eleven

She plunged her hands deep into the racks and walked down the aisle, pausing only when the right fabric slid over her fingers. Summer having entered its humid, sweltering zenith, certain fabrics—old rayon, silk, linen—drew her, hypnotized her with their cool promise of days sipping lemonade on the front porch, of nights dressed in kick-ass muumuus, tipsy on girlie drinks, dazzled by tiki torches.

Verity had in her mind a list. The actual, physical list resided somewhere in her apartment, but she knew its contents as well as she knew The Forbidden Sounds of Don Tiki songbook, or the inflated rate of Six Million Dollar Man metal wastebaskets. A thrift store is an everyday treasure hunt, and the list of things she needed had grown to epic proportions. She knew that people who thrifted with her for the first time were always amazed at the amount of stuff she needed. But what was the point of paring down a list to only a few items? That only increased the chances that you would find nothing, that you would leave the thrift heartbroken and empty-handed.

“Ah,” she said suddenly, stopping in her path. “Silk.” She lifted a hanger from the rack and beheld a gorgeous yellow robe embroidered with blue peacocks and mulberry trees, fastened up the front with green silk knots. She held it up to Charlie, stretching the garment’s shoulders to his. “I think it’ll fit! Wow, did a woman this big really wear such a flashy dressing gown? What an awesome person she must have been.”

“It’s a lady’s robe?” Charlie tried to push it away. “I can’t wear a lady’s robe.”

“Who cares? Look at this stitching: it’s quality hand embroidery. There’s a lining! Everything is intact! Why has no one snatched this up? Where has it been all these years? Who first owned it? It’s so excellent, I feel like crying.” She closed the space between her and Charlie; her thrifting radar began to echo and she saw other shoppers eyeing her find.

“But it’s a lady’s robe, Verity. I don’t see how I can conduct my rituals in women’s wear.”

Verity led him through the aisle, still holding tight to the robe, and asked, “What kind of rituals? You still haven’t told me what an urban shaman is.”

A thoughtful expression crossed his face and he searched the heavens, or rather the Salvation Army’s acoustic ceiling tiles, for inspiration. “As we all know, shamans in general—or is it shamen? Shamans, shamen. Hmm, neither sounds right. This is something I should know, but the resources are slim.”

“Maybe the bookstore has Shamanism for Dummies.”

He went on. “Never mind. The shaman, according to ancient lore as well as the definition I found on the Internet, is part priest, part sorcerer, a seer, healer, and prophet, who can enter into a trance state and call upon benevolent spirits to fight against malevolent ones. The shaman executes justice, heals the body, and saves the soul. As an urban shaman, I plan to do all this while focusing on the plights common to us city dwellers.”

“Like what?”

“Well, I could spiritually cleanse apartments for new tenants, cast spells of protection against evil landlords; perhaps I could even christen new coffeehouses and Laundromats.”

Verity said, “I don’t think ‘christen’ is the right word.”

“All right, inaugurate, bless, whatever. First off, as you know, I’d like to evict the ghost in my parents’ apartment. It’s all his fault I’m only a temp and will never be promoted; why he has it in for me in particular, I’ll never know, but perhaps he just feeds off my suffering. From there, I’d like to get into hosting shamanistic rituals in public parks for the community. I mean, they let homeless guys sleep there, why wouldn’t they let an urban shaman do his thing? I’m all about goodness and light; I would never hurt anyone in my rituals. Of course, I haven’t figured it all out yet, but you can’t advertise for shaman mentors easily. This is going to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-cape operation anyway.”

Thus reminded, he pulled from the rack a long black robe, shiny and thin polyester with a deep hem and flowing sleeves. “Nice!”

“That’s a graduation gown.” Verity gently replaced it on the rack; the kiss she suddenly planted on his lips made a lovely, muffled ptch. She felt as surprised as he at her unexpected public display of affection. “Okay, I think I can really see it, bub. I do. You’re going to be an enormously successful urban shaman and it will make you happy. You’re lucky to have been called to a vocation.”

He put his arm around her. “You can be one, too. You can have Wicker Park and I’ll handle Rogers Park.”

“No, thanks,” she said. “I have no calling.”

They continued shopping, pushing the wobbly grocery cart down the narrow aisles. In the toy section alone they found voodoo charm sticks (cute shrunken heads impaled on skewers), a plaid bowling bag, and a cracked crystal ball.

“I don’t need those things,” Charlie said.

Verity made check marks on her mental list. “These are for me.”

         

Bob rested his elbows on the desk, staring at Team Leader Joe, willing an embolism. Team Leader Joe tapped his hoof by the front checkout counter, staring down Verity as she strolled in ten minutes late. “Late, Verity. Unacceptable. Clement here has had to wait to punch out.”

Clement, his giant red Afro bobbling above bloodshot stoner eyes, hitched his thumbs into the belt loops of his rodeo clown trousers and smiled sleepily. “No sweat, man.”

“It is sweat,” Team Leader Joe protested. “I’ve said it a hundred times: the team must never arrive late to work. Without punctuality, we have chaos.” He stormed off, a spitball lodged in the back of his perm. Bob slid a straw back into his shirt pocket.

After punching in, Verity took her place behind the counter next to Bob.

“Here’s one,” he said, starting a conversation in his usual way. “They hired a new café worker today, a fat shithead also named Bob. Guess how he suggested they differentiate us? He persuaded everyone to call me One-Eared Bob, while he’s Regular Bob.”

“Jag-off. They’re all jag-offs. I hate working here,” Verity said.

“Aha! I knew it.” Bob was triumphant. “What happened to ‘Oh, I’m satisfied just being a bookstore clerk’?”

“I lied.”

“Good,” he replied. “I like what I’ve been seeing. You’re lying, you’re ambling into work late, you’re freely admitting to hatred. I sense great things from you, Verity.”

The tray of fishwiches made their weekly appearance in the break room. Verity had two, the first of which had a BandAid stuck to the underside of the bun, discovered, unfortunately, midbite.

“Do you really need two of them?” Team Leader Joe trundled in, accusatory. “How about saving some for the rest of the team?”

Mouth full of fishball, she tried to explain it was necessary due to the used medical dressing confiscated from the previous grotesquerie, but he held up his hand. “Save it. Your break’s over anyway, and I have a new task for you. Maybe it will spark some interest and entice you into showing up on time.”

He led her out to the floor and pointed to the two tables of new fiction. “We’re trying to unload some of this dreck and I came up with a fantastic idea. Our store is going to have a book club and you’re going to run it. Some of these novels have reading guides, some don’t. You’ll figure it out. Also consider the books on the two-for-one table. They’re not selling as well as we’d hoped.”

Verity looked through the books on the tables. Many of them had soft-focus images of portions of women’s bodies. Never a whole body, just legs or a headless torso, cut off by artistic cropping at the top of the cover. Sometimes a whole body appeared, but the model’s face would be obfuscated by a suitcase or title box or cigarette pack.

Other books seemed geared toward manly men, not to be confused with the Manly Den and its excellent admirers, but bombastic men keen on a life of hard drinking and ugly truths and other sensitive shit, at least as espoused by disenfranchised writers with six-figure advances embarking on thirty-city book tours.

She returned to Bob and related her new drudgery.

“You mean you’ll have to interact with customers outside of our worker containment field?” Bob held steady to the cash register for support. “They might touch you. There might be conversations.”

“Yes, I know,” she said. “Although I don’t actually object to running a store book club.” She should have been shocked to discover this but found herself relaxed and even energized, the kind of high brought on only by a prospective project. “But why can’t I choose the book myself? Why does it have to come from those three tables?”

“Because that’s what they’re pushing.”

She shook her head, firmly positioning her glasses back in place. “No, I didn’t see anything I particularly liked over there. A book club should be challenging. I can do this, but I need to select my own book. I can’t ask people to read and discuss some hokey family saga or any other media-sanctioned, misguided publishing venture.” She paced behind the counter, kneading the hem of a polyester blouse straight from the Norman Fell line. “It should be the equivalent of an Olympic sport. It should be a literary Olympiad.”

“Go west, young woman.” Bob turned her away from the three tables and steered her toward the morass of identical fiction shelves. “Thomas Pynchon to your right. Finnegans Wake to your left.”

Twenty minutes later, she stumbled triumphant and sweaty from the stacks. It was not, after all, just a project. It was a project that gave her the means to drive customers, assorted doofi all of them, out of their minds, for in her hands she grasped a test of raw patience and endurance. A newer translation, but still the tangled subordinate clauses, convoluted sentence structure, and rambling chapters on pastry and sleeping remained. She rejoined Bob behind the counter and slammed the enormous box set down in front of him, whereupon he studied it for a moment, then nodded.

“Proust,” he said. “Splendid.”

Verity smiled blissfully. “Yes. Remembrance of Things Past. Book club members will weep and blaspheme and rend their garments. Some will hate me. It will be glorious.”

Bob asked, “All eight volumes? What’s that, about four thousand pages?”

“Give or take.”

“And what if Team Leader Joe is not enthralled by the rambling work of obsessive French dandies?”

She said, “Team Leader Joe can bite me.”

         

The rest of the evening passed in a haze. Verity was consumed with the idea for the book club; her book club, something of her own. First she had talked Charlie into getting the awesome yellow silk robe; now she had the chance to foist Proust on an unsuspecting consumership. The reunion looming in mere weeks seemed less creepy now that she could brag about being a book club organizer. She considered this infinitesimal promotion; sure, it might not be much to your ordinary productive citizen, but it was a giant, lovely step for career sleepwalkers.

         

On Verity’s sixteenth birthday, Tex took her and Victory out for a celebratory evening of putt-putt and ice cream. Some families had beloved vacation spots, others had certain sports in which they all excelled; the Prestis had a definitive list of favorite miniature golf courses, and topping it was the excellent Par-King, medieval-themed home of All-Sinatra Wednesdays and the twice monthly Hot Dog Night.

“I thought you were coming out with us,” Will complained. “You could watch us skateboard around the train station fountain and then drink beer over at Stan’s house.”

“My dad’s taking me out,” she said. “We’re going to Par-King.”

“Come on! You’re old enough to ditch your family. It’s your birthday, after all.”

“You don’t understand. This year my birthday falls on an All-Sinatra Wednesday and on Hot Dog Night. It’s unprecedented. He’ll be crushed if we don’t go.” Their family unit had disintegrated only two years previously and Thelma was expecting a baby with her new husband, Dick. Much rested on every encounter Verity had with her father. His emotional well-being hovered daily between recovery and nervous breakdown.

“Can you believe it?” Tex fairly crowed as he bustled the girls into the station wagon. “Hot dogs, Sinatra, and a birthday, all at once. How lucky we are.”

Other teens might have responded with an eye-rolling whoopee, but Verity and Victory, sensitive to Tex’s forced single-dentist status and his perch on the precipice of complete mental collapse, just smiled at each other and playfully punched their father in the shoulder.

“Wow, sixteen, honey,” Tex said as he pulled out onto Fifty-fifth Street. “I know a lot of girls would like a car to commemorate such a milestone, but I . . . I . . . things are just not . . .” His voice trailed off, reflecting on the mess of his life.

“I don’t care, Dad. I don’t want a car. I don’t even like driving.”

“But still! I just wish I could give you a car on your sixteenth birthday, a nice red one that you could easily make the monthly payments on. You deserve a wonderful present and birthday.”

Verity said, “I am having a wonderful birthday. I’m really looking forward to my hot dog and bashing a golf ball through that clown’s teeth.”

Tex started to cry. What kind of birthday was this? What kind of father was he? What a sad-sack idiot, sobbing at the wheel, their so-called mother nowhere to be seen, no presents (he couldn’t drag himself off the couch to get to the mall), no cake (Thelma had taken her mixing bowl).

Victory looked in panic from her sister to her father. “Dad, don’t cry! You’re veering all over the road.”

“I can’t help it.” He ran a sleeve under his nose. “I’m sad.”

Verity looked through her purse and found a handkerchief, a beautiful vintage one that had a pair of lime green cowboy boots stitched in the corner. Gratefully, Tex took it from her and wiped his eyes. He gazed at it before handing it back. “That’s a real nice hanky, hon. You know that’s how I got my nickname, right? My old green cowboy boots?”

She knew. That’s why she paid three dollars for a used snotrag at a marked-up estate sale. “I’m going to collect a bunch of different ones and make a shirt out of them.”

Tex sniffed again. “I’ll go halvsies on a sewing machine with you once I get back to work and pay off some of the bills.” His lip got wobbly and a strangulated howl escaped his throat.

“It’s okay, Dad.” Verity patted him on the back and tried to ignore the blood roaring in her ears, the exquisite ache of watching a parent cry. A hole opened up in her.

The car came to a halt in the Par-King lot. The smell of hot dogs eventually drew them out.

An adenoidal teen in doublet and hose sighed as they paid him their fee. “The King welcomes thee. Here ist thou free hot dog ticket. Pray thee selectest a putter and Day-Glo golf ball, and takest no more than six strokes per hole. Snack bar closes at ten.”

From the tree-mounted speakers came the strains of “Summer Wind.”

“I love Par-King.” Victory smiled dreamily, then whacked her ball into the eye socket of a giant fiberglass chipmunk. “Maybe I’ll buy it one day.”

Tex waggled at the tee, setting up his putt, and crooned along with Sinatra.

Verity thought it would be nice to own Par-King. Attached to the snack bar was a half-timbered Tudor-style banquet hall, often rented out for parties, that would make a fabulous home. “It would be great to have complete control of Par-King, Vic. You could live in the banquet hall.”

“We all could,” Victory said. At fourteen, she still harbored some familial fantasies.

“Not me. I’m going to own a store and move downtown.”

Tex’s ball took a wrong turn through the windmill and ended up in the moat. “Golf is a game of inches, girls. And more are lost on the putting green than won on the fairway.” He reached in the water and pulled out his ball. Something green and stinky hung from it. “What kind of store, Verity?”

“I don’t know. Something cool that sells cool stuff.”

With some embarrassment, he hit from the ladies’ tee. “When the time comes, I’ll help you secure a low-interest loan. I’m glad to hear you’re thinking about a career. It’s important to plan for the future. You don’t want to be thirty-five and thinking, ‘What am I doing with my life? What happened to me?’ ”

The last verse of the song floated through the air. Tex swayed with his putter and sang softly. “And still the days, those lonely days, go on and on.”

But by the end, his voice splintered. “My fickle friend, the summer wind . . .”

He stopped swaying. His hand passed like a shadow over his face and he wept.

Victory put an arm around Verity. “Happy birthday,” she said.

         

But Verity wasn’t thirty-five yet. She was a glorious thirty-three, two full years away from the period of gloom that Tex had warned her about. It was perfectly fine to be a nothing at thirty-three.

Team Leader Joe pulled her away from the counter and directed her toward the café area. He told her to mop up, even though the employee handbook clearly stated that only café workers were expected to maintain café-area cleanliness. This was her punishment for tardiness. New employee Regular Bob—tumescent, evil—smirked at her and handed over the mop and bucket.

“Have fun,” said Regular Bob. “Oh, and there’s a bunch of smashed scones in the corner over there. Don’t miss ’em.”

Verity scowled at him, at his gray fishwichlike pallor and tubular body. How could one Bob be so righteous, and another be so disgusting? She glanced down at his name tag. It read BOBB. She could not quite explain the delicious sensation that rippled through her after viewing the ridiculous spelling of his name.

As she scrubbed the tile floor, she heard Bobb chatting away on his cell phone, which, during work hours, was clearly against the rules of the employee handbook. Alternately he cooed at, then browbeat, the caller, no doubt someone female and masochistic. He shouted and swore, then evidently tried to charm her with a nauseous, one-sided tide of vulgarity. Customers moved away from him.

“Hey, Bobub,” Verity barked. “Put your cell phone away. Nobody cares about the mad drama going on in your life.”

Bobb paused in his woo-pitching. “It’s pronounced ‘Bob.’ The last B is silent.”

He resumed his flood of frightening filth, explaining to the unseen, wireless troll the sundry acts of varying legality they would perform in the sanctity of Bobb’s kitchen, bathroom, and, if time allowed, bedroom balcony. Oh God, the very idea that some woman would willfully rut with this human fishwich! In protest, her stomach threatened to dislodge the free dinner she’d just eaten. Befouling the café area seemed appropriate, despite the progress she’d made with her mop and bucket.

She had slopped gray water over the smashed scones when it occurred to her: she was actually much closer to thirty-four. Her birthday was just weeks away. Thirty-four was so much closer to thirty-five that it practically obliterated all memory of thirty-three. She felt something rise up in her chest and flap its wings. She loved being thirty-three. It was a mystical number, just like the Rolling Rock commercials insisted. It was the age when Jesus got the boot and returned to the mother ship; the number of degrees of initiation for the kooksville Freemasons; the number of elements in the “Tree of the Sephiroth” of the Kabbalah; the number of years King David reigned in Jerusalem. What the hell was thirty-four? Nothing! Thirty-four was when ob-gyns began warning you about your advancing maternal age. Thirty-four was the age for dead-eyed soccer moms to drive their SUVs through the streets, for men to consider hair plugs. It was twelve months away from saying, “What have I done with my life?”

Suddenly the golden light of an untapped future, a burnished and beautiful thirty-three, began to slip away from her.

         

She took the Chicago Avenue bus home. The passengers after second shift were no more peculiar or aggressive than those earlier in the day, but they did exude an aura of resigned hopelessness more plainly than the morning commuters. Her seatmate was a garden-variety seat hog. He held a newspaper spread out in front of him, overstepping the invisible boundaries of personal space, and he had wedged his briefcase in between himself and her. This whole posture ran counter to Verity’s own bus-riding etiquette, which involved squeezing as tightly as possible next to the window, piling your belongings on your own lap, and staring at nothing. The man flipped a page of the paper, and as he did so, his arm hair brushed against her. She drew herself further into the aisle and tried to rub the sensation from her skin; arm hair contact was much more disturbing and intimate than actually being elbowed.

She got off at Damen even though her apartment was technically closer to the previous stop. The corner at Wolcott and Chicago sucked, and picking her way through the assortment of gangbangers and urinaters and men who made that peculiar slurping sound through their teeth was to be avoided whenever possible. Her building, once a perfectly respectable brick four-flat, had been painted that strange shade of landlord gold twenty-five years ago and had entered its associated decline ever since. The first floor housed a discount store featuring very little of thriftdom and much of cheapo peddling: satin-look couches in mauvey shades, thousands of Hallmark Precious Moments knockoffs, giant bags of tube socks, and other items recently birthed from the sweatshops of Malaysia. The occasional find redeemed the shop in Verity’s eyes, so she made allowances for the preponderance of dollar-store garbage.

Main door unlocked, she quickly made her way up to the fourth floor, past the heavy-metal Asian dudes’ apartment on the second and the fireman with the friendly pit bull who was coming out of his flat on the third.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she answered, the rules of urban neighbor decorum thus met.

Not one of them knew any of the others’ names. The apartment buzzers were marked only 2, 3, and 4. Someone from number 2 had drawn a Viking helmet next to the numeral.

She threw down her bags, deposited her keys in a bowl made out of an Allman Brothers record, and flicked on the dining room lamp; it had the unfortunate screeching eagle base and Spirit of ’76 patterned shade found in every thrift in America, but whatever mysterious process that made lamps light up when you shoved a bulb in the socket seemed to work, and that made it all right. Better to light one ugly bicentennial lamp than to curse the darkness.

Ice cream called. She spooned up a big bowl of Snickers flavor and retired to the living room to turn on the stereo. Yes, Esquivel was unmatched for perfect aural ice cream accompaniment. Verity drew the curtains, their tropical floral designs in green and maroon and cream eminently soothing in the soft light of the living room bowling-pin sconces. Now, who to spend the evening with? The June 1951 issue of Better Homes and Gardens? One of the hundred back issues of ThriftScore, the thrifting zine? A Kennedy assassination conspiracy tract? The Woman in White? Crockpot Cookery for Singles? Verity perused her bookshelves and wondered what it would be like to have friends.

The phone rang, its beautifully harsh tone unique to heavy, black, rotary-dial models. Verity plopped into the green vinyl telephone chair, expecting Charlie or some relative caught up in familial high drama. Stan, she was not expecting. “Oh! Hello.”

“Hi,” he said. “Busy?”

Of course: ice cream, the hi-fi, xeroxed leaflets, it was all waiting for her. “No. What’s up?”

“I was just thinking about my Manly Den, and I am all pumped to do it. I cleaned up all the kid’s toys and it’s ready to be made manly, and I was thinking since I work downtown anyway, I could just meet up with you after work tomorrow and we could go looking for stuff.”

“Are you whispering?” she asked.

“No,” he whispered.

They set up a time and place to meet. She had asked if Laurel was coming, too, but Stan said that someone had to stay home and watch the kid. Verity hung up and went back to her ice cream. In the past, whenever Tex was mad at Gin for some canine infraction, he referred to her only as “the dog,” as in “The dog just rolled in something dead,” or “Will someone get the dog out of my home clinic? It just stepped in Mrs. Percy’s impression tray.” So it was “the dog,” just like “the kid.” Only now, Tex bawled when he thought of calling Gin “it,” “the dog,” or anything other than her given name. No matter if she peed all over her dog bed or got lost in the yard or asked to go out ten times a night.

Verity decided to sew Gin a soft bandanna collar lined with jingle bells. That way, Tex could track her down more easily when she wandered around in soporific dementia. A warm gratitude spread over her, having multiple projects to work on. She drew up a flyer for the book club and planned to copy it tomorrow at work, cut out a pattern for the collar, and then retired to bed with a notebook, listing possible items for the Manly Den.

The pineapple lamp cast an amber arc upon the wall, bathing the framed pictures upon it in golden pools. Unlike the thrifted photos mounted in the tiny hall between the kitchen and dining room (the Hallway of Strangers), these photos boasted only family and friends. Or friend, as the case was. There was Charlie, drunk on the Dodgems at Six Flags, there was Tex at a long-ago Easter dinner, wearing a purple plaid sport coat and ’70s-era Tom Selleck mustache. And there, setting a humane trap for the Downers Grove raccoons, was Victory, crouched on all fours and grinning. The largest photo, framed in semirealistic bamboo, showed Victory crocheting beer-can hats, seated on a picnic blanket with baby Gin. Verity stared at it; she could not help it. The pineapple lamp shed gorgeous light on her sister, an almost sunny beam. Her hair had been dirty blond like Verity’s, but lemon juice that summer had brightened it. She painted her mouth with that awful brown lipstick everyone wore in 1990, but on her it had not been too gruesome. She smiled earnestly in the picture, as she always did in real life, a friendly soul to her core.

That terrible lump grew in Verity’s throat, that Ping-Pong ball of electric despair. Silence blanketed her room; even the howls of horror from the Chicago alleys stopped. Esquivel ended. The window fan circulated more hot air. Something closed up in her. “I still have you as my sister,” she said. But she felt silly talking to a photograph and turned to the opposite wall. I have these memories. I live in a house full of junk, and all of it is tied to other memories, and other people, to strangers and family. She turned off the pineapple lamp; the new blackness muffled all thoughts of old history swirling around her, and of this experimental future she had begun toying with, leaving her in the solace of now. Nothing comforted like the dark; not even the past had such quiet power.

         

Charlie sneaked down into the kitchen for a midnight snack. He opened the fridge and took out a Tupperware container of leftover elbow macaroni with slightly curdled cream sauce. He felt something cold and weightless brush against his arm. The ghost hovered at Charlie’s shoulder while he scarfed the contents in the sickly yellow cast of the fridge lightbulb.

“Cut it out,” said Charlie, hunching over the macaroni tub.

The ghost took a respectful step back, imagining the scent of pasta delicately curling up to where his nostrils would be. He knew that sauce, what was it called again? Oh yes, béchamel, though Mrs. Brown’s unorthodox recipe called for past-its-prime buttermilk.

Charlie felt the ghost withdraw. It had obeyed him; he had said, “Cut it out,” and the ghost had moved away. Charlie straightened up, put the macaroni back, and tightened the sash of his robe. “He fears me,” he said. “I am an urban shaman.”

         

The next morning, Craig’s cubicle phone rang, so the project manager took a break from dragooning him and stepped away.

“Craig Kickel.”

“It’s Will.”

Craig glanced behind him. Personal calls were frowned upon at the office, and even if they weren’t, the onion-skin cube walls afforded no privacy in which to take them.

“Are you busy?” Will asked.

“Just proofreading content.”

“Oh? What drug?”

Craig scrolled down the screen. “An antipsychotic. This one is supposed to be good because it doesn’t make the psychotics gain weight like the other drugs.”

“Samples?”

Craig said, “How I wish that handing out antipsychotic drugs was part of the incentive package here.”

“Well,” Will said, “here’s the thing: were you serious about that ‘activist’ nonsense the other night?”

Craig’s cubicle wobbled as the zombie on the other side bashed his head against the shared divider in a daily ritual of frustration. Thumbtacked photos of Kronos and Aura fell into the crack between the desktop and the fabric wall. “Not really,” he said.

“Excellent. There’s got to be more to life than pretending you’re an activist. I’ve been thinking: what reason is there for us to be stuck on this hamster wheel? I mean, what kind of lives are these? Things just happen and we let them happen, and the next thing you know you’re having panic attacks or beating up guys in Laundromats or bathing with a toaster. There’s more to life than just working and drinking Belgian beer and remodeling bathrooms over and over again. I don’t know about you, but I want something for me. Something meaningful, gratifying. Something that will make a difference.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I think we should start up the Lousy Dates again.”

Craig paused. “Our old band? The Lousy Dates can make a difference in the world?”

Will ran his hand over his crew cut and across the stubble on his chin. “Well, my other thought was maybe we could host a radio show and rip apart modern music. I think we have faces well suited to radio.”

“I don’t know. Eventually we’d just be two forty-year-old music dorks having petty squabbles that men half our age have outgrown, about topics we’re too old to be discussing.”

“Well, yeah. It could be very entertaining. But I still would rather start up the Lousy Dates again. You have a better idea?”

Craig stared at the manila folders scattered on his desk, each one a clone of the others, all containing equally depressing production schedules for the various drug-Web-site launches; he looked at the Outlook appointment alert calendar, which popped up every half hour announcing more dreary meetings in which he understood nothing; he regarded his Ziggy mug and the ring of dried false creamer that had become one with the glaze. “I have no better ideas,” he admitted, “but Carolyn locked my drum kit away in the storage unit and I don’t know where it is.”

         

It was settled then. Will spent the remainder of the day trying to clean his wreck of an apartment and forgoing his usual prework nap. He ate dinner in front of the TV and then reclined in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach in satisfaction. Stan was in, Craig was in. All that remained was getting the drums out of the storage unit, but he seriously doubted whether Craig had the guts to talk Carolyn into it. He, Will, might have to intervene. The truth of it was anyone could handle Carolyn better than her own husband.

He glanced at the clock; time to get to work. He threw his leather jacket on and slammed the door behind him. It was Ladies Night at the Kit-Kat Karaoke. But then again, thought Will, when he was KJ-ing, when was it not ladies night?

He had not seen Verity and Charlie at the club since that first time. Why not? He just assumed they, or rather she, would come back again to visit. Wasn’t she interested in pursuing their friendship, in picking up where they had left off? She was not a shy person, it couldn’t be that, but then again she was a private one; she kept to herself. That might have explained her continued absences. She was never, of course, an extrovert or outgoing type of girl, but in high school she at least showed some interest in being with him. Maybe not being with being with, in the normal way men expect, but that’s not to say he ever ruled that out either. There was a time, yes, rum had been involved . . . well, better not think of that now. He warmed up the crowd with a disturbing, Nick Cave–like rendition of “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”

Victory Presti had been in an accident and had died and he had not come back for the funeral. Within two years he had transferred from Illinois State to Eastern to Western, each one of them a shittier state school than the next, so he had been anxious, stressed. He had failed something at that time—geology possibly—just when he heard the news from Carolyn. He sent word, or rather condolences, through Carolyn, explaining his messy circumstances and inability to get away from school for the funeral. Verity understood; everyone understood. Everyone said they understood.

But he had met Verity for drinks two years later and saw her at the other end of the table as through a kaleidoscope—fragmented, flattened, and far away. He’d tried to invite her to come down to the city and hang out sometime; he said he had two new roommates who were nice, a guy and a girl, maybe they could all go out.

She shook her head and said, “I’m sorry, I can’t. I don’t have any room.”

“Room? For what?”

“For any more friends.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose, blinked a few times, then looked toward the exit. No reproach or malice in her words, only resignation. That evening did not end there like that, but Will could not remember anything that came after.

A nubile young thing walked up to the KJ booth. Will saw the house DJ scowl in jealousy from across the bar. Of the two of them, Will usually attracted the most girls at the club because the DJ was too busy showing off his red vinyl imports to the reverent geek brigade. Like those East/West Coast rap wars one was always hearing about, the KJ-DJ animosity at the KKK ran high. The nubile young thing smiled and greeted him. She was one of the Thursday night DePaul crowd who slummed it in Bucktown every week.

“You didn’t show up at Blues Fest,” she pouted. “We all had a big blanket spread out and sangria and everything.”

“Sorry,” he said. Blues Fest? Had he really said he would meet a bunch of college kids at Blues Fest with its hopeless smattering of Bruce Willises and families with screaming babies? “I hate Blues Fest.”

“How could you hate it? It’s fun.”

“It stinks,” he said. “The whole Chicago festival scene is terrible. Each one is the same: greasy food, cops swinging their big batons everywhere, and it’s either one hundred degrees or it’s raining. Especially vomitous is the way the white people dance and the look of surprise on every blues guitarist’s face as he solos those four chords over and over.”

She said, “The blues is like an art form.”

Will made a dismissive psshh sound. “Please—those twelve-bar limitations? Some art form. Nothing’s ever new! The newest invention was that gaudy hammer-on, hammer-off technique Eddie Van Halen made famous on ‘Eruption’ over two decades ago, which he stole anyway from Melvin Taylor. I have better things to do with my time than watch an art form develop at glacial speed with the jag-offs from Alsip and Bridgeport.”

The nubile young thing took a sip of her drink and said, “I also love the Dave Matthews Band.” Her friends pulled her away for a group trip to the bathroom and she waved good-bye.

A man with a sad fringe of last-hurrah hair in the classic horseshoe pattern approached the KJ booth and selected “Lady” as his song.

Will groaned. “Styx again? That’s three times tonight. I can’t listen to any more Styx. Was that guy who sang ‘The Renegade’ with you?”

The man, unaccustomed to karaoke challenge, nervously looked from the six-foot-two karaoke jockey with the angry eyes back to his table of fellow middle-aged combovers. “I like Styx. They’re . . . they’re kind of kitschy.”

“No, they’re not. I’m sorry, you can’t like Styx in an ‘ironic’ way. You can’t like them because ‘they’re so bad, they’re good.’ Either you respond to Styx or you don’t.”

“Fine,” said the man, trying to be a sport as the bored audience ran for the bathroom and the bar. “I respond to Styx.”

Will said, “How can anybody respond to Styx?”

The man said, “Can I just sing my song?”

Will sighed in irritation and waved him forward. “Fine. Sing your fucking stupid song.” The man ascended the stage and loosened his tie. Pathetic, the way he crossed his fingers and waved them hopefully at his friends. The majestic arena-rock chords of “Lady” began and Will signaled the bartender for a double bourbon.

As he had every night for the past several weeks, he scanned the crowd for a glimpse of Verity. Oh, what was the use? She was not going to show up here, that much was certain. So what then? Will watched the fat choad with the microphone sway on stage. That could be Craig one day, he thought, the poor slob. He thought, That could be me. Will slugged back his drink. He wasn’t going to rot here forever—if he owned his own bar and KJ equipment, he’d quit here in a second. He was on the cusp of new things, of launching a life, of reuniting the Lousy Dates. If Verity would not come to him, then he would go to her.

The Styx fan finished his performance with closed eyes and a fist brought down sharply in triumph. At some point thereafter, the nubile young thing returned to Will, sufficiently drunk for whatever adventures lay ahead. She selected her song and he pushed the appropriate buttons. Twitching her hips, she smiled at him as she began to sing. He admired her infant-sized DePaul shirt, thrusting pelvis, and gooey, oozing sexuality, but decided at that moment to go home alone, because despite her obvious charms, he found he could not forgive her for liking the Dave Matthews Band.