CHAPTER ONE

Friday early in June, and Lydia’s come to Poughkeepsie’s Main Street to sort out some last minute details at Floral Euphoria. Her friend Marla opened the little shop six years ago, a testament to somewhat better times, but the recent recession has undone many of the last decade’s incremental improvements. Though as Marla likes to point out, marriages and funerals go on regardless, and Floral Euphoria goes on as well.

Lydia doesn’t get downtown much these days, which is a shame; her life used to revolve around the pedestrian mall that replaced Main Street in the early eighties but had the unintended consequence of driving all the pedestrians away. With automobile traffic long since restored, the sidewalks are, if not exactly crowded, at least peopled. Still, some ghost image of the old mall with its dying trees and broken fountains remains affixed to the scene before her, like those annoying floaters her ophthalmologist tells her not to worry about, they’re just a symptom of age. She’ll be fifty-five in August.

She blinks hard, but the ghost image persists. She used to work for a vintage clothing store in the building across the street that now houses a Mexican grocery; the coffee shop that jump-started her hungover mornings is now Sally’s African Hair Braids; she and Anatole and Chris used to meet nearly every afternoon after work at Bertie’s, the bar down that alley that closed a number of years ago. Two blocks east lay Chris’s little record store—she can’t even remember what it was called.

But there on the corner, still in its second-floor location, Anatole’s Salon Reflexion perseveres, strangely linking present and past. He’s working frantically today; on Sunday he and Rafa are flying to Spain for two weeks, and a host of ladies are distraught at the prospect of his taking a honeymoon from their hair.

Well, they can just wait, she thinks. After all, Anatole and Rafa have waited long enough.

They’ve been friends Since When, she and Anatole—that’s always been their line with everyone—but there was a period when their friendship seemed completely finished. She hasn’t thought of that ugly chapter in ages. When was the great rupture? 1985, 1986? It must have lasted three or four years, she muses as she enters the fragrant coolness of the flower shop. She can’t even remember who reached out to whom, but she has a feeling it was Anatole, even though he was the one who’d felt more wounded by the whole stupid debacle.

So much in her life had changed during those years of their estrangement. She’d cut way back on the booze, banished the drugs and cigarettes. She’d gotten a “real” job as an administrative assistant at Marist. And of course, the biggest change of all, she’d married Tom Rylance. Mr. Steady, she calls him, both mockingly and in not-so-secret gratitude. He isn’t a lawyer or doctor—he’s a mechanic at Friendly Honda—but, as her mother said when they got engaged, “He’s an echt mensch, and your poor father would be proud.” Lydia wasn’t at all sure what her father might have thought, but she was learning to pick her fights.

She’d refrained, for instance, from insisting that her mother take sides in her quarrel with Anatole; of course her mother was going to stay in touch with Anatole whether her daughter liked it or not.

She regrets not having kept a diary. So much has disappeared. There was something about those days—not the bleak time when she and Anatole weren’t speaking but before that, when she and Anatole and Chris Havilland were the closest and most fabulous of friends.

Marla’s made up a sample centerpiece, an astonishing confection of sweet peas, hyacinths, cyclamen, and peonies, all in shades of pink to fuchsia. There’ll be fifteen tables of ten guests each. And for the attendants, elegant white rose bouquets.

“It all looks perfect, doll,” Lydia tells her. “The weather forecast is good, the caterer seems to have everything under control, the DJ promises to rock us all out. But frankly, I can’t wait for the Big Day to be over.”

She’s agreed to pick up Chris at the train station at two thirty.

Finally, as he likes to say. After twelve years with Rafael, isn’t it about time? Of course, he and Rafa have actually been married for years, it’s just taken the state of New York a while to catch up. Still, now that he’s able, he intends to make the most of it. They’ve rented the clubhouse at Whispering Creek. They’re going the whole hog. His clients, mostly women of a certain age, have proved surprisingly sympathetic—which means a hundred and fifty guests will be there. Nearly sixty wives and their Republican husbands. Mix them in with a handful of relatives and a cohort of gay friends and this promises to be a rather sensational event.

He never knew he was so conventional at heart. Part of that’s Rafa’s influence. Anatole left the church years ago, since the Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church made it perfectly clear that it wanted him no more than his parents had when they turned their backs on him. But Rafa has tempered his long-simmering resentment, and taught himself that there are thoughtful ways to remain Catholic. Rafa has even convinced him to go to Mass—occasionally!—at Holy Trinity. And of course Rafa’s the one who’s talked him into getting married at the great age of forty-nine.

Naturally, there won’t be a Catholic priest to bless them, but Reverend Judy, the lesbian Episcopalian, is the next best thing.

Of all the guests, only Chris Havilland gives Anatole pause. They haven’t spoken in twenty-seven years, more years than Anatole had even been alive when he knew Chris in the mid-eighties, before everything fell apart. Before Chris betrayed him.

A boy came between them. Can we even remember his name? But of course we can. At the time he seemed as auspicious as a wounded angel fallen out of Heaven. Our Boy of the Mall, Anatole christened him. How vividly he remembers that first glimpse, one September afternoon on the pedestrian mall. Leigh on a bench eating an ice cream bar. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, loafers without socks. His profile was perfect.

Leigh won’t be invited. Why should he be? He meant nothing, and besides, Anatole has no idea whatever happened to him. But Chris is different. Chris didn’t just pass through; he took up residence, he was Anatole’s best and most intimate friend. And then he too simply vanished. Anatole remembers calling him in desperation. How he let the phone ring endlessly, unaware Chris had already cleaned out his apartment and skipped town. For years Anatole assumed Chris and Leigh absconded together. For years he nursed that grievance. But the years bring other sufferings. One day his business partner at Reflexion gets sick, and life becomes the struggle to take care of Daniel, to keep him in the world, to resign himself to not being able to keep him in the world, to watch him waste away and then slip away. By then Chris and Leigh are just incidents from a distant past, the light of stars that burned out long ago.

Without Daniel, Reflexion should by all rights have gone under. He’d been the genius of the place, Anatole never more than the sorcerer’s grateful apprentice. But maybe the genius of a place never entirely relinquishes its old haunts; improbably enough, Reflexion will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary next year.

It was Lydia who hooked him up him with Rafa. “You’ll like him,” she said. “He works in IT at Marist, and I know how much you love all things technological. Plus he’s cute and smart and ethnic, and best of all he doesn’t like girls.”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “I’m still grieving. I think I’m suffering a case of Permanent AIDS Stress Syndrome. PASS. Have you noticed? If you want people to take something seriously these days, you’ve got to give it an acronym.”

To be honest, though he’ll never admit this to Rafa, the ethnic part put him off more than the IT part, but after some weeks of hemming and hawing he finally got in touch, they met for dinner at the Milanese, talked tentatively, then engagingly, then exuberantly through a martini, a bottle of wine, a final sambuca. They kissed chastely in the parking lot, separated; then, as if simultaneously hearing some otherwise inaudible cue, replayed that kiss, only prolonged and passionate, and by the time Anatole got home there was already a message on his answering machine saying, “Hey, fellow, that was probably the most romantic three hours of my whole life.” Anatole wasn’t sure he believed that, but as white lies go it wasn’t a bad one. They saw each other the next weekend, and twice during the following week, and soon the past, that forlorn country of Chris and Leigh and Daniel, had come to be irrevocably past.

It’s Rafa the IT wizard who tracks Chris down. It seems he works for an outfit called Sterling Global Risk Consulting. His present location is unspecified, but he’s reachable by email. “Really,” Rafa tells Anatole with a self-satisfied gleam in his eye, “you’d be surprised how hard it is for anybody to disappear anymore. Though this one seems to have done his best. I tell you: it’s the golden age of the stalker we’re living in right now.”

For weeks Anatole dithers. He composes and recomposes an email. How do you break such a long silence? Then one day—or rather one night, quite late—he hits Send. It’s with not a little trepidation that he receives Chris’s terse reply, saying that, as it turns out, some business compels him to be in the States the week of the wedding.

She wonders whether she’ll recognize him. In his email to Anatole he wrote, “These days I’m fat, bald, dyspeptic, expatriate but otherwise exactly the same.” So she’s not prepared, as she catches sight of him ascending the stairs from the train platform, for how very little he’s changed. He’s still slender, but where there used to be something dissolute and languid in his posture, his body now is taut, fit, alert. He bounds up the stairs, small black travel bag in hand. His hair is much shorter, a severe buzz cut Anatole won’t be happy with; his gaunt face is leathery from the sun, as if he’s spent these years lying by pools or sailing on yachts.

He wears mirrored shades, a white short-sleeved shirt, sand-colored cargo pants, hiking boots. Practical, down-to-earth gear, not the kind of stylish attire he used to affect.

She waves, and seeing her, he removes his sunglasses and smiles—maybe a little warily. Well, why not? Despite her excitement, she feels a little wary too.

“Sorry to disappoint,” she says, even as she opens her arms to greet him. “Anatole’s got a hectic day at work, so he sent me.”

“Lydia,” he tells her, moving into her hug. “Still putting yourself down, aren’t you? It’s very good to see you.”

Their embrace is a long one, and she releases him reluctantly. The past shines through, and yet it doesn’t. “So, stranger,” she says. “Where exactly are you coming from?”

“Denver,” he tells her, lighting a cigarette, taking a long drag he’s been craving for the last two hours. “I flew into New York last night. I was out there putting my dad in a nursing home.”

“Tell me about it,” she says. “The life of middle-aged children.”

“Your mom’s still around?”

“Hanging in there. She’ll be ninety in October, if you can believe it.”

“Dad’s eighty-five. Been on his own for a couple of years. My mom died a while back, he remarried ten months later—very efficient, my dad, when he puts his mind to something. Next task: Find New Wife. Only trouble was, New Wife didn’t last as long as she was supposed to. And apparently it’s a bit harder to date in your eighties than it was in your seventies. Very frustrating for a guy who’s used to getting everything he wants, though by the time I left I could see he was already starting to make some inroads on a couple of his new neighbors at the Home. I’m betting the odds of a Number Three before the final curtain call are pretty good.”

His bitterness has the same light touch she remembers, and she laughs in spite of herself.

“Mom lives with me these days,” she reports. “Us, I should say. Or actually, we live with her. Same house where I grew up. I’m married, if you can believe it, twenty-one years. I’ve even got a kid. Don’t quite know how all that happened, but it did.”

She regrets trying to match his cynical tone. Marriage and family are the best things that ever happened to her.

“And you? What’s your life like?” she wants to say, but something constrains her. He always seemed so self-contained, even when she knew him well. Anatole’s told her their old friend works for some British company that does risk management—not that she’s sure exactly what that entails.

“And before Denver?” she asks. “I take it you don’t live there.”

He laughs an odd little laugh she doesn’t remember from before.

“Actually, this is my first time back in the States since 2003.”

It takes a moment to sink in.

“So where do you call home?”

“Let’s just say I’ve moved around a bit. Chris the Wanderer. I’m doing some work in Nigeria at the moment. Nothing too exciting.” He laughs again, that half-nervous, half-embarrassed laugh, and looks around. “I can’t believe I’m back in Poughkeepsie. I feel like I’m going to wake up in a minute.”

“Welcome to the little nightmare some of us never left.” That unwelcome cynicism again. “Actually,” she revises, “it’s not too bad. You’ll see. Parking’s impossible down at the station anymore. I left the car up by Reflexion and walked down.”

“Reflexion’s still there? Extraordinary. Anatole and Daniel—”

“I’m afraid Daniel passed some time ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

She makes a brave face. “But Anatole’s absolutely thriving. There’re now three Reflexions, if you can believe it. One in Kingston and another in Rhinebeck.”

She realizes that she keeps saying “if you can believe it.”

“Hey, I have a request,” he tells her. He flicks away his cigarette butt, then looks around like he’s worried someone will have seen. “Do you mind if we walk down to the river? I’d like to see it. I mean, obviously I saw it all the way up on the train, but that’s like watching television. You should have heard the soundtrack. Some guy kept telling his girlfriend something about a Buddhist wise man who’d attained enlightenment, and one of his students was so upset that the wise man would never be reborn that, just as his teacher was dying, he said something that irritated the wise man and caused him to miss enlightenment. And so the wise man was reborn, and it took him another twenty-eight years on earth to make up for the three seconds of irritation he’d harbored just before he died.

“For some reason, the girlfriend didn’t seem to understand the story, and so the guy kept repeating it, almost word for word, and I thought, if you tell this story one more time I’m going to fucking slot you. All the time I’m looking out the window and thinking, this river’s one of the most beautiful landscapes I’ve ever seen.”

“Slot?”

“Off. Kill. Exterminate. I work with these Rhodesian guys. Well, ex-Rhodesians. Whatever. I pick up their slang.”

He’s aware that he’s just talking, but he’s not sure what else to do. Truth is, being met by Lydia has flummoxed him a little. The years haven’t treated her all that badly. At first glance she looked stout, even matronly, but then he’s taken in by her brashly dyed platinum hair, the enormous, flashy handbag she carries, her too-bright lipstick, the even brighter orange shoes. Once a fag hag, always a fag hag, he thinks—not unkindly. Truth is, he hasn’t thought of her in a long time. Before Anatole’s email out of the blue, he hadn’t thought of any of them. He’s suddenly shy about meeting Anatole. Communing with the river’s a postponement, but then so much in his life has been a postponement.

He wonders if Anatole’s sent Lydia to pick him up as a way of postponing as well.

In the little park at the bottom of Main Street, old men and young mothers sit on benches, reading the paper, eating sandwiches, staring into space. A radio plays that catchy, annoying song he’s been hearing at the drinking club in the Rumukoroshe compound for the last couple of months. In the old days he’d have known who the singer was, but now he has no idea. He lights another cigarette and stares into space as well: the brown, implacable, magnificent river, framed by the pleasingly Art Deco suspension bridge to the south, and to the north the great derelict hulk of the train bridge...

“...Is now the Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park,” Lydia explains. “All paved and fenced in and safe. It’s been a huge success. A half million visitors a year, or something like that. Hard to believe. I’ll take you out on it. It’s not scary at all—it’s like being out on a big pier. And the views are to die for.”

He notices now the protective fence, the festive flags. He used to find that ruin intensely poetic—a kind of symbol for everything that was wrong and beautiful about Poughkeepsie. He used to dare himself to sneak past the fences and venture out some night, but he never quite worked up the courage. Now tourists stroll there. It’s OK: he went on to do far more dangerous and necessary things.

A weekend in Poughkeepsie’s small potatoes compared to the life he’s chosen. Still, he wonders why he’s elected to put himself through it. He’s staying at the Inn at the Falls, where he’s arranged to have a rental car dropped off. Habits die hard: he’s spent the best part of a decade relying on a set of wheels, a ready kit, some body armor, and sunglasses. Not to mention his own private arsenal.

He hears himself say, “Yeah, that might be fun to go out there. I mean, why come all this way and not be a tourist?”

When was the last time he said “that might be fun?”

At Reflexion, Anatole keeps darting back and forth to the big window over Main Street. A lady cop is writing parking tickets. A Hispanic fellow on a bicycle is having a jovial shouting match with a large, dreadlocked Jamaican; the man on the bicycle keeps circling back so he won’t drift out of earshot. Each return provokes a new outburst. They both seem to be enjoying their quarrel so much they don’t want it to end. Moving from car to car like a cat investigating a garden, the cop ignores them.

For thirty years he’s been calling it his window on the world. It’s a symptom of latent ADD, no doubt, but the truth is, he focuses better when he’s distracting himself. Daniel used to joke he depended on that window the way other people depend on television.

Right now he’s anticipating his first glimpse of Chris. Why this anxiety? Maybe he’s still in love. (He popped a Xanax a while ago, but it hasn’t helped.)

Nonsense, he tells himself, returning his attention to Carole Braunschweig and her unruly mass of hair. He’s been candid with Rafa. It’s self-indulgent, I know, maybe just plain selfish. But I want Chris to be here. Maybe what I want is to let him know that I’m OK. I didn’t get destroyed, I didn’t get sick. I survived. Maybe I want to see if any of that matters to him.

And Rafa has reminded him, calmly, as is Rafa’s way, that he’s got three, count them, three former lovers coming to the wedding. So surely Anatole can have just one.

Anatole’s never told him Chris was not technically a lover—but since when is love about technicalities? It almost worries him that Rafa’s so trusting. Most of the time that trust feels like maturity; only occasionally does it feel like—a kind of indifference? A kind of delusional self-confidence? But Rafa’s neither indifferent nor delusional. He’s just, well, Rafa—the computer geek with near-magical abilities, the good dancer with terrible taste in music, the fabulous cook who takes photos of his creations and posts them on Facebook, the avid bicyclist who’s even found a way to automatically post his cycling stats from that day’s bike ride. Why anyone would want to post such things is something Anatole’s never figured out, but there you have it, Rafael Pujol’s personality in a nutshell: generous, extroverted, a little exhibitionist, completely oblivious, totally adorable.

“I’m thinking of trying this new rinse,” he tells Carole, running his fingers through her imperial mane.

Then once again to the window, and this time Anatole catches sight of his quarry. They walk unhurriedly, Lydia in animated conversation, Chris smoking, leisurely turning his head from side to side as if to take in everything. It’s like seeing a ghost. Anatole tests his heart; there’s a frightened rabbit cowering in his chest. They’ve disappeared from sight; they’re coming up the stairs. He’s sorry for Carole—her hair, rather. Little does she know how dramatically it’s diminished in importance. And her husband’s the assistant D.A.

Then they’re in the salon. Heads turn. And why shouldn’t they? A deeply tanned, strikingly handsome man, no longer young, stands before them all. Chris’s hair’s been brutally shorn—he used to have such beautiful locks—and Anatole instantly assesses the reason: he’d be showing a bald spot if his hair were longer. It’s the way to go. Forget the comb-over. Just be fierce. Embrace baldness for what it is. Really short hair on men can be incredibly hot.

Chris is smiling—ruefully, it would seem, in acknowledgment of everything: his disappearance, the long silence, the missed years.

Anatole moves toward him. Chris puts out his hand, but Anatole’s not having that. He blusters right into a hug that seems to catch Chris off guard. Chris, he reminds himself, never liked to get touched. There was a time when Anatole fantasized about what it would be like to make love to Chris. Lydia and Leigh had succeeded—if that’s the right word—where he failed. For a long time he hated both of them for it, but now, as Chris pulls away from his embrace, he’s perhaps glad that he never did. It somehow makes this easier.

“Long time no see, Kemosabe,” Chris says in that deadpan that used to keep them entertained at Bertie’s. Anatole wishes he could meet it halfway, but he finds himself too flustered.

“I don’t even know what to say to you, Mister,” he sputters. “I’m just very glad you’re here.”

“Hey, no problem,” Chris replies—as if he’s just gone a block or two out of his way.

“We’re not staying,” Lydia says. “I know you’re crazy busy. I just wanted you to see that the package has been safely delivered. Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll keep him entertained. We’ll see you at your place at seven, okay?”

And just like that, they’ve gone. His head is spinning. But that has been the plan all along: work like a banshee till six, then a calm reunion dinner at the little house on Garden Street he and Rafa have been restoring for the last couple of years, and where Rafa is even now doing something wonderful with foodstuffs in the kitchen. Still, he can’t help feeling a little bereft, as if he’s stumbled back into a half-remembered dream where something precious is offered and then snatched away.

Anatole turns back to Carole. “Sorry about the interruption. An old friend in town for the wedding.”

“Anatole, dear, you’re crying,” she says. And it’s true. An annoying tear has crept down his cheek. He flicks it away.

“What can I say,” he tells her, resuming his work. “I’m a sentimental guy.”

“This is going to be a tremendous weekend for you,” she says.

Anatole’s put on weight. His once well-defined features have gone rubbery; the animated scarecrow’s body Chris remembers as being in constant, hectic motion has gone slack. Not that he looks unhealthy or even unattractive—it’s just disconcerting to see this disconnect between the present and the past.

“I didn’t mean to hustle us out of there,” Lydia says. “I know Anatole would’ve loved to throw down everything and join us. But he’s got work to do.”

“Are you thirsty?” Chris asks. “Bertie’s isn’t still around by any chance, is it? I’d love to buy you a drink.”

“Long gone,” she tells him. “Besides, it’s a little early for a drink, don’t you think?”

He glances at his watch. Three thirty seems a perfect time for a drink. He’s glad he packed a flask in his overnight bag. Always keep the escape routes open.

“You’re right,” he tells her. Her abstinence is nearly as disconcerting as Anatole’s weight gain. “So here’s what I want to do,” he announces as a way of retaking charge. “I’d like to check in to the hotel at some point. Maybe grab a quick nap. Then if you give me directions to Anatole’s—”

“Oh, I’ll come pick you up. Not to worry.”

“I can manage on my own. I’ve rented a car.”

“You haven’t changed,” she tells him with a flash of the old Lydia. “Still skittish around the humans.”

“Now prepare me,” he says as they pass the ice cream and samosa stands that flank the entrance to the Walkway. A series of educational signs detail the history of the river, the considerable engineering feat of the bridge, the fire that ended its working life, the years of dereliction, its transformation into the tourist destination it is today. The Walkway is a ribbon of concrete, peopled by mothers pushing strollers, old couples, bicyclists. “Tell me about this Rafa. I like to know the lay of the land in advance.”

You’re just meeting Anatole’s husband, Lydia thinks. You’re not reconnoitering. But then he’s seemed strangely on edge since his arrival. He keeps glancing around. Pay attention to me, she wants to tell him, though she’s learned with her son that instructions like that tend to backfire.

“He’s five years younger than Anatole. Grew up in Washington Heights, works at Marist, which is how I know him. His mom’s Dominican, his dad was a French doctor who ran a clinic in the town where she lived. Passed away a number of years ago. I’m not sure exactly when they came to the States. Rafa can tell you all that when you meet him tonight. His mom’ll be there too. Very creative type, old style bohemian. Paints, does ceramics, makes jewelry—this is one of hers.” Lydia pulls back a sheaf of platinum hair to show off a gaudy orange and blue earring. “I adore her stuff. And she’s still going strong at seventy-something. We should all be so lucky. Oh, and Rafa’s got two sisters who’ll be coming up with their families from the city tomorrow. What else can I say? He’s the best thing that ever happened to Anatole. They’ve been together twelve years, if you can believe it. They’re totally settled and domestic. And I’m not even being ironic when I say that.”

Chris thinks of Anatole’s binges, his frenetic fleeting crushes on teenage boys, his elations and depressions—everything that made him an anarchic and agreeable companion.

“Hard to imagine,” he says.

“Oh, Anatole always wanted to settle down. Even back when you knew him. We both did. It’s just that neither of us had any idea how.”

“Funny, I don’t remember either of you mentioning it at the time.”

“We were way too cool to say what we really wanted.”

“And then you figured it out.”

“Thank God,” she says. “One or both of us would probably be dead right now if we hadn’t. We’d be like Daniel, poor soul. Getting drunk or high every night. Being hungover every morning. You run out of options at a certain point. You come to understand why everybody else is living the boring life. And it doesn’t look so boring anymore.”

The sun on the bright concrete reminds Chris that he’s been in slight hangover mode all day, courtesy of a preposterously late night.

“Tell me more about Daniel,” he says, as they pause, like any tourist, to take in the latest informational placard. “You know, I never liked him all that much. He seemed so…” He searches for the word.

“Gay?” she says.

“Not that. Just too…”

“Campy?” she tries out, and he suddenly remembers a night at Bertie’s, he and Anatole drinking scotch, Daniel at the bar in consummate, platinum drag. And Lydia’s younger brother Craig home from college—fall break it must have been. The details are hazy, but they involve his urging Craig to go talk to that dynamite blonde chick he’d been admiring from afar, and the two of them hitting it off, making out on the dance floor, then disappearing—to Anatole’s prudent alarm and Chris’s schadenfreude—then Craig coming back baffled, frustrated, Daniel as was his wont having ducked out before the inevitable and unwelcome discovery scene, the whole tawdry episode precipitated by nothing other than Chris’s desire to play a punishing little joke—but on whom? On Daniel, whom he didn’t care for (was he just a little jealous of Anatole’s breathless friendship with him?) or on Craig, whom he’d found seethingly attractive?

Or had the joke been on Chris? Craig was as straight as they came, but what Chris wouldn’t have given to overpower him in a dark alley in some other dimension where everything is possible, everything is allowed.

He winces to recall that he once slept with Lydia solely because the unattainable Craig Forman was her brother. In a life of many bad acts, that was one.

Lydia’s been telling him the details of Daniel’s illness. He senses that she’s unfurled this narrative a number of times before. “He wasn’t exactly the best patient,” she recites. “He wouldn’t give up the booze or the drugs, and he kept going off his meds because they made him feel lousy. Anatole was incredibly patient. He had to keep tabs on Daniel to make sure he wasn’t doing something insanely self-destructive. ‘Daniel’s not house-trained,’ he used to complain. They had some terrible fights. Daniel would scream, ‘Just let me fucking die, asshole,’ but Anatole wasn’t having it. He was a saint, really. He saw Daniel through to the very end.”

“Not to play the devil’s advocate,” Chris ventures, “and, of course, I wasn’t there, so I don’t know, but in the abstract at least, isn’t it sort of selfish to keep somebody alive if they don’t want to stay alive anymore? I mean, if I was Daniel, in that situation, I think I’d have wanted to make as quick an exit as possible.”

She shakes her head. “Live fast, die young, stay pretty. Please: tell me you got that out of your system years ago.”

She’s adamant in the way of ex-smokers or drinkers. That tone in itself’s a good enough reason never to give up anything, Chris thinks. “So I guess now you’re going to tell me that I’ve grown old but I haven’t grown up?”

He’s nettled her. It’s not what he wanted to do, but he’s irritated by the sense she exudes of having finally figured things out.

Barely two hours into the weekend and they’re at odds with each other. She envies Anatole, back at Reflexion, blissfully unaware of what he and his silly nostalgia have unleashed.

They’ve come to the edge of the Hudson, that river arising in Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks (as a placard has informed them) and flowing south toward Manahatta. As they leave the shore behind, two hundred feet below them, and venture out over the water, the open vista invites their mood to expand as well. Muhheakantuck. River That Flows Two Ways. Chris seizes the chance to reset the tone.

“I want to hear about life, not death,” he says. “Tell me about your life these days, Lydia. Your family. Who’s this fellow you married? How’d you meet him?”

“How about the service bay at Friendly Honda?” She’s aware she packages her stories, but that doesn’t stop her from delivering her well-rehearsed account of the time she dropped off her Civic for “D” service and Tom was there with a clipboard to write down the mileage and ask about anything she wanted checked out. How he was there at the end of the day when she came back to retrieve the car, some five hundred dollars poorer. This was 1992, and he said, “Um, not to be too delicate about things, but if you haven’t noticed this you might want to,” pointing to her Clinton/Gore bumper sticker that somebody, unbeknownst to her, had vandalized to read Cunt/Gore. They had a laugh, these two complete strangers, and then two days later they ran into each other at ShopRite, and that was pretty much the end of the beginning, as she likes to put it.

“He’s not the person I ever thought I’d marry. We don’t see eye to eye on much of anything, which I guess is what keeps it interesting. He’s pretty conservative. Dole, Bush, McCain—right down the line. He’ll be pulling the lever for Romney in the fall. But hell, even I might be doing that if the economy tanks any more than it has. He’s not Jewish, but he’s very chivalrous toward my mother, which goes a long, long way with her, since obviously she was dead set on my marrying a Jew. Plus he’s as pro-Israel as you can get.

“And one other thing. He’s just a tiny bit homophobic, more knee-jerk than anything else, but sometimes that can be a bit of a problem.”

From this vantage, Poughkeepsie’s a forest from which slender church spires and squat apartment towers rise. To the south, the dark Hudson Highlands; to the north, the blue Catskills. A small plane is making lazy circles above the river. The sound of its engine fades and surges and fades again. Chris catches at a memory, but it recedes before he can grasp it.

“Will Tom be at the wedding?”

“Oh, of course. He and Anatole get along well enough. I mean, without me they’d never be friends, but I have to give it to Tom, he’s grown a lot, he’s a lot more open-minded than I’d ever have thought.”

“And you mentioned a kid,” Chris says nonchalantly.

“Caleb. Our golden boy. Just turned seventeen. He’ll be a junior at Arlington High this fall. He’s been going through a rough patch, but who doesn’t at that age? Life’s been pretty tough on him at times, but all things considered, he’s doing wonderfully. See, he was born with severely damaged nerve endings in both ears. He got cochlear implants when he was two, and that helped a lot. He even plays drums in a band, if you can believe it. Unfortunately, the insurance didn’t cover a whole lot of the implant cost, so we’ve been pretty strapped. It’s why we live with Mom. We’ve never really been able to get ahead. But it’s been completely worth it. You’ll see when you meet him. Anatole’s helped out where he could. He’s like a mentor to Caleb.”

Once again, this theme of Saint Anatole. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d let that old pervert get within ten light years of your son,” Chris can’t resist saying. “I mean, knowing what you know.” He says it as a joke, or sort of a joke, or maybe not a joke at all.

Lydia’s ferocity catches him off guard. “We were a pack of stupid, self-absorbed predators back then. All three of us. It’s a disgrace. I can see that clearly now that I’ve grown up. And Anatole’s grown up too.”

“I’m sure Anatole—” Chris begins to say, but Lydia interrupts him.

“You want to know something? I came out on this bridge once. Back in its derelict days. I came out here with Leigh. Surely you remember Leigh. Leigh Whatever-His-Last-Name-Was.”

She regrets her tone, but she’s already said it.

“Leigh Gerrard,” Chris says. “What did you think?”

“Sorry. Of course you do. Did he never tell you we went out here?”

“No,” Chris says with a feeling of awful emptiness, “he didn’t.”

“We’d been up to the Vanderbilt mansion. I guess it was our first date, if you can call it that. A couple of bottles of wine and a baggie full of psilocybin mushrooms. Very glamorous. Anyway, we somehow ended up out on the bridge. I guess Leigh must have dared me into it. I was scared shitless we’d plunge to our deaths. I’ve never told anybody this, so consider yourself privileged.”

“I take it Our Former Boy of the Mall’s not invited,” Chris says, knowing all along, without wanting to know it, that the secret spur to his accepting Anatole’s invitation was the possibility that Leigh might be there. How wondrously strange it would be to see him across the room, drink in hand, all grown up now, handsome but still somehow in full (or even diminished, he’ll settle for that) possession of whatever ineffable qualities had made him so absurdly compelling.

Lydia dashes any hope of that.

“Of course not. Nobody knows what happened to him. Unless you do.”

“I don’t, no. I cut my ties with everything and everybody when I left. It’s what I had to do.”

“Yeah, remind me. Smash all the china and then just leave. Though I give it to you; for a bull, you were pretty exquisite. But I just have one little question, after all these years. Mind if I ask it? You owe me a secret, after all.”

He supposes he’s glad they’re having this out the way they are. “Shoot,” he says.

“Let me put it delicately, okay? Did Leigh seduce you too? Or did you seduce him? That’s always been the big question for us earthlings left behind. Did the two of you run off together, as the evidence, or at least the timing, would seem to suggest?”

Chris can hear perfectly well the question she doesn’t ask: Were you as treacherous as we’ve had to assume? And if you were then, are you still now?

“No,” he tells her. “I never fucked Leigh, if that’s what you’re asking. Trust me. I wouldn’t have done that. My leaving had nothing to do with Leigh one way or the other.”

“Then why?”

But Chris doesn’t say anything. He lights another cigarette. He used to have a wonderful stylish way with his cigarettes, but now it just seems haunted and automatic. Overhead, the little plane is practicing stunts, showing off for the tourists on the Walkway.

“Whatever you might think,” he says finally, “not all of us were predators.”

She was looking forward to having Chris on her own for a couple of hours before Anatole got hold of him. Now she wonders exactly what it was she was looking forward to.

The house smells of incense. Rafa likes to light a few sticks an hour or so before guests arrive; he says it wakes the place up. Anatole’s not so crazy about the practice. “Secondhand smoke. I don’t really want to get lung cancer. Can’t we just use Glade instead?” To which Rafa will usually point out: “Honey, you smoked for twenty-something years. The damage is done. And anyway”—he shoos the rising vapor toward Anatole—” this is holy smoke. Buddhist nuns made it from sacred trees.”

Tonight the incense masks but doesn’t erase other delicious odors. Anatole peers into the small kitchen and offers the obligatory but heartfelt “Smells wonderful!”

“Well I hope so,” Rafa tells him. He’s barefoot, in gym shorts and a paint-spattered T-shirt. He’s taken the day off from work, hasn’t yet shaved or showered. His shaggy dark hair is all a lovely mess, just asking to have a hand run through it. “I’ve been slaving in here for hours.”

Over the years they’ve developed a parody domesticity cobbled together from a shared childhood diet of I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, The Flintstones; it overlays, not unlike incense, the real and mostly satisfying household routines they’ve fallen into.

“So has he arrived? Have you seen him?” Rafa asks as Anatole kisses him on the back of the neck, massages his shoulders, succumbs to temptation. “Hey, don’t mess with the chef,” Rafa warns. “Things have entered a particularly delicate phase.”

“So what has the maestro conjured up? And yes, Lydia allowed me a single, tantalizing glimpse. He hasn’t changed a bit, you know. Except for an atrocious haircut. So maybe he has changed. Oh my god: what if he’s gone and lost his sense of style? That was his only real asset, you know. But it was a thoroughly impeccable asset.”

“I tell you, Mr. Kitten, you’re still in love. And I’m going to be the jealous husband all evening. Can you hand me that bowl of walnuts, please?”

“Are those beets?”

“It’s going to be a beet and walnut puree. Traditional Georgian dish.” He brandishes a tattered cookbook. “And I don’t mean American Georgian. Perfect for this warm weather.”

“It was like a vision,” Anatole admits over the whir of the Cuisinart, “having him appear in Reflexion just for an instant like that. Then Lydia spirited him away. God knows what the two of them have gotten up to this afternoon!”

“Oh, by the way, she called to say they went out on the Walkway. And she deposited him at The Inn at the Falls. And he rented a car and will show up on his own. She gave him directions. She says he won’t get lost. He’s a world traveler these days. He lives in—Nigeria, I think she said.”

“What?”

“That’s what I said. I’m sure we’ll ask him all about it. Now I’m going to go take a shower and freshen up. If the timer dings, could you take the zucchini boats out of the oven?”

“You do understand why I’m anxious, don’t you?”

Rafa turns and puts his arms around him. “Of course, Mr. Kitten. You loved him and he didn’t love you back. That always hurts. But it’s never the end of the world. You should know that better than anybody.”

His room at the inn is comfortable, clean, and reliably air-conditioned, with a view of the eponymous falls. He splashes cold water on his face, turns on the TV, searches for Al Jazeera, but as in Denver the channel is nowhere to be found, so he settles on CNN.

Lying down on the bed is a mistake; his fading hangover decides to make one last stand.

He feels shredded by Lydia’s attentions. Was she always so aggressive? Or maybe his younger self had more energy for that kind of sparring, maybe he used to feel emotions mattered more, that he and his friends were staking a claim to something important when they talked so endlessly about their feelings. But Lydia and Anatole never knew him, did they? Those secret trips to New York, the teenage boys on whose blank, bought bodies he’d enact those tawdry, stirring tableaux he’d scripted in advance and would savor for melancholy days afterward. Anatole and Lydia would have been scandalized, had they known. But they hadn’t known. Truth be told, despite his genuine affection, he always slightly despised their cluelessness.

He hasn’t been paying any attention to the background noise of news burbling into his room, but the phrase “Niger Delta” snags him. The flawless mannequin of a newscaster reports that two hundred people have died in an explosion in the troubled Rivers state. Ten seconds of inferno footage roll by. “The victims,” says the newscaster, “were engaged in a practice known as bunkering, by which oil is illegally siphoned from the thousands of miles of pipeline that crisscross the region. Most of the victims, including many women and children, were incinerated instantly. The area has seen increasing strife in recent years as armed militias—”

He clicks off the remote and shuts his eyes. His hangover throbs. He sat far too long in that chic bar in Hell’s Kitchen last night, a middle-aged out-of-towner methodically bunkering one scotch after another, as out of place as he could be and yet perfectly invisible to a roomful of callow young men chatting and flirting, oblivious to the sad old wolf lingering at the edge of the woods.

He can see too, on the back of his eyelids, the scene CNN hasn’t shown, but which will have been broadcast in graphic detail on the Nigeria News channel—a jumble of seared human sausages, plump charred casings burst open, extruding tender pink meat.

He’s seen his share of both corpses and boys. Too often they’ve been one and the same.

Half an hour of shut-eye, maybe forty-five minutes, he thinks, having long ago learned to catch sleep when he can. He’ll be a little late to Anatole’s, but that’s also a lesson learned long ago: always keep them waiting a bit.

Selfishly, he wants a few minutes alone with Chris, since Lydia’s gotten her share already. But it’s not to be. Lydia’s the first to arrive, and Anatole hides his disappointment as he hugs her, pecks her on the cheek, relieves her of the bottle of wine she holds out.

She can read him thoroughly. “I know,” she says. “I should’ve held off a bit. I wasn’t thinking.”

“No, no,” he tells her. “Chris and I’ll have plenty of time to catch up.” Though just when that plenty of time might show itself eludes him; he’s realizing how heavily scheduled everything is, starting right now and going all day tomorrow till the chauffeured Rolls Silver Cloud spirits the newlyweds away from the music and dancing at Whispering Creek to their honeymoon suite at the Millbrook Inn and the next morning—Cinderella’s carriage having metamorphosed into a pumpkin—via a more modest car service to Newark and their flight to Madrid.

“It’s not like I’ve exactly caught up with him,” Lydia admits. “I’d forgotten how good he is at extracting all sorts of information without giving up more than a shred in return. Maybe if we’ve both got him in our crosshairs he’ll be a little more forthcoming.”

“We’ll get what we can get. Did he tell you anything about what he’s up to in—did you say Nigeria?”

“Not a word. It’s a little embarrassing, but he maneuvered me into talking about myself for practically the whole time. And you and Rafa, of course. He seemed to want to know what he’s getting himself in for.”

“I’m glad he’s still Secret Agent Man. I’m glad he hasn’t given that up.”

“I don’t think he’s given anything up. He seems caught in a time warp. I don’t think life’s touched him the way it’s touched you and me. Though that’s just a guess.”

Anatole understands he shouldn’t be thrilled by that observation, but secretly he is. He wants Chris to have stayed exactly the same.

“Well, let’s have a drink, shall we? Rafa’s got dinner under control. Miosotis has had her nap and her tea, so she’s good to go.”

Lydia wonders if she should mention their talk of Leigh; now that she’s conjured him, she can’t quite dispel him. And she can’t shake the feeling that it somehow has the potential to threaten the happiness of Anatole’s weekend. She trusts Chris won’t bring up Our Boy of the Mall, but who knows what happens when old friends get together and drink too much wine and the talk inevitably turns to the past? With any luck, Rafa and his mother will be a firewall against too much of that.

Miosotis is ensconced in the comfortable wing chair by the fireplace. She looks wonderfully regal this evening, dressed in a black skirt and purple blouse, over which she wears a vest embroidered with bright flowers. She’s pulled back her long silver hair in a way that accentuates her high cheekbones and thin lips. At her throat rests a silver brooch of her own design. Rings encrust bony fingers. Only her feet seem incongruous, clad in those hideous crocs that are all the rage; hers are lime green—and comfortable as all get out, according to Miosotis. Lydia wouldn’t be caught dead in them.

“Don’t get up, my dear,” Lydia tells her, crossing the room to bestow a kiss on her forehead. “You’re looking very chic, as always.”

“These days I just throw myself together any old way.”

“Well, it always seems to come out beautifully. Now, what’ll you have to drink? I’m going to have a nice white wine spritzer. Would you like me to make you one too?”

“Gin and tonic, please,” Miosotis tells her. “Extra strong. Now, remind me, who’s this man who’s coming to dinner? I can’t quite get him straight in my head.”

“Don’t worry. None of us can,” Lydia says, thinking she should have put her foot down the first she heard of Anatole’s invitation plans. One thing Anatole’s never quite learned is how to protect himself.

Professional habits die hard: before setting out he checks, then double-checks, the oil, the tire pressure, the radiator fluid, the gas level. He takes a circuitous route that by degrees modulates from evasive to leisurely. Evening sun drenches the city. Clouds billow peach and salmon colored in the downpour of light, and for the prolonged moment Poughkeepsie seems nothing less than paradise. Unarmored, unarmed, he drives down leafy residential streets, past grand nineteenth-century houses, some still in good nick, others in sad decay; then along other streets populated by their more modest twentieth-century brethren. The orderly traffic is simply traffic. Intersections pose no hazard. Men lingering on street corners simply linger. A bit of trash in the gutter isn’t worth a second glance. He hardly even bothers to look in the rearview mirror to see who might be profiling him.

It’s a stranger who answers the door of the neat little house on Garden Street. “Come in, come in,” he says, extending his hand. “You must be Chris. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“And you must be Rafael. I’ve heard practically nothing about you. Except for what Lydia told me this afternoon.”

“Lydia has such romantic ideas about me. But I’m not really a gangster, I swear.”

“Then I’m disappointed,” Chris tells him. “I guess I’ll be going now.”

“Well, maybe occasionally,” Rafa says. “When things get boring.”

Their banter, paltry as it is, nonetheless establishes a tone between them, and Chris is relieved. Despite Lydia’s descriptive litany, he hasn’t really known what to expect. Rafa’s not unhandsome. Maybe a tad on the heavy side, with thickish wrists and neck, but a nice chin, large, attractive brown eyes, a noble nose. A dark stubble covers his lower face.

Handing over his bottle of wine, Chris follows his barefoot host into a cramped living room.

“So you found us,” Anatole says. “I was starting to worry you’d gotten lost. I should’ve given you my phone number.”

“Sorry I’m late. I wasn’t lost at all. Turns out I still have a surprisingly accurate map of Poughkeepsie filed away in my head. The instant I turned on Garden Street, I recognized exactly where I was. I even remembered this house. Didn’t it used to be blue?”

“Good memory. The place was pretty run-down when we bought it. Which is why we could afford it. We’ve been working on it since—Rafa? When did we buy this house?”

“2005,” Rafa says. “Why can you never remember that?”

“I have a mental block about lots of things. As you know!”

“This, by the way, is my mother, Miosotis,” Rafa says.

Chris shakes the hand of the elegant older woman whose fine features have been blurred in her son.

“Here, let me give you the house tour.” Anatole clutches Chris’s arm. “Come. Follow me. This obviously is the living room. We’ve redone the floors. Rafa chose the apricot for the walls. I wanted something darker, but he was totally right. And here we have the kitchen, with these horrid tiles that need replacing.”

It’s the old Anatole, the awkwardness masking the nervousness masking the endearing enthusiasm. Chris relaxes into the moment, accepts the glass of wine Anatole offers, allows himself to be led through the dining room, a study cluttered with multiple computers, up the steep stairs to the blue-hued master bedroom with its four-poster bed that’s too large for the space but which, Anatole explains breathlessly, they couldn’t resist. Then here’s the tidy guest bedroom where Miosotis is staying, and the bathroom which unfortunately is very small, and another room used mainly for storage, but if they ever decide to have a child—

Chris stops him. “No? Really?”

“That’s a joke,” Anatole tells him. “Well, sort of a joke. I mean, you never know. What do they say? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in a baby carriage.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Strange that this is how they arrive at the first moment of intimacy they’ve shared in a quarter century. It’s the moment when it all becomes real to Chris. Anatole and Rafa aren’t playing. This is their life, which they take with exactly the seriousness with which people are allowed—even expected—to take their lives.

“Don’t worry, I don’t think there’s a baby in the works. But then I never thought marriage was in the works either. We do keep a turkey baster downstairs in case some frisky lesbians stop by for a visit. Come, let me show you the garden. We’ll take the back stairs. For some strange reason, small as it is, this house has two sets of stairs. Designed for hanky-panky, I guess.”

Anatole has successfully deflected the serious moment, and Chris supposes he’s grateful for that. At the bottom of the stairs, Anatole opens a door onto a flagstone patio with table and chairs, and beyond that the back garden in early bloom. Chris doesn’t know flowers, but he knows enchanting profusion when he sees it. For the second time this evening a paradise—this one small, fenced in, amply protected—beckons him.

“Mostly Rafa’s doing,” Anatole explains. “But I’ve been learning. Turns out I’ve got a bit of a green thumb too. Chartreuse, you might say. I put in all these Siberian irises myself last fall, and just look at them now.”

Delicate white blossoms float above slender foliage. White butterflies flitter among them, looking like blossoms that have detached themselves and become airborne.

Rafa has brought out appetizers—black olives in a bowl, several cheeses on a board, a basket of bread, a whole smoked trout on a platter, salsa and chips. No one ever minds that he overdoes it.

“Now that Anatole’s bored you to death with every drafty window we’ve replaced and every bathroom tile we haven’t, has he told you we’re thinking of going solar? Sounds like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? Though we’d have to cut down the big catalpa tree in front.”

“Which I’m reluctant to do,” Anatole adds.

“If we don’t all go solar, and pretty soon,” Lydia says, “there’s no future for any of us, humans or trees or anything else. I know—it’s a difficult trade-off.”

“It is a difficult trade-off,” Rafa affirms. “Anatole and I go back and forth. What do you think, Chris?”

Put on the spot, he laughs nervously—that hiccup he picked up in Iraq a few years back and hasn’t been able to get rid of.

“Go with it,” he says. “A tree’s a tree. Lots worse happens in the world than a tree gets cut down. Sorry, Anatole. That’s my two cents—for what it’s worth. I’m actually surprised not to see more evidence of solar since I’ve been back in the States. Every fucking house in the country should have solar panels on the roof.”

His lurch into vehemence surprises them. Surprises him as well. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just that, in my line of work…” He hesitates. He knows he’s a mystery. It’s the one card he’s always held. He’s reluctant to let it go.

“So just what is your line of work these days?” Lydia prompts.

Chris barks that laugh. “These days? I work for an oil company.”

“In Nigeria,” Anatole says.

“Yep. Place called Port Harcourt. The Niger Delta. I’ve been there a couple of years. In my line of work I move around a lot. I was in Iraq for nearly six years. Way too long. After Baghdad, Port Harcourt’s fucking retirement.”

“I’ve never even heard of Port Harcourt,” Anatole says. “Or the Niger Delta, to tell you the truth.”

“Why should you? Port Harcourt’s nothing but a hellhole and I should know, I’ve seen enough of the planet’s hellholes. The delta’s ruined these days, but it’s still one of those truly grand things—a big river meeting the ocean.”

Lydia’s not so easily deflected. “You keep saying my line of work. But what exactly is your line of work?”

“Right now it’s called Risk Management. Back when I was in Iraq, it was PMC.”

“In English?” Anatole asks.

“Private military contractor. Basically I do security, whatever it takes to enable other folks to do their more important jobs. In Iraq that was Coalition contractors repairing the power grid. In Port Harcourt it mostly means making sure foreign engineers don’t get kidnapped on their way out to the rigs and refineries.”

“So you’re some kind of glorified bodyguard?” Lydia suggests.

“I don’t know about the glorified part.”

“Tell me you weren’t with Blackwater in Iraq,” Rafa says sternly.

“Rafa spends all his time on the Internet,” Anatole explains. “He reads, like, five newspapers a day.”

“I procrastinate a lot,” Rafa admits.

“I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near Blackwater. Blackwater was everything that was sublimely fucked up about the occupation. No, in Iraq I worked for this little Brit company, Spartan, that specialized in covert profiles.”

“I have no idea what any of that means,” Anatole says, trying to suppress a panicked feeling that Chris has somehow gone and gotten himself in over his head. But that’s ridiculous; of course Chris knows what he’s doing. It’s just Anatole’s own ignorance, his lack of worldliness.

“It means, basically,” Chris explains, “nobody can fuck with you if they don’t know you’re there.”

“I can see how you’d be good at that,” Lydia says.

“It’s all about trying to blend in. You drive beat-up cars with local license plates. You wrap your head in a shemagh and hang prayer beads from the rearview mirror and slap on some Islamic bumper stickers. You keep your guns well out of sight. You don’t swan around in a convoy of brand new, obviously weaponized 4x4s with a chopper escort overhead. You slip in, you deliver your guys to wherever they need to go, you slip out. You’re long gone before the bad guys even realize you were there. So yeah, that’s been my line of work for quite a while now. And I’m still mostly in one piece—masha’Allah, as my Iraqi brothers say.”

Lydia’s not sure what she expected, but it’s definitely not this. She feels a little flummoxed, even betrayed, though she knows that’s completely irrational. Whatever tiny claim she ever had on Chris and his future expired long ago; still, it’s as if the languorous, world-weary glam and punk rock devotee she once cherished beyond words has been resurrected only in order to vanish before her eyes.

She’s a little horrified to hear herself say primly, “Chris, this all sounds just terrifying. I can’t believe it’s what you’ve been doing with your life. I was imagining something so very different.”

“Like what, I wonder?”

“I don’t know. I mean, you go from owning a quiet little record store in Poughkeepsie to the most dangerous place in the world? How does that happen?”

As if owning a record store in Poughkeepsie hadn’t been dangerous too, he wants to remind them, but what he says is, “You join the army, for starters.”

“You didn’t!” Anatole says.

“Yeah, I did.”

“But wasn’t your dad? Didn’t you grow up on bases? I mean, didn’t you just hate all that? Don’t tell me my Alzheimer’s is making this up.”

“I did hate all that,” Chris says. “And my dad was Air Force, so yeah, he ragged me no end about joining the army. And maybe I did it in part to piss him off. You know, demean myself by becoming the lowliest of grunts. Who even cares anymore? The fact is, I did it. After I left Poughkeepsie I went back to Denver, got a job working with a bunch of tattooed dropouts at a health food store, but pretty soon that was too dead-end even for me. So one day I let some recruitment guy at the local mall sweet-talk me into signing up, and before I knew it I was off to Fort Benning. It was all stupid as fuck, because almost everything about the army’s stupid as fuck, but at the same time it was kind of intoxicating. I mean, here’s this guy who can’t run, can’t jump, can’t shoot. Who likes showers and clean clothes and independence and keeping to himself. I was fucking twenty-eight years old, and I gave all that up. How absurd was that? But I learned how to do all those things I never thought I could do. And you know what? I got really fucking good at them.”

They’re in the palm of his hand. Nobody’s bothering to eat Rafa’s appetizers—except Rafa’s mother, who munches methodically, imperturbably, as if she’s in another place entirely.

“Okay,” Anatole says, “I’m impressed. I think. How does it go? Join the army, visit exotic places, meet interesting people, then kill them. You must have done all that, right?”

“I was basically everywhere you’d never want to be in the nineties,” Chris hears himself saying. “Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia. Kosovo. That’s when I got out. Thirteen years, and I’d had enough. I was forty-one. I didn’t want to spend another instant of my life locating yet another mass grave full of massacred Muslims. And then of course 9/11 comes along. I couldn’t care less about 9/11, to tell you the truth. We had it coming. By the time we staged Shock and Awe, I’d been out of action three years, I didn’t believe in a single thing we were doing over there, but when an old buddy from the Rangers called me up and told me about the private military companies ramping up big time with all the civilian contractors coming in for the quote, unquote rebuilding process, well, I realized all I wanted was to be back in the thick of things. So I went. Just like how I’d gone off to Fort Benning in the first place. Because that’s what I’d learned about myself in the army, for all its fucking stupidity. You can sit on the sidelines and be witty and critical and aloof, or you can be in the thick of it. The huge joke of my life is that I got myself all wrong for such a long time. I thought I wanted to be on the sidelines, running my little record store in Poughkeepsie, hiding out from the world, but I didn’t, really. If you’re going to live in the fucking world, then fucking live in it. Honestly, I’ve never felt so alive as when I was ferrying some scared-shitless civil engineer from the Jordanian border along that long, lonesome highway across the western desert, then around the fucking death trap of the Fallujah bypass and the Ramadi ring road, and on into Baghdad and the Green Zone.”

He knows he’s boasting—but hasn’t he earned the right? Faced with evidence of their settled lives, doesn’t his have its own peculiar, not unenviable shine?

At the same time he’s embarrassed he’s let his guard down, ashamed he’s said so much. How to account for such a breach of discipline? How could the presence of old friends he’s scarcely thought of in years melt his resolve like that?

Lydia and Rafa carry the mostly untouched appetizers into the kitchen. Chris excuses himself to have a much-needed cigarette on the front stoop while dinner’s being put on the table. The peach and salmon clouds of earlier have turned the color of slate. Anatole joins him, sensing he’s going to have to keep snatching moments like this. They’re all he’ll get. He hasn’t realized how much he’s missed Chris, how famished for him he’s been, how complete a stranger he is now.

“I quit several years ago,” he tells Chris. “But I still get that craving from time to time. Mind if I have a drag? We won’t tell Rafa.” There’s something stupendously sexy in the idea of sharing a cigarette with Chris.

Disappointingly, Chris shakes one from his pack. “Go ahead—treat yourself.” He flicks his lighter, and Anatole, with despair, inhales the familiar fumes.

“You’re such a bad influence,” he says. “I love it. I’ve had to get rid of practically all my bad habits since you last saw me.”

“Because of Rafa?”

“For Rafa, I like to say.”

“And is that what you think as well?”

“Definitely. I know it’s a cliché, but meeting Rafa really did save my life. I don’t think I’m exaggerating.” He takes a deep drag. “Ugh. This is one habit I think I really have kicked. You know, I went through some pretty terrible times after you left, especially when Daniel got sick. I was absolutely convinced I was going to get sick too. I mean, how could I not? But the tests kept coming back negative. I was sure they were missing something, like I had a strain of the virus too subtle or new to show up. Things got so bad, I even said to one of the doctors, I don’t think I can handle this. And you know what he did? He just looked at me and said in this stern voice, Cut out the booze. I mean, was it that obvious? Maybe I wasn’t all that different from a lot of other gay guys he was dealing with. Hysterical faggots hitting the bottle because their friends and lovers were dying and there wasn’t anything anybody could do about it. But you know what? I took his advice. I even went to AA meetings, though after a while I just couldn’t stand that crap. Finding your inner power and all. Maybe the guys there weren’t drinking anymore, but at what price?

“Anyway, I managed on my own. I limped along. I had good weeks and bad and I fell spectacularly off the wagon a few times. Then I met Rafa. There’s something so measured about him. He has two drinks and that’s basically it. And because I wanted to impress him, I made myself stop at two drinks as well, because whenever I went beyond two drinks I could see he thought less of me, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to live up to some idea of me that would be lovable. I took a good hard look at my life and said to myself, You know, Rafael Pujol is your last chance. If you blow this one, there’s not going to be another. And then I thought, this is why I’ve been spared. God wanted to give me the opportunity of Rafa. So I either seize it or I don’t. Do you even want to hear any of this? It must seem so boring compared to where life’s taken you.”

“Of course I want to hear,” Chris answers, his ears still ringing with his own ill-advised account of himself, about which Anatole hasn’t said a word—the way you pretend not to notice an embarrassing incident. Lydia and Anatole seem to have agreed in advance on the “not just surviving but thriving” script for themselves. It’s impressive but a little sinister. And he’s really not sure how bearable the evening’s going to be with the two drink limit Anatole is suggesting as the standard for earning Rafa’s approval.

Not that Chris needs Rafa’s approval. He long ago went past the need for anybody’s approval.

Lydia sticks her head out the front door. “Hey, boys. Dinner’s ready.” Anatole flings his cigarette away, but not quickly enough. “Anatole,” she clucks, shaking a finger at him.

“I know, I know,” he says.

Once again, Rafa’s outdone himself. There’s Georgian beet and walnut puree, a radish and kohlrabi salad, zucchini boats stuffed with rice, onions and sausage with a sprinkling of paprika and parsley on top.

Dinner’s an opportunity to reset the conversation, and they try. They make a point of bringing Miosotis in, coaxing her to tell stories about Rafa as a boy—which she seems happy to do, in fluent, lightly accented English. “Such a solemn little fellow, so serious,” she says. “But imaginative. He had this made-up language all his own. He’d sing songs in it. He’d recite poems in meter that rhymed. His father asked him once, at the dinner table, what he called that language of his. And do you know what he said? He said the name of his language was Buffalo Latin. Do you remember that?”

Rafa shakes his head. “Mama’s the one with all the imagination,” he says.

“You just don’t remember,” she tells him. “Why would I make up a thing like that?”

“How could I forget a thing like that?”

“Buffalo Latin,” she says grandly. “I was sure my little boy was gonna grow up to be a priest.”

“You’d have killed me if I’d become a priest,” Rafa teases her. “Anyway, I’m not a pedophile. I wouldn’t have been a good fit.”

She chuckles comfortably. Chris wonders what Anatole thinks of her; she must seem like some kind of dream parent after his own rejecting mother. Are those cruel parents of his even still alive? Did Anatole ever manage to reconcile with them? And he had a younger brother, didn’t he? Who rejected him as well? He hasn’t thought of any of this in years; now there’s so much he wants to ask Anatole, but he’s not sure when he’ll have a chance. It’s not a conversation all that well suited to the occasional cigarette break.

“Mama’s always been very accepting,” Rafa is saying. “Of all my creative peculiarities. The gay thing was just one more item on what by then had become a fairly long list.”

Miosotis taps him fondly, flirtatiously on the shoulder. “Honey, I knew you were gay even before you were speaking Buffalo Latin.”

The food is delicious—a million times better than Chris is used to eating. His wine glass, however, is empty already, though he sees everyone else’s is still half full. Except for Miosotis’s. Hers isn’t yet empty, but it’s getting there.

Usually by this time of the evening he’s well into the scotch or Jack Daniel’s or whatever he’s managed to procure. He’s not as bad as some of his colleagues, not by a long shot; he’s cut way back since the Green Zone.

Miosotis comes to the rescue. “Rafa,” she says imperiously, extending her wine glass. “Pour me some more. And pour this gentleman some more as well. My son can be so damn abstemious,” she explains. “I don’t know where he gets it. Certainly not from me. Not from his father either. We used to have such parties. Up all night, listening to records, dancing. Making music ourselves. Americans don’t do that, I’ve noticed. They depend on others to make the music for them. Not us! We Latinos invite all the neighbors so nobody will call the cops. Every house has a few drums, castanets, a guitar—you name it. Anything that’ll make noise. And so we make beautiful noise till dawn comes. And nobody complains, because everybody’s making beautiful noise together.”

“When Chris lived in Poughkeepsie he owned this fabulous little independent record store,” Anatole tells Miosotis as Chris gratefully sips his replenished drink. “Immaculate Blue. I always loved that name. Where’d you ever come up with a name like that?”

“I have no idea,” Chris admits truthfully.

“So do you still keep up with the latest music? You used to be encyclopedic. I still have all the albums you made me buy. Only trouble is, the turntable broke at some point and I never got around to getting a replacement because who has a turntable anymore.”

“I don’t really follow music much these days,” Chris says. “I guess I just lost interest.” In the army, he made a decision not to stand out in any way, so he only listened to what the other guys listened to, which was mostly top-forty shit, and then rap came along, and hip-hop, none of which even seemed like music to him anymore. And the music he used to love—David Bowie and Psychedelic Furs and The Smiths and The Cure, all that glorious, fatuous, maundering self-absorption—by then it had shrunk to nothing in the scheme of things.

When he arrived in Nigeria, he heard for the first time the fiercely political, spiritual, sexual music of Fela Kuti, and for the first time in years something stirred in him. He doesn’t imagine they’ve ever heard of Fela Kuti.

“I don’t think I gave music up so much as I outgrew it,” he says, even as a stray memory materializes: GIs in their barracks in the Green Zone, putting together and videotaping an elaborate dance and lip-sync routine set to Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.” He remembers two soldiers—eighteen, nineteen, handsome as all get out, kids bored and scared and very far from home—practicing their moves together with big, blissed-out smiles on their young faces. He despises Lady Gaga—the Taliban and Al Qaeda are exactly right to want to eradicate our decadent asses from the planet—but at the same time he was moved by the spirit that led those grunts to try to express whatever it was they were trying to express, a kind of inexpressible, young, sexed-up, anarchic energy. Three days later the prettier of the two, out on dismounted patrol in the Karadah district, which was supposed to be relatively safe, stepped on an IED that blew off both his legs as well as his genitals.

Anatole’s down on his hands and knees rummaging among the CDs shelved in a little tower by the side of a bookcase filled with cookbooks. Having found what he was looking for, he brandishes a jewel box with a pink triangle emblazoned on a black background.

“Bronski Beat,” he exclaims. “Remember them? ‘Small Town Boy’ used to practically be my national anthem.”

The melancholy, beat-driven music emerging from the speakers takes Chris back, despite himself. It had been his national anthem as well, though he’d never have admitted it. But then his private life had been so much more complicated and problematic than Anatole’s admirably public one. It was Anatole who proudly and unabashedly proclaimed, “I love boys!” It was Chris who took the train down to New York to pay teenage hustlers to have sex with each other while he watched. Jimmy Somerville’s falsetto is a time machine transporting him back to that sweet, sad, vanished world. Is Somerville even still alive, Chris wonders, or did the tsunami of AIDS sweep him out to sea along with all the others?

Rafa pours Miosotis and Chris more wine—their fourth glass. Rafa even refills for himself and Anatole.

Lydia puts a hand over the mouth of her glass when the bottle comes her way. “I can’t afford to be hungover tomorrow,” she says. “And you boys don’t want to be either, if you know what’s good for you.”

“By the way,” Anatole tells Chris, “You’re going to love the music at the reception. You’ll see what I mean.”

Chris desperately needs another cigarette. And if there’s a way of getting to the flask of vodka he stashed in the glove compartment of the rental car, he’d love to manage that too.

“I’m afraid our friend’s being a naughty influence,” Lydia confides to Rafa. She scrapes the dinner plates and then hands them to him to put in the dishwasher. “Anatole’s out there with him stealing puffs.”

“Oh, let him,” Rafa says. “Sometimes it’s good to invite the bad habits back for a visit, just so you remember why you kicked them out.”

“Let’s hope.”

“What does that mean?”

Lydia wonders whether to proceed. She doesn’t want to be an alarmist. On the other hand, she’ll staunchly defend her own; that’s who she is, and Anatole and Rafa long ago became as much her own as immediate family.

“Anatole seems a little smitten with the past tonight. Don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t been noticing that, particularly.”

Well, she’s certainly noticed. Chris has deftly scooped Anatole up into the palm of his hand. Those stolen cigarettes on the front stoop seem just the tip of some dangerous iceberg. She can’t believe Rafa’s not irked or rattled or distressed by it.

“Ugh. This is such a weird evening,” she says. “I’m not at all sure I like who Chris has become. Though I can’t tell whether he’s just the same person he was all along, and I’m the one who’s become something different. But this military stuff is just creepy. I mean, he was always an enigma, but now that I know what he’s up to, he’s sort of downright sinister. Don’t you think?”

She hates her tone.

“I have to admit,” Rafa replies, reasonably enough, “I don’t completely get him either. And I really don’t know enough about what he does to know whether it’s something I approve of or not. It all does seem a little dubious, but then lots of people might say the same thing about the more arcane aspects of IT work.”

“It’s not even remotely the same.”

“That was a joke. Relax, Lydia. You’re very uptight this evening. You and Anatole both. I wouldn’t call it ‘smitten,’ exactly, but I can definitely say this: Chris does something to the both of you.”

“I’m just being protective. It’s a mother thing. I don’t want bad things to happen to people I care about. I mean, what’s Anatole told you about Chris?”

He doesn’t look at her. He methodically inserts dishes into the dishwasher. “He told me Chris broke his heart. And that it was a really, really long time ago. And that the world’s in a different place now. He’s in a different place. And I believe him. I don’t really need to know any more than that.”

She’s surprised she never thought of it before, but now it seems clear. “You don’t get jealous, do you?”

The last plate stowed, he shuts the dishwasher door, then looks at her with that serious, kind expression that makes her trust him, that makes her think he’s decent and good and exactly right for Anatole. “No,” he says, “I actually don’t think I do. I used to. You should have seen me twenty years ago. Now I don’t believe in tempests. All I really believe in these days are tea pots. Are you worried Anatole’s kissing Chris out on the front stoop right now? I’m not.” Swiftly, unexpectedly, he throws his arms around her and plants a kiss on her lips. “There!” he says. “Don’t worry. Tonight, everybody’s kissing everybody!”

Miosotis stands in the doorway watching. “And I only came in here to see about dessert,” she says. “And to see if there’s another bottle of wine.”

“I wonder what you make of all this,” Lydia says.

“Don’t worry,” Miosotis tells her. “At my advanced age, I’ve become a great connoisseur of the human comedy.”

The season’s first fireflies are out, pulsing against the dark shrubs.

When Anatole points them out Chris says, “I haven’t seen fireflies in years. None in Iraq. None in Nigeria either. I think I even forgot they existed.”

His cigarette adds its own pulse to the night.

“I really shouldn’t,” Anatole says, allowing Chris to light one for him as well. He’s a little perturbed how natural it feels to smoke again. “Lightning bugs, we used to call them. But they’re not anything like lightning, really.” He hasn’t been able to keep his eyes off Chris all evening. At the dinner table he found himself on the verge of staring outright, though he contented himself with measured, abstemious glances. Crow’s feet radiate from the corners of Chris’s eyes, he’s noticed; there’s a crease in his brow that doesn’t go away. Time hasn’t diminished him, exactly, but it’s passed a stern hand over him. A curious agitation has replaced that indolent, floating quality he used to adore—as if, even in the midst of this reunion with old friends, Chris is impatient to be on his way. But where to? What business could call him so urgently?

“Speaking of lightning,” Anatole says. “Do you remember the first time we ever met? On the Metro North platform at Croton-Harmon. In a really scary thunderstorm. You were funny about it, you actually managed to calm my nerves.”

“I honestly don’t remember that,” Chris tells him. “Sorry.”

“You must’ve been pretty surprised to hear from me after all this time. I remember sending that email and thinking, He won’t even remember who I am. But I was really, really in love with you, you know. There, now I’ve said it. And it’s not just the wine talking.”

He waits for a response. The ember at the tip of Chris’s cigarette glows. The scattered fireflies throb. I should’ve turned the porch light on, Anatole thinks; then I could at least read his expression.

“Nobody should ever have been in love with me,” Chris says. “I’m just sorry I didn’t understand that back when I knew you. Things wouldn’t have happened the way they did.”

“What does that mean?”

“To be honest? It means I’d never have known you. I’d have closed that chapter before it even started. Instead of letting us get into the mess we did.”

“But I’m glad I knew you. However fucked up things were. I wouldn’t have missed what you call that mess for the world.”

“Yeah, well, you were one of the lucky ones,” Chris said. “At least you managed to survive. And look at you now. Getting married! And Lydia tells me Reflexion’s become a local empire.”

“I haven’t done badly. But I don’t know at all how you’ve done. I know, you’ve got a job that sounds exotic and dangerous and, frankly, a little perverse. But what’ve you been thinking and feeling all these years? As a matter of fact, what were you even thinking and feeling when you were living here in Poughkeepsie?”

“Poughkeepsie,” Chris says. He wonders if he’s ever spoken honestly to Anatole before. He wonders if Anatole has any idea of the gift he’s being given. “Poughkeepsie was just an accident. A place to hide and catch my breath for a while. It’s all so long ago, and so fucking sad. I came to Poughkeepsie with a broken heart. My punishment for breaking somebody else’s heart. I’d never have said this to you back when we were friends.”

“But we’re still friends. I’ve never considered you not my friend.”

“Lydia thinks you’re some kind of saint. And probably you are. But I worry about you, Anatole. Even now, from what I can see, you’ve got no defenses. Of all the people I’ve ever met, I think—with one major exception—you’re the person with the least defenses of all. And I should know. I’m in the protection business, after all.”

“That major exception wasn’t by any chance Leigh, was it?”

Chris laughs. Of course Leigh will have to keep coming up. Now, as then, Leigh—or at least the memory of Leigh—is the star they orbit. He flings his cigarette to the ground and rubs it out with his foot. “Here I go, dirtying your front stoop. Sorry. And no. Leigh had plenty of defenses. He was quite the skillful little hustler, don’t you think?”

Anatole hates to hear that word. He doesn’t want to believe hustling was all those three months were about. Even now he clings to the notion there was something ineffably genuine—even pure—in Leigh.

“I’m sorry, but I never saw the hustler in him. What I saw was a sweet, confused kid stumbling toward some kind of oblivion. But then, weren’t we all? It’s just that we had more resources to draw on. We were adults. He was just a kid. Anyway, whatever happened to him?”

“I have no idea,” Chris tells him. “No idea at all. You know he’d fallen in with this older guy toward the end of his stay here, right? Rich guy, drove a red Porsche, lived in a big Tudor-style mansion out toward Pleasant Valley. Owned a Cessna. When I exited the story he was proposing to take Leigh up in it.”

“I didn’t know that. I didn’t know you exited the story. I always assumed you and Leigh took off together.”

“Well, you and Lydia both, it seems. But that’s not what happened. I withdrew. It was as simple as that. I walked away, like I’ve always walked away. It’s not an admirable trait, but there you have it.”

“You know,” Anatole says, “till the very end he was still staying at my place. Even after he took up with Lydia, and then, I guess, with you. He didn’t have much stuff, but he never came back for any of it. He even left his driver’s license behind. For the longest time I thought he might come back for it. Strange where you place your hopes.”

“Do you still have it?”

“I probably do. Somewhere. At the bottom of some box of old stuff I haven’t looked at in ages. I never throw anything away. Wouldn’t it be strange to come across it? I can’t even really remember what he looked like. Isn’t that crazy?”

But Chris remembers exactly how Leigh looked. He remembers exactly the expression on Leigh’s face the last time he saw him.

“You should know,” he tells Anatole, “what happened. If that’ll put your mind to rest. It might be hard to hear, though.”

“I’m way beyond all that now,” Anatole assures him. “Do your worst.”

But it’s not to be done. At least not now. Lydia pokes her head out the door to alert them that dessert’s on the table. “And Miosotis makes one mean dessert, let me tell you,” she says.

There’s something unnerving in these stolen interludes. A well opens up, the bucket goes deep, brings up all sorts of strange stuff. He’s organized this weekend very badly. He can’t shake the uncanny feeling that the wedding’s no longer the real event; that the real event consists of these snatches of conversation with Chris; that he’s somehow sabotaging the wedding, even his and Rafa’s future happiness. He’s being egregiously unfaithful, in his way, though he knows—rather maddeningly—how understanding Rafa will be. Rafa doesn’t feel threatened in the least by Chris, and though on one level he’s perfectly right not to be, on another level he should be extremely worried. Because Chris makes their whole relationship seem suddenly like a sham.

He’s not falling in love all over again. Nothing so simple as that. It’s much worse. It eats at everything he thinks about himself, everything he thinks he’s achieved over the years. Everything he’s prided himself on.

He’d like nothing better than to get very drunk with Chris right about now.

Instead they eat Miosotis’s dulce de leche, made the way her mother made it back in San Pedro de Macoris. It’s delicious, as usual, but as she regales the table with a long, involuted story about her mother’s travails on Hispaniola back in the 1930s, suddenly, for perhaps the first time, Rafa’s wonderful mother begins to seem to Anatole a little insufferable.

The dessert’s sweetness makes Chris shudder, though Miosotis herself rather charms him. She tells the story, clearly often told, of how her mother lost her virginity one night on the beach to a Soviet journalist named Tarkovsky, an acquaintance of her father’s who’d arrived that morning from Mexico—where, she subsequently learned to her great horror, he had taken part in the first, unsuccessful, attempt to assassinate Trotsky. Part of the charm of the story, Chris decides, is its great unlikelihood. But never mind. He’s certainly not one to condemn other people’s fictions, especially if they’re entertaining. And everyone seems content to listen to her, as if they’ve exhausted their own capacity for talking.

But what, exactly, have they talked about? For friends who haven’t seen each other in so long, the dinner table conversation’s been, except for Chris’s eruption, banal, even pointless. At some point Chris realizes he’s not longing for a cigarette or even a furtive swig of vodka so much as a continuation of his interrupted front porch conversation with Anatole.

When Miosotis’s recollections finally wind down, Lydia confesses, with a dramatic yawn, “I for one am totally zonked and ready for bed. I’m calling the hubby taxi.”

“You didn’t drive yourself over?” Anatole asks.

“I never drink and drive these days. And you guys are all too wasted to get behind the wheel, so don’t even think of offering me a lift.”

Her transformation’s complete. Chris remembers that first night they met Leigh, and took him back to Anatole’s apartment, and drank scotch by the gallon, and drew on the poor kid’s T-shirt with crayons as he sat half passed out on the sofa, and how Lydia drove Chris back to his apartment, both of them so crocked they confessed to each other later they couldn’t remember a thing after leaving their friend and his possibly underage acquisition behind.

She doesn’t know—she’ll never know—but for years Chris has presented her as his girlfriend, fiancé, whatever. Everybody’s got a girl back home—that’s just a given. And nobody’s ever curious, nobody’s ever going to check out the details. They just want that assurance—that you’re not a fag. And Chris is most definitely not a fag. “Yeah,” he’ll say, “me and Lydia are thinking of tying the knot. Yeah, I’d love to have had kids, but after Lydia’s operation… Yeah, Lydia’d kill me if she knew what I was really up to out here.” The other guys say the same sorts of things, and he presumes they’re actually telling the truth, but to be honest, he’s not all that curious either. Where they go and what they do on leave is nobody’s business, which is exactly the way it should be. And if he goes to Amsterdam or Berlin instead of back to the States, who needs to know that?

Strange that he randomly chose the name “Lydia.” He’s never really thought about that.

Within minutes the doorbell announces the hubby cab’s arrival. In strides Tom—only it’s not Tom, Chris thinks, it can’t be Tom, all the while thinking, Oh my fucking god.

“Dad wanted to finish watching the end of his show,” Caleb says in an oddly uninflected voice as Chris registers the two plastic commas behind his ears, the circular disc affixed to the left side of his skull. He somehow expected an awkward, even goofy-looking kid, complete with acne and thick-lensed glasses. And now the joke’s on him. Only it doesn’t feel like a joke; it feels much graver than that, as if a storm has just blown in. Caleb’s tall, lean, ferocious-looking. His hair is cropped to quarter-inch stubble, military induction style. His lips are thin, his cheeks sculpted, his neck long, Adam’s apple prominent. All his lines are spartan; there’s not a single part of him that’s superfluous. His eyes are steel blue. He’s everything that tricks Chris’s black, battered heart into leaping.

“Honey, this is our friend Chris,” Lydia is saying. “From darkest Africa.”

Caleb’s handshake is perfunctory.

“Hey,” Chris tells him nonchalantly. “Nice to meet you.”

But Caleb is completely inattentive. “Let’s go, Mom,” he says. “I still have stuff to do before I go to bed.”

“Okay, okay.” Lydia pats his arm affectionately. “Now, you guys better not have a slumber party without me. And Chris. Lunch at our place tomorrow. Twelvish. Though feel free to come earlier. No need to call in advance. You remember the way?”

He doesn’t. Maybe it’s only a momentary lapse. Flustered a little—no, punched hard—he says, “Remind me of the address, okay? It’s been a while.”

* * *

Rafa has put Miosotis to bed. She’s a bit drunk, which isn’t unusual, but she’s made sure to take her pills, plus two aspirin, and to put out her inhaler and a glass of water by the bedside. Also a novel she’s reading and rather enjoying: La Virgen de los Sicarios. For the moment she lies under just a sheet, but there’s a quilt folded at the foot of the bed in case she gets cold in the night.

Rafa sits on the side of the bed.

“I’m proud of you,” he tells her. “I should tell you that more often.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “I’m proud of you too. And very happy for you and Anatole. And your dad would be as well.”

“I know that. I’ve been very lucky that way.”

“And I’m proud of Anatole. Whether they’re in Heaven or Hell right now, his parents should be ashamed of themselves.”

Rafa has to laugh. “You don’t believe in either Heaven or Hell.”

“Well, I hate to think of them as just being nothing, but I suppose they are. I wonder if they ever regretted casting him away like that.”

“Who knows? At least his brother eventually came around. He won’t be completely on his own tomorrow.”

“He’s not on his own one bit. He’s got his own family now. His real family. You made that happen for him.”

When she’s drunk it can go two ways: either she turns sentimental or rises to a sort of brilliant, bitter irony. Tonight, he’s relieved to see, is honey rather than salt.

“We all made that happen for him. Now, go to sleep. We’ve got a long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

He bends down to kiss her on the forehead, but she stops him.

“I don’t like that man downstairs,” she says. “Why’s he here?”

“He’s an old friend of Anatole’s. They go way back.”

“He shouldn’t be here. There’s something wrong with him.”

“What do you mean, something wrong?”

“I was looking and looking all evening, and I can’t find it.”

“Can’t find what?” he asks.

“He has no soul.”

Rafa laughs, though he’s a little perturbed that he hasn’t picked up on whatever Lydia and his mother seem to have detected. Anatole has a campy way of saying, in certain situations, usually when he’s been right about something and Rafa’s been wrong, “Feminine Intuition! Don’t underestimate it!” Maybe there’s something in Chris he’s oblivious to. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea for Anatole to invite him after all—though for the life of him, Rafa still can’t make out why that might be so.

“He’s not a good omen,” Miosotis says with conviction. “He doesn’t bode well.”

“Mom! He works in Africa. It’s not like we’ll even see him again after this. And besides, he seems just fine to me. You’re being superstitious—which is something you’re not, remember? I’m the superstitious one. I’m the one who actually goes to Mass.”

“I still don’t know where you got that from.”

“All gay men are superstitious, in my experience. Forget the sex; it’s really the one thing they have in common.”

“I never know when you’re teasing me.”

“I never tease,” Rafa tells her. “You should know that by now.”

“Whew! I think I could use a little nightcap after all that,” Miosotis says.

“No, Mom. Now, go to sleep.” This time he succeeds in kissing her on the forehead without any resistance. “You’ve had plenty for tonight. Besides, tomorrow is a drink-all-day kind of day. That’s your favorite kind, remember? You’ll have fun.”

* * *

In Rafa’s absence, and against his better judgment—but who cares? this night will only happen once—Anatole opens another bottle of wine. He and Chris sit on the stoop, drinking and smoking and watching the fireflies, the streetlights, the urban night. Somewhere down the block, guys are shooting baskets in a lit-up driveway. Their shouts, the ball’s thump against the backboard sound faintly. Wherever Americans are gathered, Chris thinks, remembering the improvised courts that were one of the first things to go up in the Green Zone, amid the ransacked palaces and leafy boulevards, long before the Burger King and Pizza Hut went in.

“Ed.” Chris says this after a long silence. “That was the guy’s name. We’d met him in that dive bar on Main Street. What was it called? The one you never went to.”

“Not The Congress?”

“That’s it.”

“Ugh. You took Leigh to The Congress? No wonder he left town.”

“I think the idea was to avoid you and Lydia. Anyway, the guy bought us drinks, then invited us back to his house. I didn’t want us to go, but for some reason Leigh was intrigued.”

“Leigh was pretty easily intrigued, don’t you think?”

“Always on to greener pastures, I guess. Besides, I was frustrating him. I didn’t want to get any more involved than I already was, given how complicated everything was getting. I mean, first you and then Lydia. I really didn’t want to be the next one on Leigh’s list, but he’d already penciled me in. I wasn’t having any of it. And so I left. That’s the last I ever saw of Leigh. I hope he found whatever it was he was looking for.”

“It sounds to me like he was looking for you.”

“Well, it didn’t happen. You don’t have to believe me, but I tried to do the right thing. And maybe I did, and maybe I didn’t. I’ll never know.”

Anatole sits in silence. Defenseless, he takes a gulp of wine. God, how he used to love to drink! It all comes back to him. He’d love to curl up with a bottle all his own right now, forget about Chris and Leigh and Rafa and the sobering fact that he’s getting married tomorrow afternoon.

“I understand,” he says. “Painful as it is. And I have to confess something too. Leigh and I never fucked. I know everybody assumed we did, and I know I let everybody assume that, but it didn’t happen. So there. I’ve gotten that off my chest.”

“Does Lydia know that?”

“We’ve never talked about Leigh. We weren’t speaking for several years, and then when we reconnected, it seemed best not to reopen old wounds. Lydia and I’ve been very good for each other down through the years. I’m practically part of the family. As is Rafa, of course.

“But you have to tell me one thing, Chris. Who that one exception was. The other person you’ve known who doesn’t have any defenses. Not that I think that’s true about me. Anyway, I’ve got Rafa now. He can be a tiger on my behalf.”

Chris empties his glass, Anatole refills for them both.

“I’ll watch myself then,” Chris says. “And I shouldn’t have brought him into this at all. It was a long time ago, it was a very bad situation, and it ended even worse.”

“You can’t just tell me that and walk away. I’d like to think we can be honest for once. I mean, let’s face it. When are we going to see each other again?”

There’s a long pause. The fireflies must go on all night. And there’s also the shimmery sound of spring peepers he notices now that the guys down the street have called it a night.

“Okay,” Chris says finally. “There was a friend who killed himself. Actually he was my roommate, housemate, whatever. I was in love with his sister, and he was in love with me. At the end of that summer he killed himself. And I think it was because of me. I mean, you can’t ever know something like that for sure. But whenever I wake up at three in the morning and stare at the ceiling, I’m always more or less completely sure.”

“When was this?” Anatole asks gingerly.

“Cornell. The last school I dropped out of in my illustrious college career.”

Actually John had left a note, but Chris didn’t read it. He tore it to shreds without looking at it. But that part he still can’t bear to say aloud.

“You never breathed a word.”

“Why would I? I mean, how could I? I’m not even sure I should be saying anything now, except it doesn’t matter anymore. I’ve paid my dues several times over. But it made me untouchable. It made me poison.”

“You mean, it made you feel like you had to hole up in Poughkeepsie? But that’s ridiculous, Chris. You can’t live life that way. I mean, feeling like you’re toxic.”

“I’ve lived the life I’ve lived. For whatever it’s worth. And I’ve made a ton of money doing it. Close protection work paid two thousand a day in Iraq.”

“Please don’t trivialize this.”

“Sorry. You’re right. Let’s just leave the subject, okay? But now you know.”

“If only we could have talked like this back when,” Anatole says. “But what did we do instead? We tried to amuse each other to keep from being bored or despondent or whatever. What a waste. Gosh, I wish I could talk with you for hours. Now that at last we’re really talking.”

It’s not rational, it’s not even sane, but in all these years he’s never really let Chris go. Part of him wants Chris to fuck him right now. Isn’t that crazy? He’s completely happy with Rafa, he wants to spend the rest of his life with him, but if Chris wanted to fuck him he’d bend over in an instant and though it would be the most totally fucked up thing he could ever do it would also be the most wonderful moment of his entire life. Does that mean he’s insane?

“Anatole,” Chris says, “why did you invite me to your wedding?”

Funny. For weeks Anatole’s asked himself exactly that question without knowing the answer, but now suddenly he does.

“For this,” he says. “For right now. I can’t say it any better than that. If you don’t get it, I can’t explain. But I feel like something—wonderful’s not the word, momentous isn’t either, more like…” But he’s right. He can’t say it any better. All he can do is turn the question back on Chris: “So why did you accept my invitation?”

And maybe Chris’s answer will hurt, or maybe it’ll just disappoint, or maybe it’ll mean the world to him, but at that instant Rafa appears.

“Ah, here are my kittens. I wondered where you were. I was beginning to think you’d eloped.”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’re just making out. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on the night before your wedding? Anyway, you knew perfectly well we were out here indulging in bad habits.”

“True. Lydia keeps a close eye on her kids. And she always reports to Papa.” Rafa takes the wine glass from Anatole’s hand and has a swallow. “Personally, I love kids misbehaving. Though I’ll forgo the cigarettes, thank you very much.”

“Cigarettes are nasty,” Anatole says. “I’d forgotten how nasty they are.”

“Don’t let me shut this party down, but I’m going to bed. I’m getting married tomorrow. You too, if I remember correctly.”

In France, Chris thinks—one of the many useless things he holds in his head—the bachelor party is called enterrer sa vie de garçon. Burying one’s life as a boy. He watches the easy banter between spouses-to-be. It’s completely alien to him; he doesn’t even long for it. He’s got “Lydia” tucked away safely on another continent. Where might she be right now, this “Lydia” who’s served him so well over the years? He hasn’t done right by her, not by a long shot. What he’s loved is the easy, profane, butt-slapping, mind-fucking camaraderie with the young GIs in Iraq. Feckless kids mostly, dropouts, dead-enders, and goofy careless fuckups. Now in Nigeria he’s among adults who don’t interest him in the least. Currently he’s hooked up with some Rhodesians—they’d never deign to call their former country Zimbabwe—who hot-footed it down to South Africa when Mugabe came to power, worked for a number of years with Executive Outcomes, the granddaddy of all PMCs, saw tough action in Angola and Sierra Leone. Cold-blooded killer types, really, but impeccably professional, guys you can trust to watch your back. He knew them first in Iraq when he worked for Spartan. For better or worse, Ian and Darby are family.

But there’s also Jasper, Adam, Damien, Rolf, Kenny, the sweet, lost, benighted, not quite interchangeable hustlers at the Blue Bar or Jack’s House of Boys or Paradise, who either will or won’t be there on his next visit, and he’s usually just as glad if they’re not.

“I’ll be up in a sec,” Anatole tells Rafa, which is Chris’s cue.

“I should be on my way. Thanks for the superb evening.”

“Are you in any state to drive?” Anatole asks.

“I’m fine.”

“You can always sleep on the sofa.”

It’s awkward now, the two of them alone together. Chris marvels at Rafa’s equanimity. Anatole’s more than lucky to have found him. It’s clear that if there’s a weak link in the relationship, it’s not going to be Rafa.

“Chris, Chris, Chris,” Anatole says, caressing his arm. “I really don’t want you to go. I never wanted you to go. I missed you so much when you left.”

“Be realistic. I’d outstayed my welcome. And I’d only have made more trouble. You know that as well as I do. In fact, I have this feeling I’ve even been making a certain kind of trouble this evening. So yes, I have to go. Besides, at our great age, we all need our beauty sleep.”

That quip should end it, but it doesn’t. “But what’s your life like these days? Do you have friends? Do you have lovers? Men, women? I don’t really expect you to tell me anything, but still. I’m not going to see enough of you, and then you’ll be gone. It’s not like I can go sneaking kisses with anybody tomorrow.”

Sneaking kisses isn’t something Chris has contemplated, though these stolen conversations on the stoop haven’t been without a certain illicit charge.

“You used to mean the world to me,” Anatole continues. “I’ve always loved that phrase, but I have no idea what it means. I hope all this isn’t too weird for you. I’ve always wanted to kiss you, you know.”

“And you should know by now that I don’t kiss.”

“Nobody? Ever?”

“Nobody,” Chris says. “Ever.”

“Then I feel more sorry for you than I can say. But at least you’re consistent. So drive safely, and I’ll see you tomorrow. And, by the way, thanks for everything. It really has been wonderful—this evening we’ve had together. It’s meant the world to me.”

He extends his arms in an embrace, and Chris allows himself to be enfolded. Anatole goes a step further, and ventures a peck on Chris’s stubbled cheek, and once again, Chris doesn’t resist. Anatole tries to savor the moment for whatever it is. Nostalgia? Forgiveness? Hopelessness? They all have their stirring qualities, and he hopes Chris doesn’t notice that he’s a little aroused at their contact. But Chris seems, as always, oblivious to what he provokes in Anatole.

Breaking free—but gently, gently—Chris is surprised to find himself somehow moved by their contact. It’s not anything sexual, though there’s the minutest spark there—he has to be honest with himself. Bemusement? Regret? He’s happy for Anatole, really he is.

At his car, he pauses to look back at the house. What he sees is a little lit cube floating in an immensity of black space. They have no idea how fragile, how precarious that little cube is. They’re innocent, smug, ignorant, utterly unaware of the approaching catastrophe. He pities them; he feels entirely tender toward them; at the same time he thinks they probably deserve exactly what is coming for them.

Anatole never knew about this Ed. Not that it matters, it’s all like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at this point. But he can’t believe Chris cast Leigh to the wolves like that. At the time Leigh disappeared, he thought about putting up Missing Person signs all around Poughkeepsie, but that was too ridiculous, and he imagined coming home from Reflexion one evening to find the boy sitting on the sofa: What the fuck were you thinking, putting up posters like that? I’m not your pet.

After all, Leigh’s leaving was a good thing, not a disaster. And besides, the story had been so clear in his head. In one final, grand betrayal, Chris and Leigh had skipped town together. They’d made a life together, however briefly and unhappily. But now that he knows it wasn’t so, suddenly he’s in a kind of panic. But how can you be in a panic over events that happened so long ago? And who’s to say this Ed was a wolf? Maybe he’d been a perfectly pleasant fellow. Maybe Leigh had done well by him. Maybe Ed and Leigh are still living in Poughkeepsie, in that Tudor mansion…

“You’re being restless,” Rafa tells him. “Why can’t you get to sleep?”

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“Except I was asleep, and your fidgeting woke me up.”

“Sorry. I’m just agitated. Something Chris told me has got me agitated. Not that I can do anything about it. The past is the past.”

“Was he being cruel to you out there on the stoop?”

“I don’t think so. I think he was trying to be kind. I just have to turn all these thoughts off. You’d have thought I’d drunk enough wine to be able to fall asleep just like that.”

“It’s the cigarettes,” Rafa says. “You shouldn’t have smoked those cigarettes.”

“I know. My mouth tastes filthy. And I probably reek.”

“You do, a little.”

“You’re not annoyed with me?”

Rafa laughs. “Not in the least. Well, maybe a tiny bit. But I’m probably always a tiny bit annoyed with you.”

“Is that true?”

“I was just joking.”

“Don’t joke about stuff like that. If I do annoy you, please tell me. I mean, before we go through with this.”

“This is why I’m always imploring you to come with me to yoga. Yoga exists for exactly this kind of moment.”

Anatole sighs. This again. “How about I start yoga once we’re married?”

“It can’t hurt, you know. And I’m pretty sure you’d like it.”

“Gosh, I never thought I’d say a sentence like that. How about I start yoga once we’re married? What’s got into me?”

But it’s worked. Rafa’s talked him down from the window ledge, like he always does. “I love you, you know,” Anatole says.

“I love you too. Now let’s both just relax and try to go to sleep.”

NIGHT MUSIC

Night driving unnerves him. He’s gotten out of practice. In the places he’s been, once night falls all bets are off. In Baghdad he used to lie awake in the fortified villa he and his team rented on a blockaded street in the Karadah district and listen to the distant sounds of explosions and gunfire, usually from Sadr City to the north, the nightly battle that opened up between Coalition forces and the Mahdi Army—a kind of background music, oddly soothing once you got used to it, because it meant, at least for the moment, the storm was far off.

Port Harcourt’s nothing like that. The Shell residential compound at Rumukoroshe enfolds you in its razor wire– wrapped arms, you’re cradled. If you want you can wander the parody suburban neighborhood of bungalows and tidy lawns long after midnight, head out to the golf course, the only traffic a passing security 4x4. Beyond the compound’s walls is another story. Sounds carry: stray gunshots, screeching tires, tendrils of music fading in and out like the unreliable AM frequencies he remembers listening to in his Colorado childhood, in bed at night, that little portable radio whose fickle, enchanting snatches of country music, Spanish-language announcers from south of the border, weather updates, slow-talking preachers and fast-talking used car ads, Motown and rock and roll all blended together in a sonic tapestry that stood for the huge world he longed for but that always seemed just beyond reach.

He regrets having talked to Anatole and Lydia at such absurd length about his life, regrets even more having done so with Rafa and Miosotis as audience. It all has the feel of a tawdry, self-promoting performance. But if he can’t explain himself to Anatole and Lydia, then who can he explain himself to? And if he can’t explain himself to anybody, or at least try, then what’s the point of it all? He hasn’t realized how much he’s carried their friendship—the saving fact of their friendship—with him through the various unfriendly worlds he’s made his home in.

He’s had other friendships, of course, the kind you forge under fire—joshing, competitive, rough-and-tumble, uncomplicated military friendships. He never fully appreciated how much he cherishes the complexities and irritations and negotiations of mere civilian friendship.

As he glides along quiet leafy residential streets he real-izes he’s lost. WPN: Worst Possible Nightmare. Of course bad things are always on the verge of happening, kept at bay by skill and wits and (yes, admit it) dumb luck, but when you fumble your bearings it almost guarantees bad things will happen, Mike and Frasier getting sharked in Fallujah, inexplicably off-route, in a warren of streets they had no business in—he’ll never know exactly what went wrong because they didn’t live to tell. Their last frantic radio call haunts him, the agonizing race in nightmarish slow motion to GPS-locate them, by then two charred-beyond-recognition bodies in a burned-out vehicle on a sewage-swamped street with barefoot children staring curiously at the still-smoking wreckage, Ian howling Fuck, Fuck, Fuck in impotent rage, then letting loose a death blossom of automatic weapon fire, Blackwater style, aiming just over the kids’ heads, nothing like putting the fear of God in those little sons of bitches and, of course, all for nothing.

He’s not panicking, exactly, it’s not like Poughkeepsie’s morphed into Baghdad or Basra or Ramadi, though that’s the recurrent nightmare: he’ll be walking down a street in Berlin or Amsterdam and suddenly he’s not on leave but somehow he’s forgotten that, it’s gotten lost in the shuffle, which is lethal, since you have to live completely differently in the red zone than you do back in a sane and sensible world.

He knows it’s what some clowns would diagnose as a typical PTSD moment, though he scorns the notion that’s what afflicts him. No, it’s simple prudence, precaution, the skills that keep him alive. And for whatever reason they’re coming unmoored in him.

As he turns onto one unfamiliar street after another, he begins to feel an unpleasant tightening in his chest. Then a couple of blocks up ahead he sees a stoplight at the intersection with the arterial. Once he’s on the arterial, he loosens up. He’ll loop around the convention center, take 44/55 heading east, then right on Raymond Avenue, left on 376, and on out to the Inn at the Falls.

But suddenly that prospect is just too disheartening. What’s he going to do? Chug that pint of vodka?” Find some porn on the Internet and have a half-hearted jerk-off before passing out? Surely there’s somewhere in Poughkeepsie he can go, mingle with strangers, postpone the inevitable sentence of solitude.

He shouldn’t have brought up John Pembroke. That was just stupid; he knew Anatole for three years and never brought him up, so why now? And it’s not like he even thinks much about John anymore. Or Leigh either, whom he still considers a catastrophe averted. And it’s not like he broods about Gabir, now that Baghdad’s just a fitfully receding nightmare. The situation in Port Harcourt’s perfect, in its way. Africans don’t attract him; he can admire their considerable beauty with cool detachment, but they’re incapable of distracting him. It’s probably racist of him, but who gives a shit? The heart and body want what they want. That’s been the whole problem all along. And now that most of the families have been removed from the Rumukoroshe compound owing to the deteriorating security situation, the temptation European or American teenagers might pose has been removed as well.

Whatever dangers the MEND rebels and the bunkerers and the pirates represent are nothing in comparison.

He finds he can’t quite stop thinking about Leigh. Anatole and Lydia’s lack of curiosity perversely fuels his own. Nobody disappears completely anymore. The only thing that’s disappeared is privacy, which is never coming back. And which is probably a good thing. Why should anything be private? No hiding, no guilt, no shame. Just a completely transparent world.

He hides everything from everybody, of course. So the world that would be heaven to him would also at the same time be hell. Which is just fucking perfect.

It’s near midnight. Up ahead, two enormous raccoons lope across the three traffic lanes. He brakes instinctively, but a car in the lane beside him doesn’t slow at all, plowing into both creatures with a sickening double thud. And then keeps going, the driver unfazed, apparently oblivious to what’s just happened.

There’s no other traffic in sight. Against his instinct, Chris pulls to the curb.

He looks back down the road. One of the raccoons lies motionless; the other, its back legs useless, is trying to drag itself to the curb.

In the world Chris normally inhabits, he’d never dream of stopping for anything. He’d floor the accelerator, hightail it out of there. But this is the dream world, the American world.

He’s transfixed; he can’t leave till he knows the fate of that crippled raccoon. It hauls itself slowly, slowly across the pavement. The occasional car swerves to avoid it, but it’s just a matter of time till one doesn’t. He should do it a favor: put his vehicle in reverse and run it down. But he can’t.

Long ago, that fateful summer in Ithaca, he and John and Michelle adopted a stray cat. Or, to be more precise, it adopted them. Mr. Goblin, they called it—John’s idea, because of its almost supernaturally black fur. He remembers how skillfully it insinuated itself into their lives, how at some point they stopped just feeding it, or teasing it with bits of string, and actually began to depend on its antic presence as a counterpoint to the paralyzed misery of a brother and sister in love with a housemate who wouldn’t choose. Not couldn’t but wouldn’t. For reasons that to this day remain indefensible.

When it became clear that John would have to be the one to go (when it should have been me, Chris knows now, it should have been me), when they were barely on speaking terms, not out of anger but out of a sadness so heavy it was hardly bearable—John, in a desperate comic turn, would ventriloquize his increasingly hopeless sentiments through Mr. Goblin, trying in vain to ward off the inevitable.

And how skillfully, on another continent, in a different world, that other stray insinuated himself. For a time he was an occasional presence, then you began to see him more often, lingering outside the gate of the compound they grandly called The Mansion, hunkered down in that Iraqi squat Chris found supremely uncomfortable but that, according to those who grew up with it, is the most natural, comfortable position in the world. He’d wait patiently, for hours it seemed; watch shyly, cautiously, intently, a little scavenger hoping for the chance morsel to drop.

As the signs posted around the Green Zone warned: There’s nothing compassionate about compassionate feeding of strays. DON’T!

Only they didn’t have a stray cat at The Mansion; they had Gabir.

In reality, The Mansion was a huddle of three concrete block buildings surrounded by ten foot walls with a conveniently gated entrance and ample space for several vehicles in the courtyard. It was in a working-class, mostly Sunni neighborhood.

Folks don’t generally kill their employers as long as their employers treat them well; Chris made sure to hire someone from every single family on the street. In turn, he could count on them to pass info about IEDs, impromptu checkpoints, planned ambushes. On the roof he and the Rhodesians sandbagged the corners, erected a cover-from-view screen to discourage snipers wanting to pick off a white-eyes, installed razor wire by the yard. The roof was where they’d make their last stand if it came to that, and they kept the battle box stocked with AK-47s, RPGs, medical packs, a stash of ammo, plenty of MREs, and bottles of water.

Downstairs, they sandbagged the doors and windows. They built a guard room for their Iraqi guards. They set up a weights bench and punching bag. And the Rhodesians somehow managed to acquire a flat-screen TV so they could watch their beloved football matches. Their setup wasn’t cozy or even comfortable, but it was secure.

At first the guards tried to shoo the stray away, but Gabir was persistent. “Family all dead,” the head guard Ali explained when Chris asked what was up with the kid. “No place to go.” He was smart, a survivor. In no time he became a mascot/ errand boy for the guards. They’d send him off to get cigarettes or glasses of tea or plates of kebabs and rice. He invariably wore, dirtier with each passing month, a pair of gray sweatpants, those slide sandals all the Iraqi kids wear, a red jersey with CARLSBERG inscribed in gold across the chest. When winter came the guards let him make a rat’s nest in a corner of the guard building where he could spend the night. Hard to tell how old he was: probably younger than he appeared. He had the gaunt, haunted look of so many Iraqi street kids. Chris’s best guess would be fifteen or sixteen. What particularly struck him were the boy’s blue eyes and dark blond hair—bronze, really, puzzling in an Iraqi till Ian reminded him that Alexander the Great and his Macedonians had left traces in the gene pool when they conquered Babylon. “All the way to fucking Kandahar you see these blond, blue-eyed relics. Pretty fucking amazing, if you ask me.”

Any prospect of direct communication was thwarted by Chris’s rudimentary Arabic (As-salaam alaykum. Chayf aalik? Fii amaan il-llaah) and Gabir’s English, which mostly consisted of phrases he’d been taught by GIs whose idea of fun it was to coach Iraqi kids to say things like You’re a fucking douchebag. Suck my dick. What’s up, nigger?

And then there was the phrase, which the GIs presumably hadn’t taught, which was in the DNA of all the street kids: money, mister; scatter me some money, mister; money, money.

So Chris got into the totally inadvisable habit of giving the stray money from time to time, sometimes for services rendered, but more often just on impulse, dollar bills Gabir would kiss reverently but also with a beguiling hint of mockery. “Thanks, Amrika!” he’d say. And then look at Chris with those Mace-donian eyes.

Across culture, across language—was it possible the kid recognized something in him? Maybe it was as simple as sizing up this particular white-eyes for an easy mark. Maybe more ominous, like detecting a chink in the Coalition’s formidable armor. Maybe (though this seems highly improbable) he looked at Chris and saw the same kind of ticket out of hell those canny Iraqi girls working in the Green Zone saw whenever they looked at young, not-so-bright American fellows in uniform.

Or maybe it was something else. Maybe what he recognized was not that different from what first John and then Leigh had recognized so long ago, something Chris had spent most of his life hiding away.

He knew he should be careful. More than careful—suspicious, wary, always on guard. Ian liked to say, darkly, “Just remember: all of them fucking hate us. Even the ones we pay salaries to. Even the goddamned babies still sucking their mothers’ poisoned milk. Shia, Sunni, Kurd: it doesn’t matter. Saddam may have been a nightmare, but we’re an even worse nightmare. Forget all this shit about the Coalition of the Willing. We’re the fucking Crusaders, and we’re occupying their country.”

Ian was right, of course. Chris had said as much himself on more than one occasion, invariably pissing off the army morons in the Green Zone canteen chowing down—in the former Presidential Palace of an occupied Muslim country—on BBQ short ribs flown in from Kansas. It was one of the reasons his team had moved their operations to The Mansion. They weren’t going native or anything like that. They were just trying to get the hell away from the idiots who still thought Saddam had been behind 9/11.

And so in spite of himself—or no, let’s be honest, because of himself—he developed this ill-advised, one-sided attachment. Invisible to everyone but himself. And just possibly Gabir.

Sitting in a pulled-over SUV idling on the Poughkeepsie arterial, hazard lights flashing, watching in his rearview mirror a raccoon in its death struggle, Chris wonders whatever happened to Mr. Goblin. He’d like to think that Michelle adopted him permanently, but on purpose he lost touch with her so completely he’ll never know.

He knows all too well what happened to Gabir.

The other guys never blamed him. Why should they? What eventually happened had nothing to do with what went on covertly inside his skull.

Which doesn’t for an instant keep him from blaming himself.

Once again.

Against all odds, the broken-backed raccoon has succeeded in heaving itself to the curb. OK, good. And now what? If he had a gun he’d put it out of its misery. He feels totally naked and useless without a gun. Far luckier its companion: the equivalent of an IED blast, everything over in a split second, definitely how he’d want to go. But he also knows even the wounded raccoon is lucky in its way.

We should all be merely animals. As humans, there are miseries nothing can put us out of.