I haven’t left my house in almost a month.

It’s either Tuesday or Wednesday—most likely Wednesday—and three days ago a foot of snow fell on Pollard, Illinois, and its surrounding farmlands: storybook snow as soft as sifted cake mix. Although an old municipal plow has scraped down the street exactly twice—the driver’s head enshrouded in wool—clearly it’s been an effort in futility as the snow continues to fall at a dizzying rate.

I’m in the attic. I’ve been spending the last few hours counting the number of people laboring down the middle of my street on cross-country skis. Laboring, not gliding, as one might expect from a sport that uses a pair of long, preternatural runners. There have been seven skiers so far. Velocity-challenged and hunched over, the cross-country skier fights the snow, driving his poles into the frozen crust, desperate for purchase. The snow doesn’t welcome his pursuit the way it coaxes the downhill skier with its powdery, virginal shimmer. It bewilders rather than bewitches.

The cross-country skier exists as if trapped in a purgatorial silent movie.

It’s strange how full-body winterwear makes gender difficult to identify. Each goggled cross-country skier seems androgynous, machine-like, somehow pneumatic. It appears that the sport is a solitary pursuit, as I have yet to witness duos or trios. Perhaps there is something about the threat of being snowbound in a small town that inspires the lone adventurer? Where are they going, one by one? Are they skiing away from lives of ill repute? Or to a lover? Or simply to the library to return overdue books because the car won’t start?

Whatever the case, those lone skiers, as they probably already know, are not going to find much in Pollard aside from Our Lady of Snows shrine, an embarrassing, miniaturized counterfeit of the shrine at Lourdes, France (ours looks more like an interstate rest stop for science-fiction enthusiasts than a place of pilgrimage dedicated to Christ’s mother), and an enormous bookbindery on the outskirts of town.

What snow does to a small town like Pollard is vastly different from what it does to a mountainside. Whereas it beautifies the mountainside, beckoning photography and sporting life and teams of people in expensive, pastel-colored, waterproof Gortex to gather on outdoor lodge decks and drink mulled wine and hot toddies, it shuts the small town down, rendering it municipally constipated.

Mountain snow has the power to be painted. Small-town snow just gets dirty.

Architecturally speaking, the houses on my street are sort of interesting in that they are mostly mid-nineteenth-century, three- to four-story Victorians in various states of structural and aesthetic decline. The less compelling houses are a pair of low, flat Tudors and something four lots down that looks unfortunately log-cabinish. From my vantage point (the attic), the neighborhood has been suddenly blessed with an innocent gingerbread-house quality, featuring meringue-like gables, sugar-glazed finials, and frosted yards. Things look downright Alpine. But Pollard is no mountainside. Soon it will be dirty.

It’s warm and dry here in my attic room and the portable humidifier beside my writing desk issues a calming, attendant hiss and the occasional gurgle. It smells cedarn up here today. I’m dressed in two pairs of slightly yellowing, old-school, waffle-patterned long johns (long johns on long johns, if you will), a moth-bitten, Brillo-pad-gray cardigan sweater, a pilling wool winter hat the color of kelp that mostly hides my asinine hair, merino Ingenius camping socks, and a light-blue terry-cloth bathrobe that has become a low-grade monastic cloak. It is definitely the outfit of the nonattendant. The uniform of a Life in Default.

I am also now sporting a beard, and have developed a very real anxiety about it smelling gamy, like wet squirrel or coon. Beard pong can be an acute social/hygienic problem and when I encounter my tenants at the front porch mailboxes or in the basement laundry room I make an effort to keep at least an arm’s length between us. Though I twiddle and stroke the beard compulsively, I don’t know what it looks like, as I’ve been doing my best to avoid mirrors and reflective surfaces of any kind out of fear of what I’m liable to see staring back at me. I’m starting to imagine the beleaguered Civil War soldier. Or the banished indie record store warlock. Or a derelict from the northwest United States. Like one of those Olympia, Washington, societal dropouts who eats only frosted Pop-Tarts, living out a nineties grunge fantasy. The beard is mangy and random, with riptides and lots of wiry rogue strands.

The word wayward comes to mind.

But I’m a musician, so doesn’t that make my current state okay? Musicians have beards. And many musicians live outside of time. There’s Time and then there’s Musician’s Time.

This morning the molten plates of my personal history took a tectonic shift when I realized it’s been nine days since I’ve removed the bathrobe. Yes, attired in ancient terry cloth, I’ve slept, eaten, landlorded, gone to the bathroom, washed dishes, and guitar-noodled for some unfathomable number of hours.

One of the strange symptoms of even the mildest form of agoraphobia is that it gets progressively difficult to distinguish between personal and household odors. Beyond my beard, which I really can’t smell, as I’ve no doubt grown immune, the rest of my person stinks of the attic’s aged cedar, fiberglass insulation, and the faint aroma of dead mice. Mold memory. A skosh of Lysol-covered bird death. At least I’m still brushing and flossing. My mother used to say that when you give up on your teeth you might as well lie down in a ditch and wait for the dirt. I guess I’m still keeping that proverbial ditch at bay.

I inherited this house from my father, Lyman Falbo, after he retired from the accounting firm Falbo Financial Management, which he founded in the early seventies with his college roommate, Big Stu. Three years ago, upon selling his share of the company and handing over the reins to Big Stu (now Skinny Stu after turning vegan), Lyman took his second wife, Sissy Bisno (now Sissy Falbo), to live out their days in a cream-colored, heavily stuccoed ranch house in a cul-de-sac retirement community in Jupiter, Florida.

Sissy, a waggly-breasted, six-foot Lutheran widow, boasts burled hands, the shoulders of a veteran lumberjack, and a face somehow reminiscent of a young Garrison Keillor. I’m convinced that if I were to challenge her in any number of one-on-one combat exercises, she would put me on my ass six ways to Sunday. Her bidirectional, east-west breasts jiggle around so much underneath her many lilac-colored church sweaters that you have to wonder about not only their shape, volume, and bra strategy, but also their quantity. Does she possess three breasts? Five? Some large, some small, some upside-down or sideways? She’s forty-nine but looks sixty-five, and I would swear one arm is longer than the other. I keep looking for the thing that attracted my above-average-handsome, sixty-two-year-old, semi-wealthy, charming-in-a-golden-retriever-sort-of-way father, but I’m at a loss.

Lyman claims she’s a great swimmer, uncorks a deadly tennis serve, and possesses a beautiful singing voice. Her former husband, the late Southern Illinois meat-packaging mogul Chuck “the Bull” Bisno, died under the knife, during bypass surgery following a massive heart attack, and Sissy and Lyman “found each other” (the agreed terminology of their first encounter) at the weekly Wednesday night Grief Support Meeting held in the basement of First Lutheran Church. They fell in anodyne love shortly thereafter.

Why Lyman, a stalwart Roman Catholic his whole life, suddenly decided to sample the First Lutheran programming is anyone’s guess. My dead Roman Catholic mother, Cornelia, would be horrified.

Cornelia Wyrwas and Lyman Falbo fell in love in Chicago. Having just graduated from Kansas State University, Lyman was on an entry-level-job interview at an accounting firm in the Loop. Cornelia, seventeen at the time, was changing linens at her parents’ small bed-and-breakfast on Milwaukee Avenue, where Lyman was staying. I don’t know the moment they found each other, be it on the stairwell, in the dining room, or at the threshold of some potpourri-scented linen closet, but I imagine them making love on the B&B’s creaky antique furniture, Lyman covering Cornelia’s mouth, my virgin mother biting his fingers and bleeding onto fresh sheets (which she would later have to abscond with and drop in some far-off Dumpster she would walk to in hand-me-down shoes), the two of them spooning awkwardly afterward, my father inhaling the scent of her blackberry hair, the light from a bedside harlequin lamp spilling softly across their young, postcoital faces, my mother whispering Polish into the musk of his boyish neck.

Lyman’s new wife likes to make casseroles and Lyman likes to wear suits even when he’s not within twenty miles of an office building. They like this about each other and they both like that they like this about each other.

Since meeting Sissy, Lyman has been taking a large daily dose of Lipitor. He also rides a stationary bike until he starts to wheeze asthmatically, and eats a low-cholesterol, high-fiber diet.

Despite her seemingly plentiful mammae, Sissy and Chuck Bisno never had children, so marriage was a relatively clean move for Lyman. In the twilight of his life, he pretty much gets to have his new lady all to himself.

Based on an early visit to their Florida home, this is what I observed: Sometimes they play gin for a buck a point. Sometimes they’ll watch PGA golf and she’ll sit on his orthopedically replaced knee and he’ll position his hand between her gargantuan shoulder blades and call her his “girl” as if he’s talking to a beloved German shepherd. She doesn’t mind his taking his post-dinner carminative pills in front of her, and doesn’t mind even further when, while encamped on the living room sofa (Sissy crocheting scarves for Midwestern relatives, Lyman watching his prized DVD boxed set of B. J. and the Bear), he releases farts that sound like a drunk attempting a blues scale on a waterlogged clarinet. Lyman will even pat his tummy and send her a thumbs-up down the sofa.

It took more than a year after they left for Florida to rid the house of the scent of filterless Pall Malls and hemorrhoid ointment. The Preparation H was my mother’s, bless her heart, and even though she died of a brutal, soul-crushing stomach cancer two years prior to my father’s leaving-slash-retirement, I believe Lyman still hoards tubes of the ointment, whose strange medicinal odor of mink oil and boiled turnips serves as a sentimental reminder of his true love and substitute mother. The Pall Malls were Lyman’s and I’m convinced that despite his grisly alkaloid teeth, receding, stout-colored gums, and two-packs-a-day habit, he will live to be a hundred and twelve.

The house is a Queen Anne Victorian with a wraparound porch; deep, overhanging eaves; decorative milled panels; pointed dormers; lots of well-glazed, double-paned, stormproof windows; authentic nineteenth-century wainscoting; ample parking space; three ancient climbing trees; and a handsomely paneled, industrial-carpeted, mold-free basement that has never flooded. Despite recent insulation upgrades, it still gets cold in the winter but stays somewhat cool through the humid part of the summer. In other words, heating it is a hellacious money-sucking bitch, but it’s tolerable in August.

During my time on earth, the house has survived three tornadoes, a first-floor electrical fire, an authentic wild boar, and a wave of resilient, late-seventies termites that took six months of an archaic baiting process to get rid of.

In the house’s original state, there were three upstairs bedrooms and one on the first floor, just off the living room. Now the first floor functions as a single-family unit. A year ago I converted the second floor into a pair of one-bedroom apartments, adding a dividing wall of Sheetrock, a bathroom, and two kitchenettes, whose need for a shared wall and shared plumbing and electricity eliminated my boyhood bedroom. Three months before that, half the basement was outfitted with a false gypsum ceiling, the industrial carpet, pairs of bathrooms and kitchenettes, and eight panels of Sheetrock, to prepare for the two one-bedroom units down there as well—humble, dormitory-like, but very livable—I’d even say cozy. Although I’ve been running oscillating fans for weeks, however, the basement still smells like joint compound and bleach.

My first basement tenant is scheduled to move in the day after tomorrow. His name is Bob Blubaugh, which sounds like some unfortunate character in a bad American independent film. I don’t know much about him beyond that, like me, he is in his midthirties and, unlike me, he was an alternate on the 2002 American Olympic luge team at Salt Lake City. Over the phone his voice was soft and clear, verging on soprano, and I imagined it emanating from someone with an inflamed, permanently chapped face.

Also living in the house are my ex-wife’s brother, Bradley, who stays on the second floor; the Bunches, a former circus couple who rent the ground-floor family apartment; and Harriet Gumm, an art student who occupies the other second-floor unit.

The remaining basement unit will be filled soon. Just this morning I received three responses to my Craigslist posting, which makes eight total. Of those eight, I will winnow it down to five and I predict three of them will actually show up for a look-see. It’s winter break at Willis Clay and outside of a man with the unfortunate name of Victor Mold, each person who responded to my ad claims to be a student, which means they will likely be financed by their parents, which is as close to a sure thing as it gets when it comes to renting out a basement apartment with a false gypsum ceiling during the worst economic crisis in recent history. Tomorrow I’ll do some reaching out via e-mail.

In the attic, to which I repaired almost two years ago, after my ex-wife’s departure, I have a twin bed (the one from my childhood) with a good mattress. The small bed affords me a surprising amount of floor space. I have a wall of paperbacks, mostly twentieth-century American fiction, arranged alphabetically by author; a dozen binders containing my complete baseball card collection; two wave-shaped CD towers; a few crates of beloved vinyl; and a midlevel stereo system featuring a Crosley Tech turntable finished in fine mahogany, a mini-CD jukebox, and a pair of state-of-the-art Polk Audio R300 tower speakers. I have an unremarkable stuffed chair (burnt-orangish and corduroy) and a vintage freestanding gooseneck Zoalite reading lamp that Lyman didn’t bother taking with him to Florida. It’s the lamp my mother used to read under in the living room, and I honestly believe that having it near him would make him feel like an infidel.

Other possessions worth mentioning: My authentic ’69 Les Paul Epiphone electric guitar and a small Marshall kick amp, on top of which rests a wireless telephone and analog answering machine from the late eighties that requires authentic minicassettes and makes people sound trapped and desperate, as if they’re transmitting vocal arrangements from outer space.

I haven’t changed the strings on the Les Paul in over a year and I recently sketched it in the margins of the very manuscript that I am using to chronicle all of this. (Whatever this winds up being—a novel, a confession, a grand, self-indulgent, one-sided palaver—is anyone’s guess.) Sketching things that historically resonate with me is perhaps my one sentimental guilty pleasure. I sketch my ex-wife a lot. I am not a very good artist. My faces have a tendency to look unfortunately lagomorphic. As a child I was fascinated by Watership Down, and harelips seem to plague my drawings of human faces.

No one has seen the margins of whatever this is, so between my guitar and the various curves and planar pleasures of my ex-wife’s anatomy, I’m confident that the drawings’ various implications will remain an author’s secret.

I also have my own bathroom up here, properly tiled, with what I’d wager to be the quietest toilet in the Midwest (I splurged at Home Depot), a working sink, and a showerhead with enhanced water pressure. My kitchen is elfin, with a half-fridge, a portable double-burner stovetop, and a lone Formica counter space crowded with enough English muffins, Skippy peanut butter, instant oatmeal, wild flora honey, and Maker’s Mark to get me through the winter. From the top of the minifridge rises a pyramid of canned goods: beef Burgundy, stewed tomatoes, chicken giblets, pears, sardines, Green Giant corn, myriad Campbell’s soups, etc. I eat my meals at a portable “Nantucket” kitchen island. Yes, I have become a man who spends a good portion of his time bellying up to a mostly useless three-foot-high rectangular mass.

Centered on the attic floor is a bearskin rug that Glose, the troubled drummer in my band, left crudely folded and boxed in our rehearsal space. I had the surprisingly high-quality bearskin professionally flattened and steam-cleaned, and I will occasionally lie on it and think of my ex-wife, Sheila Anne:

Her strawberry blond hair and small perfect breasts.

The beautifully arranged astral dusting of peach-colored moles descending below her right ear.

The slender subtle natural arc of her back.

Sheila Anne left me for another man.

A man so intergalactically fit he could be cast as some physiologically advanced alien on the SyFy network. A man whose teeth are so white and straight it almost hurts to think about them (Sheila Anne insists that they’re natural). A man five years my junior whose chiseled, perfect jawline is deftly offset by one of those undeniably aquiline Mediterranean noses. A corporate alpha male who dresses like an adult and shaves every morning. A man with a wolfish, charming smile who can no doubt execute twenty military-regulation pull-ups while carrying on a lighthearted conversation about the pleasures afforded by his new, ergonomically contoured office chair.

Sheila Anne and Dennis Church live in New York City, in what I imagine to be some cobalt-blue-themed, sleekly furnished apartment located on the twenty-third floor of a gleaming high-rise overlooking the Hudson River. They eloped on a beach in Mexico with only a priest, an authentic mariachi band, and a local photographer as their witnesses. Sheila Anne accidentally posted public-access wedding photos to her Facebook page, and I was dumb enough to let curiosity get the better of me. Though my band did have a fan page, I refused (and still refuse) to become a member of Facebook. But after I learned of their elopement from Bradley (Sheila Anne’s younger brother), I couldn’t help putting myself through the misery and wound up clicking on her unrestricted page.

After she heard from another bandmate, Morris (via Facebook message), of my being crushed by the photos (I was bedridden for close to four days), Sheila Anne changed her Facebook settings and sent me an e-mail of apology:

Francis,

I’m so sorry you saw those photos. I hope you’re okay.

With love,

Sheila Anne

Yes, her farewell salutation was distinguished by a lowercase l. She obviously exclusively reserves the capitalized version of the word for her new husband.

In the photos, Sheila Anne looks nauseatingly beautiful in her sunflower-yellow summer dress, with Mexican poppies arranged in her hair and a bouquet of the same flowers in her hand. Her ankles are ringed with braided sea grass and anemones, the tops of her bare feet flecked with damp, Yucatán sand.

Dennis is wearing seersucker shorts; a matching jacket, the sleeves rolled to the elbows; a white dress shirt with a yellow bow tie; and a straw porkpie whose hatband smartly matches his neckwear, not to mention his bride-to-be’s dress and floral accents. He too is barefoot and his tan, ultrafit legs look somehow appropriated from a world-class tennis pro.

He’s one of those guys who can wear pastels and not in any way compromise his masculinity. I suspect you could walk up to him at a cocktail party and say, “Why, Dennis Church, what color is that four-hundred-dollar, seemingly-normal-but-designed-to-the-tits casual shirt?” To which he might reply, “It’s actually blood-orange-infused salmon,” then sip from a glass of chilled rosé in sort of a faggy way and manage to somehow increase his masculinity quotient.

The uncredited photographer captured their nuptial kiss while a corona of Mexican sun was forming a divine, perfectly timed halo around their soft joined faces, the porkpie off now (perhaps flung down the beach dramatically), the ocean calm and cerulean and twinkling behind them, an impossibly white Caribbean seagull passing overhead, high in the cloudless blue sky, wings wide and still as if in benediction.

Sheila Anne and I were married in the back room of a steakhouse in Branson, Missouri (B. T. Bones Steakhouse), during what would wind up being the band’s final tour. That morning I had passed a kidney stone and managed to sprain my ankle at the precise moment it disgorged itself from my urethra. I was high on Morris’s Percocet, and in the few Polaroids chronicling the sad but perfect little evening of ribs, smoked sausage, and pulled pork (the Three Amigos Combo), assorted sides, and a red velvet cake that the B. T. Bones manager allowed us to bring into the restaurant, bless his mom-’n’-pop heart, I look like I’m about sixty-three years old. I’m wearing a Carolina-blue cotton-blend suit that I’d purchased from the local Sears and a pair of canvas Chuck Taylor low-tops, also Carolina blue, with white laces and white athletic socks.

My collared shirt, also white and also from Sears, is too small, and my tie is of the paisley variety, phantasmagoric in that insane way paisley can be, and knotted with a misshapen Windsor that was executed by Glose while in deep, furrow-browed concentration. Despite my garroted neck, my facial muscles are somehow either so relaxed or so pain-fatigued that I appear to have jowls. Sheila Anne is wearing a candy-striped fifties thrift-store dress she bought in Branson and baby-blue rain boots (not quite Carolina blue, but close enough) and her hair is in French braids and she’s laughing sweetly at my terrible state.

We’re so in love that just thinking about it makes my viscera feel like it’s turning to landscaping mulch.

Bassist and childhood best friend, Kent, deejayed with his cheap portable boom box, pulling CDs out of an ancient duct-taped binder, while Morris and Glose basically got shitfaced on consecutive tumblers of the B. T. Bones signature drink—the Slippery Tin Roof—which, if I remember correctly, included “ice cream” vodka, chocolate syrup, and coffee liqueur, among other ingredients you might find stockpiled at a four-year-old’s birthday party.

The said Polaroid is currently affixed to the bottom of my minifridge with a plastic carrot magnet, which means I have to lie prone and drive my chin into the backs of my hands to really look at it.

I’ve been doing exactly that a lot lately.

I have never been to New York City but I visit often via the Internet. Someone called Ivan Ivanovich authors a blog chronicling the streets of Manhattan, with little abstract captions below photographs of storefronts, bridges, an East Village farmers’ market, Central Park, ethnically diverse children frolicking in urban playgrounds, the Hudson River at dawn, pigeons posing along the edges of tenement rooftops, etc.

When the band was touring we got as far east as Pittsburgh, but the Big Apple has eluded me the same way large game bass elude certain kinds of cursed fishermen.

  

Oh, the band.

The band the band the band the band the Motherfucking Band…

The band is—or was—called the Third Policeman (a flagrant plagiaristic homage to Flann O’Brien’s underappreciated masterpiece), and we made a pretty good go of it here in the Midwest, mostly headlining college bars and occasionally opening at larger venues for some younger, sexier indie/new school postpunk outfit from Portland or Akron or Walla Walla; some slack-haired, waif-thin copycat quartet brimming with wit, donning perfectly distressed clothes (matched only by their carefully ragamuffinized hair) accented by trust fund–financed tattoos and exhibiting a lazy live-performance habit, unwarranted industry irony, and stupidly large amps.

The Third Policeman, on the other hand, was a well-aged, anti-industry psychedelic semi-jam band with a penchant for outro pop harmonies and the occasional speedy punk vibe. We had smallish amps and old duct-tape-corrected quarter-inch cables that had survived the spaghetti-blob insanity of years of bad postshow breakdowns and crammed-to-the-tits gig bags.

I mostly fronted, wrote a good share of the lyrics, and played rhythm guitar. Backed by a small label out of Madison called Slowneck Records, we recorded an EP and an LP. After the LP (Argon Lights) was released we spent most of our time touring highbrow indie music towns (Cleveland, Louisville, Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh) and making the occasional college-radio appearance.

At our best we were as tight as anyone, and when our drummer, Glose, wasn’t fucking us (and himself) over during his huffing stage (as in airplane glue out of small brown paper bags), we looked like a band that could break through the ranks and make a real go of it on the national level. Before Glose wound up in an emergency room in Lawrence, Kansas, for accidental self-induced septicemia (blood poisoning) that he’d contracted from a dirty fork he’d been using to pop a blood blister on his foot, Slowneck Records had planned a monthlong European tour that included Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Paris, which would have surely taken us to the next level, or simply improved the quality of our lives by a modest percentage.

Glose has since sworn off forks, though I have no doubt that his lifestyle still affords him ample opportunity for some other form of accidental self-poisoning. Once he ate a TV Guide just to see what would happen. Nothing happened, so he decided to follow that up by ingesting the first three books of the New Testament. The shame about Glose is that when he has his head on straight, watching him drum is like witnessing someone operating a flying machine.

Besides Glose’s erratic episodes, which included shoplifting, public nudity, urinating on small-town barbershop windows, and several fistfights (for some reason he liked to head-butt other bands’ bassists, rugby-style), our biggest weakness was our lack of focus. Or maybe it was fear of success, or some combination of the two. We were creepily Chekhovian. Our Moscow was New York and LA, and we talked about testing those larger markets with emphatic music in our voices. But whether our handicaps were financial (no one made more than $300 a week), romantic (what became fondly known as the Third Policeman’s “Yoko Factor”—my bad, fellas), spiritual (depression, lack of artistic faith, fear, etc.), or transportation-related (no one ever seemed to have a large enough car to fit two guitar amps, a bass amp, a drum kit with hardware, and a bunch of gear, or good enough credit to rent one), we couldn’t manage to get our shit together. Everyday distraction is a syndrome that can cripple any band, especially one with four members. At least one of them has to be the organized one who keeps things rolling with the booking agent and label rep, not to mention manages the responsibilities of maintaining the website, silk-screening the T-shirts, preserving a good vibe with the tour manager, etc.

Of the four of us, Morris, our lead guitarist, pedal collagist, and minimaster of the Arto-Lindsay-No-Wave-inspired punk incantation (in one of the Third Policeman’s signature bits, his voice would break through an aurora of guitar shimmer like a mad dog barking down rabies), was that guy. He knew it but didn’t like it. I could have been that guy, but I was too in love with Sheila Anne and my priorities were shifting away from the band and toward the false ether of married life. For seven thousand reasons, Glose most certainly wasn’t that guy, and Kent, despite his genuine Third Policeman enthusiasm, had a hard enough time simply balancing his checkbook.

Sitting here, at this very moment, it’s somehow Morris I miss most. Morris “the Cat” Sparks, who ran a 10.8 100 meters in high school and was the first white male to win the state of Ohio in that event in almost thirty years. Morris turned down Division I track scholarships to three Big Ten schools to attend the nonathletic, cannabis-saturated Reed College in Portland, Oregon, for the sole purpose of studying with the poet Gary Snyder. Morris, the left-handed “white Hendrix.” The enigmatic master of the upside-down imitation Danelectro with which he could make more exciting noises than a guitar jock with a five-thousand-dollar axe and nine-hundred-part loop station.

Morris came to Pollard by way of the Wicker Park area of Chicago. He wanted to live cheaply while writing prose poems about power stations and dirty Midwestern children and the encroaching dominance of what he called the “Great Digital Eye.” He was a graduate of the U. of Chicago (he transferred from Reed after his sophomore year), and I happened upon him playing an open mic at Pollard’s lone independent coffee shop, Hello Hi Coffee on Plano Street. He had long dirty-blond hair and a reddish beard, and was busing his solid-state imitation Danelectro through a delay pedal and triggering some other low-end sound bed with his left foot while performing selections of his poetry. It might sound like utter pretentious nonsense, but it was one of the purest forms of human expression I’ve ever heard and witnessed. His face did honest things, as did his voice. It was as honest as milk from a cow squirting into an aluminum pail. He performed barefoot, and his slender, surprisingly clean, feminine feet, which he didn’t even bother tapping time with, seemed honest too. When I later asked him why he chose to perform barefoot, he said it was important for him to feel the vibrations come up through his heels. The thing about Morris is that he meant it when he said and did stuff like that—stuff that, coming from anyone else, would likely seem affected or snake-oily or just plain random.

He rented an apartment above the coffee shop and survived by working as a barista at Hello Hi Coffee and giving guitar lessons. For nearly a year I courted him to form a band with me, and when he eventually caved, I thought I’d acquired a great secret that would solve perhaps .3 percent of humankind’s foibles.

After Slowneck Records was absorbed by a soulless industry monolith, they dumped us; at least that’s how I’ve managed to arrange that narrative. The truth is, we sort of dumped ourselves. Imploded is a good word. Before Slowneck made the move to the big leagues, they actually tried to rally us to stay together and keep grinding it out. But unfortunately things were already too far gone.

After the band split up Morris stuck around Pollard and we jammed in my basement for a few months, trying to work up new material, but there was something missing that the four of us had had together—something intangible and tense and roundly inspired—something that made jamming feel necessary, even religious at times.

Morris eventually left without a good-bye, which would continue a recurring theme for the Third Policeman.

He currently teaches language arts at a junior high school in Durham, North Carolina. I imagine him barefoot in the classroom, still long-haired, clad in chinos, a plaid button-down and navy knit tie, reading Edgar Allan Poe to eighth graders by candlelight while scoring it with one of his guitar collages. The kids probably love him.

All four members of the Third Policeman had always held day jobs. Glose was a technician’s assistant at Pollard’s lone stand-up MRI clinic. Morris eventually became the lead barista at Hello Hi Coffee. Kent, a certified librarian, worked at the Pollard District Library re-shelving books and on the sly sold vintage rock ’n’ roll T-shirts to the kids who would frequent the library’s surprisingly sophisticated, Kent Orzolek–curated Young Adult section.

I wrote a column for the local alternative weekly, the Pollard Pigeon, mostly charting my experiences, opinions, and attitudes about the regional and national music scene. I would occasionally embed a record review in my generous thousand-word allotment, which was no problemo for my editor, an old hippie who called himself Chuckie Skyhawk. I’d been a writing major in college (Grinnell College, Grinnell, Iowa), so my byline gave me the false sense that I was actually applying an otherwise wasted higher education.

My column was called “Notes from a Rock ’n’ Roll Windsock,” and I had a good readership and a modest but lively online dialogue that would follow each entry. I thought about continuing the work as a blogger after the Pigeon, like so many other small-town weeklies, folded, but I couldn’t get beyond the pride-spurning, reductive fact that I would no longer be getting paid for my important, expectant work. Despite the Pigeon’s meager circulation (2,500), the byline was surprisingly good for my ego.

  

For reasons I don’t completely understand, my Sheila Anne did not take Dennis Church’s unfortunate last name, so it is a consolation to me that she did take mine, the unlikely Italian cognomen Falbo, which translates as “fair-haired” or “blond of beard.” Unlike Lyman’s prior to midlife, my hair is not fair, though my beard is sort of reddish. I believe I inherited most of my external physical attributes from my mother’s side. She was a hundred percent Polish, dark-haired and pale-skinned, with icy blue eyes. I got the dark hair and pale skin from her, and the tired, grayish eyes from God knows where, as Lyman’s hound-dog-sad eyes are one of his best, most lovable features.

Perhaps my eyes are simply Pollardian?

Sheila Anne and I were Mr. and Mrs. Francis Falbo for exactly three years, eleven months, and twenty-two days. I arrive at my number based on the Thursday evening she walked out of the house, not the postmarked date featured on the top left corner of the divorce papers, which arrived by way of certified mail not even two months after her leaving. In official terms, our divorce was based on “irreconcilable differences,” for which Illinois law requires a two-year separation before the divorce can be completed, but the separation can be reduced to six months if the proper waiver and stipulation are filed correctly. And, yes, I somehow agreed to all of this, always the gentleman, always the fool.

The summer following our elopement, in an effort to satisfy both sets of parents, we held a Commitment Ceremony in the backyard, where we recited carefully composed vows to each other under Cornelia’s copper beech. While I know Cornelia and Lyman would’ve preferred a Catholic church, they were more than happy to host. Sheila Anne and I were staunch agnostics, so we didn’t want to go anywhere near a place of worship.

Cornelia’s cancer treatments hadn’t become too debilitating just yet, so she was in great spirits, making her signature paczki (Polish donuts) and welcoming everyone with smiling eyes, offering shots of Nalewka Babuni, an ultrasweet Polish liqueur.

Sheila Anne’s parents and several members of her extended family drove down from Minnesota. They were a tall, hearty lot, some of whom looked Nordic, others more ruddy and Irish. They wore a lot of Ralph Lauren and liked to drink Budweiser out of the can and talk loudly about their baseball Twins and football Vikings.

This was the first time I met Sheila Anne’s parents face-to-face. Her mother, Erin, a beautiful former model and tennis pro, immediately hugged and kissed me on the cheek, welcoming me warmly to their family. Robert Farnham, on the other hand, a tall, broad-shouldered corporate attorney with unimpeachable silver hair, was more than a little circumspect. He was handsome in the same way sailboats can be, and when he shook my hand it felt as if I were being administered a gentle life-or-death warning.

Glose oversaw the proceedings wearing what appeared to be a white pleated muumuu that was supposed to be some sort of official-looking garment.

Our vows were embroidered with words like eternity and collaboration and life-partnership. And humor and fun and devotion. Authenticity was one particular word that seemed to hang in the air that night like a magic spinning platter.

Morris performed a genuinely moving ballad on his nylon-string guitar, and Glose played accompaniment, using only a brush and his fingers on his snare drum. After this, drinks were served and Morris and Sheila Anne’s brother, Bradley, sixteen at the time, took turns deejaying and both sets of parents lit tiki torches and citronella candles to keep the mosquitoes at bay and everyone danced under the copper beech. It all went down without a hitch in that no one tore an ACL or passed out in the front yard.

I spent most of the evening avoiding Robert Farnham’s stern, emasculating gaze, keeping within arm’s reach of Sheila Anne, who acted as a buffer between her dad and me after our tense handshake.

Kent, who was not in attendance for reasons I’ll get to, was sorely missed, of course. I e-mailed him the few digital photos that Lyman took with his iPhone, but I never heard back.

To bring things to the present, Sheila Anne now uses her maiden name—Farnham—and mine has been deleted from her identity like a smudge Windexed from a bathroom mirror. She has recently been hired onto the elite sales force of AstraZeneca, a leading pharmaceutical company that specializes in medications designed to combat, among other embarrassing afflictions, cholesterol, hypertension, and prostate cancer. It’s no coincidence that Dennis Church also reps for AstraZeneca.

I imagine my ex-wife walking around New York City in mannish suits and heels fit for a venture capitalist, talking to accounts on her Bluetooth headset, clicking across serious avenue pavement, the Wall Street Journal tucked under her arm, a to-go cup of barista-made cappuccino in her hand, some impossibly crafted foam art like President Obama’s face or a rare rhomboidal leaf keeping its shape through sips one, two, and three, Sheila Anne defying pedestrian traffic signals, hailing a cab on a whim, multitasking her tight little ass off, carrying an expensive but sleek leather attaché full of high-end sales materials and brightly colored pharmacological samplers that would probably do a world of good for Yours Truly.

  

Although she makes frequent visits to Milwaukee, Chicago, and nearby St. Louis, I haven’t seen my ex-wife in almost two years (688 days to be exact).

Sheila Anne and I first met after a gig in Louisville, where she was getting her master’s in health science at Bellarmine University. The Third Policeman had just played one of that particular tour’s best sets at the Rudyard Kipling, a small but indie-respected mom-’n’-pop venue that Slowneck had booked us at as part of one of our many meager six-city treks. While we were breaking our equipment down (we never got to the level that garners guitar techs or roadies), Sheila Anne introduced herself. Those eyes of hers were set against pale, lightly freckled skin and marmalade hair, and although she hid her figure under tomboyish corduroys complete with fob chain running back pocket to belt loop, and an oversized plaid button-down shirt that at one time might have been her uncle’s, there was no doubt that she possessed a killer, extremely feminine body. But in the grand scheme of indie-rock regional chilliness, which was infecting my entire life at that time, it was her engaging warmth that was almost shocking.

Later at the bar, after we’d loaded everything into our institutional-looking rental van, and following small talk during which I couldn’t really focus because I was so immediately smitten, she offered to take some photos of the band at our next gig in Cincinnati the following night. I hadn’t even noticed the digital camera around her neck. It was her spring break and she had some time off, and although she wasn’t a professional she’d studied photography as an undergraduate (College of Saint Benedict, MN) and had recently developed a passion for shooting the interiors of Louisville bars: those dank, old-school joints that still serve cheap bourbon and don’t give a shit about cleanliness, coolness, or closing time. Classic analog jukeboxes. Fading beer light signs. Bartenders donning flea-market wigs. Half-burnt-out Christmas tree lights twinkling sadly.

Sheila Anne was only twenty-five at the time, with long braided hair and those eyes that never seem to tire, age, or lie. I invited her to have a few more drinks with the band over at Freddie’s, another local dive bar that kept later hours—and one that she’d recently photographed—but she declined the offer, saying that her boyfriend wouldn’t approve and that she always got herself into trouble when she went to Freddie’s because the Maker’s was so cheap. The fact that she drank Maker’s was an immediate turn-on, but the mention of her boyfriend made it a bitter one. Profound disappointment spread through my limbs like nerve damage. I wound up going to Freddie’s with Glose anyway and drinking several consecutive shots of said holy bourbon, chased by cans of aluminum-tasting Miller High Life, whereupon I passed out in a vinyl booth riddled with duct tape, knife lacerations, and cigarette burns.

Nevertheless, Sheila Anne showed up in Cincinnati and shot much of what became the first images on the Third Policeman’s now semi-frozen website (it hasn’t been updated in well over a year). That night she decided to stay out late with us. We drank at a bar near the ballpark, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off her. While she was in the bathroom, Morris kept insisting that she was into me, which I didn’t believe, despite the fact that, as our resident chick shaman, Morris could suss out these kinds of things the way pigs can find truffles.

Upon returning from the bathroom she took my hand under the table. Morris and Kent were at the jukebox, and Glose was skulking around, beating the busboys to leftover baskets of chicken wings. I was overwhelmed with the sensation that my stomach had disappeared and I was turning to powder. I think I fell in love with her at the precise moment she took my hand. And though it was brief and likely unremarkable, it is a feeling I will never forget and one I’m afraid I will never experience again. Elysian Fields and all that.

She stayed with me in my hotel room that night, but we didn’t sleep together. We mostly shared a bottle of Louisville-purchased Maker’s Mark, passing it back and forth, with no assistance from the Quality Inn’s faulty ice machine. She really liked our music, especially the lyrics, and thought the way I played the guitar was “quietly sexy.” The highest compliment an attractive, intelligent woman can pay to a rhythm guitarist is to tell him that he is “quietly sexy.” It’s like telling a young center fielder that he “runs like a deer.” I felt a surge of confidence, as well as a surging boner.

She wouldn’t talk about her boyfriend, though she did mention that things weren’t going in the right direction. (They were both master’s candidates in the same health science program. His name was Laird.) But instead of taking the men-as-stepping-stones theme as an early sign, I egomaniacally interpreted the declining Laird chapter as an invitation and opened my lonely heart the same way seventh graders thrust their chins heavenward and free their tender souls after a hoped-for love note is discovered in a homeroom locker.

Sheila Anne followed us to Cleveland and Chicago, shooting our shows and helping us manage the merch table. Morris was cool and slept in Glose and Kent’s room, and Sheila Anne and I made love for the first time in Chicago, at the Days Inn off Clark Street—appropriately a legendary rock ’n’ roll hotel—with a Lake Michigan wind rattling the window like intermittent applause.

Miraculously, those brief seven minutes—perhaps the most perfect seven minutes of my life—produced simultaneous orgasms, yielding zoological noises from us so hilarious that upon completion we were immediately seized with hysterical laughter. Someone on the other side of our door might have thought we were watching Monty Python. There’s nothing better than coming and laughing at the same time. It had been a first for both of us.

The following morning, while I paced along the carpeted hallway outside our room, Sheila Anne called Laird and, through a long, teary phone conversation, ended their relationship. Over the course of the next few days I asked her repeatedly if she needed time to recover/decompress/heal from her breakup. Nobody worth his salt wants to be a rebound lay. But she insisted that we dive right in, headfirst, eyes wide open, and continued from these clichés to her platitudes about how we only lived once and life was too short and we had just a few tragic years to flop around and be foolish and dare the gods of love.

Again, I should’ve taken note.

A few days later we got married in Branson, Missouri. Branson was the next leg of the tour. It’s situated in the Ozark Mountains. The Third Policeman got booked to play a Journey tribute set at the God & Country Theatre. This was the kind of gig that would essentially pay for the entire tour. Somehow, Morris can hit all of Steve Perry’s impossible high notes, a challenge for any man who still possesses testicles.

High on Vicodin after the gig, I took a knee in front of a packed house of die-hard Journey freaks, professed my love to Sheila Anne, offered her a braided cocktail straw arrangement as an engagement ring, and asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted, laughing, no doubt equally high on Vicodin, and pulled my head into her midriff. She then kissed me so passionately and fully that I could have died right there.

The following day, a Monday, after I had passed the aforementioned kidney stone and sprained my ankle (were these not omens?), we obtained a marriage license from the local recorder’s office, a document later signed by Morris and Kent in the back of B. T. Bones Steakhouse after a municipal judge named Lester Moncrief, a half-blind, wheelchair-bound albino whose business card we’d found resting on a little shelf beside the marriage-license window, solemnized our marriage.

While my marriage to Sheila Anne was in full bloom, Kent was heading in the opposite direction as he and his girlfriend, Caitlin, a professional quilter (meaning she hand-made and sold quilts on consignment) as well as our minitour merch manager and occasional head barbecue chef, were about to go through a painful breakup.

Caitlin Carr of Indianapolis joined the tour in Pittsburgh, five days after the Branson show. Little did we know that she was less than twenty-four hours from leaving Third Policeman bassist and my best friend since sixth grade, Kent Orzolek. She wound up publicly accusing her boyfriend of some three years of being a homosexual. This little imputative nightmare took place in a dive bar on Pittsburgh’s South Side, while we were playing electronic darts on a Friday night in the middle of hockey season among scores of shitfaced, pissed-off Penguins fans, who had just witnessed a hard-fought loss to the New York Rangers.

Caitlin’s accusation seemed preposterous, but was in fact, as we were about to discover, wildly and unpredictably true.

Poor Kent.

It turned out that he’d been in love with Glose for several months and that the reason he’d been putting on weight was that he knew Glose preferred fat girls. Kent had grown particularly heavy, pushing 250 pounds (at a generous five foot ten).

He came out to Glose roughly at midnight, the night before our Pittsburgh show, in Glose’s Holiday Inn motel room, as Caitlin, Sheila Anne, Morris, and I were getting stoned and streaming a Three’s Company marathon on my laptop in another room. I think Kent got inspired by my sudden, impulsive marriage to Sheila Anne.

According to Glose, this is what happened:

Wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt featuring a Shazam thunderbolt, perhaps to highlight his plump pecs and bulbous tummy, Kent Orzolek professed romantic love to his longtime rhythm section partner. Glose, in response, vomited his Dairy Queen double cheeseburger, root beer, and vanilla shake onto the fire-retardant carpeting. Then he (Glose) freed his uncircumcised penis from his underwear-less pants and proceeded to urinate on the plot of regurgitated matter, at which point (according to Glose) Kent actually went to his knees. This, I assume, was probably out of desperation or relief or horror, or some combination thereof, as those extraordinarily heightened moments in our lives have a tendency to naturally lower our center of gravity, thus the need for phrases like “She took my legs out” and “He made my knees go wobbly.” Glose, however, obviously misinterpreted Kent’s genuflection as an inspired offer of fellatio, and according to Kent, Glose struck him square in the face with the cheap digital clock radio he’d aggressively snatched from the bedside stand. Glose claimed he thought Kent was coming by simply to huff a little glue and watch reality TV, something they’d been doing ad nauseam the entire minitour. (As an aside, Kent swears to the God of Rhythm and Blues that Glose has three testicles.)

The following morning, while Kent was out gophering coffee (it was his turn), Glose went straight to Caitlin and told her everything, which Kent, of course, despite his inflamed and bruised face, vehemently denied, calling Glose a liar, an iconoclast, and, of all things, a hairy, emotional Nazi.

That evening’s gig at the legendary Gooski’s, in Polish Hill, was, for good reason (and to put it lightly), a sloppy, unfocused mess, and we lost the room halfway through our set. The rhythm section was a horror show. Glose refused to look at Kent, whose eyes were bulging with tears. To make matters worse, because of his recent weight gain, Kent was short of breath and double-chinned and sitting on his amp the way old people sit on buses, and he was making a lot of faces that the middle-aged antihero stroke-victim character tends to make in American films just prior to having to go to a knee at the wedding reception for his estranged daughter who hates him but will likely grant him forgiveness.

We muscled through the set and broke our gear down in front of a disappointed crowd and sold a whopping four CDs and maybe three T-shirts, and only half-a-dozen people signed the e-mail list and we loaded into the van and headed back to the motel with our collective tail between our legs.

Later that night, Caitlin’s Inquisition reached its peak at the aforementioned dive bar on Pittsburgh’s South Side. Through several rounds of Iron City Lights, Kent couldn’t convince his girlfriend of three years that Glose’s story didn’t hold water. It was his word versus Glose’s and Caitlin believed Glose, whose version was sadly and inexorably the truth.

It turned out that Kent and Caitlin had been having sexual problems for months. She told me the only way Kent could achieve an erection was if she turned the lights off and lightly blew into his rectum while he brayed incoherently on all fours. And if that didn’t work, she would have to gently jab at his puckering anus with the tip of her thimbled index finger.

The breakup was inevitable. Caitlin wound up boarding a Greyhound bus, leaving Kent and the band for good.

Along with my marriage, Kent and Caitlin’s breakup was one in a confluence of unfortunate events that would lead to the demise of the Third Policeman. Glose, who’d exposed himself as a passionate homophobe, a terrible friend, and dare I say a hairy, emotional Nazi, basically stopped speaking to Kent altogether, which broke Kent’s heart, smashed it like a felled swallow under the wheel of a two-ton truck. After Pittsburgh we canceled gigs in Morgantown, West Virginia, and Bloomington, Indiana, and returned to Pollard.

The van ride home was eerily quiet, to say the least. I drove most of the way while Sheila Anne sat beside me in the passenger’s seat. Behind her, Kent basically stared out the window catatonically, while in the far back, amid a lot of equipment, Glose disappeared under a Hawaiian shirt he’d mysteriously acquired in Branson. Morris, as even-keeled as ever, manned the seat between Glose and Kent, reading a paperback and writing in his notebook.

Despite the tension between Glose and Kent, Sheila Anne and I couldn’t have been happier. In a few days I would be putting her on a bus back to Louisville so she could complete her master’s work at Bellarmine. We held hands and doted on each other the entire ride back. We were newlyweds, after all, and our whole life was ahead of us.

Back in Pollard, within days, Kent quit his job at the library. Without farewell, no doubt shamed and embarrassed, he packed his things into his ’79 Ford Fairmont and drove north to his parents’ poorly insulated winter cabin in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he currently resides doing God knows what. He does not answer my e-mails or his cell phone. I’m told it snows six months out of the year in the Upper Peninsula, and I worry about my best friend since sixth grade being gay and alone and cardiovascularly challenged in the hinterlands. Perhaps the saddest part of it all is that he did not take his bass with him. It’s still zipped in its Reunion Blues pleather gig bag, standing upright, leaning against one side of my wall of paperbacks.

Without any of us realizing it, Gooski’s in Pittsburgh’s Polish Hill would prove to be the Third Policeman’s final show.

  

So now I am a landlord in the house I grew up in. Lord of the Land. Francis Falbo, Landlord, take my card, won’t you?

My mother died on the first floor, in her converted hospice room, roughly where Bethany, the three-year-old daughter of my longest nonfamily leaseholders, the Bunches, used to sleep. I don’t make a habit of discussing my mother’s death with tenants. No one wants a ghost around, especially the ghost of a woman who spent a lot of time swallowing screams precipitated by intestinal pain.

I’d like to think that after a failed marriage and a semi-promising rock ’n’ roll career, which has evaporated into the Mist of Destiny (or Irony), I have found comfort in coming to accept the clear simplicity of my life. The practical duties of landlording are satisfying and chock-full of miniprojects that are actually solvable (unlike my personal life).

Such as: Replacing water heaters. And keeping raccoons out of the trash and bats out of the attic. And clearing gutters and battling ants and devising strategies for eradicating mid-July wasp nests from under the rear eaves. And installing bathtub drains or snaking a sewage pipe when the plumber isn’t available. And the acquired skill of speaking to sunburnt, potbellied, Kodiak-chewing contractors about installing drywall or routing conduit or reglazing windows while they spit tobacco juice into a 7-Eleven Big Gulp cup.

Is this approaching grace? I wonder. Or is the aggregate narrative of my life a series of small, ill-shaped rationalizations that mask an enormous failure? I probably won’t know until I reach old age, if I’m that lucky, as cancer runs on my mother’s side of the family like salmon in the River Tweed.

Is becoming the landlord in the house you grew up in sort of like running a funeral home? Or is it awesome and humble and rife with the coolness of familial legacy?

Two weeks ago, just after New Year’s, Todd and Mary Bunch’s three-year-old daughter, the aforementioned Bethany, disappeared. They were purportedly at the local Target, perusing the Outdoor/Camping aisle, when toddler Bethany wandered off, as toddlers throughout history have been wont to do. Was she kidnapped? Conveniently left?

The local media has made a pretty big stink about “Little Bethany,” although both the Pollard Pioneer (our daily ultraconservative newspaper) and the WKCG evening news seem to be in cahoots, hell-bent on treating Bethany Bunch’s disappearance more like an alien abduction than something actually disturbing and real.

Meanwhile we are halfway through the month, and while I try not to dwell on it, Todd and Mary Bunch still owe me rent for January. It’s not easy wrangling money from tenants when they’re down on their luck, let me tell you.

The Bunches are former trapeze artists in the Ringling Bros. Circus, from which they retired after their daughter was born. They were apparently married during a performance, shouting their I DOs midflight in front of a paying audience in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Todd, a short, quiet, wide-shouldered redhead with “invisible” adult braces, is now a rookie at the local fire department, and Mary, a petite, doll-eyed, slightly haunted-looking milkmaid of a girl, spends almost as much time moored to the house as I do.

This morning a detective came by. We spoke to each other on the front porch. His last name is Mansard and he is tall the same way high school history professors can be tall and he is severely bowlegged and sports a flesh-colored hearing aid. He possesses the face of an insomniac, distinguished by a nicotine-stained brown-gray mustache, and his line of questioning had mostly to do with the Bunches’ domestic habits, specifically odd behavior, and whether or not there has been any sign of spousal or child abuse, to which I could only answer—and honestly so—that I didn’t know, that I’d never noticed anything out of the ordinary like bruises or limps or silent cries for help. I explained that the house was nearly two hundred years old (it’s 134 years old, actually), with thick walls, fireproof-carpeted floors, and a layer of acoustic vinyl I had installed underneath the carpeting on each story.

Mansard seemed suspicious of me, as if I was somehow protecting the Bunches. “You really haven’t seen anything?” he asked.

“No,” I said, my wool hat snagging briefly in the synthetic holiday conifer wreath I’ve yet to remove from the front door. “They come and go, keep to themselves.”

He asked me what I charge them for rent, and how large their unit is.

Was this guy actually an undercover rep from some government agency created to investigate amoral landlord behavior? I told him they had the entire first floor, gesturing toward the window behind me, whose heavy brown drapes suddenly made it look funereal. “It’s roughly nine hundred square feet.” Perhaps he was asking about their living conditions because a cramped unit might be motivation for creating more space, thus eliminating a three-year-old?

“Is it nice in there?” he asked.

“Nice enough,” I replied. “Simple.”

He asked me if I spent a lot of time with the Bunches. I told him that I didn’t make it a habit to socialize with my tenants. He wanted to know if they went to church, to which I answered I had no idea. Then he actually asked me if I went to church, and I told him I attended the Church of Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

“It takes place in my headphones,” I added.

“You’re Lyman Falbo’s kid,” he said.

I told him that indeed I was.

“He did my taxes once. Got me a pretty decent return. How’s your dad doing these days?”

I told him he was down in Florida with his new wife.

“He was a helluva bowler,” Mansard said. “Didn’t he bowl a perfect game?”

“Nineteen seventy-nine,” I said. “He had the score sheet framed.”

Mansard stroked his calico mustache. He took his time. He acted like someone trying to portray a detective on a TV show. Like there was a camera set up at the other end of the porch and he was filming an audition. At home he probably wears a plaid flannel bathrobe and smokes a pipe. No wife. Maybe a two-decade-old cat sinking into a matching plaid armchair, fat and slow, runny-eyed, blind.

A tree branch down the street cracked. It sounded like someone’s femur breaking at close proximity.

Mansard eventually said, “You know, it took them four days to file a missing person’s report.”

I didn’t reply.

“That’s ninety-six hours after little Bethany disappeared,” he continued, touching his archaic hearing aid. “Usually, the parents’ll file within four or five hours.”

I asked him why he was telling me this and he replied that as their landlord I should know the kind of people I’m renting to. “They do hold a proper lease, I presume?”

I said nothing, but nodded.

The snow, which had ceased for almost an hour, started again. It looked somehow theatrical, from the Ice Capades or some other holiday extravaganza, as if it had been cued and someone hiding across the street in the Grooms’ ancient sycamore was turning a dial.

Hazard Groom, the retired Pollard Memorial football coaching legend, was shoveling his driveway in what appeared to be a Formula One fire-retardant racing suit. He also was wearing hiking boots and a hat that made it appear as if an owl had landed on his head. He stared up at the heavens, indignant in the face of the incessant snow.

“It’s about twenty-four degrees out here,” Mansard said. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

I explained that there was no common area.

He asked if we could just go to my unit and I said something about cramped quarters, so he suggested going to get a cup of coffee.

I told him I was expecting the plumber.

Then he mentioned the cold again, saying, “I’d really love to get the heck out of this weather.” He blew into cupped hands and stomped his feet.

I asked him if he’d tried ringing the Bunches’ doorbell.

“I did,” Mansard replied. “If someone’s in there, they’re sure as hell not answering.” His face was starting to contort from the windchill.

My unclean, riptiding, transmogrifying beard was protecting me brilliantly, and I was quickly tiring of the storkish bastard and his calico ’stache.

“Couldn’t you force them to come in for questioning?” I said.

“Oh, sure I could do that,” Mansard answered obliquely. “Not sure that’s necessary just yet.”

Was this guy lazy or did he have some weird veteran detective strategy?

Through gritted teeth he added, “I understand the husband’s a firefighter?”

I told him that as far as I knew this was true.

“Former circus couple going straight.”

“Straight?” I said.

“The straight life. No more big top. No more freaks. Clowns. Contortionists. Midgets with cardboard swords. The smell of big-game dung and hay. All that fantasy. Suddenly deciding to hunker down and do the neighborly life in a place like Pollard. Going for the quiet America. It’s bound to do a number on your head.”

“I suppose it could,” I said, and wiggled my toes, which were safely warm inside my merino Ingenius socks, which were covered by a pair of Scandinavian ergonomically advanced wool slippers that Sheila Anne had gotten me for our first Christmas.

“What do you do,” Mansard then asked, “besides chase down the monthly?”

I told him I used to be in a band.

“Like a rock ’n’ roll band?”

“Um, yeah,” I said. “We played rock ’n’ roll.”

“What instrument?”

I told him I mostly played guitar and sang. “Some hand-clapping, too,” I added.

Then he asked if he would have heard of the band, and I said probably not.

“What were you guys called?”

“The Third Policeman.”

“No kidding?”

“You’ve heard of us?”

“No,” he replied. “I mostly listen to Mickey Newbury, Waylon Jennings, that sorta stuff. Kristofferson.” Then he asked if we were interested in police work.

“Only the police work of the soul,” I replied.

“There’s no other kind,” he said.

We were practically flirting, and it felt just plain weird.

He cocked his head to the left a bit, as if suddenly beholding something. The gesture was distinctly beaglelike. “Do you always wear the robe?” he queried. “I only ask because there appear to be about thirteen different species of mustard stains at play.”

I told him I eat a lot of sandwiches.

“And the hat?” he asked.

I told him it was part of my landlord ensemble. “I have an evening robe too,” I lied.

“Comfortable living,” he offered, somewhat gently, though I could sense the hidden barb in the cotton ball. For the first time I noticed that his mustache hairs looked like they were growing into his nostrils and that his nostril hairs looked like they were braiding into his mustache. Mansard gave me his card, touched his hearing aid again, and said, “If you speak to your dad please give him my best.”

Then he descended the porch steps, his head still tilted slightly to the left.

Across the street, Hazard Groom was taking a break, leaning on his snow shovel. Plumes of lung smoke escaped his mouth, and his silver racing suit reflected squibs of light.

Mansard started whistling as he fished for his keys, or maybe it was his hearing aid feeding back. He walked with a hitch. Something to look forward to: arthritis in the winter. I briefly imagined him bowling with my father back in the seventies. Sideburns and turtlenecks and polyester pants. Disco playing over the PA.

Mansard’s car—a metallic-gray Lincoln—squawked as he engaged the remote to unlock his door.

  

Although, as I’ve said, I haven’t seen Sheila Anne in nearly two years, my ex-brother-in-law, Bradley, who was staying with us for a few months before she left, still lives in the street-facing second-floor apartment (Unit 2). For unexplained reasons, Bradley, twenty-two now, had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater and arrived on our doorstep after the first semester of his sophomore year. He’d been wrestling a pretty ferocious weed habit, which, since the acquisition of his sister’s thirty-seven-inch high-definition Sony plasma flat-screen television, has been recently upgraded to Lifestyle status. The flat-screen was de-installed from Sheila Anne’s and my former living room and reinstalled onto his freshly Sheetrocked bedroom wall once he moved into his own unit, roughly a year and a half ago.

He simply knocked on my door and stated it plainly: “She said I could have the plasma.” As if I were giving him the very stuff of my blood, or my ex-wife’s.

I didn’t fight him for the TV. It had to be de-anchored from the wall with a special tool that only the guy from Best Buy has, so it cost me a hundred and fifty dollars to have him come to the house, de-mount it from my wall (now the Bunches’ wall), then remount it to the virgin Sheetrock in Bradley’s unit.

Bradley is one of those handsome, athletic-looking men who, aside from Hacky Sack, Wiffle ball, and occasional stints of skateboarding, has never played a sport in his life. Women seem to descend on him the way crab apples fall out of trees in the late fall, yet he seems only vaguely interested at best. In my opinion it’s not his sexual orientation that accounts for his indifference to women—he seems pretty obviously straight—but rather it’s a kind of general disconnect from the world. This detachment in its most elemental state is plantlike. And like most plants, marijuana included, it is only sunlight and water that he needs, a condition that might be called human photosynthesis. Recently, like me, Bradley has grown a full beard and exists largely in his underwear, though he wears simple V-neck T-shirts and boxer briefs, not long, waffle-patterned double-layered thermals.

We obviously have more in common than I’d like to admit.

When he does leave the house he dons a long black trench coat and a navy-blue knit skullcap, as if he’s heading off to work at the docks, though aside from the Blackhawk River, which is a stagnant, sulfuric glorified tributary with a cement promenade featuring an outfit that offers summer paddleboating, a Baskin-Robbins with faulty refrigeration, and a dozen or so vacant, suspicious-looking storefronts, Pollard’s only other body of water is a crappie-stocked man-made lake glutted with Jet Skis and pontoon boats.

Despite the fact that my ex still pays his rent, Bradley and I seldom speak, and when we do, the conversation is executed with the fewest possible syllables.

“Hey,” I’ll say, after he opens his door, upon which I was knocking for several minutes.

“Hey,” he’ll reply in his sleepy baritone.

“What’s up?” I’ll ask to ease into things.

“Nothin’ muh.” The words are almost breathed out, a somber little anti-song, the three syllables getting equal exhalation and drone.

For some reason I feel it necessary to hang on to the thin vestige of familial tissue—however dehydrated by marijuana, baseboard heating, or general male sadness—that connects Bradley and me.

He’ll say, “She sennit, righ?” Sennit meaning “sent it.” It meaning “the rent.”

“She sent it,” I’ll confirm for him.

“Coo,” he’ll say, after a genuinely blank moment, the word sapping one of his few remaining available breaths for the day, his face as vacant as a Tupperware lid. Not “cool”; “coo,” and sincerely uttered, not hipstery, and with absolutely no intent of sounding urban or in any way ebonical. I’m convinced he drops the l out of classic stoner elocutionary fatigue.

“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” I’ll offer, feeling my blood pressure, which is already low, dropping to match his.

“Coo,” he’ll say again.

“You’re good?”

“Yeah, I’m coo…”

Then we’ll stand there and stare at each other, the smell of reefer creeping into the hallway, almost manlike in its sharpness, with his sister’s state-of-the-art TV murmuring in the background and Halo’s pause-mode riff looping maddeningly.

Bradley and Sheila Anne have mouths shaped the same, the upper lip fuller than the lower, perfectly imperfect, and they have the same color eyes, somehow sea-foam green. It pains me to look at him.

“Heard from your sister?” I’ll finally ask, trying with all my weakened will not to pose this question, but ultimately failing, like some pathetic crystal meth addict breaking down in front of a stranger at the Greyhound station.

“Other day she tole me to check my e-mail,” he said recently.

“She called you?”

“Lef a message.”

“But you don’t have a computer.”

“True dat.”

“Do you even have an e-mail address?”

“Think so.”

“You can borrow my laptop anytime,” I offered.

And he nodded, evidently having exhausted himself of any more verbal energy. And I nodded too. And when the nods decayed to cranial stasis, we just sort of stood there like cows in a field of mud.

“You have Cheetos in your beard,” I said, or something to that effect.

And then he mustered one final nod, almost infinitesimal in its movement, and shut the door not quite in my face, and I turned and headed back up to the attic.

Since he became a leaseholder I’ve seen exactly thirty-two women knock on Bradley’s door, which is just at the landing of the eight stairs that lead up to my attic unit, so it makes it easy to spy. And yes, I count them (I actually keep a tally on a piece of paper that is thumbtacked to a small corkboard over my desk). Both the front and back doors are well secured; you have to be buzzed in to get into the house, which means that most of these girls are waiting around for someone to leave the premises so they can sneak in, likely because Bradley is too lazy to cross the necessary square footage of his apartment to reach his intercom. And because I am by all definitions housebound and beyond Bradley and me there are only four other people living here (well, three now, considering the fact that little Bethany is missing), I imagine this waiting could get exorbitant. I estimate most of the women to be in their twenties. They are all above-average-looking to beautiful, slim, if not blatantly fit, and slightly agitated. The majority of them leave dramatic notes taped to his door.

Notes like:

Bradley, you really hurt my fucking arm…

Or:

Thanks for all the lying!

I have no idea where he meets these women or how he goes about accumulating them. I thought for a while that it might be some sort of personal dating enterprise developed through one of our more mainstream social media platforms—Facebook or Twitter or what have you—but in addition to not owning a computer, Bradley lives without the services of a smartphone. His telephone is of the analog rotary-dial variety. In fact, I’m almost positive that it was a phone I grew up with. So he assembles a stable of women without click, drag, text, post, tweet, or any other missive from the digital world. Which makes his babe magnetism all the more remarkable. Aside from the plasma TV, he is the Luddite Lothario of Pollard, Illinois.

Bradley owns a silver Toyota Celica with one brown door and a replacement tire. It’s a car he parks in the back of the house, but rarely drives. I’ve seen him mostly getting stoned in the driver’s seat, pulling from a seven-inch, sunburst-orange fiberglass bong, the stereo system playing Bon Iver or Bill Callahan or Sufjan Stevens or some other soul-blighted “In” or recently “Out” Midwestern indie crooner.

Next to Bradley, in Unit 3, which faces the backyard, whose majestic copper beech is perhaps the property’s greatest natural asset, is Harriet Gumm, a twenty-year-old art student attending Willis Clay whose current project involves nude studies of local middle-aged African-American men. Like Bradley and his stable of women, I have no idea how she finds her subjects or where they come from. Despite its rural profile, Pollard is ethnically diverse, with a surprisingly large African-American population, upwards of something like 27 percent. Lyman, my quietly racist father, always claimed the majority of them were Southern blacks who didn’t have the resources or the will to make it all the way north to Chicago. My mother would shake her head disdainfully, only half-joking that she married a racist.

“You married a realist,” Lyman would contest, dead serious. “A realist!”

Harriet Gumm boasts dyed black bangs over mischievous Coca-Cola-brown, heavily lined eyes, and she is one of those sun-phobic loners whose ears are perpetually plugged with iPhone buds. She wears mostly navy-blue or black clothes, often covered by a charcoal-gray wool pinafore, a silk headscarf, knee-high white socks, and black leather, brass-buckled children’s shoes. She seems somehow out of time, as if she could have been a troubled silent-film star, or some haunted character from an Edward Gorey fable. In a more pedestrian context, at a glance she could be mistaken for a parochial junior high school student. But then she’ll turn and cast her large brown eyes at you with such intensity it’s as if a four-hundred-year-old witch is glimpsing the damp, thin paper napkin that is your soul.

Our exchanges have been limited to brief hellos in the basement laundry room—her voice surprisingly quiet and girlish—and minimal discourse about the rent, which she always pays in cash (invariably twenty-five twenty-dollar bills), which she wraps in scented white, patterned Kleenex and stuffs into a white business envelope with “Mr. Falbo” printed on the front. The strange thing about her penmanship is that it’s an uncanny replica of my manual Corona typewriter font. So much so that I took an eraser to it only to discover that it was composed in fine-point charcoal pencil.

When she moved in she brought with her a duffel bag, a waxed canvas backpack, and a wooden easel. Once, when I had to fix her window, which wouldn’t close, I noticed that she had turned all of her artwork around, so that it looked like she was hanging blank pieces of sketch paper on her walls.

Her music of choice is a multitude of African-American female classic soul singers, ranging from Etta James to Tina Turner. Her skin is so alabaster white it’s almost blue, and as far as I can tell, she doesn’t appropriate cultural “blackness” in any way. If anything, she presents herself as a prog-rock/goth chick, and I would expect her playlist to contain more Ministry or PJ Harvey than Sister Sledge.

There is something porcelain and doll-like about her. She is slim-hipped, not quite long-legged, not quite full-lipped, and, like Dennis Church, possesses a long yet unapologetic nose. But her icy pallor dominates. For some reason I can’t quite imagine her with pubic hair. I see a small series of pyramid-shaped gemstones instead. She is attractive in the same way that certain kinds of high-end candy dishes can be.

The man whom she is currently drawing, Keith, is an overweight, slow-moving, light-skinned perpetual smiler whose extreme positive nature could be misconstrued as Christian. He’s always beaming, or at least on the verge of it, and the grooves in his deep-guttered corduroys produce such loud swishing noises that I can hear him approaching the back porch all the way from my attic room. Keith stands a hulking six-four, with oddly thin, vermiform arms. He apparently doesn’t own a car, as I’ve witnessed him only afoot.

  

As I sit here in my yellowing, decade-old thermals, while the ghostly snow (it has officially been declared a blizzard) passes through the spill of weak moonlight outside my attic window, I am seized by the certainty that I am still obsessed with a woman who no longer wants me, and has not wanted me for a good long time. This certainty I picture with a large Marfan hand, one that might be wearing a thin, black, homicidal-looking leather glove, and it hurts. It makes it ache in my Adam’s apple, this certainty. It makes me want to drink consecutive bourbons and play Minnesota-based, midnineties slowcore music, which doles out fewer beats per minute than Chopin’s brutally sad nocturnes.

Other than the wretchedness of cancer, which I came to know vicariously through my mother’s suffering, there is perhaps no greater misery than the loss of the Love of Your Life. I know it’s hyperbolic and sentimental and whiny, but those are the truest words I can type.

The Love of My Life. The One Great Love. Miracle Love.

As if I were some sad-eyed, slope-shouldered, prehistoric mountain creature roaming the antediluvian earth at night, and was befriended by a lonely, nocturnal, equally prehistoric bird, say, a kind of burly, mechanical-looking but kindhearted loon of the night who saves the prehistoric mountain creature from the terror of Epic Loneliness.

In other words, Love So Special It Might as Well Be a Children’s Fable kind of love.

I could certainly use the services of one of Bradley’s visitors. I’d like to believe that, like my former brother-in-law, I have willingly devolved into my own monastic plantlike state, solitary, self-sustaining, animated only by moisture and an attic window’s worth of sun, but I can’t deny that I long for the simple creature comfort of companionship, specifically female companionship. It’s not sex that I’m talking about, although that certainly accounts for something; it’s the warmth of another. The reliability and purity of a woman’s shape moving through a shared room. The cast and cant of her shadow on a wall. The warm apples-and-smoke scent of her hair hanging faintly in the air. The perfect spiderweb smallness of bras and panties clinging to a hamper’s wicker skin. The minty effluvium of her toothpaste breath on cold winter mornings.

In the simplest of terms, according to Sheila Anne, she left me because I lost my ambition. Because I settled—that was the word she kept throwing around.

Settle: to decide on something; to solve; to make or become resident; to colonize place; to stop floating; to pay what is owed; to move downward; to subside; to stop moving; to make or become clear; to end a legal dispute; to make or become calm; to put details in order; to make somebody comfortable; to put something in place; to establish or become established; to compact something firmly; to assign property; to impregnate or be impregnated.

I’m fairly certain that, with regard to me, the definition Sheila Anne was referring to was “to stop moving.”

And why did I stop moving? Because I grew to be satisfied with our life in Pollard and the cresting of the Third Policeman and the cluttered familiarity of the basement recording studio. Perhaps the most troubling reason I stopped moving is because of love itself. Because I let love become my priority, which, I realize in retrospect, results in too much doting, a compulsive need to touch and cling, and the dissolution of any mystery that might exist between intimate companions. It is mystery, after all, that keeps a marriage interesting. Things secreted in drawers. Unknown telephone numbers on the long-distance bill. Unusual URL addresses on the web browser.

I think I took marriage to be a kind of pre-midlife apotheosis, but instead of it inspiring me to continue to grow as Francis Falbo the Man and Francis Falbo the Rock Musician (thereby increasing my mystery quotient!), it pushed me into a strange mode of self-satisfied semiretirement. I loved getting domestic and cuddly. I practically swooned at the dependable regularity of shopping for groceries and the weekly Laundry Day and tri-weekly scheduled Magic Hour Sex and morning coffee/newspaper reading and making “team” decisions about dinner and evening entertainment and whether or not we should get a Puggle (we never did).

Sheila Anne commuted to work ninety minutes away, where she managed the Human Resources Department at Decatur Memorial Hospital. Route 41 is not the most exciting drive in the state, and the boring commute, combined with my boring car and her boring, mostly devout Christian staff, made her tenure at Decatur Memorial pretty uneventful, if not existentially challenging. Then she would come home to a cookbook dinner, prepared by her domestically satisfied, bemused-by-a-midlife-type-lifestyle-but-actually-only-thirty-two-year-old husband, and a few glasses of twelve-dollar Merlot, and maybe a semi-interesting studio film foisting itself off as an independent dramedy about a small-town varsity wrestling coach or lawn-furniture salesperson or some such middlebrow, down-on-his-luck-despite-being-world-class-handsome hero, and then we would bed down to sleep and wake up early and she would man the espresso machine and scan the newspaper while wolfing down the granola and the antioxidant blueberries and then once again the ninety minutes in the fuel-efficient Volkswagen Jetta to clip time at a hospital where it rarely got better than talking to disgruntled nurses about when they could expect to be fully vested 401(k)-wise.

The beige Midwestern hamster wheel spins and spins.

I suspect Sheila Anne met Dennis Church at some hospital function where pharmaceutical sales reps were rubbing shoulders with pharmacists, pain management buyers, psychiatrists, and other hospital higher-ups. I imagine the scenario unfolding at a Ponderosa, Glen Campbell on the radio, Sheila Anne and Dennis Church falling in love-at-first-sight across tubs of hi-cal/low-cal dressings at the buffet-style salad bar.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey,” she replies.

“I’m Dennis. Two Ns.”

“I’m Sheila Anne.”

“You’re with the hospital. According to your lanyard you run the Human Resources Department. I’m with a top-three pharmaceutical conglomerate. That’s Glen Campbell on the radio. ‘Rhinestone Cowboy.’ Great tune. You know it was actually written by an Australian? Great American country-and-western pop song written by an Australian. Dingo ate my baby. Go figure.”

“How long are you in town for?” Sheila Anne asks, warmed by his Top 40 trivia charm.

“Only tonight. Why do you ask?”

“Because I find you incredibly attractive, particularly your masculine, aquiline nose, and I don’t want to go home and face my mediocre husband whose recent increase in body-fat percentage is only seconded by his declining mystery quotient. Plus, our sex has become like the mechanical, shame-tinted, physiological sawing you read about in Christian reproductive books written for children, where the husband and wife look like pancake people and don’t have genitals per se, but sort of smooth, glabrous, Teflon-like surfaces.”

“Awesome. You have beautiful, sea-foam-green fuck-me eyes.”

“And you have an interesting, incredibly strange but undeniably sexy fuck-me nose.”

“And without going too hyperbolically off the rails here, I have to say, glabrous—what a cock-smoking word choice.”

“Learned that word from my husband. Good with words. Bad in bed.”

“Dingo ate my baby.”

“Put that heaping plate of low-cal lentils down, cowboy, I’ll follow you out.”

But it really probably went like this:

“I’m Dennis.”

“I’m Sheila Anne.”

“You looked marooned at the salad bar.”

“Oh, I’m just being vague and noncommittal. There are too many options.”

“The variety of croutons alone.”

“It’s all just so complicated. And is that supposed to be blue cheese or ranch?”

“I’d bet my baked potato that it’s ranch…I gather from your lanyard that you’re with the hospital. I’m from AstraZeneca.”

“Is that a new addition to our solar system?”

“It’s a pharmaceutical company. It would appear that I’ve lost my lanyard.”

“Maybe it’s down at the other end of the salad bar, deeply recessed in that tub of cottage cheese and pineapple bits.”

“I’m one of the reps. This is part of my new territory. Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. Do you live in Decatur?”

“I live in Pollard. Southwest down Route Forty-one. Two-lane highway, lots of nice arable fields to take in. Corn. Cows. Silos. What about you?”

“I live in New York.”

“City?”

“The Big Apple, yep.”

“Never been.”

“Instead of corn, cows, and silos, we have skyscrapers, pit bulls, and the smell of salmonella in August. I’m actually originally from Colorado. Little town called Yuma, about two hours northeast of Denver.”

“What lured you east?”

“The job.”

“They bring you all the way out to New York City so you can work in the Midwest?”

“They fly me out here once a month. Put me up in decent hotels, rent me quality sedans.”

They smile. He reveals his white, nonbleached, staggeringly irresistible teeth.

Sheila Anne’s larger upper lip dimples up adorably.

“Mind if I join you?” he asks (finally).

“Not at all,” she answers.

And then they finish filling their plates with low-cal, colorful salad bar selections and sit together at an imitation oak, poorly padded, ass-cheek-hardening booth and talk about things like the Wellness Profession and the pros and cons of socialized medicine and why maybe the French and the Swedes have figured it out and the insane hours doctors put in for the good of mankind and how fluorescent hospital lighting makes one look and eventually feel bloodless as a macadamia nut, which can be generally counterintuitive to healing, and how the cafeteria fare at Decatur Memorial has actually improved quite a bit since they brought in the new eco-friendly food services company.

And over his medium-rare porterhouse steak, in between graceful but without a doubt masculine mastication, Dennis Church, in his lightweight, well-tailored spring/summer business suit, tells the sea-foam-green-eyed beauty across from him about the loneliness of traveling and how low-down and just plain weird it is to have your only companions be your company-bought MacBook Pro and your tricked-out company-financed smartphone, and how sometimes he wishes he lived a simpler life, in a small town with like a Little League diamond and a swimming hole and a barbershop with one of those swirling red-white-and-blue barber poles and ceramic Nativity scenes erected on the lawns of churches during the holiday season and a really high-quality miniature golf course with a windmill that’s so big it almost looks real and a shopping mall with an authentic food court and a grade-A Fourth of July fireworks display at the local speedway and a lima-bean-colored water tower with the town’s name featured in black majuscule letters.

And in between his words, Sheila Anne imagines her life in New York. The faster metabolism it would educe and the taxicabs and the inconceivable volume of humanity teeming on actual boulevard-sized streets and wide cement sidewalks and sluicing bike messengers and the unspoken rules of engagement on subway cars and the new urban way of walking and the learned skill of avoiding insane encephalitic homeless people with swollen carbuncular faces and leaky eyes and Pilates at dawn and bartenders who can knock your socks off reciting Shakespearean soliloquies while shaking the daylights out of a martini and high-speed elevators and crammed espresso bars and the yeasty sweet smell of Broadway theater lobbies.

And every other sentence or so Sheila Anne starts to imagine this New York life with him, this incredibly magnetic Dennis Church, who has undone the top button of his oxford now and loosened his tie so his impressive, well-shaven Adam’s apple can be free to dance a bit. And although at this point it is an absurd, premature notion because she is very much married and supposedly in love with and spiritually and legally committed to a man she lost her mind over some four years earlier, she lets her imagination run like a wild horse galloping along the cliffs of the Costa Brava, and all she can see is Dennis’s presumably fit, low-fat, highly conditioned body poised over hers, the two of them composed missionary-style in some cheap roadside motel room off Route 41, with great classic soul music like Larry Graham’s “One in a Million You” playing at a volume so perfect that they can inhale the music with the pores of their conjoined bodies and yet also hear each other’s animal pleasure—the wordless mewls and whimpers—releasing into and infusing with Larry Graham’s velveteen baritone and by the end of their meal, which she can’t even remember eating, let alone choosing, Sheila Anne Falbo has decided to give herself permission to fall under the spell of this extremely thoughtful, surprisingly charming, endlessly interesting gentleman with the aquiline nose who is sitting across from her.

  

Earlier I keyed into the Bunches’ unit. The grief over their missing daughter tinges the air like a spoiled egg. Their apartment is surprisingly neat, with furniture that is as beige as it is simple. I assume their plain living is due more to ignorance than some minimalistic aesthetic choice. They were itinerant circus travelers after all, most likely living out of secondhand Winnebagos and camper-trailers, enduring and adapting to gypsylike caravanning. Perhaps they have yet to experience the challenges of domestic stability and therefore know nothing of the concept of classic American household clutter.

I was surprised by the lack of toys. Aside from a stuffed corduroy cat that was more of a throw pillow than a child’s companion, there was little if any evidence of toddler life. Regarding Bethany, I thought I might find a series of circus-themed photos of her arranged around the living room walls, the sequined trapeze-artist parents thrusting her joyously into the air as celestial big-top lights glint overhead…a clown riding a miniature tricycle over a sawdust floor, little Bethany perched on the handlebars…an elephant standing in the center of a ring of paper lanterns with Bethany cradled safely in its trunk. But save for what appeared to be a wool Navajo blanket hanging above the sofa, their walls were blank.

In their entertainment console, an archaic TiVo’s red light was engaged. I imagined them recording The Oprah Winfrey Show, an episode dedicated to the epidemic of Missing Children in the Heartland. The Bunches would view it encamped on their itchy calico sofa, their legs extended on their unremarkable coffee table, as they ate microwaved Stouffer’s.

Mary Bunch keyed in while I was clutching their remote control. I have no idea why I was suddenly holding it, and I was forced to hide it in the pocket of my bathrobe.

“What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice was high and faint and trapped in her nose.

I told her that I’d heard a strange noise in her apartment as I was walking up the stairs. She asked me what kind of noise, and I said, “A sort of scrabbling. There were coons in the attic last night,” I lied.

“Coons?” she said.

“Yep,” I replied. “Scrabbling raccoons.”

She said she was under the impression that raccoons were in hibernation mode.

And I told her that, yes, the majority of raccoons were indeed engaged in deep hibernation mode, but that sometimes it was necessary for a few of them—a brave select few—to venture out for the purpose of foraging for food. I could hear my voice sliding into its higher bullshit register.

“During a blizzard?” she asked, dubious.

“Especially during a blizzard. The stakes are higher. Hunger becomes paramount. They have to refuel.”

“Whose apartment did you hear them in?”

I told her in rare cases such as this—in “coon cases”—that I always do a quick check of the other units. “A cursory inspection,” I offered, and explained that I had keyed into Harriet Gumm’s and Bradley Farnham’s apartments too.

She hadn’t blinked yet, and the space between us was acquiring a strange density, like the air before a thunderstorm. Her light-blue ozone eyes appeared to be somehow glued open. I had never noticed it before, but Mary Bunch has freckles. The kind where the pigment appears to have dissolved and settled over the paler layer of skin, more infusion than dusting.

“They’re pretty resourceful creatures,” I added. I breathed through my nose. A trail of cold sweat was running from between my shoulder blades to the small of my back. Time was slowing down. I said, “By the way, how’s your heat been?”

“Our heat is fine,” she replied.

A dollop of embarrassment began slogging through my intestines. “Sorry if I crossed a line,” I finally offered, swallowing the dry mouth. Swallowing twice actually.

She was wearing a ski vest over a weather-resistant anorak, accompanied by a gnomic, conical red winter hat and mismatching collegiate jogging pants. The ski vest, puffy and hazard orange, looked bulletproof and gave the impression that she was either a municipal worker or a deer hunter.

“Can I help you with those?” I asked, pointing to her bag of groceries.

“I can manage,” she said.

There was another awkward moment, during which she sniffled back a snot globule and finally blinked. It was as if the blink somehow reset her. She exited into the kitchen with her groceries.

The warmth of their unit was making my pulse drop and my feet felt incredibly thick. Sweat was now also forming at my temples and soon my beard would start glistening repulsively. Something beyond the embarrassment of having been caught nosing around in one of my tenant’s apartments, something beyond the clammy humors of shame, was overwhelming me. Something sad and heavy and haunted.

I could suddenly smell freshly cut apples. And Mary Bunch was putting groceries in the fridge. I imagined it filled with doubles and triples of things. Jars of mayonnaise and bottles of ketchup. Four-packs of butter. Eight quarts of whole milk, most of which would never get drunk. A dozen misshapen grapefruit. Overbuying to compensate for their missing child. Little dimple-cheeked Bethany with her baby teeth and her impossibly large blue eyes, her wheat-colored hair.

Once she knocked on my door. She was wearing only a saggy cloth diaper and holding a dinner fork.

“Hi, Bethany,” I said.

The flaxen hair, duck-curling at the base of her neck. Her tiny pink hands. “Fork,” she said, thrusting the utensil high in the air. The word was a perfect note, almost pure oxygen. I wasn’t sure if the fork belonged to the Bunches, if it was mine, or if it was one that had been randomly left in the stairwell.

“Thank you,” I said, taking it from her.

She then plugged her mouth with her thumb and headed back down the stairs, all on her own. I remember being vaguely troubled that it was the beginning of December and the Bunches were letting their daughter wander around the house unsupervised, wearing only a saggy diaper.

When Mary reentered the living room she’d removed the ski vest and anorak and was now wearing a Phish concert T-shirt, too large, probably her husband’s, with a long-sleeved black T-shirt underneath.

“You think we did something,” she said. “To her.” Her voice was still congested, and I had the strange impulse to go to a knee, to actually genuflect; perhaps out of some expression of abject, confusing shame for trespassing in my own house, or worse yet, for being a completely neutral human who exists mostly in wool camping socks.

Still standing, I said, “Did something to who?”

“Our daughter.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

Mary Bunch was surprisingly attractive in her Billy Breathes T-shirt, and our proximity, likely tweaked by my recent extended lack of female companionship, felt weirdly romantic. Was there a sudden charge between us? A little ionic landlord/tenant valence? Whatever it was had taken me by surprise.

I quickly fantasized that she was trapped in a bad marriage, that her lack of blinking was in fact a dry-eyed cry for help, that behind her retinas a home movie was playing that featured Mary being emotionally terrorized by her husband, Todd, with his invisible braces and inescapable circus strongman holds, and that I was the only one who could save her. I would invite her up to the attic and we would simply spoon in my boyhood bed. And then I would wash her hair in a basin of water, frontier-style.

But what about little Bethany? Was she actually alive, being held captive by her parents, gagged and duct-taped, locked in a closet somewhere?

Mary Bunch’s nostrils were gluey with snot. I got the sense that it was more than just a cold, that she was somehow spiritually congested, that her soul was heavy with some unnameable guilty paste. She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. I realized that, like me, she didn’t appear to have showered recently. Her face had a film. The hair sneaking out from behind her ears was matted and dirty. I wanted to smell it. I imagined the sharp odor of her unclean scalp embedded deep in the fibers of her gnomic ski hat.

Finally Mary said, “I saw you speaking to that man yesterday.” I asked her what man she was referring to and she said, “The tall creepy-looking guy with the mustache.”

“So you were here,” I said. I told her how he’d claimed to have rung their doorbell several times.

“Who was he?” she asked.

“A detective,” I replied.

She said something about how “these people”—I supposed she meant cops—were “relentless.” She asked what he wanted, and I told her how he’d simply asked a few standard questions. “About Bethany?” she asked.

Hearing her say her daughter’s name was strangely shocking in that it revealed nothing more than if she’d uttered “clock” or “can opener.”

She said, “What exactly did he ask?”

“If I’d seen anything out of the ordinary.”

She started bobbing her head. Tiny little nods. It was almost parkinsonian, this bobbing.

I was confused, back on my heels, defensive, yet I still had this impulse to pull her close and feel her breasts press into me. Something about our mutual desperation. Or maybe it was just my hormonal loneliness, my proximity to an unwashed woman pheromonally spiking my testosterone. Despite our many respective thermal layers, I was convinced that an old-fashioned breast-to-chest hug would do us both a world of good.

After her head came to rest, she said that they hadn’t filed a missing person’s report because they didn’t even know what that was.

“Of course,” I said.

She said that when they signed the lease they told me how they were “different.” “We’re still getting used to this kind of life,” she added.

I told her I totally understood.

“Why did he give you his card?” she asked, and the space between her words had shrunk, her breath had quickened.

I said I was pretty sure it was standard procedure and that he had given it to me unsolicited.

Then she asked if she could see the card, and I told her it was up in the attic.

“What’s his name?” she asked.

I told her “Mansard” and she asked what kind of detective he was. “Just a regular detective,” I said.

Her eyes seemed to go soft-focus, and she mouthed his name a few times. Then the head bobbing started again. “Are you gonna call him?” she said.

“Should I?” I asked.

Her blue eyes seemed to surge. She regarded me with an attitude I can only describe as ultracontained vitriol, her mouth a small knot of bitterness. “We didn’t know about the Office of Missing Persons,” she said.

“There’s no need to explain anything to me, Mrs. Bunch.”

“Mary,” she said.

“I mean Mary.”

“I’m not a librarian.”

“Of course,” I capitulated yet again.

“She disappeared while we were shopping,” she said. “Someone took her right out of the fucking Target.”

Their refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Hides of snow calved on the roof. Someone in the neighborhood was trying to start a chain saw. Plows scraped by on distant streets. These were epic sounds.

Then, to change the subject, perhaps cheaply, almost in the voice of another man, someone I’ve never heard speak before, I said, “I don’t mean to have to be a landlord right now, Mary, but you’re almost three weeks late with the rent.”

“We’ll have it to you in a few days,” she replied tersely.

Her large, unblinking eyes, their pupils enormous again. This is what grief does to your eyes, I thought. It turns them into doll’s eyes. Grief or sociopathic numbness.

“Todd’s waiting on a check,” she added.

“Don’t worry about the late fee,” I offered.

For which she didn’t thank me. Mary Bunch was about as thankless as an interstate tollbooth attendant.

“By the way,” she said, “are you planning on shoveling the front steps? Todd almost slipped and fell this morning. It’s starting to get dangerous and we can’t afford him losing any days.”

“I have someone coming by,” I lied.

She asked me why I couldn’t do it.

“Bad back,” I lied again. “But don’t worry, they’ll be shoveled and salted first thing tomorrow.”

Then, without looking at my hands, she said, “Why are you holding that?”

I hadn’t even realized it, but I’d removed their TiVo remote from the pocket of my bathrobe. I was squeezing it so hard my knuckles were pearling. I loosened my grip, handed it to her.

She gently snatched it and wedged it into her armpit. “I think you should go,” she said, her arms folded in front of her, her chin still jutting.

I found myself wondering how many times she’d fallen into the net while doing trapeze. Twelve? Two hundred? And would it have been a product of bad timing or a missed cue? Her body hurtling through the air as if thrown from the window of a high-speed train.

The remote fell from her armpit to the floor, and the cover for the batteries popped off and one AA battery rolled across the space between us and kissed my slippered left foot. We froze in recognition of a kind of mushroom-cloud moment. Neither of us would look down.

I realized I was squeezing my butt cheeks together with all my might, which I surmised was related to my acute dehydration. It somehow felt like the AA battery was now lodged in my rectum.

“I’m sorry,” I said, hoarse now. “Next time I’ll make sure someone’s home.”

She uncrossed her arms and then crossed them again.

Then I bent down, which allowed me to release my butt cheeks, engaged my unfit, atrophying hamstrings, and grabbed the remote, its small plastic battery cover, and the battery. On one knee I negotiated the battery into its correct plus-minus position, clicked the case closed, and rose to hand Mary Bunch the remote, which she accepted with cupped, rigid hands, as if being forced to inherit a piece of unwanted heirloom crystal.

Up close she had soft, perfect skin, and despite her mucoidal nostrils, her breath smelled like maple syrup and pancakes.

  

Later in my room I took a Viagra. Earlier I’d procured a vial of the little blue rhomboidal pellets from my pot dealer, Haggis, who, in addition to the popular erectile dysfunction pill, is now selling Vicodin, Xanax, and chocolate bars infused with psychedelic mushrooms. It seems that when it comes to matters of small-town drug dealing, expansion is more than possible, even during a recession.

Despite the blizzard, Haggis wore frayed corduroy cutoffs and hiking boots with no socks. I could smell his feet. Oddly buttery, deeply fungal. Like multiplex popcorn and the between-the-toes cheese of masculine decomposition.

Haggis lives out of his car—a venom-yellow midnineties Nissan hatchback that boasts a suspicious-looking Nevada license plate and many dings and dents. He’d recently fashioned ghetto-style valance curtains from what appears to be the felt hide of a pool table, which he uses to conceal his front and back windshields and all windows. He’s one of those post-post-post-college-aged eccentrics who spring for custom curtains but won’t fix the dents on their car.

Haggis came up to the attic, and after completing the Viagra transaction, we drank instant Folgers and listened to side A of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

Inspired by his shorts, I offered him my corduroy reading chair. I manned my twin bed, which sort of sags in the middle.

Our hands were interlaced around kooky gift-store mugs. Mine had a snoozing Garfield the cat on it, the phrase “Anybody can exercise…but this kind of lethargy takes real discipline” splitting at the ellipse, ringing either side of the rim. Haggis’s mug featured the words BEST WIFE IN THE LAND OF LINCOLN in large red letters, which were superimposed over the silhouette of our great sixteenth president’s profile, the profile framed by a cookie-cutter outline of our twenty-first state. A joke gift from Sheila Anne. Given that I am the one who was technically cuckolded, wife now carries with it an ugly, stomach-turning connotation, yet I keep the mug around the same way people who suffer through excruciating toothaches keep extracted wisdom teeth in jam jars.

We both drank and re-interlaced our hands around our mugs. I think Haggis really appreciated the company.

“So you chose the attic,” he said. “Cozy.”

I told him that I felt better having everything going on below me.

“Like a lordship.”

“I never thought of it that way,” I said.

“You’re lording over your subjects, Fran. You’re like a fucking monarch.”

I imagined actually commanding this kind of status over my tenants. I’d have to start showering and wear jackboots or something. Jackboots and a greatcoat. I could shape my beard into a kingly Shakespearean spade and speak in declarative iambs:

Come live / with me / and pay / me rent.

“I dig the stairwell paneling,” Haggis said.

I told him that I’d been thinking about adding a workout room in the basement. “Treadmill, StairMaster, rowing machine, some dumbbells.”

“Fitness,” Haggis replied sadly, as far away from the concept of the word as a shipwrecked man from a fax machine.

I wondered if Haggis was one of those men who doesn’t die a human death, but dissolves like a piece of wood in a barn.

“Diggin’ the beard, dude,” he offered after a silence. “You’re startin’ to look downright apostolic.”

Despite his nearly forty years, Haggis hasn’t gone gray and still possesses a boyish, clean-shaven face. His jet-black hair, like my apostolic beard, is wayward and at certain angles looks like a smashed crow clinging to his head. He has the strange habit of absentmindedly stroking his left nipple, over the shirt, in a curiously circular fashion, as if perpetually haunted by a life-altering grammar school tittie twister. His teeth are dim, so dim they’re almost blue. They belie his youthful face and non-gray, unwashed hair.

Stevie Nicks’s syrupy voice began “Dreams,” the second song on side A but easily the record’s true beginning. I’ve always thought the first track, “Second Hand News,” sung by Lindsey Buckingham, to be an asinine, herky-jerky chest-wiggler better suited for the end credits to one of the Muppet movies. It’s totally beneath the rest of the album.

“So, Viagra,” Haggis said. “Gettin’ back in the game?”

“Trying to.”

“Seein’ someone?”

I told him I was pretty much just watching Internet porn and whacking off, which was a lazy half-truth. I’ve actually been thinking about my ex-wife and whacking off.

“I could use a laptop,” Haggis lamented. “When it comes to lovin’ Old Lefty, I have to rely on my faulty memory.”

“You’re left-handed?”

“No, but I like changin’ it up. Makes me feel like I’m gettin’ away with somethin’.”

It gave me hope that a lost man living in his car could still be blessed with wit and ingenuity.

After Haggis finished his cup of coffee we said nothing for a while and listened to the rest of side A. “Never Going Back Again” into “Don’t Stop” into “Go Your Own Way” into “Songbird.” I have always loved Stevie Nicks’s voice the most, but lately Christine McVie has been winning me over. Her voice is less bewitching and not as haunted with the troubles of the world, but clearer, stronger. You’re not as fooled by it.

When side A was over, the wind whistled through the cracks of my attic’s finial window, which made everything suddenly forlorn and remote, like Haggis and I were the only two people left in some shack in the Arctic. In a semi-arthritic three-part move, Haggis wrested himself from my corduroy chair and buttoned his capacious loden coat. His calves peeked out from underneath, pale and bald as freezer-aisle chicken breasts.

“Hey,” I said, “you know anyone looking for extra work?” I figured one of his clients would be desperate to make a quick buck.

“Not really,” he replied. “Why?”

I told him I needed someone to come by every few days and shovel the sidewalk and porch steps. “Salt them down afterward. Just a few times a week. Someone sort of dependable.”

“I could do that,” Haggis offered, his voice suddenly hopeful, childlike even. “Shoveling’s my thing.”

I was surprised. He was obviously making good money dealing drugs—enough to finance homemade valance curtains at least—and I presumed he had very little if any overhead since he was living in his dinged-up car.

“I’d pay you twenty bucks a go,” I offered.

“Oh, keep your money, bro. God knows my flat ass could use the exercise.”

“I’d do it,” I said, “but I tweaked my back the other day.”

“Say no more,” he said.

I asked him if he could get it done by tomorrow, explaining how one of my tenants had been complaining.

“I’ll do it tonight,” he said. “I just have to run a few more errands. I’ll be back later.”

I told him he was the best.

After he left, I placed his mug in the sink and turned Rumours over to side B.

The whistling again. The blizzard passing diagonally across the attic window. That snowplow was back, scraping by on the street below.

When “You Make Loving Fun” started, I lay on the floor, pressed my ear to the central air duct, and listened, hoping to somehow bypass the second floor and hear into the Bunches’ apartment. I imagined Todd and Mary Bunch not talking, but passing notes to each other across their kitchen table, their daughter’s small half-rotted body interred in some frozen field on the outskirts of Pollard, her ice-blue cyanotic face arrested in an attitude of calm certainty, as if she glimpsed something beautiful just before Mommy and Daddy forced her to drink from her sippy cup of strychnine-laced cranberry juice.

After the Viagra finally kicked in, I powered down the turntable, manned my desk, opened this manuscript to here, where I had sketched a fairly decent likeness of my wife’s naked body, her eyes staring back at me, irises larger than her real ones, the pupils dreamy and crepuscular, her rabbitlike mouth filled with yearning. Her breasts small yet full, nipples erect. Her perfect hips, shaded with faint cross-hatching.

I masturbated with the intensity of a thief pillaging a dark room. Crazy images bloomed in my mind: Sheila Anne on all fours; Sheila Anne morphing into Mary Bunch with stelliform eyes, fellating me on my bearskin while clutching her TiVo remote. Even Kent’s ex, Caitlin, made an appearance, her feminist thatch absurdly large and dark, simian-like. She rode me while I clutched her bush. But it was Sheila Anne who returned and brought me to the promised land, in a classic missionary formation. Though I aimed for the nest of paper towels I had fashioned in my lap, I accidentally orgasmed copiously onto the reverb and volume knobs of my Marshall kick amp.

  

Later I was awakened by strange, guttural huffing noises coming from the front of the house. From my attic window I could see Haggis, down on his hands and knees, using the back of a hammer to chip away at one of the four ice-encased steps leading to the porch. He had already cleared the walkway from the street, and there was a big bag of melting salt on the lowest step, against which leaned a snow shovel.

Haggis’s grunts were impressive, and he seemed to be making great progress, clawing away with his hammer as his breath smoked up through the now thinning snowfall. Behind him, as the dawn just started to silver the Grooms’ rooftop, a lone cross-country skier clad in goggles and head-to-toe sky-blue Thinsulate passed down the middle of the poorly plowed street.