the only other mammals that can contract leprosy. A woman on the TV holds the armadillo up so the audience can see his soft underbelly.
“Wonder if armadillos in the pink of health exile the leper armadillos,” Jonas says. “Maybe they make them stay on highway islands.” Jonas laughs. Thelonious echoes his laugh. “Maybe armadillos have their own mythology, tell a story about an armadillo savior that raised a leper armadillo from the dead and miraculously cured his disease with a mere wag of his tail.” Jonas laughs. Thelonious laughs.
The phone rings. “Hello,” Thelonious says.
“Pipe down.” Jonas picks up the phone. “Hello?”
“Yeah, Jonas. There’s a lady in 2410 says her lamp keeps blinking on and off. Sounds like the type to be spooked by such things. Better check it out.”
“Will do.”
Jonas knocks on the door of 2410. A fair-skinned woman answers. She has tall, blue-black, ratted hair covered by a sheer scarf and thick, shiny, red lips; her eyes are hidden behind jeweled sunglasses. “Yes?” she asks in a gravelly whisper.
“You called about a persnickety lamp, ma’am?” Jonas smiles. The woman continually licks the corners of her mouth and clenches and relaxes her hands. The woman reminds Jonas of a wild cat, a leopard or a lynx, moody and tightly coiled. He feels as though he’s on an accidental safari, his toolbox a tranquilizer gun.
The woman grabs Jonas by the hand carrying the toolbox and pulls him into her room. She closes the door behind him. “I’m Flora,” she says. “Thank you for coming.”
“Hear you got a lamp with a nervous tic.” Jonas looks around the room for the guilty flicker.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Flora chews on her fingers.
“Just meant I’m here to fix your lamp.” Jonas notices Flora’s hands. She has long, sculpted, sharply steepled nails, but there are cuts, scabs, and freshly bloodied spots surrounding the cuticles.
Flora removes her sunglasses. The skin on her face seems taut, as though her hair were pulled back in a too-tight ponytail. “I suppose you’re wondering why exactly I look the way I do.”
Jonas shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head.
“Can you keep a secret, what’s your name?”
“My name is Jonas.”
“Jonas, you look like a decent soul, and I really need a complete stranger I can confide in. Would you please be that stranger for me, Jonas?” Flora takes Jonas’s toolbox from his hand, sets it on the floor, and leads Jonas by the elbow to the bed. They sit down.
“Look, miss…”
“Shhh.” Flora puts a finger to Jonas’s lips. “No, please. Just listen. My real name isn’t Flora and I’m not from around here. Actually, I’m just passing through on my way to … somewhere else. It’s about the only place they won’t look. I’m just here for some bridgework and some R and R to recover from the other reconstructive surgery.” The woman begins to rub her cheeks.
“Miss Flora, I’m just here to fix your lamp, heard you had a flickering light.” Jonas stands up.
Flora pulls him back down. “Well, you would too if you’d been through what I’ve been through. Look.” Flora runs her finger along her jaw line, tracing a thin seam. It looks to Jonas as though her face has been sewn on, a tight mask. “I turned state’s evidence on my murdering ex-husband and joined the witness protection program. They gave me a new face, new name, new hair, new everything. They said they could even give me new fingertips if I wanted. Wait. I’ll show you. This is what I used to look like.” Flora takes a billfold out of a purse. She removes a tattered picture that appears to have been cut out of a magazine. She hands it to Jonas. “I used to be some looker, hunh?”
Jonas recognizes the woman in the picture to be Rita Hayworth. She lies sprawled and twisting on a satin sheet, red hair wreathing her face. “Yes. You were awfully pretty,” he says. Jonas stands up and turns on the light that sits on the nightstand.
“Don’t,” Flora screams. She pushes the lamp onto the floor. It snaps dark. “Out like a light.” Flora bends over her knees and grabs her feet. Jonas sees her body shudder, but she is silent. “He killed my baby,” she says, her face pressed between her shins. “Him and those doctors took her, and they snapped her head like she was a dandelion or a tiddlywink. They said it was empty. But I know she just wasn’t done yet. She came early. But they wouldn’t give her time. They said she was blind and deaf and couldn’t even coo. They said she had only enough brain functioning to keep her barely alive. Said she was no more than a carrot or a potted plant. My beautiful little baby. My little premature baby.” Flora stands up. She picks up the lamp. “Then they held her up to a bright light. They held her head next to the hot bulb so I could see it was empty. The light shined right through to the other side like it was only a little pink balloon.” Flora strokes the round body of the lamp. “It’s not the Godlight we’re all looking for, you know. It wasn’t the Godlight. It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t give me peace or answers. They just didn’t give her enough time. They wouldn’t give her a chance to try harder.” Flora sits on the floor and clutches the lamp.
Jonas bites into his lower lip, chews. He tastes blood, thinks about the stinging in his mouth, continues to chew.
* * *
Jonas sits in darkness in his room. He sings softly to himself. The wonderful thing about tiggers, is tiggers are wonderful things. Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of spring.
“Where are you Emma Dilemma? What are you seeing now? Is your God everything you’d hoped he would be?”
Our Father who art in heaven, Harold be thy name.
That’s why it’s Jesus H. Christ.
Jonas sees Emma’s picture on the milk carton, the shadowy black-and-white picture. The police artist shows him the computer projection of what she will look like when she’s thirteen. He wonders how the computer knows she will let her hair grow long. He knows it means nothing, but he is comforted nevertheless by the fact that she has no new facial scars and still has her front teeth. It is good she is still smiling, he thinks. He asks to see what she would look like if she lived to be twenty, if she is not already only a memory. They tell him to go home, eat some soup, sleep.
Jonas pushes the pin into his palm. He feels nothing but a slight pressure.
Jonas walks the streets downtown. He stares at the dirty neon and flashing lights. An arrow of yellow bulbs blinking on and off points to a pink neon sign that says RAY’S PLAYPEN. Further along there is a blue neon champagne glass effervescing three ascending circles beneath a red neon MILTON’S. The circles make Jonas think of Dread’s flapping hands. A man stands under the sign. He has long blond hair and a reddish beard. He wears a Rolling Stones T-shirt, black with red lips and a long, lolling tongue. He reaches out to Jonas’s arm as Jonas walks by. “I am the one,” he says. “The good one. I will die for your sins for only five dollars. You can resurrect me personally for ten.”
Jonas immediately spots the tracks reddening the man’s forearm. The man leans forward and kisses Jonas’s forehead. Jonas starts to walk away.
“Everybody’s a goddamned Judas,” the man says.
Jonas turns around. “Do you know where my daughter, my Emma, is?”
“Sure, man. She’s safe. She’s safe, man. Sleeping. Sleeping like a baby. Ain’t no harm going to come to her. I’ll see to that. She’s happy. Real happy. Like a clam at high tide she is.”
“What’s your name? Is your name Harold?”
“Yeah, that’s my name all right. My name’s Harold.” He moves toward Jonas. “I am the one. The one you heard about. I can show you the truth. Cheap.” Harold’s legs quiver and pulse, as though the earth were moving beneath only his feet.
Jonas takes out his billfold and hands Harold a ten-dollar bill.
Harold takes it, fixing his eyes on Jonas’s. “Your place is set. All is forgiven. The kingdom is yours. Your daughter is happy. She’s free. She’s been set free, she’s eating peaches. She’ll be in touch. And I’ll tell you something else, Jack. Something that means something. Knowledge.” Harold leans toward Jonas. He breathes heavily in his ear and kisses it. He whispers, “We got tornadoes because we drive on the wrong side of the road, man.
Counterclockwise. Think about it. Only you can stop it.” Harold turns and walks back toward Milton’s.
* * *
Jonas looks out his window at the city awash in neon. He reads the newspaper as Thelonious paces his shoulder. “Hello,” Thelonious says.
A man was found dead in the alley behind Milton’s. Jonas knows it is Harold. An unidentified male Caucasian in his mid-thirties was found dead…. Cause as yet uncertain.… Any information leading to his identity … “What are you doing?” Thelonious asks.
Jonas imagines Emma and Harold together. They lie on their backs amid the thick stems of sunflowers. They puff on chocolate cigarettes and reach into the air. A tangle of green birds hovers above them as the light needles their faces. “They’ll be back,” Jonas says.
“Hello.”