WEST

2

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

It was a Sunday morning when Sarah first called to talk about Dad. I remember because I was standing on the treadmill she gave me. The TV was on, one of the news channels, and sometimes I looked at it, but mostly I just stood there staring at the dead odometer. I was fully dressed for the day, and sipping coffee. A glance here and there at the morning show. The power button on the treadmill totally untouched, no red numbers telling me how much time I had left. It should’ve been our eighth anniversary. A year already since the divorce, and things weren’t getting any better. They were getting better, in that I no longer wanted to throw myself into the Pacific (in those fantasies, Sarah always came bounding down the beach, bikini clad, just in time…), but everything else was turning to shit. I still couldn’t believe Mom was gone and all the world around me hardly noticed. This was Mom. We did talk, Sarah and I, occasionally, but not much. I felt like a stranger in my own life. The sound of her voice used to be mine, and now it was his. Nikos, the infamous Grecian usurper. I wanted to hate the man, but more I wanted to avoid what I really knew in my heart, the basic truth that she went with him because she was lonely, and because somewhere along the line, her loving husband had become an asshole. I’ll say this: the phone call was unexpected. I took my cell from the holder on my belt.

Sarah 8:55.

“Well, hello, stranger,” I said.

She said, “I can’t really talk, not now.”

“So talk.”

“Okay. There is something up with Dad. Your dad. Something unkosher, I mean definitely. But I can’t really talk right now. So call him.”

“So nice to hear from you, too,” I said.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I’m coming,” she said to someone else.

“What, is he sick? He told you he’s sick? And who are you talking to?” I did not yet know about Nikos.

“It’s not that,” she said. “It’s something else. There’s a quiver in his voice, a kind of manic thing. It’s depressing and a little bit scary. I can’t talk.”

“And yet here we are talking,” I said.

“I’m coming,” she said again to someone else. “Go see him. Just go see him.”

“We should have dinner tonight.”

Sarah and Dad had already been phoning each other for years, and this way before any talk of unhappiness, or separation, back when we were still giddy as pink pigs rolling in cool summer shit, and falling on each other every chance we got. Good God, I loved that woman. I should say actually it was Dad who phoned Sarah, and hardly the other way around. The man felt responsible for her soul.

“You should see him,” she said. “Go visit him.”

“Okay, stop. Dad and I are fine,” I said.

“He tells me.”

“And if he’s sick, he hasn’t said anything to me.”

“Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise,” she said. “The man is talking to me about his dreams again, about your mother, and I’m not sure these are good dreams. Sadder than I’ve ever heard him before.”

I said nothing.

“I’ll call you tomorrow,” she said. “I have to go. Maybe dinner tomorrow.”

She hung up. I put the phone back on my belt.

“And happy anniversary,” I said, because hey, you know what, who knows, maybe a post-anniversary dinner with Sarah. Some white wine, polite conversation. I’d been going through such a long and predictably depressing phase, typical divorce stuff. I’d been angry, and lethargic, then just sad, and generally unmotivated, afternoon bourbons poured to the brim of a water glass. But as of this morning, I decided, it was over, finished, finito. We were beyond the cliché of the broken warring couple. We were adults.

Beside the TV, on the far wall, there was an old picture of Sarah and me at the beach. Two silhouettes, the blaze of a setting sun. We’d lived there in the condo by the water for seven long years. I always liked beaches, but I never really liked the ocean. Too damn big. And that treadmill was tremendous, took three men to bring it up the stairs. She had given it to me the year before. Said it was her goodbye gift and, frankly, despite the fact that I did come to love the convenience, jogging a few mornings here and there, I was tired of seeing it every waking morning of my life. I wasn’t exactly a runner when we met. Running for what? Toward what? I tried asking her this once. On our very first run. We’d been dating for a few weeks. I guess it was dating, but I also feel like I’ve never dated in my life. I feel like I meet a woman, or girl—this habit goes a long way back—and I completely surrender, all the way, I’m in love. Like it or not, it’s all over. Maybe they were dating. But I certainly wasn’t. We went on a run, Sarah and I, which was probably a date for her, but for me was an expression of unbounded and obvious loving devotion.

This was not an easy run, especially for a beginner. Bogging down in the sand, I couldn’t keep up. We went for a mile, maybe less, probably a lot less, before I was wondering how it was I’d never run on my own beach. Baywatch was popular at the time, and so I’d seen how beautiful running on the beach could be. It seemed to me I’d done something immoral, this not running. Sarah was ahead of me, her red-shorted bottom bouncing back and forth like a heart, upside down, buoyant, and persuasive. Keep running. But I was slowing, my heavy and also a little bit wet camouflage shorts weighing me down (I’d already tripped and stumbled into the water), and she was getting farther and farther away from me. I stopped running, and watched her go small, smaller and smaller, and then suddenly I started to panic. I felt like I had to prove myself; I was worthy. The last thing I wanted was for her to turn and see me just standing there, like I’d totally given up. So I bolted. I ran like I never had before, or ever have since. My calves on fire, the torn hems of my camo shorts chafing just above the knees. I ran for her, my tiny love getting small in the distance. No matter what, she would not turn and see me standing still or far behind. I willed it so. And so I ran. But then Sarah was getting bigger. Bigger and bigger with every passing second, because she had turned! I was powerless, and she had seen me for what I was, and she was getting bigger and closer and bigger and closer. Effortless for her, as far as I could tell. Then she was right there and slowing down and then she walked up to me, and said, hardly out of breath, “Hey, slowpoke.”

She was careful to wipe her face of sweat with her forearms, and not her hands, I remember this, so she could take my face in her hands and kiss me. How do you describe a kiss without making it sound sentimental or different from any other kiss? I don’t know. There was this—a piece of sand from her mouth went into my mouth, and that single grain tasted like salt and her sweat and the whole Pacific Ocean. I didn’t spit it out when she was finished with me. I lightly bit it between my teeth, and I could not stop smiling.

She said, “I like it when you smile. You should smile more.” She took my hand and we walked in the direction she’d been running. She said, “I don’t like running alone anymore.…”

I stepped away from the treadmill, and told myself to stop being sappy, and looked at the clock, nine a.m.

Already thirty minutes late for work.

But I also happened to be the boss, which came in handy since work was seeming less and less a priority with each passing day. Until today. This day.

I shut off the TV.

We ran a few more times together after, but never for very long. I slowed her down, and I couldn’t go very far, anyway. Eventually I started running at the gym, by myself, and then on the treadmill at home. We took long walks together instead. She teased me once and said my occasional morning jogs did not exactly make me a “runner,” not yet. At least not according to her, who was a runner practically monkish in her devotion. Plus Sarah, with her claustrophobia—and God forbid we call it that, because she refused to admit she had a problem, “I just don’t like low ceilings”—she never ran inside. She preferred the freedom of a forest trail, the wide beach path, the airy and open outdoors. At some point I really should take my mileage outside, she’d said. She apparently believed a treadmill in the bedroom by the window was supposed to help get me there. Eventually. And she thought it would help with the whole ugly common process of divorce, that it would clear my head. On the other hand, I was convinced our problems were not at all common. I bridled at the thought of being common. She often said, “But running can save your life, Josie.”

The clock now read 9:04.

Amad was opening up the store, I was sure, and I expected him to call any minute now, wondering where I was. I put the mug on the windowsill and decided I would take the long way to work along the water, maybe give Dad a call. Have a chat. It would be three hours later in New York, about noon. A light spark of hungry angst fizzed in my belly.

I opened the window and looked out over the courtyard to the palm trees and the open back windows of all four buildings, curtain-sails ballooning with the morning breeze. I saw my neighbors’ pull-blinds all gone wonky. The barbecue grills, and the folding chairs, the tikis propped in buckets of sand. I looked up over the roofs to where the birds were squawking. I was expecting seagulls, and a breeze carried over the salt-rot stink of the bait-and-tackle shop around the corner. Morning clouds were laundry white, slack, and sprawling over blue. What a day. I was very proud of this view. It wasn’t cheap. And I remember there was a flood of blue sky that morning. I saw a shark’s eye in water, a pale moon east of the morning sun because nighttime hadn’t gone home just yet. I liked to think I wasn’t one for omens. But Dad was maybe not entirely fine, and there I was way up with the clouds, fastening clothespins, and still needing a cigarette. I heard the water, the soft crash of ocean waves just across the street. I’d taken up smoking again, not sure why. This world works in circles, or maybe more like squashed, elongated ovals. I went downstairs and got a new pack from the freezer.

Keys, wallet, phone.

I took the path through the courtyard and around the garden I shared with my neighbors, where I never did much more than put out the occasional butt in the flowerpot soil. Bev, on the other hand, in the condo diagonally opposite, took great care with our little garden. She watered almost every morning. And Charlie, who lived right next door, often tended to a scaly potted tree, his favorite. The condo walls were so thin I sometimes heard Charlie talking to his parrots. He was a volatile man of sixty, fond of bicycles—the kind of guy who’d lived alone for a long time by the water.

Unkosher? I was already late for work. But I was heartened that Sarah and I would share an evening meal.

Sarah liked to think she was responsible for bringing Dad and me back together—and she was. But she also liked to think that, if not for her continual upkeep, he and I would forever lose touch. She was my wife (ex-wife), his daughter-in-law, yes. But she was also a stereotypical Jewish mother to us both. Make sure he’s eating enough. Make sure you’re eating enough. Would it kill you to pick up the phone? Whether she believed it or not, Dad was forever on the borders of my brain, practically stalking every thought since Mom died. He and I talked on the phone, but also he was right there on the perimeter of my thinking, all ghostlike and circling like a buzzard. Don’t get me wrong. This is my father we’re talking about. I felt nothing but love for the man but, like I said, it was complicated.

The palm trees out front by the street were spread up high like God’s grabbing fingers. The fiery orange and midnight-blue birds-of-paradise bursting from the ground like frozen firework moments. And that fading neon pink bumper sticker on Bev’s yellow Gremlin: “Live Each Day Like It’s Your Last.” That always seemed to me to be a terrible idea.

 

 

 

 

I walked toward the water and called Amad. I told him not to worry, said I was on my way.

He said, “You’re late.”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling. To tell you I’m on my way, but I’m late.”

He hung up on me. Very Amad.

I walked on and waved to Mrs. Dunbar, down the street, as she swept her driveway with a push broom. She waved back. I walked by, admiring the trees on her corner lot, the tall crepe myrtle with its brown-butter leaves, and her American persimmon in bloom with orange fruit hanging in orbit like succulent planets. We said a quick hello. Persimmon trees, at least the American ones, she’d told me once before, are naturally self-fertile. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from this, as I certainly had to on many a lonely night.… And the magnolias, Mrs. Dunbar loved her magnolias; she’d gone to great pains in the past pointing out to me the overt and subtle differences between the many types. The lily magnolia, the saucer, star, and pink star magnolias, all very beautiful and hung with those enormous and puffed-out flowers, a black eye staring from the center of each. A cork tree stood on the corner by the road. A wide monster of a thing, knotted, and tall as any tree I’ve ever seen. She’d also told me the cork was not native to California, and yet this one had to be a hundred years old at least. If that’s not native, I don’t know what is. I liked pressing my fingers inside its soft and fleshy give-way bark.

I headed for work along the beach, wondering if my father would answer his phone. Sometimes he flat-out refused even though I paid his cellular bill.

I called, and it rang and rang and rang …

Of all things Californian, probably my least favorite thing was the water. I liked the beach, yes, but you’d never catch me swimming. Water has no shape, and I like shape. I’ve had more than one nightmare of me going over some mammoth and rushing Niagara, on a spindly wooden raft, screaming my head off all the way down, only to wake like a petrified dead man born to his bed in the afterlife. I have to say I especially liked watching the sunset from where my street dead-ended. All clichés are true, so I say it’s our job to refresh them. I liked looking out past the grassy rise where the kids played Frisbee, and way out there beyond the boardwalk. Past the deep stretch of sand and the lifeguard’s tower of rough, white wood, and beyond the tower, where the ocean stretched out to the hazy silhouette of Catalina Island, where the sun goes down to sleep. I stood at the waterline sometimes, at the end of America, one of the ends anyway, and I imagined there was nothing else at all.

Only days before, Amad and I made a wager that I wouldn’t actually show up this particular Sunday. He told me Teri, his wife, had been asking questions lately: Seriously, how bad a shape was the store in? Was business so bad? Should he start looking for a new job? And what about the baby? (Teri was pregnant!) I mean, if Josie can successfully close down three stores, why not a fourth? Actually, Amad told me the bet was her idea. And I couldn’t blame her. The stakes were small—the loser bought breakfast burritos and coffee—but I got the message. Otter Computer, right there on Main Street, was my first and eventually my only location. At one time there were four. Then three. Number two closed during the divorce. And finally just one left. I worked there a few days a week, but never ever on a weekend. Business wasn’t great. Like I said, I was a bit unmotivated. But not the lovely Mister Amad Singh, my only remaining employee, and closest friend (also thirty-seven, such a complicated age). Amad was all things Otter Computer. He had been with me since the beginning. And I spent a good part of my days off avoiding his phone calls. The economy was tanking and he was worried about the business, with good reason. I always told him to calm down. I said I had a plan, and I knew what I was doing. Don’t forget I built this place from nothing. Then again, I’d been saying that for a long while, and not very convincingly.

Nevertheless, I promised him that we would turn things around pretty soon now. Do your best and stay focused. I told him once how crazy he was for having kids and, I swear, he stopped just short of slapping me across the face. I agreed to start working on Sundays because the weekend business had been getting better. Sarah would have laughed out loud at the idea of me working on a weekend.

A buzzing at my waist; it was Dad.

“Hey, I was gonna call you again. I just called you.”

“Hey yourself,” he said. “I can’t talk.”

Another one in a rush. “Okay.” I put on my talking-to-Dad voice. “So, tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I’m fine.” He coughed. “I’m fine.”

“Well, Sarah says you’re not.”

“Your wife is making up stories.”

“Not my wife anymore,” I said.

“Ridiculous. No divorce lawyers in Heaven.” His attention must have been drifting, because his voice was getting lower, like he was talking to the room he was in and not to me.

“Well, maybe I should look at some plane tickets.” Pause. “Dad…”

He coughed again. “I told you, I’m fine. Call me later. Sundays, I get a little busy.”

“I’m headed to work.”

“A little work and a little bit of wine. Good for the soul!” he laughed out. He was all of a sudden louder now, like he was shouting into the phone. “Hey! Maybe I can show you what I got going? You should come out and visit us!”

I didn’t say anything.

“Josiah,” he said.

“Like I said, I’ll look for a ticket.”

“Hey! Josiah?”

“Yeah.”

“You eat yet?” he said. “I’m hungry. Tell your pretty wife you love her!”

“I’ll call you later, okay?”

Since the divorce, I’d asked Dad more than once to please stop calling Sarah. But he couldn’t sit back while I did apparently nothing. He’d say something like “Her blood will not be on my hands, but yours, Josiah, come the Final Reckoning.” He still absolutely refused to call me Josie. And I’d say something like “I understand, Dad, and your heart’s in the right place, I know that. But you should also know that Sarah is definitely not in agreement with this statement. And at least she’s respectful enough not to tell you this. You do remember she’s Jewish, right? Please tell me you remember she’s actually Jewish.”

“And what about you, do you think I’m wrong?”

I would then change the subject because I don’t answer questions like this.

After Mom died, and then the divorce, Dad started calling Sarah even more. She’d told me, the last time we talked, really talked—this was weeks before, twenty-two days to be precise—that now he was calling her late at night and poetically describing the weather back east. He was sharing his more recent and memorable dreams. I recall one of her favorites, Dad in a desert eating the book of Daniel. Dipping the pages in a bowl of melted butter, one by one. If Sarah and I had ever had children, I think, they would have found her postdivorce friendship with Dad a little confusing. I found it confusing. But for whatever reason he sometimes felt less comfortable talking to his own son about whatever the two of them talked about. Whatever; we were fine. I think Sarah pitied him, maybe even hoped in some weird way that if she were generous with him it would be good for me by extension. Or I liked to think so, anyway. When I reached Main Street, I stood there at the beach end, where I came to the realization that I’d never once, not once, explicitly thanked her for being so generous with Dad, even after we split, and I felt very shitty for it.

Amad was standing in front of the store, on the sidewalk. He was looking up and down the street, back and forth, probably looking for me. There weren’t many people about. Just before the long pier that juts into the Pacific, I saw a family of five. Two young girls and an even younger boy were having their picture taken. The boy couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen. They were all standing by the iron statue of an otter balancing a ball on its nose. The boy was trying to climb its smooth metal back. He was probably about Issy’s age, or Issy’s age the last time anyone had seen him, anyway. But I didn’t think of him then, watching that boy only now. Isn’t that odd? Why not think of him then? Why not think of him always? “We should all be thinking of Issy.…” I thought of Sarah instead, and of our possible dinner, and made a dumb smile. I hoped the little boy wouldn’t fall off the statue and crack his front teeth, because I’d seen it how many times before. I’d also seen ancient photos at swap meets of nineteenth-century ladies in full-body bathing suits posing by that very same statue. Nostalgia can sometimes be dangerous. Otter was always a minor tourist draw, but tourists aren’t really people. They’re all toe bouncers, invariably looking for some manifest version of Heaven. Maybe tourism is a sort of sin, I think. Whereas Otter was the kind of benign sleepy town where kids leapt from the splintering docks, where locals fished in the big sun, leathering happily until they died.

Someone who looked like my neighbor Charlie came riding from the pier on a bicycle. A fishing pole balanced from under his arm and rested on the basket attached to his handlebars.

I waved and his middle finger rose, right on schedule.

Amad went back in the store.

Wooster’s, beside the main beach lot and across from the clock tower, was teeming with hollering swimsuited kids. Sodas in hand, they ran off in a dispersive sprawl into burning sand. In the parking lot, surfboards stuck out from back windows of cars and trucks, like knife handles, and the voices of young women flittered, sliding my way on the hot breeze. I walked toward the water, toward the floral-printed bikini tops and torn jean shorts. Their young feet and candy-colored nails, pale between sunburned toes scampered over the hot white powder. The girls jumped, laughing, into the white, hand-blocked light of the blue sky, flip-flops dangling from fingers. I scrunched my eyes, and they all half dissolved in a sun-soaked vision of volleyball, flickering in the screaming radiant light. I had to catch my breath. And a throng of runners, immaculate, numbers pinned to their chests, came padding up the concrete path, and I wondered where on earth they were going. This was southern California, land of perpetual health. The religiously healthy nearly naked everywhere you looked. The roads like clogged arteries, but nobody seemed to give a shit, bouncing along beside each other, breathing smog and briny smoke blowing inland from the ocean. I was feeling hungry and thirsty. And tired, because I’d always been a light sleeper, suffered from scary colorful nightmares as far back as I could remember, and while I no longer prayed before sleep like I did as a child, to keep the nightmares at bay I did sometimes close my eyes and ask that I might dream of Sarah running.

I saw the taco line was way too long. I was sure Amad was steaming.

The grilled fish taco at Wooster’s was not a thing for which I’d moved to California, but had I known the simple joy of it, I would have. Red cabbage slaw and a fresh corn tortilla. Hot peppers, radish, and a lime slice, squeeze your lime slices. Even for breakfast. This is among the most perfect things I’ve encountered on earth. On occasion, back east for business, I’ve even made pilgrimages to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens in response to reverent whispers, rumors of a Latin authenticity, of, say, a short Dominican couple serving chimichurri in the back of an El Camino. I was always disappointed. I originally went west, I guess, because of the simple fact that it was about as far away from New York as I could get without leaving the States. I was a young man running. I chose Otter because of Main Street, which was really just so charming, but also for its rough beach and the eroding rocks along the shore. This was a humbling place, beaten down by water and wind. I was supposed to be here. A spot of such natural and open mystery that it let me fill up with wonder, and not have to give that wonder a name. New York had become a land of secret corners and dark side streets, all man-made. Everything we make seems to fall down anyway. And of course I went to California for the women. Who was I kidding? For the quivery dream of young women, the lusty blur that fills you just before waking. Pink mouth and breast, the unhinged leg hovering just above dream, still inside the still-asleep bubble. Until morning sun fills a gauzy window; then gone. Girls of my teenage American wet dreams. Barbie-doll drivers of classic cars laughing in the saltwater wind. Of course, I found no such thing. Sarah was nothing like that. She had freckles on her forehead. Really not so unlike some romantic runaway from a midwestern farm filled with dreams of a brand-new birth, placenta snail-trailing as you first cross Sunset Boulevard, fresh off the bus, I left under the oldest American spell of all: I ventured west to begin …

Another buzzing at my waist.

Amad 9:37.

I walked down Main Street, suddenly excited for work. I smelled the sun, and the salty Pacific stink. I would prove, today, this day, that Amad and Teri were wrong; this would be the start of the long-awaited resurrection of Otter Computer Incorporated. Of me. No more idle hands.

Then a buzzing, and a text from Amad.

“I’ve been watching you dawdling for the last five minutes. I can see you from here.”

 

 

 

 

I watched Amad through the plate glass window. He was speaking with a large bald man in clam diggers, and he was wearing one of his ill-matched sweat suits. Clean white sweatpants rolled up high near his knees, and a bright poppy-red sweatshirt. He checked his watch and smiled, holding up an ergonomic keyboard. When Amad had first walked in the store, this was how many years before, after answering an ad I placed in the L.A. Pennysaver, I said, So, tell me about your work history. He crouched, started rummaging through motherboard stacks, and silently assembled a desktop system. Hardware and software, it ran Solitaire in twenty-five minutes. I knew my way around a computer, well enough, but really my reason for being in the business was happenstance. I was lucky. Then again, I was always good at selling. It was in my blood. My father was a born salesman, always selling me on the idea that I was special. I bought it, for a while anyway. I’d been giving sermons since I was seven because I had a knack for commanding attention, and I liked it. Even still, I can turn it on but rarely do. If I’d been born into a more practical family, I likely would have run for class president, or started a small business at twelve. The entrepreneur’s toolbox is not so different from the preacher’s. I say that with respect. And so I sold computers—processors, hard drives, and memory—and this turned out, at first, to be a lucrative and very special service. Inside the computer waits every future mapping of the world. Amad had tried to explain the inner workings to me many times. It’s easy, he’d say, all very easy. I would stop him cold.

He looked up when he was finished, and said, “My name is Amad. This is how I work.”

Then he said, “Forgive me, I wanted to kill the ugly man that was driving right behind me, but now I feel much better. Praise to all that is.” I remember him nodding and making a sweeping-away gesture.

I once said to him, “I want to be more like you. You’ve got it all figured out.”

He said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The big stuff, I mean.”

“Big stuff doesn’t interest me. What big stuff?”

That first week we opened, a customer referred to him as Gandhi. He said, “You mistake me for someone else. Please, my name is Amad,” and he put out his hand.

I said, “You are an unacknowledged master, a crackerjack Sufi. You help me recognize the world.”

He called me a “foking tommy.”

He said, “I’ll kick you right in your balls if you don’t stop that bullshit. I’m hungry and I’m going to lunch.” Three hours later, I found him across the freeway, getting drunk on Budweiser. He raised a glass as tall as a nightstick and said, “Back home I was a rocket scientist.” Then he belched. “It’s not a joke.” A few years later, he named his dog Little Josie so that I would have a role model. This also wasn’t a joke, and when I look back I see the good sense it made. Little Josie loved every day, no depressions! If I’d paid more attention to the pup it probably wouldn’t have taken me so long to snap out of my stupor.

I knocked on the plate glass window.

I watched the bald man leave as I entered the store. I waved, and Amad nodded back: So, you’re actually here. He walked over to a display table sparsely stacked with boxes for external tape drives, cabling, wireless mice. The boxes were empty, and a pale ray of light painted a band across the table.

“Here I am,” I said. “I told you.”

He turned and walked to the back counter, obviously displeased. “And you’re late. I thought you were going to watch the bikini girls all day.”

A short, squat woman in wraparound sunglasses walked in and quietly waited. Her wide waist was cinched in a pleated denim grip. One size fits all.

“Guess what, I talked to Sarah today.”

He raised a finger to his lips and walked toward the woman.

I saw my reflection in the mirror behind the counter, and the digital numbers, the red reversed clock numbers on the shelf behind me.…

“Please make yourself useful.” He was suddenly beside me holding a clipboard. “Josie.”

I shook away and took the checklist.

He said, “Inventory. Please.”

Behind me, the woman said, “My husband says our old computer is fine. I’m not even sure what I’m doing here.” I turned. She wore a baby-blue sun visor, crowned with explosible rust-colored curls, and they fought the visor’s hold like blood boiling over.

“You are here,” Amad said, “because you know that your husband, he is dead wrong.”

I watched her for any signs of customer discomfort. She took off her sunglasses.

“Mr. Amad,” she said, “why do you say that?”

“This is not a joke.” He put one hand flat on the counter. “For your husband to privilege the old computer simply because it has worked in the past, simply because it is dependable, it is to take it lying down. It is to die.”

A bit persistent.

He said, “It is we who change, not the world.”

“My daughter,” she said. “Her cell phone’s more like a pacemaker. I don’t think she’s ever seen a typewriter. I say, learn all we can. Let me run next door and tell her where I am.” She patted his hand like, you just wait right here.

I watched her leave, and said, “That was really something. The hard sell.”

He picked up a fallen cable from beside my foot. “You’re late. You dawdled. And somebody has to make the money here. What can I say?”

“But I’m here. You owe me a breakfast burrito. And a coffee.”

“You mean Teri does.”

“Teri isn’t here.”

“She will be. And if you want to ask her yourself, feel free. Myself, I’d be very afraid.”

I laughed, and said, “Today’s supposed to be our anniversary, and guess who calls.”

“How is she?”

“We’re having dinner tomorrow. Maybe.” I gave him a look like, is this a dumb idea? Please tell me it’s not a dumb idea.

“You are what they call a necrophile. You love what is dead. And my very pregnant wife is fine, thank you for returning the favor and asking about her.”

“Oh, stop. How is she?”

“Too late.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. You are way too late. And she’s fine, giving me acid in my stomach. Do you know how expensive a preschool is?”

“I told you it would be crazy.”

“What did you tell me? You told me nothing. You have nothing to tell me. Do me a favor and put on a chicken suit, and stand out front. We need customers. Unless of course you would like to make an effort here.” He motioned toward the door.

The woman had returned and now she was dragging her daughter along. The girl was fifteen, maybe sixteen, gangling, and popping gum, a perfect picture of bulletproof teenage oblivion.

“This is my daughter, Alison, Mr. Amad. I’d like her to meet a person like yourself. And I’d like to buy her a portable computer for school. Like we talked about.”

“Hello, Alison.” Amad extended his hand.

But the girl just looked at it.

“Take his hand, young lady.”

The girl reluctantly extended one hand, cell phone snug in the free palm.

Amad said, “This is Josie. My boss who is very late.”

I set the clipboard on the counter. “I’ll be right outside.”

All three of them gave me similar looks of disapproval.

Sitting on the bus stop bench out front, I lit another cigarette and watched the tourists walk by lapping ice cream. I thought I saw Sarah drive by in a red Honda. Lately I was seeing her face in lots of places. Because there are several ends to every love, and good God, we mourn its death in many stages. I saw her in supermarket lines, in afternoon game show commercials, and in the face of pretty much every short female runner. Hairs glued in strands across her forehead, glasses forever fogged while she jogged, actually impairing her vision. A pink ribbon emblazoned on her T-shirt: “Race for a Breast Cancer Cure.” She had a vast collection of souvenir shirts. “Let’s Win the Race Against AIDS.” Run for muscular dystrophy awareness, or heart disease, or some children’s hospital. Actually, anything at all having to do with children. Personally, I’d never wanted to have kids. I had made this clear from the very beginning. I also said that if she wanted kids, well then, we should have kids. She sometimes accused me of contradicting myself.

I told her once how I heard a man tell his son—well, I assume he was the boy’s father, because they were walking along with baseball equipment bulging from a duffel bag—this was a sunny day and I watched this man proudly announce to his son, his chest was all puffed up, he said, “Do you know it takes only four minutes for sunlight to reach the earth?” I figured no way this was possible. I had to go home and look it up. It takes eight minutes, it turns out. He was wrong. And I knew this was not the kind of misinformation that would necessarily divert a child’s healthy trajectory, but all I could think of at that moment was when my own imaginary son first asked me why the sky was blue, or where babies came from. These are basic father-son exchanges, and was I really going to tell my child, if we ever had one, that I had no idea? I mean, I did of course, I do, but we all know where those kinds of questions lead at some point—how did we get here, why are we here, and what happens after we die?

I usually told Sarah the timing wasn’t right.

She actually hit me once with a pasta spoon. This was not a wooden pasta spoon. And this just because I told her that kids would never keep us from dying. Can you imagine? I actually said to my wife, No matter what you may have heard, you cannot live through your children. Which was especially unfair, even mean, because our life at home had become so constricting, the place felt smaller every day. I knew that having somebody besides me—a child, say—would have been a completely natural and welcome and well-deserved change in our life. What can I say? The only real family life I knew seemed distorted. What model would I use? I told her once, toward the end, that a baby is no way to save a marriage. I accused her of “polishing brass on the Titanic.” I believe she called me a motherfucker. Who was that guy? And who was I now? I was a man who wanted to raise children with his ex-wife. Ridiculous. I hardly recognize the old miserable me anymore. I mean, there was a time when Sarah and I actually clutched at the soil on a daily basis, and we would not let go. We went mountain climbing. We drove cross-country and made love on desert floors. We bungee jumped over the Colorado River, and muled our backpacks down Grand Canyon paths. We took a hot-air-balloon ride in northern France and ate up the cold air in mouthfuls. We watched the ground fall away looking like a patchwork blanket, sweet earth sleeping beneath us.

I still loved her.

I considered calling Dad again, thought better of it, and watched the woman in the visor and her daughter leave the store.

They brushed right past me, as if we hadn’t just met, a large plastic bag in the daughter’s hands. The mother tapping the bag as they walked toward a gray-haired man sitting in an idling station wagon.

Amad was beside me, showing a receipt. He said, “Not a bad way to start the morning.”

I said, “Today is the day, my friend. I can feel the tide is turning. I feel alive, Amad, I wish I could tell you.” I followed him inside. He slipped the receipt into a black tin behind the counter. He snapped the tin shut.

I looked at him in the mirror, caught his eyes. “I may have to go to New York. See my dad.”

“The walls are still standing, for now anyway.” He patted my back. “But why are you having dinner with Sarah?”

I shook my head. “It’s supposed to be our anniversary today, so it’s funny, you have to admit. To have dinner tomorrow. But it should be fine, no big deal. Am I right?”

“Nothing is supposed to be anything and that is why you are always in a pickle. Nothing is supposed to be anything.”

“One of your famous pep talks.”

“Happy anniversary.” He blew me a kiss, then opened the door to the storeroom and disappeared inside.

I laughed out, “Is that all you got? We need to vacuum this floor.”

A muffled shout from the storeroom: “Teri is coming soon. And if she sees you standing there and doing nothing she will ruin our day.”

“When do I get to be the boss again?” There was a lot of light filling up the windows. “Tell me something,” I said. “What are we doing wrong here, exactly? And for how long already?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This, like a ghost town in here.”

He came out from behind the counter. He took my hand in his and he put it to his cheek. “My friend. If my wife left me, I would shrivel up and die. So I’m sorry. I really am. And you are right, this place will come back to life if we work together. Remember? When I first met you I said to myself, this man knows how to make money. Used to, anyway.” He walked away. “On the other hand, all of this did not happen overnight.”

I rubbed my hands together.

He knew the story all too well; he was there for most of it. How in the late nineties I’d backed a software developer after reading a magazine article. It had claimed all the clocks would stop come the New Millennium, 2000. My kind of language.

“Three million and change,” I said.

“You see?” He was fully awake and alert now and kept looking over my shoulder. “You were a millionaire. Maybe you still are, I don’t know.”

“Not so much.”

“You should come by for dinner this weekend and we can sit, and we can talk about what we should do. Is that Teri? I think I see her car.”

“Tell her to make that chili.”

“Come with me,” he said.

We went outside. The sun was low and reddening through clouds.

He said, “Look at them, all the tourists by the water. You see that? They always look for otters, and the otters have been gone for too many years already.”

I nodded.

He jerked his head and looked away. “I thought it was her.”

I said, “Do you think we can do this? I think we can do this.”

“Look, you go and have your dinner tomorrow night, which if you want to talk about crazy, that is a little bit crazy. But be careful. I love Sarah, and I miss Sarah, but remember they call it a past for a reason. And this weekend we will have dinner at my home. And we will have Teri’s chili, and we will have a beer, and we will knock our heads together until we figure out how we get this place shipshape. We are all in a funk, my friend. And soon I will have a son, or a daughter, either one would be fine with me, really, either one, as long as the baby is healthy, I promise, to put all the way through preschool. And then to college. And we will do what everyone else in the world is doing and that is having meals together and making a living and having a drink together and watching our little ones get grown up, and getting ready to retire so we can die a little bit happy, okay? What do you think?”

“I like it.”

“A good plan?”

“Good plan,” I said. “And what’s the mission today?”

“I will take care of the front, if you do the inventory.”

“No problem.”

“This is not a small job. The storeroom is like a jungle. You’ll be in there all day long.”

Again with the buzzing at my waist, I hoped it was Sarah.

Dad 10:20.

I showed Amad the phone, and said, “Nothing excites me more right now than the idea of taking our inventory.”

“Then we are halfway there.” He put up his hands and went inside.

“Dad,” I said.

“You called me before,” he said.

“Yeah. And then you called me back.”

“What?”

“You called me back.”

He said, “Don’t treat me like I’m crazy. You called me.”

“Okay,” I said. “Are you all right?”

“What?”

“I said are you all right?”

He coughed. “Your mother,” he said. “She’s here.”

And then he hung up the phone.

 

 

 

 

Not long after Mom first got sick, I was maybe thirteen, Dad pulled me aside in the backyard. It was late morning. He asked me if we could talk, seriously, man to man. I nodded my head. The maples were in my peripheral vision, and some sort of family get-together was going on in the yard behind ours. I didn’t recognize anyone there as a neighbor.

He said, “I’ve been praying for your mother. Have you been praying for your mother?”

We sat outside on the back porch steps. I was catching lightning bugs and letting them free. The day before I’d caught one and crushed it with my foot on the concrete and watched it glow briefly like the electric smear of a highlighter. And then I watched that yellow light dim and die out. I felt terrible, and guilty, and I asked for God’s forgiveness.

I said, “Yeah, I pray for Mom.”

“Good,” he said. “It’s working. And I’m going to tell you something that you can’t tell anyone. Okay?”

I nodded my head: Yeah, okay.

He said, “I think our Heavenly Father is testing us. I think somewhere inside this horrible woe is a test, a reward. It’s our job to find it. And I believe my good son has the gift of communion with our Heavenly Father.”

I said nothing.

He said, “Don’t you?”

I probably nodded.

He said, “I want you to commune with our Heavenly Father. Ask for his blessing on your mother, on this family, and I think even as much as we do this we still aren’t doing enough. I want to reach him. I want to reach out to him. Will you make a sacrifice with me?”

This made me uncomfortable.

“Nothing would make me prouder,” he said, “than to have my son beside me while I make a sacrifice. A burnt offering of thanks, a visible sign. Will you help me?”

I nodded.

I admit I was interested. What kid wouldn’t be? I had visions of him buying a live chicken or a goat. From where? Maybe a large, live fish from the market. We went to the store to get groceries for dinner, and get charcoal, and Dad filled up a bag with fruits and vegetables. I saw the fish tanks all along the wall. I walked over to them, and heard Dad, behind me, raising his voice. I turned around. He was making a small scene with the produce woman.

“What kind of a produce section doesn’t have pumpkins?” He must’ve wanted them for their dramatic size.

“But they’re not in season,” she said.

He asked her what the most expensive kind of produce was. The most precious. And she shrugged, pointing to a box of dried cherries, and Dad said, “Are those really considered produce?”

“They’re in the aisle,” she said, “so yeah. Ten dollars a box, which is a whole lot more per pound.”

That first cancer was in Mom’s left breast and I remembered how they cut out as much as they could without removing the breast entirely. Oncology has come a long way. I don’t think Mom or the doctors would think twice about removing it now. She went through radiation therapy, and chemo, and the doctors said fatigue should be expected, but it would go away, eventually. Except she just got more tired. Mom had been working as a secretary for a large toy manufacturer back then (now out of business), and so the insurance was good. So were the people she worked with. They visited her in the hospital, and then they visited her at home, and they called her on weekdays while she lay in bed watching Donahue. Her boss was a friendly lady, I don’t remember her name. I do remember Dad being rude to her, to all of them, and making a comment about the flowers they brought, that flowers always die and who brings flowers to a hospital? Who doesn’t bring flowers to a hospital? Dad always seemed ill equipped for the world, or maybe he just lacked enough experience with it.

When Mom first found out she was shocked, yes, I think, definitely, reluctantly shocked and sort of confused. Dad was certainly confused. Baffled. Cancer was not in the plan. How does a family that gives itself all the way to God fall prey? But Mom turned stoic pretty quickly. She found a neutral and practical state of mind that played a good healthy balance to Dad’s manic spirit and bent for abstraction. She would deal with this, and stare it right down. Therapy sessions were regular, and sometimes I went along. We took the bus when Dad was working. Mom didn’t drive. I heard the doctor talk to Mom about “fractional kills,” about the process of cancer therapy and the attempt to kill off the cancer, cell by cell, but that meant small good parts of her got killed, too. I tried to imagine what good parts of her, exactly, were getting killed, and because I couldn’t quite imagine what a real adult woman’s breast looked like (especially my mother’s), I thought of her breast as maybe like a pear or some other piece of fruit, because that’s what it looked like under a sweater or a dress or a shirt. A thin slice of that fruit got cut off at the hospital, every time.

She got depressed, and she prayed. Members of our congregation often visited the hospital and then the house, after she came home, and we all said prayers there together. Sometimes Dad would lead us in prayer, but then at other times some thoughtful visitor who clearly meant well would say something like “God works in mysterious ways,” and Dad would get angry. Mom’s cancer wasn’t a mystery. It couldn’t be. Impossible. To Dad it was absolutely obvious—she had done nothing wrong, probably never a wrong thing in her life, and so this couldn’t be punishment. The only possibility was reward. Somehow, Mom’s getting sick was a reward, a divinely inspired reward, and one that required a deep and considered interpretation lest we think otherwise, because to think otherwise would suggest a God with no plan at all, or at least one not so committed to protecting his devoted.

I only knew that something invisible was killing my mom, and that when I thought hard enough about it I found myself not wanting to talk about that thing at all. Or about anything. I for sure didn’t want to talk from a pulpit. Yet Mom’s sickness brought the elder brothers even closer.

Also, Mom slept a lot. I knew that, too.

She wanted to sleep, I think, because sleep made the hours pass along unfelt, and she could dream. She said she dreamed of paradise and Heaven. And the rest of 1980 seemed to pass like all of us were sleeping. I was in the throes of such adolescent intensities, some of which I can hardly now recall, and Dad was working nonstop and praying nonstop, blaming the world and life itself for Mom’s misfortune—I guess, in a way, he was right—and Mom, a fast-graying and emaciating mamma bear in long hibernation, was always upstairs, losing more hair by the day. Dad slept mostly on the couch downstairs in the living room. Everything had changed. He was working two jobs, selling ad space in a local paper by day and working nights at a convenience store in Astoria. I was going to school, and coming straight home to sit with Mom, or to help Mom to the doctor, or do anything at all Mom needed. So church and Bible study fell off a bit to the wayside. But only for a little while because, this was about spring of 1981, the doctors said the chemo was finally working. They couldn’t say how much exactly, but it was working.

Yet Mom was now more tired than ever. Dad was convinced we simply weren’t doing enough.

Hence the backyard sacrifice.

We bought the dried cherries, and lots of other stuff, and we went home, and before making hamburgers on the backyard grill, the spring light still high in the sky and looking more like morning than night, Dad piled his produce on the metal grill grates. The box of cherries first, and everything else tumbled and piled on top. He squirted the stack with lighter fluid, and told me to not be afraid. He lit it. And the fire burned high and fast while he said a prayer out loud. Not as dramatic as a bloodletting, but it would do. It had to. The air smelled of sugars and charred fibrous vegetable skins and the cardboard box and brown paper bag it had all been brought home in. Dad raised his arms and his hands, and threw back his head in complete supplication, a desperate and sincere plea: Lord, please listen to my heart. His eyes were closed. But mine were open, because I couldn’t look away from what I suddenly realized was a pretty girl in the backyard right behind ours. She was tossing her head back and forth to music I couldn’t quite make out, coming from a boom box on the back porch. This was Bhanu. And I was changed. The answer to our prayers, and Dad was missing it.

 

 

 

 

Bhanu was Bangladeshi, and she and her family had moved in just days before. I didn’t even know the family living there previously had left. There had been no children in that house, only an older Irish couple and the husband’s aging parents. I didn’t know their names. Bhanu became the only thing that could take my mind from Mom, and from Issy and the constant question of where he was. Things no longer made sense, and I could think of nothing but that. Plus, thinking of Issy made me not think of how sick Mom was. Bhanu changed all that. She was alive, and lovely, and from the very moment we met I would think of little else but her.

She saw our fire, Dad and me standing beside it.

Then Dad fell to his knees, and he tried to get me to fall down, too.

She approached the fence. She waved.

But I did not wave back.

Why not? Was I embarrassed? Absolutely. I was seeing myself and my father through someone else’s eyes, and it was strange. We were strange. I knew this now. Then again, I was coming to know it more and more with every passing day in school, because strangeness can pass in grammar school, in fifth grade and sixth grade—but in junior high and high school? Not a chance. And they’re made for that reason. Junior high and high school train a child and make him understand, follow the general social contract, et cetera. Strangeness of any kind, any deviance at all, will be amplified and shouted from the gymnasium rooftop and blared over the loudspeaker system. I was the Jesus Freak, the Preacher Kid, and this was the case because Havi—who I never spoke a word to ever again, and truly and shamefully wished cruel things upon throughout my teenage years—was in my school. He had nothing to do with the Brothers in the Lord anymore, and had decided the best way to make room for his hallway swagger was to tell everyone in the school who would listen, including teachers, deans, and the janitorial staff, that I was “Jesus crazy,” and that I gave a sermon saying the world was going to end soon and that his best friend, Issy, would die even sooner. And remember that kid who disappeared, he would say? That was my best friend. Josiah’s a freak.

At lunch, there were safety tables for all, every tribe and stripe. But not for the Jesus freaks. I became even more of a loner. It would be a long time before I understood how addictive and dangerous sadness can become, but at the time I reveled. My mother was ill, my father was a mystery to me, and I could not stop thinking about the unexplainable loss of my friend.

Regardless. I should have waved to Bhanu. I should have, because that one simple wave could have saved me years of trouble, of all that time trailing her like a sick dog on a very long leash. I followed her at school. I followed her in the neighborhood. I threw balls and Frisbees over the fence into her yard just to have a reason for climbing and standing on possibly the same spot where she had once stood. And I hoped to see into her window. I once braved walking right up to their house. I looked into a kitchen window just as her mother stuck out her head to hang a sheet from a clothesline. She didn’t see me. I dove behind a small shed and froze for what seemed like hours. Until she shouted out to Bhanu to please go out back and roll up the water hose like she’d been asked to. I checked to see if she was looking—she’d ducked back inside—and I jumped the gate into their next-door neighbor’s yard and ran for my life. I also once stood behind her at a corner deli, holding a small grape drink and praying she would not say hello to me. She bought a pack of black licorice—the only thing I found unattractive about her, which in itself made the licorice attractive, because clearly I was wrong—and an orange juice. She paid, and she turned and said: “Hi, Josie.” Josie? I’d never heard the name before, and now I wanted to wear it like a suit of armor. After she shook her head, she said, “You’re so weird.” She left the store, and I stood there looking into the space she had just taken up, at the air itself, the dust in the air, like a cutout shape of her, until the woman behind the counter said, “You buy.” Later, I bought black licorice and, just as I had expected, thought it horribly bad. One week after that, I bought black licorice and orange juice. I ate them together, in my mouth at the very same time, like two kinds of medicine at once; it was disgusting. But I finished it. I was in love.

Or what felt like love. Who knows what it is when you’re young? I mean, real love has a long-burning fuse, but those first flares burn like hell. And they hurt, and snuff out all too soon. She would have nothing to do with me at all, I assumed. For years. But it didn’t really matter. Because everything else fell away. School. Bullies. Issy. Even cancer. Love is a lot like faith, because you surrender yourself, fully, and with no expectations. There is hope, yes, but never expectation.

It was years before I finally opened my mouth and said hello back. This was in high school, and I found her smoking in the lower stairwells with the Goth girls and the metal girls, all lips painted black but hers. Christian Death and Slayer band patches on their denim jackets and backpacks. I was entranced. They all seemed so evil and romantic. I was fifteen.

Inspired, I said: “Hello.”

She started laughing, and said, “Took you so long. He lives on my block!” she said to the girls. They could barely stop giggling.

One of the girls high-fived her, and said, “Isn’t he that freak? Aren’t you, like, a preacher?”

Another girl said, “No, he’s the one with the mother. His mother has, like, cancer.”

Bhanu said: “Shut up.”

I sat with her at lunch that day. And we talked. This may have been the first time I actually talked with someone at lunch, or at least talked without worrying for my life, that some metalhead, or some jock, or some other misanthrope in hopes of scoring points with normals would trip me on the way to my table, or hit me with an empty milk carton, or ask me what I was looking at. It was glorious. In the fast-working ecosystem that is high school, here I was, a boy sitting with girl, a pretty girl, and having lunch. I wasn’t such a freak after all. Things would get better. We walked home that day, and she said Goth was stupid, but Slayer was cool, and the girls were mostly smart and she liked them okay. We shared from a 25-cent bag of potato chips, and I tried to place her particular and lovely smell—and then one day, a long time later, this was years and years later, I was offered a coconut milk to drink, and I smelled it, and time caught me up like a trap. Here was Bhanu.

A few weeks on, my father spotted us walking home from school. He later asked me if I’d made a proper witness for the Lord. Did I tell her what I believed, and say why she should believe it, too? I must’ve betrayed myself and instead showed how it had never occurred to me once, not once, and I expected him to show some disappointment in me at the very least, say I should be ashamed, et cetera—but, surprise: grinning, my father said, “My little man is in love. Promise you won’t tell your mother. Enough on her plate as it is.”

He was all of a sudden full of surprises.

That same year, I’m guessing this was 1983, when there were commercials everywhere for what was being billed as a “Historic Television Event.” A made-for-TV movie called The Day After, coming soon, and it would air on a Sunday. A Sunday! American audiences would finally see what a real Armageddon will look like—a nuclear one, yes, and man-made, but who says God’s above using such weapons? Why waste all that effort? There were stockpiles.

The whole congregation was in a tizzy.

We talked about it at home, over dinner, in the morning, for weeks before the movie ever started. What do you think it will look like? Do you think this is a sign of the times? Do you think the actors are aware that God is actually watching? And how could a young boy in love with Star Wars not want to see a movie like this? Special effects! Those two words echoed like a chant for me and every boy my age. The movie has special effects! My mother talked about the movie, but she stayed mostly quiet. It was Dad who said things like “This is ridiculous” and “We all know it’s not coming for twenty years more, because of Josiah’s vision.” I would say nothing, and he would say, “The movie’s bound to be wrong.” But he also couldn’t hide how excited he was. Taking my cereal box away from in front of me—I used to read every line of the ingredients list—he would eat dry Froot Loops with his hands, and said to the kitchen wall: “I wonder how much is actually based on scripture?”

Sunday at church, one week before, an announcement was made from the stage.

Announcements were a big deal, and hardly ever good news, more like “So-and-So has been excommunicated and asked to leave the congregation,” or “So-and-So is dead,” or something foreboding and starting with “It has recently come to our attention…” But this was about the movie. One of the elder brothers said to the hundred or so of us there: “There has been talk of a television film, I believe we all know what I’m referring to. The Day After promises to be not only an important film, but a relevant one, especially to our work here. Preparing ourselves for God’s Holy War. And after much serious thought, we’ve decided to incorporate the film into our ministry. So we’ll be viewing the film as a congregation. Next Sunday. In lieu of a sermon. And we’ll talk afterward, as a congregation. Please feel free to invite your friends and neighbors. This will be a rare opportunity to make witness. And regarding the children, the film will be quite realistic from what I understand. And so children will not attend alone but with parents. Let us pray.…”

Dad didn’t talk much on the way home.

That next day, a Monday morning, the mailman brought a letter regarding the kids of New York City’s public schools, suggesting parents not let their kids see a certain upcoming television movie. That it would be age-inappropriate.

That next Sunday, church was packed. Extended family members, curious neighbors dressed in weekend shorts, and borderline stragglers who hadn’t attended in years. Standing room only. I’d almost invited Bhanu, but, in the end, was so glad I didn’t.

Four TVs had been brought in and set up for all of us to watch. We got there early, and sat up front by a TV as big as a sofa, encased in wood, with a turntable on top. A hefty thing, a real piece of furniture, it must’ve weighed a ton. I wondered how they ever got it in there.

The lights went low.

The microphones set up by the TV speakers crackled.

There was chatter, and shuffling in the seats.

I looked around and saw the faces of people I knew from the neighborhood, and the faces of strangers. Which was both exciting and upsetting. They had entered a place they didn’t belong. They were dressed wrong. Talking, mumbling, when they should have been quiet. I saw the black man from the convenience store around the corner from church. He didn’t seem to be with anyone standing in the back, by himself. He wore jeans, and a T-shirt, his usual white apron rolled up and tied around his waist. He wasn’t looking at the TV, though. He was looking at the people in the room, the brothers and sisters. His face looked thoughtful, and bewildered. I realized he wasn’t there for the service, as such, or for spiritual reasons of any kind. He was curious: What do they do in there? I watched him scan the room, until he looked at me. He gave me a neutral sort of acknowledgment, Yes, I have sold you Pop Rocks, given you change for Donkey Kong.

I looked away from him and toward the TV, the opening credits and then …

I’ve watched it at least one more time, some parts twice more, even read about it, and still I can’t remember the plot; what was the plot? I remember the attack. A five-minute collage of mass death in Technicolor, the apocalyptic footage, fiery rain, the buildings blown to quick rubble and ashy voids, the rolling thunderheads of nuclear fire wiping out forests, livestock, and people, entire cities laid waste—and so much of this footage was real! Actual stock film clips of war and early atomic testing. All of this coupled with—how can I say it?—a cartoonish X-ray obliteration of people. A mother and her baby turn to the sky and zizzzzzz—dark bones in a flash, and they’re gone … The infant’s tiny skull … A man runs from his car for his life and zizzzzzz—his skeleton shows in a bloodred splash on electric white, and he’s dust … A large group together and what are they doing? Walking? Standing? Sitting in church? zizzzzzz—X-ray fried, now invisible, and gone … I have to say, watching this again as a grown man froze my insides. It’s too artful. Armageddon respects no bones. Only dust, instant dust … But to a boy, the scary stock footage within that film looked like news. I half expected to find the world outside our church destroyed when the movie was over. This was the End, factory manufactured, and yet the imagery was the same. This was not a biblical vindication, or God’s fire raining down. This was man versus man. All the fault of bloodlust and earthly dispute. This strikes me as a great and disturbing irony.

Lights up.

There was some muttering. No applause.

How did we feel? How many different kinds of response? Was I the only one so frightened by what I saw?

An elder took the stage and calmly asked, “Any questions? Comments?” There were a few, but not many before the real event took place.

My father stood up and started speaking.

*   *   *

Dad never spoke in church. He said it wasn’t his calling. So when this happened, Mom and I, we were dumbfounded. He stood, and stayed where he was, right beside his family, and said to the elder in a voice not quite loud enough: “I want to be a true believer, it’s all I’ve ever wanted out of life.” He turned and talked to the whole room now: “This means more like the Apostle Paul. More like our original first-century Christian brothers and sisters. Just a few decades from when our Savior walked this earth. Only miles from the places we read of. Galilee. Gethsemane.”

I looked around and there were people nodding their heads, like usual, Yes, brother, say it.

A microphone came passed down the aisle, its rubber cabling falling on our feet. I looked at the mic, and wondered how many eyes were on me. Will he stand, too? Will the boy speak? Or maybe they weren’t thinking of me at all. Dad looked at me. I couldn’t read his face. I gave him the microphone.

“Thank you, son.” Loud now, he was filling the room.

“Why such speculation?” he said. “Why doubt? We have living proof. Here. In the flesh, here, my son, who stood before you filled with God and gave a number. It’s not for us to know how it’ll look.” He spoke to the back of the room. I turned with him. Mom kept looking straight ahead. She squeezed my hand. “But our Savior comes at the New Millennium. And this”—he gestured to the TV—“this movie has no place in here. All lies…”

“Brother Laudermilk,” said the elder from the stage.

My father quieted him, his hands saying Now now now …

“Look at my boy,” he said. “Josiah, stand up.”

Mom squeezed my hand again. I didn’t move.

“He’s in shock. You see? You doubt him? A child? You doubt the Lord’s Holy Spirit.”

I still didn’t move.

“And my wife. She wears a hat so you don’t have to see her shining head. For you! You think this is sickness? This is God’s work! All of it God’s work! All of them signs we are living in the End Days, and you won’t even see it. Look to the book of Matthew. In the Last Days. The Apostle Matthew says in the End Days one shall be taken, but the other left behind—”

“Gill.” The elder was beside him now, his hand on my father’s shoulder.

“You want to silence me? Make my wife an outcast? My son cast down like some false prophet for a TV show? In here? You bring this”—again the TV—“this Wild Beast. Mammon! Babylon the Great in here? Why not bring money changers? It’s blasphemy!”

“Gill—” He tried taking the mic, but Dad wouldn’t let him.

“Stop looking forward! It is here! In our presence! And we have to go back for it. Back! And return to original worship, to authentic faith. Have faith in the Word of God, in what God grants, a vision for his son, my son. A healing for my wife…” He fell back against the chair behind him. The brother sitting there caught him, held him up. “For my wife,” Dad said. He seemed dazed.

I was heartbroken, for him. Confused.

“Thank you, Brother Laudermilk.” The elder took the mic from Dad’s hand. “Okay. So obviously—”

My father stood back up and shook his head, looked around the room. He wildly made for the stage, for the TV, and then he stopped himself. He turned back, and took my hand. He took my mother’s hand and pushed his way along the aisle toward the exit. Some of the assistant servants followed, in case of a scene.

We went home.

That’s when as a family we stopped going to the Brothers in the Lord. Or any church, really. Unexpectedly, I found myself actually going to church more, a weird rebellion against him. I sat there alone like Issy used to. Dad’s display had sufficiently sullied what reputation I had, and whatever capacity I had for sermonizing or for visions had been supplanted by fears that I might have an unwelcome outburst onstage, like my father. I was now the son of the man who made a scene at church, and nothing more. That went on for about a month. And then it just stopped. Partly because I didn’t know why I was doing it, and I would sit there for the duration of the service, hardly listening at all, trying to understand why I was there, and partly because I realized that not a soul there cared to speak to me.

I started telling Mom and Dad that I was going to church, but then I would go straight to Bhanu’s house and watch weekend morning TV. We held hands under throw pillows. Mom hardly paid attention, anyway. Seems like Mom slept for years, all the while getting better according to the doctors, but sleeping away her every last earthly hour. She just slept and slept and slept. I became hungry for even more freedom.

Bhanu and I started cutting school together that fall. We hid deep in the woods of Forest Park, and watched truancy vans roam along the park roads. We kissed sometimes, and I wondered if God would one day open up the earth and drop me in for loving a pagan. While I knew Bhanu wasn’t a Christian, I didn’t really know what that meant. I didn’t want to think about it, what it meant for her, or me, us, or for my family, and so I decided it was easier to not think about it at all. We only talked about it once, and I asked if she thought it was weird. We were trying cigarettes for the first time, stretched out on the cement floor of the Forest Park band shell.

We passed the cigarette back and forth like it was delicious, and she coughed. I didn’t. I had a talent for them, and I liked how the nicotine made everything slow down and go foggy. I rolled my head to one side, and blew smoke in her face. She laughed and slapped at my leg.

I said, “Is it weird that we’re different?”

She didn’t understand. “You mean how you’re so so so so white?”

Now I laughed. I said, “I mean my family. You’re not Christian.”

She looked at me like I was kidding. “You mean how you’re not Hindu?”

I looked up at the sky, but there was no sky. Instead I saw the top-ridge lip of the clamshell and I thought of a giant clam. I said, “I guess so. Yeah.”

She started to say, “I like you, Josie, even though you’re not a Hindu—” But she lost control of her voice in a sudden coughing attack made worse by the fact that she could hardly stop laughing. I thought of the giant clam, and imagined we were lying prone on its tongue.

It was a long year, and much of what transpired at home with regard to Mom or Dad has fallen out of my head, forgotten. I spent that year with Bhanu, in and out of school, a place that no longer meant loneliness for me because I was with Bhanu, and her friends, who eventually accepted me, too. She was alive and love was all around me, and it felt like nothing else unfortunate could touch me.

Later that year, there was a high school field trip to Niagara Falls. I didn’t tell my parents, and just went. Forged their signatures. It was the event of our year, and it would be all day long, with no real adult supervision, somewhere else entirely, outside of Richmond Hill, outside New York City. I bought a Ramones T-shirt from the Aqueduct Flea Market on Rockaway Boulevard even though I’d never heard one song. Bhanu mentioned them once and said they were cool and she was going to get their tapes. I never had the nerve to wear it. It looked too clean and too new. On the bus ride upstate I told her all about Issy. I told her how much I missed Issy, and was that weird? We were sharing a tall black vinyl seat and it felt like nobody could see us, we were all on our own. She said, “You’re weird, but that’s not.” I told her how I always wanted a brother, and she gave me a kiss on the cheek. What a shame kisses on the cheek never matter so much as you age.

She said, “Now you got me.”

I floated.

We slept alongside each other there in the daylight, on warm black vinyl, until we got to Niagara.

The bus parked. We stepped off and felt the mist in the air, heard the rush and gushing of the falls. We walked toward one of the railings, and the great void in the center of the falls. We wiped water from our faces and stood there, spray raining upward and needling our foreheads. We clasped our hands together, and we were silent. We looked at the white implosive hole.

“It’s so big,” she said.

I said, “You can’t even see where it ends.”

“It’s so deep,” she said. “How deep do you think?”

“No idea.”

She asked me if I’d ever read a short story called “The Wish.” Bhanu loved to read. But I didn’t read much, then, so I lied and said I’d heard of it. She said it was about a small boy who played make-believe and actually fell into one of his make-believe holes.

I thought twice before telling her a story this reminded me of. But then I told her about the biblical story of Korah, once a wise man of God, who bared his teeth, screaming for help, as the Good Lord punished him and turned the hard ground beneath him into a hole. A gaping and gorging mouth that swallowed him whole and all of his possessions, even his family. Bhanu asked me what he did to make God so angry. I said he rebelled against Moses (I asked, “Do you know who Moses is?” She said, “I’ve heard of him”), that Korah would not listen to God’s appointed men. That he claimed he could speak directly with God. I told her how it took up two pages in my children’s Bible storybook, accompanied by comic book–like illustrations, and that I’d seen it performed in full costume onstage at Bible conventions. At some point she’d stopped listening to me, and said, “That’s a horrible story.” She was letting her face get wet. Her mouth was open and the upward rain was on her tongue and teeth. I moved closer to her, my mouth closer to hers. The mere idea of a kiss! The possibility was so charged, I was surprised every time she let me.

We stood there and watched the rushing falls, and I imagined the observation deck collapsing and sucking us under, and I was okay with that. This was the asshole of the world, and I looked away toward the river, the Niagara River; who ever mentions the poor river? It came roaring at us like water spilled from a bottomless bucket, incoming nonstop across a long and winding table. I promised myself I would never let anything bad happen to Bhanu as we were both entirely overtaken by the drama of it all, and cued up our Walkmans accordingly.

 

 

 

 

The year I turned eighteen, Mom finally decided she was better. She sat up in bed one day, came marching down the stairs, and said she had to go for a special session at the hospital. Dad took her, and they came home with tremendous smiles on their faces; I don’t know whose was bigger.

“Full remission,” Mom said.

Dad took her face in his hands, and he kissed her. Never saw anything like that before. He kissed her so hard, she started pushing him off, and she was laughing, but he wouldn’t let her go, she was laughing so much. Then he stopped, and picked her way up in his arms, and she was up there almost to the ceiling, and laughing, while he played biting at her belly. This is my most favorite memory. Not just because of how lovely, but because it woke me up to their lives in such an unexpected way. Like a bucket of cold water over my head. I’d been living peripherally, in my own home, walking along the walls like a mouse, following the same daily paths in hopes of avoiding direct contact with the people who owned this home.

But here they were, right in front of me. Mom was back, and fully charged, and she swore she would set this house aright because this was a churchgoing family. I have to say there was a welcome sense of security in having her back and taking the lead, and we returned to church as a family. Dad was reluctant to go. He’d since taken to calling the Brothers in the Lord apostates. But he went anyway, for her. We all did, arrived just as service started, and left as it drew to a close. We spoke with no one. Mom also somehow managed to ignore the fact that I’d had a serious girlfriend for the last few years.

I’d thought I’d done a good job of obscuring the presence of Bhanu, even though she lived around the corner, but it wasn’t like Mom was blind to it. She occasionally mentioned “the Indian girl around the block,” and when she was really bugged at me, “the brown girl.” When I think back on this behavior it seems so unlike her, uncharacteristic of her. She even claimed once that I chose Bhanu because she was Hindu. I remember being shaken by such a hateful accusation and not even bothering to respond. My parents began to unashamedly hanker aloud for the old neighborhood, because in the last few years Richmond Hill had become a haven for not just Bangladeshis, but Indians and Pakistanis, and there were rumors that the construction site around the corner was the future home of a Sikh temple. This was a new strain in my parents. I didn’t like their new behavior. It appeared to be connected to Mom’s remission: maybe she felt a debt to her Heavenly Savior and nothing less than the purest of worship would do. Mom and Dad were seeing eye to eye. They talked about the old days before the high trill of Hindi ragas, before the tap and pounding dance of tablas all of a sudden sang from car stereos all summer long. Before the teenage Hindi boys in shell-top Adidas made out with white girls on brick front porches. The corner store put up a sign in its window: “Fresh Goat Meat.” And this absolutely horrified my parents because, What, now everybody’s too good for hamburger? Dad turned hot dogs on our backyard grill, and the neighborhood barbecues smoked hot yellow curries.

The faces at church had changed, too. As many brown faces as there were pale, and I could practically see the gears of my parents’ brains turning, trying to process this new information. Regardless, this was good news because the new faces probably didn’t know of Dad’s outburst. Or about me. So we got to arrive and sit and leave in relative peace. City congregations like this one are protean, always changing, just like the city. Picking a different congregation never even occurred to my parents, that I knew of. I spent most of those services thinking about everything but worship. I thought of school, and graduation, and leaving the house. I thought of Bhanu. I invited her a few times, but she’d always decline and then invite me to their temple, which I always politely declined. I told her there were people like her at our church now and she should try it just once. It wasn’t like I was trying to convert her, I hardly paid attention anymore myself. It was more like there was this significant part of my life, and she had no idea of what it looked like, much less meant. I also wanted her to understand that I was going to church again for my mother.

One Sunday, when the minister onstage spoke of the doomed unbelievers, I couldn’t help but think of Bhanu. That she was doomed. I’d avoided this for how long already, made excuses for me, and for her, for my parents, for God himself, but I could no longer cover my ears. The elder onstage said they were hiding in our homes and in our neighborhoods, the Devil-music listeners, and the adolescent masturbators, the false clergymen of neighboring churches, and closeted atheists, the New Agers and yoga practitioners, and even casual dabblers in the abominable Oriental religions. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs. They would all be punished if they didn’t open their hearts to the Lord. And then I saw Bhanu’s lovely face. I thought of her mother’s bindhi, the bloodred dot decorating her forehead like the center of a bull’s-eye target—she who always had milk and jellied sweets waiting for us in their kitchen, ever since the first time I met the woman, in their kitchen, baskets of peppers hanging from the ceiling, when she took me into her arms and said with her lilting voice: “So this is the young man who has my daughter in a spell. Let me see you.” She set me in front of her like a melon she was considering for purchase, and said, “Okay. Be good to my Bhanu and I will be good to you.”

I sat there and looked at the minister speaking and I watched his mouth moving but I couldn’t hear a thing. I imagined Bhanu’s front porch collapsing in the swell of a blood-river wake produced by some warring millennial and messianic chariot. I thought of her sweet-smelling hair—coconut!—and I sort of swooned right there in my seat. I wanted to run out of church and do something totally dramatic, like yell into the sky and dare Him to touch one hair on her head.

That Sunday, because of that sermon, I started my long fight and flight from the angels.

Sarah asked me once when it was exactly I lost my faith. I told her there was simply no such singular time. No single moment when whatever hairline crack suddenly widened, opening up like a fissure. I don’t even know what caused the crack to begin with. This was a slow and invisible process, practically geologic, but I do know that I didn’t join my parents the following Sunday.

That next weekend, Dad asked if he could speak with me, alone. I assumed he meant without Mom around, and so I made like I was going to leave the room with him—but he stopped me.

“Can we talk?” he said.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table. Crying, starting to wheeze. She was losing control and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just about me not going to church.

“Shoot,” I said.

He said, “Talk. Tell me what’s going on.”

I said, “I don’t think I can talk about it.”

“Try me.”

Mom was recovering her composure.

Dad said, “Ida. Maybe you should leave.”

She shook her shoulders, and wiped at her face. Makeup smeared. Without looking at me, she said, “Josiah.”

I said nothing.

“Answer me this,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”

Mom was on to me.

“You’re angry,” she said, “I know.”

I expected to see judgment in her eyes, accusation, disappointment. I saw nothing of the kind. Only empathy, and her beaten soul.

“Me, too,” she said, and stood up. She pushed past my father, briefly took my hand, and then let it fall away. She left the kitchen.

Dad said I’d grow out of it; it was just a phase. But I never did go back to church. Except then Mom stopped, too. She lost steam. And Dad was only going for her. Dad hardly looked my way anymore.

This made me bold enough to one day ask him—he was out back watering what grass we had surrounding the concrete patio—I walked right up to him as if I’d been dared to and I said: “Look at me, please, and tell me something.”

He aimed the hose away, took his time. He looked at me.

“What about you,” I said. “What’s your testimony? Tell me. I have no idea how you feel. I come from you and so I’m a lot like you, but I’m also not like you at all.”

He squeezed the hose with his hand and cinched it, so the water stopped and the hose looked like a snake swallowing its food. He was quiet for a few moments.

Then he said, “Your grandfather. This was a man of great faith. And he was wrong about some things, but he never lost his faith. I’ve been wrong, too, but I never lost my faith.” He looked at me. “How strong will you be?”

We looked at each other for some time and then I turned and went back to the house. I heard the water jet from the hose and smack the pavement.

I’m not so sure faith is a thing that can ever be lost. Like every love we have, there’s always remnants deep inside us, in our cells.

Mom and Dad did agree on one thing, though: that Mom would never get sick again. We’d been washed, a family washed by God’s love and a chemical bath, and if we were to keep that death at bay, above all, we must remain clean. So morning and night we showered. “At rise and fall,” Dad’s words. And, yes, making something so personal the subject of our daily conversations, ritualizing, really, my morning and evening wash and toilet was discomfiting to say the least. It was odd. At first he asked if I’d fully washed myself, made reference to “our unclean fleshly vessels,” which I supposed was my body. Before long, a new rule: he insisted I wash my vessel seven times, no less, the biblical number of perfection. I did this a few times until I no longer did, and Dad made a few passing comments about my skin not looking vigorously cleaned. I didn’t exactly realize what this kind of behavior suggested, that Dad had other issues. Finally one day I had to put a stop to it.

He tried to open the bathroom door one morning while I was getting out of the shower. No knocking, nothing, he just entered. I threw myself at the door, and it closed on his arm.

He screamed. Slammed it open. I was naked.

He was wearing a small towel, barely covering him. His hair was wet, his skin wet and ruddy. Red marks on his arms and collarbones from what looked like a vicious scrub. “Seven times,” he said, and turned, leaving the door open behind him. I moved to close it—he stopped me. He stopped the door. I grabbed his arm and I pulled him back into the bathroom. It was so easy, I remember thinking, He’s so light!

I pushed him into the clothes hamper, and stood over him.

He was stunned.

He was naked now, his towel fallen to the floor. I wrapped a large bath towel around my own waist, covered myself, and left the room.

He passionately explained to me over dinner one night that his baptism, my baptism, and Mom’s baptism—the original ones, mind you—were false, insufficient in the eyes of God.

“They lack commitment,” he said.

We were sitting at the dining room table eating takeout Chinese food, passing the greasy cartons back and forth. Spooning onto our plates. Mom was quiet.

Dad said, “A sprinkling! Ha!” He was laughing; rice fell from his mouth as he talked. “Baby’s getting baptized! Ha! And these grown-ups dunking their heads underwater. In a swimming pool! How very nice and casual. Ida?” he said. “What can I get for you?”

Mom shook her head: Nothing, thank you. Her head was wrapped in a floral silken cloth.

“This is how you were baptized,” he said. “Josiah. You listening?”

I looked away from Mom, and said, “What?”

“Can you believe it?” He couldn’t stop laughing. “We’re supposed to take this seriously? You were baptized in a swimming pool. Above ground! I doubt you were underwater more than half a second.”

I reached for a carton. Dad helped.

He went on to explain that the original baptismal command required full immersion. We died in that water, were buried underneath and not breathing, which took more than half a second, you bet. Only to be resurrected upon ascension from a symbolic and watery grave. He was positive this should be done every day.

“Every day,” he said, “we live and die in the Lord.”

Mom was hardly eating at all.

One Sunday, I watched her help him distribute pamphlets in our neighborhood, brightly colored Xeroxes announcing “The End Is Near,” rolled into tight tubes piercing the diamond mesh of chain-link fences. She walked slowly, with a walking stick now. But when the overlarge drunk guy from three houses down cursed at Dad from his porch, when he rushed at Dad and pushed him into the hedges, and when he then tried to put my father in a headlock, it was Mom who hit him back. Hard. She scratched at the big man’s neck. She scratched and punched at the skin showing where his shirt pulled open, and she pulled my father away. She swung her walking stick. It all happened so fast that when I ran over to help, the big man had already fallen back on his yellowing grass. Dad’s pamphlet was in a ball beside him. In the kitchen, I watched her scrub blood from underneath her nails. Nobody ever mentioned what happened.

Bhanu and I often talked about what we would do now that we were out of high school. I wanted to move out as soon as possible, and so did she, but we both knew we were too young to get married. And then in July of 1987, Bhanu went to her cousin’s house upstate for part of the summer. When she left she was wearing jean shorts and a white T-shirt that said “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?” And one day there, while visiting neighbors, she dove into a swimming pool and she hit her head on the hard concrete bottom. Either nobody else was there, or nobody was watching, but either way, at nineteen, she drowned and that was it.

I don’t think I cried, not for a long time, anyway. I went to the funeral. Mom and Dad supported this, it was too serious a thing not to. Mom even sent me to get flowers, and told me to say they were from them. I laid them there on a chair at the funeral home without telling anyone who they were from. I walked up to the front of the room, not really prepared for what was happening. I’d never seen a body before. Bhanu was there, looking fast asleep, and peaceful, and I was weirdly pleased just to see her there. I kissed her mother’s forehead, and saw after, in the restroom mirror, there was a red stain on my lips from her bindhi. I went home and kissed my mother’s cheek and I swore I could taste the dormant death cells of her skin.

*   *   *

Bhanu’s accident gave Dad a sense of hope, I think, about me. They had lost me to her, and the accident was a tragedy, yes, he said, “But this is an opportunity for the three of us to get back to how things used to be. We can regroup. As a family.” We were at the dinner table, always at the dinner table, one of the few times of day Mom would leave her room. I don’t remember what we were eating that night, probably takeout again.

Dad said, “I have an announcement to make.”

My stomach tightened. I tried not to show any physical response. Mom said nothing.

He could hardly contain himself anymore. He was fidgeting in his seat.

“Well?” I said.

He said, “Not yet.”

I looked at Mom. Her eyes didn’t say much of anything. I looked back to Dad. “What do you mean, ‘Not yet’?” He was practically bouncing in his seat.

“Wait,” he said. He stood up, and walked over to where I was sitting, put his hands on my shoulders. Rubbed, squeezed. “Give me a second,” he said.

He walked over to the window, looked out. Walked over to Mom, stood behind her. She stayed still. I’d been holding my fork in the air all this time. I set it down.

“What?” I said.

He started unraveling the cloth on Mom’s head. She tried to stop him, took hold of him by the wrists. But he kept unraveling. He took off the cloth. She sat there, bald-headed. He grabbed her head, hands over her ears, and began kissing her head, here, there, everywhere, kissing her. He threw the cloth against the wall, laughing, “Haha!” He walked back to my side of the table, and then on into the living room, mumbling, and saying things louder. We couldn’t understand what he was saying.

“We’ll do it here. Right here,” he kept saying. “Right here.” He walked back into the dining room and tried to sit, could hardly contain himself. He stood again, this time with a food carton in his hands. He ate from it, pacing back and forth, dining room to living room, in and out of the kitchen. Sometimes over to Mom, to kiss her head, or grab her head and kiss it. She stayed still. Her head cloth lay on the floor in a crumple. I watched it all as if I weren’t there, as if, if I stayed still enough, he wouldn’t see me. He paced, ate, and paced. Set the carton down. Picked it up again, pacing back to the table.

“We’ll do it here, do it here, do it here…” He was sweating.

At some point that evening I picked up Mom’s head cloth and gave it back to her. Dad’s pacing and mumbling had moved to other rooms. Upstairs. At one point, he stood in the bathroom beneath the stairs and scrubbed at his face, looking in the mirror, and calling out the numbers one through seven. Mom went to bed. I started cleaning up the dinner table just as Dad sat back down. He was saying, “Leave it, leave it, leave it…” He had a notebook, and started writing in very small script. It looked like he was making a list.

Dad had decided he was starting his own church, at home. He’d received a revelation.

He said, “We’ll invite everyone we knew from the Brothers in the Lord congregation.”

He was making a list of names.

“And the neighbors.” He asked me to get him a glass of water. I did. “And you’ll give the very first sermon.”

He probably assumed that if he could tell the old brothers and sisters from church that I was giving the sermon they’d simply have to attend. According to him, they had been eagerly awaiting my return. I don’t know where he got this information. The idea seemed silly to me, even then.

He looked up at me, sipping water, his face glowing. “You’ll do it?”

I didn’t answer. I think he took this for a yes. But it didn’t matter. Nobody came.

We sat there at the table next week, suit and tie. Mom in a dress. A stack of bagels. Cream cheese. He’d moved the table as far back to the wall and windows as he could, and set up a makeshift podium for me, a tall and slender chest of drawers he brought from his bedroom. He had called everybody, he said. Left messages. Told them it was “imperative” they attend.

We sat there for two hours. Silent. Until Dad suddenly left the room, the house. We heard the car start. Mom insisted she help me move back the furniture. We put the bagels in a paper bag.

Would I have spoken? I never thought about it, what I would do if anyone showed.

That night, at dinner, Dad informed us he’d received a brand-new revelation, a shower was no longer sufficient and I must swear to bathe myself, fully immerse my body underwater, at rise and fall, to keep the house and my mother’s body clean. For me, this was too much to ask. The request was just too intimate. For the first time in my life, death was suddenly a worthy adversary, something worth fighting against, not something to be washed, or massaged, or colored with fear or fantasy.

 

 

 

 

A year went by before I could leave and afford an apartment of my own. I had a job at a Radio Shack and I finally cried for my girlfriend. A few years passed before I gave my savings to a coworker who had been developing what seemed a good idea for a video game. We got lucky. And before long, I was living in the future. When did that happen, exactly? Life was about what comes, and this was a frightening time for me because you cannot ever really know what is coming, no matter what, not the hour or the day. I was suddenly hanging out there like a leaf about to fall. But I was getting more and more okay with the idea of falling; everything that ever made me afraid started sloughing off like scales. One by one. Then I started picking them off.

I went to work one day at Radio Shack suddenly filled with the feeling that I was no longer a Laudermilk, which was thrilling and scary as hell. I gave my notice and decided to make a longish bet on my future. I would take my cash and move to California, where computer electronics meant more money, the magazines said, and because it seemed so far away.

Finally, one Sunday (always a Sunday!), I went home to say goodbye. I found Mom sitting in the kitchen, at the table, and she was sipping Lipton tea with milk. Her hat on the table beside her. Her white head like a bright pearl doorknob. The blinds were louvered almost closed, the atmosphere of the room more like evening than the midday outside. She wore her blue slippers, her robe. I would be leaving New York in the morning.

She said, “Come over here.”

I put my hand on her shoulder, picked at the pilling of her robe. The tea was half finished, so I turned and took the pot from the stove and poured more water in her cup. I said, “I’ll be back soon to tell you all about it.”

She patted my hand. It was on her shoulder again.

“And we’ll talk on the phone,” I said. “It’s just a matter of making a living, and nothing else. You know that. This isn’t the place for what I’m planning. California is the place for what I’m doing.”

“You could just go to Florida, open a store. Not so far away. Or upstate,” she said. I tried to respond, but she stopped me, and said, “I shouldn’t say that. Don’t listen.”

“Josiah!” Dad shouted from upstairs. “Is that you?”

Mom looked up at me. She put both hands on my hand, and squeezed my hand. Her eyes were so very anxious. “You know that I want you to go, don’t you? You know I am not your father.”

“It’s gonna be fine,” I said. “I promise. And the moment you don’t feel good, you call me. I’ll jump right on a plane.”

Dad’s footsteps were on the stairs. “Josiah?”

Mom pulled at me weakly. I crouched down and we looked at each other face to face. My God, I came from inside this woman. Life was inside her, my life, and her life, and the very void I came from. Her cells would rise up and kill her, the second time around.

Dad’s footsteps were in the hall. “Josiah?”

I took her face in my hands, pulled her close, and kissed her head.

“Up,” she said. “Before your father—”

I shot up at the sound of his steps in the kitchen.

“So,” he said. “A big day for the big shot.”

A shadow, probably of some cloud, or of a passing plane, must have fallen over the house as the light gave way to dark through the blinds. The three of us stayed quiet, waiting for the daylight to right itself, because it always does. The next morning, I left for California, a brand-new millennium inching over the horizon.

 

 

 

 

It was high time for inventory: and what lovely things can I say of that storeroom? Not much. Then again, how was it that a room a third the size of all of Otter Computer contained so many things, more than the rest of the store combined? Boxes on shelves, on tables, on the floor—where was the floor? I could barely see it. I remembered painting the floor when we first moved in, a slate gray color, and we even tried to get fancy. We started painting decorative yellow caution lines around the shelves. They were tall shelves. But we abandoned the idea halfway. Who was ever back there, anyway, but us? Plus, business got busy so fast—back in the beginning, I mean—that we never got around to finishing. A good problem to have. But now we had plenty of time, a good thing, too, because it would take all day.

The storeroom was a mess. Rubber storage bins bursting with unwieldy spools of wiring, tools new and rusting, plastic tabs and drive plates removed from system cases, packages of nonscuff floor pads, of batteries and power cords. The cases themselves, desktops, large, small, and huge, arranged along the floor, against the wall, like VCRs tipped on their sides. And monitors! The dinosaur parts of the ’90s and early 2000s. Because they took up so much space. Like a television showroom in there, but stacked (of course, everything stacked), and precariously balanced on top of one another, 13-inch, 15-inch, 20-inch screens. Some were missing glass altogether, looking like cubbyholes for shoes. Screens were cracked, even shattered, broken shards protruding from the sides like teeth. My God, there was so much media, too. Zip discs, floppies, and compact discs. Bags of magnetic tapes. And the drives for each and every one, floppy drives and hard drives, the all of a sudden everywhere CD-ROM. And of course the boxes, so many boxes—of brand-new products, or broken products, or wrong products waiting for RMA return authorization stickers from distributors so we could hopefully, let us pray, get our money back. Laptops piled like impenetrable textbooks. Keyboards piled high like delicate rectangular plates. Green translucent motherboards like slices of vegetative earth, freeze-dried for science and posterity. And not just the current, but the past, the long and recently dead stuff mercilessly mined for parts, from manufacturers who had long ago disavowed their products. It was overwhelming, gloomy, and cold.

Amad on the other hand was out front, with people—customers, maybe. Warm sun coming through the windows.

I stepped on a screw; it went right through my sole and into my foot. I cried out.

“Josie?”

“I’m fine!” I heard Amad coming closer, talking to someone, maybe Teri.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Stepped on something, but I’m good. Just leave me alone and we’re in business.”

“Good!”

He walked away.

I saw in a far corner, by the back wall, a small clear space. By the memory and CPUs. The central processing units, each no bigger than a stamp. I went over there, with clipboard in hand, and made sure my pen could write. I decided to start with the memory and the CPUs, which hold a special place for computer technicians, for someone like Amad, because without them you have no computer. Not so unlike a human, a computer can always do more, and know more, but only with respect to the capacity of memory and the CPU. The two hemispheres of a computer’s brain. As for computer sellers, like me, the processors were special because they were expensive.

They were the only carefully ordered things in that room. Memory chips set in foam, in shut black cases. In neat rows like caviar tins. I read each label and made careful notes of what memory we actually had, what we thought we had, and before long my mind strayed away to other precious things.

I used to at one time actually believe Sarah had always been waiting for me in California. But tragedy generally works on us this way. We retrofit, like a prophecy in reverse. Sarah and I met in the Otter Beach Bookstore (also now out of business). I was standing there holding a large used King James Bible bound in soft leather, very old, and it fell open in my hands like a small animal dozing in my arms. Oversize and heavy, with a crimson silken bookmark hanging from the pages like the tongue of some serpent encased in a large block of yellowing cheese. I used to sometimes go to the bookstore in the middle of the day just to hold the massive thing in my hands. Never really read from it, except for the times I scanned for typos. I’d never once seen a typo in any Bible whatsoever and this had worried me for years. I wanted to look at it and hold it, open it and smell it, try to imbibe it in a way I’d not done before. To the point that I once tore a small corner piece from a page and let it soak on my tongue like a wafer. That was only the once, and I felt stupid afterward. It tasted the way old pillows smell. I was thirty-two when this happened.

Nathan Two Foot was the grumpy and vaguely Native American man who owned the bookstore. He would say something like, “Just take it already. From me to you.”

And I would say, “But then I’d have no reason to come here and bother you.”

And then I would usually leave, because my store needed me. Actually, at that point, my four stores needed me.

When I met Sarah, I guess I was something of a retail mogul, a respected businessman of the community. Amad and I led in points on the company’s league bowling team. Here I was, a man with a 180 average and a custom red leather bowling glove. Team captain—a reluctant one, though. I liked being in charge, and part of me liked the attention. It came naturally to me, but it also made me feel uncomfortable. What I liked most was maintaining a cool and quiet presence at work, making random check-and-sees at the other locations. Employees looking up from a computer screen surprised to find me standing there and smiling. I never said much. But when we bowled or had a barbecue at Amad’s or an employees’ night at a local Chili’s, I liked the opportunity to command. I would stand, and surprise them again. I would be charming, magnetic, if I wanted. But on most days, I didn’t feel the need. I watched Sarah walk into the bookstore, not so much walk in as fall in, with her thin black running shorts, and her nearly sheer and wet-with-fresh-sweat T-shirt, aqua blue running bra showing beneath. The lenses of her glasses fogged. She came falling in with her hands on her knees, completely out of breath.

She said, “What’s new, Nate?”

I had never once thought of calling him Nate, and was immediately filled with jealously for the level of intimacy Nathan Two Foot obviously had with this small woman, glistening there in a shaft of beach light.

Nathan looked up from his book and asked how much.

“Sixteen miles,” she said. “Give or take.”

He said, “There is something wrong with you. Who works themselves like this on a weekend?”

“You’re working,” she said.

“This isn’t work.” He looked back at his book and turned a page.

I must have looked ridiculous. My mouth open like in a cartoon, that tremendous book in my hands.

She walked over, ducked beneath the cover some, looked back up, and said, “If that’s a King James: terrible translation.” Her hair was a bit knotted up and back in a wet feathery bunch. Some frizzy wisps were dancing.

“My hair.” She pointed at it. “Is it ridiculous? I was running and the wind is crazy.”

I said, “A little bit. Yeah.”

“Who buys a Bible?”

“I like to look at it.” Her hair was in the hinge of her glasses. “Your hair.” I put my hand near it.

“What.”

“It’s in the hinge.”

“The hinge.”

I laughed at how she said it.

She carefully took off her glasses and freed the red tangle. She looked at me and I could see she was straining. I moved in closer. Her eyes were hard at first, and then I swear we didn’t speak for a long time. She just looked at me, trying to see me without any help.

She finally said, “For a second or two I can see you clearly without my glasses. Then you go blurry again.”

I said, “I can see you clearly. Very clearly.”

“Well, you got strange kind of quickly.”

I said, “I don’t feel so strange.”

“Me neither. Maybe.”

“What did you mean about the translation?”

She laughed. “Ah, you broke the spell.”

She looked toward the front of the store, like she was waiting for someone. “It’s beautiful, I’m kidding. Bad joke,” she said. “I’m a translator, Hebrew,” gesturing Blah, blah, it’s boring.

We were still standing there.

I said, “And you’re here for…”

“Catching my breath.” She looked back to the front of the store again.

“You’re waiting for someone.”

“I get a little restless some places. But I like it here. And I like Nathan. You’re waiting for someone?”

“Nope,” I said. “Me neither.”

“And I come here to run, a good path. Isn’t that heavy?”

I put the book back on the shelf.

She walked toward the rear of the store. And I followed.

The door was wide open, and she was in the narrow restroom, washing her face. She threw water on her face and on her hair, and every time she lifted her arms the T-shirt lifted, too. Just enough. And, my God, is there anything in this world as intoxicating as that pink rise of hip skin all crimped from the elastic band on a pair of running shorts—has to be shorts—and peeking out from where you shouldn’t see, like a rosy and puckered sun; I wanted to press my face against the skin of her hip—

“You’re following me.”

“What can I say, I think you’re cute,” I said. “And you’re not waiting for anyone. And I’m not waiting for anyone.…”

She turned away from the mirror smoothing back her hair, smirking just barely. She was softening. “You think you’re charming. When really you’re just a weirdo who hangs out in a bookstore.”

I laughed. “No, no, no. I run a store down the street. I just come in sometimes. At lunch.” I cleared my throat. “You know, I actually have four stores.” I showed four fingers, wiggled them. She laughed.

And then she tripped, walking out of the restroom.

I should’ve caught her, but I didn’t, and she went flailing into the aisle. She stopped herself just short of smashing her chin on the floor. I rushed to help her up, and she let me.

Really I wanted to laugh, because people falling down always make me laugh, but she seemed so put together and maybe a little bit hard and serious. I decided in a split second that whether or not she laughed would determine everything else from now on. And then she cried out. Laughing like a shameless little kid, showing me her palms, scratched all bloody and littered with dust and grit and sand. She laughed and really she couldn’t stop laughing. She covered her mouth and I fell for her, hard. Now I was also undeniably staring at her mouth, how her laugh was total and vulnerable and how she was fine with that, I’d never laughed like that, and how she bit her lip because she was starting to get nervous, and then I realized that I was the one making her nervous because I was also obviously imagining what she looked like in not so many clothes—but not in some lascivious or creepy way, but because I was totally overtaken by her skin and her hair and the small belly rise just above her shorts, and, my God, that glorious little crescent swath of skin—

“You’re just staring at me like it’s normal.”

She studied me. She took her glasses back off and looked at me, her eyes scrunched and then open wide, trying to see more clearly. Then she grinned. It was a half grin, like I know exactly what you’re thinking, mister. There we were beside the extraordinarily narrow restroom in the back of the store, beside the art books and the coffee-table books (where I first met Blake and his angels), and I wanted to put my mouth on the salty rise of her so slight belly.

“You work on this street?” She walked away from the restroom.

“I do.”

“Prove it.”

We walked over. I introduced her to Amad, and I think she was impressed, this also thanks to Amad who has never failed to make a good showing for me.

I offered to buy her lunch.

“Look at me,” she said. “I’m a sweaty mess.”

“Or a coffee.”

We all walked outside.

“I do have a change of clothes in the car.” She looked at Amad like, Can I trust this guy or what? He shrugged his shoulders.

“I can get us a seat outside.” I pointed to the diner at the end of the street, across from the pier. “They have a mean breakfast burrito, and it might not be too late.”

She looked at her watch and then walked away, yelling, “What about your store?”

I didn’t answer.

She turned around and saw me watching her, laughed, and shook her head.

She changed in the diner restroom and then we sat outside on the deck, facing the water, where she relished every last bite of her burrito, which I found exhilarating. And watching this made me enjoy my omelette like no omelette I’d ever had before or have ever had since. She stretched back and yawned, reaching for the sun, and said, “I have nothing to do all day.” Then she ordered a Bloody Mary and asked for a bottle of hot sauce.

I joined her.

And then we had another Bloody Mary.

And then we had a few petite margaritas each, and before you know it we were drunk in the middle of the day, fully alive in our liquor-dumb bodies. Just for the hell of it, we started acting like a couple very much in love, like we’d known each other for years. And then it kind of stuck and started to feel real, even though all the while our afternoon was abundant with the most wonderful of surprises, like her name, who she was, and where she came from, her parents, my parents, and at one point I apparently launched into a sermonic diatribe about God, the Devil, and the World and Everything in It. I’m told I instructed an entire deck full of people on the finer points of Armageddon and Y2K. We walked on the beach in the late afternoon, smashed on tequila and falling on each other, acknowledging that what we were doing was ridiculous and we’d have to face the consequences in the morning. I begged her, Please, just let me just kiss that pretty little ribbon of skin on your hips, and she said What on earth are you talking about?

“On your hips.” I hiccupped.

“What.” She started looking about herself. “What?”

“From your shorts.” I pointed to the place, now safely cushioned by the hug of a gray sweatpant.

She folded down the pant at the waist one inch, and said, “Here.”

I knelt down in the sand and I lightly kissed her hip. She patted my head.

Then I vomited on the sand right beside her, not a lot, but enough to cause her to start laughing, and kick sand over my mess like a mother would or a girlfriend would, I imagined, and she led me to the water where she sat me down. She leaned me back and wet my hair and washed my soiled face in the lapping tide. Drunk, too, she stroked my head, laughing out, and remembering to cover her mouth. I never went back to the giant King James.

She moved in three months later, I insisted, and we threw ourselves at each other whenever possible. And this wasn’t just sex, mind you, but face-petting and back-kneading on the beach come sundown, and making out in restaurant bathrooms like we were in high school. I liked to watch her eyes go wet with a kind of boozy zip when we drank white wine. And then we’d fall on each other in the stairwell. Sarah took to me much like one often takes to a puppy, impetuously, absolutely, lovingly. In the beginning we were on fire, and I knew one thing: that I lived in the world, and for the first time I was really living on Earth Time, my feet firmly planted on the hard ground, here in this place of no angels or demons, where clocks make sense and never go backward, only forward, and who knows what all awaits us when we get there, and how we got here and where we come from makes no real difference at all. I believed myself worthy of that time with her. She was a woman who wanted to spend herself in love because, well, her rock-hard parents never let her spend love on them, and I was the kind of man, it turns out, who’d eat it all up, a cheapskate at a buffet stuffing his pockets with bread. I have to say here in the interest of fairness that I really did love her for this.

Sarah and I got married, quietly, on the beach, in the fall of 1997, on Otter Beach by the legs of the Main Street boardwalk. By a local judge. Just Sarah, and me, Amad and Teri. White flowers, flip-flops, and the crash of water in the surf. Tidal foam. It was lovely. I called my parents two days later to tell them. They’d known about Sarah, of course, and were happy to hear it, happy just to hear I was happy. That we were happy. So we flew out to see them as soon as possible. It was one of those rare times in life when happiness reigns; not that we became unrealistic or lived with rose-colored glasses on our noses—and I never did get that saying, actually, because I’ve worn real rose-colored glasses, orange-colored ones, too, and it’s nothing less than wonderful, and in no way stops you from seeing the everyday ugliness that people are capable of; it merely changes the light, and I like light. It felt like we were wearing those white clothes, and holding those white flowers in our hands, for days.

We flew out to New York and took a cab to Richmond Hill. But I remember so little from the trip, and almost nothing from the experience of returning to the old neighborhood. I usually see and file away all I can, so I must have closed my eyes in the taxi. I do remember this: my father opening the door, and then something I never expected. The door opening wide, slamming open, really, and hitting the wall behind: and there he was, standing like a game-show host, in suit jacket and tie, with his arms out and open, saying loudly, “So, this is my daughter!”

Mom was behind him in a robe and one of her macramé hats, I think her hair was short and wispy, but finally growing some. Her face was pale because she mostly stayed inside. She was holding her robe together like I imagined a geisha girl would. She looked so proud of me, and of Sarah. In a low voice she kept saying, “Come in, come in, come in…”

Come to think of it, the house was already looking a little rough. Not dirty, necessarily, or terribly unkempt. But little things left undone were accumulating. Dust on every surface. A musty odor. Things were not put away. It appeared as if they’d been gone for months and had just returned for our visit, with no time to freshen up. Except for Dad. In his suit.

“You look so fancy,” I said. We were standing now in the kitchen.

“Come on,” he said, now arranging us, Sarah and me, like figurines on a wedding cake. Josie, like so, and Sarah, like so. “Okay, let me get a look at you,” he said.

They stood there, Mom and he, looking at us, almost like they were willing us not to move, Just stay like that, because you look beautiful! I was really taken aback. But why should I be? These were my parents, and I was their son, and now I’d given them a daughter. I’d always figured Mom wanted a daughter; what mother doesn’t want a daughter? She stood there looking almost shyly at Sarah, afraid to approach too close, like Sarah would skitter off into some other room. At the time I couldn’t know or even consider the truth because I was too happy to wonder about its reasons, but now I see she was probably just afraid of what I might have said, of what horrible things I’d told Sarah about them. Not that I ever would, or did, or that Mom would seriously think I would do anything to hurt them, or that there were any horrible things to say to begin with. And yet this is something we do all the time with our boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives, and our parents did it with theirs. We exaggerate and understate the family secrets, even lie, all in order to get more love. But I’d always been up-front and honest with Sarah, mostly.

“Look at you both!” His suit was too big in the shoulders, or he was getting thinner. Then again, he was already getting older, which is actually a silly thing to say because of course it’s always true.

“Can we move now?” I asked, laughing.

Mom answered for all of us and ventured forward, her hands out and aimed for Sarah’s face. “So beautiful,” in her new low voice. “Look at her, with a mess like you,” she said to me.

I laughed.

And she said to Sarah, “My boy knows I’m kidding, right?”

Sarah hadn’t said a word yet, just kept smiling, our bags still hanging from our hands.

Dad said, “How about champagne?” He turned to the fridge, took out a bottle from the freezer, and started wrestling with the cork. “Leave your son alone, Ida. You’re suffocating him.” He wrapped the top of the bottle with a kitchen towel to get a better grip.

Mom pulled away from me, faking she was embarrassed. “I can’t help it,” she said.

Dad was pulling at the top of the bottle.

We set our bags down on the kitchen floor, and I said, “Get over here.” I hugged Mom and watched Sarah walk over to Dad. She took the bottle from him, he let her, and she locked it between her knees, and turned the towel in her grip over the cork like she was unscrewing it. Dad watched, totally fascinated.

I watched, and Mom watched.

“What does she do for a living, again?” Dad was clearly talking to me, but still watching Sarah work the cork, the towel now tossed aside.

I said, “You’re allowed to ask her yourself.”

“Ahh!” Sarah said, aiming the cork away and pop! It hit the ceiling, foam easing out of the bottle.

Dad shouted, “I’ll get glasses!”

Sarah offered me the bottle, and I took a swig, I was laughing, and handed it back to Sarah. She took a swig, she was laughing, and then she handed it to Mom, who refused, but Sarah insisted, pushing the bottle—Take it, just take it—while she wiped at her own mouth. Mom took it, and took a big swig. Dad shouted, “Aye! Wait for me!” He handed out glasses, took a swig of his own, and started pouring.

It was almost surreal. The new Laudermilk family.

I can see it now like a photograph, Mom, her head just above water, in a way. We had no idea she’d get so sick again. Dad in his Sunday suit. The two of them pleased in every way, almost overly so, trying so hard to get it right, because their son left once before, and this was the woman who brought him back and made them a family again.

Sarah said, “I’m a translator.”

We all stopped, froze for a second, and then broke into such lovely and comfortable laughter because how strange was it that this was the first thing she’d said, that this was the first time they’d heard Sarah’s voice, that we’d been in their home for five or ten minutes, and that all of the emotion welling up and spilling over was directly because of her, because she had softened me toward them and they knew it, and maybe “softened” is the wrong word, she made me better understand them and myself is what I mean to say, and the first thing she says sounds so unlike something one says in a room so emotional. And then said the second thing she’d ever said to them—a loving creative lie, and I loved her for it—she said: “So, Gill, or Dad—do I say Dad? Dad? Ah! All Josie talks about is you since I met him. Dad this, and Dad that, do you know?”

My father was always many things, contradictory things, but never a fool.

He took her face in his hands again. He kissed her cheeks, one and two, and he said, almost whispering: “Thank you.” He wiped at his eyes. “Okay, enough of this blubbering. Ida, stop crowding your son.”

“Oh shut up,” Mom said, wiping her eyes, too. “You two take your stuff upstairs, and make yourselves cozy.”

We went out to dinner that night, a local Chinese restaurant, where Dad ordered for everybody, and Mom and I talked all night about the neighborhood and how she was feeling, and I told her how good she looked—“What a stylish hat”—and she laughed. All the while Dad and Sarah talked, relentlessly talked. He wanted to know what it means to read, and reread, and translate scripture, and not believe the words you’re reading to be divinely inspired. How could that be? I heard Sarah tell him that she did think it was divinely inspired, but no more so than any other great book. This was like a different language for my father, and I think it was here, ultimately, at this very moment, at Yen Jing’s Chinese restaurant, in Queens, Dad became so taken with Sarah. He was convinced they were reaching for the very same thing, only Sarah hadn’t had the same opportunities, but the sensibility was there, and she would eventually see the truth he was trying to share with her. Sarah’s heart was at ease, however—searching, but also at ease with itself. This was something he couldn’t imagine. They were a pair that night, and it delighted both Mom and me. I can still see Dad, showing off, filling a spoon with hot Chinese mustard and swallowing it whole, his eyes tearing up, all of it a show for his new daughter. She couldn’t stop encouraging him, daring him to do other things, while casting conspiratorial looks at me, and then at him, as she waved off my attempts at conversation: You leave us be.

The phone calls started the week we got back to California.

And yet she never saw them in person again until we saw Mom at the hospital, and then the funeral. I don’t like to think about the funeral, though. But they spoke every week on the phone, sometimes several times. Sarah loved me whether I liked it or not, even when I was depressed; why was I so depressed? All of which of course made her one day stop loving me so much anymore, which makes perfect sense, now, when I think about it.

That’s a cop-out.

I knew exactly why I was depressed. I knew why I was so miserable. And I’m sounding more and more like a hagiographer here. I nominate Sarah for sainthood! Instead of a somewhat sensible ex-husband who, believe it or not, has learned a thing or two about marriage and love, I have learned this: Nobody’s perfect. Not even Sarah. Certainly not me. And more, it’s unfair to paint such an unreal picture. Worse, it’s not right, and plain inhuman to expect sainthood from someone you love.

Dad told her things he’d never told me, not once, for whatever reason—things about his own calling, even about his father. He hardly talked to me about his father, my grandfather. When I was a boy, I asked. It was natural. And he sidestepped every single time. As I got older, I got the feeling Dad felt like a disappointment to his dad. I could relate. Sarah said it had to do with what my father called my “calling.” I’d heard the phrase plenty of times, but hearing it spoken from Sarah’s mouth made it feel like a real thing in the world. No longer a family secret. Even though Dad was freely telling Sarah about his own calling, and that my grandfather had one, too, and I had no idea.

All of which eventually led to a much needed talk between Sarah and me.

This was just before 2000, and I wasn’t doing very well. I used to think a small part of me, a very small part, a piece I thought I’d flushed, deep down, thought, Who knows, maybe Josiah was right after all. Who doesn’t like to be right? And yes, there’s the untidy technicality that Armageddon could be bad news for me (which is debatable because if I had been right, then technically I would’ve survived), and more, it would be very, very bad for Sarah. For the whole world, really, but at least there would be some order in everything.

The crux really was this: if Apocalypse never did come that day, January 1—and of course I was sure that it wouldn’t—if I was wrong, I had proof. I mean, if faith ever leaves you in a flash, then this would be that day. This scared me. The day was coming soon. Who would I be? What would I believe? And, most of all, what would this final disappointment do to my father? So we talked, Sarah and I, but I didn’t tell her all of this. Not exactly. Rather I recounted what had happened on that stage. All of it. I told her about the moment, my reaching up for Heaven and receiving revelation from the Lord. I told her about the horse, and I told her none of it was real. Your husband is a failed child prophet, my dear.

She laughed, and said she wasn’t too surprised.

And so I told her more, later on, the beach, which felt right, because so many important things happened to us on that beach. It felt good to be honest (although never entirely…). And she listened. Wives do this! I told her about it over dinner, and walking on the boardwalk. I talked more that week, and the next week, I talked a lot. At brunches, and over breakfasts before I went to work, until I think before long I was becoming unbearable because that year I went from hardly talking about it with her to talking about nothing else at all.

And then came the day, 2000.

Sarah and I stayed up that night, on the beach. A bottle of champagne. Takeout tacos. And we cheered at midnight to the great messianic no-show, and howled while the fireworks broke open like neon flowers over the Pacific. Sarah poured champagne on the sand, and said, “To a shitty year.” We got very drunk that night, and convinced ourselves the new year would be new in every way imaginable.

It must have been the wine because I woke up that next morning, that first morning, and I was the same old me. No new me. I was disappointed.

We went for a walk.

It was a plainly beautiful day, brisk and bracing in that Californian January way.

“Talk,” she said.

We watched a pregnant woman at the end of a nearby cul-de-sac sweep up New Year’s confetti into a dustpan. I asked Sarah: If we had a kid, did she think I would pass on the “calling”? God forbid. I’d been wrong, and never wanted to be right. Even Dad had been wrong once. And I don’t know what year Grandpa Laudermilk put his money on, but apparently he was wrong, too. This depressed me. We went home, and I’ve been told more than once that that day was the beginning for Sarah: from then on, I became increasingly “emotionally unavailable.”

I hated the phrase.

We decided on a brief separation, a brief one, because the fighting became constant, about my moods, yes, but who doesn’t have moods? But mostly about not having kids.

One year later, in September, the planes came.

What I’m about to say is not an easy thing for me to say, and it’s the one and only real secret I’ve kept from Sarah, but when I first saw what was happening on the news, when the Big Shit buckled the fan and down came those poor toppling towers, for one brief dark moment in the basement of my soul I seriously thought the planes were proof. The prophet lives! I was only off by a year. Only one year, not so bad. I actually had this thought. Fleeting, yes, and fast like light, but that doesn’t matter now. Because I didn’t first think of their faces, and how every single one had a name, and I didn’t think of the purple carpet on the Trade Center lobby floor. I didn’t think of rubbing my shoe soles on the carpet when I was a kid, and shocking my dad’s arm in the elevator on the way up.

That afternoon of the eleventh, Sarah came by the house to pick up some of her stuff, and I was drinking. She’d have a drink with me, a quick one, she said. She turned on the television and we watched the news, and then we turned it off. We were both feeling so sad and were dutifully polite to one another. We didn’t really talk about anything. We just kept drinking. And then we fell on each other in the living room. She then hit me squarely in the face, and it hurt. I clearly heard the crack of her hand against my skin, and then the sound of her fingers tugging at the zipper on her jeans, even the shush of the silk ribbon line of her underwear just above her belt rubbing against the palm of my hand. I could’ve sworn I heard the blood rush all through my ears and my head, to my cheek where she hit me, thinking I could actually hear the skin going red. She hit me again. I grabbed at her wrists trying to stop her, and then thought better of it. She started hitting me in the chest like she was beating the steering wheel of a car that wouldn’t start. She was crying, too. I wasn’t, not yet, too overwhelmed by it all, by the pure and naked anger and the final remnants of our love and her frustration coming off her like sparks. Then she grabbed my face. I started to talk, and she said, “Shut up.” She undid all of my belt and pants and whatnot, and then she undid hers, pressing herself against me. Then my back was against the cold hard floor, and she beat herself against me, again, and again, and again, with her hands and her haunches, until I pushed her off because I was going to start. So she let that happen. And then she pressed herself against me again, and again, and again. The floor went warm, and she pressed herself against me until it was almost unpleasant, I think, for us both. I was in one particular place in the whole of the world, knowing where I was and when I was, and then she fell back sprawling on my legs.

We lay there on the hard floor, legs crossed on top of each other for what seemed like a very long time. The room was quiet. She wasn’t crying anymore. She patted my hand, because now, I think, I had started. She stood up and pulled on her jeans. She stuffed her underwear in her front pocket, and kicked mine within reach. She picked up a wadded sock from the floor and tossed it to me. I caught it. She allowed herself one more blurting cry, before stopping herself. Then she let out a cough of a laugh, and said, “That should not have happened.” I’m sure at least a small part of her meant the last few years.

And thus my dear (ex-)wife, mid-separation, got pregnant. We did not keep it. Which ruined us and remained forever between us like a deep furrow in the dirt, which neither of us could cross.

Dad called me later that day. He wanted to know what I thought about the planes. I was in shock, stunned by the footage, and didn’t have the appropriate language to express myself. I said something like, “I think it’s scary as hell and it looks like the world is coming apart on TV and maybe it’s symptomatic of a much bigger problem.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

I said, “I don’t know, maybe we want God too much.”

“We who?”

“People.”

“What people?”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Have you even seen the news?” he said. “You think this is really happening?”

I said, “I’m still processing. I can’t even look—”

“Well, your mother is sick. She’s sick again.”

“What?” I said. “Say that one more time.”

“Your mother.”

“You went to the hospital?”

“She’s been tired. We went six weeks ago.”

“You’ve known about this for six weeks?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

It’s very strange how it all works, how we get a handle on the darker things. “And you waited to tell me today. Something like this happens.”

He was quiet.

“It’s okay,” I said, “forget it.” I exhaled. Inhaled, exhaled. “At least I can process.”

“This is what I’m saying,” he said. “We can talk about it.”

“Is she in pain?”

“Some.”

“Same place?”

“Same place. And her liver. A little.”

“A little?”

“That’s the word the doctor used. A little.”

“I’ll look into flights—”

“You’re not taking a plane.”

“Shit. Are they even flying planes?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Shit, shit, shit. Can I talk to her?”

“She doesn’t like the phone anymore. The radio waves, who knows…”

I didn’t respond.

“Josiah?”

“Yeah.” Biting my lip.

“You feel okay?”

“It’s a lot at once. Jesus. I can see Mom’s face, I swear, like she’s right here in front of me.”

“God is Giver of Tests. I’ve been saying this for years. We should not. Be here. I’ve been honing our worship.”

“I’ll tell Sarah about Mom. I’ll call you back, and see about a plane. The doctors said how bad?”

“I told Sarah. She thought you should know immediately.”

I held the phone away from me for a few moments, and then I put it back so I could hear.

“Josiah?” he said. “Your mother, she wants to go home, and her body knows it. But up here”—I pictured him pointing at his head—“she can’t see it.”

“Well, I don’t want Mom going home. Or anywhere, but staying right here.”

“You shouldn’t be way out there,” he said.

For Dad, the fact that Manifest Destiny had moved westward meant that back east is, was, and forever would be the only real deal, God’s One Manifest American Fingerprint. Everything after was blasphemy, half-ass imitation, poor and poorer servings of our Good Lord’s perfect recipe. And L.A. County was the red swollen cherry on a shameful sinful sundae. He never did visit me.

“I’ll look into flights,” I said. “And I’ll get there as soon as possible. No matter what it costs.” Money wasn’t a problem then. The paranoiac software bubble around Y2K had been actually good for business. But after the planes, business took an overwhelming nosedive. Plus the Internet. Amad told me we had to start embracing the Internet, and I was stupidly nonplussed. I got more depressed, and I convinced myself—which is not exactly true, is it, because it’s not like we ever formally sit down and convince ourselves of anything, but my behavior certainly did speak of something out loud—I realized something: I felt guilt! Guilty about the planes. Which were in no way my fault, of course, but still I was racked with a personal guilt, like it was me sitting in the cockpit, as if they were only responding to my polite request for Armageddon decades before, and I felt more guilty, cripplingly so, about that brief but utterly corrupt and fleeting sense of satisfaction with regard to their belated-by-a-year but successful arrival. God forgive me. I even felt guilty about Mom, like I was the one who made her sick. Why did it take such a long time for me to see how self-centered all this was? Why was this the kind of lesson I’d always learn and forget, learn and forget? I was also feeling guilty for being so selfish with Sarah, for not being man enough to own my own destiny. Have a child, Josie, and bring some new joy into this world.

I eventually learned all this, and indeed I took it into my stupid heart, but not before the melodrama totally soured Sarah and me; and not before Sarah got pregnant; and not before we did not keep it; and not before all of this gave way to anger, so much displaced anger. And thus, hence, my “Mad Max” period, so called by Sarah, because I was mad at everything I saw and acted like the world was “nothing but dead bones and dust,” her words (I wasn’t the only one who could be dramatic). We fought fiercely about every fucking thing under the sun, except what mattered.

We split for good.

And then we tried again. Split. And tried again. We did this for years. We eventually divorced.

Then Mom died, a long and slow and eventual demise that felt more like she just went to sleep, and finally she never woke up. What she’d wanted all along. Losing Mom weirdly cushioned the divorce proceedings, probably because, well, the worst possible news certainly lessens the impact of just bad news, and also because I’d somehow gotten it into my head that if Sarah stayed in my life she would almost certainly die.

 

 

 

 

There is a sad and ironic sort of symmetry regarding Sarah’s pregnancy, how after years of talking over the idea, it was only later on, after arguments and insults, and at least one assault with a kitchen utensil, that my seed took root in her womb as a result of what felt like goodbye-forever sex, both of us neck deep already in a trial separation, and that we didn’t keep it, and how it was this whole distressing scenario that flung us back and forth at each other, for years afterward, until one day we realized our marriage had actually died long before. I’m told the procedure wasn’t as physically painful or emotionally traumatic as it might have been if she had not decided and acted so quickly. I’m not so sure. I drove her home from the clinic.

My immediate response to hearing she was pregnant was the last thing she’d (or I’d) expected: “Let’s keep it,” I said. “Please.” I look back at this now and, sure, I see how desperate I was. Maybe a baby would have fixed us. Sarah knew better than I did, so we wound up talking about it for hours and hours. I was also worried it might be my only chance, the Laudermilks’ last chance for survival. I didn’t mention this. The procedure took place inside of the first four weeks. And regardless of what the doctor said, and the pamphlets, and the websites, and what Sarah said, too, who promised it would all be fine, it was an awful morning all around. She spent the remainder of the day in the bathroom. She let me help her in, and prepare the water, get it warm, and hang a bath towel and a robe within reach.

She asked me to leave.

I stood there at the door for a long time, listening for signs of anything I could do that might be helpful. I talked to her some, too. But she wouldn’t answer for a long time, and then she said, “I love you, Josie.”

Stammering, I said it back. “I love you, too.”

“But you have to leave me alone now. Okay? I’ll know if you’re by the door. Promise you’ll leave for a while. Please.”

I did. And then the doorbell rang.

“Go,” she said.

I went into the bedroom, stepped over the treadmill, and looked out the window.

At first I didn’t realize what I was seeing, and then I questioned whether or not I was guessing correctly. There were two young men standing at our door.

I looked at them, sort of in disbelief, at the timing mostly. I waited.

They rang the bell again.

They wore dark suits, flat shoulder bags propped between their feet. They didn’t lift their heads. One had a Bible in his hands, the edges of its pages glistening in the afternoon sun. The other had a magazine rolled in his grip. It was clear: two Jehovah’s Witnesses, my father’s former brothers, and my ancestors in a way. I watched them moved on to Bev’s door. They rang her bell, and waited. Knocked. And then they moved on to Charlie’s door. I thought of Sarah who was not but two rooms away, and found myself suddenly offended by the intrusion. I wanted a smoke. But then, unexpectedly, a very small part of me also wanted to open the window and call down to them, ask the young men inside, and offer them water, a chair. It was like my past had come knocking and here I was looking at it.

I went over to the bathroom door, tapped gently. “I’m gonna step outside.”

She didn’t answer.

I went downstairs, opened the door to the courtyard, and said loudly, while lighting a cigarette, nonchalant, “Can I help you?”

The taller one turned, and said: “Good morning.”

He walked over to me, and placed his shoulder bag on the ground. He was maybe nineteen, and had the delicate face of an adolescent with allergies. He motioned his partner over, and said, “My friend Gerard and I were in the neighborhood and we’re sharing some good news for a change. Isn’t this a fantastic day? Are you a Bible-reading man?” He opened his and flipped through its pages.

I turned and blew smoke behind me, but a breeze sent it back over my head like a hood. I started coughing.

He said, “If you’re in no mood to talk, that’s fine. Just one scripture, and we’ll leave you be on this fine day.”

I noticed a spot of unshaved whisker beneath the left side of his jaw. A pimple. The thinner end of his tie was hanging too long from behind, tucked inside his pants. I was still coughing. I cleared my throat. “What’s your name?”

He closed the book. “Bart. And you, sir?” He put out his hand.

I took and vigorously shook it. “Josie,” I said and looked up at the bedroom window. He looked up with me, followed my gaze.

“Forget something?”

“Bad day,” I said.

“Even the bad days are a gift.”

I looked at him. “I suppose.” I looked up at the sky, and then back at him. I was starting to sweat. I wiped my forehead.

“Can we help at all?” he asked, looking at Gerard, at me.

This took me aback. “With what?”

“You tell us,” Bart said. “You’d be surprised how much comfort the scriptures offer.” He was kind of glorious there in the bright wash of morning, palm fronds painting low shadows on his sunlit suit. He said, “There’s always a cause for sadness, right? It’s the nature of an earthly life. But a spiritual life can be joyful, too. Our Heavenly Father loves me. He loves you. I know His love, and this”—he presented the world: trees, sky, and sun—“all of this was made for me.”

Gerard said, “I have this knowledge, too.”

This touched me. It really did, to really know something, to be so sure of something like this. I don’t know what I’d expected from them, but it was nothing like this. Back in my younger and angrier years, whenever I saw the Witnesses, I felt either a great sadness, a pitiful and frustrated sadness for them, but also for myself because I was clearly projecting, or I felt a fast-abating fury, for lots of irrational reasons, one quick blast of invisible anger directed right at them, and also of course directed right at me. We don’t like to see who we were, or who we still are in the places buried deep within us. But here they were at my door, and what did I feel? I was jealous! Jealous for their abiding assurance. Plus I was truly moved, I have to say, because I saw Bart really meant it. He wanted to comfort me. He wanted to help.

“My wife is ill,” I said. “But thanks. And you guys,” I was looking for the right words. “You’re doing fine work. Just wanted to say hi, I guess.” We were silent for a few awkward moments, our three heads warming in the sun.

Bart said, “We can just say hi. Like people.” Gerard laughed.

There was a white dusting of what looked like doughnut powder on Bart’s left lapel, and I saw Gerard was slightly paler than his partner. A thick blue vein ran along the length of his neck like a power cord. I backed up a few steps, and stopped. Stood there. They stood there, too. What was I waiting for? What did I expect? Time bent all around us, and I realized this easily could’ve been me—I could’ve been Bart. I was Bart. And he was me.

Bart looked at his watch. He said, “Well, we’ll leave you to your wife. I hope she feels better. Maybe we’ll stop by again sometime. And just talk. I might even use my Bible!” He laughed, putting his bag back on his shoulder. He patted Gerard’s arm.

He said, “Josie, right? You know, the scriptures do make a promise. This life is not all there is. And I promised you a scripture.” Then he recited: “And he will wipe out every tear from their eyes, and death will be no more. There be no more sorrow, and no crying, pain will be no more. The former things have passed away.”

Memory washed over me like a slow wave. “Revelation,” I said. “Chapter twenty-one.”

Bart made a face—he was impressed.

“Your wife,” he said. “I hope she feels better soon. And remember, one day, you won’t have to worry about that anymore. That’s what He says, anyway.” His eyes looked skyward, and he put out his hand again.

I took it.

“You’re not afraid of anything, are you?” I said. “Not even death.”

We were still holding hands.

He said, “There are plenty of things worse than death.”

I let go, and I stood there, looking at this young man, at the two of them, and I’m sure they were wondering, What’s wrong with this guy? What’s he standing around for? I thought of Sarah upstairs, all alone, and how I so wanted to be up there with her, right beside her, and I thought of the child, or not the child, exactly, but the idea of the child we might have had, and how it was only just that, an idea, a nothing, and not really here at all, and yet it was all I could think about so, in a way, it was right there in front of me. I actually started to cry. I wiped my face.

Bart said, “You want us to stay?”

“Funny,” I said, “the strangest thing I just thought of. My father took me to a funeral, when I was a kid.”

They were interested.

I said, “Not really a funeral, more like a wake for one of the neighborhood kids. About my age. He just disappeared one day. A year goes by and they figured we’d better have a service. Cleared the whole living room of furniture. No coffin.”

Gerard said, “That’s so sad.”

Bart said, “There’s no guarantee this side of Armageddon. But your little friend, he’ll be on the other side. Waiting, and all made new.”

I smiled at the thought, but I also realized, if this were in fact true, how strange it would be if he were raised still a child.

Sun splintered up there on the bedroom window, and I figured there had to be another kind of time, aside from what I imagined eternity is, or infinity is, and aside from our few years here on earth, a kind of time outside us, because I could pull a memory like fruit from a branch. I could reach for little Issy’s face like an apple, and there he was.

Now Bart was talking about Armageddon, and how it would be good news for some.

I listened and was all of a sudden filled up with love for them both. I wanted to take them by the shoulders and shake them. I wanted to promise them a day would come when they would see the hard ground for the first time, really see it, and the sky, and the water, and if they were lucky, it would break their hearts. I wanted to promise them that on that day, your heads would fill up with fear, and with love, and that one day you’ll get married, and you’ll never guess how vicious things get in love, and if you’re not careful, your wife will rightfully brain you with a pasta spoon, and talk of possible futures without you, and you will eventually come around, but it’ll be way too late, and the floor will fall away from your feet. But who was I to promise such a thing? We were standing there, all quiet, and then I saw something: I saw fear in their eyes, I knew it, a natural human fear. I turned away from them. And looked up again. I faced the bedroom window, and closed my eyes, and I thought of Sarah and her claustrophobia, and I hoped she felt secure and safe and warm in her bath, but if someone ever asked if she was afraid of confined spaces, she would always answer, Absolutely not. This was a fear so ingrained, so embedded in her cells, that it only simply existed, was taken for granted, like the blood in her veins or the flesh on the soles of her feet. A fear like this is a hole, a blind spot, a negative space, and it makes itself knowable only by implication, by habit, by her choosing stairwells over elevators, by her avoidance of underwater tunnels whenever possible, and by her long lone runs into infinite space, no walls or ceilings anywhere. I opened my eyes, and saw her up there, my sweet wife, it was Sarah; how easy it is to forget how much and why we love who we love. She was standing at the bedroom window. A faint trace of a smile. She waved, just the barest suggestion of a wave, a slow and tired show of her palm, like she was saying goodbye. I turned, and the young men were gone.

 

 

 

 

Three hours I stayed in that storeroom. Three hours before coming out for air, and for lunch, and for something to drink because I was thirsty—and what did I find? Cold coffee, a crumpled brown paper bag, and a burrito half-congealed with cheese, poking out its head from a foil sleeping bag. All of this looking lonely on a cardboard box outside the storeroom door.

“What’s this?”

“What?” Amad was plugging in the vacuum.

“This. Cold.” I was sipping the coffee. “Totally cold. You couldn’t tell me it was here? Where’s Teri?”

“You missed her. Running errands.” The vacuum turned on, vrooming loud like a go-cart, and he pressed the thing with his foot so the top part with the bag unlocked from the sucking part and he pushed it around in front of him. “And you said to leave you alone!”

I shook my head. “I win fair and square. And cold.”

He wasn’t listening or couldn’t hear me, just kept pushing the vacuum. Something small, hard, and metallic rattled up inside it.

I’d made some progress, planned an order, and filled a garbage bag with what we should have realized was garbage long ago. The floor was now showing through. I took a bite of the burrito. Delicious. And so I was a little annoyed that I could no longer be as annoyed as I had been with Amad for letting it get cold. What is it about California burritos? Why can’t the other forty-nine states get it right? Or even close? Why can’t they master a tortilla so it doesn’t fall apart in your hands like a hot wet salad? And avocado everywhere. If you don’t love avocado, then I pity your soul, and your soul’s lack of green supple goodness. On every California plate like how New York puts parsley. It’s generous. No pale ribbing of kale for a garnish. I mean, even the garnish was gorgeous, and it waited in a small plastic-covered cup at the bottom of the bag. But bring me hot sauce. Always hot sauce.

“No hot sauce?” I shouted over the vroom.

“What?” Amad shouted back, didn’t turn around, and kept pushing.

I couldn’t think straight it was so loud, so I grabbed the coffee and took my lunch outside, figuring I should try Dad again. I waved to Amad, pointing at my ears, “I can’t hear you,” and then to the door, “Be outside.” I set the bag and burrito on the bench, sipped my coffee.

It was a lovely day, and the sky seemed a bit dark for so early. I called him. No answer. I called him again. No answer. It wasn’t like he had a message service or a machine because God knows the man would never use one because he didn’t care to, or he refused to learn how, or for some other irrational reason, and he’d say something like If I can talk, we’ll talk. If I’m there, we’ll talk. How can we talk if I’m not even there? This literalism always drove me nuts.

The vacuum stopped. I went back inside.

“My father’s not answering the phone.”

He gave me a curt nod.

“I talked to him before, doesn’t sound good. Sarah said he sounds pretty bad. He was a little loopy.”

“How loopy?” He was wrapping the cord around the vacuum neck.

“He said my mom was there.”

“Where? There?”

My phone rang. “Dad?”

He sounded far away: “Why is my phone ringing so much?” Almost like he was on speakerphone and actually walking away from the phone while we talked. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“I wanted to see how you’re doing. I told you before I’d call.”

“When?”

“Before. This morning.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He was yelling now.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, you’re alive.”

“Yes! I’m alive! Are you satisfied? I’m going to bed.”

“It’s like two o’clock. That’s like four o’clock your time.”

“I’m tired.” He hung up.

I looked at Amad, shrugged my shoulder.

I went back in the storeroom, and I wanted a cigarette because now I was feeling anxious and I’d forgotten to smoke one outside. Plus there was no smoking in the storeroom, one of Amad’s many rules. I’d smoke later on with another cup of coffee, but a hot cup of coffee. Planning cigarettes was almost always as pleasurable as smoking them. I’d never given real thought to who was taking care of my father at home since Mom died. Who was cooking? Was the man having hot meals? Then again, a burrito could be just as good cold. I organized and moved things. I swept. I picked up broken glass from things that fell from the top shelves and broke around me while I was cleaning up—we’d been on to something, after all, with those yellow lines—and before you know it Amad was standing in the doorway eating an apple, and saying “You’re hired.”

“I’m being serious,” he said. “This inspires me. So clean!” He ran his finger along a shelf, held it up to the light, and even from where I was standing I could see the filthy smudge.

“Getting there,” I said.

“Yes. And I’m going home now.” He put out his hand. I shook it, exaggeratedly, like, You got a deal there, mister. I wiped what smudge came with it on my jeans.

“You close shop?” he asked me.

“It’s been a long time.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll close shop,” I said, feeling very proud.

He waved as he walked away, and closed the door behind him.

 

 

 

 

I walked home along the water, and had my cigarette with a hot black coffee I got at the corner gas station. The smoke climbed up, the color of the moon’s silver swirls. Obviously I had to go see Dad. As soon as possible. Maybe tomorrow. Tomorrow? Or was that too soon? But if I went tomorrow, it meant no dinner with Sarah … Which was an easy decision, yes, but also it felt important. I needed to recognize it. And then I looked out at the dark water and could’ve sworn I saw someone coming out of the ocean. A shadow of someone, probably just had a night swim, but then he bled away in the night.

I blinked my eyes, shook my head.

Dad was getting old, and I knew what comes next, what always comes next, and I wondered why I was smoking so much when I hardly liked the taste anymore. Plus dinner probably wouldn’t have happened anyway. She and I were dead, long dead, and shamefully, forgive me, but a dying and not-quite-dead-yet part of me also used to sometimes stand by that water and watch the sun drop below the waterline at sunset, and I’d wish the great reddening ball would quash out, get doused, fall purple and cooling toward the bottom of the ocean. Take us all down with it. I put out my cigarette in the sand. I was getting morbid, and maudlin, and decided that what I really needed was to just get laid.

There was so much sand, and the ocean was rolling in and rolling out, and the waves were playing and toppling like animals wrestling. Water roiling and boiling in the dark. And then it happened again. I saw someone coming from the water. But this time it was two men, looking like two black liquid things walking from the water, except they stayed where they were, and were sort of suspended. One of the drilling rigs miles away on the water let out a booming signal, and it spooked me, so I took off running; then I stopped. I turned back and there they were, natural as night, two figures forming there in front of me. They were made of the water, and the dark light, and the night air. Just as fast, they disappeared. They rose up again from underwater, and then bled away in the darkness. It was all a trick of the light, or the no-light. I was tired, and I was seeing things, a grown man running from ghosts on a cool and lovely summer evening by the water. Things would be better in the morning.