Bob Blubaugh moved in four days ago.

Bob Blubaugh Bob Blubaugh Bob Blubaugh…

Stating his name over and over sounds like a septic tank going bad.

His possessions include a steamer trunk, an aluminum-surfaced kitchen table, two matching dinette chairs, a small wooden desk, five milk crates filled with books, and a full-size mattress and box spring.

On Friday morning, just as the blizzard finally died, he unloaded his few things from a green Family Truckster station wagon boasting a wood-brown stripe and Minnesota plates. Filigrees of snow made his passengers’ windows look ornate and otherworldly. The backyard was effulgently white under the bright morning sun, the copper beech majestic and silver.

At the back porch we shook hands and I halfheartedly offered to help him haul his stuff down to the basement, but he politely declined. I was still wearing my ensemble of double thermals, bathrobe, slippers, and pilling knit hat. I had gummy eyes, and my nose felt like a swollen, hemorrhoidal ass haphazardly arranged on my face. My head was starting to itch, as were my cheeks, and I had genuine concern about psoriatic scales radiating through my beard. Despite having to lug myself out of bed at the sound of his car pulling into the back lot, I was grateful for his early arrival.

From the porch I watched him carry both mattress and box spring on his back in one go, Egyptian-style, slightly bent at the waist, with an athletic grace that I’ve rarely seen. I held the door open and he thanked me every time he passed, seemingly not at all winded. He was clean-shaven and his breath had a wintergreen kick to it.

When he was done moving his stuff in, I gave him a quick tour of the house’s ground-level communal spaces: the mailboxes, the wraparound porch with its white wicker patio furniture and standing ashtrays, and the backyard, where behind the copper beech someone had erected a child-sized snowman, complete with a carrot nose and two pieces of charcoal for eyes, but no mouth. Draped around its neck was a pink scarf. The snowman threw me. I hadn’t noticed it when Blubaugh was unloading his things.

To Blubaugh I explained that in the spring, just after the thaw, I would arrange the three-piece wicker furniture set under the copper beech, which was also a smoker-friendly area and available to all tenants. Setting up the white wicker ensemble each spring was one of my mother’s simple pleasures, and I’ll admit that I’ve made it my own little Falbo tradition, a kind of sentimental elegy to Cornelia. The copper beech was her favorite tree after all, and in the summer months she would often read under its branches well past dusk, sometimes using a flashlight, unconcerned with the insane number of bug bites she would acquire. From my bedroom I could sometimes hear my mother laughing. She liked Kurt Vonnegut, J. D. Salinger, Anne Tyler, and John Irving. She especially liked the precocious children in Salinger’s stories. It was the only time I would ever hear my mother laugh, while she read late at night under her tree.

I pointed out the alleyway Dumpsters and gave him the lowdown on the weekly Thursday garbage pickup, the importance of separating the recyclables, etc.

Then I gave him a quick tour of the basement. I showed him the coin-operated washer-dryer and next to that the storage room, which houses an ancient manual lawn mower, a few boxes of fifty-watt lightbulbs, and retired Falbo family bicycles, including Lyman’s bad-ass-looking Schwinn Fastback (which he never used) and my seatless Huffy BMX with yellow mag wheels, which I once manned with the asinine intention of jumping over Kent’s secondhand Yugo until the makeshift particleboard ramp collapsed midlaunch and I wound up bouncing off the driver’s side door like a confused porpoise sailing into an ocean liner. I sustained a mild concussion and a deep thigh bruise that put me on crutches for nearly a week. Behind the remains of my BMX junker and mounted on the wall is my mother’s ancient burgundy Raleigh three-speed, complete with whitewall tires and Wizard of Oz handlebar basket.

I’m not sure why the bike is mounted. I sometimes think Lyman was confused about the purpose of her gravestone. After her death he mounted not only her bike but also her prized enamel colander, a red straw sun hat, and the clarinet she played as a girl. These items were randomly displayed around the house: the colander on the wall over the downstairs toilet; the sun hat over the old RCA console TV in the living room; the clarinet in the kitchen, in the small wall space over the microwave. At first I was touched by Lyman’s meticulousness. He measured the walls to find their perfect center point. He used a level and special curved braces for the clarinet and made sure the sun hat was hung in a way that wouldn’t damage the brim. Hanging the bike took him half a Sunday. I realized he was starting to lose it when I found him standing over her wedding dress, which he’d smoothed out on their bed and was attempting to clean with a toothbrush.

When I began the renovation I put the colander, straw hat, and clarinet in a box, which I shipped to Lyman down in Florida. I had the wedding dress repaired and dry-cleaned and sent it to Cornelia’s mother, my grandma Ania, who is still alive, living in a nursing home in Chicago. For unknown reasons, Grandma Ania and Lyman have stopped speaking. I suspect the moratorium has something to do with his remarrying, although he is financing her residency at the home.

After the storage space, I showed Blubaugh the boiler room, which is probably as totally unnecessary as it is uninteresting, the space being a dank fungal cement bunker that reeks of mold and dust and corroded iron. I always show it on the tour out of some need to illustrate the authentic bowels of the house. I mentioned that I’d been considering turning the storage room into a mini fitness center. I thought Blubaugh, being a former Olympic athlete, might perk up, but it didn’t seem to excite him at all. In fact, I think he yawned and flared his nostrils. Then I pointed out the dropped ceiling, which one could easily argue to be counterintuitive, lowering an already low ceiling. But it actually needed to happen to hide the old beams and termite damage.

“Brand-new ceiling,” I said. “The whiteness actually opens things up.” I stretched and pushed up a gypsum tile to feature the hollow space. “Good for hiding illegal substances,” I added, jokingly.

Blubaugh offered a half-smile that was probably actually a quarter-smile, maybe even an eighth.

“And there you have it,” I said. “The grand tour.”

Blubaugh finally broke his silence and said, “The fundaments.”

We shook hands in a gentlemanly fashion (again) and I left him alone.

Up in the attic, I looked up the word fundaments, which is a noun whose first definition is cited as “the buttocks,” the second definition, “the anus,” and the third, “a base or basic principle, underlying part; foundation.” The final part of its tertiary definition was a relief, to say the least. I wrote the word down in a notebook I keep for lyrics, weird words, and other errata.

I also drew a small, blank-eyed, mouthless snowman wearing a child’s scarf. I did some nerding out on the Internet and found that another word for mouthless (which actually isn’t a word) is astomatous. I wrote that down as well, just to the left of the snowman.

Astomatous.

  

A few hours later I knocked on Blubaugh’s door with two copies of the lease and a bottle of Côtes du Rhône, which I always offer a new tenant. I keep cases of red and white wine at the foot of my bed. As a general rule I offer the men red and the women white. It’s one of the few pieces of Neanderthal advice I’ve taken from Lyman, who is by no stretch of the imagination an Epicurean, but simply believes that one’s gender and one’s wine should have a corresponding natural order.

Blubaugh appeared to be entirely moved in. There was something spartan going on. At a quick glance I noted the lack of an entertainment system, which would bode well for the overall sanity of the other tenants, the Bunches in particular, whose bedroom sits directly above Blubaugh’s living room. Some weeks before, over the phone, I had explained to Blubaugh that while I had done my best to soundproof each story with acoustic vinyl, the Sheetrock, though of decent quality, is by no means the intricate, labor-intensive, mid-twentieth-century lath-and-plaster system that traps and eats sound waves, and tenants were expected to keep loud music, television, and other potentially noisy activities to a minimum. As far as I could tell, at least with regard to unit noise, there would be no problem with Bob Blubaugh. If anything, his apartment emitted an absence of sound. Aside from the faint hum of the refrigerator, there was almost a palpable, vibrating silence.

“Welcome,” I said, offering the bottle of wine and the two copies of the lease.

He thanked me and took the Côtes du Rhône, placing it in the center of his kitchen table. He seemed intensely preoccupied with the table’s true center point, adjusting the bottle until he was satisfied. Then he sat and started going through the lease.

“I have white too,” I offered. “A Clairette.”

“I’m fine with either,” he replied.

Lyman firmly believes that men who drink white wine are homosexuals, whether they know it or not. “A Chardonnay man is not a real man,” he would say. So according to my father’s theory, I was renting to a sexually neutral being, which no doubt would drive Lyman batshit crazy.

At a glance, there is something almost shockingly, well, normal about Bob Blubaugh of St. Paul, Minnesota, former first alternate on the American luge team that competed in the 2002 Winter Olympic Games at Salt Lake City. In terms of physical stature, he is maybe five-ten, of normal build, neither chiseled nor flabby, handsome nor homely, with hazelish eyes, Clydesdale-brown, slightly thinning hair, which he parts to the side Robert Redford–style, and an impressive cleft in his chin that might be deep enough to hide a lemon seed or two. He wears aluminum-framed, amber-tinted glasses, and on the day of his arrival, he donned a light-blue button-down oxford, navy Levi’s corduroys, a thick, ropy, gray wool cardigan over the oxford, and penny loafers.

In short, Bob Blubaugh looks more like a reference librarian who might also collect vintage eyewear than a former Olympic athlete. And he might be as ageless as a cardboard cylinder of Quaker Oats.

In the living room, his steamer trunk was opened vertically, revealing a five-drawer wardrobe and a miniature closet, the two sections separated by three ancient hinges. It gave Blubaugh the air of someone from a distant land, a traveler of oceans, a secret hoarder of rare spices.

Next to the steamer trunk was his desk, which had a soft leather top, embossed with what appeared to be the outline of deciduous deer antlers. Stacked on the floor, in small thigh-high towers, was his modest library, book spines facing out. There was nothing on the walls, not a single framed photo, a poster, a clock, or a wall calendar. If he possessed a computer, it wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

This was apparently a man without history or family, birthed in a luge chute, ejaculated from a frosty tunnel fully formed. He will live for two thousand years, following blizzards around, snow and ice being his only true ancestry. Windchill his lone friend.

His small dinette set was centered in the kitchen. He sat in one of the two chairs. I stood a few feet away, fighting the urge to twiddle and claw at my itchy beard.

While he signed both copies of the lease, I said, “How was the drive down?”

“Not too bad,” he replied.

His voice has a distinct lack of music in it. It subtly modulates in one slightly alto-ish register. Adult men with high voices always surprise you, though. They’re either incredibly well-endowed or know karate.

“You just missed the blizzard,” I said.

He nodded like he was gesturing hello to the postman.

“Nothing you haven’t seen before I’m sure,” I offered stupidly.

The last thing a fellow Midwesterner wants to commiserate about is the harsh winters in the Midwest. It’s like dentists making small talk about teeth.

He handed me the two copies of the lease. His penmanship was the cleanest I’ve ever seen. On the underlined space beside “vocation” he’d printed “person” with a lowercase p.

“You’re a professional person?” I said.

He smiled and adjusted the bottle of Côtes du Rhône yet again.

“You get paid for that?” I asked, joking.

He smiled like taxidermy. Meaning his mouth in that position appeared to be somehow stitched and glued.

He then produced a royal-blue, vinyl-skinned checkbook, which must have been living in the pocket of his cardigan. He filled out a check, signed it, and handed it to me, though I can’t be certain that I actually caught all of these movements. In some strange way it almost felt like the check had written itself. Or maybe it was prewritten and Blubaugh simply tore it from the book.

I studied it briefly and said, “Bob, this is over six months’ rent.”

“Which includes the security deposit,” he replied.

Again his penmanship. Each letter rendered masterfully.

I told him that I had no problem with tenants paying me on a month-to-month basis.

“This is better for me,” Bob replied. “Simpler.”

I folded the check in half and placed it in the pocket of my robe.

He remained seated at the table and I was starting to realize that my new tenant moved with such restrained, kinesthetic efficiency that it was sometimes hard to catch him moving at all. There was something Eastern going on. Dare I say ninjafied. He existed with such rarefied functional stillness that there was the odd sensation that I was talking to a life-size painting of Bob Blubaugh, not Bob Blubaugh the actual man.

“Not to get too personal on day one,” I said, “but do you mind me asking what brings you to Pollard?”

“I was just looking for a quiet place.”

“To do what exactly?”

“To live.”

I asked him if he knew anyone in the area.

“No,” he replied.

I noticed that the checkbook was gone, and although I had turned away only briefly to look at the actual check, I had no idea where. However, there was still a ballpoint pen on the kitchen table, this much I know for sure.

“Here,” I said, handing him a small Post-it note, “the Wi-Fi code.”

He accepted it and blinked. Or maybe he didn’t blink. Maybe he didn’t even accept the Post-it. A few breaths later, I did notice the Post-it note affixed to the anodized surface of his kitchen table, near the base of the bottle of Côtes du Rhône.

We were quiet. Above us Mary Bunch was running a vacuum cleaner.

“The Bunches,” I said, pointing toward the ceiling. “I’ll be sure to introduce you.”

Bob Blubaugh said nothing. He simply sat there, motionless, his face blank, almost blissfully neutral. Eyeballs framed by his tinted glasses. It was all so fucking subtle. Maybe he was undergoing some strange process of meditation? He knows how to make time slow down, I thought.

“If you ever need anything,” I offered, “don’t hesitate to knock on my door. I’m up in the attic. Accessible from the aft staircase. Welcome to the building.”

Still nothing from Blubaugh.

I turned to go but stopped. “By the way,” I said, “will you be getting a landline? I only ask because I have a pretty good connection with a guy at the phone company. With a day’s notice he can get it installed in no time.”

“No, thanks,” he said.

“You’re exclusively mobile? I only ask because I’m looking at your lease and I’m noticing that you didn’t fill in a cell phone number.”

“Because I got rid of it.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So but what if I have to get in touch?”

“I’ll make sure you can.”

We looked at each other for a full five seconds. I think I actually counted them out in my head.

“Oh, and no pets,” I added for some reason. “Meaning mammals. I’m cool with fish, or something that can be kept in a terrarium, but no mammals. Guinea pigs, dogs, ferrets, cats, gerbils, hamsters, that kind of thing.”

A bustlike response. Complete stillness. An expression I would describe as Beethovenish.

I left with my copy of the lease, feeling sort of gently freaked out. When I got back to the attic, I filed his lease in a cardboard legal box under my desk and took a shower for the first time in two weeks.

Before I got under the water, I finally looked in the mirror, focusing exclusively on my beard, which had begun to look like it was made of granite. I tried to avoid my eyes. Somehow I knew they would be ringed with shameful, baggy, bourbon-colored circles. Of course I failed. When you start to become your own science experiment, you can’t help looking. They weren’t as bad as I thought. I looked mostly sad. Sad in the same way that weather can be sad. I was the human equivalent of a cold, rainy day. I was a brown puddle in the middle of a dead-end street, with maybe a Popsicle stick or two floating in my dank, dog-slobbered water. If Sheila Anne were to see me I would be embarrassed. The thought sent such an intense pang of shame through my stomach and kidneys that I had to sit on the toilet for a moment.

I realized that I hadn’t left the house since around Christmas. This was my second one without Sheila Anne. I thought it would be easier than our first one apart, but it was harder. On Christmas Eve I wound up drinking a bottle of Maker’s Mark and crying myself to sleep and staying in bed the entire next day and maybe even the day after that. It was a bad forty-eight hours. I’m pretty sure that was the beginning of not being able to leave my house. You figure there’d be some horrible inciting incident, but there wasn’t.

The hot shower felt like needles on my skin. To rid the oil slick that had congealed on my head I had to shampoo my hair three times. I really dug into my scalp and sideburns, which actually burned a little, giving newfound literalism to the word. I shampooed my beard too, an act that gave me so much relief I whimpered.

  

So I have a bad tooth.

My lower first molar on the right side zings when I drink anything cold or inhale the winter air. Almost a year ago, I was supposed to have a root canal, but I kept putting it off, and I now get repeated calls from Dr. Hubie, the Falbo family dentist. Yes, the calls are from Dr. Hubie himself, not his secretary, the ageless, honey-voiced Julie Pepper. I don’t have the heart to tell him that I’m having serious problems leaving the house, but I need to get this tooth fixed before it rots through my jaw.

Post microwave lunch of Dinty Moore beef stew, I was flossing in front of my bathroom mirror, trying to wrest material from my bad molar, when I heard something being slid underneath my door. No envelope, just a blank piece of heavy-bond sketch paper, one fold, elegantly creased.

It read:

Mr. Falbo,

My toilet’s running again. Would you mind taking a look?

Sincerely,

Harriet Gumm, Unit 3

  

Harriet Gumm often almost smiles when she speaks to you, as if she’s constantly harboring a secret. It makes her a little sexy in a mischievous sort of way.

Her apartment is set up as a portrait studio. There is a simple mahogany stool in the center of the living room, surrounded by a handful of wooden easels, each easel loaded with large, variously grained sketch pads. There is no furniture here, nothing cozy or domestic, nothing feminine, a simple iPhone dock resting on the floor, no magazines or books—only the stool and the easels and the iPhone dock and an apple box filled with countless stubs of charcoal and pieces of colored chalk. Under the centered stool, a large piece of muslin, gathered around the legs. I couldn’t imagine this girl owning clothes or shoes or makeup, but she obviously did. She practically wears costumes! Her bathroom contained only a cake of generic, peppermint-smelling soap, a bottle of No More Tears shampoo, and a simple white towel hanging from the chrome rack that I installed on the inside of the door. It could be the bathroom of a construction worker.

Affixed to the living room walls with blue masking tape were drawings of all the black men she’d been studying, mostly in charcoals. I recognized the African-Americans who’d been coming to the house over the course of the past several months: Cozelle; Markeif; Jershawn; and her present subject, Big Keith.

Each man had a seven-part narrative progression.

Panel One:

Nude slave being purchased shipside by a plantation owner, ankles and neck ringed in medieval-looking iron shackles.

Panel Two:

Semi-clad, barefoot slave engaged in some form of plantation work involving cotton picking, soil tilling, or field clearing.

Panel Three:

Freed slave fighting in Civil War setting, dressed in makeshift Union Army soldier’s garb, aiming a musket at unseen Confederate enemies.

Panel Four:

Educated freed slave sitting in a high-gloss university lecture hall, bespectacled, in collared shirt and tie, slacks, and fine leather shoes.

Panel Five:

BCS college football player striking a Heisman pose in the end zone, white Amazonian cheerleaders going apeshit with oversized pom-poms.

Panel Six:

Wealthy professional football player manning the wheel of the infamous O. J. Simpson white Ford Bronco, a trio of bikini-clad, blond Caucasian women fawning over him from the backseat, one of them fondling him under his uniform pants.

Panel Seven:

Modern-day, twenty-first-century African-American, nude again, confident in expression, staring straight at the viewer, holding a smartphone, a Bluetooth device in his ear, penis dangling midthigh, a noose around his neck, an ancient Southern oak tree in the background, conflating the literal and ultrasymbolic “lynching” theme, bringing the whole thing full circle, back to the Inescapable South.

Each subject has a slight variation to his story. For instance, the thin, sinewy Cozelle, instead of scoring a touchdown, is playing NCAA basketball, knees bent at the free throw line, mid-rhythm-dribble, wearing a North Carolina Tar Heels uniform and classic Air Jordan high-tops.

In his slave work setting, the dark-skinned, abdominally endowed, large-eyed Markeif is picking cotton, bare-backed, with grotesquely raised flogging scars, whereas the light-skinned, GQ-handsome Jershawn is dressed as a white-gloved butler, fully wigged and facially powdered, serving silver platters of food to the plantation owner and his family in their decadent dining room, ghostly portraits of patrician, Hircine-faced forebears looming on the walls above.

The only panel that is exactly the same throughout is the rendering of the white Ford Bronco; the one thing changing being the actual subject, but each receiving a handjob.

“What are you calling these?” I asked.

“The Seven Stations of O. J. Simpson’s America.”

“Wow,” I said. “Intense title.”

“It’s my senior thesis project.”

“You’ve really nailed Keith’s face.” She had obviously nailed his enormous penis, too; vermiform like his arms.

“Thank you,” Harriet said shyly, wearing the faintest hint of a smile.

“They all pose nude for you?”

“That’s what they agree to.”

“Do they sign a contract?”

“We simply have a conversation over coffee. If it feels right, we agree to meet for one sixty-minute session, for which I pay them twenty bucks. If that goes well, we continue the process, hopefully eventually arriving at the white Ford Bronco.”

I asked her if she ever felt unsafe.

“No,” she replied.

I asked if her subjects ever get excited.

“You mean erect?” she said.

“Yeah, that.”

“One of them had that happen the first few sittings, but the problem resolved itself.”

I tried to imagine what this could possibly mean. I envisioned Harriet handing Markeif a tube of Astroglide and a paper towel and leaving the room.

She asked me if I’ve ever posed nude.

I told her that I hadn’t, that I couldn’t even imagine it.

“It’s surprisingly liberating,” she said.

“You’ve done it?”

“In my life drawing class we all do. Even Professor Chubb models.”

“Wow,” I said, taking in the detail work. “Jershawn…”

“What about him?”

I told her it was hard not to notice his “endowment.”

To which she replied: “The African-American male is perhaps the most unfairly sexualized archetype in modern culture.”

I told her that according to her drawings, it didn’t seem to be unfair at all. “The word ample comes to mind,” I said. “The word fortunate. The word blessed.”

“Those are not exaggerations. The renderings are physiologically accurate.”

Cozelle had the most normal penis, meaning normal-looking by comparison. And even his was impressive.

“What’s unfair about a large penis?” I said.

“I would argue,” Harriet said, “that the owners of these penises are not seen as full human beings. The African-American male is blatantly heralded for his athleticism and genital endowment. It’s as unfair as Marilyn Monroe being worshipped for her body.”

I told her that I worshipped her face too.

Harriet shot me a circumspect look.

“And her underrated singing voice,” I added.

She told me I should pose for her. “In all seriousness,” she added.

“Why?” I asked, totally thrown.

“Why not?” she replied.

I took a half-step back, still holding the cardboard and plastic packaging for the toilet’s new refill flap. “How old are you?” I said.

“I’ll be twenty-one in March.”

I asked her if what she was doing was even legal.

“Of course it’s legal. My subjects come to me by their own volition. They’re grown men. They’re not mentally challenged in any way. It’s not like some form of reverse statutory rape.”

“Do you even like me?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Why?”

I told her that I wouldn’t want her to render me if she didn’t at least like me a little. “You might be predisposed to highlight all my flaws.”

“I like you,” she replied. “You dress like you live in an institution, and I think you have a secret life.”

“You think I have a secret life?”

She sort of squinted and pursed her lips.

Arranged on the cutout over her kitchenette was a set of three charcoal drawings unlike the others. The subject was a small blond girl wearing fuzzy, footy pajamas, wandering through a dark forest. In the drawing her figure is illuminated by a long blade of light too narrow and focused to be from the moon. Its source is unseen, but the feeling its omniscient perspective evokes is one of surveillance, be it government-, Hollywood-, or UFO-motivated. The only colorized elements are the long beam of light cutting through the forest, the lit-up trunks of trees featuring oily snakes, an owl, some nocturnal rodents of prey, and the little girl’s blond hair and Pooh Bear pajamas. The subject appears to be either oblivious or gently bemused that she is being followed through the tall, dark, and hairy forest.

“Who is that?” I said, completely absorbed by the three-paneled narrative.

“A girl.”

“Anyone in particular?”

“No. Why?”

“It’s just that everything else on your walls is based on actual people.”

“Maybe she’s me,” Harriet offered mischievously.

“But you don’t have blond hair.”

She said she dyed it.

I asked her if she was a natural blond.

“I feel like you’re asking me if the curtains match the drapes. Do you like it?”

“Your hair?”

“The triptych.”

“Yes,” I heard myself say.

She asked me what it was precisely that I liked about it.

“The little girl,” I said.

“What about her?”

I told Harriet that it really felt like she was somewhere. “Lost but definitely somewhere,” I added.

“Else?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “somewhere else.”

“Well, she’s definitely somewhere.”

I’m not sure we were talking about the same thing. Of course I was thinking of Bethany Bunch, but who knows where Harriet Gumm was coming from.

“She’s in a never-ending forest with slithering nocturnal creatures,” she said.

I asked her why the forest was never-ending.

“Because that’s what I wanted it to be,” she replied.

“And the light?”

“What about the light?”

“What’s its source?”

“Who knows?” Harriet said. “Maybe you are.”

That’s where she lost me. Harriet Gumm liked being provocative for the sake of being provocative.

“You should seriously pose for me,” she said.

Again I asked her why.

“Because I think you’d make a good subject. I’d pay you twenty bucks a sitting.”

“Nude?”

“Yes.”

I looked at the surface of the stool and imagined all the large black men who’d sat upon it, their anuses and perinea, their bulbous testicles dangling. Did she disinfect the top of the stool after each sitting? Was there like some special disposable doily that was utilized?

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

We were quiet for a moment. Harriet wouldn’t take her eyes off me. It was like she could see me naked. My atrophying muscle tissue and fish-belly skin. My average, flaccid, circumcised penis. The strange mole in my belly button that Kent used to say was Nestlé Toll House’s lost chocolate chip.

Her buzzer sounded. She crossed to the front door, let in whoever it was.

“A subject?” I said.

“Keith. Final session.”

“Time for the noose?”

She didn’t answer.

Before I let myself out, I said, “Should I shave?”

“No,” she said. “Keep the beard.”

And then I glanced at the triptych again and asked if she’d made a snowman in the past few days.

To which she answered: “I’ve never made a snowman in my life.”

  

I didn’t want to run into Keith, so I exited toward the second-floor aft staircase. From the stairwell window overlooking the backyard, I spied Mary Bunch on her way to the alleyway Dumpsters with a bloated black Hefty bag. With great effort, she lugged it through two feet of snow. I had an impulse to scream out to her. From behind the double-paned window she likely wouldn’t have heard me, but I still had to cover my mouth to stop myself.

What the hell was in that Hefty bag? I couldn’t contend with the dark possibilities, so I went down to the basement and started pacing the laundry room. There was a load tumbling in the dryer. Was it a load of the Bunches’? Were they washing bloodstains out of their clothes? I couldn’t quite get myself to open the dryer door and check.

After I heard Keith’s heavy feet pad across the second-floor hallway and disappear into Harriet Gumm’s apartment, I headed to the front porch to check the mail. Bradley was coming up the steps, wearing the black trench and skullcap, carrying a bag from Ace Hardware.

“Bradley,” I said. “What’s up?”

“Hey,” he said, the y barely resonating.

His beard had really cool cowlicks in it. Sort of silvery-blond whirlpools that seemed to have their own little fairy-tale universe. I imagined Lilliputians emerging, stealing crumbs, and diving back down into the depths. He could probably store things in his beard. Like almonds or match heads or even a mailbox key. He was almost fifteen years younger than me and his beard was teaching my beard a serious lesson.

For someone so low-pulse he seemed a bit agitated. It could have been the simple fact that he’d been walking and was out of breath. If he’d hoofed it all the way to the Ace Hardware and back, it meant that he’d covered some four miles.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

He didn’t respond, so I said, “Long walk?”

“Longish,” he replied, hardly hitting the g.

He wore old mustard-yellow Chuck Taylors, which were soaked from the snow, and no socks. All of the buttons but one were missing from his black double-breasted trench. He kept it closed with a brown extension cord. Underneath the trench he wore a white thermal not dissimilar to the one I was wearing.

I pointed to his footwear and told him that he was going to get trench foot walking around in all the snow.

He didn’t respond.

He was starting to look homeless, a little malnourished. I could sense that we were about to start another awful, thick silence, one that contained the sad realization that I was the loser whom his sister had left and that I was even more of a loser because I tried to access her vicariously through her younger brother who didn’t even like me. For a second it felt as if our beards were communicating animalistically, independent of their owners, like two dogs sniffing each other’s asses on the street. Bradley’s beard smelled like weed and nacho cheese Doritos and some other faint but ripe moschatel odor I can only describe as deeply wrong.

“What’s in the bag?” I asked, worried about power tools, drywall anchors, carpentry nails, etc.

“Supplies,” he answered obliquely.

“Home improvements?”

“Yep,” he said.

I asked what needed improving, and he said nothing major. I said, “Anything you need help with?”

He shook his head.

What could he possibly be up to? I wanted to look in the bag. Was he making something? A new kind of bong? A nursery for growing weed? A pipe bomb?

Just then Mary Bunch walked onto the front porch and stomped snow off her boots. She was again in her many layers, the hazard-orange vest and conical winter hat. Her nose was running and she held two grocery bags from Econofoods. She said hello to Bradley, but her eyes bounced off me like I had a huge raised facial birthmark with fuzz. Then she keyed into her apartment and shut the door, turning the deadbolt on the other side.

I pointed to Bradley’s Ace Hardware bag and said, “No holes in the walls, now. That Sheetrock was expensive.”

He replied, “Okay, Dad.”

Somehow I liked Bradley calling me dad. An absurd notion, I’ll admit, but it made us feel related again, which meant that in some ludicrous reality burbling in the sad part of my mind, I was still in his sister’s life. I said, “You’re free to go, son.”

It came out way more paternally than I’d intended. I didn’t even recognize my own voice. I sounded like a high school principal who wears chinos or something. Bradley pushed past me and up the stairs.

  

It nearly gave me a heart attack to stray from the back porch and forge out into the alleyway, but I had to see what Mary Bunch had left in that Dumpster.

For the first time in a month I actually ventured from the house, trudging thirty or so feet through twenty-two inches of snow. At first I took baby steps, carefully lifting out of the depths of snow. It was slow going. My teeth chattered uncontrollably in that weird way that has nothing to do with the cold. My heart triple-timed in my chest, as if I’d been injected with some stimulant intended for racehorses. My mouth went dry and my tongue seemed to shrink. I thought my throat would close. I might as well have been teetering on an ancient mountain precipice.

I had stupidly worn my wool slippers and my bathrobe. A sudden gust sent a snow shower from the branches of the copper beech into my face and eyes, and a blackbird flapped wildly, as if on cue, and disappeared over the garage. It was as if someone had planted the bird. My blood pressure spiked. My heart beat in my mouth. I could feel my dick shrinking.

The tar-paper shelter over the Dumpsters gave me the false sense that I was at least partly enclosed, so that made it a little easier. Hands on thighs, like an oxygen-starved, postrace miler, I breathed through my nose and tried to calm down. I honestly thought I might have to go to a knee. I’d left my cell phone in the attic, so aside from shouting out to the snowbound neighborhood, there was no way to call for help.

What a terrible way to die this would be. A heart attack at thirty-six. Out back by the Dumpsters. In thermals and wool slippers. In not even two feet of snow. Literally scared to death for no good reason.

After I regained what was left of my composure, which wasn’t much, I worked quickly. Inside Mary Bunch’s Hefty bag, scattered among household refuse, were children’s clothes: a pair of navy sneakers with rainbow stickers on the sides; white T-shirts; old bibs with food stains; a few pairs of cotton pants; a denim jumpsuit with an elastic waistband; socks so small they seemed more suited for a doll; a baby bonnet; cotton turtlenecks; and a set of pink poly-blend mittens, joined with a clip.

Panic seized me again. The only thing that mattered was getting back inside.

  

That night I dreamed there was a basement under the basement. A subbasement, if you will, whose floor was soil, black as pitch. A distant crying lured me down there. Crying from a child, muffled and desperate. I had to enter the washing machine and shimmy down a flagpole, fireman-style. The pole was slick with a kind of warm, gelatinous substance and during my descent I had the distinct dream-mind thought that it would be impossible to climb back up, as the flagpole was without ruts or anything to grab hold of.

My mother was standing in the center of the soil floor, in her hospice gown. She was thin from her cancer, the bones in her face sharp and prominent, her collarbone enormous, a wisp of hair matted over her soft, pale skull. Bethany Bunch was pulled into her, held close, and my mother was covering the little girl’s eyes with her hands. Bethany wore only a diaper, though she seemed old enough for clothes. Her hair was a dirty-blond galaxy, almost pulsing with life. The room was very warm and humid. They were both covered with a film of sweat, both filthy from the soil. It was as if they had walked hundreds of miles and had nothing left, too tired even to sit.

Then I was suddenly barefoot and could feel between my toes the damp, cold earth, where worms wriggled.

“She’s blind, Francis,” my mother told me. Her voice was tired. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere else. From somewhere and everywhere. Below and above me. “The little girl is blind.”

I had the strange sense that there were other subbasements below this one, going on for infinity, with other lost children. A threnody of children’s voices sang from some recessed place. Ugly, unresolved, incomplete harmonies, wailing and feral.

The copper beech was suddenly in the little room. My mother and Bethany Bunch were gone. I had the horrible, certain feeling that the tree had swallowed them.

I woke up with such tenacious cottonmouth I had to check to make sure there wasn’t actual cotton in my mouth.

  

After instant coffee and some unamplified guitar noodling (unamplified guitar noodling always seems to help rid a bad-dream hangover), I called Mansard and told him about the Hefty bag.

He said, “Children’s clothes, huh?”

I mentioned the snowman and the pink scarf, the matching mittens.

Mansard said, “The mittens were in the garbage?”

“Yes.”

“And the scarf was on the snowman?”

“The scarf was on the snowman.”

“And you’re certain that it matched the mittens.”

“The mittens were pink and the scarf was pink.”

He said he would come by and take a look.

  

Later today, Baylor Phebe, a man in his early sixties, is coming by to have a look at the available basement unit, opposite Bob Blubaugh. According to his e-mail, Mr. Phebe is a retired junior high school teacher from down in Little Egypt—Cairo, Illinois, to be exact. He’s attending continuing ed classes at Willis Clay and is interested in a two-year lease. Mr. Phebe’s been staying in a local motel, paying a steep monthly rate, and is ready to make a larger real estate commitment. He has an authentic Southern accent, as do most people who hail from the lower third of the state, and the deep melody of his voice alone inspired me to move his request to the top of the small pile of three candidates, the other two being an undergraduate junior-college transfer student and a guy from Arkansas named Reggie Reggie. Both had poor references and nothing to speak of in terms of guaranteed income, and the landlord part of me is loath to offer a lease to someone who calls himself Reggie Reggie. Sirhan Sirhan comes to mind, or some homeless drag queen with third-degree burns. I think having a senior presence like Baylor Phebe around could be good for the overall ecology of the house.

“You’re going back to school, huh?” I asked him over the phone.

“Spring semester,” he said. “Just a few classes.”

“Are you married?” I asked.

“I was,” he said. “My wife passed away three years ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a formality. I have to ask.”

“Oh, no offense taken,” he said.

I asked him if he had kids.

“I have a daughter, lives up in Milwaukee.”

“Pets?”

“No pets,” he said. “No wife, no kids, no pets, no attachments whatsoever. It would just be me and my fishing poles.”

  

I called Dr. Hubie and spoke to his secretary, Julie Pepper. I told her about the pain in my tooth. I think I actually pretended to cry a little.

“Dr. Hubie doesn’t do house calls,” she said. “Most dentists don’t.”

I told her about my back. I was starting to really carve out some good fiction regarding the injury. A slipped disc. A “hot” disc fragmented onto one of my sciatic nodes. Shooting pains radiating down my left leg. A terrible snowballing ache. I learned about all of this on the Internet.

“I really can’t get down the stairs,” I told her. “Can you at least ask him to call me?”

“I’ll put you on the list,” she said.

  

Around noon, Todd Bunch knocked on my door. I was rotating thermals, sending the under layer to the laundry basket, replacing it with the outer layer, and adding a new set on top. I also had changed into a new pair of wool socks, probed my ears with Q-tips, applied Mennen Speed Stick, musk-scented, and trimmed a few nose hairs that were on the verge of autogenously braiding themselves into my mustache, à la Detective Shelley Mansard.

Tying the terry-cloth sash around my bathrobe, I said, “Mr. Bunch.”

He was sporting a crew cut, which, in sharp contrast to his former floppy head of spaghetti-sauce-red hair, made him look like a young Marine in training. Either that or a counselor at a Christian youth camp. Was the crew cut an attempt to change his image? To avoid being publicly recognized as the evil father of little Bethany, the prevailing media opinion of him?

Photos were starting to be shown on the evening news. The famous black-and-white Target surveillance still of Todd and Mary Bunch standing in the stuffed-animals section, almost the same exact looks of abject shock on their faces. Holding a stuffed panda bear, as if Bethany had dropped it in that very aisle and they were summoning her spirit.

Todd Bunch was wearing his navy-blue Pollard Fire Department uniform shirt, with official patches on the shoulders. He had a few days’ growth of a sandpapery beard, fine as mica dust. He seemed tense, ultracontained. I was struck by how small his head was, as if the cavity containing his brain was smaller than most. His hands were fists at his sides. There was a little white bloodless halo around his wedding band.

He said he just wanted to personally thank me for taking care of the front steps. He spoke slowly, deliberately, almost as if delivering a memorized recitation. “The walkway too,” he added. He was having a hard time making eye contact.

I told him it wasn’t a problem, that it was my duty as his landlord.

He opened and closed his mouth in a guppylike fashion, then proceeded to unclench his left fist and drive a knuckle into the meat between his eyes, as though warding off a migraine.

I asked him if he was okay.

He exhaled through his nose, a whistling noise. His eyes, open now, fluttered nystagmically, the pupils contracting to little black pinpricks. I thought he might keel over, but he remained standing. Knees slightly bent, extremely still, shallow of breath, he opened his mouth again, closed it yet again, and then launched in, saying, “Mary and I would really appreciate it if you didn’t go through our garbage.”

It suddenly felt like there was a piece of gravel caught in my throat. I swallowed hard. I think I said, “I” and “uh.” I retched and swallowed again.

“Mary saw you out back by the Dumpsters.” His lower lip was trembling now. When it came to classic man-to-man confrontation, it was clear that we were equals in the discomfort zone.

I coughed again and then cleared my throat. I explained that I’ll occasionally do a garbage check to make sure tenants are recycling properly, that I get fined if the city finds recyclables in the regular trash and vice versa.

He looked down at his feet and said, “Our garbage is not your concern.”

This was obviously the next thing on the list to say. He wasn’t interested in engaging in a dialogue; he was checking off bullet points.

My arms folded now, I said, “But it’s my duty to execute the occasional Dumpster check.”

“We recycle,” he replied quickly, a little too loudly.

Then his lips got really small and taut. His clenched teeth, which were showing now, seemed to radiate a white-hotness behind his dull braces.

In my most soothing FM-radio voice I said, “That very well may be true, Mr. Bunch, but I still have to do the compulsory checks. I do it to Bradley Farnham’s and Harriet Gumm’s garbage too. As a safeguard.”

Then he closed his eyes and breathed through his nose intensely, as if there weren’t enough air in the small space between us. That faint whistling noise again. The tiny head, seemingly shrinking further. The rubbery dome of his skull, visibly pink underneath his crew cut. He turned to the side as if consulting invisible counsel. I realized for the first time that in profile Todd Bunch has almost no nose. This combined with his thick, furrowed brow made him look like the enormous mahimahi trophy that Lyman had had mounted in his office, above the tufted leather sofa in the waiting area. The similarity was almost breathtaking.

Through his rose-tinted orthodontia, Todd Bunch said, “We threw her clothes out because it’s too hard having them around—” He stopped and made a sound like he was choking, then exhaled powerfully and continued. He explained that he had suggested giving Bethany’s things to the Goodwill, but that Mary couldn’t bear the thought of other children wearing their daughter’s clothes.

In that moment I felt this man’s heart breaking. I could almost hear it. Like the smallest pinion snapping in a clock’s delicate machinery.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Not about Bethany,” he replied. His voice was suddenly small and boyish.

I told him that my question didn’t involve his daughter.

“What, then?”

I asked him if he’d made the snowman.

“What snowman?”

“The snowman in the backyard,” I explained. “Someone made a little snowman.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

I searched his bald, alopecian eyes. “Out behind the copper beech?” I said.

Nothing for a moment. It felt like the big wintry wheel in the sky had stopped clicking on its sprocket. I think I even heard the clouds above us skid to a halt.

Then Todd Bunch extended his fist toward me. Not in a threatening way, although it did make me swallow again and quickly find my feet. His fist was very tight and trembling. It was as if he were doing his best to hold a freshly boiled stone. His knuckles were white, his wedding band reflecting the harsh overhead fluorescent light I had installed after Christmas so the tenants wouldn’t feel like they were entering a dark place when knocking on the door of their trusted, down-to-earth landlord.

Todd Bunch opened his fist to reveal a rent check, crumpled to the size of a piece of popcorn. He grabbed it with his other hand and attempted to unkink it. His hands were shaking, and he continued to breathe very slowly through his nose, working at the check, eventually smoothing it between his palms. He handed it to me and said, “The late fee’s included.” Then he turned and descended the back steps.

After I heard him key into his unit—perhaps thirty seconds later—I quietly went downstairs to the back porch and looked for the snowman. Although it was only just past noon, the thick cloud cover weirdly made it almost dark out. I flipped a switch to turn on the spotlight mounted over the front of the garage.

The copper beech lit up monstrously. Like a figure that could chase you down and ruin your life.

And the snowman was gone.

I ran back upstairs, taking two at a time, and called Mansard.

“Hey, Detective,” he said, jokingly, but I had no time for that.

“It’s gone,” I said.

“Slow down,” he said, “take a breath.”

“It’s gone,” I repeated, not taking a breath, not sitting, completely winded from the sprint up the stairs.

“What’s gone?” Mansard said. He was watching a rerun of The Honeymooners. I could hear Jackie Gleason railing on his wife. It irked me that Mansard was watching TV on the job.

“The snowman,” I said. “The snowman’s gone.”

“Where did it go?” Mansard asked.

“I don’t know.”

He offered that perhaps it had returned to the North Pole with Rudolph and Santa Claus.

“Very funny,” I replied.

“Well, it couldn’t have melted.”

“Not in this weather, no way.”

“Huh,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or sincere. “Yeah,” I said. “Huh is right.” The live studio audience was howling with laughter. Even through the phone it felt like they were somehow mocking me.

“Are you watching The Honeymooners?” I said.

He said that he was on his lunch break.

After a silence I said, “Are you still coming by?”

“Do I really need to?” he asked.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Snowmen tend to crop up during snowstorms, kid.”

“But with pink scarves?” I asked.

“I saw one wearing a sombrero once. It was wearing a sombrero and it had tortilla chips for eyes. Didn’t warrant grounds for an arrest.”

“But the pink scarf matches the mittens. The ones the Bunches threw out.”

He asked me if I was in possession of the scarf.

I told him that I wasn’t.

“What about the mittens?” he said.

I told him that I didn’t have those either. I’d stupidly left them in the garbage. I was too panicked to get back to the house.

“Then there’s not much I can do,” Mansard said. “No scarf, no mittens, nothing to go on.”

Suddenly someone in Mansard’s office was talking to him. He covered the phone. I could hear the muffled sounds of Art Carney making some indecipherable noise. Jackie Gleason was still screaming at his wife.

Mansard uncovered the phone and said, “I gotta go, Francis. If another snowman pops up, give me a call.”

  

The dark skies persisted for a few hours and then brightened a bit, just in time for dusk. Consequently, it felt like the shortest day of the year.

At around four thirty p.m. my prospective tenant, Baylor Phebe, came by the house. To say that he possesses the largest stomach I’ve ever seen might be an understatement. It is exceptional, perfectly oval-shaped, and protrudes perhaps a full two feet from his waistline. It’s strange because the rest of his body isn’t in any way obese. He’s certainly husky, but his midsection is completely and ludicrously incongruous with his legs, arms, head, and neck. It’s a stomach out of a comic book. It looks almost like a prosthetic, as if it’s been screwed on somehow, a Halloween gimmick.

His voice was deeper than it had been on the phone. “I shoulda worn snowshoes,” he bellowed, stomping his boots on the porch, shaking my hand.

His paw is enormous. I noticed that he still wears his wedding band. After Sheila Anne divorced me, I continued to wear mine for almost a year. Now it lives in a matchbox on my writing desk. I like to think it’s sleeping. Baylor Phebe has a vigorous, warm handshake and huge mountain-peak knuckles. This man could clear a bar, I thought. A bar and a smorgasbord. He stands a hulking six-three. His head is the size of a cinder block.

His broad Nordic face is marked with little broken blood vessels; purple and blue and pink spider legs drift across his nose and are faintly embedded in the yellow oysters under his eyes. Speaking of his eyes, there is an unmistakable kindness living there. Grief softens some people, distorts others.

After my mother died Lyman got weird and mechanical and emotionally distant. Cornelia’s death turned him into the used-car-salesman version of himself. He got his teeth whitened and told more jokes and hung out at restaurant bars and started wearing Paco Rabanne. He brilliantined his hair and compulsively fiddled with the change in his pocket. And he bought a bunch of shit. Like a Rolex watch. And a nine-hundred-dollar Montblanc pen.

But back to Baylor Phebe’s stomach, which has the same effect as a great Frenchman’s nose—it somehow makes him more epic. I wondered what his students called him behind his back, whether the protuberance was the stuff of preteen mockery or legend. Songs could be written about Baylor Phebe’s stomach. It could be the subject of a Roald Dahl story. And it also makes you think about diabetes.

He wore an augmented one-piece snowmobile suit. Augmented meaning an entirely different winter garment had been fashioned for the area covering his belly. A kind of torso shell of down-filled tufted nylon. It was sophisticated, festooned with snaps and a little marsupial-looking pouch, which had its own snap. There had even been an attempt, though unsuccessful, to match the color to the original one-piece. The patched stomach panel was a sort of hickory brown, whereas the one-piece was more straight-up chocolate. I wondered whether his dead wife had made the piece for him. Under a red-and-black-plaid wool hunting hat complete with earflaps, his hair was a thick yellowy silver, sprouting in all directions. His eyes were bright blue, the whites a bit dull but still white nevertheless.

I showed him the available basement unit—the small kitchen with its marble-top eatery nook, the bedroom, the living room/dining area, the bathroom where I had imperfectly set the base of the toilet, so that it’s a hair cockeyed—and he immediately said he’d take it. He didn’t ask questions, didn’t even give me a chance to talk up the heating system or the amazing lack of substory mold or the necessity for the dropped gypsum ceiling or the pleasures of the house’s lone true eco-friendly refrigerator.

“Is the size okay?” I asked. “I realize it’s a little small.”

“I don’t need much space. Only enough for the couch to pull out.”

I told him he could easily have a bed in the bedroom. “You can fit a king in there.”

“The pullout’s for when my daughter comes to visit,” he explained.

I nodded. He seemed larger in the apartment than he did upstairs, as if he were slowly expanding.

“You don’t mind the lack of sunlight?” I said.

“That won’t make a difference. I’m mostly an outside guy.”

Outside.

The word itself caused me to briefly relive my anxiety at the Dumpsters. The mad dash to the back porch, slogging through the depths of snow, everything speeding up on the inside but eerily slowing down on the outside, my limbs turning to lead. I could feel the cottonmouth coming on. I swallowed hard.

“I get plenty of sunlight,” Baylor said.

I told him the apartment was his and he asked when he could move in.

“As soon as you’d like,” I said. I added that we could even prorate the days for January.

“Great!” Baylor beamed.

I told him that per standard procedure, I’d need a final month’s rent as a deposit, to which he replied, “No problemo.”

His sudden Spanish made me smile.

It’s worth noting that upon exiting the basement, while ascending the stairs, I observed Baylor Phebe to be much lighter on his feet than one might expect for a man of his size.

  

There was a young woman sitting on the floor in front of Bradley’s apartment. She was very pretty, of mixed race, skin like caramel. Her corduroy jacket was too thin for the weather. Beside her lay a book bag and a large blond canvas sack, the size of a laundry bag, snapped shut at the top, and somehow bloated. The sack dwarfed the girl, who was text messaging on her cell phone.

“Can I help you?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Can you?”

She was tough, a little feral, maybe from East St. Louis.

“Who are you?” I said.

“Who the fuck are you?” she retorted.

I told her I owned the house.

“Good for you,” she replied. She completed her text and sent it off.

I asked her if she was waiting for Bradley.

“Maybe,” she said, not looking up from her cell phone.

She smelled of patchouli oil and clove cigarettes. I thought maybe she was his pot dealer, that her book bag was full of those little tetrahedral terrariums containing helices of high-quality crystal-budded hydroponic. But it was the larger sack that was really getting the better of my curiosity.

I asked her if she was Bradley’s girlfriend.

“Naw,” she answered. “We just friends.”

“Video game buddies?”

“He don’t play video games no more,” she said.

I was shocked.

She said that he didn’t even have a TV. “Gave all his shit away,” she added.

I asked her whom he gave the TV to and she said she didn’t know, but that he’d given his PlayStation away as well. “He’s been simplifying,” she said.

I asked her what was in the sack.

She told me to mind my business and she said it like a man.

She was prettier when she didn’t speak, with sharp hazel eyes. They were almost silver, these eyes.

“You mind me asking your name?” I said.

She asked me if I was conducting a census.

I told her that Bradley was sort of like my brother. “I used to be married to his sister,” I explained.

“Oh,” she said. “You that dude.”

“Francis,” I said.

“Yeah, Francis the Fuckup.”

“The report’s that bleak, huh?”

“Pretty bleak,” she replied, “yep.”

The central heating system kicked on. A deep whirring sound, almost subliminal, soothing.

“Why you so worried about Bradley?” the girl said. “He’s just doin’ his thing.”

“Which is what exactly?” I asked.

Her phone chirped again. She read something off its screen, then wrote and sent a text. Her thumbs moved with exceptional velocity.

“So you’re just gonna wait for him?” I said.

“That okay with you?”

Her phone chirped yet again and she checked it and shook her head.

I asked her her name.

“La-Trez,” she said, the emphasis on the second syllable.

“Pretty name,” I said.

“Thanks,” she replied. “It’s got a hyphen.”

She stood and we shook hands. She was taller than I expected. Her legs were much longer than her torso. She hoisted her backpack. I didn’t hear anything clinking around. For all I know there could have been actual books in there.

Again, her phone made a noise. Checking it, she said, “Fiendin-ass nigga.” She asked me if it was cool to leave the large canvas sack in front of Bradley’s door.

I told her I’d make sure he got it.

“Thanks,” she said. “Tell him I said keep makin’ your way.”

“Keep makin’ your way,” I echoed.

She thanked me and descended the front staircase. She moved quickly, like an athlete, her feet a fast patter down the steps.

After I heard the front porch screen door open and close I unsnapped the huge sack. Inside was an enormous blob of string, the kind you might use to bundle packages. I dug my hands into its depths to see if there was anything else hidden—drugs, chemicals, bomb-making materials, what have you—but there was nothing but string.

  

I miss my wife.

It’s late and I’m drunk as I write this. It’s four in the morning—4:07 to be exact—and I can’t sleep and there is a kind of postoperative ache deep in my side that feels like a rib has been removed, and for no good reason.

I spent the evening doing dishes, organizing bills, shelving paperbacks, anything to keep my mind off of Sheila Anne. I even went down to the basement and cleaned Baylor Phebe’s bathroom again, though it was unnecessary.

I keep going over the bad nights, the irreconcilable moments, and when I really examine the peptic marital viscera in a hard forensic way there really isn’t any one thing that I can point to. The end of our marriage lacks an event. Sure, we fought about little things. She hated that I often didn’t get out of bed before noon. She thought I was wasting half the day sleeping and dreaming and drooling on my pillow. She never bought the argument that the artist needs to be afforded the time to let his unconscious flower. She liked to rise early and go running and eat organic granola and update our streamable Netflix cue and knock out at least two-thirds of the New York Times crossword puzzle. She got more things done before eight a.m. than most people accomplish in an entire day.

After the band split up, my attack on pursuing a career in rock ’n’ roll waned. Contending with the inchoate narrative of the Third Policeman—really taking a long, mature look at it—would have been like being forced to eat potting soil. The very idea of touching my guitar made my stomach churn poisonously. I got a few offers to tour with another band, to replace a rhythm guitarist who had fractured the ulnar styloid process in his wrist. It would have paid pretty well and most certainly would have led to other opportunities, but I wasn’t crazy about their music and I was just too damn sad about the Third Policeman’s demise. That band, Natural Appliances, sounded like four other alt-country outfits from Southern Illinois shamelessly trying to ape Son Volt and early Wilco. I turned down two overtures from them and instead stayed in bed, a king-sized Swedish affair made with brass springs and authentic horsehair (a wedding gift from Sheila Anne’s wealthy parents).

Then my mother died, and Morris left for North Carolina and my column in the Pigeon was no more, so I stopped going down to the at-home studio and a film of post-nuclear-holocaust-looking dust settled on all the recording equipment and I started getting flabby in the middle and some random hairs sprouted simian-like around my shoulder blades and I developed a sty on the lower lid of my left eye that looked unfortunately cystic and maybe even a little venereal and that same eye started twitching uncontrollably and then I tried to pop the sty with the tip of a safety pin that I’d sterilized with a Bic lighter but it made it worse and it took months to go away and even when the twitching stopped I developed a paranoia that the sty would return from a sneeze or from a brisk wind or from telling a little white lie about whether or not I’d called the cable guy to upgrade our package and Sheila Anne NEVER SAID ANYTHING ABOUT THE STY IN THE FIRST PLACE, the omission of which was a point of contention constantly dangling between us, and there were more than a handful of occasions when I couldn’t get fully erect despite being thrillingly turned on by Sheila Anne’s face and mind and body and something really intense was happening to my stomach, meaning I could often feel it digesting itself, and in the bathroom mirror I could see psoriatic wens forming on my scalp and sometimes I could smell a faint metallic rot escaping from my own mouth, which meant other people could smell it too, especially Sheila Anne, and when I would drop my towel post-shower to leg into boxer shorts or briefs or what have you, Sheila Anne started looking away, as in literally doing a disgusted one-eighty, and then I turned down another offer, this time to go to Madison and help the guy who ran Slowneck Records start a new label, because I didn’t want to live in Madison because it reminded me too much of the band failing and then I noticed Sheila Anne coming home later and later into the evening, like sometimes as late as tenish despite Decatur being ninety minutes away and she never got off work later than seven, and I’m sure she was doing some emotional screwing around with Dennis Church like Skyping with him from her office and maybe even engaging in cybersex, which still makes me brux because I start imagining Sheila Anne baring her breasts to him and him making obovoid shapes of awe with his mouth and then getting the right laptop camera angle trained on his cock so it looks larger than it actually is and the simultaneous mewling and sounds of mutual suspiration and actual utterances like YOU’RE SO HUGE, DENNIS CHURCH, and I CAN FEEL YOU INSIDE ME, DENNIS CHURCH, and YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE ME COME SO HARD, SHEILA ANNE, and I’M COMING INSIDE YOU, SHEILA ANNE, and their embarrassed but honest laughter during post-jism jism-policing, with Dennis Church’s conveniently placed box of scented Kleenex within arm’s reach, and Sheila Anne Purelling her hands so it almost looks as if she’s wringing his cyber sperm into her very being, and the convivial silly guffaws at their desperation and elation and the scintillatingly unbearable fucking vernal attraction for each other practically setting fire to the Internet waves they shared and then the plans they made and the conspiratorial low-voiced conversations Sheila Anne had, or maybe as a rule she spoke to him only when she was alone in her car or maybe they texted each other in code or maybe there was a whole narrative of digital subterfuge, like when he came up on her smartphone it said PHYLLIS or KAREN or fucking BLYTHE or some shit, and when did all the trickery begin and when did that (the trickery) start to get old or even unbearable and when did they finally declare to each other the promise that they couldn’t stand to be apart for another hotfooted minute and did he use his last available frequent-flier miles to tear-ass it through the heavens to Chicago and Amtrak it to Decatur and fuck her in his rental car because they just couldn’t wait to get to the Marriott and did she wax her pussy for him because I DID NOTICE THAT TOWARD THE END and when I asked her about it she said she just wanted to try it and the last time I went down on her I thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted in my life and I still do, even better than birthday cake and vanilla ice cream when you’re stoned, and I was in a kind of erotic schoolboy utopia complete with a fully engaged erection, maybe the largest it’s ever been, but Sheila Anne kept making a face like I was trying to put chilled serrated salad tongs inside her and when I consider the moment she decided to wax her pussy for him I want to die, I want to take an entire bottle of painkillers, preferably Percocet because of its warm, steady undertow and downright goofy slow-motion feeling, and enter the perfectly configured Francis Falbo–sized death canoe that will float rapturously down the loving River of Neveragain and evaporate into sun splash and low satiny cumuli and the gentle infinitesimal breath of fluttering hummingbirds…

  

I called Haggis.

“Francis,” he said.

He’d been sleeping, as one is expected to in the predawn.

“Can you get me some Percocet?” I said.

“Of course.” He asked if I needed it right away.

“Later’s fine,” I answered, dreading the long hours ahead. Feeling sickened by it, actually.

“Your back’s that bad, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s bad,” I lied. “It’s turning into full-blown sciatica.” I explained that the sciatic nerve is the largest nerve in the body and once inflamed takes a long time to tame.

“I’ll be by later,” Haggis assured me. “And I’ll shovel again.”

I thanked him.

Below, despite the hour, an occasional car passed, muffled by the snow-impacted street. Otherwise, the neighborhood was hushed. The only sounds were of the house settling, the cycle of the central heating system whirring on and off every twenty minutes or so. I wondered how many other Pollardians were awake at this hour, limping around inside themselves, doubled over in the marshlands of the dispossessed, their hearts like a cold damp toad in their hands.

  

This morning I woke around eleven thirty. I was hungover and dehydrated, with bloated bowels and a kidney ache. I had pissed the bed, which raises all sorts of concerns when one is thirty-six years old. Fortunately, the mattress was mostly spared because of the wicking action of my double-layer waffle-patterned thermals and the terry-cloth thickness of my bathrobe. My urine smelled sweetly of bourbon. I peeled off the soiled long johns and took a shower and made some instant Folgers.

I looked up the word agoraphobia. Agoraphobia: an abnormal fear of being in crowds, public places, or open areas, sometimes accompanied by anxiety attacks. Well, a standard definition just about sums it up.

I turned on the radio, which reported various school closings and highway maintenance in the southern area of the state. Somehow, between dawn and now it has snowed another eight inches.

According to the radio, things in Afghanistan are bad. An American soldier lost his mind and barbecued an entire Afghani family. Another head coach for the New York Knicks has resigned. And in local news, Bethany Bunch is still missing.

After I stripped and sprinkled baking soda on my mattress, I took my coffee to the window and peered out. Indeed there was a fresh hide of snow, with a bluish, lunar crust. An old four-door Buick was moving slowly down the street, spinning its tires. The two bald sycamores in front of the house were so heaped with virgin snow they looked put-upon, humiliated.

Across the street, in plain perfect sight from my attic window, the astomatous snowman was in Hazard Groom’s front yard. Charcoal eyes. The carrot nose. The pink scarf.

I called Mansard and told him as much, not taking my eyes off it.

“So you’re coming over?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll swing by.”

  

At around two thirty p.m. Haggis shoveled the walkway and steps to both the front and back porches. He salted everything down too. This time he actually used a new snow shovel made of bright aluminum, which he said he’d purchased from Target.

When I came downstairs to meet him at the front porch I feigned stiffness in my back and lurched dramatically for the handrail.

“You might want to see someone about that back,” he said.

“If it doesn’t get better in a few days…,” I said.

Haggis had also brought me a small blob of foil, about the size of a baseball, inside of which were two dozen Percocets. He could have charged me five bucks for each little white pill, which could double as Tylenol, but he charged me only sixty dollars.

“Enjoy the flotilla,” he said. Then he told me about some new shipment of pills he’d just gotten in that were supposed to guarantee a fifty percent growth of your penis.

I considered the thrill of my penis doubling its size. The confidence it would inspire. The hefty bulge in my thermals. “I’ll take some of those too,” I said.

“Next trip,” Haggis said.

Just as he was leaving, Baylor Phebe pulled up with a small U-Haul trailer attached to the back of his black Dodge Ram 1500. He parked in front of the Grooms’ house and met me at the front porch. He walked like an escaped circus bear, making his own time in the world. We shook hands and I told him it’d be easier to pull into the back lot, behind the house, and unload from there.

“The aft staircase has a little more width,” I explained.

“I don’t have much,” he said. “The whole kit and caboodle’s in there.” He pointed to the U-Haul. “Everything else is in storage in Cairo.”

When he got back in his truck and pulled around behind the house, the snowman was gone from the Grooms’ yard.

  

I stood beside Mansard on the front porch, staring across the street at the Grooms’ yard. “It was right there,” I said. “Next to the ceramic deer.”

Squinting and visoring his eyes with his yellowed hand, he said, “The deer on our side of the tree or the deer on the other side of the tree?”

“On our side. That other thing’s an elk.”

“An elk,” Mansard said, “right.”

Certain men have smoked for so many years that you can actually smell the nicotine coming through their pores. In the summer mosquitoes avoid these men. You could probably put Mansard in a Speedo, stand him on a pontoon boat in a thriving Southern swamp in the middle of August, and do a field study on high levels of epidermal nicotine in congruence with mosquito avoidance.

He lit a Lucky Strike, pulled on it so that his mustache pulsed, and said, “Pink scarf again?”

“Pink scarf, yep.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive, Detective.”

He exhaled an incredible amount of smoke and said, “You realize you have cereal in your beard?”

I raked my hands through my beard. Two pieces of Cap’n Crunch tumbled onto the front porch. And another smaller item that might have been a crescent of fingernail.

“Why don’t we cross the street,” Mansard said, “and you can stand exactly where it was.”

“I’m not going to do that.” I said this resolutely, like a man refusing to eat a worm. I cited my back yet again. “If I slip and fall it could be disastrous.”

He looked at me for a second, pulling on his cigarette. With smoke in his lungs, in that cool, small-voiced way, he said, “I feel like every time I see you you’re in your pajamas.”

To which I replied, “You’ve only seen me twice and these aren’t pajamas. They’re long johns.”

“Are they?”

I looked down and I was wearing plaid flannel pajama bottoms.

He exhaled and said, “Look like pajamas to me.” He produced a face that somehow made it seem like he was thinking with his mustache, as if whatever powers of sleuthing he possessed were sourced in those yellowing brown bristles. “You gettin’ enough sleep there, Francis?” he asked.

I told him that I sleep just fine.

Then he touched his hearing aid and asked me if anyone else had ever mentioned these snowmen.

I didn’t answer.

“Might it be possible that you’re seeing things?” he said.

I couldn’t even scratch the surface of this proposition. He smoked some more and ashed in one of the front porch’s standing ashtrays, crushing the butt. I think he finished his cigarette in under six pulls.

“Have there been any leads on Bethany Bunch?” I asked.

He replied that there hadn’t been a single one. “Best theory we’ve come up with so far is that she was kidnapped by someone passing through town. That it wasn’t even premeditated.”

“What, like someone saw her and just said, ‘Come with me, little girl,’ and walked her out of the Target?”

“Could be.”

“Which means Bethany might have gone willingly?”

He said it could have been love at first sight.

“Which means it’s possible Bethany wasn’t exactly too keen on Mommy and Daddy.”

“The mind of a three-year-old’s not an easy thing to decipher,” Mansard said.

“So, but what are we talking about, like a trucker or something?”

“More likely’d be a woman,” he explained. “A little kid isn’t gonna just start walking toward a big scary-looking trucker. We’d like to bring some dogs by. Get Bethany’s scent.”

I reminded him that the Bunches had thrown their daughter’s clothes out.

“They’ve likely kept other things,” he said. “Toys. A pillow. Her mattress.”

“What if Todd and Mary don’t cooperate?”

“It’d be in their best interests, don’t you think?”

“Maybe they’re freaked out by all the attention.”

He knocked on their door. Out of the side of his mouth, negotiating his lips through his calico mustache, he said, “Freaks getting freaked out? They were trapeze artists, Francis. Why would a little attention bother them? They’re used to performing in front of hundreds of people.”

I told him that they just seem a little anxious.

“If they’re anxious about people trying to help them find their daughter,” he said, “then that says something right there.”

Mansard knocked again.

“By the way,” he said, “always knock, even if there’s a doorbell.” He was suddenly instructing me on the subtleties of detective work. He said that people were generally more likely to open the door if you knocked. “It’s less heraldic,” he added.

I told him I’d keep that in mind.

He stroked his mustache with one hand, pinching the midpoint, just under his nostrils, and spreading his thumb and index finger wide. An unself-conscious gesture shaped by years. He glanced at his watch and then produced a piece of chewing gum, a lone, old-fashioned stick of Wrigley’s, still in its foil. He unwrapped it and folded it into his mouth a little obscenely. The piebald mustache began undulating as he chewed.

He pressed the doorbell now. “Doorbell is phase two,” he instructed.

“What’s phase three?” I asked.

“Occasionally I’ll go to the side of the house and tap on a window. Columbo would do shit like that. Or he would pretend to be the plumber. Or he would just break the hell in somehow. Columbo was a fucking god.”

Still no answer, so he pressed the doorbell again. It was the same doorbell we’d had since I was a kid. I’d kept it as one of the original items. It was strange to be so familiar with its two-part tone yet feel so far away from the rooms that used to be on the other side of the door.

I asked him if he was going to go tap on a window.

“Not just yet,” he replied. He explained that phase three was a big jump. “Once you start tapping on windows you have to see yourself actually breaking into the house. I’m not seeing that yet.”

I nodded, a little baffled by the detective logic.

“And the next time our snowman makes an appearance, do yourself a favor and take a picture of it with your cell phone.”

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of that. “Good thinking,” I said. I swear I could hear Mary Bunch quietly padding around inside her apartment. Mansard pressed her doorbell three more times, but there was no answer.

  

Down in the laundry room I was putting my sheets, thermals, and bathrobe in the dryer when Bob Blubaugh poked his head in.

“Bob,” I said. “Hey.”

He asked if he could show me something. There was a slight look of dread on his mostly neutral face. Or maybe I was projecting dread. I thought he was going to lead me to a dead rodent or some sort of unfortunate water leak caused by the extra eight inches of snow, but that’s not what it was at all.

He led me to the storage room. He bent down and lifted the old rope rug that used to live on the Falbo living room floor. Again, the efficiency of movement. Nothing wasted. Total balance and coordination. He pulled at the rope rug, clearing away some floor space.

Underneath the rug was a door. An old iron door perfectly housed and hinged, rusted and ancient. I’d never seen this door before.

“How’d you find this, Bob?”

“I thought I heard something in here in the middle of the night.”

“Like a person?”

“I don’t know what it was. But something was moving around. It could have been anything. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t an animal.” He explained that back in Minnesota his family had similar rugs, and mice would get trapped under them. “When I pulled the rug aside,” he said, “there was this door.”

I yanked on its handle but it wouldn’t budge. It was outfitted with a mortise lock, the same kind of system used to secure government explosives. The lock was much newer than the actual door. I pressed my ear to the single keyhole and listened but could hear nothing except my own blood pulsing through my head.

  

I called Lyman down in Jupiter.

“Son,” he said.

In the background I could hear voices, laughter, clinking glasses, Frank Sinatra. He wasn’t thrilled to be talking to me. Lately I’ve felt like some past-life irritant.

“We’re sorta in the middle of somethin’ here,” he said. “Sissy’s throwin’ a cocktail thingy to try and raise money for African babies with cleft palates or some such.”

“What’s up with the door in the floor?”

“The door in what floor?” Lyman said.

“In the basement. Under Grandma Jelly’s old rope rug.”

“Oh, that.”

“That?”

“It’s a shelter.”

“A shelter?” I said.

“Yeah, a fallout shelter, a bomb shelter.”

“Since when did we have a bomb shelter?”

“We had it made before you were born.”

“What? Why?”

“Why do you think? In case we got nuked by the friggin’ Russians.”

I asked him what year it was built and he said, “Seventy-one, I think. Your uncle Corbit was puttin’ ’em in all over the Midwest.”

I asked him how big it was and he said it was only a few rooms, maybe a few hundred square feet.

I asked him if it was furnished and he said that indeed it was. “With actual furniture?”

“With actual furniture, yes. Kitchenette, sofa, functional bathroom. Entertainment stuff.”

“And supplies?”

“It’s stockpiled.”

“With what?”

“Canned goods, candles, a generator, cans of Sterno, flashlights, blankets, pillows, board games—”

“Board games?”

“Monopoly, Yahtzee, Scrabble, that sorta thing.”

“Family night in the bomb shelter,” I said.

“Gas masks too. And your mother loved pears, so there’s a few cases of canned pears. Del Monte, I think.”

“There’s a mortise lock on it.”

He asked what the hell a mortise lock was.

I told him it’s the kind of lock the government uses for securing explosives. “In like pressurized bunkers,” I explained. “The lock is way newer-looking than the door.”

He said he had no idea why it would be necessary to have such a lock.

“Like I said,” he continued, “your uncle Corbit built the damn thing.”

I asked him why he and my mother never told me about it.

To which he answered: “I guess we forgot.”

I asked him how I would get down there.

“Well, you need the key,” he said. I asked him where it was and he answered, “It’s definitely somewhere.”

In the background an old lady made a whooping sound like she was getting goosed, followed by a chorus of elderly, wheezy laughter. I imagined oversized earlobes and insanely white dentures radiating through tan, leathery skulls. Rolexes and ship captain hats. Absurd alien-being face-lifts. Gauzy hair augmented with high-end toupees. Lifted, laser-corrected, macular-looking eyes.

I said, “I can call a locksmith.”

“No,” he replied. “I’ll dig up the key. I think it’s in a safety deposit box somewhere.”

“And you’ll send it to me?”

“Why are you so hell-bent on going down there?” Lyman said.

I told him that I’d like to know the house I’ve been living in for basically my entire life. “Which I’m now leasing to people who are depending on me,” I added. I explained that as of tomorrow every unit would be filled.

“Good for you, Francis.”

I told him that I didn’t like keeping architectural secrets from my leaseholders.

“Fair enough,” he replied.

“By the way,” I said, “you still haven’t seen the renovation.”

“I’ll be coming back north soon enough.”

I told him that he’d like it.

“It’s just not so easy being in the house. Your mother…,” he said.

His voice went faint.

He hadn’t cried at her memorial service. He’d mostly smiled and looked stunned. For some reason he handed out individually wrapped butterscotch candies to everyone, a random, out-of-nowhere gesture that had nothing to do with my mother, either side of the family, or anyone’s purported love of butterscotch.

Cornelia’s service was held at an Elks lodge banquet hall in Skokie, just north of Chicago. There was a polka band and plum brandy, and the Wyrwas contingent was in full effect. Lyman pulled his hamstring dancing with Cornelia’s beautiful young cousin, Aldona. I had to help him to the car.

Sheila Anne drove the whole way back to Pollard, where we had moved into my boyhood room during my mother’s last weeks. Prior to that we’d been living in a two-bedroom apartment on the other side of town. Morris had been staying in our spare room, and we were still writing music in the basement studio space at the house, below Cornelia’s hospice room. Although the studio was well soundproofed, we kept things quiet, on the acoustic side, using mostly guitars and a weighted digital keyboard that sounded like an authentic upright piano. The music we wrote was dirgelike—dreamy figments of sadness. This collection of songs—perhaps a dozen—was haunted, chorusless, and bridgeless. Drifty junk ballads that were as close to the concept of slowcore as anything we’d ever done. We felt this music deeply but I think it was ultimately too sad to share with anyone. We started to drown in it and I think this is one of the reasons why Morris ultimately left our apartment and Pollard altogether. The music started to digest us. There was no release in it, only a heavy, arterial thickening.

On the way home from Skokie, Sheila Anne and I were quiet as Lyman snored drunkenly into the passenger’s side window, clutching his bad leg. Though I’d been too sad to dance, there was something incredibly life-affirming about the way the Polish side of the family celebrated, even in death. It was bitter cold that night, the middle of January, and the Lake Michigan wind we experienced walking the short distance from the banquet hall to the car is hard to describe, even in retrospect. The brutal indifference of novocaine thaw. Or an orchestrated attack of the nervous system that is both inside and outside you.

Into the phone I said, “Dad?”

“I miss her,” he said, his voice cut in half.

“Me too,” I said.

Only the sounds from the cocktail party. Hearing-aid chatter. Emphysemic laughter. Frank Sinatra and his big swinging band.

I was shocked. Hovering in that dead digital airspace was the closest I’d felt to my father in years.

Lyman cleared his throat and said, “I gotta go, son.” His voice was a little ragged. He cleared his throat again. “Some former PGA golfer with ridiculous slacks and a bad dye job is makin’ the moves on Sissy. I’ll track down that key for you.”

  

A few days passed. I couldn’t wait for Mansard to politely ask the Bunches for some item of Bethany’s for his dogs to sniff. I waited for Mary Bunch to leave the house, and when the coast was clear, in my bathrobe and wool slippers, I padded down to the first floor and tried to key into their apartment.

But they’d changed the locks!

They’d changed the fucking locks, which is an egregious infraction of their lease!

I went upstairs and retrieved a hammer from under my sink and broke a window and let myself in. It was one of the two small rectangular frosted windows inset in the mullions of their back door. The window broke cleanly in half and made surprisingly little noise. After I reached through the opening and turned their new deadbolt, I eased into their apartment, closing the door behind me.

I just sort of stood there for a moment. There was a sad, still-life quality to their furnishings. A weak, doleful light leaked through the slit in the living room curtains, grazing a lampshade, the top of an armchair, and their dull, pilling carpeting.

Their phone rang.

Which was so alarming that I almost released all matter that had been brewing in my rectum. I squeezed my ass cheeks together as hard as I could, thrusting my pelvis forward absurdly.

Their message machine beeped and an elderly woman began speaking. “Mary,” she said, “it’s Mom. Just callin’ to see how you guys are doin’.” Her voice was faint, dry as tissue paper. “I sent you some of those ginger cookies you like so much. Did you get ’em? Just wanted to let you know that everyone here is prayin’ for you and Todd and little Bethany. We love you very much. Call us back when you can. Your father says hi.”

The machine beeped.

Mary’s mom had a Southwestern lilt to her voice. I imagined her to be much older than she probably was, arthritic and shuffling, blind, losing her memory, swiping at invisible flies.

The answering machine somehow rattled my nervous system, and rather than begin my search for a “Bethany” item, I became obsessed with how to cover up my forced entry. I was suddenly sprinting upstairs to the attic. I put on a pair of old work gloves, pulled a brick from my bookcase, returned to the Bunches’ unit, and threw the brick through the already broken window—chucked it with real reenactment accuracy—so it would look like a breaking and entering.

Then I absconded with their DVD player. Detaching it made my hands feel huge and blocky and it took way too long. I ran it upstairs and wrapped it in an old towel and pushed it under my bed. And then I sprinted back down to the Bunches’ apartment because I had forgotten the hammer!

At this point my lungs were burning, as were my thighs. Somehow the hammer was on their kitchen counter practically with a spotlight trained on it. I couldn’t place when or how I’d managed to put it there. What else had I done without realizing it? I seized the hammer with both gloved hands and started for the back door, but stopped yet again because out of the corner of my eye I could see that ONE OF MY SLIPPERS WAS JUST SITTING THERE, right in the little parabolic path between the kitchen and the living room, resting there like a felled bird of extraordinary evidence, so I spun, grabbed that as well, and hightailed it out of there.

Back in the attic I removed my work gloves and lay on the floor, my knees tented, my lungs chapped, my nostrils dilating like some oxygen-starved water buffalo. The whole event had probably taken less than five minutes but it felt like the heavy slow-mo physiological thickening of nightmares. I had officially committed my first felony. I burgled my family home.

Sure, Francis Carl Falbo had done his fair share of petty adolescent shoplifting. As a preteen Donkey Kong junkie he’d stolen money out of his mother’s purse and even dined-and-ditched a few times in college, but that was lightweight stuff compared to what he’d just done in the Bunches’ unit. I was enlivened and embarrassed and exhausted and I think I had a fever.

After I caught my breath I called Mansard, and instead of reporting the brick toss, I asked him if he thought I was a good person.

“I’m a detective, Francis, not a friggin’ guidance counselor.”

I had no reply.

“Do you think you’re a good person?” he said.

“Yes,” I heard myself reply.

“Then you’re a goddamn good person!”

I apologized. Undoubtedly Mansard was starting to tire of me.

He accepted my apology and told me to take it easy.

I waited on the front porch for Mary Bunch to get home and told her the news there. “Someone broke into your place,” I said. “Through the back door.”

She had just gone for a jog. Her cheeks were red, her eyes tearing from the cold. She marched past me. I followed her around the porch to her back door, which she touched as if it were boiling hot.

“I was going to call the police,” I said, “but I figured I’d wait for you or Todd to come back.”

But Mary refused to call the police.

I followed her inside, where she immediately clocked the missing DVD player.

I told her my best guess was that it was someone looking to make a quick buck. “Pawning electronics is always a safe bet,” I added. “Probably some random drug addict. Otherwise he would’ve taken more stuff.”

She ran her hand across the surface of the shelf where the DVD player used to be. There was a small potted cactus I hadn’t noticed before. Miraculously, in my panic to unhook and steal the DVD player, I had avoided getting punctured.

“When we moved in,” Mary said, “you assured us this neighborhood was safe.”

I told her this was the first incident in as long as I could remember, adding, “Pollard’s not exactly the burglary capital of the Midwest.” As much as I wanted to bring up the lease infraction of the Bunches changing their locks, I decided against it.

She asked me if I would accompany her as she looked in on the other rooms. “I’d feel safer,” she added.

I followed her into their bedroom. The queen-sized bed was unmade, the sheets rumpled and twisted, the mattress ticking visible in places. The room had a smell of liniment and something sweet and gamy. The odor was oddly mannish, what I imagine a penitentiary to smell like. Clothes were scattered about. Athletic socks and T-shirts and sweaters. Boxer shorts. A black sports bra hung off the headboard. The source of the gamy smell was part of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, still in its opened container. There was a sense that this was the room’s constant state, that things were half-eaten and forgotten, that the Bunches never even thought to crack a window. There were no books or magazines, no TV. Only these strewn clothes, a dresser with two drawers half-opened, and a messy bed.

Mary asked me if I would open the closet.

I feigned vigilance, sneaking up on it and opening it quickly, in a move that probably resembled a suburban white man’s version of kung fu. Inside the closet was a sad wardrobe that seemed to include mostly hand-me-downs from the early eighties. Cowl-neck sweaters and thick corduroy pants balding at the knees. Polyester dresses with explosive floral patterns. Paisley blouses. A few cheap men’s suits in dry-cleaning plastic.

“No one’s in here,” I said, making a quick scan of anything that might have been Bethany’s. But there didn’t appear to be anything.

I checked under the bed and sneaked up on the curtains in the same way I had the closet. I think Mary found me to be brave and noble, really sticking my chin into possible danger, ready to go toe-to-toe with a drug-addicted, nunchuck-wielding intruder.

Next we went into the bathroom, where I crept up on the shower curtain, pulled it aside, and, literally, put my dukes up. They used generic dandruff shampoo, Dove soap. A contorted washcloth, dry, clung to the spout of the bathtub like a palsied hand.

“It creeps me out to think that anyone was in here,” Mary said.

Next was Bethany’s room. Just as we were about to enter, Mary said, “I’d rather you not come in here.”

I asked her if she was sure, if she felt safe enough.

“It’s our daughter’s room,” she said.

I nodded, hugely disappointed.

She opened and closed the door so quickly I couldn’t steal even the slightest glimpse.

The short hallway was dark. I kept expecting to be reminded of something, of the old version of the house. A smell like my father’s aftershave or some abstract water stain that in my youth I mythologized as an extraterrestrial presence, but I had done such a thorough job with the renovation that all imperfections had been wiped, spackled, and painted clean. I’d inadvertently denied myself the sentimental pleasure of archaeology in my boyhood home.

At the end of the hall there was a phone book splayed in the corner, as if it had been thrown. I tried to turn the hallway overhead on, but the bulb had burned out.

The Bunches didn’t have much, and their few possessions were uncared-for. Things seemed to have lost their purpose—for example, the phone book flung and left for naught, the dead lightbulb unchanged. I wondered if this translated to their daughter, if the reason they’d lost track of Bethany in the Target was that she had become just another faulty object to them, like a cracked dinner plate or a chair with a wobbly leg that gets relegated to the garage.

Mary came out holding a ceiling mobile of Muppet characters: Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, etc. “This fell onto her bed,” she said. “It keeps falling.”

“I can fix it if you want,” I offered.

“No,” she said, pulling it close. “Thank you, though.”

“Was anything missing?” I asked, not aware until I said it of how insensitive the question must have sounded.

Mary shook her head, opened the door, dropped the mobile on the other side, then closed it.

I really wanted to go into Bethany’s room, but I knew I shouldn’t push my luck. I was already improbably beating the odds. “You really should report this to the police, Mary.”

“No police,” she said again. “We’re through with them. Please just fix the door.”

“Of course.”

“Maybe get us a solid one. Without glass in it.”

I told her that this made perfect sense.

Then she asked me if I wouldn’t mind sticking around until Todd got home.

I told her I’d be happy to.

She turned away, produced a cell phone, and went into the kitchen, leaving me at the threshold of their living room, staring at the vacant shelf where their DVD player used to be. The small cactus suddenly seemed like it possessed a human intelligence. After I left, it would tell Mary everything. I wanted to seize it and throw it out the window.

In the kitchen Mary was bringing Todd up to speed on the situation and insisted that they not report the burglary. She told him that I was there with her and that I’d promised to stay until he got home. Then she started whispering.

I found myself inching backward, toward Bethany’s room. My hand found the doorknob. I turned it slowly and opened the door. The Muppet mobile was blocking the entrance, and I didn’t want to step over it, out of fear that Mary had somehow strategically placed it. I didn’t even cross the threshold.

There was a child-sized twin bed, immaculately made, a small white pillow, no headboard, a baby-blue cotton comforter crisply tucked into the mattress. There was also a canary-yellow ruffle around the box spring. Beside the bed, a stand with a Big Bird lamp on it, also yellow. The stand looked weirdly “country” and out of place, like it was something used for showcasing knickknacks at a Cracker Barrel gift shop. Opposite the bed was a short chest of drawers, mahogany. Everything that used to be contained inside them had obviously been sent to the Dumpster in that Hefty bag and was now long gone. The curtains, neatly drawn, were also yellow, but a sadder, flatter yellow than the box spring ruffle and Big Bird lamp. It seemed as if the winter sun were somehow avoiding them. This was my mother’s hospice room, where she often groaned out in the night. Where there were screams for morphine and Dilaudid. Where she would often speak Polish, drifting in and out of narcosis.

The closet was closed. Next to the closet, on the floor, a small stuffed bear, brown, faced the corner, as if put there to be shamed. With every angstrom of will that has been genetically assigned to me I had to fight the urge to enter the room and take the bear. I quietly closed the door and returned to the living room.

Mary was still on the phone. After a long silence punctuated by some sniffling, she said good-bye and came back out into the living room, wiping her face.

I asked her if Todd was on his way and she nodded. I told her that as soon as he arrived I’d get to work on replacing their door.

Mary seemed to contract within herself like a sick child. For the first time I wondered how seldom she slept. How she got through each day. How little peace she felt.

She must have smelled the empathy steaming out of my pores because she said perhaps the most improbable five words to me since I’ve known her, which were: “Can I have a hug?”

“Sure,” I heard myself say.

We took a half step toward each other and hugged. She forced her hands under my armpits and inside my bathrobe, where they interlaced between my shoulder blades. For a half second I thought she was going to perform some inverted version of the Heimlich maneuver. But it was an authentic hug and she pulled me tight, burying her head in my midchest region. Mary is a good deal shorter than I am so I rested my chin—or beard, rather—on the crown of her head, which didn’t smell anything like the dandruff shampoo from her shower cubby. It smelled more like gloom. Like the funk of pure sebaceous gloom leaking through the pores of her scalp. A peppery, oily musk.

We clung to each other desperately. The heat from her face radiated through my many layers. I realized I was sort of pulling her into me. Her breasts, which felt surprisingly fuller than they appeared in her clothes, were pressing into my rib cage.

“Thank you,” she said, still buried in my chest.

“You’re welcome,” I almost sighed.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a bitch.”

“You’re not a bitch,” I said. “You and Todd have obviously been through a lot.”

The hug started to develop chapters. There was some shifting of weight and subtle movements of her hands, which were still interlaced between my shoulder blades. She sighed a little as well. I think our sighs occurred in roughly the same register, which means that mine were likely pretty womanish. She switched cheek positions, offered shallow breaths. A kind of laryngeal bellowing. I bellowed as well.

The hug was verging on novella length. Just when things couldn’t get more bizarre I felt an erection coming on. And I was wearing loose boxer shorts under the plaid flannel pajama bottoms—which were also loose in that semi-pleated MC Hammer genie pants sort of way—so there was no way to prevent detection. We thawed out of our hug as it was about to get visibly embarrassing, and I turned and took a few steps, walking like some wayward, bowlegged Christmas soldier.

Todd Bunch entered through the front door, his face worried and ghostly white. He was wearing full firefighter regalia: the boots, the rubber coat with neon-yellow bands, the helmet, the vulcanized gloves.

“Was there a fire?” I asked, my hands forming a severe steeple in front of my pajama bottoms.

“Simulations,” he said, and embraced Mary, who buried her head in his fireproof shoulder. She was like a dope fiend for hugs.

I stood there and awaited instruction.

Todd made severe eyes at me, but I think he was just generally freaked out. His face was incandescently alive. “I can take it from here,” he said.

“Just knock on my door if you need anything,” I said.

Todd somehow looked like a Fisher-Price fireman. A human-sized figurine with child-safety features.

As I was leaving, guarding my crotch with one hand, I reached down with the other and picked up the brick. “I’m assuming you don’t want to keep this.”

Todd shook his head.

I told them that I’d get to work finding them a new door.

When I got back upstairs, still erect, I slid the brick back into its position on the bookcase, which had been dangerously teetering.

Although at the embarrassingly young age of thirty-six, I am only infrequently visited by the Galloping Magic Cowboy of Natural Erection, once it’s fully achieved, the only way to make it go away is by ejaculating. I thought of Mary Bunch, naked on the trapeze, high in the air, her nipples erect, her body glistening under the circus lights…I thought about taking her from behind, in her circus dressing room, the roar of the crowd and the smell of elephants and clown makeup…

Then I whacked off to great relief.

  

Before it got too late, I used my Makita drill to screw a piece of spare plywood into the mullions framing the Bunches’ broken window panel. I said good night and repledged my promise of replacing their door.

They were grateful and exhausted.

Just as I was about to ascend the aft staircase, out of the corner of my eye, I saw another snowman. As soon as I spotted it I felt a chill pass through me. The snowman was at the base of the copper beech. The charcoal eyes. The carrot nose. The pink scarf.

My mouth went dry, and there was a strange pulsing in my head. I took a few steps toward it, my nose nearly pressing against the back porch’s cold screen.

“Everything okay, Francis?”

I turned.

Baylor Phebe was standing behind me.

“You look like you just saw a ghost,” he said.

I said hello to him.

He told me he was just going to go get a few things out of his truck. “My phone charger. My Bonnie Raitt CD. Can’t fall asleep without my Bonnie Raitt.”

I said, “Baylor, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he said. “What?”

“Tell me what you see when you look at the tree in the backyard.” I moved aside and he stepped toward the screen and squinted.

“I see a tree,” he said.

“Anything else?”

“Nope, just a big old tree. And a heckuva lotta snow. Why, you got coons or somethin’?”

“No,” I replied, “no coons.”

“’Cause I can certainly help you on that front. I’ve never been known to hesitate when it comes to dispatching a meddling coon.”

I thanked him and he headed out toward his truck. I turned on the floodlight over the garage. From his driver’s side door, Baylor waved appreciatively, but I wasn’t thinking of him.

He was right. At the base of the copper beech there was nothing but snow.