FOUR

The World

[2005]

The day. The night. The sky is heavy when it grows dark. What’s the smell? A year ago. Almost, today? No, more than that. More: May to June to mid-June, a year and a month and then more still, a week, a day. The smell, I think, is, are, leaves, and they are burning. Cannot see the smoke, but know that it is there. And hot metal. And something else. The loose step underneath of gravel underfoot, the false foot of gravel and glass on pavement. Makes a grinding on the ground, foot to ground, through pavement, on pavement, never meant to be such a certain thing, perhaps, and sometimes slips the step. Slip up. Step around, if you can. Sound the word, hold it on your tongue hold it there: Hollow. The sound is hollow. They pressed a hollow inside him, and that was it, and it was there. It was. No? They? No, no, I did that. The sound itself is hollow and the thing in the middle is hollow, in the mids-part, it’s missing, is all. Is all that, just not there, is all. Good. God.

Up the hill. Hate the Hill. No, don’t hate. No use to that. Just there, only is. Still, I’ve never liked this part of it. The noise and something fearful. Desperate people. See there is the Round One, very large, all that. Who pays for that? Somebody does, not me. Rather go without.

The air was warm and still and thick. The cloud cover, lit gently from beneath by a density of city lights, hid all the stars from view, masking the sky, all flat and bland and mottled, and as I rounded the corner from Madison to the avenue, there was tall Davis at the sidewalk, waving his arms like a windmill, feet planted solid on the ground and unmoving while his upper body pivoted lazily left then right, stop, right then left, stop, arms and hands aflap. I looked up in surprise. He moved so seldom beyond the front porch.

“Hello, Davis,” I said, making my voice bright and I hoped not falsely so. He stared warily at me but said nothing, kept flapping his arms; left, stop, right, stop. He might not have recognized me, for all I could tell. I, too, was out of context.

As I crossed the yard to the porch, the distorted sound of overdriven Christian hymnals, and sound not much improved through the peak, blared out from one single speaker of an ancient tape recorder kept tucked under the bench along the wall, where above it sat Henry, the cassette machine’s owner (who I would, soon enough, need to ask to turn it down) – an aging black man with crystal-white kinks of hair above a scarred face. I noticed he had a bandage wrapped tightly around one hand, his left: today, part-mummy. Willy stood to one end, putting distance between himself and the others; or rather, not stood, he walked his tight circles, turning widdershins, again and again. Or was it deasil? I could never remember which was which. His jaw hung loosely to one side, like an extension of the brim of his sagging hat, an overall gesture of looseness. Mary occupied the front steps, a cloud of cigarette smoke trailing out of her head, her eyes locked forward and staring in mute, numb terror. Hers met mine as I passed in front of her.

“Hello, Mary,” I greeted her, again, as brightly as I could manage. She looked directly ahead as I climbed past her and she said nothing. My voice was a no-impact thing.

Through the front door, the office was immediately on the left, where inside I found Vivianne, a bright yellow boa being dragged slowly across her shoulders by her girlfriend, blonde boa-wielding Marg, who stood over and behind her and slightly to one side. The bright-dyed feathers sprung silkily from out of the spill of Vivianne’s dark hair behind her neck, over her back, one by one by one, each feather in turn, while she paid it or Marg little mind. “Viv. Marg,” I said, resigned. Marg flashed her eyes at me, half-menace, the rest disinterest. Vivianne, at the desk, leaned into the spiral-bound logbook before her, scribbling at its open page with a ballpoint pen. I stepped around them, over the open case with its red velvet inner lining and Viv’s guitar, like eviscerated guts, propped up beside it, E string missing. I set my knapsack onto the unused back desk and lowered myself into its plastic chair to wait. My shift didn’t start until eleven, but I’d hoped I might find Vivianne alone. No such luck.

She said to me, without looking up, “Just a sec, Proteus, I’m almost done,” and scribbled some more, and as she did, Marg collected her accessories from Vivianne’s body and moved away, a languid doll. In a moment, Vivianne had finished with the pen and dropped it, sat back, exchanged a quick look with Marg, then turned to me. “There was an incident,” she said, “today with Davis at dinner. You can read about it in the log, but I’ll tell you. He went after Henry with a fork.” Davis and Henry were roommates.

“He thought what, that Henry was meat?”

“Funny. I had to give Davis a formal warning, and there’s plenty of documentation. As you might imagine. Said documents are available for your perusal, at your leisure. But you should read them.” She tapped the logbook, its ragged cardboard cover now shut.

“I’m going now,” announced Marg. “I will see you later.” This last part she said to Vivianne, but she did manage a hostile look toward me as she left.

Viv called after, “I’ll come by in a little while, right after my shift.” Marg worked at another house in the Republic system, three blocks away.

“I just saw the two of them out front,” I said uselessly. “Davis was doing that windmill thing with his arms. Henry’s on the porch. Was anybody hurt?”

“You saw Henry’s bandage. It’s not bad, but you’ll want to check it later and make sure there’s no infection. People made a lot of noise when it happened and were upset, but it didn’t get any worse than that. I think they’ve all forgotten about it by now. Still, you’ll want to make sure there isn’t any trouble in their room tonight. I’d say that if Davis wants to sleep on the couch, go ahead and let him.”

Davis usually did sleep on the couch in the TV room, and I always let him, but I didn’t want to tell her that. “I’ve never known Davis to get violent,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve even seen him angry. Do you know how it started?”

Vivianne shrugged.

I stared into the space between us and blinked. Something somewhere shifted.

“Do you know…?” Vivianne began, but then seemed to lose the thought. She looked at me with her eyes wide and round.

Did I know that she was a sea creature? I thought.

I blinked again, and for the first time, I felt like we were in the room together. My fingers worried at a loose bit at the edge of the folding desk.

She went on finally, “I’ve never quite understood what that was about. I mean, when I first met you.”

My heart jumped, and I started, “What do you mean?”

“At the monastery, do you remember? I mean…” She searched for something. “…What the ritual was about.”

I calmed, though deflated. My heart returned to a normal pulse, more or less.

“I never asked anyone at the time because it… didn’t seem important, in a way. What anything actually meant. I was just there, and that was what I was doing. I had to go there, and be there, and… But now I want to know. What is a hungry ghost, for instance? And how do you feed it?”

The loose bit of plastic peeled further away from the table’s edge as I pulled it. I had to force myself to stop. “There’s no one answer to that,” I told her. After thinking for a moment, I continued. “Think of it this way. Have you ever seen a ghost?”

“I think so. Have you?”

I nodded. “When I was younger, when I was in college, I knew this guy – he wasn’t exactly a friend, just someone I knew and was friendly enough with, except he was a terrible mooch. His name was Finch, and he was another student, or at least he had been – he maybe dropped out after a while, but he still hung around, and he never had any money. Whenever any of us saw him at the tavern where we frequented, the first thing out of his mouth was to ask for a cigarette. Then if you gave him a cigarette, he’d ask you to buy him a beer. Every time. It got so you knew that if you saw him, he’d ask you for something, and so after a while, it got really annoying. He was a nice enough guy, except that he always… well, you understand. We dreaded running across him. Once my roommate Alan and I were walking up the street to the bar, and there we saw Finch at the entrance, talking with some other people out on the sidewalk. We were still half a block away when he looked up and he saw us, and there was that look in his eyes, like he’d flashed on some new targets, or suckers, or whatever, and Alan and I, we turned right around and we left. It was totally spontaneous, and I don’t think we either of us even said anything. We were poor too, and we just didn’t want to deal with him. So we went somewhere else, across town.

“It was maybe the next week that we came back to that same tavern again and somebody told us that Finch had died. He’d been living on somebody’s couch, in a house with a bunch of people, and in the morning they found him like that, overdosed on heroin, and cold and dead as dead gets. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Finch was normally into at all, needles and serious drugs like that, so they thought it was likely that he’d meant to kill himself. But of course, nobody really knew. He’d not left any note to explain himself.”

“So it was probably an accident,” Vivianne offered.

“Well, sure, that would be sensible to think. And now I’m almost certain that was the case. But that wasn’t what any of us quite believed at the time.” I looked at the loose plastic edging, sticking out. “It wasn’t hard to imagine that he might be suicidal. Not if he felt he’d backed himself into a corner and couldn’t get out of it. Not if people were starting to respond to him like Alan and I had. I thought it was possible Finch had been a lot more sensitive than I’d given him credit for, and like people do, I felt at least a little responsible.”

“But you’re not, you know,” said Viv.

“Well, no, of course not. Not really. But I didn’t understand that then. And what happened a few days later was I had this dream, and in it, I was here, in the city. Or some city, like this one – some kind of generic city, or the… the original city.” I shook my head, as if to clear it. “Anyways, it wasn’t where I lived at the time. At the time, I went to school in Olympia. But in the dream I looked up, and there was Finch, standing on the sidewalk in the city right in front of me, and his face was gray and pasty and he looked kind of sick and confused. He just looked at me and he shrugged a little, slightly standoffish, and when he did that, he was telling me, if not in words, that he didn’t know why people kept saying these things they were saying about him. He couldn’t understand why people talked about him as if he was dead, when here he was, standing right here. I mean, it was all in that gesture, in that look on his face. I knew exactly what he meant. He really didn’t know that he was dead.”

“And that was really him?” asked Vivianne. “Not just a person in a dream, but his soul?”

“I’m sure of it. His soul, whatever. Finch was one sort of hungry ghost. He’s not the only kind. He’s the literal kind. But what do you think it might take for him not to be hungry anymore? What does he really need?”

“I think I get it,” Vivianne decided, nodding slowly. “So what happened to him then?”

“After that,” I said, “in the dream, we drove around. I had this big, shit-colored Impala, both in the dream and for real. It was in bad shape, but it still ran, and we drove through the city real slow. It was just like any summer’s day in the city, more or less. The sky was thick. The traffic was really bad. It was hot. We were going north, I think, and just talking about this and that as we waited at the lights and slogged through traffic. It seemed kind of aimless, what we were up to, but I remember Finch told me how he would be leaving soon, that he thought he’d found a better place to go, maybe another city somewhere, and he was going to try things out there.”

“What was this other place, do you think?” Vivianne asked. “Was it heaven?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Not like that, I don’t think,” I told her. “Another body, maybe? I don’t know. Maybe just someplace where he could get a proper meal.”

•

“I need to get going. Marg is waiting. Do you want me to leave the radio on or turn it off?” She spoke as she packed her guitar back into its velvety case and gathered up her shapeless cloth bag, her long, slim back bent over the collection on the floor.

I’d not been aware of the radio until then, though now that she’d mentioned it, there had been a low-level murmuring carrying on for the duration, just behind things. Sibilance from the small deck on a bookshelf drew my ear as I passed it, moving toward the front desk, now vacated.

“Leave it, that’s fine,” I said, trying not to sound deflated.

“Are you alright?” She stood, arms and shoulders hung with everything, dangling. Obviously, I’d failed.

“Hm. Okay.” I managed a little smile.

She scowled. My heart sank.

“I’m fine, just tired,” I lied, sort of. “This shift is a hard one on me. I don’t sleep enough in the daytime, and it’s catching up.”

“There might be something opening up in the daytime. You should ask Wade about it.”

“I will.” I wouldn’t.

“Bye!” She glided out the door and I watched her shape pass through the clouded glass of the window to the porch, where streetlights glared, wan and fuzzy, from across the avenue.

The air in the room shifted, the dim lights settled. I stared at the logbook in front me, its tattered cover shut. From the radio, if I concentrated, I could just make out the words: “…you think, what’s going on down there? What is it our government is not telling us? Is this really evidence of an earlier civilization far in advance of our own, lost now in…?” I looked up to see tall Davis filling the office doorway, silent and darkly silhouetted. How long had he been waiting there?

“Come in,” I waved. Enter Davis, bending as he moved. Behind him stood Willy, then Mary, then the others all raggedly forming into a loose and pensive queue. He aligned himself with the plastic chair and sat, without hurry, into it, rubbed his face with his hands, and stared forward expectantly.

•

The house gives us its typical arrangement. There is nothing different in this; it is always the same. There are things and there are people, their forms and functions interchangeable, mostly there, one might easily though mistakenly conclude, only to inhabit the space, to conform themselves into these shapes, subjecting themselves to gravity, inertia, laws of thermodynamics, the strong and weak forces, etc., for no reason whatever. Thick atmosphere both contains and permeates them, and thus they are aswim in it. They do not, will not, explain themselves, but they were never meant to.

The television, on its pedestal at the far end of the room, across a sea of orange carpet, buzzed its distress in fuzz-patterns, tuned half to static and half The Late Show, while in its glass frame Letterman oozed a well-practiced charm as his guest, an actress I only vaguely recognized (and whose name I didn’t recall), brightened in a sleek dress and laughed. I could not hear what they said.

I counted eight bodies inhabiting the room, spread out before the set in quiescent stasis, filling the chairs and sofas which were all donated and therefore supremely mismatched. Since I am a sea creature myself, I understand well enough the positive attraction held by such shifting lights, aslant as arrows from the wavering surface membrane, which seen at the sea-floor can be mistaken for things of promise and other hopeful phenomena, and can too easily hold one of us in sway, enrapt. It can be useful to see how these things work, both for the helpful corralling of my wandering fellows, and to escape from the harms of hypnotic paralysis myself.

It happened once, perhaps only a week before, that somebody – it wasn’t me; I don’t know who it was – thought to turn the television off. I walked into the room after the set had already been shut down. Maybe whoever did it meant it as a joke, or perhaps some desperate bid at an uncluttered mind, but it changed nothing. Everyone – much the same crowd then as now – only sat in place, filling the spaces, silent, expectant, staring at the blank screen as though something were still happening on it. Bent and knobby in the convex screen, their reflections stared back and also waited. In a moment, Mary also shuffled in off the front porch, followed by the cloud of cigarette smoke that clung to her, and sat herself into the only remaining empty chair, her eyes turned wide and numb and flat toward the box, which clicked its intermittent cooling-off noises of glass and electric circuitry, the only sound left in the room. No one said anything. What was there to say? At last, Eugene, his frustration growing obvious, blustered over to the set and turned the thing back on. Relief.

Now I found Davis spread out over one long sofa, his long self taking up its entirety, fast asleep and snoring. It should perhaps have bothered me that I thought of holding a pillow over his face, just to see him thrash his arms and legs about with it there until he slowed and stopped. No, it really should have bothered me, but instead I simply settled with not doing that and moved on.

Through the back of the room was an entrance to the house’s addition. A winding rampway led down to the lower floor and its dining room, bypassed by a simple staircase leading also up to the top-floor bedrooms. Part of my job was to make hourly rounds through the house to check on emergency exits, making certain they were shut and locked, to inspect the common bathrooms and chase out any “guests” sleeping in the tub, and generally to make sure no one behaved in any obvious rule-breaking sort of way. I rounded a corner to a plain corridor which led past the ground-floor bedrooms. Most of the residents in these late hours were asleep, and as I walked the hallway, I could hear from behind one or another door the small and squirrelly sounds from radios turned low, electronic voices secret and unintelligible, the signatures of late-night call-in shows, needful of unceasing sources of talk. The stillness of these walkways carried a weight of its own, and the walls were coated in ages-worth of greasy dust that dulled their paint. Tread patterns wore the carpeting bare down the middle, and a similar colorlessness wore darkly over every surface. Nothing but myself moved through here now, the air was still; myself and the flickering lights.

Upstairs I found Willy exiting his room, pulling the door click-shut behind while he edged himself out, and though I said hello as he passed, he would only look at me sidelong through rolled eyes while he walked around me, slowly descending the stairs in solemn profile.

At corners, exit signs glowed dull red from the ceiling where they hung block-like and institutional. I checked doors. I sniffed around corners. I put my hand to the wall and felt the stickiness of its cracked white paint. Nothing. Nothing. The two communal bathrooms of the upper floor were both open and empty and clean enough. Nothing nothing nothing. Good.

Downstairs, the dining room made a humming noise. The fluorescent tubes in the ceiling above flickered and buzzed. Plastic chairs waited at empty, linoleum-topped tables, arranged over a floor of black and white checkerboard squares. The coffeemaker sat ready to one side; glimmering metal and two empty, orb-shaped pots, each with a small amount of stained water at the bottom. The kitchen door was closed and locked, its shuttered service window also locked. I took my keys from my pocket and unlocked it, pulling the spring-taut door aside with difficulty. Its tight space inside contained a flattop grill and four burners, also an oven, sink, and countertop. These were the cleanest surfaces in all the house, though they too were scuffed and worn, the metal scratched, the counters gouged. The shelves above held boxes, cans, packages of various sorts, also a small portable stereo, while those below kept cleaning supplies, pots and pans. In the next room whirred four refrigerators and a freezer, all domestic models, all donated and therefore as mismatched as everything else in the house. Against the far wall rested a washer and a dryer, each badly mangled but running, though for now still and silent, almost pensively so. Another set of stairs out of this cement-floored room led back up and out next to the office. A look to the left and I saw again the TV room: The Late Show was done, now it was The Late Late Show on the set, and a collection of heads and bodies occupied most chairs. Davis was still asleep on the longest couch. To my right was the front door, where outside sat Henry, who had known to turn his tape player down without my having to tell him, though still I could hear its saccharine hymnals across the barrier and wondered, not for the first time, what sort of bastard church produced music as awful as that. Willy turned circles at the edge of the porch. He would do so all night. Cigarette smoke curled and drifted in the yellow porchlight. I rounded the corner in through the office door and met a face, round, wide and brightly painted, turned and staring up at me from a doughy body, sat in the chair just inside.

Rose waited. She’d been waiting. She’d sat facing the empty desk until I’d arrived.

•

“Rose,” I said, “hello.”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Is it your roommate?”

“I keep feeling forces move through me.” Her huge pink face puckered, lavender eyelids flapping like butterfly wings under a loosely wound pile of deep black hair. Once her eyes had stopped flapping, she stared at me with them wide and open, now unblinking. “I think they are the demons.”

“What is it we normally give you to help you sleep? Let me see.”

“Diazepam.”

“Good God, what’s this in your set, here…”

“It’s the pink one. No, it’s the blue one.”

“Right, it’s these. Try one, and if that doesn’t work…”

“Have you seen me dance?”

“Rose. No. I don’t want to see you dance.”

“I was a dancer, and then I was in danger. I was a danger-dancer, ha! And now, if I lie still, the forces come and they move through me. They come down from the ceiling. I’m sure they must be demons. They come for my spirit, but I won’t let them have it. But I will dance for you.”

“Rose. No.”

“That’s alright, Proteus.” She blinked, finally. I handed her the small, blue pill, whatever it was, the one from the separate box in her mediset marked for sleep. She accepted it as it rolled from the plastic box, fell across a small space, and landed into her palm. She took the pill with water, then tossed her small Dixie cup to the garbage and remained, staring forward, almost, sort of, at me. Something in her face changed, just slightly, but still she wouldn’t leave.

“Rose, I have –”

“I can’t go back there.”

“Rose, you –”

“You think you know what it’s like but you don’t know.”

“Rose, I –”

“When the demons come for me they take my body.”

“Rose!”

She looked at me.

“I have work I need to do. Please, go.”

She stood, smiled, blinked her purple eyes, revealing cracks in thick-caked eyeshadow, and left.

•

The portable stereo on the shelf emitted a blue glow from its diodes as evidence that it was still on, and as the absence of Rose settled in the room, some moments after she’d left it, I could hear again those noises that it made, the low voices, professionally attuned.

“…in our last hour, we hear from investigative reporter Sandra Song, today reporting from the United Kingdom, following up on this season’s spate of crop-circle developments. Many of these have occurred and are even now occurring in the immediate area. Is that not right, Sandra?”

“That is absolutely right, William,” came a woman’s voice, warbled and insistent, distressed by the telephone connection. “This summer has been an especially busy one for the circle-makers here in England, whatever or whoever they may actually be. As I believe you and many of your listeners are aware, the farmlands of Wiltshire have had, since the early 1980s, the highest concentration in the world of these enigmatic designs. Usually these circles are focused around the ancient megalithic sites of Stonehenge, Avebury, and nearby Silbury Hill. This year, the fields near this small, rural village of Devizes, where I am today, seventeen miles north and west from Stonehenge, is for some reason the locus of circle-making activity in England.

“I’d come to the English countryside, as I do each year, to do on-the-ground research, both of the designs themselves – and I’ll have more on that in a moment – and to report on the efforts of investigators who also come to this region each year, who take samples for analysis, who take photographs, and who observe, if possible, the appearance of these designs in the fields.

“William, let me tell you, this year has been a stunner! Certainly, in the –”

“I HAD A… I HAD DR. PEPPER. DIET PEPSI. I HAD TWO DIET PEPSIS.”

“Eugene, hello. Sit down, if you like.”

He did. He lowered his gut and himself slowly into the plastic chair, eyes wide and staring and fixed on my own, as if in challenge.

The voice on the radio crept back into the momentary quiet: “– able to witness myself several of the ‘balls of light’ phenomenon which are often reported –”

“PANCAKES. PANCAKES. PANCAKES and sausage and eggs and waffles and Pepsi Diet Pepsi Diet Dr. Pepper. I like waffles better than pancakes I like soda I like sausage WAFFLES AND PANCAKES WAFFLES AND SAUSAGE MAPLE SYRUP AND BLUEBERRY SYRUP RASPBERRY SYRUP –”

“I need for you to calm down, Eugene. Quiet your voice. People are trying to sleep… Because it’s night.”

Eugene sat staring forward and said nothing. His head, and his bulging eyes with it, spasmed a little to one side, then back, toward me. Then something loomed behind him, appearing into the doorframe, around its edge, bent and dark. “Can I get a cigarette?” the shape asked – Davis, awakened, needing this.

“– of the English research and publishing group Circlespotters, who’d been camping in this particular field –”

“Sure, Davis, just a… hold on just a…” I folded myself over to reach into the low cabinet, found Davis’s slot with his three packs of cigarettes, tipped and shook from the opened and half-empty one three of those, and then knocked the back of my head against the underside of the table straightening back up. “Oof!”

And I would reach my hand forward to touch it, to touch the object, and I would remember why I’m here, except that I won’t find it. It’s gone. It’s just a shape now, hung in the air, a shape inside, not even that. It’s too long gone. I can’t even imagine the thing anymore, what it looks like, what it… what it means. What could anything like that mean? I know it’s the wrong word, but I haven’t got any other. Shake it off, I tell myself, this space it’s left inside me, the ache, the gnawing ache of what’s missing, shake it away…

I dropped three cigarettes into the palm stretched smudged and open toward me from across the desk. “Thangew,” said Davis and he slouched off toward the porch, its screen door banging shut behind him. The back of my head revealed its soreness by degrees, an aperture opening toward pain, so I felt at it with my hand, looking for a new bump or possibly blood. This, the skull-shape, the thing I recognized, it was close to what I needed, but not the same. A similar shape, but different, not the same.

Eugene, bug-eyed, burst out from temporary stillness, “I WENT I WENT TO IHOP…” then settled back into fragility. I had nothing to offer, nothing to add, no further questions, nothing. He was a body without a ghost, and I was looking at him. Or was it a ghost with no body? Either way. The pieces were separated. His nostrils flared. Eugene did not smoke.

“– the group had situated themselves to be facing in the wrong direction at the very moment the circle appeared –”

•

“Is there coffee yet?”

“No.”

“Are you making some?”

“No.”

“Will you be making some?”

“Yes.”

“When? Soon?”

“Soon.”

“When?”

Through the yellow door and shuttered counter window, I ignored the voice, cracking eggs, one after another, thirty altogether, a whole flat. I piled the shell-halves back on themselves into a nook on the cardboard flat. The egg-liquid and yellow-eye yolks dropped into a bowl and floated, staring up.

“When?”

“Go away.”

Bits of shell in the fluid. Goddammit.

I found a butter knife to be a more effective means of scrambling this many eggs than a wire whisk, although I knew that it was wrong. A professional cook would look at what I was doing and tell me, that’s wrong, that’s what the whisk is for. The problem I found was with the yolks, which could evade a whisk through being slippery. They would see it coming and slide out of the way, some of them, but a dull knife simply sliced right through them before they knew what happened. In the bowl, the ruptured yolkstu? blurred and bled through both the clear and clouded white.

“When will you make the coffee?”

“Later. Go away.”

The kitchen’s small space was a better sanctuary than the office. Its doors were kept closed and locked. My time here was holy time, breakfast-making time. It was mine. I started early.

If I could put my face up against the edge of it… I tried to remember, was it cold? Was that how I remember, that it was cold? My face against it. Or do I just imagine, because I don’t know?

And every empty man and woman will stand awake and staring, and they will face into the rising sun, and they will sing the morning music of the sun, the hollow music, the music made of wood and numbers, sung in hollow numbers, melded into harmonies, of seconds and of semitones, facing toward the blackness, acknowledging the blackness, acknowledging space, the darkness of the empty form, and they will know this, they will know about this, they will understand they are alive and knowing now about this.

I stood back and looked at everything, the arrangement, the mise en place. Pancake batter, mixed and waiting in a jug. Eggs broken and scrambled. The oven now was hot and ready for two sheet trays of bacon already set into even rows; I’d put the hotel pan of eggs to cook in a bath of water, a double boiler, a trick the guy who trained me had shown me for making large amounts of scrambled egg. I used margarine to grease the edges because we didn’t keep any butter – too much saturated fat, they said. What about the partially-hydrogenated blah-blah, I could’ve told them, but who would listen? I’d start the oatmeal soon, but not too soon, because it turns to gelid mush if it’s on the heat too long.

Vivianne was a shape in the darkness of my imagination, and I could picture her: her body turned, slightly twisting at the hips, her dark hair, straight down and hanging past her shoulders, down her back. I could picture her, but I couldn’t talk to her, not here. She was facing away. Here, she was silent and unmoving. She faced away.

There was a splotch of egg spilled onto the linoleum counter. I would make the coffee now. If I made the coffee sooner, they would only drink it sooner. They would drink it all day long, and all night, and this was a bad idea. But the coffee people, for now at least, would be happy.

•

Passing Willy in the foyer as he turned his circles (all night and all day, did the man never sleep?) and as too-bright morning sunlight pushed through the speckled window from the porch, I found Wade in the office when I returned from making breakfast. He sat behind the desk in a daylight muted red through the thick curtains, checking the entries that I and Vivianne before me had written into the logbook. Wade kept his hair short, like mine, shorn and close to the skull. His head was an egg-shape, also like mine. We could have been brothers. When I entered, he looked up, glasses perched at the end of his nose, bookishly effective.

“Good morning, Proteus.”

“Wade. Hello.”

“Much of a night?”

“No, not much, nothing to speak of.”

“Good.”

“Good.” I sat down into the facing chair. There was something I was going to ask him, something I was supposed to ask him, but I couldn’t think of what. “Oh, right…” I said aloud, surprising myself, “there was that matter between Davis and Henry. The fork.”

“The fork. I saw this here.” He wiggled the notebook in the air.

“I wasn’t here when it happened. I didn’t see it.”

Wade squinted at me over his glasses.

“So I don’t really know,” I continued, “but I did check Henry’s bandages. The wound isn’t bad. It didn’t look infected or… or anything. Just like a wound. A wound you’d get with a fork.”

“If somebody stabbed you with it.”

“Right. He seemed alright. They kept apart the whole night. I didn’t keep them apart, but they kept apart and didn’t fight. All night. When he wasn’t smoking, Davis was on the couch.” I didn’t want to admit how normal that part of it was.

“Not smoking.”

“Right, when he wasn’t out smoking.” None of this was what I’d meant to ask him about, but I couldn’t think of what that was. “Henry listened to his music, his weird-as-shit gospel music, and then he went to bed, or he just disappeared, I don’t know, and then nothing happened.”

“All night?”

“All night, nothing happened.”

“So there was a lot of that.”

“Of nothing happening, yes. And I can’t help but wonder, what sort of church is that?”

“What church?”

“Of Henry’s,” I said, “that has gospel music that horrible. I mean, that’s really horrible, that stuff. It’s like dried-out marshmallows, the kind you’ve dropped behind something, behind the refrigerator, and then find six years later. Really horrible, like nothing at all.”

“Nothing is that horrible.”

“Nothing is worse than that.”

“How was…” He hesitated. “How did Vivianne seem to you?”

“How did she seem?”

“Right. How was she?”

I had to think about this. “She seemed… she seemed like Vivianne. She seemed okay.”

“She wasn’t…”

“No,” I said, “she wasn’t.”

Wade looked off to the side, as if searching for something. He was a little older than myself. He could’ve been my older brother. Someday, I thought, I could be like this too, looking off to one side, searching for things.

“Okay,” he said. “Good.”

“Yes. Good. Why do you ask?”

“I thought she… Never mind. It’s nothing.”

I looked into his squinting eyes, which flicked between me and the logbook. “Wade, you’re not…”

“Of course not. You are, that’s obvious. But I’m not. Besides, I’m…”

“Yeah, I know. I knew that. I know. It’s just that, I mean, you seem…”

“It’s not that. It’s something else.”

“Something. What?”

“Something…” Wade mumbled, burrowing into a stack of binders piled up beside him on the desk.

I picked up a pencil. Its eraser was a blunted, blackened nub. I tried to balance it on its tip at the edge of the desk and was unsuccessful. It dropped with a wooden clattering, so I stared at it for a moment as if I couldn’t understand what it was – which in fact, for a moment, I really couldn’t. “Okay then,” I announced and stood. I gathered up my backpack, shouldered it, and faced toward Wade as he peered up at me past his glasses, eyebrows upraised.

“…”

“…”

“Okay, bye.”

•

Out on the street, I took one last look behind me at Inn House Manor, which stood in the sun a faded red, a red-painted block of brick and stone and wood that crawled with people. Willy’d moved out to the porch, to his satellite spot at the corner where he turned. Mary’s face peered through the ragged, weedy shrubs, wrapped in lingering smoke. Aside from these two, the others out now were all day people, and I didn’t recognize many of them. The night people had gone away and these were a different crew.

I stepped along the sidewalk and crossed Madison, a street more hectic and unlikeable by day than in the dark. It was nearly a two-mile walk back to my apartment, and the fug of the morning hung on me. It was under my skin and stuck to my eyes. I felt less tired than an all-over hurt. The small and eager chirrupings of birds in lonesome daybreak had been lost by now to the full-on morning rev and tumble and racket and summer heat, the unmitigated sunshine, cars with their drivers pulled up at the light, pedestrians and bus people with cardboard cups of lidded coffee, waiting, moving forward, waiting again, sucking at the coffee. Past Madison the air thinned out. Trees overhung city blocks of small houses, a leafy density that speckled the pavement in shadows and splotches of light. It was quiet here, more or less, and green, and I liked it better. I wove a zig-zag pattern through the neighborhood, block by block, avoiding the main streets.

I am alive, but I don’t know it. Foot skipped and I nearly tripped over something, couldn’t see what. Crack in the. I am alive, but don’t know that I’m alive, and the sun is missing. There was a something about the sky. A something. I looked up and the sun was blotted out by a vast metal wrecking ball. Who knew? That the sun could be knocked out of the sky like that? No, not that, there was something else. The sky was always there, yes, but it was different. Full of holes, full of potential… what? Something. There were no clouds. There were no clouds but the smallest, barest hints of clouds, more like thoughts about clouds, the things themselves not formed, Neoplatonic, ideal, but unable to take shape in this impossible sky-condition. But for all that potential cloud-shape, there was something – something in the gradient perhaps, a second self, a second sun, a thing unseen. I’ll take a camera to the sky I’ll take a picture –

There was a game that I had begun to play, I don’t know when it started, in which I ask myself a question and then I answer it, as if I were two people, as if I were me and I were also me.

– of what I can’t see that’s what I’ll do. I’ll take a picture of the thing that isn’t there.

I ask myself a question: Hey, Proteus, what is that face? The one staring back at us?

I answer the question: That is not your face. That is not my face. That is not a face at all. That is No Face. The thing in the mirror is NO FACE. It is the sky where the sun was knocked out. It’s the big hole, the spot at the center, it’s nothing. It is the NOFACE the OFFACE the OFFICE it is OFFICER and I daresay that zero spot seems FRIENDLY, don’t you think? It smiles. Smiling back at us, blank, simple, undefined. These are the real people, these are the soul police; here is an OFFICER of the mind. Let’s just say. A FRIENDLY if pensive man, the surest means of defense against stupidity, timidity, turgidity, fluidity, a strong reminder to floss daily, and to keep your fingers clean. Listen, small man, you will keep your nose shiny, your head square, your hands by your sides and visible at all times. Hold still. Don’t let him see us. There will be trouble if he sees us.

He sees us!