Credits

First published
Fiktion, Berlin, 2014
www.fiktion.cc
ISBN: 978-3-9816970-2-5

Project Directors (Publishing Program)
Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann

Project Director (Communications)
Henriette Gallus

Translators
Léon Dische Becker and Emily Dische-Becker

Editor
Alexander Scrimgeour

Proofreader
Tess Edmonson

German-language Editor
Mathias Gatza

Graphic Design
Vela Arbutina

Web Development
Maxwell Simmer, Version House

The copyright for the text remains with the author.

Fiktion is backed by the nonprofit association Fiktion e.V. It is organized in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and financed by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Fiktion e.V., c/o Mathias Gatza, Sredzkistraße 57, 10405 Berlin

Chairs
Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann
Registered association VR 32615 B
(Charlottenburg Local Court, Berlin)

Jakob Nolte
ALFF

Translated by Léon Dische Becker
and Emily Dische-Becker

what if life is just some hard equation
on a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts

The Silver Jews

The Holy Spook

Meggy’s eyes snap open. She sees a child’s room, nine fingers, the alarm clock. Sagging tectonic plates. She showers. She brushes her teeth and pulls a sweater and jeans over her pajamas. She takes two stairs at a time, stumbles every two steps. She grabs the fridge door, the granola, the key to the lock, pulls down her visor and takes off. Lawns race by her, semi-detached houses, parents, and parents of parents. At the school entrance, she hears a badly parked scooter tip over behind her but carries on walking. In the math exam, she picks the right answers. Someone jams her in a locker. Someone slams the books out of her hands. Someone kicks the glasses off her face.

Behind the corridors, behind the swing door and bike racks, behind the schoolyard and baseball field hangs the body of a lifeless boy. His skin has been fastidiously sewn into the fence’s boring, symmetrical grid. Once the police have photographed the scene from all conceivable angles, they peel the corpse from the mesh with a carpet knife. The blade breaks at the right elbow and the right heel. Slowly he slides into the undertaker’s arms, into the narrow coffin, into the belly of the cemetery. Nearly everyone from the High & Low High School attends the funeral — teachers, students, caretaking staff, the lifeguard from the outdoor pool. Benjamin’s parents stand above the graveless rectangle and beneath an inconsequential sun. His father is wearing that skinny tie, his mother a necklace of orange beads. She says,

– He was never quiet and he was never loud.

One autumn, in the year 1994, ice cream sales are down. Homecoming weekend. Meggy’s face is pretty. Meggy’s face would be pretty if it weren’t for that birthmark under her right eye. Her face is a mess. Or totally exquisite. It depends. Her left eye is green, her right eye is blue. Her nose is delicate. Her fingertips are delicate too, as if they were carved from wood like those old wooden spoons grandma used to drag through the spinach. The ring finger on her left hand is missing. She wears layers of silk, cashmere, and knitwear, muted colors, and suede shoes. She was never quiet, never loud, never foolish. What troubled her about last summer was not so much the absence of beauty, but the loss of that cheerfulness that makes doing nothing peaceful and relaxing. A parasitic notion of self-reinvention and rediscovery took hold of her thoughts.

Benjamin wakes up, looks at his alarm clock and curses. He curses in every way that he knows; he curses life, time, the sky, and all animals in the forest. Why didn’t his Mom wake him up, as she does every morning? He finds none of his forebears in the bedroom, none in the living room. Maybe in the kitchen? No, not in the kitchen either. Benjamin cuts two slices of homemade bread, toasts them, garnishes them with sweet potato strips, sprouts, brie, pear slices, mayonnaise, and a leaf of leaf lettuce. It tastes good. He washes it down with orange juice and decaffeinated drip coffee. The word decaf makes him think of air force, because the f sticks out at the end like the wing of a fighter jet. If Benjamin were to find a genie in the coffee jar, one that carried out any and every command, he would order the bombing of Belgium. He thinks the Belgians got off too easily for the crimes they committed during the colonial period and after. Justice. To pay his mother back for not waking him up at the usual time, he’s not going to clean up the kitchen. For his mother, that open jar of mayonnaise will, for the rest of her life, bea symbol of God’s arbitrariness or, rather, His non-existence. Had Benjamin known this, he’d have picked something more interesting. Or less complicated. He gets on his bike, rides to school, French-kisses Nataly under the bleachers, disregards a joke about his freckles, rocks back and forth in his chair, chews gum, and falls. Why am I not on the baseball team? Why does Nataly have such small breasts? What does the immortality of the soul actually mean? Strangely, Benjamin only asks himself two of those three questions that day, though only one of them is truly compelling. The next day, shortly before noon, three boys are out in the woods smoking their first cigarette and stumble upon him. Nataly places the palm of her hand on his cheek, which bears a striking resemblance to the Milky Way. She says,

– See you soon,

and

– Maybe your T-shirt is too small after all,

or she says,

– I wish you were an antelope, standing alone on the prairie, and then a wild lioness comes and tears you apart. I would be the wildlife photographer.

But most of all she says,

– See you soon.

Fourteen months later, a dog will retrieve a scrap of his clothing on the outskirts of an entirely different city in an entirely different state.

People who have so far gone unmentioned: the angry ginger with the pockmarks and the one-eyed girl.

The day after Benjamin’s naked corpse is discovered on the fence, Nataly and Meggy meet in the girls’ toilet. They stand next to each other at separate sinks, but a single mirror reflects back their faces.

– I’m sorry about the thing with —

– Yeah?

– Yeah.

Nataly shows Meggy the hickey on her neck.

– You know where I got this?

– Is it —

– It’s the only thing keeping Benjamin in this world. When this hickey is gone, that’s it.

Her eyes thick with tears, Nataly rummages in her handbag. It is full of notes and pens and hair clips and a nail file. She plunges the sharp cosmetic tool into the spot where Benjamin’s lips had been hard at work only yesterday. Nataly faints. Meggy is overwhelmed by the splutter of blood and faints. Susie, Susie, and Susanne enter the bathroom. Seeing the puddle of blood, they all faint. Fortunately, Susie tumbles into the doorway in such a way that a young voyeur is offered a glimpse up her skirt. He immediately faints. A few minutes pass in which nothing happens except that Nataly loses more blood. Meggy comes to. She pulls the nail file out of Nataly’s neck and stops the bleeding with her thumb. This is how they drive to the hospital. Nataly survives the escapade, though she spends a while on suicide watch.

School closes for a few days, and Meggy wonders how she will live from now on. She has a soft spot for radio shows, national anthems, and short books. She loves going to the movies because there you can stare into the sun without going blind. Here’s what she doesn’t have: a functional family bond, a horse, a functional hair band, a ponytail, cocks.

The members of the Party Party Club are in shock. How are they supposed to organize a decent Homecoming so soon after one of their classmates has been executed? And what about all the slogans they made up? MURDEROUS MEANS: SO MEAN or WE’RE HUNG UP ON VICE or LET’S HOPE BENJAMIN DIES SOON: all these were now out of the question. They would seem ironic now, insufficiently pious, even.

So Meggy is thinking and she notices something. She wants to do good and to help people. She doesn’t want to be the kind of girl one can accuse of having no purpose in the world. But the police won’t hire her anytime soon, so she decides to become a private detective. At the crime scene by the fence, she launches her own investigation into the murder of Benjamin MacNash. An icy wind blows against her eyelashes. The streets are gray, the cosmos cheerless. A clue, she thinks, there must be a clue. She pats the grass and mashes a bug between her fingers, sniffs them. She jots down: The murderer must have been tall and strong, technically skilled, perhaps with a penchant for sewing or knitting. He or she must lack all scruples, but be in possession of a scalpel; a serial offender, perhaps. But raindrops make the ink run. Who does this kind of thing, anyway? I mean, who even has extreme emotions like hate, love, or lust? Finally, she finds something substantial, a clue. She can’t understand how the police overlooked it, but at least it confirms her low opinion of them.

While Nataly’s in the hospital, she and Meggy seem well on their way to becoming friends.

– Enemies? I don’t know if he had enemies. Not really. Why would anyone have anything against him? He was a normal guy, he got along with the jocks, the math geeks, his teachers, people of all persuasions. His parents were good-looking, caring, thoughtful, and I loved him.

– Jealousy?

– No.

– Still, I would like to come over to yours for dinner sometime.

– Of course.

– I’ll give you a call. I most definitely will. Like, sometime in the early evening?

– Sure.

The asymmetry frightens Nataly. Meggy’s face reminds her of something — some thing.

The guts of November are cold. Meggy gets an A on her math exam. She is the best. Mr Cello praises her. After class, they jam her in a locker, knock the books out of her hands, and kick the glasses off her face. The starting roar of an airplane rings in her ears. She’s afraid that she’ll explode, alone, helpless in the dark. She screams and screams.

Nataly has signed up for the ski trip, but she feels uncomfortable because people see her as fucked by death and as an outsider. This annoys her tremendously.

Home-o-ween. The town is still in righteous mourning, so the Party Party Club has decided not to throw a party and to organize an illegal warehouse party instead, in an old machine plant that used to be a meat market and, before that, a crematorium. It’s Halloween, after all, and people eat pumpkins. Nataly, Miranda, and two boys, Joseph and Lenny, weave through the streets in a car, hoping to throw rotten eggs at buildings and smash letterboxes with baseball bats. Nataly met Miranda on the ski trip and at least one of their tensed calves touched the other’s. The idea of falling in love with a boy who’s not Benjamin seems repulsive to her and wrong, and so, to finally get back at God, she is now trespassing in female flowerbeds. But as same-sex love is never far from social exclusion, they both pretend to be on a date, driving around in a group of four, often not saying much, but at least there’s good music playing.

– So, at the party —

– At what party?

– Haven’t you kittens heard?

– Kittens?

– Well, you’re some feisty little kittens, aren’t you?

The things one puts up with.

Meggy lies in the tree-lined street. She stares at the sky, which is being eaten up by treetops, left and right, above and below. Things drizzle down on her — leaves, leaflets, tree trash. The color spectrum resembles an autopsy. She lies on the asphalt and drinks rye. She tosses a black stone in the air and catches it in her mouth. She tries to chew on it, but it’s too hard. She sucks on it, twiddles the stone with her tongue, wants to find a place for it somewhere in the gap between two lines, but can’t. She realizes that the universe is not in equilibrium, and that the missing piece to the puzzle is the worst metaphor there is. She realizes that there are only knives that cut into everything and stomachs that digest. She bites down again and again on the stone until her whole mouth is full of blood and splintered teeth, and she pours some rye into the mix and it burns and in one sharp jolt she swallows everything — tooth splinters, blood, the whiskey, and the stone.

A four-four beat repeats itself over and over. Nataly, her secret lover Miranda, and two boys, Joseph and Lenny, stand in a corner that’s far too big for them, clutching their strawberry punches. To get an idea of what they look like, standing there, surrounded by dancers and disco balls, you have to picture them from far away, with heads and lives like empty microwaves and splashes of tomato sauce in the corners of their eyes. Everything is different until everything is the same again. While Nataly dances, while she talks about the pills that people there call XTC, the pills the boys got from somewhere or other, haggled off someone, scored off someone, while she takes a swig of her drink, while Miranda tries to slip her hand under her buttcrack — during all of this, Nataly asks herself if it’s always like that with the dead. Do they always stay behind in the past, or is there a way of getting them to come along? Are they watching? She remembers when she was in Hawaii with her parents once, she and her sister pushing puberty, with just a few nights to go — it was an untroubled, glorious time. Leaning on the counter at a beachside bar, an old man told her about the mechanics of voodoo. Camera flashes, fog, cigarette weather. Was all that dead people stranded in the present? Later, Nataly and Miranda sit in the back seat of a car. They couldn’t care less about the morning sun. They are looking for protection and warmth. They don’t touch one another, they just discuss what crime novels are worth a read and Nataly asks herself secretly whether its a gift from the universe that she’s so damn good at making other people happy.

Benjamin’s murderer is nicknamed the fencecutioner by the school newspaper.

– Why do they assume it’s a him not a her?

nobody asks.

Nataly didn’t do it. Meggy knows that. Sure, Nataly can be violent, she’s a member of the knitting and embroidery club, and emotionally reckless as well, but she’s really not the type. On the whole, Meggy thinks it’s unlikely it was someone from school. The type of murder, the blow of the hammer to the skull, the pleasure in cracking bones, and the meticulous presentation of the work — that doesn’t seem like something a student from the High & Low High School would do. Everyone she knows is far too lazy to go to that kind of trouble.

Miranda nods off, Nataly inspects her. Miranda’s chest heaves up and down, the air in her lungs is warm. Her skin, that skimpy rag that stops her from leaking, is soft. You could wipe spectacles with her skin. Nataly runs her fingers over Miranda’s lips, takes the bottom lip, grasps it between her thumb and middle finger. Pulls. And spits into the small vessel between mouth and teeth. Their faces are very close. She reaches deep into the left pocket of her pants, then the right pocket, and falls asleep.

By the time Benjamin turned fourteen, he and Nataly had been together for two years. She gave him a special present because they were sure they were made not only for each other but for ever and ever. It was the ring she found in the woods. It was made of wood and gold. In return, on Nataly’s fifteenth birthday, she got a ring as well. Benjamin had made it from the wiring of his beloved tube TV set. They were in love, they were serious, and it was good. When it became clear that Benjamin was a deceased juvenile, Nataly cut the ring off her ring finger and the ring finger off her hand.

One day, when spring is already around the corner, Nataly and Meggy meet outside on the fields. Winter never came and the ground is soft, though the light is still frozen. Each of them puts forward their scarred left hand. Their finger stubs interlock like the cogs of an antique machine.

– Did you hear? They’re saying that an old couple living in a hut in the woods took the life of your lover.

– I know.

– They’re being executed tomorrow.

– I know.

– But they didn’t do it.

– I know.

– Funny.

says Meggy.

– Not so important. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out, get out of everything.

But nothing can grow where once there was a wish.

The stadium is on the edge of the town, which borders a forest and a small mountain. This small mountain is the only elevation for dozens of miles, with the exception of the church steeple. It’s a flat little town. Its three-story houses have such low ceilings that they would elsewhere count as two-story houses. To make up for it, the streets are so wide that the wind hardly whistles. Everything is gray-green or white or red, except the telephone poles, which are remarkably black for their age. Even the cables have lost none of their blackness; they still map out the symphony of telecommunications installed in the early ’60s, when everything was redone around here: the houses, the streets, the sky. The church isn’t smack in the center (and it never was). If the town were a dartboard, you’d find the church on triple 19. The church steeple is there and you can see it from all over, and for anyone so inclined it’s a wagging index finger, protruding toward the sky. Of course it’s pathetically short and nowhere near scraping the sky, but it’s still higher than everything else, cold and severe. Its severity, though, stops short at its own facade, since the steeple clocks, projecting the time of day in all four cardinal directions, are each wrong in a different inexplicable way. Rumor has it that the clock on the north face is right three times a day, you just have to keep checking it. So that’s the church. But thanks to a grassroots campaign, an exception was made and the execution will be carried out in the stadium this time instead. Meggy and Nataly go together. Wood shavings are strewn everywhere and security people line the arena, holding buckets and blankets. The couple from the forest are led shrieking and begging into the center, where everyone in the sold-out bleachers can see them. The security people throw the blankets over the condemned and beat them to death with the buckets. The whole thing takes 47 minutes and although ice cream sales are not as good as expected, the peanut vendors make a killing.

After the spectacle’s over, Meggy and Nataly saunter through the center of town, a place of emptiness, dusty storefronts, and streetlights. There used to be a fish vendor and a cheese store here, there were specialist shops for shoe inserts, lottery tickets, and pistachio ice cream. There were bars and cafés that were truly one-of-a-kind, and hotbeds of expertise on subjects such as pumpkins. A lady owned a whole store here that sold nothing but pumpkins — pumpkins in the shape of snails, vials, and cauliflowers — but today it is closed. Everything in the city center has closed down, except the diner. For all other essentials, the residents of the town have to scavenge in basements and catacombs, the stretch of the sewage system where Darkmart opened in the summer of ’92. Quietly, Darkmart’s owner chiseled shelves into the underground, and from that point on, bit by bit, he squeezed out all other economic life in the city. Sometimes, during the short night hours when Darkmart is closed, steam rises to the streets through the storm drains, mingling with the stench of burned rock, and you can hear the store shelves adjusting their position quietly beneath the ground, a monstrous serpent of tupperware, preserved meat, and gallons of milk; its hot breath. Nataly talks about Miranda a lot, about the fact that her parents and sister aren’t allowed to know about their forbidden love, although it’s so beautiful, and about how the love of one lover can be so different from that of another. They sit in the diner, where a grouchy sailor serves them.

– What’ll it be? Are you bunnies here for some lettuce?

– No.

– Two large Cokes, zucchini burghers, and fries.

From her bag, Meggy pulls the evidence that she found and then forgot, then found and forgot again, found again, forgot again, then saw on the desk by coincidence and misplaced somewhere, and then salvaged from her memory to show to Nataly. That thing from the crime scene. Neither of them knows what to make of it.

– So.

– It looks like some kind of geometric nebula.

– Or more like a piece of silverware.

– A key, maybe?

– Or a crank?

– A motor?

– Or a tool?

– Maybe it’s an artist’s tool?

– Or art?

– Maybe it’s just stuff?

They disagree. The food arrives and Nataly doesn’t feel like playing the guessing game anymore; she suspects that the girl sitting across from her despises her. Meggy is asymmetric, idiosyncratic, borderline uninteresting, and doesn’t take care of herself. Nataly knows that beautiful people are often exciting and charismatic, clever and quick, while less beautiful people tend to be more banal. But then who could help her — Meggy, that is — identify the piece of evidence? That would be Bobby, King of Boyhemia.

– Oh? And who’s that? And how can I meet him?

– I know somebody,

says Nataly. Fear, happiness, fear and happiness. They like the sailor, so they leave him a big tip. Meggy sticks around for a while and takes some notes.

Medium-sized birds sing as Nataly wanders between the town’s low-rises, losing herself in thought. Sticks, stones, and bottle caps pierce her sneakers’ worn soles. She chews on her hair. Then she chews on the knot of her friendship bracelet, her fingernails, fingers, and hand. Eventually she crouches down and chews on her knee. What if Meggy wants to meet up again? What if she wants to be my girlfriend? What if no one ever solves the murder? How much more time am I going to spend with this person? What excuses will she find to call me again? To hassle me with her presence? Nataly bites down. Her front teeth have gouged out a small hole in her knee, which she now laboriously tears open further. She lies on the ground, in the middle of the sidewalk, and dreamily licks her exposed kneecap. Later, much later, when she’s finally asleep, Joseph and Lenny swing by on their red scooters and take her away. They bring her home; Joseph cradles her in his arms and carries her through the door, past her mother and father, into her room, where he tucks her in. He strips off his jersey, his shirt, and lies down beside her, folding his arms into a pillow. He offers her a cigarette; she shakes her head. He offers her his tongue; she shakes her head. A small Jesus on a small cross gleams on his chest.

– Do you believe in God?

He takes off Nataly’s skirt, kisses her feet and shins, her thighs, her hips, the fabric of her underpants, lukewarm, while she shrieks, curses, and spits; it doesn’t stop. She balls her fingers into a fist and punches him in the neck. Her sister, who’s been watching all along, grabs a marker pen and rams it into Joseph’s ribs. He doesn’t fight back. Fine lacerations appear on his skin. The scent of lust mingles with a stench of fear.

There are strict rules at the High & Low High School, concerning, for example, who is allowed to eat what where and when in the cafeteria, and for how long. Of course, not everyone gets to have a meal without meat. Some students spend entire semesters eating ground meat, goulash, schnitzels, goulash, or goulash. Rules of this kind govern other daily routines — all of them, in fact. Students who follow them are essentially choosing ritual humiliation over the cruelty of improvisation, which can be a good deal more scary. Privileges fall to the older students, the more beautiful and wealthy students. Meggy takes issue with these structures. She simply doesn’t recognize them, so she cannot respect them, contextualize them, or reproduce them. Maybe this is because her whole life plays out exclusively in the present. Maybe it’s calcium deficiency. Maybe this problem, which is her great problem with life and the world, is in a strange and special way her great advantage over them both.

While Nataly stares at the ceiling of her bedroom, ignoring what her sister is saying, the phone rings and she tunes out her surroundings. She has no idea where Joseph is, nor even if he was ever there at all. She shifts her gaze from the ceiling to the wall. Benjamin once gave her Slayer’s Reign in Blood and called her his little angel of death. This prompted her to buy a Slayer poster and hang it on her wall. Miranda made her a mix tape of her favorite songs; now Nataly wonders if she should hang up a poster of Miranda or one of her favorite frontmen. Nataly’s father Henry, her mother Amy, and her sister Emily lie down in her bed, one after the other. Amy asks Nataly why she didn’t answer the phone. Didn’t she know who was calling? No, she didn’t know.

– How should I have known? Who was it?

No one picked up the phone.

– Shall we eat dinner?

But they are full and stay in bed. They wonder who would call at this hour. Their relatives from Zurich? The defilers? The guard with the wooden eyes? The war dead?

They lie there watching the lives they didn’t live flicker by: days in the park, silent hours, and the hands — mostly, the hands — which would have stroked their shoulders and drawn treasure maps on their backs. Standing together at the station; a sudden shift from warmth to lust, sending a shock through their muscles — just to hold and hug that body, throw caution to the wind, and swallow it whole.

Lenny is skinnier than Joseph. You can see ribs and wrist bones under his skin. He has thick short black hair and wears metal-rimmed glasses, their right edge patched up with yeast and baking parchment. He owns a lot of music on vinyl and a record player and also a red scooter. At night, when his dad is asleep, he goes over to the liquor shelf and the bookshelf, selects the most beautiful items from each, and rides down the tree-lined streets on his red scooter. At every spot that makes him think of Joseph, he stops to read a chapter and takes a swig. By the time he realizes that Russian writers had the habit of writing very short chapters and that Scottish distilleries manufacture very strong liquor, it’s too late. He is incredibly drunk. He drives into a fence and into a ditch. Loses contact with his legs and other parts of his body. The accident changes Lenny. Not only does he drag his right foot when he walks, he has also gotten lighter. As he lay there, among fence pickets and the shards of his front light, with his face on the ground between the splinters, looking at his bloody hand, the drops forming on it and seeping into the ground, everything blending to a single blackness as he waited for someone or something to free him from this immobility, something took root within him — a plant that grew larger and stronger with each minute of silence. The power of a full bathtub. He reads all his father’s books and listens to all the records available at the record store. Joseph often visits him in hospital, but Lenny doesn’t care. One day, even Miranda and Nataly drop by.

– How are you?

– I know that you’re a couple.

– We know that you love Joseph.

With threats flying at them, they leave the room at once. Lenny has a Gibson SG delivered to his hospital room, along with several amplifiers and fuzzboxes. He records an experimental, expansive, loud, and sometimes extremely distorted guitar album called Doom Town Boys onto Joseph’s answering machine. Compared to the music that will emerge in the future, these compositions are nothing out of the ordinary, but for their time they are revolutionary, or rather, they would have been, if Joseph’s father hadn’t deleted that crap instantly to free up some space on the tape.

The principal of the High & Low High School runs into Meggy in the hallway. Meggy is alone. Her eyelids are twitching.

– What are you doing out in the hallway?

Meggy collapses into a pile.

– What’s the matter?

Meggy pushes her arms onto the linoleum floor, trying to hold up the weight of her body.

– Meggy?

She vomits.

– What’s up with you?

She shivers from the cold.

– A doctor, quick!

She gazes at the principal. She whispers.

– The newspapers are bad. They’re as bad as can be. I can’t stand it anymore. It’s too much. No one can stand it. These germs, this disease that calls itself journalism.

– Oh? Then join the school paper and make it better.

With her remaining strength, Meggy punches the principal in the face.

– Gosh, you’re so angry. I’d like to give you a hug.

– Never!

She rolls away, sobs into the distance, having only just dodged that hug, and when she stops, alone in the fields, nothing around her but the smell of buildingless air, Meggy spreads out her arms and waits for the wind to undercut her body. A kite. She flutters. Nataly pulls her back down with the kite string.

– I heard that you hit the principal?

– Yeah.

– Why?

– She defiled me.

– Oh.

– And nobody is allowed to do that.

– Why did you want to meet me?

– I’m very alone, Nataly.

– That’s why you wanted to see me?

– I’m afraid for you and Miranda. That couple from the hut: they weren’t murderers — not Benjamin’s.

– Benjamin?

– You’re my only friend and I don’t want anything to happen to you.

Nataly has to stop herself from laughing, she bends down, pretends to tie her shoelace, and cuts the cord attaching Meggy to the earth. She flies away and gets caught in a row of poplars jutting out of the horizon like long-range missiles.

Back home, Nataly’s sister Emily asks Nataly if she can have her vanilla pudding. Nataly agrees, though it’s her favorite dessert.

Back home, Meggy’s mother asks Meggy why she’s so cruel but Meggy doesn’t say a word. The two of them are sitting at the kitchen table. Meggy’s mother is drinking half a bottle of red wine and Meggy is eating figs with cream cheese. Meggy’s mother can’t look her daughter in the eye. Throughout the cramped, self-defeating conversation, her eyes stay glued to her glass of red wine. Meggy keeps silent. They watch a documentary on TV. Her mother spouts endless variations of her incessantly dumb, cowardly opinions. Her mild sociopathic tendencies are diffused by drunkenness. She drinks half a bottle of red wine. Meggy does her homework in her room. Meggy’s mother drinks half a bottle of red wine. Meggy locks the door. Meggy’s mother drinks half a bottle of red wine. Every step to her daughter’s room, she drinks another half a bottle. Meggy props a chair against the door handle. She lies down in bed. She is wearing jeans and a sweater over her pajamas. A blood vessel in her eye bursts. When her mother leaves her to drive to work the next morning — going for at least a week, darling, to Santa Fe — Meggy pretends that it’s not her mother kissing her, but a lusty boy trying to steal her soul. She leaves Meggy a lot of money, but her daughter isn’t particularly good at spending money. She acquires ever more simple, drab items. She doesn’t know how to live large or live it up or anything like that. So, rice puddings and Lucio Fulci films; today, for instance, Paura nella città dei morti viventi. If it were up to Meggy, she would live in Italy in the 1980s and be called Mario. Maybe she (Mario) would meet a young woman at a café and take her to the beach on a bicycle to sell melons. The sea would be all water, and the water would be deep and blue and clear and salty. Its surface would never be smooth. In the sea, their heads would bob up and down, to and fro. Perhaps he (Meggy) would put the young woman in a headlock and force her to eat theseeds that tourists spat out on the sand.

When Benjamin MacNash was born, his parents held him up to the light like a letter one is not allowed to open but still wants to read. They were hoping to find a coded message inside his baby body. A note. If we destroy our language, we will all be saved, redeemed. We must disembowel the words and stuff their innards into the carcasses of other words. Crudely and cruelly. Until all words are hacked into tiny pieces, the remnants of unreadable symbols. Only when there are no remaining differences between words will there be no differences between people. But little Benjamin turned out to be a normal boy, not an oracle. When he turned twelve, the MacNashs accepted his conventionality, and started to smile again in their everyday lives. They also had sex. It wasn’t so easy at first; the thought of having his member near a birth canal and penetrating it made his father feel quite unwell. It wasn’t just called a birth canal now; as he had proudly witnessed with his own eyes, it actually was one. But after some candid conversations, he ardently and passionately reconsidered his wife’s genitalia. He had seen an ad for exotic dances from Bulgaria and Romania at the Milk & Milk dance school, and soon, in their early old age, aside from raising their son, dancing and sex became the MacNashs’ thing. Until their son was murdered, that is. They blame themselves, because they spent the night before Benjamin’s basal skull fracture practicing a tricky sex position in a cabin loaned them by a friendly couple from dance school. The rest of their life feels very short.

Joseph lodges his complaints:

– When I’m showering in the morning and lathering myself up, who will wrap their fingers around my penis? Have I not gone long enough without the beautiful, the noble, and the good?

What he also saw was a figure, probably a person or a shadow, a faint shadow, maybe with a face, but he wasn’t sure. Numerous parts of this apparition appeared oddly encapsulated within one another. It was wearing a fur coat or a feathered dress.

– Where was that?

– The figure snuck across the school campus. I’m not sure anymore. I think I saw something but forgot it immediately.

Joseph fiddles around with the napkin dispenser. There’s a large strawberry milkshake in front of him.

– If you hadn’t hypnotized me, I wouldn’t have remembered anything.

– When did this happen, when exactly?

– Early morning. It had just begun to get light.

– That same?

– That same day they found Benjamin’s body.

– And you didn’t tell anyone?

– Not until just now, no.

Good work, Meggy thinks to herself and orders a beer.

– 21 already?

the grouchy sailor asks.

– Nope, it’s my first today.

– Well then.

Meggy and Joseph take sips of the cool amber and make thoughtful motions of their heads. The two met a week before, butting heads because Meggy was skating counter-clockwise at the roller disco. She said sorry and then noticed that she had in fact collided with the one head she would describe as her favorite. She immediately began to tell him about her investigation into Benjamin’s murder and she was quite sure that Joseph was a little impressed. So she asked him if he’d ever been hypnotized. That, she said, was a way to access to the most secret parts of one’s subconscious. Which is true, but in this case Meggy is more interested in the deed than the result. She wants to treat him to his milkshake, but hardly has enough cash to pay for herself. Really, the diner is too colorful for this encounter, and the music is irredeemably European. But Joseph, who has for some time held the title of unembraced master of loneliness, is happy about every encounter with a girl, even if Meggy seems more like a prattling old woman. At least he finds her odd and not repellent. As she rambles on about the perpetrator who is still at large, as she tells the story, with the words tumbling out of her mouth in a hasty, dictatorial manner, the room grows bigger. Joseph stops paying attention to the sounds coming from Meggy; his right eye sees nothing but a glaring hole behind the bar counter, while the left one tries to counteract it, to flare it out. The tables, chairs, guests, and fries around them draw ever further into the distance, the edges of things blur, white and empty, the ambient noise turns into wads of sounds that bounce from wall to wall.

– The face, Joseph!

Meggy pinches his arm.

– Listen to me! The face! Whose face was it?

But Joseph doesn’t know the name being demanded of him. He stutters. When did he start to stutter?

– I don’t know. I, I, I, I —

Meggy strokes his forearm. It’s okay. And when Joseph leaves the diner, the diner is the diner again. Being alone calms him down, but his failure to give a more exact description will play a small part in the slitting of his younger sister’s wrists. Later. Her skin, too, will be worked into a fence by the fencecutioner.

Chesley wakes up. She dreamt that she had written an opera for a cast of autistic people, midgets, and policemen. She became an international celebrity overnight and banjo chords rained down on her. Brushing her teeth, she is struck by the fact that a good many country singers can’t sing. She is wearing panties and her father’s old shirt. The thick and grainy toothpaste seeps from the orifice in her head. She studies herself and the bathroom in its early morning boundlessness. She spits at the mirror.

– I asked you what you want from me.

And she cleans everything up, sits down at the breakfast table. She has already forgotten her dream.

– Don’t you want to wear some pants?

She will never write an opera. Her brother is sitting across from her.

– Or do we all eat breakfast in our underpants now?

– All of us?

Joseph believes in the idea of the family, in closeness, profundity, in kindness and in love. But this belief is, it seems, sometimes not shared by the rest of his family.

– Why are there only two of us, sitting at the kitchen table on a weekday morning?

Where could they be?Chesley asks herself silently.

– Yes, all of us. In this particular case, that means you and me.

– Alright, alright.

– And I’m not sitting here in my underpants.

– You’re not wearing underpants?!

– I am, but not only underpants, you cheeky bugger!

Joseph is happier than he was yesterday. It’s hot. The Kool-Aid glows in the south. Joseph is eating Sugarjacks from a cooking pot, because none of the ceramic bowls are big enough for him.

– You can’t even fit a quart in there!

– Tell me, why are you in such a good mood?

– I’m going to meet a girl.

– Who? Nataly?

– Oh, shut up.

– Well, who else?

– You don’t know her.

– Tell me.

– Meggy.

– Isn’t she —

the cocky little sister starts her sentence and wants to finish it with scum, mold, tin, but she has already been hit on the shoulder by cereal and milk.

– No gotcha questions!

The last truly beautiful, straightforward, and profoundly childlike moment in Chesley’s life unfolds. The big food fight. She dons a red shawl, while her brother straps a soup strainer to his head. They chase each other around the house, into the basement and pantry; a frozen pack of butter — or rather a brick of fat — strikes Joseph on the temple, which rings like a French school bell. With his remaining strength, he retreats to study the military strategies of Sherman, Patton, and Armenius, chief of the Cherusci. He digs a ditch in the hallway, fills it with rice and noodles, lays a carpet over it and waits. Chesley wants to surprise him with a lightning attack, but in fact falls into the treacherous trap.

– Ha!

Joseph triumphs, laughs, does a victory jig, and kisses his sister on the forehead. She leaves the house in a state of disarray. Joseph, on the other hand, decides to skip school after such a tiring morning, choosing instead to shoot empty baked-bean cans with his father’s rifle. Joseph’s red scooter was sold after Lenny’s accident. The equality of

mankind is dwindling.

Miranda’s tummy likes to be stroked. It’s tender, and tender things love tenderness. Tender things are unique in this regard. Nataly knows what to do because she’s a lover. And loving is the most beautiful thing in the world. Miranda left the High & Low High School a while back, but still sometimes helps out as a chaperone on ski trips because she gets on so well with the PE teacher. Miranda has her own apartment. A room with a small kitchen and a small bathroom; a bed, a desk. Food, sometimes in the cooler, sometimes on the stove. Her clothes hang on the walls, on hooks, she doesn’t have space for a dresser. Nataly has been there a lot in the past four months. Miranda thinks she’s mature for her age: Sometimes Nataly just sits in the corner and thinks things over. This earns Nataly — who is, in fact, a cross between a mouse and a snake, not thinking but waiting — the respect of the older girl. At other times, she reads a book about dinosaurs. She mainly wants to be close to Miranda. Nothing else. She doesn’t ask for anything unless she really wants it. She makes her own tea; she also tidies up and does the dishes. At night, the two of them go to the bar where Miranda works. The Bar Scene From Star Wars Bar is in the industrial neighborhood. The waitresses are topless, but earn a decent penny. They ask Nataly if she’s 21 yet. She must have heard wrong, because she says

– Yes.

After Miranda’s shift she visits her in the changing room and finds her frisking for stray five-dollar bills in her underwear. Nataly places her head in Miranda’s lap. She whispers,

– Miranda. You know Bobby, right?

It tickles a bit.

– Yeah, why?

– I have to talk to him — Meggy does, I mean. You know Meggy, right.

– I think I know who you mean.

– Good.

– Didn’t you say you that you can’t stand her?

– Yeah. That’s why I have to put her in touch with Bobby, or with someone who will help her play detective — to finally get some peace.

– Hmm.

– So?

– Alright then.

– Are you mad at me?

– No.

– Sometimes I just forget how young you are. Can you please hand me my jeans?

That night, Miranda and Nataly sleep with each other for the first time.

– The way you stood there, the way you danced, it just made me —

Two bodies in a room, tenderly fucking each other’s brains out. A knee collides with a thigh, splitting muscle from bone; Miranda the poultry scissors. The quivering of tongues, the circular motions in the sludge, continued to the point of jaw dislocation and the total loss of feeling in all facial muscles. One of them wants to prove to the other how old she can be; the other to herself that she is a calculating bitch.

Chesley likes to wear bracelets and her hair goes down to her shoulders. She likes to wear baggy shorts with the bottoms rolled up. She likes to keep a magnifying glass in her bag because she likes everything that is too big. The textures of wood. The grooves on fingertips. Chesley is obsessed by details. Like when a tea bag revolves in fruit tea as if by its own volition. She senses how the doors shut behind her and the sun vanishes from her neck. Susie, Susie, and Susanne utter sweet and nonsensical words and phrases, but that’s not the kind of thing that bothers Chesley. She likes tuning in and out. She thinks that talking is one of the great things a body can do. And for one single moment, she thinks that she’s as good as dead, and a few moments later she is as good as dead, only better.

Subjects that interest Bobby: European unity, time’s impact on skeletons, the starry sky above him, Dungeons & Dragons. He remembers going to the theater with his father (an unhappy Swedish man), shortly before the death of his mother (a happy Swedish woman). His father is sitting next to him, his dust-white hair combed back, wearing a parka and a shirt, both in the same style. His forehead is boundless and he’s staring not at the stage but into the great unknown. An actress or actor in a Japanese costume has just come onto the stage. He — or more likely she — is wearing a kimono and a mask, and has a fan in his — or probably her — right hand. The mask is cheerful, its eyes very narrow. The eyebrows are shaved off and penciled back in just below the hairline. The figure is lit from behind, so the light shines onto Bobby’s face. He stares at the stage. His mouth is open, he no longer feels his arms, and his legs are a distant memory. He has never seen anything like this. The beauty and grace and all the inhumanity expressed by the mask seemed to him a deception filled with truth. That same night, he writes a letter to his father. He leaves it on the kitchen table, which is made of walnut. From now on and forever, I will no longer lie. He leaves home immediately to find work on a freighter. He peels potatoes, stares out the cabin, thinks about Hungarian music ethnologists, and crosses the Atlantic. He can look very young if he wants to, and when he arrives on the terra firma of North America he firmly states that he is indeed very young. He is sent to the nearest high school, where he graduates a few years later. But he doesn’t consider this time beautiful or well-spent; he doesn’t know what he’s looking for but he knows that he hasn’t found it yet. So he gets a fake ID and enrolls at another high school. There he falls in love with a young girl who dies of consumption. At the next high school, he falls in love with a girl who gets sick from hysteria and so he changes schools again, his shaving techniques growing ever more deft, though having blond hair means it’s not such a challenge. It’s sad, maddeningly so: As soon as he falls in love with a girl, she succumbs to some European disease. His final stop is the High & Low High School. His body is so mature at this point that he has to rush to the toilets to rejuvenate during every break. He is working tirelessly on making his face into a mask, which reminds him of the theater and cheers him up. Back then. When was that? He doesn’t remember. But even forgetting cheers him up. He falls in love with a boy, they kiss, and the boy moves to a distant city on the west coast. That’s all that happens to that boy. The curse is lifted, apparently, and so he gets used to loving young men, the kind that don’t shave, or have small red pimples on their foreheads. After graduation, he does something childish. He takes up residence in the school building and sets up a surveillance archive. He follows the hustle in the hallways and the bustle in the classrooms. He keeps tabs on every move, every high five, every slap on the ass. He has built a den in the basement, a library, in which he compares the different ways that living beings live, hoping to work out the Theory of Everything. He wants to calculate the smallest common denominator of the human race. To finance this project, he works as a sailor at the diner. Few people remember him; he was inconspicuous, a phantom. But Miranda remembers him very well. Bobby (actually Börje) is happy. His father, however, writes poems in the Swedish snow, with titles like Ö Melancoli, and misses his family.

Lenny is in his room. He is looking at the windows. Not at the outside, not at the inside, but at the in-between. He goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. Lenny has eleven raw eggs in the fridge. He takes three, drops two on the tiled floor and fries one in the pan. How many eggs are still in the fridge? Eleven? Eight? Six? Lenny chops spring onions into slices and wonders when summer onions will be in season. Lenny eats raw mushrooms and gets a stomach ache. He runs a bath, a luxurious one with candles and hash, masturbates and sticks a piece of soap into his anus. He starts to worry that he won’t get it out again. It burns, he comes. He calms down and spreads his legs as far as they’ll go so he can maximally free up access to his rear exit. Eventually he’s got it and pulls it out. And it is white as usual. It smells of cedar. He washes it thoroughly and puts it back in the grooved soap receptacle on the side of the tub.

Meggy meets Miranda in front of the church. It’s a hot morning, probably the hottest of the year. Rumor has it the pastor has been selling ice cream in waffle cones under the table and without Darkmart’s consent. Beneath the clock tower there is in fact a huddle of non-believers — Meggy thinks that’s the best way to describe them — who are all licking something behind their hands. She pushes past the people in line.

– Pistachio!

The young woman behind her recognizes Meggy from her friend’s description. She grabs her by the shoulder.

– They’re out of pistachio.

– Really?

– But you can have mine.

Later, Meggy and Miranda sit down in a confession booth. You can hear that someone is playing organ music on the church organ, that the people’s speech is more of a whispering, that everything reverberates and echoes. The acoustics are so bad they hardly understand each other. But soon the name Bobby comes up.

– The place you can find him is in an archive. As for where that is, it’s in the school basement.

Meggy immediately makes her way to the school and Miranda only narrowly escapes a raid by Darkmart’s security guards, who see to it that the church is shut down, at least for the time being.

In the principal’s office the radio plays at a volume that suggests that she either has exceptional hearing or that she can’t stand the radio but silence even less. She turns to Meggy, who is still on her way to regaining consciousness.

– What were you doing in the basement?

Without really understanding what is being expected of her, she counters,

– What were you doing in the basement? I mean, how did I even get here?

Their conversation ends with Meggy finally agreeing to work for the school paper as a sports writer, and also as a cartoonist doing at least three panels a month. Out of there as quick as possible and back to the basement, find Bobby, avoid fainting. But where a few hours ago there was just a door to the basement there is now a crowd.

Chesley looks into her tormentor’s eyes. They are small eyes. Chesley. What a name. A name like a riddle. Like a good game of chess or a polar expedition to the best-hidden oil reserves on earth. She sees a hammer and thread in his hand. She wants to run away, to free herself, to drop everything, to feel her own wholeness one last time, the helicopters, the silver and gold linings of the azure; she wants to jump and not let go, to tear herself up; to damage the air, she wants to glow, to become a piece of burning charcoal, to touch lava, to lie down, to dream and to love, but then the iron strikes and the top of her skull springs a leak.

The debate club’s noticeboard hangs on the door to the basement. The list of the best debaters. Nataly doesn’t make the cut, but Chesley comes in second place and Benjamin first. Posthumously. In both cases posthumously, as it turns out. The lifeguard’s shriek cuts right through the school’s marrow. He has never seen anything so terrible. This young, full-blooded girl, just as old as his own daughter, has stopped being young and been emptied of blood. She hangs there, neatly and cleanly woven into the fence by the outdoor pool, which was supposed to open next week, now that the weather is getting nicer. The police arrive and cordon everything off. They secure the crime scene and very soon they feel very guilty about the couple from the hut in the woods who were only recently executed. Clearly this is the same killer who tricked that boy out of his life. Their guilty conscience coagulates with their fear of litigation, which could result in their own execution because of wrongful execution, so the majority of the police force flees to Old England that same night. There they build a whisky distillery with the finest highland barley, eventually exporting a quite successful brand of Scotch called Widowed Bride.

When Joseph hears that his sister has been brutally dehumanized, he takes his dad’s rifle and visits Lenny. He aims at his head.

– We are starting a band. We’re going to record an album. Guitar, guitar, percussion, that’s it. Do you understand? Above all no singing. Nobody will sing. And now we’re going to try this heroin stuff that everyone’s always talking about.

They call themselves La Deutsche Vita, which they think is a clear allusion to a period in the Federal Republic of Germany that spanned from May 7, 1945 to April 11, 1961; the time before the Eichmann trial — that carefree time when the country’s inhabitants still believed that they hadn’t committed perhaps the worst crime of the twentieth century and that they weren’t guilty of being complicit or turning a blind eye. To capture that feeling of good old German craftsmanship, the Quandt feeling, all 45 of La Deutsche Vita’s 61-second tracks are recorded in a spacious BMW. Almost instantly the two of them become endlessly wealthy and can afford not only heroin but as many books as they like. They start to take a pronounced interest in the history of indigenous peoples and invest vast amounts of capital of all kinds in translations of literature in Eskimo-Aleutian languages. Years later, Joseph will put on sunglasses and walk through a garden mumbling to himself. He’ll be holding a rifle in one hand and a flimsy knife in the other. He will walk as far as his legs carry him, because the garden will be gigantic. Around him, everything will grow greener and more intense, but he will lose strength. He will sink to the ground, his jeans will have grass stains on the knees and his sweater will be torn at the collar. Joseph will be exhausted, and in his exhaustion a spring will well up before him, and on the surface of the water he will see not his own face but the face of his sister. He will stab the spring with his knife, the green will turn brown and the brown will turn gray. He will be lying there, years later, the shiny end of a rifle tickling the roof of his mouth. He will gag and spit will run down the barrel like mild dewy honey. He will have to bend his thumb to an awkward angle in order to finally pull the trigger.

Given the absence of executive authority and the explosive nature of the case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation establishes a committee in what used to be the most peaceful small town in New England. Agents. They rent the two uppermost floors of L'Otel Chacal; they set up whiteboards, pinboards, listening devices, old furniture, and Swedish ashtrays, and expertly position themselves in front, behind, above, and below them. There are technological marvels among the new fixtures, too. The special operation is lead by a man called Donna Jones. Donna had a great time from 1993 to 1994. He moved from Staten Island to Washington DC and embarked on a career as a criminologist. Also, Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers, Black Moon’s Enta Da Stage, the Souls of Mischief’s 93 ’til Infinity,and Nas’s Illmatic had just been released. This gave Donna a deep sense of validation, and his self-confidence grew. The music reminded him of an earlier time of humiliation. When a skateboarder spat in his face, and when he almost lost his life at an intersection. When he sat on the waterfront and drank beer out of a brown paper bag. When he bullied his son on the basketball ball court one night, and his son disappeared along with his mom. Slowly the feeling of loneliness returned, the anxiety that he’d never done the right thing in his life. Which is why he wanted to try the wrong thing in order to find out if it was the right thing. This is how he started his career with the police force, and it was amazing how straightforward everything was. How easy it was to get promoted and to move to DC back then, in the spring of 1993, only to find himself in this small town two years later. You can see everything from L'Otel Chacal. Donna stands by the window, smokes rollies, and waits.

To lift morale at the High & Low High School, which now has two dead students on its hands, Nataly, star of the ski trip, is going to perform a dry run of her best parallel turns in the school auditorium. This is an honor as well as a danger, for if Nataly embarrasses herself, she will be ostracized. The hyenas will tear the bones from her limbs. Meggy, the sports reporter for the independent student newspaper The Hatred, is on the scene, of course. Nataly stands center stage, the searchlight has put her on the spot, turned on her just like the eyes of the audience. Her own eyes fade to black. Silence. The wood makes cracking sounds. Drops of sweat fall from eyebrows onto shoulders. Nataly in her snow suit. Miranda has come too, and is waiting backstage. She has brought flowers. Nataly’s blood stops circulating, frozen for 31 seconds; she almost suffers a stroke because she is so tense. She looks to the left, swings her heels to the right, her hips sway along, now smooth and enticing. A murmur goes around the room. Meggy scribbles in her notebook like mad; she’s wearing a nice hat. She is hoping to catch Nataly after the performance and get some quotes. Weren’t they friends? Didn’t they have a secret and a sadness in common? Hadn’t they both lost a ring finger and hadn’t their scars kissed one another? Did that touch ever happen, or had it never stopped? Clapping. Cheering. Screams. Everyone is thrilled. Nataly steps off the stage. Miranda puts her forearms around her; locks her into her limbs as if she were riding on a roller coaster. The lovestruck girls hang around the studio apartment. Miranda stuffs one, then two, then three pizza baguettes in the oven; wet and sweet and hot breath comes out of Nataly’s nose. Meggy waits outside the changing room. No one comes.

– Are you there?

– No.

No one is there. Meggy’s review is damning. She criticizes the lack of technique and passion, the lighting and equipment, the performer’s facial expression and hips. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief, an anonymous robot, complains that the article is incorrect and demonstrates this empirically. Meggy quarrels with the editor-in-chief and convinces him that the freedom of the press is a good and sacrosanct thing. The article appears unaltered and alters the perception of what happened. No one liked the performance. A number of students meet in the assembly hall to stage a protest against their memories. They clap in reverse to undo their shame. Nataly and Meggy will not exchange a word for the rest of high school, partly because they now move in separate circles and Nataly no longer has permission to talk to Meggy. The only person who sticks with Nataly is Miranda. They lie side by side, surrounded by empty pizza-baguette cartons. They regret giving Bobby’s contact information to that mean journalist, who apparently did nothing with it — the fencecutioner, after all, is still at large. But good deeds are only good when they go unrewarded, and now that they think that, they reward themselves, and in this way what they did was not good but bad and foolish.

If a man enjoys touching penises, he’s either passionate about a crude line of employment or has an unconventional sexual orientation (that is to say, he’s boy-curious). Meggy finds Bobby’s hiding place. She knocks on the door. He opens it. They don’t recognize each other at once, but a moment later they do.

– I was told that I would find you here, but I didn’t think you’d look like this; that’s to say, that you were the sailor-waiter from the diner.

– And I wouldn’t have thought that someone who eats their fries with no ketchup could track me down.

– Can I come in? I have a couple of questions.

– No way.

– Alright then.

– We’ll meet in the parking lot in 37 hours.

– Which one?

– By the outdoor pool, of course.

Of course.

Meggy’s mother is not at all pleased with her daughter’s recent development. What has become of her? Since she started working for The Hatred, she no longer lets her mother join her in her kiddy bed. She bites the hand that gropes her. The long days are getting warmer. Insects are crawling out of their sleep, out of their eggs, out of their shells and cocoons. They are covering the final days of this neverending spring with an epidermis of revulsion. Meggy is supposed to hang the laundry, which she doesn’t do, and when her mother comes home the laundry room has become a colony of long legs and feelers. She doesn’t get it, but she does get the courage to kick her daughter out onto the street. Meggy goes to the bus terminal to buy a ticket to California, but the ticket vendor refuses to sell her one because she’s underage. Instead, she buys a six-pack of Sam Adams and squeezes into an empty hunter’s hide. She drinks hectically, draws caricatures of God and begs him to kill her mother. How doesn’t matter if he’ll just bring it all to an end. God refuses and languishes in the fetal position, which God holds to be the most comfortable. (That said, God sometimes claims that he prefers to sleep on his back.) When Meggy wakes up, a man with peroxide blonde hair, someone she’s never seen before, is staring at her. He says he’s new to the city and works for the government.

– For the government? Which one?

– This one, you know?

– Oh, that one.

She tells him about her job as an independent journalist, how she hates it and actually prefers her hobby, working as a private detective on the fencecutioner case.

– Fencecutioner?

– That's what the local media are calling the murderer.

– Macabre.

– Sorry, no time!

She has no time. She has an appointment, but no time.

Donna can’t sleep at night, so he either smokes opium or sleepwalks. But smoking opium has been illegal since sometime around the beginning of the twentieth century, and besides it never really did much for him, so he mostly sleepwalks. Then he feels tired for a spell and sleeps 40 to 75 minutes. He repeats the process until he meets his daily requirement. Yesterday, he ended up on Margin Street, in the fourth world, on the sixth continent, in the forest. Sitting under a huge corrugated iron tree, he found a badger dressed like a fogy, smoking a stogie.

– What’s your name?

Donna asks, as lightning flashes.

–  I won’t tell you that,

Plitz says, to the sound of thunder.

– Unless you roll me a cigar.

Donna agrees to the trade. Plitz the badger says that he is Plitz the badger. Donna asks,

– What, wise badger Plitz, is the difference between night and day?

– At night, we see the light of the universe; during the day, the light of the sun.

– And the sun? Isn’t it part of the universe?

– Is an island part of the ocean?

Baffled and surprised, Donna continues on into the depths of the forest, where he discovers a hunter’s hide. Getting closer, he spies a sleeping girl with an asymmetrical face. He stares at her and tries to partake in her dreams, but he doesn’t succeed. Just as dawn breaks and warmth spreads like fresh beeswax over the fields and semi-detached houses, Donna sleeps for 89 minutes. When he wakes up, the asymmetric girl next to him is coming to her senses. They chat for a while, but then she suddenly has to go. Donna returns to L’Otel Chacal and draws a picture of her on the map, right where they first met. He looks over the city. He is puzzled. No curtains. No flowers on no balcony. Nowhere. Nothing with any charm.

It’s a surprise to see Bobby in daylight. His skin is tanned, and his stern handlebar moustache complements his shaved head. Everything is gray and the sky begins to drip like it has a cold. Meggy interrogates him about the case. They get along; both of them enjoy bantering. Meggy first tells him about Nataly, the time she gouged a nail file into her neck and how she cut off her ring finger, but Bobby says that he already knows all that. So Meggy instead talks about Chesley and Joseph, and how no one knows what Joseph is up to. Bobby tells Meggy that Joseph and Lenny have just recorded an album called the Heinrich Fun LP, whichconsists of forty-five 61-second tracks. Meggy is impressed. What else does he know? About the fencecutioner, for example.

– Not much. I think that that he’s a man. Or an animal, rather. Probably a male animal.

– Do you think he is faceless? Joseph made it sound like he could have seen someone that lacked a real face.

– Could be.

– A bird, maybe? Birds don’t have faces.

– We shouldn’t forget that the crime involves extremely sophisticated handiwork. A bird’s wings make that kind of thing very difficult.

Bobby and Meggy look at the swimming pool, which still isn’t open for use. Every little drop on the surface sets off a sequence of diamonds.

– And do you know anything about this object?

She shows him the skein from the crime scene.

– Or do you know if the second murder included anything like this?

Bobby’s expression darkens.

– There are two people currently in the High & Low High School who won’t be at all pleased that you have that thing in your possession.

Meggy’s anorak is soaked; so is her wooly hat.

– It’s late. If you’d excuse me.

She is standing there alone. It’s just as if she didn’t actually have an umbrella with her.

Emily apologizes to Mr Cello. She couldn’t do her homework yesterday, she was simply too lonely. Mr Cello believes her. What she actually did, though, was lie in bed and listen again and again to La Deutsche Vita’s two records — day, night, day and night. She is the presiding officer of their fan club. She was the first to know the band; she even owns the Sean Connery EP. She likes how nobody sings, how they produce a pure surface, perfect loops. Listening to their tracks, their repetitions, she feels as if a gardener has entered her life, to blow the leaves, clear the weeds, and protect her skin from snails and lice. In the bathroom, which has the best acoustics in the house, she records the vinyl onto tape. That way she can listen to the band’s music on the go, always in at least one ear; and even when she is lying to Mr Cello, standing in front of the teacher’s desk, she’s plugged in to their infinite loops. Joseph and Lenny are the city’s first celebrities. No one knew their names, but now word of their birthplace is spreading along the nation’s dirt roads: Beetaville. Beetaville. Beetaville, New England, home of the most promising young musicians in the country in the era after Cobain (A.C.E.). Emily, at least, is sure of this. Suddenly she takes a keen interest in German class and gets more interested in war crimes. Though her parents forbade it, she tattoos the Brandenburg Gate on her knuckles, with no regard for the fact that it has six columns and the human hand only four. But her friends assure her that it looks totally awesome, and that may be the most important thing. She even knows Joseph from back in the day, when he visited her sister and lay on the bed, something that Emily now finds a bit unpleasant to recall, also because she stabbed him with a marker, though not everyone needs to know that. Her sister’s disgraceful ski performance in the assembly hall has driven a wedge between them. Emily is still young. She has at least four years left in school. She can’t afford to be loyal.

Agent Donna starts off by questioning the three boys who found Benjamin’s corpse on the fence, but he doesn’t get much out of them that he doesn’t know already. They walked into the woods to smoke. They were eight, nine, and ten years old at the time; now nine, nine, and eleven. They should please try to remember what they saw as clearly as possible.

– Scenes from that mild autumn afternoon have been implanted into our memory, as if tunneled by a line of termites. Even though what we remember diverges a bit, we can only testify here as one person, only as the three boys together. For instance, Ben insists to this day that John kissed him, but John swears that he only lit Ben’s cigarette, and that when Ben started to cough, he just wanted to suck the irritation out of his throat. Paul swears he was wearing boots with heels taller than a fully grown blindworm. Afterwards, no one knew anything. We are the dog-ears in a history book; nobody even spares them a thought, but someone once needed them to find an important section quickly. Right, so Benjamin was suspended before us, he seemed to be levitating; he looked sad. One could see from his expression that it hurt him to no longer be part of the present, which is at once the most recent and the oldest moment in time. We touched his feet. We sank to the floor. We wailed and moaned. Eventually, we called the police.

Donna asks them if they saw anything unusual, and the exact time of day.

– Fur was strewn around him — soft feathers, maybe — like magnetically charged metal shavings. The only other thing we know about Benjamin is that he was a good debater, a man of the people, popular and smart. He had a very sweet girlfriend, called, um, what was she called, the one with the small breasts that did such a terrible, you know, in the assembly hall; like, so, weirdly, he was with that girl. Also, we knew that his parents, the MacNashs, moved here only a few years ago, from someplace in Minnesota.

– Wait a minute. Fur? That’s the first I’ve heard of that.

– Are you wondering if he had a cat, Mr Donna? No.

– Or a different pet?

– A wild forest thing probably scampered around him during his suspension sentence. What could they have punished him for? We don’t know. We are still so young.

After the cross-examination, Donna shows them his Bill Cosby T-shirt; they have never seen it before and find it beyond tasteless. The T-shirt itself was discovered near Phoenix by three girls and their dogs, who sent it to the General Police Station of the United States of America, which forwarded it to Donna. DNA analysis would reveal more. So far, however, no could make anything of the T-shirt. Not even the MacNashs recognized it — but what do parents know about their children’s T-shirts.

Jeopardy! is on. A distressed Nataly asks Miranda if she’s ever heard of the Srebenica massacre. Without shifting her gaze from the television, Miranda says that of course she’s heard of it. Miranda is very interested in wars. She thinks this is the duty of every reputable citizen of her native country, which has dominated the medal count in this discipline for the past 50 years.

– Civil wars are raging in Sri Lanka, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Nepal, Northern Ireland, and Angola; there are separatist wars in South Sudan and the Indonesian province of Aceh; add to that the Croatian war, the Chechen war, and, finally, the independence struggle in East Timor. Also, there is a mass of Rwandan refugees in Zaire, where they won’t find home sweet home but rebel militias and the veteran dictator Mobutu. In the Philippines, Islamist groups are fighting to seize power, the so-called Moro conflict, meaning everything happening between Mindanao and the Sulu archipelago; add to that the country’s communist-revolutionary rebels. Also, the paramilitary drug lunacy in Columbia; the Papua conflict in Western New Guinea; the battles between Kukis and Nagas in northwest India; Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. And Myanmar. The conflict between Turks and Kurds is now marking its 10-year anniversary; and, strictly speaking, the various mujahideen in Afghanistan are also in a sense fighting a civil war. But at least we’ve finally ended apartheid in South Africa.

Miranda says this in a particular tone of voice, one like that, and it makes Nataly jealous and proud.

Summer vacation. Autumn is about to fall and the sun beats down on the people as if they were mosquitos in a tent. In primary school, Emily learned that one must work every day, because a day without work is a day without meaning. This is why she decided to compile every newspaper article and TV slot that has anything to do with her favorite band. Naturally, the New England Times has the best selection. What she likes most about this publication is the well-meaning tone of its writers. She also transcribes radio interviews. Lenny doesn’t say much. In photos, he looks like a gash in the page. Joseph talks about how much he despises the time he inhabits. He feels that the life he lives could be punctured and torn about as easily as aluminum foil. He feels that he is living in a Frankenstein country, a bastard child of mythologies and falsified history, a country that exists because some fateful night it was struck by a money-bolt. He feels that it will all come to an end in five years, tops, and that Kurt Cobain knew this and beat the zeitgeist once and for all by dying. These fears could be substantiated, for example by the breakthroughs in quantum physics that were made in Copenhagen in the late 1920s.

– One doesn’t need to take recourse to Hugh Everett’s many-worlds interpretation to —

– But what does that —

– The point is that one can prove fiction through science. The foundations of a world based on reason are threatening to collapse. What are we supposed to rely on when everything has abandoned us?

Emily finds the idea that civilization could soon come to an end totally convincing. It feels good to be the last of one’s species. And she certainly doesn’t want any children. To make this totally clear and to hail Kurt Cobain as the only true counter-prophet, she founds the Students for an Anachronistic Society (SAS). From that point on, she and a few of her friends live only in the time before April 5, 1994. Their mantra is simple: an incantation, a simple morning prayer, as dismal as it is honest: I hate myself and want to die. This magic formula, which teaches the children of the world to fly, is their guiding light. They are filled to the brim with self-love and self-loathing. Their usual meeting places are the diner, the forest, the fields, collapsed houses, and the second-hand shop, as well as the record store inside Darkmart. Also, the Unaged Café, the halfpipe, the fuzz-box store, and the ship. They never drink coffee out of paper cups; instead, they build campfires and stage spitting contests with cherry pits. While the distance between the present time and April 5, 1994 is subject to a linear expansion, SAS experiences an exponential rise in the number of things they are not permitted to do. Its members no longer attend the parties of the Party Party Club, because contemporary music is played there; they don’t go to gallery openings, because there innovative paintings are on view; they can’t even attend La Deutsche Vita concerts. The only leisure venue where one can still bump into SAS members is the national theater. There the word chic is still used unironically, when discussing the life and work of dead white men. Whoever breaks a rule is ruled out of the movement. Scanning the store shelves, Paul mistakenly picks a nail polish remover that’s new on the market. It’s unusually cheap and contains the highest legal percentage of acetone. He hopes that no one will notice and buzzes around the playground. Exceptionally wasted, he lies in the sandbox. Emily finds him. The rest is up in the wind.

Meggy’s mother has revoked her daughter’s exile and purchased apples and oranges. Sitting at the dinner table, Meggy looks confused, like her confusion is total. She speaks about a skein and a robot, critiques of love, and about a king who lives in her school. Meggy’s mother tries to steer the conversation toward the apples and oranges, but Meggy isn’t having it. She proclaims,

– People have become useless without noticing. Adults are children past their prime.

Meggy’s mother doesn’t say a word — no, she snickers.

The DNA analysis of the Bill Cosby T-shirt leads the investigators to a man called Jeff Cello. Mr Jeff Cello. He teaches physics and math at the High & Low High School. He suffers from manic passion. Donna confronts him in the physics room.

– Mister Cello. Mister Jeff Cello,

he calls out.

– Where were you on the day of the first murder and where were you on the day of the second murder?

– With my fiancée,

Jeff answers.

– How do you explain then that we found your DNA on Benjamin MacNash’s T-shirt?

– I didn’t know Benjamin MacNash and I cannot explain it either. He was never my student. Nor did I know Chesley at all.

– I see. What’s the name of your fiancée?

– What’s that got to do with it?

– Let’s see.

– Holly.

– Just Holly?

– Yes. Her first and last name are both Holly.

Her apartment is nice. Holly is from San Francisco; she hates it so much when people ask her if she’s from Frisco.

– The city is called San Francisco, alright? It’s called San Francisco. Is that so hard? San. Fran. Cisco. Got it?

After all, she doesn’t say B-Ville or Beeta-V. Holly’s apartment is tastefully furnished. It is a mixture of the apartment of a teacher from San Francisco and the apartment of a teacher from a small town in New England. Particularly the floor lamp in the living room gets compliments from visitors. It has a distinctive panache.

– Was Jeff Cello with you?

– Yes.

– Do you love him?

– No.

– Shouldn’t one love one’s fiancé?

– A question for you in return: Why can we capture beauty, but not possess it?

– That’s irrelevant.

– Exactly.

Meggy takes a sheet of ruled paper and sketches the universe. All that’s required is letting nine ballpoint pens draw circles on the page a hundred thousand times. Above that, she writes HAVE YOU SEEN THIS OBJECT? and below PLEASE CONTACT MEGGY. The MEGGY is underscored with a wavy line. Bobby speculates that the object is almost certainly a motor, and that this motor could help facilitate research into time travel. In response, Meggy gives Bobby a sci-fi slap in the face and he takes back what he just said.

On the other side of the night, SAS is working on a project called VIAL/SEAGULL/HAT FACTORY, whose purpose is the development of a machine-based religion. The project eats up all the membership fees, however, so they sell it at a profit to a middle-middle-class couple. The three objects in its name symbolize the cornerstones of anachronistic reason. An ephemeral trinity: the vial represents the control of nature, the seagull represents the capriciousness of evolution, and the hat factory represents the inauthenticity of the self.

Because the MacNashs have holes in their jacket pockets through which they tend to lose all their affection — only for it to dry up, untouched on the cold pavement — or because they have, on several occasions, accidentally left their affection by the Darkmart deli counter, or sometimes at the cheese stand, they decide to buy a dog. The dog is meant to ensure that no affection goes to waste. He’s a big dog with furry fur and eye-like eyes; he is different from other dogs in every respect, and the MacNashs always recognize him when he’s standing or walking or lying next to other animals. Then they say,

– Ha! That’s our dog.

You can tell it’s him just by looking at his shape. The MacNashs and their dog get on so well that they jointly decide to give him a name. From that point on he is called Nadja: from Nadéschda, which means hope. Of course, not quite Nadéschda, hope, but Nadja, hopeyness. The MacNashs are so proud of their Nadja that they enter him into a competition for the best dog in town. Competitors must leap through parallelograms, hide in triangles and balance a circle on their snouts. There are many good animals there, but none of them are as good as Nadja. He wins by a wide margin, is shot, stuffed, and hung up by the town entrance. He holds an acceptance speech.

– Though taxidermy is usually an honor and an imitation, at once a substitution and glorification of life, I would like to be a champion of the stuffed condition and imitate the imitation.

Whereupon his deboned tail, which now has a wire running through its length, does a full 360 behind him, as it will continue to do once every three hours from that point on. The MacNashs receive a framed diploma certifying that BEETAVILLE’S STAND-OUT DOG 1995 IS YOUR DOG, with the name Nadja written underneath in fountain pen. They also receive a photo of their champion in bleak and white, which they place next to the one of Benjamin. They are proud, at first. But then they start losing their affection again in the most outrageous places, so they decide to buy a cat. The cat couldn’t care less about their expectations; it doesn’t get a name but often gets caned on its paws. Always on its paws.

Jeff Cello relaxes on the couch, while Holly makes pasta. They had some red onions left over in the fridge, also an eggplant, some mint and jalapeños. Jeff Cello is brooding. He walks into the kitchen. He takes the knife out of the knife drawer. He would like to slit something open. He looks at Holly; she’s humming an old Yiddish song while the noodles boil in the water. She still thinks about kreplach a lot. He hopes she didn’t use the iodized salt.

– What are you doing with that knife?

– I’m going to slice some cheese.

– Why do you always have to mutilate my food with cheese?

– Did you use the iodized salt?

– There was no other salt left.

– Why not go straight for the herb salt while you’re at it?

– Cook for yourself if you don’t like it.

– I’m always cooking for you!

– Then invite me to dinner!

– Where were you when that boy died?

– I don’t know.

– You don’t know?

– Yes, I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, I just don’t know.

Holly lifts the pan off the stove and lights a cigarette from the gas flame. And, for a moment, the grin on her face is Ted Bundy’s.

– Invite me to dinner. I think now would be a really good time for you to invite me to dinner.

– Let’s talk about me for once,

Lenny suggests and Joseph agrees. They’re sitting on the 32nd floor of a hotel in a big Japanese city, drinking champagne with codeine and eating crackers with cheddar. The groceries are so expensive; their packaging is free of branding or text. Only the codeine stands out in its pharmaceutical uniformity. Lenny talks about his father and how he always lost to him in chess. How he was once sitting with his father on the edge of the Atlantic and toyed with the idea of pushing him into the water. Joseph’s mind is elsewhere, he is busy inventing a new word for water because he doesn’t like the sound of the word. Shashlop. Lenny looks at him quizzically; Joseph glances back.

– Okay then, let’s stick with water.

He carries on telling his story, talking about the time the boy with eczema next door threw his flashlight in the lake. That flashlight lit up in three different colors. He talks about the time he found a dollar and didn’t buy ice cream with it. Joseph is bored to tears, wants to ignore the monologue but doesn’t manage. He can’t help listening. He sucks in every word and feels a cage forming around him. He’s so bored, he might as well be in a monogamous relationship.

Donna Jones suffers from so-called Balcerzak and Gabrish anxiety. In the early morning of May 27, 1991, two women cross a street and stumble upon a naked boy who is evidently disturbed. Moreover, he is bleeding from several places on his body. This boy is the 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone. They call the police. A man with terrifying eyes approaches them; he wants to take back the small naked boy, but they don’t let him. After a short while, the police officers Balcerzak and Gabrish show up. They question the man with the terrifying eyes.

– That’s my 19-year-old boyfriend. We had a fight and I now want to take him back home. He’s mine.

– And why is he hardly saying anything?

– He’s drunk.

– Right. Roger that.

The two women complain. They even get angry at the policemen: you can’t do that.

– Let him go!

But, yes they can. The man takes Konerak Sinthasomphone back home with him, and the only thing the two officials find slightly remarkable is the smell in the apartment, nothing else. So they drive back to the precinct and maybe drink a cup of coffee, or maybe they drive on to the next investigation, Milkwaukee can be a crazy place when it wants to be. Later, as night falls, Konerak Sinthasomphone is hacked to pieces. Jeffrey Dahmer, already a registered child molester and out on parole (they would have only had to check his ID), will keep the boy’s head as a souvenir. Donna knows that if he acts like an idiot, however briefly, he will never be happy again. You’re never allowed to be an idiot — that’s the most important and difficult part of being an agent. Donna keeps Jeff Cello under constant surveillance, but he eludes his trackers time and again. They don’t know that this is just the kind of exercise that amuses Jeff Cello. When Jeff Cello is lying in the tub, he sometimes thinks about a 13-year-old girl and how he knocked out her left incisor.

A contemplative man boards the wrong bus, falls asleep, and suddenly finds himself at the last stop on the 33 line. He is wearing a mackerel-colored hoodie, and sees a group of people dancing around a ball of fire. He doesn’t want to get burned. Afraid, he turns around, but there’s no one sitting behind him. The angry ginger with the pockmarks and the one-eyed girl board the bus. He’s chewing gum; she has a toothpick in the corner of her mouth. They smell of soot and rolling tobacco.

– Any idea when the bus is leaving?

– No, I —

– Hungry?

She rummages in her parka and offers him a slice of salami. He doesn’t want to take it at first, but then the angry ginger suddenly looks at him, and he hesitantly accepts. He clasps the salami in his hands and nibbles on it, maybe in the way a mouse nibbles on a piece of cheese.

– You know, I once read that when you borrow something from someone, they instinctively like you. Imagine this scenario: I am sitting in school and I ask the pretty boy if he will lend me a pencil. If he agrees, his affection for me grows.

He imagines it.

– Do you like me?

The thoughtful man doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.

– Yes?

He still doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say.

– No?

He shakes his head.

– I’m happy to hear it.

For a while, no one says anything, just the sound of chewing, jaws, and gum.

– You know, I think it’ll still be a while before the bus leaves again, and my car is a few minutes’ walk from here. Would you like to walk to my car with us?

– I think I’ll wait here.

– Sure?

He doesn’t want to get burned. He keeps a straight face.

– Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll wait here.

His hand slides to the grip of his small-caliber revolver.

– It’s a pretty nice car, a ’64 Chevy Malibu. I have a stereo. You like listening to music?

He releases the safety catch with his thumb.

– Yeah, I like listening to music.

– It’s a shame that Karen Carpenter killed herself, isn’t it?

the angry ginger nods.

– A shame,

the thoughtful man agrees and pulls the weapon out of its holster.

– What do you say? Shall we take a drive? Shall we chat a bit, about this and that? Do you know anything about jazz? I bet you know a thing or two about jazz.

He tears out of his seat, clutches the revolver with both hands and aims at the hollow of skin in the one-eyed girl’s skull. The bus driver returns from his cigarette break and gets behind the steering wheel. The doors close, the motor starts up. They take off with a lurch. The angry ginger and the one-eyed girl alternate between staring into the thoughtful man’s eyes and into the barrel of his gun.

– You are really exceptionally pathetic,

she says.

– Are you afraid of us or something?

asks the other one.

– Just because your skin’s a different color, you carry a weapon?

– No, I, no, not, me, no. That’s not why!

– It’s true, you really are a pathetic specimen of a human being.

– Sit down! The vehicle’s in motion!

the bus driver shouts, and the thoughtful man sits back down in his seat, red-faced. Secretly, he swears revenge.

There is a lot going on when Meggy’s mother arrives in the newsroom of the New England Times. The editor-in-chief still hasn’t showed up. Meggy’s mother sits down at her desk and revises a few obituaries to calm herself. Her desk is always tidy. Her desk is made of dark imitation plywood and has a green mat on it, a picture of her husband in a black frame, and a smaller one of her daughter — that portrait the school photographer snapped two years ago. She still had braces then. One can see that she’s not very popular. Meggy’s mother finds this frustrating, since she always wanted to be the mother of a popular daughter. She feels that she failed ever so slightly. This, if you were to ask Meggy, is the biggest, cruelest understatement of all time. Actually, someone should probably tell Meggy that her mother feels she failed ever so slightly as a parent — she would wipe the tears right out of her mother’s face. When the editor-in-chief enters the newsroom, a mass of staff latches onto him and he only starts speaking when everyone is there. Yesterday, on the bus, in mortal danger, he listened in on a couple’s conversation, and now he knows who’s responsible for the murders of Benjamin MacNash and Chesley Heithworth — a young ginger and his girlfriend, who has no eye where her left eye would be. The front page should be redesigned immediately; it’s time for a national manhunt. So far, he keeps stumm about their motives.

Emily derives the greatest pleasure from the taste of fresh green apples, but it never lasts very long. One day in class, she sees Mr Cello enjoying a fresh green apple that he ate the evening before. After the bell rings, she goes up to him and asks what his secret is, and he says that it’s hard to explain. One can only experience it, really, but she can come and see him in the staff room after school, and that would give them a chance to discuss this phenomenon and the possibility of her experiencing it for herself. Although she’s uneasy about the many modern gadgets in the staff room that she’s not allowed to touch if she wants to remain in the Anachronistic Students — and still more about being offered a new kind of soft drink — Emily agrees.

The investors who invested in VIAL/SEAGULL/HAT FACTORY are happy with their new life. They jaywalked last Saturday and were struck by a truck; they weren’t badly injured but the truck driver died in his cabin. The last thing on his mind was how lovely it had been, after all, back when he was a little boy, before he knew about foreign continents, like the time he snuck into an R-rated film with his friends to see a naked breast. He saw the couple, wanted to spin the wheel and avert what was to come, split the vehicle through the middle, but they both turned toward him, hand in hand, making eye contact, not at all perturbed or afraid, smiling with a sense of premonition — a wind flickering around them, as bright as fire in a film projector. Everything turned white, time stopped or took a moment’s break (though strictly speaking this was no longer a moment), and the truck driver took off and burst through the windshield while his truck crashed into a wall. Both The Hatred and the New England Times publish extensive reports on the incident. Kate Corey interviews the janitor, who’s mainly annoyed that she has to clean up the mess. Kate Corey’s daughter Meggy talks to the uninjured couple.

– How come you weren’t injured at all? Isn’t that a miracle?

– No, no,

they say,

– no, no.

– What is it then?

– It’s — how should I put it. Why don’t you say something?

– I don’t know what to say about it either.

– Okay.

– Why don’t you just describe what happened then?

– So we were crossing at the light, it was orange, and then this humungous vehicle came hurtling toward us. I screamed, my girlfriend here clutched me tight, and we closed our eyes. And when we opened them, we were standing here.

– And now we can be happy.

Meggy thanks the couple of pedestrians from the middle-middle-class. In print, she brands them liars and criminals. Pedestrian lights don’t even turn orange, meaning they crossed a red light, meaning they are responsible or at least carry some of the blame; they weren’t the truck itself or the centrifugal forces or anything like that, but they’re still partly the reason for the driver’s death. Her mother’s article is a good deal more friendly and inconsequential. The editor-in-chief tells her it would be good if she read the article in The Hatred because journalism can be done like that as well, meaning better. She confronts her daughter.

– How come you are working for The Hatred and you didn’t even tell me — me, your own mother? And then you publish rabble-rousing agitations like that. If people knew we were related, that might cause problems for me at work.

– I don’t tell you about my work at The Hatred, because as a rule I don’t tell you anything about my life. Glad that you noticed, Madame Mother.

– Why can’t we be a family without a father?

– Because you molest me when you’re drunk.

– Now that’s not true.

– Yes it is.

Donna is perplexed that an angry ginger and a one-eyed girl are suddenly a factor in his case. Jeff Cello is the prime suspect and now, out of nowhere, accusations have surfaced against two other people he didn’t even know existed. He visits the editor-in-chief of the New England Times in the newsroom. The editor refuses to reveal his sources. Donna threatens him with an arrest warrant and a subpoena. The editor grins knowingly and takes a bite of a licorice wheel and starts to speak:

– You know,

he says, pretending to gaze out the window, when he is actually gazing at his reflection in the window,

– everything is up in flames.

While Jeff Cello is waiting for Emily, he looks at the photograph hanging around his neck in a rectangular golden frame. Meanwhile, he eats the raw flesh of an onion and thinks about Holly, how she spends all day playing with the morphine-soaked pipe tobacco, and how she is frightened of opening the curtains. Emily knocks softly on Mr Cello’s door. He lets her in and offers her a seat. She looks around shyly, then with more confidence, and asks,

– So, how does one live a full and enriching life?

Just as Jeff Cello prepares to knock her head over heels with a dazzling punch line, such as,

– By resolving to die every night

or

– By never waking up,

Donna bursts into the staffroom with his weapon drawn and roars his rights at him in police staccato. A few hours later, Jeff Cello’s erection begins to subside. Holly sits across from him in the visitation room. Her facial muscles look frozen. Neither of them considers placing their hand onto the reinforced glass to offer the other the illusion of touch. Holly starts a conversation in disjointed phrases. She breathes despondently or lasciviously, holds the phone receiver so tight and so close that the plastic melts around her slender fingers.

– I didn’t

Pause.

– Again and again

Pause.

– In the night that

Pause.

– When the boy and —

– Where were you that night, Holly?

Holly realizes with a start that her fiancé was merely protecting her when he said he was with her that night. A thought like a kiss.

– You shouldn’t have.

– Shouldn’t I?

Pause.

– I will get you —

– Thanks.

– They can’t —

– I know.

– They have nothing on you —

Pause.

– No one can take away your alibi.

During a creative break at the French overseas department of Réunion, Joseph dulls his senses with analgesics and brandy. He is surrounded by bright pastel colors, a steady flutter of silk curtains that suggest the presence of a blue sky behind them. He thinks about Nataly and, as if out of nowhere, through no fault of his own, he takes a pen and writes a sentence. Now it’s written on a page, the first page of a notepad, the kind of notepad you can find in any hotel in the world. The sentence is written there, and it isn’t much different from the other words on the page: the name and address of the hotel, its advertising slogan. So the sentence has been written, and at first it doesn’t mean much at all; it’s on the cryptic side — more of a grave than a coffin, more of a coffin than a corpse. For La Deutsche Vita, however, it spells the end. Their conviction that language was a betrayal of music, a betrayal of talent and of reality, had been the very foundation of the band — they even swore to abide by it over Chesley Heithworth’s body one Sunday afternoon. But now the sentence is there and there’s a melody to it.

– What did you just say?

– There’s a melody to it.

–  You made an oath in the name of your dead sister!

Lenny screams at him, with tears on his cheeks and collarbone. But it’s too late; once the elements assemble, you can’t stop the big bang moment of pop music as it expands outward, forever, creating rhythms and lyrics. Sometimes you taste the piss, sometimes sweet pink flesh. These nine words split up the most promising band in the country, and make Joseph a solo artist. His These Bubblegum Days LP comes out several months later. Lenny locks himself in a hotel room in Chicago, snaps the fingernails off his body and drinks cocoa. Joseph releases music under the pseudonym Chesley & the Holy Chain, which his mother doesn’t find at all amusing. When Nataly reads in an interview that the album is about his unreciprocated love for a girl named Nataly, it’s like someone is pokinga cold finger into her aorta.

Emily is shocked that she was in a room in which someone was threatened with a handgun. A real handgun. She really wanted to touch it. Are handguns warm or cold? Is it true that if you lick a handgun in winter, your tongue sticks to it? With a bit of practice, she has become very good at drawing ammunition. The shape of hollow-tip bullets arouses feelings of unexpected intensity in her. Sometimes she even thinks her pussy’s a hollow-tip bullet, just waiting for the right triggering mechanism to finally pose a real threat. She goes to the lending library and spends a lot of time researching the history of guns. She urges her parents to organize a trip to Gettysburg, and draws a picture of General Lee on a white T-shirt with fabric marker. At a meeting of the Students for an Anachronistic Society she proposes that they hold a garage sale to raise the funds to build a lemonade stand, sell enough lemonade to buy tools, and use them to break into the local history museum, because it contains a musket from the Civil War, a real one. To be exact, it’s a Springfield Model 1855, muzzleloader, .58 caliber, which can be fed only with Minié brand bullets. These delicate ounce-heavy lead candies taste of precision and death. Wrapped in colorful paper and with 2 ounces of gunpowder, they are, according to Emily, great party snacks.

– French delicacies that’d be simply to-die-for if children were to guzzle them at a muzzle velocity of 950 to 970 feet per second. They can easily hit their target at 200 feet — easily hit a child’s face, if it doesn’t move out of the 11-inch radius. The Springfield Model 1855’s forty-inch barrel contained the grammar of destruction, a single voice that would be heard around the world.

It’s much easier to agree on the best possible war than the best possible peace. The dream of surgical battle already lay dormant in the Springfield, opposing humanism with meticulous precision, even if no one quite understood this at the time. Emily’s idea wins a narrow three-quarter majority, and so it is passed and is transformed into a plan. The first blueprints are drawn up.

After his frustrating conversation with the editor-in-chief, Donna stands in front of the building, bundled up in his undercover agent’s jacket, and tries to get some information out of the newspaper staff. He notices a lady with a cigarette in one hand and half a bottle of red wine in the other. He tries his luck.

– How come the New England Times is accusing those two people of being murderers?

– I don’t know. Who are you?

– I’m Donna. I’m new in town. What you drinking there?

– Californian red wine.

– Is it good?

– You haven’t answered my question.

– What question?

– Who you are.

– I’m Donna.

– And what are you doing here and why are you asking me about articles we’ve run in the Times? You should go talk to the editor-in-chief.

– I, well, I can’t tell you that.

– You’re either a bad liar or a worse cop.

– Who’s the angry ginger?

– Maybe the product of oppression and poverty.

– And the one-eyed girl?

– Maybe a figment of the imagination.

– Why is your boss lying? Just to make some money?

– Come with me.

– Where to?

– My place.

– Why?

– I have another half-bottle of red wine there.

– I’m a father.

– And where’s your kid?

– Somewhere, probably, or gone. Hopefully he’s a starter on a promising high school basketball team.

– I’m a mother. It’s below freezing and it’s raining, but my hips leave enough room for two under the covers; and when the days get shorter you needs someone to count the hours of darkness.

Bobby sits in his data bunker and thinks about time travel. To bind together space to time, a bridge between two planes, a vector or a category, you need a gauge. But when you stretch that skein, that sponge, and place it between the two dimensions — what happens then?

In the dining hall of the High & Low High School, Meggy finds a note in her spinach lasagna. Come to the dirty dishes right now! Meggy loves the imperative mood. Over by the dishwasher, she finds the angry ginger and the one-eyed girl. They’re wearing oat-white aprons and hairnets.

– Give us the navigator.

– The what?

– You’ve got the navigator, Meggy, hand it over.

– How do you know my name and what are you even talking about?

The angry ginger grabs hold of her.

– Don’t you recognize us?

The one-eyed girl takes the high-pressure pull-down faucet and holds it over Meggy’s arm.

– Where’s the navigator?

– I have no idea!

The angry ginger presses his hand onto the face of the helpless child. The one-eyed girl pulls the trigger. Meggy’s skin seizes up , she is scalded in some places, and she can’t even scream.

– We know where you live, we know where you go to school. You help us, we’ll help you. Understood?

Lenny left Chicago and now lives at his dad’s. He doesn’t want to be a houseguest anymore. He goes back to school. Emily has so many questions to ask him, but she doesn’t dare. In a few months, he will graduate and move to the Arctic, or Antarctica, maybe. He usually talks to no one, or to almost nobody. He has started to write with his left hand, because his right hand reminds him too much of the time he spent with Joseph. They shook hands with their right hands every time they met.

When the ambulance driver rings the Coreys’ doorbell, Donna quickly pulls on a white T-shirt, his brazen nipples protruding into the fabric.

– Your daughter has been through a lot, sir.

– That is not my daughter.

– But she told us that she —

– I am just, well —

Meggy’s mother squeezes past the sweaty man in the doorway and stands in front of the ambulance driver. She has small bits of something red between her teeth.

– Meggy! What on earth happened?

– Don’t touch me.

Meggy recognizes the man with the peroxide blonde hair.

– And what are you doing here? Get out.

– But, we once —

– Yes, we once. We met once — once — when my mother kicked me out the house; the same person, apparently, who kicked you into the house. Regardless. Piss off and never come back. You can’t solve this case. Only I know how to find the guy that murdered Benjamin and Chesley. You see my arm? You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, bureaucrat.

– Why the guy? Who’s to say that it wasn’t a woman?

– Just piss off, before this gets even more embarrassing.

Donna and Meggy’s mother are wearing their T-shirts inside out.

– If, that is, it can get any more embarrassing than it already is.

Nataly is arguing with her sister because she wants to sell the old audiobook tapes at the garage sale. She claims it’s for a good cause. Nataly gives in, because she thinks of herself as a compassionate person. What she doesn’t know is that compassion and pity are different things. They have a different chemical composition, comparable to, say, methamphetamine and amphetamine, which resemble each other in practice but not at all in theory.

Winter’s nothing like it used to be. The town’s inhabitants marvel at depictions of falling snow, at the way it settles on windowsills, and at the Christmas festivities shown in store window displays. They experience it on television or the radio. It’s New Year’s Eve. Nataly and Miranda can’t uncork their champagne bottles and end up bashing their heads on the wall. It’s the year of running away. The snow has turned into rain, the rain into trouble.

Her face is white. A lost star in a morning sky, abandoned by its herd. Kate Corey’s dry fingers throttle her daughter’s neck, the thumbs pressing down on her windpipe, middle and index finger clawed into her neck, the top of her spine. The pain stabs her brain, numbs her mind. When Meggy’s mother realizes that Meggy’s windpipe is about to collapse, to buckle inwards, she lets go. She gives her daughter a slap on the butt and locks her in her room. Meggy lies there, staring out the window. She snips the star out of the sky and a new day begins.

When Nataly tells her parents, Henry and Amy, that she wants to go to college and study epistemology, her sister gets jealous.

– Why’s she allowed to do stuff with pistols?

She must be stopped. When Emily isn’t careful, she thinks about shooting her sister in the stomach. Jeff Cello loiters by the lemonade stand every day, and asks if he can get some from Emily. He ends up paying for a glass. Holly is keeping a close eye on all this. Jeff has gotten a bit cocky since his release from prison. Their wedding day is coming up. Holly’s parents are sleeping in the guest room. Jeff Cello claims that he doesn’t have parents, says that he’s the clone of a dead orphan child.

The These Bubblegum Days LP sits on Meggy’s desk while she draws a comic strip of Joseph arranging his dead sister’s remains on a sandy beach to form the letters N and A and T and A and L and Y. The Hatred’s robot-in-chief tells Meggy that it’s not a good idea to print this kind of dreck, but Meggy pushes the robot up against the wall and makes it clear to him that he’s just a robot and has no soul, that he could never even get served at a bar because only humans are allowed to drink beer in New England. The robot cries categorical tears.

– Soon we will have beer served to us, Meggy. Not long to go and our rights will be recognized. We’ll be respected — even loved. People will buy us beers. We will play pool and lose; we’ll guess how many bulbs are in the fairylight chain, though we already know; metallic alloys will touch the velvet of curtains and wiry hair from sweaty armpits will rest upon our processors; people will whisper their secrets to us.

The girls warm up by running in a circle. Boys and girls are separated for school athletics. It’s swimming for the boys, finally time for the kids to have fun in the swimming pool and wash away all reminders that Chesley was murdered there. The girls spend the last hours of their high school days in the gym. The coach is friendly. He instructs the young ’uns to jog for 10 minutes, sprint for 10, jog another 10, and that’s it, they’re warmed up. A monotony sets in, round for round, the sound of sneaker soles on linoleum flooring. Breathe in, breathe out; twirling ponytails and sweatbands. The coach stands at the center and prepares his girls for their departure, a tear secretly dripping into his whistle. The girls keep running like fading whirlwinds. Meggy and Nataly are chosen as protagonist and antagonist of the final great contest. The coach’s favorite sport is face-slapping. Everyone forms a circle around the two contestants — a wall, a hollow cluster. The adversaries sit across from each other with their legs crossed. The rules are pretty simple. Taking turns, they try to slap each other in the face, and the first to lose consciousness loses. A coin flies through the hair: heads. A high-pitched whistle. Meggy starts. She slaps. Clapping, a giggle. Nataly responds with a slap of her own. Another response, a slap, a slap back, a cough, a huff, a response and a response to the response. One slap in the face after another. Meggy’s cheek is red. A deep red. She responds. Applause, laughter. Nataly responds. It goes back and forth for a few minutes, the rhythm slows down, gets harder, more atonal, an hour of strategy, acts of desperation, surprise attacks, both of their faces blue-red, their palms chafed, biceps and triceps straining, right shoulders aching, but still they respond. Meggy has begun to bleed from her nose, Nataly from her left ear — first, a small red thread, then a river that flows into her collar. It’s the middle of the night; most of the girls have gone home already. Their parents are waiting for them. And dinner awaits them — tonight it’s tater tots with peas and gravy — as well as a fresh pillow cover and a book to dip into on the nightstand. No limb is not in pain. The slapping, the being slapped, the sitting. Meggy’s strength is waning, her eyelids don’t want to stay open. The coach shouts encouragement; this may just be the most beautiful day in years. Meggy tries to lift her arm, but it no longer follows her wishes. She can no longer see, she wants to keel over backwards, ideally into a comfortable grave, but then Nataly grabs her collarbone.

– You can write what you want, Meggy Corey, but you are and will always be the one that got annihilated. And, by the way, I could never stand you. Because you stink.

She grabs Meggy’s face with her left hand and, with her right hand, smacks the cheek that’s glistening with blood one last time. The tired spectators who are left clap and walk to the locker room. The showers fill the room with hot fog. Light-blue shorts lie on the wooden benches; Nataly is sprawled on the tiles. The water burns her body, the soap stings as it enters her wounds, but she has won. At Miranda’s house, she will be nursed and caressed.

Once Meggy has recovered from the fight, she writes an article for The Hatred criticizing the antiquated way PE is taught. She is jammed into a locker. She writes that the system is antiquated, that it’s built on old systems and languages, hermetically sealed from the outside, cruel and vicious on the inside. The books are slammed out of her hands. She writes that all old things are death, and that they are being reanimated every day in a voodoo séance; that everyone at the High & Low High School is surrounded by the undead, and that they will be transformed into the undead if they don’t start to look for something new. The glasses are kicked off her face. During her last days at school she loses everything she worked for, even her job at the school paper. Nataly, on the other hand, is held in high esteem, perhaps actually respected for the first time since Benjamin’s death. She wears the quarterback’s jacket, embroidered with the felt letters H&L.

Donna seeks out the badger Plitz once more. He smells like syrup.

– What do the angry ginger and the one-eyed girl want?

– What would you want, if you had only one eye?

– A second one?

– Or maybe none at all?

Donna would go for the second eye, he thinks.

– Why would anyone want no eyes at all?

The badger Plitz has already fallen back to sleep, the sip of whisky half-swallowed in his snout.

Joseph comes to Beetaville to confront Meggy. As it happens, he didn’t appreciate the caricature of him arranging his sister’s bones.

– I’m not working for the school paper anymore.

– Alright.

– Didn’t mean it like that.

– Okay.

– And how are you doing? What’s up with Down Wave?

– With what?

– Down Wave, Ghost Wave, Angst Wave — those are the names I thought up for your genre of music.

– Sounds great. Can I call my next album that?

– Best you call it Church Music.

– Okay. Thanks.

– Gladly.

– Do you like champagne, codeine, or both?

– Why not?

Joseph and Meggy fly to Singapore for four days and spend most of their time at the hotel bar or in their hotel room.

Jeff Cello rummages through his blazer pocket. The lights are dimmed. Spacious music in a major key; the room is filled with wax.

– Do you want to be my wife?

A sobbing sound.

– Yes? Do you want to be my wife?

A tear falls.

– Yes, I do.

– Good.

– And you? Do you want to be my husband?

A joyful sound.

– Yes, I do.

– Then we hereby declare ourselves husband and wife.

Jeff Cello has now found what he was looking for. He slips the ring on Holly’s finger. A thunderstorm of bliss. Holly does the slipping-on. She is surrounded by the white that Christ picked out for his own nursery, as well as benches and family members and friends and pale flowers, and Chopin. Later, at night, when everyone is dancing or can’t dance anymore, the groom will go up to his groomsmaid and whisper.

– I’ve fallen in love with you, Emily, you sweet little rabbit.

This on the day of his own wedding. But not only is she no rabbit but she can’t understand what he’s saying because the music’s too loud. She is about to go home because it’s getting late. Her parents have stayed up waiting for her; the Students for an Anachronistic Society will want a list of the songs played at the party. As if that’s not enough, she has to help her sister choose a prom dress the following morning.

The prom is looming. It’s supposed to be something beautiful. But how is Nataly going to have a beautiful night when she’s fighting with her lover Miranda?

– Can’t I be by your side? For this special event? Can I really not have the first dance with you? Can I really not take you in my arms on this night of liberation?

– You know it’s not that simple.

– What isn’t?

– Us?

– We’re the simplest thing in the world.

– But the world isn’t simple, Miranda, and you know that.

– I’d always hoped.

– Yes? Just say it.

– No, I won’t put it in words.

Agent Donna wants to warn Emily.

– I don’t take advice from anyone, thank you very much.

Meggy drinks too much gin at a bar in Singapore. She looks at Joseph, the city in front of them, the river, the noisiness of the crowds.

– And why,

she asks him

– did I come here with you? So the moon could reflect the cold sunlight onto my face? Is that it?

– What did you expect? That I would set you free? That I would take you along on my journey?

– What if I told you that I've fallen in love with you a bit in the past few days?

– I have to be alone, Meggy. Always alone — that’s the only thing I know.

– Why did you have me come here then?

– Because you gave me a good album title. That’s why. Also, you remind me of —

Nataly starves herself a little bit to better fit into her dress. The MacNashs have planted themselves a pretty garden. Lenny wakes up. The day’s long over, the darkness calms him, and he decides to devote the rest of his life to the study of the polar night. Holly walks around the sun, caresses it, probes it. She has lost a contact lens. She has started jogging every day. The break-in was successful; the Anachronistic Students are now in possession of a Springfield Model 1855. Everyone gets to look after it according to a prearranged schedule. Emily sometimes goes to bed with it and simply lets herself drop. Donna is afraid of all seasons that aren’t hot or cold.

Meggy is picked up at the airport by the angry ginger. He stuffs her and her suitcase in the trunk.

– My exams are tomorrow!

– Give us the navigator and you can examine whatever you want.

– But what’s the —

He slams the trunk door shut. They drive to Meggy’s house. Her mother is tied up on the couch watching Dallas. The metallic light from the cable television beams onto the walls. The one-eyed girl sits next to her.

– Give us the navigator and nothing will happen to your mother.

– In that case you’ll never get it.

– Give us the navigator and something will happen to your mother.

– But what’s the navigator?

– A kind of geometric silence.

Meggy understands. A shock flashes along the muddiest pathways of her synapses, she blushes. In a fit of generosity, she saunters to her bedroom and gets the thing they want from her. The object that she found at the murder scene countless years ago. The skein.

– If I give it to you, will the murder ever be solved?

– No, but perhaps it will be atoned.

– Here you go.

And by giving away that treasure, the poisoned riddle that made her head run hot, by surrendering it to the angry ginger and the one-eyed girl, Meggy also gives up her calling. She is no longer a private detective.

– What do you need that thing for?

– The navigator? To build a space machine.

– What on earth is a space machine?

– The opposite of a time machine, of course.

– Oh?

Something like that.

Miranda and Nataly rarely fight, but when they do — and this is something that sets them apart from most couples in their social circle — they do it honestly. When they fight, they mean every word they say, and their fights are about real and grave dangers — the extinction of the small squirrels and dragonflies that inhabit the nature reserve that is the site of their great love. At this very moment, on this afternoon when the carpeted floor is particularly soft, making it hard to move, and the lovers are spread across it like lego blocks, Miranda peers at her girlfriend’s face through a strand of hair. She is wearing her reading glasses and is feeling too sluggish to sweep away the strands. She looks at her girlfriend, and although everything has already been said further sentences keep slipping out, ones that no longer signify anything except the initial accusation. Metastases of fear. Nataly runs her hand over the carpeted floor and starts to giggle; the tiny hairs on her arm are electric. She rolls around the room. She’s a monkey.

– But Miranda, just because I’m moving to another city doesn’t mean we won’t see each other anymore, that we won’t love each other anymore!

She claps two small bowls together, tak, tak, tak.

– Oh really? And what do you know about that?

– Everything.

Meggy looks at her mother lying bound on the couch, and in that moment Meggy already poses a threat to Meggy’s mother. She makes a hoard of provisions in the basement, a bed, a bucket, towels and soap, a mirror, the TV. She comes back, grabs her mother by the hair and throws her down the stairwell. Her silhouette projects a shadow through the basement door onto the helpless woman’s body. A gourmet experience. She goes to the hardware store, buys a dog chain and foot-cuffs. Once the mother has fallen asleep from exhaustion, the daughter puts her in chains. She wears the key as an accessory, and it will earn her many compliments for her good taste; that’s how beautiful the key to the dungeon is. The time of running away has begun.

Exams. The last days of school. Meggy could hardly have studied, as she spent all her time drunk in the island city-state of Singapore. She does poorly. Her teachers are disappointed, but don’t show it. They treat her with indifference. Nataly, on the other hand, does great. And Lenny also graduates with flying colors. He goes up to Meggy.

– Did you say hi to Joseph from me?

– Forgot.

– How is he anyway?

– Good.

– I miss him.

– Me too.

– Did you know that he’s always been in love with Nataly?

– Who doesn’t?

– Don’t you think that he invited you to Singapore only because you look so much like her?

– Do I? Am I not by far the ugliest thing that has ever bled out of a mother’s belly?

Lenny shakes his head. Meggy feels flattered. In her mind, she takes off her glasses and is simply radiant, radiates all the other girls away. In her mind, she’s a melting nuclear reactor — a wonderful moment marking the greatest possible gap between how she sees herself and how others see her.

– What are you going to do after school?

– I’m taking my mom’s job at the New England Times. Only for as long as she’s gone, of course.

– Where is she?

– Down under.

Meggy can’t suppress a giggle and it makes her feel unprofessional. Quiet. Okay then.

– Where?

– New Zealand.

– But where there?

– Fiji.

– But isn’t Fiji —

– And you, Lenny? What are you going to do?

– Me, well. I’ll probably divide my time between the Arctic and the Antarctic.

– Sounds exciting.

– Are you interested in ice —

– cream? Sure. Pistachio. And sometimes chocolate chip, too.

Meggy Corey wants to write for a living.

Everyone looks smashing on prom night. The Party Party Club has agreed on the slogan THE UNIVERSE: PART TWO, as scientists recently discovered a sequel to the universe. Jeff Cello writes Emily an anonymous letter, saying it would be great if she attended, and that he sometimes imagines her naked, trapped between two glass doors. But she sticks to her principles and instead plays the Game of Life with the Anachronists. The assembly hall is glittering with stars made of cardboard and countless little lights. There’s a huge bowl of punch, nicknamed the black hole, which has been spiked with benzedrine. A DJ is playing Space Wave and Sun Ra symphonies. The interior is all by Verner Panton: plastic, eternity, the expansion of space. We, the gleaming shadows of our youth, will show the night the way. We are the numbered days. Coordinates of an innocent continent. They swivel on the dance floor, their hands touch, they exchange fleeting glances. Lowered gazes, longing eyes. A group of fat students hover near the bowls of rosemary potatoes, risotto and ratatouille, stuffing their faces, while daintier figures leaf through the salad bar. Dresses and suits stand around bar tables, glasses on their noses, smoking cigarettes in front of their parents. A line of onlookers leans against the wall; someone peers through a viewfinder and snaps an underexposed photo. It's getting late. Flowers in hairdos and around wrists begin to lose their petals, their scent mingling with the scent of sweat on silk. The air is irrelevant. The vote for prom queen. It’s not as if it matters right now, or that it feels like it matters, but still it makes sense to want to burn up, just for one night. To want to be a tyrant, to lord it up, to destroy an empire, to leave everything in ruins, all the things you’ve woken up for in the morning since forever, just for one night. A throne is erected in front of those oppressed by their own redemption, a monument made of galactic disruptions. Each guest gets to write a girl’s name on a slip of paper. She is then asked to go to the front, be beautiful and winsome, to say something about life — everything they know about it so far. Then the girl gets a crown and a happy memory. Like a crooked, jaded journalist, Meggy rigs the vote and steps up to the lectern. Everyone is surprised, but, okay, if everyone else voted for Meggy it doesn’t make sense to complain. Sitting and standing in front of her are all the people who have been with her on this journey, during which some have been cruel and others indifferent. She has rehearsed this scenario a thousand times in her head, spoken these sentences a thousand times, taken breaths at the right places, found an outlet for her frustration, and given others a glimpse into her days of gloom and confusion. She had discovered them, the metaphors that would make humans humane. The putting-up-with would come to an end, and she would finally be welcome. Some people might offer to buy her a glass of red wine, but she wouldn’t let them.

– You don’t need to do that, because we’ve moved past money and past injustice. We can have what we want, and give what we have; we can drink half a bottle of red wine and more; we can spread the message, drill it into the world, and use it to spin the solar system!

She would leave the party with these words and everyone would be crying tears of happiness. Real, deep tears. It would also be the first time since the death of her father that she would speak to her mother normally. Small wrinkles on her nose.

– Mother. Mother, I get it now. I know, now, how to deal with it, the loneliness. It’s really easy.

Are they making fun of her? Meggy clears her throat. A sip of water. They stare at her, half amused, half bored. The asymmetry has grown: she’s two half-people now, a Siamese twin, with the left side of her head growing out of the right side. She starts speaking, more nervous than she’d anticipated. She stammers through the first sentence. Did someone just giggle? She starts again.

– My fellow students, dear, dear parents, dear teachers of the High & Low High School. It’s my great honor to speak to you so freely today. I know that tradition dictates that one begins these kinds of speeches with a didactic parable or a witticism or an anecdote from our school days. But I would rather quote something by the German distiller Müller, who once, in a letter he sent to von Eppendorf in Wittenberg, claimed that optimism was just a lack of information. And when I look into this crowd of happy faces, when I am filled with appreciation of the joy and mental calm that I encountered among the people here this evening, which was such an anomaly that I should really be in shock, then I can only smile. Of course, the letter from the distiller was never delivered, instead it was confiscated and burned. Ditto the distiller.

Mumbling, mistrust, mental work, clattering, muscles tensing up with violent fantasies. Slowly the agitation subsides, and a stream of words surges through Meggy’s skull to her vocal chords — a slightly self-aggrandizing stream of words. It is too precious for dialogue, and thus channels itself into monologue, a dictation, a tract, a polemic. She pauses for a moment, licks her salty lips, and continues.

– If I may wish you one thing, though, it’s that you banish this mental calm from your lives and that all of you turn into jellyfish. Jellyfish give the ocean its waves, through the cramps and convulsions they struggle with every day, which are the sum of their existence.

Maybe there are eyes somewhere that are good enough to see the many thin, fine threads attached to the students’ limbs, how they reflect the spotlight from certain angles, how they are being pulled. How their limbs jerk forward. How the whole graduating class marches together, under the muted gaze of the faculty, toward the lone girl. How the puppets act in unison, in one and the same movement, and destroy the lead player. How they knock the sheets of paper out of her hand. How they kick the glasses off her face. How they jam her in a locker. Without delay, there is a re-vote. And no one is surprised that Nataly wins. Everyone is so goddamn happy right now. A gaze into the crowd, despite the petite tiara nipping at the crown of her draped hair; the blowing of kisses, though none for Miranda, of all people, because she didn’t show up. The queen proposes that, before she begins to speak, they take a moment of silence, for the dead, and specifically the dead boy that could have been here tonight, but isn’t, because the fencecutioner murdered him.

– Benjamin MacNash. I’m thinking of Benjamin MacNash and about the sprawling fields outside of town, how we lay there, nothing above us but blue empty space. The crickets, their screeches, their long shadows. I am thinking of Benjamin MacNash and I want to ask him to join me for the first dance.

She holds up her left hand, inviting the ghost to lead. She seems to be following the spotlight, but the spotlight is following something else. The sound of leather sliding and tapping on laminate. The fabric of her dress, which is not rubbing up against anything yet is pressed against her body. The large hand that rests on her shoulder blade, the grip that leaves behind a moist warmth. The grip grows ever tighter, grabs her by the hand — once gentle, it is now cold and bitter, and forces her to follow, dragging her across the dance floor, spinning her around, pulling her along until the grip grabs her by the throat and disappears. Nataly is sprawled on the ground, her father helps her up.

– Did you trip, darling? You seemed to get quite carried away.

– Yes, Father.

– May I?

Dancing couples join them. Some of them rest their heads on their partners’ shoulders. The onlookers, still standing by the wall like trees, will masturbate again and again tonight, in the hope of achieving perfect solitude. When the evening is over the parents say their goodbyes and allow their kids to be kids one last time. The graduates take off their heels and shirts and dash across the baseball field. Their bare feet sink into the grass, cold and clammy and hot. One last time, they throw a Hail Mary pass across the field, or just lie there. They steal the girl. They nab the boy. They meet under the stands and leave behind shards of glass. They feel their muscles and the flakes of skin falling off their arms. They will remember none of it.

Bobby is sitting in his archive and taking notes. Meggy is lying next to him and observing his movements. She is lying on the small couch that Bobby keeps in the room in case he doesn’t make it home. One of the armrests is broken off so you can really stretch out your feet. The upholstery is black with yellow and purple petals on it. A brown crust has formed around Meggy’s nostrils. Sometimes she’d love to be an astronaut.

– Yes, I want to be an astronaut.

– No entertainment without waste. No winners without failures. No exceptions without a mass of mediocrity. No art without the lousy, the ordinary, the everyday, the gray, the merely okay, the nodding, the hushing, the listening, the grasping, the engaging-with, the thinking-about, the waiting, the procrastinating, the repetition, the cowardice, the stolen, the retained, the remembered, the sodden, the kept, the kind, the nice, the caring, the considerate, the comfortable and the cozy, the weak, the civilized, and all other kinds of crippled sympathizers. Because art is erasure.

Meggy can neither follow this nor agree with it.

– Since when have you been an artist, Bobby? And thanks for rescuing me from the locker.

– No problem. And I’m not saying I’m an artist. I’m a scientist. And really there’s no difference between those two occupations. Just that scientists are less ashamed of what they do. If someone had told Da Vinci that people would call him an artist in the future, he would have spit on the marble floor.

– I heard that Michelangelo was considered pretty dumb and that he swore a lot. By the way, I was right: that nebulous object from the crime scene was not the motor of a time machine.

– What was it?

– The motor of a space machine.

– And how do you know that?

– The angry ginger and the one-eyed girl threatened me, tortured me a bit, and then I gave the navigator back to them.

– The what?

– The navigator.

– So, that’s what that device is called.

Bobby takes a cookie and offers none to Meggy.

– And what have you concluded?

– The angry ginger and one-eyed girl traveled here from a different realm of space, maybe to mingle with people or to start a cult in which everyone has to dance around a fireball that represents, say, the sun or the center of the earth, or both, or rather the similarity between the two. But when they arrived in Beetaville, they ran into Benjamin, who saw their secret machine and thus posed a threat to their identity — if they even have identities where they’re from. So they take his life; but since it’s customary where they come from not to bury the dead, but instead to weave them into a fence, they do that without giving it much thought. Of course, it would have made more sense, for their purposes, to just disappear him, which wouldn’t have been hard with their space machine, but they didn’t think of that. Probably, they wanted to pay him their last respects or something like that. I don’t think you can hold that against them. Who can blame them for his being in the wrong place at the wrong time? They sewed him to the fence but lost the navigator in the process, which, because they’re one-eyed and angry, they didn’t notice until the late evening. Once they return to the crime scene, the police have already cordoned it off and it’s teeming with surveillance. They’re captives, because they no longer know how they’re going to get back home or retrieve the navigator. They don’t even know where it is. They hope that a curious student, and not the police, finds this all-important object. So they take side jobs as staff in the student cafeteria, and watch and wait and wait, but nothing happens. No one happens to pulls the navigator out of their backpack, no one shows it to their friends over a dish of veggie lasagna. Then the couple from the woods is executed. Despair. Panic. Because they know that, to the uninitiated, the navigator look like a mere skein and not an overlooked piece of evidence in a murder case. They assume that the navigator is lost in the police archives. They need to keep everyone’s attention on the case, meaning they have to kill again. But who should be the victim? For fairness’ sake, they pick a female this time, and not one from Benjamin’s year, as that would be detrimental to his peers. So they find a younger girl, and, to heighten the dramatic effect, they leave a haphazard trail of clues to the debate club. Chesley dies and everything goes according to plan. Donna the agent comes to town, the case gets a huge amount of attention, and, eventually, after waiting so long, they see the navigator again, if only on a notice on a wall. A picture of it: the wanted notice I drew after you suggested it. The rest went swiftly. They tracked me down, found me, took the navigator from me, and went straight back to their own space.

– So, you mean to say that the murdering is going to stop?

– No idea; it’s also possible that they had nothing to do with it.

Finally, there’s a reason for Emily to speak to Nataly again — she has just been elected prom queen, after all. Generally, these are good days for Emily, who just received a flattering grade on a chemistry project, and no longer has to share a room with her sister because she’s moving out. She will now be the oldest daughter in the house, which means she can come home whenever she likes, even past midnight on weekends. She will finally be able to go hunting at night, practice her shooting on sleeping wild horses, aiming for their nostrils; her eyes will get used to the dark. Time to finally tear those old posters off the wall. And throw away the boxes under her bed — all the old memories, notes and certificates, watercolor sketches framed in macaroni, dust, postcards, photos. Old photos. Photos of skyscraper windows reflecting a swarm of swallows; photos of Benjamin, lying on the earth in all its splendor; photos of a field, of stones and of woods; photos of them sitting on a log, of hair in water, of hair under hats, of hands in sand, in snow, in shoes, of fruit, of the sky, that festering sky, that mighty sky, of laughter and of smiling. Some of them taken accidentally — unfocused, almost black, a light or an eye here and there. The faces of friends, foreign now, eerily still, lifeless, hollow, and amusing. Photos of dozens of colors. In one photo, Emily and Nataly are holding up a freshly caught fish. They are both wearing rubber boots and overalls; one of their hats is yellow, the other is gray; the day slowly came to an end. How proud they were; they’d caught a trout without any help. Soon after the photo was taken, they threw it back in the water. Emily can’t remember who took the picture, but it was a beautiful day. It was a really beautiful day.

– You think its mouth is hurting?

– Maybe a bit.

– Do you feel sorry for it?

– No. Do you?

– No.

– I want to be a tactical warhead that penetrates 20 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating.

Holly’s eyes shine. Her cleavage is speckled pink, she is excited, she wants something. She looks a bit like Richard Ramírez, who’s still on death row. He’s just sitting there and waiting for the door to open, waiting for his last meal, which he won’t be able to get down; on one terrifying night before the poison turns his body stiff, he will tell a priest about the horrors raging in his head. He hopes that the only, last, true place of rest is waiting for him in that 15-ml vial of potassium chloride. That is how she is sitting there now and her statement of intent satisfies the Australian stuntmen agency that she hopes will take her on.

– A tactical war device, is it?

– Warhead: I mean a warhead, like one that’s used in battle. I suppose you could call it a war device, but what I mean, of course, is a warhead.

– Got it. Miss — ?

– Cello, Holly Cello.

– Miss Cello. We just received an inquiry for which you’d be perfect; we’ll get it set up.

Holly has dreamed of becoming a stuntman since she was a little girl. At the time she jumped from the garage onto a fence and broke the tip off one of her canines. The inquiry is from Miramax Films for a movie called Love Serenade, the second film for which Shirley Barrett has written the screenplay. Holly is supposed to fall off a corn silo in a sluggish, life-defying manner, the way a middle-aged man might fall. She’s on summer break — why not?

Jeff hasn’t got the time to dissuade his new wife from stuntmanship. He is too busy working out and talking to Donna, though their conversations aren’t about much anymore except things like which of them can smoke more. When Holly asks him why he smokes so much, why he coughs up deep black scratchy balls when he brushes his teeth, Jeff replies:

– Cigarettes are perfectly designed. Watch the films, look at old pictures; the very first cigarettes looked like they do today. The cigarette is the last great human invention, after bread, coins, and the wheel. It was instantly clear what it should look like; it was an immanent secret, a perfect question that could only receive the perfect response. There is nothing in nature, no creature, no stone, no weather, no single thing that can compete with the grace and integrity of a cigarette.

Two years earlier. Shirley Barrett and a friend sit at a kitchen table, they talk about their childhoods, how they spent entire summers climbing up huge corn silos, how there was nothing else to do in the small towns they were raised in. Her friend recounts seeing what he thought was someone falling off a distant silo.

– A small black dot that slowly moves from top to bottom and then disappears.

Shirley is half-listening. In her head, she is busy finishing her screenplay.

– What did you say?

– I once saw someone fall off one of those silos.

– A murder? An accident?

– I don’t know. There was nothing about it in the paper.

That’s it: the solution, the final twist. That’s the only way the two heroines can escape their story. The big fall, the toppling of the tyrant, drop him down a hundred feet. It would look like an accident. And so it goes, and Holly gets her first big stunt. She’s not afraid of heights but she has a bad feeling; the coffee was terrible, the whole catering, really. Not that she’s a catering expert, but you know bad catering when you eat it. And now she’s standing up there and just wants to throw up. Of course, the lighting guys are taking their time again. She shouldn’t have eaten those anchovies. It’s always the same thing with those damnchovies. One should never eat them. Holly finds everything frustrating. Everything. Why must this cliché be true? What a crock of shit. She throws up into her hands and into her stunt outfit. On her first gig, it had to happen on her first gig, right as she was beginning to fulfill her childhood dream — she just had to throw up in her stunt outfit. The lighting guys made it in time for that, of course. They whisper mean things to each other; they think Holly has chickened out. How she would love to spatter them with vomit, wash them away with vomit, those trash-talking lighting guys, but she doesn’t dare, or she’s too polite. She’s far too sick from the anchovies. Angry, shivering, weak, she takes off the slimy suit, stands there in her undershirt and struggles with the left pant leg, can’t for the life of her get out of it. And that’s that: for the rest of her life she’s trapped in that pant leg. It’s so hot that the vomit blends with the fabric, turns hard, then viscous. Something. Stuck to her ankle, now seeping into her light-footed sneakers. All the way into her sneakers? Those were some anchovies. Damn piss-fish: exterminate them, and while we’re at it, let’s exterminate the whole ocean; let the world become a desert; who cares, as long as it doesn’t become scuzzy and unpredictable like the fucking ocean. She hops back and forth, still up on the scaffolding. How cute she looks in this mortal danger that she’s tottered into, cursing at such a great height. Not only the lighting folks, the whole crew, from the caterers to the camerawoman, Miranda Otto herself — all of them are laughing at her. Others, who just aren’t the cheerful type, merely smirk. Then a colleague comes up to her, cuts open her pant leg and is kind to her.

– Pay no attention, let them laugh. This happens to everyone; I’m feeling a bit queasy too. I bet you ate those anchovies, right?

– Right.

– Those anchovies are the worst, I know. C’mon, it doesn’t matter. I’ll do the jump. Shirley filled me in. We’ll do a quick test and then the shoot will continue. That way, nobody will have to wait, and tonight we’ll drink a beer, okay? And then it’ll all be forgotten.

– And a shot?

– And a shot.

– Thanks.

– What’s your name, by the way?

– Holly. You?

– What — ?

he says, slowly falling from the silo.

– What’s your name?

– My friends call me —

Because the air cushion is defective, he breaks his forearm, neck, several ribs, and dies. Shirley assembles the team. Together they watch the footage. The last seconds of Collin Dragsbaeck’s life. Shirley knows that it’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and all the crew members cry. Shirley says,

– We will dedicate the film to him. For a moment, he made our lives whole.

Human death — that singular, concluding truth, that gooey unpleasantness of finality, that ultimate fetish, the fascinating secret of life itself, the creative paradox, marauding through mankind in a second and a century, raw and carnal — eventually transformed into just another image. Into something visual. How everything can be reduced to the denominator of sensory impressions. Holly can only respond to this feeling with an all-encompassing, capillary-drenching joy and humility. She lies on the hotel bed, a bucket next to her. She feels an unconditional desire to go down in history and, every once in a while, a strong urge to gag. Suddenly afraid of flying, she takes the ferry back to New England. During that three-week journey, she falls in love with two women and one man, has her head shaved, and starts taking notes. She starts with shorter sentences and borrowed words, then writes scenes, particularly night scenes and nautical observations. Thousands of slips of paper whirl around her cabin, more and more of them containing descriptions of the sea. She is up to her knees in notes. At first they lead to fragments, vignettes, and short stories, one of which she deems pretty successful, despite its title and the in parts rather awkward, unnecessarily abstract language. In this story, the first-person narrator is on a cruise from Hamburg to Hammerfest, a trip that, as we quickly find out, is actually a journey from life to death. The crew are all ghosts, who represent the origin of all fear and anguish. The first-person narrator, however, remains cold and distant throughout. He seems morally depraved, which Holly finds attractive, because she’s a bit like that, too — there are various interesting parallels between her experiences and those of the narrator. She has taken on the habit of making do with little more than three hours of sleep, and when a weary, despairing barkeeper asks her if he could perhaps start to close the bar, she laughs out loud. He gets paid monthly, a lump sum, and has to stay until the last guest leaves.

– Or am I wrong?

But when the sun starts to peek in through the porthole again, with the next shift due to start in under two hours, the barkeeper asks if it isn’t enough now, even for her; she’d still, he says, have all the cred she’s earned with those many hours of drinking. Looking around, Holly notices that she’s sitting alone again, that, if that conversation even happened, she’s been talking to herself the whole time. She looks the barkeeper in the eye, takes her index finger, gives a friendly nod, and points into the empty glass in front of her.

– Isn’t something missing there? Thought so.

Pouring, writing, world fame.

Jeff stands in the open doorway and waits for his wife. Less sauntering than trotting, Holly slurps into his arms.

– You think I should wear more shirts? Am I old enough to wear shirts all the time? Oh, by the way, how was Australia?

Holly is pleased, she feels the flatiron city steamrolling over her, gliding over her feelings, leaving everything smooth and wrinkle-free.

Donna talks to Nataly one last time.

– What more do you want from me? You know everything you wanted to know about Benjamin, and I don’t know much else. We were a couple, we were happy, we were sad, we were one, young, dumb, inefficient, childish. Our tongues touched on the swing carousel, we lay around dozing in the laserdome, or in bed, all day, the two of us, in summer, in the shadows of my bedroom, without having to say a word; everything was loose and open and the sun stuffed idiots’ pores with some kind of dopamine, and we had a good time.

Donna uncrosses and recrosses his legs. They’re sitting next to each other on a bench outside the church. He is wearing a hat at a slight angle. He has crossed his arms and stares straight ahead. Nataly is wearing earrings and her hair up. She feels too hot in her jacket, but it really suits her: a simple cut, black, with white embroidery in relief. She seems tired, but tired like someone who’s not used to being tired — at least, not as tired as she is now. Donna has bought her a cup of coffee.

– So, what else do you want from me.

– Did Jeff Cello and Benjamin know each other?

– Yeah, I think so. What do I know. No, he was never his student.

– Can you picture —

– Mister Cello? Never.

– What makes you so sure?

– Nothing.

– Maybe he did it.

– But why?

– You’re asking me?

– Yes.

– You can’t do that.

– Oh.

– Do you miss him?

– Benjamin?

– Of course.

She balks, the cup of coffee trembles in her hand. She puts it down. She stares at Agent Donna until he returns her gaze. Those vitreous bodies are washed-out, soft as ash, with khaki-colored tears in their corners.

– I don’t remember what he looked like, how he spoke, how he smelled, what he liked, what he didn’t like. People show me pictures of us together and I think, what’s that thing next to me? Who is that? I don’t remember anything. What’s happened to me in the past few weeks? I lie in Miranda’s apartment, we drink green tea, and I don’t have the strength to do anything. That book about dinosaurs — I try to start reading it again every day, but the words make no sense. Would you believe me if I told you that hell is a quiet place, a slow afternoon? Of course not. How could you.

– Come on, let’s go to the diner.

– But I’m not hungry.

Donna orders chickpea rissoles, and Nataly talks about Meggy, how sorry she is about what became of her, how once they were good friends. At some point Donna doesn’t even notice that he places his hand on Nataly’s hand and Nataly doesn’t even notice that she likes it.

– I feel like I can tell you anything.

While Donna swears that Meggy isn’t evil, that Meggy is not a resentful person, he thinks about Meggy’s mother’s naked face. He was even a bit sad when he heard that she was going to be abroad for a while. They hug upon departing. They hug for longer than four seconds, which always means that the hug is special in some way. And Donna makes a peace sign when he leaves, though that makes him look older rather than younger.

Meggy hates that her mother beats her at chess. Playing chess has become their ritual, followed by three rounds of other board games. Meggy’s mother, meanwhile, is bothered that they evenly matched at backgammon. That game leaves too much to chance. She would prefer to play another game of chess; she is already considering whether to open with the Semi-Slavic Defense or the Albin Countergambit. They were close to a draw once, but then Meggy was so excited that she overlooked the bishop on D4, leaving her queen in a near pin, which resulted in a real pin for the king and checkmate. Their relationship has improved since her mother has been confined to her dungeon. They have an easygoing way of getting along and sometimes Meggy even brings half a bottle of red wine down to her mother, who, by now, hardly ever asks to be released.

It is the day of running away. Nataly closes the door, pulls it toward her, both hands on the concave knob — slinking backward out of the past, humble and tired. The walls quake, scatter, and topple over. Turmoil has swept through the Hay household. The interior furnishings respond to the elder daughter’s disappearance with small signs of irritation. A picture slips off the wall, a piece of cutlery gets tangled in the cutlery drawer, a frame cracks, an armchair tips over, a windowpane fractures. And when the door snaps shut and the hands no longer touch the doorknob, the knapsack on Nataly’s back looks back at the house with a sneer, because it is staying, it’s staying with her, on her, tied as close as possible to her back, and the distraught house gasps in dismay. The chair on which the rucksack used to lie throws itself to the ground and breaks its own legs.

– Where is she going? Where is she going? Whatever does she want?

They ask the doorknob, shout at it, curse it for being in a state of shock, for being silent as it has no capacity for speech. The grandfather clock can’t take it anymore and punches itself in the face with all its might. It wants to feel a different pain, one that comes from the outside, a simple, beautiful, clear pain, the pain of a stab wound, which makes you stupid and empty, not the steady torment in its depths, which burns hot and transforms swinging pendulums into murder weapons. Grandfather clocks can’t deal with such losses, they haven’t got the resources to deal with losing the people around them, and it wants to chime, forty-nine times, just for Nataly, forty-nine times, and then never again, forty-nine times, Nataly’s favorite number since she turned seven has always been forty-nine, but it’s trapped in its clockwork and ticks once a second, ticks once a second and ticks, and on the half hour it peals out a cold scream against time, which is its master and slave. Nataly stands on her own at the bus terminal. In her knapsack, she has a leather briefcase, an epistemology textbook, clean underpants, and an egg sandwich. Only Emily came with her; no one else had the time. Not her parents, not Donna either. Why, why on earth would Donna come to say goodbye to her, anyway? Because he promised he would, somewhere between two bites? No. Donna was neither the kind of person who would keep his word, nor the kind of person who would do something good for someone else. Emily holds her sister’s hand, squeezes it tightly, then lets her board the bus, and receives one last tousling of her hair. Through the Greyhound window. But she is tousled as an adult would be tousled. Emily looks down at her feet while it happens. A hair frees itself from her scalp and falls to the ground. After landing, it is blown away, swept along in the wake of the departing Greyhound. Why is it not called a Silverhound? Or simply a Silverbus? Why don’t things have names that really match their appearance? Or why don’t things have names that match their character? Why isn’t Nataly just called the one who did a runner?

Lenny had already flown to Greenland a few days earlier. He had received a postcard from Joseph, who wrote to say that he found his former friend and companion’s efforts to become a scientist laughably tragic. Also, he would start mocking him in public, as that would drive up the price of the first pressing of the Heinrich Fun LP, of which he still owned several copies. A watermelon wearing sunglasses is on the back of the postcard — no slogan, no explanation, no punchline. As if finding a picture for a postcard didn’t call for anything more than simply putting sunglasses on a watermelon. Joseph got so mad that he lived in a country that spawned such totally worthless postcards that he bought all of them. He liked spending his rage away. At least that’s how Lenny imagined the choice of postcard; he had no other explanation.

Miranda is lying alone in her studio apartment, a packed bag next to her bed. Green with a hard shell; her father’s suitcase. A seaworthy ship could be built from that suitcase, maybe even a submarine. The pot of poisoned green tea is still sitting on the dresser. No one has touched a sip, and now it stands there cold and still, and really it’s a bit of a shame because the dosage was so precise, a gentle off-switch concocted from affection and flunitrazepam, an ode to the central nervous system. But Nataly didn’t want to drink green tea anymore, not since she learned that green tea is made of the same leaves as black tea. That’s how she explained it to Miranda, at least. Had she, perhaps, picked up on the complimentary toxic treat? The way her tongue played with Miranda’s earlobes, nipples, and labia — was that fear? Miranda noticed a different kind of pressure, but didn’t put it down to fear; in fact she rather liked it, the quivering; she had enjoyed it, how she had buried her face between her legs, her whole face wet, her tongue so deep that she felt her incisors on her pubic bone.

– Are you biting my clit?

The swallowing, the throat. How sodden she was. Or were those Nataly’s tears? Was it fear of abandoning her lover, of doing the worst possible thing to her, or fear that her lover would do the worst possible thing to her? Why didn’t she want to drink the tea? How did she know? Miranda is not going to take that bus. Because she knows that actually travelling with another person is impossible. There are only travelers and followers; and while the follower might be able to take a few pictures or speak about the feelings and observations of the traveler, the moment will invariably come when the follower is left in the lurch. For instance, when the follower forgets a suitcase on the platform, but the two of them are already sitting in their compartment.

– My suitcase!

the follower will say, to which the traveler responds,

– But the train’s about to leave

and the follower,

– But I need my suitcase!

And the follower will rush off the train, passing the last boarding passengers, under the assumption that they are leaving this train together, only to overhear the traveler call after him,

– We’ll meet in Rome then!

And the follower will wait alone on the platform and realize that there is no such thing as a traveling companion, there are only travelers and followers. No one is waiting in Rome. The follower smokes a cigarette and is asked to put it out because this is a smoke-free church.

Donna wanted to come down on the town like rain or a galactic storm, in tune with the laws of outer space, the laws of the universe, and leave behind nothing but order. He wanted to drive the raging chaos back into the sea with his bull-horns. But the soil in Beetaville is swampy, it runs deep and swallows up the weather, forming banks of sinter and caves full of animals that can see in the dark, not with their eyes but with their teeth, which protrude from their two thousand muzzles like salt crystals. Donna is disappointed. He searches and searches for clues as to who could have committed the murders. There’s only one lead, and though he followed it in good faith, with a dedication to duty second to none, he still knows that his relationship with Jeff Cello is purely bureaucratic. Out of frustration, and because the persistent lack of sleep is taking its toll, Donna visits the tanning salon. The man at the reception looks at him and is slightly perplexed, but Donna insists on a session. He thinks that solarium is the most beautiful word in the world. He starts to feel warm. Warm and oblivious.

Miranda looks at the open book of poetry in front of her. She sees the curves, the slopes and falls, the mutations and morphings, the loveable letters of the alphabet and the phony ones, the lost ones, the dull ones, and the flawless ones. A W, for example, following an N; or the eternal S, serenity and danger, which can be a riverbed for a word, full of vital nutrients, but also an overdose, excessive and over-acidic. Miranda has written a poem for Nataly on her electric typewriter. Writing on a typewriter is performance and applause in one. Every strike is the clapping of two eager hands. The But. Don’t Read. Don’t Write. Vitamins, yes. Wine if possible maybe. Candles. Whick not. As for whether the quality of the poem is worth an overflowing ashtray, that’s something she doesn’t know. She knows only that these words most closely match her feelings, and that she is incapable of formulating them any other way. She sticks a stamp on an envelope. Stuffs in the poem. And a teabag, a teabag of the kind of tea that would remind Nataly especially of the time they spent together; a bag of the kind of tea that will break Nataly’s little heart when she smells it. Nataly’s new address is written on the envelope. Miranda is shrinking. Maybe an inch. Also, she has gone down one shoe size. In photos, she will look like the captain of a merchant ship eating potato salad in the galley while the ocean crashes down over him.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lonely people are pathetic. The most loathsome thing, of course, is when lonely people are alone — alone at home or alone in a movie theater or alone in a hotel. It’s sickening to imagine a man sitting alone in front of his dinner (for example, a piece of baked goat cheese with rosehip jam, figs pickled in sherry, with a side of potato dumplings and a garden salad). You really have to fight your gag reflex when you picture this lonely man opening a bottle of red wine, perusing the label as if it were an old photograph, full of nostalgia, and pouring himself a glass, pouring it slowly, watching the wine roll out. Silently toasting a long-gone lover. Maybe he mumbles her name or just breathes heavily. Then he sniffs the wine, swirls the glass and tips it to his mouth, feels the wine and swallows it down. Music may well be playing, music in which the clarinet is the key instrument. Donna loves clarinets, in recorded loops or live performances. And when this dawns on Donna, his heart swells with disgust. So he goes to the playground and observes the children. He likes seeing medium-rich black girls and boys among all the medium-rich white ones, enjoying themselves on the swings and the jungle gym. He wasn’t always alone. He was once a father — a bad one, that may be true, but still a father. Somewhere in this blessed western hemisphere, there is a little Miles Jones, who isn’t really little anymore, and half of him is made of Donna. Sometimes the older boys ask Donna if he wants to play basketball with them. Then he teaches them tricks and plays fair. These are the moments when beer tastes best. Once Donna bought the boys a six-pack of Miller High Life and they thought Donna was a cool guy and their parents never found out.

– Listen. Before you all get home, drink a glass of milk. It neutralizes the smell.

He’s about to meet Bobby. Bobby also likes to spend time near the playground. If Donna hadn’t stuck around so long that afternoon — sometimes he simply can’t go back to L’Otel Chacal, the frustration awaiting him there is far too great — they would never have met. Bobby arrives after sundown with a bottle of Curaçao, and leaves behind nothing but confusion under hairless chests and blue stains in the sand.

– What are you doing here?

– Me? What are you doing here? Who are you anyway?

– No adults allowed here.

– What are you doing here, then?

– I’m investigating. What have you got there?

– Nothing, nothing at all.

– You’re not giving liquor to these kids, are you?

– No, I —

– Hands behind your back. Hands behind your back, you perverted bastard! I said, hands behind your back!

– Alright. Donna, you don’t know who I am, but if you let me go now, if you don’t charge me with seduction of minors, you’ll get one of the diaries.

– Shut your mouth!

Chesley’s diary entry on the day of the murder: Meeting that boy again today, you know, whatshisface. He wants to look at the mynah birds with me. I like mynah.

Aside from performing the odd spell-check, or placing ads and wedding/divorce notices, Meggy’s assignments at the New England Times aren’t particularly exciting. She arrived with high expectations, dreamt of investigative strategies, and practiced facial expressions in the bathroom mirror — how to convey interest, empathy, or naiveté, to make it easier to extract information. But the editor-in-chief doesn’t trust her. The tip of the pencil she just re-sharpened breaks off again, sideways, on Meggy’s desk, which is her mother’s desk. She has long completed her tasks and started doodling lazy abstract lines onto the empty surface of the desk. In time, she assumes, a pattern will emerge. She hasn’t done any real thinking for a while now. She just does what she’s told with the least possible effort. Filling empty pages with empty content, she gives up all hope of writing another meaningful sentence. Until, that is, the editor of the local section stops by her desk.

Eleonore Heithworth was expelled from Yale right before graduation because she had an affair with a janitor. Until that happened, they considered her gifted. She had worked her way up (poor parents, hard childhood), fought for the scholarship, got it. Things seemed to be looking up for her. At Yale, she soon caused a stir with her courteous handwriting. She could write twenty or thirty pages without resorting to an adjective, always clear and concise in her prose. But then came the affair with the janitor. That isn’t permitted at Yale: sex with ordinary people. As if that wasn’t enough, she actually thought he was The One, even talked about marriage. She was finally kicked out and hasn’t mentioned it since. No one knows what happened to the janitor. None of the big newspapers wanted her. Her name was dirt so she moved to Beetaville, where Rebecca, her cousin twice removed, lived with her children, Joseph and Chesley. Rebecca Heithworth had yet to come to terms with her daughter’s death, let alone the unspeakable fact that her husband had since run off with another woman, and so — when Joseph also took off to pursue his music career — she moved out of the house pronto. She left the house to her cousin twice removed, whom she had never really liked on account of her extreme poverty. This was humiliation wrapped as a present. Eleonore stands at Meggy’s desk. In a quiet and clear voice she says,

– Might you have a free afternoon coming up, Miss Corey?

–  But, uh, yes, of course. Who, what, why, I mean how, hello.

Meggy awkwardly shifts some scrap paper to cover her doodling, but there’s nothing but doodles on the scrap paper as well, so she lays her body across the table to conceal the most obscene compositions. Eleonore Heithworth smiles.

– I’m Eleonore Heithworth; I work for the local section. So, tell me about your schedule.

Meggy’s heart pounds. She has found a father figure.

– Well?

– Sure, I, uh!

On her way to the small-town zoo, Meggy fiddles with her bus pass until it becomes lighter than air, immune to all gravity, and pirouettes through the cracked-open bus window toward the canopy of clouds. She’s been asked to write an objective report about the opening of the butterfly garden. But before she even arrives at that cage full of idiotic colors, she strays from the path of duty to follow a suspicious-looking man. She sneaks past the otters and piglets without even glancing at the sweet creatures, and confronts him by the birdcage.

– Agent Donna Jones! What a coincidence!

– Meggy, what on earth are you doing here?

– Isn’t the question, rather, what you’re doing here?

– I got a tip.

– Are you sure that they’re her diaries? Are you sure that Chesley wrote them?

Before Donna can respond to this wise-cracking, a screaming comes across the afternoon. The pigs start to shriek, blood runs out the otters’ chops, guts bulge through their eye sockets, and all the birds in the cage try to flee, flapping and flinging themselves against the bars with all their might. The mynah has arisen behind them. Its crowing burns right through the sparrows.

– Thy bright white come, on earth as in ashes.

And it tears Meggy’s stomach out of her stomach. It drags her down under the soil, where everything is heat and pain. Down to the thousand-snouted parasites. Before her eyes, rainbows shudder in colors that cannot be prismed out of sunlight. A butterfly lands on her index finger. She brings it up to her mouth, licks the dust from its wings and coughs. It tastes a bit bitter. Aside from a minor barb about the ice cream prices, her contribution to the local pages of the paper will be a friendly one. Objective and sober. Visit the Butterfly Garden, residents of this town, because it’s pretty. Children will come. Donna has vanished.

Meggy’s article might have made a bigger splash if a V-2 rocket — welded together by concentration-camp laborers in Peenemünde many years ago — hadn’t fallen on Mwanza while she was at the zoo. This missile was more stubborn than its phallic siblings. It didn’t let anyone tell it what to do, always did just what it wanted. Its furnace simply burned brighter, so bright that it put off the planned second half of its parabolic curve for some 54 years, and thus missed the opportunity to plummet back from outer space onto, say, London or Birmingham, instead lingering up there, quietly, secretly, brimming with spite. That is, until favorable galactic winds blew it back into gravity and onto the planet. Right by Lake Victoria, right into the heart of Mwanza, capital of the Mwanza region of Tanzania.

Tanzania sues for compensation, but Peenemünde refuses.

– We didn’t build that rocket. It was the Jews, or maybe the Poles. Reach out to them.

But Israel says it was Wernher von Braun and that he’s the one they should talk to, and after a considerable back and forth in Geneva, Brussels, and Washington, the government of Tanzania is compensated with a state-of-the-art surface-to-surface missile, which should not to be understood as an admission of guilt, but rather as a gift on the eve of the country’s first democratic election. In short, people in Beetaville aren’t talking about Meggy’s reports of lepidopteran activity, but about strange global events that are comfortably distant from their own lives.

– I won’t sleep a wink unless a crime is committed.

Emily is lying in her bed and studying the ceiling. The cracks look a bit like a human palm, perhaps that of an old lady farmer, who cut herself on some cornhusks one November when she was a little girl. Emily has always slept on her back since she was a little girl. One could never catch her lying in the fetal position, neither in her crib nor in her first real bed. She has been sleeping on her back her whole life. She didn’t have to try to get used to it, the way lovers often do when someone expects to snuggle in a particular way. She had simply always been a back-sleeper. And this is how she’s lying there, her legs crossed, her left foot tucked under her right foot, her hands protectively folded over her diaphragm. Motionless. A wintry garden of delights. But she is sure: I won’t sleep one damn wink unless a crime is committed.Her stiff body slowly rises from the bed and she floats out the window. The white of her nightgown in the gleam of the night. No stars to be seen, only the moon, lonely and aroused. A perfect geometric form punched out from the unending black, a hole in the logic of darkness. She wanders through the streets, passes a gas station, feels for the barrel of the Springfield Model 1855 with her index finger. But now’s not the time for an armed robbery.

– Armed robberies are for weekends.

Excuses. Onward. Aimlessly. Her sleeplessness causes her to roam far and wide; everything seems bland and boring, the glowing stripes, the flashing lights, the air. Until she reaches a public mailbox. She tries to slip her bony hand through the slot, but its scrawn isn’t scrawny enough. With her middle finger she can feel the corner of an envelope, tries to move it toward her index finger, to no avail. After several minutes of groaning and a few bruises around her elbow, she finally gives up. Emily looks around in frustration, searching for tools, and at long last finds a small garden across the road, and there, on the side of the house — yes, that could work — a hose. She cranks it up to the mouth of the blue metal box and turns on the faucet. In an instant, all letters but one are immediately sodden and sink to the bottom of the mailbox. One of them, however, rises slowly to the top. She pulls it out of the box, lets it drip for a moment. If she is decoding the smudged writing correctly, then whose letter do we have here?

– Miranda Quickpath. Well, well. I’ve seen her a couple times with my, aha, so my sister is the recipient — interesting. I know my sister, of course, but what does it say inside? What would they write to each other about? What kind of thing does a woman write to another woman, on pretty, textured, egg-white paper?

She opens the envelope, takes out the teabag that’s now an airbag, and reads the poem, which is intended for the eyes of another.

Wholly ghost, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy colors. It says that on the eastern gate of Maine University in rusty, semi-oval letters. It’s not like Nataly knows what it means, but she does know why it’s there. They explained it to her and all the other new students during the welcoming ceremony for the incoming freshman class. It’s the first sentence of the late French Canadian philologist Dr. Roland Schnurrh’s probably best-known treatise. In The Author is a Ghost, Schnurrh tries, on the basis of the New Testament’s resurrection story, to sketch out a history of culture that has been shaped primarily by central and northern European ghost stories and sagas. From there, he launches into a critique of the notion of authorship, wherein he argues that writers are not living beings. He denounces roughly 2,400 years of literary history as rotten and corrupt — cadavers trying to mask their own cadaverousness — in the hope of conjuring up a hermeneutic circle ex negativo that would make the phenomenology of the spook visible. This exploration further eludes comprehension with every step, transcending the content of things to eventually become a pure, antisemantic, meaningless linguistic epidermis, a thin bedsheet with two holes for eyes. According to Schnurrh, it is in this circle that the mechanic-traumatic paresis comes into being, which ultimately leads to the final separation of world and word. New contributions lose their counter-value, and language fades into a blinding, all-erasing white — the pigment of death. According to this logic, writers create a dead reality, seemingly imbued with life but actually empty, because all that’s bustling in this reality are the shadows of past consensus meanings. Cheerful gravestones. There are, after all, no three-dimensional words.

– They don’t exist!

Schnurrh’s longstanding assistant and enemy Howard Noam screams at Nataly.

– They don’t exist!

Noam is already in his late 1960s. He became an assistant far too early, less than 20 years younger than his mentor.

– Enough already, I got it.

She hasn’t. How could she. When Noam was still a Schnurrhist, he wrote a seven-hundred-page dissertation, The Invisible Land, that advocated viewing the body politic as a spectral body, a structural madness that has befallen all its denizens. Unfortunately, roughly one-third into the tract, Noam started to base his argument on little more than his own taste. He received particularly harsh criticism for the chapter on the lesbian prison film. Citing the example of Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion (1972), he delineated a world, one he assumed was our own, in which homosexuality results from confinement in society’s cage. He arrived at the conclusion that same-sex love was in fact retroproduction, a refusal to work on the human species, etc.

– So, the madness of the western world manifests itself most strongly in Japanese women’s prisons — interesting.

That, allegedly, is the last sentence Schnurrh said to Noam — the starting point of an enduring mediocrity that has since found its way back into the halls of Maine University.

Dear Miss Quickpath — or may I call you Miranda? I feel so close to you, I’ll call you Miranda. Now, dear Miranda, you probably have no idea who I am. I’ll gladly spell it out. My name is Emily, Emily Hay. Did my sister ever mention me? I presume so. Through a few scrapes I happened to get my hands on a letter that you sent to my sister, and I didn’t quite know what to make of it. Should I now report my sister, in accordance with the laws of New England, for unnatural carnal copulation? Or you, for that matter? Please help me with my decision. Yours faithfully, Emily Hay. PS: If possible, could you please make sure not to include any bills printed in the last two years?

A beautiful thing happened to Meggy. When she was at the gas station buying hamburger-shaped sorbet and a bottle of rye for herself and her mother, the sleepy cashier messed up. He thought he had stuffed a fifty-dollar bill into the cash register, when in fact it was a twenty. She couldn’t stop grinning, the whole way home. But this is the year of running away, and when Meggy goes down the creaking stairs to the basement with sorbet, rye, and a chessboard, she finds only a mixture of spit, soap, and blood gleaming on the handcuffs. Her mother has escaped. Meggy drops what she’s holding, a bottle shatters on the concrete floor, and she runs through the apartment in search of answers. Suddenly she remembers a story her mother told her; Meggy thought it was meant to cheer her up after no one read her butterfly article, but now, with her mother on the loose, she wonders whether it was a way of mocking her. Once upon a time there was a woman who moved into the woods to chop down all the trees. What can she do now? She can’t call anyone. Help is an impossibility. Can she even return to the newsroom? Only after three whisky sodas does she notice the Post-it on the fridge: I won’t destroy you. See you soon. Mom. Her mother has really nice handwriting. Still, Meggy can’t say that they’re comforting, those nine words, but at least she won’t destroy her. A mother’s love. It’s a start.

One person who can’t run away is Emily. She repeatedly swings the butt of the gun where she suspects a face, leaving her attacker with serious injuries, but it’s no use. A hammer strikes her on the head — once would have sufficed — but nothing is of any use anymore, nor ever will be again. Or what were people thinking? That the killing would stop? Just like that?

Nataly is lying in the dorm bathtub and her roommates are banging on the door, but Nataly doesn’t hear a thing. Hygiene is her primary concern these days. Her sister didn’t answer her last letter, and she hasn’t heard a thing from Miranda either. She is going on her third month at university; it’s cold as chestnuts and most of the students are unfriendly. How did she pick up those bruises on her shin? What did she bump into again? The only person she’s spent any real time with is Professor Noam. He summoned her into his study, that musty room with its calculated reek. He seemed to like her essay about Dutch painting and Impressionism in relation to the image of heaven. Van Gogh’s apoplectic firmament. The fixity. The world as fill and manipulation. She interpreted this as a reference to the intellectual ice age that swept through Europe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. A horizon that simply cannot be broadened any further, that has become an impenetrable wall. A horizon obliterated by the knowledge of what lies behind it; the discoverers of the world imprisoned by their discovery. Professor Noam likes this a lot, but what he likes even more is how Nataly sometimes stares out the window during lectures, daydreaming, how the light falls through her hair, how it loses itself in the melanin of her iris. He will leave his wife for her, the same wife for whom he previously left his previous wife. Who would have thought that twenty-year-olds turn forty?

Two German kids stand in front of the ice dispenser; one of them is 8, the other 12 years old. They are fascinated by this machine because ice cubes are a kind of luxury to them. Then again, everything in this country fascinates them. The desert, the cloudbursts, Salt Lake City, curly fries. Floppy bread with cream cheese.

– Philadelphia. We’ve been there, haven’t we, daddy?

– Yes.

– But the road continues,

he had said,

– all the way to Boston.

A trip across the whole country. This was the year of the Atlanta Olympics. How long ago was that? Two months, three? Kate Corey only remembers the images of the bombing. Fragments spinning through a crowd in slow motion. Shot for shot, unfocused, grainy images in black, yellow, and red, as if painted onto cornflakes. They were shown on TV again and again, subtitled by the medal count. In those days of absolute loneliness, when Kate felt so empty that she couldn’t sleep, she saw nothing but those images. Again and again. She wanted to understand them, wanted to understand the origins of hatred, the stupidest of all feelings. How are they wired, the worst minds in the country? Five minutes and two gallons of spilled ice cubes later, the two boys are still having trouble filling the bucket, so Kate kneels down beside them.

– This is how you do it. There, you see now?

They don’t speak English and are frightened by the woman’s appearance, so they decide to take the bucket and run. Perhaps it’s the smell of the half a bottle of red wine that frightens them. Had they known that their father wanted to use the ice the next morning to give the two late risers a particularly cold awakening, they would have done everything differently. Kate ices the wounds on her wrists and ankles. Donna had arranged for a car — a machine, more like — an old Ford. The glove compartment contained three bottles of dimenhydrinate caffeine pills. The street, a tenth of a second of sleep, a sharp left turn, a scare. She chews one two three pills until the taste is almost unbearable, flushes it out of her gums with mouthwash and chokes it all down. Driving on she has a first spell of vigilance — lightning fast, life-saving — thanks to the corrosive alcoholic taste of Listerine Cool Mint. The second spell of vigilance is the result of craziness and gentle hallucinations. Oh, to hit that holy spot between sedation and pain. Drive as far as you possibly can from Beetaville, just drive away from it all and hope that you can’t feel your feet. She knew that her bones were injured during the escape, but she didn’t know which ones, or how badly.

They didn’t have a key and didn’t manage to break the chains any other way. Donna looked at her.

– You sure?

– Yes.

– Chew on this.

– Wait.

– What?

– Give me another one.

– Okay.

He pulls, twists, tears the cuffs off her hands and feet. It takes a while, but it’s working. Good thing the lighting down here in the basement is so bad, Donna thinks, and then the first leg is free.

– You alright?

But that question is no longer part of the world.

– Brandy!

– Okay.

Kate has now been at the motel for three days, lying in bed and putting ice on her wounds. She doesn’t want to go to the doctor, or do anything really. She looks forward to not being in such agony, and to the possibility that her wrists and ankles might be deformed in some way, so that she can keep a few souvenirs from captivity and make everyone envious when she walks barefoot on the beach. And she’s looking forward to Donna, who has promised to follow her as soon as the case is finally solved.

– Not long now — one false move from Jeff Cello, and we’ll have him.

– Who’s him?

– The murderer.

– Oh?

If Kate had driven on for a few miles, she would be lying in the same sort of generic motel bed, but she would probably have working cable, in which case she’d have CNN on non-stop. That is and always was the only thing on TV that interests her. The news. How humans act, how humans become inhuman as soon as they notice they’re on camera. Other than that, television’s useless; it has limitations in all directions. On CNN, she would have seen the young Emily Hay sewn into the higher strata of the wire fence, behind the catcher’s box on the High & Low High School’s baseball field. She would have known that Donna wasn’t going to follow her, not for a long time, not for as long as it took to solve this case. She swallows a handful of Dramamine and lies there.

– How did you know I’d be here?

– My buddy told me.

– What kind of —

– You have to run away and never come back. Do you understand?

– Why?

– That’s the condition.

– And who decides that? Your buddy?

– Trust me, Kate, you don’t know him. He owes me. It’s not simple. But trust me. If you can.

– Are you going to come too?

– I can’t. Not until we get him. One false move from Jeff Cello, and we’ll have him.

False moves include: tying a knot in a hemp rope. A two-tiered marline knot, say, in a robust piece of hemp rope, the kind that’s so rough that it chafes your palms. Making a snare and throwing the rope over a crossbeam in the attic, that’d be a false move too. Or putting a stool in place, the three-legged one from the bathroom, say, although three-legged stools are so hard to kick over. Or even setting up a shrine for Emily Hay, an altar with tea lights, and setting it alight.

Holly and Jeff haven’t seen each other in a while. They’ve each had concerns of their own. Holly has been working on her novel constantly. She locked herself in with a family barrel of Parrot’s liquor and a thicket of empty pages. Her clacking on the typewriter has become a single drawn-out sound, a roar, a vibrato, the noise of an explosion that won’t stop, the phonetic cross-section of Nixon’s Christmas bombers over Hanoi. The heat emitted by the way she writes turns her little room into a tropical biosphere — clouds almost start to form. We should imagine her naked. Every sentence of her novel Maybe starts with the word maybe. It’s the story of a young man named Opek Kamera, who notices one day that the sun is pulling away from the earth. That it is falling ever deeper into the universe, where there is neither north nor south, only depth and blur. But it’s the same old mistake: the sun isn’t moving away from the earth, the earth is moving away from the sun, leaving its orbit and racing in a hermeneutic circle ex negativo past the other planets. Past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, dragging the poor moon, sluggish with gravity, behind it like a tired mother dragging her youngest across the lawn on a Sunday evening. Until sometime, somewhere, the earth finds itself all alone in the universe, surrounded by nothing, without light from any stars, the last olive in the jar. Opek Kamera observes all this, or thinks that he does, and tries to convince his fellow humans that it’s happening, that it’s maybe happening. The earth’s descent into the void, into cold and darkness. But no one believes him — for hundreds of pages, no one believes him. Still he’s so certain; it would be obvious to anyone who looks up at the sky. But no one does. Eventually he meets a young girl who persuades him to stop looking up all the time. The earth isn’t leaving its orbit. Everything is as it always was, and the universe is still a reliable circle. It’s high time to turn one’s attention to more important matters (this part is meant as an overt criticism of the United States Space Program). The whole thing ends with a romantic trip to Lake Victoria, where Opek Kamera and the young girl let the sun shine on their sun umbrella. It is still as far away from everything as it was at the beginning of the novel. And maybe, she writes, driven by a fanatical love of paradox, an obsession of hers since Collin Dragsbaek fell off the silo, maybe it’s true, maybe we will live forever. And that’s how her novel ends, and it’s the end of her work, which she now desperately wants to show someone. And why not the person closest to her? But the book has estranged her from all forms of human life. She was miles away, committed to a real relationship with the solitude of writing, and now she sees nothing in Jeff Cello but a stranger, a stranger who gave her the surname Cello. Holly Cello is what it says on the cover page of her manuscript. She walks through the apartment in search of her husband. But she can’t find him anywhere, though she does find the folding steps to the attic unlatched.

– Jeff?

she calls,

– Jeff, I finished the manuscript.

She will find out in the attic just how wrong the last sentence of a book can be — asentence that should shine and sway with existential truth. For Jeff Cello most certainly won’t live forever, but only until a moment ago. The tea candles are still burning, some of them at least. Holly knows exactly what to do. She starts screaming and trembling, jumps up to his lifeless body, severs the rope in ecstatic shock, and falls to the floor with him, spreading the wax across the attic floor, and a few small fires. There’s too much going on for Holly to notice them. All she does is shriek the name of the person from whom she got her last name and pound on his chest to make him wake up. She bites his hand, bites into his neck and his face, to make him wake up. A favor he won’t do her. Suddenly she becomes aware of what she’s doing, sees herself from the outside, as if through the eyes of a predatory animal. She sees an emaciated thing, thin from pain, Parrot’s, and prose; lips, cheeks, and fingers smothered in blood; her husband’s skin between her teeth and gums; she sees the fire around her, the attic of her house in flames. Now she gets to decide if she should save dead Jeff Cello or Opek Kamera, the only living thing she has left.

Opek Kamera

1.

Four, maybe six police cars creep up a series of switchbacks. It’s snowing and the mountainside smells of diesel. Wipers stutter over icy windshields. Agent Donna would describe that sound as more of a squeaking noise. But if it must to be compared to a speech impediment, it would have to be one caused by deformed vocal chords, a mutation or hereditary illness. He peers out the window and somehow everything looks an ashy blue, the clouds, the snow, the conifers. Next to him on the back seat there’s a binder full of pictures of the crime scene, the corpse, the small yellow numbered demarcations on the frozen ground, one of them where the murder weapon should probably have been. The two officers in the front seats are humming a song, though he’s not sure if it’s made up or not. Donna wanted to go out for sushi. His partners both wanted chili — two against one, as usual — so he now has a faint sense of nausea between his heart and his appendix. The cars wind their way up the mountain. It’s gotten colder in the past two days. How much longer, Donna asks himself, how much longer will I be the stupidest of them all? For the time being forever — but soon, with the town metastasizing into a city, with an influx of new residents and the likely subsumption of the surrounding hamlets, with Beetaville becoming a blessed place, a place blessed by an atmosphere of inexplicable cruelty, people from everywhere in the country will want to live here. Then the stupidity rankings will have to be revised, and someone may well come along and take Donna’s place. Kate rarely gets in touch. It’s been two long years since they were close; he’s sure that she’s given up hope that they’ll find their way back to each other. Kate doesn’t want to return to Beetaville and Donna gets that, but Donna can’t leave, not as long as he’s driving around with photos of dead children on the seat next to him, children who may well be dead because he’s so stupid. But he had imagined something quite beautiful. Again and again, he has gone over the scenarios. Him and her. Standing on a roof together looking out over random buildings. Or sitting by the water. The water is warm and the night is too, and, sure, they have their scars here and there, but who doesn’t? Besides, there are days when you don’t feel them at all. They are adults. They appreciate what they have, even if it no longer has the magic it once did, even if there are no fundamentally new feelings to discover, even if love has become ordinary. But what happened was colder. The new year came and went and, after Emily’s death, Beetaville fell asleep. They called each other every once in a while, but Kate found it hard to talk at night and Donna couldn’t find the space to think during the day. Kate’s condition got worse. She started to suffer from addictions. An addiction to mouthwash and uppers and downers, a craving for silence and infinitely long, infinitely empty conversations with Donna, whom she lovingly called my negro when she was awake. Or conscious. By springtime, the pressure was too much. He tried to explain to her that she had to fight her addictions, that she had to do it by herself. And so the promise that had taken root in the two of them one night — that they had each found their final partner for the time being — had withered. What remains are the letters that Kate sends out every anniversary month. Letters that don’t say anything, but instead contain photographs of her body parts. A leg, sometimes, or a breast — rarely close-ups of her face. As if she were trying to show him how her body is aging without him, how useless it’s becoming with nobody to kiss it. How it’s dissolving into its constituent parts, disconnected layers of skin. That’s what happens when new wrinkles aren’t welcomed by a tongue or middle finger. The sight of these body parts — which seem creepy to him, like ads for a slaughterhouse, or photos of a crime scene — reminds him how much he misses his family. Or any family. He used to have one. A wife in a flimsy house in Bushwick. A place where you make friends with the burrito vendor, where you see girls with braids riding their BMXs down the street, shooting at traitors with imaginary machine guns, a place where you take your son to the basketball court until late at night and expect to see a better shot with every Miller High Life, until you need every three-pointer to swoosh through the net. Until you throw the ball at his chest with all your might. Maybe your son breaks his pinkie, having flicked it up for protection. By the next morning, this all seems a lot more harmless than it really was. Still, it’s all about his son. Only about his son.

2.

Miles — who graduated near the top of his class and framed his high-school diploma so he’d have a weapon at hand in the event of a barfight — stares into the elderly woman’s gray eyes. His job as a barkeeper at the Bankrupt Circus Bar on Highway 75 by Tifton, Georgia, doesn’t say much about him or his current state of mind, but it has improved his liquor tolerance. If someone asks him what else he’s up to these days, he usually slides a shot glass across the table:

– Sometimes, when I’m really drunk, I give an honest and truthful answer to that question. You see, sometimes when I’m drunk, I let people get close to me, as close as possible, and I want to be friends with every guy and married to every girl. The stones just fall away, and what you see, what remains — that’s me. The pure and true me, which knows no language, no gestures or mimicry or mysticism, which doesn’t have a shell or a shape — the sacred being we’ve been searching for in years of aimless wandering.

This ends, in pretty much all cases, with someone other than Miles needing to be carried out of the room. Most patrons of the Bankrupt Circus Bar are passing through, or have just rented a motel room a few miles away — people who want hard liquor and mixed drinks. The Bankrupt Circus Bar turns all its profits from hard liquor, vodka sodas, and whisky gingers. It makes money, but not with beer and nachos. Beer and nachos are sold at cost; it’s essential to maintain a certain level of human decency. The project to improve the world is far from abandoned, and it starts with every single person. It starts again every small morning, to be precise. The room is wood-paneled and the décor is welcoming and boozy. There’s a dense fog of decorations, old Jugendstil advertising posters, dartboards, postcards, and yellowed newspaper clippings. Above all, a local artist’s work stands out; he focuses on two-dimensional reproductions of amphetamine-derivative compounds, whose structural beauty he pays homage to in neon lights and brass. Miles doesn’t get it, but he doesn’t have to, nor does he have to justify it. The gray eyes return his stare.

– What did you just say?

– That they’re still not sure whether Jeff Cello died in the fire or not. That they’re still not sure he was the murderer. That they’re still not sure if the fencecutioner’s killing spree is over or not.

– No, I mean before that.

– What?

– Who you know all this from.

– The chief investigator, a friend of mine. Donna Jones.

Miles decides that he should seduce the woman sitting so alone with her vodka soda.

– Quiet night, huh?

– Not quieter than usual. Actually yes, it is quieter than usual.

– Is it normally pretty busy?

– Sometimes. Games on the big screen on the weekend. Nachos?

– Thanks.

– Do you know

– Wait.

– What is it?

– I’m fine on my own. You don’t have to talk to me; I’m not looking for something to do. If I want something, I’ll tell you. And that’s that. Also, yeah, don’t let me stop you if you want to read a book or flick through a magazine. Also, if you feel like stepping outside and taking pot shots at the horde of horses on the horizon — go for it.

– You know what, ma’am? You and me, we’re gonna get drunk now.

And so they do, and they talk about their lives, about why they’re lonely, why they don’t have jobs and never will, why salty popcorn is better. If other patrons come in, they simply ignore them until they disappear. Kate talks about her daughter, what a talented journalist she is, that it’s been a couple of years since she last saw her. She’s sure that she will find her way, though, that she will move on from the bad deeds of her youth, and find a clear style in which to report the true state of things. Miles listens to her and smiles or lights a cigarette. Kate walks back and forth along the bar to show off her crippled foot, and it seems like she really is happy right now, liberated in some way. As if she were floating. This woman who looks as if she were cobbled together from old lumber and even older nails, that dress that she’s wearing, that she’s even wearing a dress — everything is irrelevant now. She floats. She talks about the murders, squaring her information with TV and newspaper reports, offering Miles an insight into that dreadful time two years ago. Eventually, they get to talking about Donna. Miles doesn’t let on. Alcohol lends him a splendid indifference. When the two of them leave the bar, closing the door behind them, they walk arm-in-arm.

– You don’t need to, just because you may think, and we’ve also had plenty —

– I know what I should and shouldn’t do, ma’am.

This was the kind of mood where you don’t kiss, where you know that you’ll soon be naked and might use your tongue, but that it doesn’t have to lead anywhere, no build-up or arc of suspense. No tension. A drunk and entirely sober assessment and decision. At this point, Miles is pretty sure that the woman he’s propping up has almost definitely slept with his father; he could tell from the way she said,

– Donna Jones, a friend.

And so he takes her home. The sex is hard and long. Now and again, Kate even wants to slap her penetrator in the face, but she restrains herself. With age comes diffidence. She falls asleep at once. She didn’t notice any resemblance — to whom? — it’s all so long ago, and there’s a vast gap between now and the time in Beetaville, years of driving around without a destination, a time distorted and drawn out by antihistamines. Miles gets up, he finds it far too humid to sleep, so he just stands there in middle of the room. He wonders whether he should brush his teeth but then decides on a cigarette instead. He drags the match across the rough side of the box, the head ignites, crackles, sparkles, slowly explodes. Miles smokes contemplatively. He observes the blue streaks in the moonlight, how the smoke mixes with the air and crowds out the smell of sweat and sex, how it overwhelms all other sensations. Stamping out the butt on the carpet, for a short moment he wonders whether he should stamp out Kate the same way, obliterate the last little bit of fire left in her. He’s standing there, just standing there, wondering whether that would be a friendly or redemptive gesture, as he gazes at that fleshy body, lying there in all its abjection between delirium and sleep.

3.

Miles gets his backpack and leaves. He pays a visit to the cash register of the Bankrupt Circus Bar near the highway, commits one or two other, smaller offenses, and leaves. He writes a note to his mother, which he assumes she will ignore. He starts to wander through the night, along the streets, his destination New England, straight up the coast, always north. At every new latitude he pulls on another sweater, as it’s become a cold country. He hitches rides with truck drivers or traveling salesmen; sometimes he sleeps in a motel, or not at all, or on the backseat of a family car, where a small and terrified white girl tries to make sure no parts of their bodies touch. She stares at her coloring book. Mom said it would be fine to take the stranger along for a few miles. New York isn’t so much a place where people live as it is a cemetery. Driving by, he sees Queens and its millions of tombstones, which snake over the land like braids, making the fields untillable, and blacking out Manhattan. The East River runs between the two boroughs like the Styx — separating the poor from the rich and the living from the dead. That, at least, is how Miles imagines it. But he has the locations of the dead and the living mixed up; he’s wrong about which side is which, and draws a quick, mistaken conclusion from the sight of the river. Aside from a few things to keep him warm — socks, a rain jacket, and duct tape — he isn’t carrying much luggage. A small book for keeping notes, addresses, and technical observations. Two pens, two knives, a dynamo flashlight, and a book. Like other people who go into the wilderness to find the time to read Walden, who warm their escapist hearts again and again over Thoreau’s wooden hut, Miles has Opek Kamera by Holly Cello in his jacket pocket. It’s hard to say how often he’s already read it. Every day he opens it on a random page and reads for a few hours or minutes. It’s not clear whether or not he’s read the whole book. It’s possible, indeed, if chance so decided, that he has never seen the first page. Fragments of the book thread their way into his daily routine. Sentences repeat themselves, pictures resonate again, everywhere, between two houses, in the wing mirror of a Cadillac or in the huge black eyes of a cow. More and more, Opek’s thoughts become his own. Every morning he stares into the sky, into the glare of the sun, making sure that everything’s as it should be. At first, he only had a few passages memorized; now he knows entire chapters off by heart. He prays himself to sleep with Opek’s surahs. On the highway to Maine, a loud and unmelodic group of Canadian-Irish folks give him a lift, some oversized sons-of-bitches.

– You’ve got to be smart, and mean, senseless and sweet; love has to leak from your skull. You’ve got to be nice and phony, deceitful and kind, a repellent and a sponge: imitating life, filling the cracks that God left, touching everything that the Almighty has forgotten in his path.

Together they rob a vegetarian fast-food chain, and they also steal a woman’s child right out of its stroller.

– I’ve wanted to be a father since my old man beat me up for the first time.

– And what are we going to do with this little one?

– Is it a boy or a girl?

– His name should be Gin.

– It’s a girl.

– Then she should be called Gin.

– Gin MacAdler.

– That’s a good name.

– I think it’s a good name, too.

– Tell me,

Miles says, with little Gin in his arms, screaming and entirely inconsolable,

– you said you were Canadian-Irish, but why not Irish-Canadians?

– That’s a matter of emphasis: which of the two you want to emphasize, which one you make the postman and which the address, which one you make the tree trunk and which the branch.

– Also, we’re neither Canadian nor Irish.

Well, well, Miles thinks, well, well. And the closer they get to Beetaville, the more nervous his travel companions get. Not far from their destination, Gin vomits ferociously.

– We can’t keep driving, Miles. You’re a good guy, but we can’t keep driving. That would be irresponsible toward the child.

–  Beetaville’s for corpses, not for us.

– I get it, boys. Thanks for the lift.

– No problem.

– If you ever need help, just pour a little maple syrup into a glass of Jameson, and we’ll come and save you.

– Alright, thanks.

He walks the remainder of the route. On the way, he meets other pilgrims, all of whom have opinions and arguments, who know everything about the murders, who know the area, its history and stories.

4.

Holly Cello sent the manuscript of her novel to the prestigious Bierkampf publishing house in Chicago, and, four days later, an envelope arrived with a contract and a letter full of praise. The only thing that had to be changed, according to the contract, was the title. Maybe was unacceptable, perhaps one should just name the novel after its protagonist. Holly had no objections. And so, roughly six months after Jeff Cello took his own life, Opek Kamera was published with a conservative print run of 15,000 copies. As soon as her work was over, Holly wanted no part in it. She has started writing something else and hates all forms of media attention. She gives no interviews and answers no letters, not even the letters of esteemed writers, and she soon gets a reputation for being difficult. Moreover, there are no published pictures of her and no one knows where she lives. Maybe Boston, some say. That would explain her landscape descriptions. In Beetaville, only a select few read contemporary literature, and they move in circles that Holly has never encountered, which allows these same few to speculate about the possible places this wondrous writer calls home — not knowing that they often beat her to the last bottle of imported sparkling wine at the liquor store. It’s not that Holly wants to hide her identity or make a secret of it; she’s just not interested in herself and so she can’t make sense of other people’s interest. The paperback soon follows suit, as well as a second and third printing of Opek Kamera — or Opus Kamera, as some people mispronounce it. Translations are published worldwide, as well as a comic-book version that’s as thick as a telephone book. A studio in LA tries to buy the film rights, but the publisher negotiates badly, so the studio in LA instead buys the rights to the comic that’s as thick as a telephone book. The critics praise her to the heavens at first, but then take back some of their hyperbole and revise the verdict slightly. But it’s too late: Holly Cello has become an icon of American counterculture, which is partly due to her writing, and partly due to the fact that people know so little about her. Europeans hate her. When Donna asks her whether Jeff was in the house when it burnt down, she doesn’t say a word. She has stopped talking altogether. After all, talking just represents her eternal self. It’s the same with her appearance, which she also finds abhorrent. She wears long rain jackets and pulls the hood down over her face. She decided to let her husband’s body burn in the attic; there’s nothing more to say. What is there to say, anyway? We are cruel animals and there are scraps of meat around the watering hole. This isn’t enough for Donna, so he hands her pen and paper, asks again. She writes: He wasn’t in the house. Or maybe he was. What do I know. And there it is, the lie, the fons et origo of her writing — and all writing, broadly speaking — the one place that this wondrous writer could truly call home. It makes her happy and expands her horizons; it’s freedom to her, the wind under her wings. Inventing and manipulating. Rendering reality illegible. The clandestine removal of bits of the world from the world until only the outline is left. Then people can die in wars or civil wars or natural disasters and it won’t matter; because when people have been transformed into their own outlines, only the outlines are damaged, and nothing matters less than that. Her assumption is that if she keeps writing for long enough, the world will turn around. That won’t necessarily save anything, but at least that tedious game players play without knowing that they’re players will be over. That would be good for everyone, at least for their own pathological moral attitudes. Really, she just didn’t want her deceased husband to be excised from Beetaville’s family tree for killing himself. And as long as that isn’t written anywhere, not in a newspaper, not in a police file, not on a Post-it, it isn’t true. And with the lie, insofar as it is not the most perfect lie, comes speculation. Speculation about whether Jeff is the murderer or if he has skipped town, and what exactly happened in the house that burnt to embers under such murky circumstances. But with no further murders occurring in the immediate aftermath, people just assume that Jeff did it, and also that he’s either gone or dead. And, soon, enough time passes without an adolescent being stitched to a fence for everyone to believe that they are safe and secure again. Sure, now and then, people still die in Beetaville — in fact, the homicide rate has increased sharply in the two peaceful years since Emily’s death — but these feature much blander methods of murder and are solved quickly by Donna and his taskforce, who are now firmly anchored in the city. The people are happy. If no one else dies by the end of the year, then the coast is clear. For sure. In the spirit of moving on, they name the church the Emily Church, the stadium the Benjamin Stadium and the diner the Chesley Diner. They have paid their dues — and it feels pretty good.

5.

Miles finds the dog strung up at the city entrance a bit tasteless. He sneaks through the streets. The wind and rain make his bones go soft; the black of his clothes has faded to brown and gray. His shoes are worn out, their floppy tongues drag on the asphalt. No stores in sight, no newspaper stands, no bar or nursery. Only steps leading underground, down to the mall.

– We’ll see how long you can stay above ground,

they sneer at him,

– And how long you’ll have the strength in your arms to pull yourself up again.

Time will tell. A bed seems pretty important at the moment. He goes to the diner and orders a double Chesleyburger, five beers, and a pot of coffee. And this is how he builds himself a lair, by filling his belly. The service is leery of him. In part because he stinks, guzzles, and spills. Burger, beer, a chaser of hot coffee, two three hot fries like a sword-swallower, then back to burger and beer. A small landscape emerges on the table before him a ramshackle plain — a moor, perhaps — of leftovers, saliva, brown and light-brown fluids. A patch of ketchup. A toothpick would be good, so he asks the waiter, who is thin as a toothpick; a waiter-in-waiting, he thinks to himself and likes the phrase. Bobby is printed on the nametag on his chest. Is that thing above it supposed to be a face?

– Bobby. Bobby, hey!

The waiter ritually responds to his name, which is, after all, what he gets paid to do.

– Tell me, Bobby, what will you do if I don’t want to pay up?

– Then we’ll put it on your tab.

– Aha.

– And what if I throw these beer bottles, say, into the apple pie display?

– Then we would write that on your tab. The display, as well as the beer and apple pies.

– I see. And what if I then slash open your stupid face with the shards?

– Then I would notify the police.

– Agent Jones?

– Well, no, not him.

– Alright. Got it. But what if, for instance, I were to take one of these theoretical shards and turn the vein in your wrist into two veins, the way you can turn an earthworm into two earthworms? I should mention that there’s one difference, which is that there’s no crazy duplication process going on, as it’s a simple process of done-and-over-with. Would Agent Jones receive a call in that case?

– Yes.

– Oh, great! Thanks for the info, Bobby.

– But you could also just ask me to call Agent Jones and see if he’ll drop by for a coffee. If you really want to talk to him, I mean. Because he doesn’t really sleep, and his duties, well, I’m sure he has some, but for you he’d surely make an exception.

– You would do that? Make a phone call? For a stranger?

– But Miles,

Bobby says with a straight face. And he plays his card very calmly, and it’s an amazing thing that he plays it so calmly, it’s immensely satisfying that he’s able to stay calm in this kind of situation, to offer no insight, to give away exactly nothing to the other person. There’s no better feeling.

– Miles,

he says,

– but you’re no stranger here. Your father talks about you all the time. Whenever his attention slips, he mumbles your name. Says you should just come here already. The first thing he does every morning is check whether you’re finally here or not. So the story can continue. And now you’re here, and you’re so, you’re so good-looking, you’re also so good-looking on top of it all. You’re the first good-looking person I’ve personally met. Only ugly people live here, you know, but now you’re here and —

Bobby loses his composure. He breaks out in tears, throws his arms around Miles, overwhelming him. Miles is used to people responding less enthusiastically to his threats, and so looks quite befuddled. It’s true, though, he hadn’t noticed — everyone around him is ugly. Not terribly ugly, not ugly like the night or gas stations, not vomit-inducing, but still remarkably ugly.

– My father mentioned me?

– That’ll be 32 dollars, by the way.

– Including tip?

– Excluding tip.

– Make it 38.

– Thanks.

– Donna — Agent Jones, rather, I’m not sure which you prefer — should be showing up any moment now. Why don’t you just smoke another cigarette or see what’s in the local paper. You don’t seem to be good at waiting.

Miles thinks the newspaper sucks. Like almost all newspapers, it only provides information about the oh-so-awful events of the day or reports about a local beaver. On the second-to-last page, however, the page before the meteorological trivialities and the local movie listings, which are of course the pinnacle of frustration, he reads something quite unexpected and fantastic. The Good News. A page full of happy anecdotes of daily life and regional tidbits, with a caricature, a recipe, and furnishing tips that are leaps and bounds beyond the usual interior design harassment.

–  Hey, Bobby, Bobby, c’mere. Have you read this? What it says about wood and paint?

– No, what is it?

– It says here that if you want to give real wood a real colorful paintjob, it’s best to first stick your fingers in a blender.

– You think that’s funny?

– Not funny, no, yes. But tell me, now that we’ve gotten a bit closer —

Bobby’s pupils dilate.

– What kinds of things did my father say?

– Miles?

The bell above the glass door rings softly, swings forward and back, the clapper going in the opposite direction, a dull smack against the brass.

– Miles, is it really you?

Donna ran over. He’s breathing heavily. His short hair has grayed in patches. One can hardly tell the difference between the scars on his head and the signs of aging. He really looks like a man of 45, which confuses his son; the last time he saw him, he was still young and mean. His felt jacket hangs down to the backs of his knees, beneath it a red knit sweater that has a frayed collar. His jeans are black, his shoes made of hard leather. He has practically no shoulders left.

– I’ll leave you two alone then,

says Bobby and hides behind a houseplant.

– My son.

says Donna.

– Dad.

6.

It’s been years since Miles saw someone this pathetic. No, he has never seen anyone this pathetic. Not once in his whole life has he laid eyes on anything quite so pathetic. That sweater! A red sweater — who would even wear that? Seriously. And frayed! It’s too much to bear. Much too much. Donna doesn’t know why his son is almost exploding with laughter, but he smiles along in solidarity. He finds it a bit unpleasant at first, but after a while, honestly, he also starts to giggle. Grinning, he joins his son at the table. From up close he looks even more pathetic. His face, that face, it’s incredible. Yellow and full of indentations like a junkie’s mattress. Or the wall of a public toilet. Or the filter of a smoked cigarette. Or a condom. An ancient condom forgotten under a bed. The sponge in the communal shower of a women’s shelter. Stop. This has to stop. He has to get a grip. Such a pathetic figure — it’s amazing. Miles can’t take it. He doesn’t see that the city is already doing the same to him, flushing everything that is fresh and lively out of his body. Stealing his symmetry.

– I was afraid you might be mad at me. Because I never reached out, and because I tried to force you to do what I never could.

Miles’s anger at his father never left him. And now he’s sitting across from him, face to face, he’s finally got the chance to spit up the bile he’s been saving up for as long as he can remember, to deliver that hate-filled monologue he’s so often practiced in the shower. Instead, he says,

– Oh, c’mon. Not at all. I’m not mad at you.

And he’s still giggling a little bit, but when he realizes what he just said, his expression freezes. He would have preferred to tell his father that he would stick a screwdriver into his neck as soon as he got the chance. But he can’t. It’s beyond him to tell his father why he’s really here and that he wants to fight and destroy him. To put him in his place. But all that comes out of his mouth is a friendly

– Nice to see you,

which contradicts everything he’s thinking. He wants to show his dad the sky, to let him know that the world is drifting away from the sun, that they will be frozen in a block of ice, that life among the cannibals will be full of pain and without mercy. But there’s no point unless he can get him to look up. Sure, he could try again tomorrow — tell him what’s what, talk to him, challenge him. Donna asks if he’ll join him for a rum, as if that were the only drink that could accommodate both father and son.

– I’m so very sorry, my dearest —

– Yes, Father?

– But the only bar still serving rum is the Bar Scene From Star Wars Bar. So please don’t think that I’m interested in bare-breasted women, because I’m not — this is about rum.

And so they sit there in the red light, among electric candles, decade-old pop songs, pretzel sticks, and ash, and the way everything is reflected off the smooth plastic bar counter makes Miles’s tear ducts feel stuffy. And the only thing counteracting that feeling is the liquor. Here is where Beetaville’s repellent character is most apparent. The girl and boy dancers, who are really young, really terribly young things, are tremendously ugly. Their breasts, their hair, the transition from their hips to their legs, their bellies, and their dicks — they all look like insects. And the air. In- and exhaled thousands of times. Even the air outside, even the night air. It feels like the inside of your mouth and your hands and all your sensory organs are covered in plastic wrap. There is always something thin and icky between your body and the outside world. Even the glasses of rum that Donna and Miles down in silence produce little more than a dull rasping sensation. Meanwhile, they occasionally glance at each other, waiting for the other to get drunk enough for the conversation to loosen up. Or for someone to fall off their stool. Or for a patron to act out of line, compelling a heroic intervention. Which could, say, lead to Miles befriending the nine-fingered stripper. They could get to know each other, exchange names and addresses.

– Miranda,

she would say, in a voice that’s all dirt and booze. Miles would visit her in the changing room and see a black eye under her make-up; she would be naked — almost, wearing nothing but panties — but she wouldn’t think it mattered, wouldn’t even notice the absence of clothing. She would smoke, taking quick drags, and her cheekbones would jut out like cliffs. Miles would make a botanical joke about her black eye. Miranda wouldn’t laugh, but she would appreciate the attempt. Miles would ask her why she has only nine fingers.

– An homage.

And though she’s so icy on the outside, he would get through to her. Together they would look into the small mirror encircled by light bulbs, and eventually Miranda would smile. Only then would she realize that she was naked, and she’dblush, feel ashamed, feel ashamed for the first time in years, and she would enjoy the feeling. She would put something on, and Miles would ask her to go out with him for a meal.

– But where to? There’s only the diner.

Naturally, he would buy her flowers, and naturally they would be black-eyed Susans, and naturally they would fall in love and leave town together. And, in time, they would become good people. But the guests have learned their manners and no one gets grabby, so Miles and his father continue to sit there, unheroically, and drink as the bartender looks on with pity.

– Another one, Agent Jones?

– It’s enough.

They gather their belongings. Both of them are physically and mentally so unfazed by the booze that they scare themselves. At least now I know who I got that from. They order a cab to L’Otel Chacal, where Donna has now been living for quite some time. His room is small and the wallpaper is slowly peeling off the walls, revealing a composite of plywood and concrete, brown, green, and dark. Donna prepares the sofa; his son gets the bed. Miles takes a look in the fridge. Miller and milk, a gallon of orange juice, avocado, mustard.

– Got any bread?

– There’s toast under the sink.

– Thanks.

– Would it bother you if I read for a bit?

– No problem. What are you reading?

– You wouldn’t know it. This book by this author you wouldn’t know.

– Probably not, no.

– Well, probably doesn’t matter then.

– Beetaville has a pretty successful author of its own.

– I see.

– Yes.

– Congratulations.

For a while nobody says anything, then Donna goes off to shower. They brush their teeth, lie down to sleep. Donna switches off the light.

– Miles. What do you think? Will the Bulls do it again? They have an unbelievable squad. An extraordinary team. Harper, Kerr, Pippen. An extraordinary team.

Miles pretends to sleep, and runs through the most precise and hurtful sentences he could throw at his father. That gall again: so typical of his father not to mention Michael Jordan in that lineup; like he had nothing to do with it. And Dennis Rodman, what about him? Is Donna too proper to say his name? How he hates his dad for being such a coward, for being a coward in every conceivable situation, never standing up for anything. Not even his own opinions. Always taking a detour. Always making himself unassailable. Always hiding. Miles’s thoughts grow smaller, darker, and mutate into feverish fractals that soon flood every level of his alertness. Donna lies across from him, awake.

7.

The next morning, Miles begins to settle in. But in response to every question that might make for a good day if answered correctly, he is told to try the Darkmart. That’s where one can eat breakfast, borrow books, and watch movies on the big screen. Even the most beautiful autumn leaves can be found at the Darkmart.

– Then I guess I’ll just go to the diner for some pancakes.

– You can do that, of course. But they don’t open until noon.

– And what time is it now?

– I’ve got to go. I’ve got to get to work. Here’s the key to the front door; this one’s for the bike lock.

– A bike? Who still rides a bike these days?

– It’s in the garage.

So Miles spends the morning pushing the pedals of a bike. Three gears, my ass — they’re all the same. He feels like he’s riding a millwheel. In the parking lot of an abandoned shopping mall, he practices cycling with no hands. The industrial park is a ruin. No one to be seen. It’s very cold, so when he falls down, his open wounds freeze shut again. But he doesn’t stop practicing, keeps letting go of the handlebars and stretching his arms into the sky or behind his back. And then he gets the hang of it and rides on. Look no hands. First he sings quietly, then louder and louder; he wants to make a racket is all. He doesn’t know what he’s singing, but it has to be loud. Sometimes he feels like he’s aging; sometimes he thinks that time is standing still; at other times, it’s like he’s growing younger every morning. His thighs ache and he can feel his body, every quart of blood, and how it fills him. He thinks about pancakes and blueberries. About maple syrup. Maple syrup and Jameson. He grins at the sky. The trees, the concrete, parking grids for hundreds of cars, dormant prisons, ten-foot high lampposts under the morning sky — the wind, the gold leaf, the good life. Those crazy Canadian-Irish. Pure hearts do exist. Maybe they’re sitting at a gas station in Montreal, drinking coffee, smoking, sneaking another sip of condensed milk into their paper cups. They would be grinning, too. Holding little Gin MacAdler, who got used to her new parents long ago, and to the wonderful love that is freely given. How they care for her! A busload of parents, just for her. Miles buys the latest issue of the New England Times and flips straight to The Good News. Every story is awesome. Like the report about the young student from Maine who didn’t strap her kid into the stroller. The great thing about that article is that it doesn’t conceal its scorn. Then a review of the fourth Chesley & the Holy Chain album. Graves & Lithographies doesn’t quite achieve the soaring heights of their second album, Church Music, but does somewhat alleviate the disappointment of the third. Their music has settled into a peculiar calm. Where their previous albums transferred the anger and pain directly to the instruments, and the lyrics described the horror explicitly, there are now empty spaces and placeholders, fig leaves that hint at the horror behind them. This becomes most explicit in the twenty-one minute sound collage Portrait d’une jeune fille sans bijoux, in which a meticulous description of a romantic painting from the 17th century is mixed with the full range of minor chords one could make with a harp. But underneath that, you don’t hear the racket of a buzz saw cutting bone, as one has come to expect from Chesley & the Holy Chain; no, below it, one hears the sound of a picture frame being manufactured. The Vita Diminutiva comic strip is also great. The protagonist, whose distinguishing features are glasses and a striped sweater, stands on a lawn and stares at the sky. He asks,

– God, if I have to die, will you die then, too?

And then there’s a speech bubble coming from the sky that says,

– No.

But the highlight of today’s issue is an article about a bachelor who has been a bachelor for 15 years and says his favorite dish is a fried egg, sunny-side-up. He has fried himself an egg every morning for 15 years, but hasn’t once managed to keep the yolk intact. His name and picture appears in print, but Miles forgets both instantly. Of course, he orders eggs, sunny-side-up, at the diner right away.

– Nah, make it three.

And as the yolk gums up in his mouth, spreading over his enamel, as the yolk runs through his teeth, down his gums, viscous as it is, as it turns his tongue into a numb slab of meat, as the yolk makes his mouth egalitarian, he thinks again about the ways in which he could humiliate his father. He sketches scenarios as he sits there and eats, sometimes chortling happily. The closer they get to each other — the more sincere his father-love becomes — the greater the drop, and the deeper the wounds. He wants to get to know the person responsible for The Good News. The newsroom is in a run-down house just outside town. At least it’s not down in those catacombs, Miles thinks to himself. He inquires at the reception about the person he’s looking for, whose name is denoted only by a pair of initials on the page.

– M.C.? That stands for Meggy Corey.

says the secretary and jabs a ballpoint pen into his hip to offset the revulsion summoned by that name.

– You need to go to the attic.

– Corey. I see, yes, well, then I’ll go ahead.

Corey. Hasn’t he seen that name before, somewhere? No matter. Everything in the newsroom looks just like he’s always imagined it. People in expensive suits and dresses sitting around on solid wood furniture, stroking themselves; wearing cards or feathers in their hats, brooches, hustle and bustle; they kiss each other’s genitalia every once in a while and consume imported goods.

– You’re a bunch of geckos!

He doesn’t dare say it, but he dares think it. There are a lot of things he dares to think.

8.

Miles knocks on the attic door and a short, fat woman — maybe more of a girl, he’s not sure — opens up.

– What do you want from me?

– I, uh, so.

– I asked you what you want.

She starts to shake him.

– What do you want!

– Help!

Miles is confused. He’s in shock.

– So, what is it? Are you here to make fun of me? Are you from the union?

– No, no, I. So, no, I’m not. I just came here, because, so, someone said, um.

– My God, pull yourself together, will you?

– I was told that you’re responsible for The Good News.

– I am, yes.

– Well —

– C’mon, then. Crack your joke and get out. I’m sick of it.

– What huh, no, I just wanted to let you know how much respect I have for you.

– You what?

– I deeply respect you. Because, you know, I’ve had a rough 22 hours, and if it wasn’t for your work, who knows what would have happened to me. The Good News lifted my spirits and gave me power; The Good News was like a sister to me.

– Meggy Corey. My pleasure.

– Miles Jones.

– Jones, as in Donna Jones?

– Exactly.

– But you’re not the Miles — Miles Jones, I mean?

– I am. And, while we’re at it, how come everyone knows me around here and I don’t know anyone?

– Because Donna occupies an important position in Beetaville and it’s good to know more about people in important positions, particularly if you don’t trust them. Life has changed around here in the past four years, you know. The city has changed and that’s why we need Donna. He’s something like a second mayor or sheriff. He protects the people, or at least they think he protects them. I’m not entirely convinced.

– What do you mean?

– Well, Agent Jones has gained power, and power, without exception, makes people suck.

– Okay. True.

– Furthermore, we apparently live in a world where actions have consequences, but Donna doesn’t face the consequences of his actions. Which is why he won’t solve the murders. Sometimes it seems like he really thinks Jeff Cello did it. Do you know what I mean?

– Not in the slightest.

Meggy was hoping for the opposite response, but she still offers Miles a piece of chocolate.

– Chocolate?

– Sure, thanks. But how do you mean that? What you just said.

– You’ve heard about the murders, two years ago —

– Of course.

– I was young, so I saw myself as more of a detective, but instead of solving the case, well, it’s not so important, it had something to do with a skein and with mysticism, in any case I am well informed about the matter. And Mr Cello, he simply didn’t do it. What do you want, by the way? Do you live here now?

– Yeah, with my dad.

– With that pig, of all people!

– I’m starting to get the sense that you’ve got something against my father — specifically against my father, rather than against power in the abstract.

– Because, well, exactly, it so happens that he slept with my mother and that is the most appalling thing I can think of.

– Okay. I get it. Yeah, he’d be in my bad books then, too. That said, well, I would have been happy if he had slept with my mother more often.

She laughs.

– How long have you been working here?

– I started right after graduating high school.

His brain faintly recalls a woman named Kate, a pair of gray eyes that once told him about a daughter who works for a newspaper. Miles notes that not asking people for their surnames is one of his redeeming habits. Or what was she called again?

– So, what do you want to do?

– I want to stick around until I’ve seriously injured my father, or until he succumbs to melancholy because of me.

– If you need help with your plan, say the word. Besides, we should drop the formalities and be pals.

This suggestion makes Miles sad; he loves all the shimmering constructions of politeness, but it would be impolite to decline.

– Gladly.

– Why don’t you just come and visit me every day from now on.

– Will do.

– Or if you ever need a couch — ?

And Miles likes the way the light falls into the attic and lets you see the grains of dust floating around aimlessly. Meggy likes it, too.

9.

And that same light is shining into Donna’s eyes, annoying him. He’s standing in front of a life-size replica of Bill Cosby — a doll with empty eyes, stiff limbs and a far-too-colorful cardigan. It has been carefully sewn to a fence. Its neck has been broken. It stares back at Donna and his colleagues, grinning. The grin has been painted on its face. It’s as if they can hear Bill Cosby’s voice, that exceptional voice that can bounce off every syllable. Soon, my dearests. And then his hearty laugh, which silences all the city’s inhabitants. It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened; that someone has sewn an homage into a fence. In memory of the hard times. Always on Halloween, but that’s no surprise. It’s not the first time people who have earned their right to a drunken night have gone out and emulated the fencecutioner with a mixture of fear and reverence. But something is different about this copycat. The Bill Cosby connection was never public knowledge. Which means that the person responsible for this mischief is either familiar with the case — the three boys that found Benjamin come to mind — or, on the other hand. Well. Or the fencecutioner himself is back in town, on the prowl for a new victim. They cordon off the extended area around the dummy and forage through the forest. But there’s nothing to be found. Nothing that offers any clues. Donna wants to shut down the high school. But the high school refuses to believe it’s in for more bad luck. Not again.

– There is no danger, no, there is none, no one is in danger. Really not.

– You idiots, you’re risking —

They’ve hung up on him. Donna feels like Martin Brody in Jaws, but doesn’t tell anyone about this feeling. He’s a bit ashamed of it. He always hoped that the moment would arrive when he could feel like Phillip Marlowe. Maybe because he wants to be like Humphrey Bogart, or at least like Robert Mitchum. This, by the way, is one of the many things he has in common with Meggy. Except that, in Meggy’s case, Mitchum would readily take first place. Then Bogart. Then Joan Crawford. And if it’s Mitchum, then obviously Reverend Harry Powell from The Night of the Hunter, armed with a switchblade and false sermons. Donna and Miles eat dinner at the diner again. Bobby tries to make eye contact.

– Considering you only arrived yesterday, you’ve sat at this table pretty often.

– And?

– I mean, do you like the food that much or —

– I like the food.

He ends on a glance that makes clear — I like the food, not your face. Madonna is playing on the radio. Some Madonna song, but anyway nothing but Madonna has been playing on the radio for decades. Madonna, who stands in front of a green screen and doesn’t age. She reflexively, almost mechanically — a blink — moves her hips. Behind her: big cities in time lapse. Points of light that turn to stripes or flags in a synthetic nuclear wind.

– Bobby, could you change the station?

– I’m sorry, but we only get one here. Also, I like the new album.

Donna asks his son why he laughed so much when he saw him yesterday. Miles answers that it was because he was so happy. And then he wishes he were not living but dead. His father smiles. He was afraid, really afraid, that his son might be mad at him. Now he can make up for everything. Now everything will be cleared up. His knife gets blunter with each cut on the porcelain. The sunchoke rissole gets smaller. Unwittingly, Donna has cut his food into little rhombuses, rhombuses that, if pieced together, would resemble a fence. Miles asks him if anything happened at work today, and Donna just wants to scream at him and tear his face apart, but soon realizes that he should take care his frustration himself, that that’s one of the things a good father does. He has resolved to become a good father. And for that reason, and this impresses him, this truly impresses him, he tells his son the truth. He recounts his day, how his colleagues always want to eat revolting crap, how he hates it, how he hates feeling like he has a mass grave full of political refugees in his stomach; how he felt seeing the Bill Cosby doll and the reminders of the slaughtered children. How he hasn’t been able to forget those images for such a long time, and now they’re back again. He talks about the shame he just can’t shake, how it darkens all his thoughts. He talks about Emily Hay’s burial, how they threatened him with a shovel. How they cursed him and threw soil at him. How he was beaten up with the urn, the taste of Emily Hay’s ashes in his mouth, how it burnt in his eyes. He tells his son about Nataly, the sister, and what her contempt felt like. He can’t forget the way she looked at him.

– They all looked so worn out. And maybe their lives would be better if some other guy had come to town instead of me. Maybe someone could have solved the case before that girl died.

Unwittingly, Donna is scrunching the tablecloth tight in his balled-up fist. His grip is so strong that it has its own small but swiftly intensifying gravitational force. His fist is so tightly clenched that it becomes a black hole and sucks everything up. It’s slow, at first. The coffee spoon, the saltshaker, the cup, the saucer. Donna’s plate has completely disappeared, along with the tablecloth, the ketchup bottle. The windowpane bulges inwards, starts to cave in, bursts into shards and is sucked into his fist, along with the counter, Bobby, the griddle, and the other guests. They all disappear into his fist. Miles tries to get away, holds onto the doorframe, half the diner torn away; Donna is crying and his tears and eyes implode, along with his face and skull, and his guts slither out of his torso into his fist. Miles yells at him, begs him to stop, but his father no longer exists. At the edges of the black hole, the city starts to lose its optical coherence. Miles loses his grip, and there’s nothing to hold onto, nothing left. Everything finally disappears. And Miles finds himself in a space beyond space or time. An angry ginger and a one-eyed girl are laughing at him and pointing a hundred fingers at him.

– Just let it be, Miles. Everything is fine as it is.

– What? Let what be?

– Don’t do it.

And already they’re gone. Miles tries to wash down the spicy potato wedges with a swig of beer. He chokes on it. He coughs. Takes another swig of beer and calms himself with coffee. Even if the itch hasn’t quite left his throat.

– I will help you with the case, Daddy. Because, well, I have the feeling I could help. And I don’t have anything else to do right now — well, not really. So I might as well help out, right?

– I don’t know. I don’t want to drag you into this.

– But you’re not doing too hot. I can see that. Let me help you.

– What is it that you want to do?

– That doesn’t matter. I just don’t want you to be sad.

– Miles? You, you would do that for me?

– Of course.

– Then tomorrow’s your first day on the job.

10.

Today is Miles’s first day at work. He introduces himself to his colleagues. Some of them have even seen him around L’Otel Chacal.

– First, we took over just two floors — now it’s the entire hotel.

All that means is that the investigators have now rented the ground floor as well. The owner is still there. He looks after his guests, changes the bedding every Sunday afternoon and prepares breakfast in the morning. Sometimes he also spends hours behind the hotel bar listening to the agents’ woes; they are frustrated, obviously, lonely, of course, getting old slowly, and underpaid, and that’s not the half of it.

– You know, Finley,

All their sentences start that way, and the later the night gets, the more Fin it gets and the less ley.

– It isn’t easy.

The agents like to pretend that Finley is a British hotel owner, but he comes from the Midwest, as does the whole middling rest. No one comes from the best west or the worst west. Those types are elsewhere. They are in jail or at the carnival or in church.

– You know, Finley, I like you, I really like you, but next Sunday, could you drop by a little later to change the sheets? I need to catch up on some sleep. I desperately need to sleep in. I’m such a light sleeper, such a light and thin sleeper, my sleep is anorexic, Finley, and every time you drop in, and how late is that, I mean, when do you come to the room? Maybe it’s nine o’clock, or ten, at the latest. Damn, that’s too early. Finley. Please come by, at the earliest, at the very earliest at 11 — that would be nice. That would be so nice. Don’t you think, Finley?

– Amen to that.

Amen to everything a drunk person with a drawn handgun asks you. Miles loves having colleagues. In his mind, he already calls them his buddies and imagines celebrating his 20th birthday in the mineshaft. He can see the champagne flowing over coals and down throats in the light of the gas lamp. Everyone has respiratory problems, black lungs, revolver hands, and bare chests. Dirt and muscles everywhere, so much dirt and muscle that one can hardly distinguish between the sexes. And they cough, toast each other in the ribs, and lay into stone walls with heavy machinery. And this creates a rhythm — a beat and a spark.

– Colleagues, buddies, you took me in as one of your own.

– Cheers to that!

– Yessir!

– Long live Miles!

– To twenty!

– Warmth, closeness, and love!

– To him never being lonely again!

– To Miles finally not being so goddamn lonely!

– Let’s drink to that!

Slipping out of his daydream, he realizes that he works for his father; he has moved to Beetaville and now works for his father. It is the year of failure. It is the year of accepting defeat. He will never be honest. He will close his mind for ever. He will adopt other people’s thoughts and cloak them in opinions. Everything is false and will stay that way. It is the year of the easy lie. The end of doing nothing.

11.

– When did aptitude become more important than attitude?

– That was around the same time formulation became a synonym of form and more important than plot,

Meggy volleys back, holding the latest issue of the New England Times in her hands. He visits her during lunch break. They eat together.

– So you work for your dad — like that’s the worst thing in the world. You’re acting like he scalped your mother and enslaved your sister. If you still want to avenge yourself, though, my offer stands. We can do an investigative piece on him. I see a special edition. What’s gone wrong with the investigation, how they’re throwing our tax money out the window — informants asleep at the wheel, perverted medical examiners — the whole nine yards.

– Okay, okay.

While Meggy says this, and while Miles imagines what exactly perverted medical examiners get up to, she runs the back of her middle finger down his forearm, almost undetectably.

– Prostitutes would be good.

– What?

He folds his arms.

– Prostitutes?

– If they were spending our tax money on prostitutes, that would be good, too.

– We went to a strip club once, Donna and I.

– Like this?

Meggy unbuttons her blouse and shows Miles her breasts.

– Yeah, kind of like that.

– So, I wanted to ask if you’d like to sleep with me.

– No.

Then, a moment of silence. But it isn’t awkward. On the contrary. Miles is happy to be desired, and Meggy is happy that Miles is being honest. She’ll just pay someone to sleep with her, then, which is also nice. And so the erotic question has been resolved and they can now be great friends. Nonetheless, Miles kisses her on the cheek when he leaves. Out of respect for her lust.

12.

Meggy orders an exotic rentboy to her house. For a small tip, he sleeps with her in the kitchen. The tiles may be cold, but Meggy’s had underfloor heating installed. She starts off sprawled on the old wooden table, her legs spread; she’ll finish up later in missionary. He doesn’t come; he strokes her sweaty face, takes the envelope lying — as agreed — by the bowl of keys, hair clips, matches, and rubber bands, and leaves. Before he shuts the front door behind him, he says something to Meggy, but she doesn’t catch it.

– Bye, was lovely,

or

– Thanks,

or

– You’re welcome.

She lies there a bit longer. Not naked, just with her skirt hiked up and her blouse so far over her breasts that you can see her nipples. Did he take the condom with him? Or did he throw it away here? She rolls over to the fridge, eats two raw eggs, a granola bar, chocolate, and twists open a Sam Adams. She guides the bottle very carefully to the edge of her lips and slowly pours the beer into the open cavity. Sip by sip it seeps into her. A drop runs down her cheek, just past her ear, and onto the nape of her neck. The lamp on the ceiling is one her mother picked out. She’ll buy a new one tomorrow — or, better yet, an old one. An old beauty. She falls asleep. She dreams of an ice-cream cloud falling out of the sky, onto her belly and thighs. She starts to stuff her face with the cloud. And wakes up. Annoyed, she pulls her underpants back on, cleans up the kitchen, finds herself sentimental, and lugs herself down the hallway toward bed. She feels light-headed, bumps into the doorknob, and curses softly. Her gait is wide and clumsy; she stomps like an autistic bear. A thin strip of light falls into the hallway from her study. Did she forget to turn off the light? But, just as she wants to lift the beer bottle — which she’s dragging behind her as if she’s Christopher Robin and it’s Pooh Bear — and toss it at the bare light bulb, she is captivated by a scene that she hasn’t knowingly seen in ages, certainly not since childhood. She can’t explain why she’s noticing it now, but she notices it. She sees it for what it is. Hidden in plain sight. Over the years, the walls of her room have been transformed more and more into notepads; scattered around the sudden focus of her attention, there are hundreds of newspaper clippings, photos, and notes stapled to the wall. The material extends past the edge of the ceiling. Some key terms have been underlined or circled in various colors, linked together with pins and yarn; articles from The Hatred, the New England Times, and various national magazines and dailies. Everything she could find about the fencecutioner’s crimes: copycat offenders in medium-sized small towns in Ohio, North Dakota, and Minnesota; biblical conspiracy theories and Jesus comparisons; shaky photographs of the alleged perpetrator, who was caught near the highway exit to route 50 in Jefferson City, Missouri, with a hammer, a nail, and some thread on his person, and even admitted to the murders, but was just a blowhard who couldn’t even partially reconstruct the course of events; diverse essays by social theorists about the performativity of death and the nature of contemporary rituals of sacrifice in the mass media; and, finally, macabre underground comics and hardcore pornography in which the terribly young victims are not just tortured and mistreated, but also sexually abused before being sewn to a fence. Meggy wouldn’t have given these videos any further thought were it not for one peculiar detail: the perpetrator (in some episodes even two or three of them; extremely virile men, in any case) wears a bedspread over his body and so becomes an anonymous white blob with two holes for his eyes and one for his penis. According to the porn industry, the fencecutioner is a ghost. Meggy’s gaze, however, is locked on something else. On something her mother gave her years ago, for her sixth birthday, maybe — or when was it again? Had she really been six once, or was that something that only happened to other kids? In any case, the present still hangs there, dusty and yellowed. An embroidery. A kind of quilt, a family quilt featuring a mother and daughter with a father between them. All three are happy and smiling; the sun is shining, also smiling; there are flowers and sunflowers next to them and yes, even the sunflowers are smiling. Next to the sun, OUR FAMILY is emblazoned in fine red thread. In capital letters. Was mom that good at embroidery? I’d surely have known, but who else could it be? Dad? An embroidered quilt? What puzzles her most, after overlooking it for years, is her father’s pose. He’s standing between his child and his wife, his arms outstretched, welcoming and friendly, while they have their arms down at their sides. And right now, at night, shortly after waking up, the flowers and sunflowers, the grass on the ground — it all looks a bit like a green fence, like the green fence on the baseball field. She removes the picture from the wall, to see which of her parents made it, who is responsible, whether there’s a greeting on the back, a date, or some initials. When she takes the quilt down, the wallpaper behind it is lighter than the rest. Instead of someone’s initials, there is another picture on the back. How many years has it been hanging there? Fifteen? Twenty? And she’s never taken it off the wall, never seen the other picture? It’s not that different from the one on the front. You see the family again, and, in red letters above: YLIMAF RUO. But the mother and daughter are kneeling in this picture, with their eyes closed, in prayer. The father is in the middle again, with his arms stretched out, gazing up at the sun in the top left corner. This sun is smaller than the one in the first picture, really tiny, and pumping out black lightning bolts, like dead veins, into the flowers and sunflowers, at the chalices and petals. Meggy decides it’s high time she mounted a concerted search for her mother. She already knows which of her new acquaintances could help revive her ties with Donna without making him suspicious. Their relationship really took a hit from the constant attacks leveled at the investigation by the press. The next morning, the quilt is gone. She looks for it everywhere, is convinced that it wasn’t a dream, and is frustrated over breakfast, frightened by the idea that someone could have broken in, spied on her, and stolen things.

13.

– Bobby.

– Yes?

– Where did you get these blueberries from anyway? It’s not blueberry season. I mean, winter is about to break out. Summer and fall took the arms race too far, and now nothing can stop him. No treaties, agreements, peace talks, no Kofi Annans can stop winter.

– Not sure what you mean, honey.

– That winter’s coming, and blueberries aren’t in season. And still, there are blueberries in these pancakes, which leads me to wonder where you got them from. Maybe they’re frozen, which would be a bit of a shame, because they lose all their vitamins that way. But hey, still better than imported. If they were imported, I would find that pretty irresponsible and would consider boycotting the Chesley Diner.

– They were in a jar. As for all that talk of winter, all I know is that spring’s right around the corner.

– But it’s fall.

– Exactly.

– Bobby?

– Yes?

– Whatever. What do I know, anyway? I have to get back to work. See you later.

– See you soon, honey, and thanks for the tip.

14.

Miles’s activities are limited to office work. Copying, editing, cutting out, hole-punching, and filing. He had hoped to launch right into the investigation. Instead, he’s emptying ashtray after ashtray, making beds, not as an agent, but as an employee of the eccentric hotel owner Finley. When he catches sight of Donna during lunch break one day and communicates his grievances, Donna says things like

– Could I get an extra dumpling today?

or

– Could I pay for this tomorrow? I don’t have my wallet on hand right now.

And suddenly Miles realizes that he has started working in the cafeteria, alongside Missy, a dishwasher from Mississippi.

– But I wanted to help you, Father. Why won’t you let me?

– But you are helping me, my son. Look, there, on the side, you might go over that again with some polish.

And so it dawns on him that he has turned into Miles the grumpy shoe-shiner.

– But, Dad, you can’t treat your son like that.

– Of course I can. The simple fact is that you have no skills, no experience in any line of work, neither manual nor intellectual. I also don’t want you to die or become a target for the killer, now that it’s gotten pretty safe to go back to assuming that there is one who is not Jeff Cello.

And while Donna is giving this glib and evasive fatherly counsel, he thinks of the perfect task for his son. He could be the bait.

– The what?

– One thing we know about the victims is that they were the best in the High & Low High School debate club. It’s good that you hardly have any facial hair and you look a bit weedy on the whole. That’ll make it easy to give you a high-school makeover, and smuggle you into the corridors of repetition, humiliation, and one-upmanship.

– But, Dad, isn’t that precisely the problem with the means of production that inform the way we think? We always assume, for example, that trained actors in their early to mid-twenties can play people who are really 16 or 17 years old and go to school in small towns? But it’s far more likely to be 16- or 17-year-olds attending those schools and exactly none of them are in their early to mid-twenties. And people around sixteen or seventeen then feel they should behave like actors in their early to mid-twenties, which they can’t, of course, so they start destroying their lives with crazy ideas about what they should be like. Just imagine how many young girls today want to be like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But instead they should just be who and what they are, and it doesn’t matter how bad or simplistic that sounds because it’s true. These girls shouldn’t try to be like Buffy. They can’t be like Buffy because Buffy is a lie; she comes from the kingdom of lies. Then again, who can really distinguish between their life and a lie? Who is brave enough to say that they are small and not strong at all, and yet maybe still healthy, or happy, or in some way right and good, entirely at home in their own skin? Do you know what I mean? There’s a gap there. A void that we’ve thoroughly internalized. The repeated assertions communicated through a cheaply produced televisual reality have led us to accept the idea that conditions in this country can’t be changed, that poor people are poor and rich people are evil. We have simply learned to accept contradictions — or, rather, the bridges and fillings that have been stuck and pasted between life and the lie. We no longer see how we got from one to the other, but the main thing is that nobody feels the pain or the loneliness that used to be there. Or the main thing is that you can pretend to no longer feel it, so as not to feel even lonelier. Or, worse, we secretly celebrate the great uncertainty, and call it a soul, a world-wound, or ultraviolet tremors in outer space.

– Miles, that isn’t our problem; it’s the core and fulcrum of what we’re going for. Really, it all fits wonderfully. We’ll get you a new identity and a new haircut and enroll you in the high school as an orphan who’s just arrived in town. The only thing you have to do then is become the best debater in school, and spend a lot of time alone in dark or remote places, and alert us at the right time if your life’s in danger so we can protect you.

Donna looks his son up and down, imagines him in marine blue shorts, or in a single-breasted suit with the buttons done up and a leather bag in his left hand. A sharpened pencil always in his lapel and another in reserve. They could study for math class together. He could explain van der Waals forces to him, or not use the word Darwin, or not talk about the carpet-bombing of Tokyo or Dresden. Yes, maybe his son could become one of the school’s best basketballers, make a college team, and win a scholarship from one of the best universities in the country. His son could become one of the most important athletes in the world, if the Chinese weren’t so darn ambitious. But what does it matter if they’re so darn ambitious if they lack passion. And passion is what wins competitions, not discipline. Miles cannot fathom that his dad would put him in such danger, but at the same time he doesn’t want to go back to school in the slightest. He always hated school — the idea of school, the group mentality, and all the commands concealed within it like hair-fine shards of glass in John Wayne Gacy’s cotton candy. So he agrees.

– But, dear Father. How should I dress? How should I behave? And where do I get an MTV baseball cap on such short notice? I don’t know a thing about pretending to be someone else and, to be honest with you, I find debating pointless. I like drinking, that’s true, and beating my enemies at arm-wrestling, and knife-fighting, sure — but I’ve always thought that the combination of talking and tournaments is distressingly close to terrorism.

Beaming, Donna hugs his son, who is already slipping into the role of a teenager; he’s a born undercover agent. During the hug, Donna pats Miles on the back two, three, or four times.

– Listen. I know someone. She is a fantastically smooth talker. She will teach you in no time. Anyway, you don’t really have to be good at debating, you just have to pretend you’re good at it, you know what I’m saying, spy?

He offers his son a cigar.

– What do you say, my little spy?

15.

L’interior, L’Otel Chacal, late afternoon. The light of a wet-gray and cool-blue sky enters into the third-floor window and casts no shadow. It is thwarted only by the unreal yellow flame of a candle that spits good cheer in all directions. Josephine Bob is a wardrobe specialist. She works freelance, mostly for secret government agencies or Broadway. She’s a woman of indeterminate age, who only wears gray clothing, pearls, and a gold ring on her pinkie. After two and a half weeks, she has taught Miles how to speak, how to move his hands, how to hypnotize an audience through demagoguery, how to effectively clear his throat, and, generally, how to pretend to have something to say.

– There’s a moment that has to be timed and controlled precisely, not forgetting facial expression and body language, in which you have to stop your opponent’s breath like a well-directed punch to the solar plexus.

Whenever someone asks her what she’s called, she invents a new name for herself, along with a suitable biography. She teaches Miles as Heather Sasquash, while introducing herself to his colleagues as Lucy M. Terramore.

– And what does the M. stand for?

– Malaika; it’s Swahili.

She doesn’t do this for fun, or because she doesn’t believe in identity on principle, or because she’s forgotten who she really is. She knows who she really is. She may in fact be the only one who knows, since her parents passed away long ago and she grew up alone with them on an atoll near the Marshall Islands until the age of 17. She is Henry Clocksmith, the simple child of two difficult expats from Wellington. She invents names for herself so that she can finally be sure that no one actually knows her. Miles begins his second round of school days. He gets to know young people, talks to them about their problems, and doesn’t fall in love. He’s not accepted into the youth division of the Students for an Anachronistic Society, which has spent the past year and a half embroiled in a tiresome legal battle with Joseph Heithworth, who, according to the last will and testament of the late Emily Hay, is entitled to the Springfield Model 1855. Of course, their executive board argues that the weapon belonged to the Society rather than to Emily, but that doesn’t sway the lead singer of Chesley & The Holy Chain, who just wants to take ownership of the gun at long last. He insists, and so does his army of lawyers. The society of anachronists is on the brink of dissolution. But Miles doesn’t catch wind of any of this. It’s gossip. Miles is busy debating. Meggy has promised not to blow his cover, even though she works for the newspaper and so on. The two of them still get along well, but Miles has less and less time and Meggy has worries of her own. She’s having a rough time at the New England Times. Her self-described foster mother and patron saint Eleonore Heithworth — who replaced the last editor-in-chief after he publicly declared that he valued a GI’s life more than the life of a civilian from, say, Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Congo, Sierra Leone, Cambodia, Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, Sudan, or specifically Iraq, in general — has lost faith in her work. Hence the articles in The Good News are becoming ever more crude and cryptic. She accuses the city’s residents of breaking into strangers’ apartments at night; she reports about cultish meetings, burning fireballs, churches filled with turpentine; writes stories about people who drowned in the rain.

16.

In the spring that chimes in the year 1999, a single question is printed on what used to be the best page in the newspaper. A single question, a total of 79 times, in different sizes, different fonts, in bold, in italics, or underlined: What are you doing on Saturday night? Eleonore approaches her, visibly disappointed.

– I had such faith in you, my child. You were going to reinvent the newspaper, make it simple and beautiful, and clearly say what clearly had to be said. Without too many dependent clauses, adjectives, wordplay, or meaningless lists of references that lead nowhere but the writer’s own ego. But what has come of all that? Concept journalism. The worst thing possible. Formalism. The plague of Zen, the plague of abstraction, the plague of free association and eclecticism; ultimately, the plague of John Cage.

She is summarily booted from the paper. That’s to say, she’s allowed to stay on at the weather desk. She still hasn’t managed to track down her mother, hasn’t heard anything from her. Every day, she kneels with a bouquet of wild flowers by the void her father left. She searches between the spruces where the sun never shines, and goes where the cold wind blows. Miles has no time; he has to prepare for the big debate contest. Josephine Bob is at his side. No mother-son relationship has developed between them. He thinks of her as more of a hairstylist, or someone who knows how to do manicures. Despite feeling bullish about the competition, he is unusually excited, though this has more to do with Holly Cello’s announcement that her second novel is appearing on Saturday. Broccoli Two will hit the stores, it will actually be available for purchase. What kind of title is that, anyway? Donna feels good in his dad-self because his son is doing well and he feels good in his agent-self because his investigation is too. He is sure that the fencecutioner will strike soon; he doesn’t know exactly when, but perhaps now, in spring, as the weather is getting better. Or did the murders happen in fall? He can’t remember.

– What murders, what murders are you even talking about?

he yells, one night, at Finley the hotel owner. Donna hasn’t slept well.

– The three kids that were sewn to the fence.

– I don’t know what you’re talking about, old man, spare me your horror stories. You bitter old man. You’d love to twist a bayonet between my lungs and spleen; you want me to be your dog, to kick the bucket; I bet you ate kids in Korea. I know all about it — Busan, the flash of guts pretty much dripping from the leaves, right, and the furrows carts leave on the roads full of blood and mud and radishes — but I don’t put up with everything. Not everything, badger. You probably want to see me all white, stuff me in a sack, cover me in butter, you slimy rodent. Not like that. Never.

And yet, Donna doesn’t entirely lose his mind. A stroke saves him, and makes him the youngest stroke patient in the town’s history. The mayor awards him a medal made of soapstone. A stroke right before the day that could have marked the high point of his career. The shame. He could have touched the fencecutioner, finally; he could have grabbed his wrist and spun him around. He could have pulled at his skin and shown the public his face and given satisfaction to all of the country’s mourners; he could have stuffed them full of it. He could have hung out his flesh in the scathing air, cooked soap from his bones. He could have carved a spittoon out of his skull. But Donna’s body no longer abides by his wishes. He had been exposed to the city for too long. For too long, too much wasn’t working out as he wanted. Everything alive started to settle and rest. The butterflies fell like leaves, littering the streets with colorful mandalas, quiet and extinguished, not a whistle to be heard from a beak or a snout. The mynah remained silent. The oysters locked their secrets safely in their shells.

17.

– What are you doing on Slaughterday night, Meggy?

Miles clutches the thin hand protruding over the edge of the sickbed. It’s warm and the walls are far too white or far too orange or far too pale. When he swallows, he feels a nip in his sinuses, somewhere under his eyes and behind his nose. The only thing that could exacerbate the hospital’s air of sickness would be a machine beeping to the beat of a failing heart. Donna sometimes wants his son to open the curtains; other times, he wants them shut. They discuss the coming day and tactics for the debate contest, though Miles has already gone over everything with Josephine Bob; and, with the last spark of his youthful arrogance and the irreverence that comes with it, Miles tunes out. He stares at the paralyzed half of his father’s face, and imagines cutting three gills out on either side of his neck with a box cutter. Only fingernail-deep, so he can breathe under water. A nurse arrives with something like food. The nurse really looks like Bobby, but Miles doesn’t mention it, because he hasn’t come here for an unwanted flirtation. Ceremoniously, he kisses the points of intravenous access to his father’s veins and, for the time being, leaves him forever.

18.

To introduce a wider audience to the art of debating and carefully worded contestations of global realities, the school organizes a spelling bee for children and foreigners before the main event. Highlights include a girl who’s just turned seven who spells all the letters in disillusionment without any trouble, and there’s someone from Madagascar whose letter-by-letter rendition of the declaration of human rights impresses even Meggy, who is on site as a freelance journalist. Hurt is a small town near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As far back as the civil rights movement, or even the end of the civil war, Hurt can claim some of the finest public speakers and demagogues as its sons and daughters. For example: Madeleine Albright, Roy Cohn, Atticus Finch, Jim Casy, Jim Jones, and a youthful Abraham Lincoln. Generations of political activists, lobbyists, and baseball coaches can be traced back to Hurt, at least on the father’s side; on the mother’s side, it’s the neighboring town of Quinth. Due to this unusually high concentration of eloquence, the nation’s greatest verbal battles are usually waged between these two small towns; every time the citizens gather around the ring, one can assume that talent scouts from across the country are among them. Men in expensive cotton suits from BP and Shell, who can conjure filing cabinets full of gold, cigars, and liquor with a smile; women with austere glasses and iron-hard knots in their hair, who are looking for someone to write speeches for a Texan presidential candidate who is tremendously rich but unfortunately quite dim. It’s extremely rare for a team from Hurt to leave the hundred-mile radius around Harrisburg to take up a challenge from a New England high school. But what choice did they have? They had to accept; a rumor was making the rounds on the talk-it-up scene that there was a new Benjamin MacNash. Not a new Chesley Heithworth, sure. But to debate another mind as sharp and original as Benjamin’s — that’s an opportunity worth getting on your knees for. On the ride over in their minibus, the five teammates go over the newsworthy events of the day in all the rich nations of the world, and they run through the speeches of skeptics and sophists. During the actual contest, however, they are tired and scatterbrained, mixing up Sweden and Norway, bungling the difference between libertarian and libertine, mangling the surnames of Syrian nuclear scientists. After three rounds, they’re already babbling over each other, attacking the arguments of their teammates rather than those of their opponents. Eventually, they plead with Miles — whom they acknowledge as the new touchstone of linguistic dexterity — to let them finally leave the stage, begging him to conclude his speech against the General Motors regime. They promise to personally write the president, if necessary, to advocate subsidies for research into electric cars, if only he will let them leave the stage. The shame is too great; they can no longer endure the pendulum swinging back and forth between dazzling rhetorical flair and the audience’s laughter. Finally, they crawl off stage, beaten and humiliated. They were too weak. Their roots didn’t run deep enough into their hometown’s illustrious soil; they were driven apart, cornered, and torn to shreds.

– This has to be the feeling that other people always describe as happiness, is that possible?

whispers Miles, to the person sitting next to him. Six weeks later, the school secretary receives a letter from a Harrisburg doctor attesting that a young student from the Cash Boys School in Hurt developed cancer of the vocal chords that very Saturday evening. The principal will frame it and hang it alongside the High & Low High School’s other trophies. But looking at it will always give her a sharp pang, as her school also lost someone that night.

19.

Miles emerges from the changing rooms, fresh and showered, his hair combed back. Steam rises off him. He gives Meggy an exclusive interview. He drops three quarters into the vending machine and grabs a lemonade, his bag hanging loose on his back. He leaves the auditorium, steps outside, and as the door clicks shut behind him, darkness falls. Imperceptibly at first, then quicker, then at breakneck speed, until there’s no light left, not a single pixel, and he sees no hands, no feet, no horizon, and no starry specks in the firmament. All that remains is the storm and howl of the city. The streets twisting around, the tectonic plates crunching as they seek refuge underneath one another. Instinctively his body begins to react to the darkness. He shakes himself and feels warmer. It’s springtime. Someone is calling him, calling his name; somewhere in the distance a dog barks. Miles begs and shouts and wails for help, but no one responds. People pass him by. Holly Cello saunters by on her way from A to B. She places her hand on Miles’s shoulder, wants to let him know that she thought he did good. She strokes his cheek. She is looking for a way to invite him back to her house. She’d be willing to start speaking again, for him, with him, about everything: his life and her books, the old one and the new one that the press has ripped to shreds; she thinks she may have found a new partner in Miles. She senses a kinship between their brains, the pace of their thoughts. She twists Jeff Cello’s engagement ring off her finger and swallows it before his eyes, to which he can only nod. Nod and climb into a cab with her. Nod and drink imported sparkling wine at her place over long conversations. But Miles registers none of this. Feels nothing, sees nothing. He lies on the ground, screaming. Holly has long since disappeared. He’s gone blind, he thinks, panicking. His limbs do as they please. They lash out in all directions. Snapping like twigs. He thinks the light in his eyes has gone out forever, but that’s not right; it’s the world that has lost its light. Everything is pitch-dark. And suddenly the noises stop. Silence. Now all he has is the pain, the feeling of having a body and taking up space. Until the numbness sets in. His fingers first, then his arms, his legs and so on. Then he feels nothing anymore. And loses his balance. He has now been stripped of all his senses, and his thoughts are the only thing holding him back from the abyss of total emptiness. They, too, are getting sparser, disappearing, a dwindling tension in the spool of his skull. The wave becomes a line. He has not been saved by sleep or death. And there is no time anymore. And maybe, maybe everything is different. What? Maybe we will live forever. He feels a sharp prick as a needle is drawn through the flesh on his back. Maybe. The sliver of a sensory response. An electric impulse. Suddenly: sharpness, perception, adrenalin. In an instant, everything becomes clear and bright and cold. Thoughts come back, smells. The stench of one’s own execution. And he feels every inch of every bone, the fractures and the fragments, the hole in his skull, the fresh air on his frontal lobe, the dried blood on his forehead. He can hardly see anything. His eyes are gummed up by something, it could be blood, or liquor. Tears? Or the jelly from inside his eyes? There are bungee cords tied firmly around his calves, thighs, arms, and chest, intended to keep him bound to the fence until the needle and thread alone can sustain the weight of his body. Delicate stitches go up his spine, burning under his skin. His central nervous system is completely overloaded. He can’t let himself move, he has to feign unconsciousness, but he can’t help looking around a bit. He has to see him, his executioner, the face that only the three dead know, as he too is dead, after all; he’s only regained consciousness by some stroke of misfortune. And he looks. And he sees the flame of a BIC lighter as it glides along a long, sooty steel needle. There’s no face, it’s more like a shape in the gleam of the flame, a flicker in the long shadow of the street light. These are the only two light sources under the night sky, dark with clouds. Where am I, what time is it, where am I? For some inexplicable reason, Miles can think, though that wasn’t part of the plan. That’s the upside. But still he is bound, severely injured, and unarmed, as opposed to the person currently sewing him to a fence. That’s the downside. He hears the slow breathing. Then another stitch around his spleen. Then another. If he stirs now or starts to feel pain, he will die. If he reveals the small advantage he has — if indeed there is such a thing as a lucky chance or an end to the night — pain won’t be his problem. The fencecutioner is roughly as tall as him, white, and has no forehead; his nose fuses seamlessly into his mouth, his mouth into his teeth and chin. His hair is hidden under a black wooly hat. Sweat and spit drip slowly off him, gliding out of every pore. His shirt is dirty; it’s too dark for Miles to make out its original color. They are roughly the same age. But he can’t say whether he would recognize him if he were sitting across from him at an ice cream parlor reading the newspaper. What are his chances? What can he do? Endure. Wait until the fencecutioner leaves his work. Sometime in the morning, as the sun is coming up. He could call for help, free himself. Or overcome his own resistance: succumb, disappear, leave it all behind. No. Wait, endure, and bear it. Get off this fence and to the bottom of the case. But for that to happen he must first survive. Not bleed to death. Hope that there’s no checking of his pulse once the work is done, and, if it is pumping inappropriately, that this won’t be corrected with a pointed blow of the hammer to the back of his neck. He could also try to free himself, to somehow loosen the chords around his legs, a targeted kick and. Not with me, you psycho! Now I’ve got you. Now I’ve got you, you psychotic bastard. Miles has to laugh. The fencecutioner looks baffled.

– Why are you laughing?

His voice sounds like the voice of a child, high-pitched and tender.

– I just thought of freeing myself, somehow, and overpowering you.

– Aha.

And a moment of awkward silence ensues. Miles wants to say something, but he can’t think of anything.

– You work for Donna Jones, right?

– Yes.

– Don’t tell him you woke up, and don’t give anyone any clues as to how I look or smell. Or what kind of voice I have, how old I might be, and all that. No details about me or my tools, alright? Can you promise me that?

– I, um —

– Okay, sure, all this hurts a lot, I know that, but your waking up is the last thing I wanted. You seem like a healthy guy. Haven’t lived here very long, huh? Whatever. Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t have woken up until, like, the day after tomorrow. And by then, much of it would have healed already. Tomorrow you will be a picture, and that picture will say something, something truthful, and then you can carry on as before.

– A picture?

– Just promise me that you won’t tell anyone about this conversation and my murder fantasies will never inconvenience you again.

– That’s fine.

He squeezes a hand that’s hanging off Miles’s arm, which is somewhere to the left of him. His hand is small and rough, he’s wearing no rings. Is that a tattoo?

– Promise? You won’t kill me?

– If I wanted to kill you, don’t you think you’d already be dead?

– Okay.

– The other ones, those were accidents. They weren’t supposed to die.

– You didn’t mean to kill them?

– Shut your stupid mouth.

– I —

A hypodermic needle is lodged in Miles’s calf, through which a few milliliters of transparent fluid are squeezed into his bloodstream. This nearly kills him, but only nearly, and two days later he wakes up with a hangover.

20.

He’s lying in a hospital room, with his father next to him. Donna has been making a steady recovery from his stroke. For about ten hours, he has been sitting in a wheelchair by the shell of his former son. Confused, Miles looks around.

– Where am I? What happened. What —

– Quiet. Calm down. You can’t exert yourself now. The most important thing is that you tell us who did this to you, so we can get an exact description of the perpetrator. We’ll see from there.

– What?

– Can you tell us roughly what the person looked like? How old he or she is, give or take?

Is he really sitting in front of me as an investigator on a murder case? As if I am merely a witness and he is not my father?

– Miles. Look at me. You have to focus now. Who did this to you?

Focus? the severely injured patient thinks to himself, how on earth should I focus? Couldn’t this father just hug me for once; couldn’t he have bought me a comic book? Miles keeps silent. He looks up at the ceiling. A cold tear runs out of his eye.

– Who?

Donna grabs hold of Miles’s shoulder.

– Who did it?

The stroke has turned him into an old man. His skin is speckled, leathery, and loose; yellow moss between his teeth. He spits as he yells. He coughs after he yells. A knit sweater hangs over his shoulders. But precisely because, or rather although, he immediately forgot his vow never to tell anyone anything about his executioner’s identity, Miles keeps quiet. He can’t talk to his father. He can’t be honest with him about his problems, his feelings, his expectations, or his mother, and so he can’t tell him what he knows about the fencecutioner. It’s just not possible. All that remains is the sound of linoleum stretching beneath them. It is the year of being silent. The time of overeating and overdrinking.

– I want to be a thousand dumb people,

Miles explains to his father, slowly,

– a thousand dumb orphans.

They are not looking at each other, but at a picture on the wall, which in a curious way captures their mood. Donna slowly rolls to the door, and says,

– Excuse me,

and he says,

– You’re very dear to me, I mean, I, so, I’m your father —

and he says,

– I mean, I know I was —

and suddenly he pauses his self-aggrandizing speech and goes quiet, for, from the depths of the hospital, from somewhere in the canteen or the place where corpses are stored, a room full of tiles and chrome, the wavering sound of violins and violas rings out, then oboes and flutes; a beat, a rhythm, a drum, a march; a bassoon’s lament followed by silence, and one and two and, cymbals! clarinets! A limping choir of the disabled marches through the halls — autistic children, paralyzed geriatrics, paraplegics, and preemies, tuning their voices in chorus, yelping and hosanna-ing the message of hope. Donna tears open the curtains and the room is engulfed by the light of the breaking day.

– I wasn’t always good, I know that, but I love you, and I will always be your father. No matter what. I will always be there for you, because you are my son, my only son, and the most important person in my life.

A bird crashes into the window pane, then another. Father and son look at each other quizzically, then Miles asks him to please close the curtains again.

– Oh and here, I forgot about this. I got you a book. It’s Holly Cello’s latest. We talked about it once. The night you arrived in town. Back when I still thought that you hated me. Remember that? She even signed it for you.

Donna puts the book on Miles’s nightstand and leaves, as his son seems to have fallen asleep. A few days later, Meggy pays a visit.

21.

– Afternoon.

– Hi Meggy.

– So? How was it?

– Awful.

– Can you tell me anything about the murderer?

– He’s roughly as old as you and me, probably went to school with you or something. He has an unusually high voice and it kinda looks like he has no face. His features sort of blend into each other. In any case, he hasn’t got a forehead or a nose; they’re the same. Also, he used a BIC lighter, but everyone’s got one of those.

– And what should I do with this information?

– You could write an article about it?

– They fired me.

– Really?

– Yeah, well, the other editors felt that the city’s residents had lost interest in The Good News, and so the section was most often found in trashcans, birdcages, and the butterfly exhibit. Anyhow, toward the end I was only writing nonsense, really.

– I liked that.

– Thanks. I did too, actually.

– Then don’t call it nonsense.

– You know, sometimes you just lose all belief in yourself, and that’s that.

– Meggy. Please.

– Have you really not told your dad any of this?

– Nope.

– Why not?

– No idea. Just like that.

– And what do you want to do now?

– I’m going to team up with the Canadian-Irish, who are waiting for me outside.

– I guess that means goodbye.

– Exactly.

– I like you.

– Come with us, Meggy, there’s a spot for you in the car.

– This is my spot.

– Beetaville? This shouldn’t be anyone’s spot.

– Wrong. Someone killed three friends of mine and tried to kill you. I can’t just leave. Not until the murders are solved.

– Well, first of all, he didn’t try to kill me; he mistreated me as part of some ritual, or to make some kind of statement about symbolic representation in times of de-symbolization. And, as for the other thing you said, you always told me that you never really liked Benjamin, Chesley, or Emily. You hardly knew them.

– I was friends with Benjamin’s girlfriend. With Nataly.

– Such close friends that she smacked you unconscious in front of all the girls in your year?

– That was PE. That was different.

– Meggy, you don’t owe anyone here anything. Just come. Please. It would be —

and here Miles breaks off, looks at his fingers, which he keeps crossing and uncrossing, then into Meggy’s eyes,

– nice.

– Yes. It would be.

And so they fall silent, filling the room with an unrealized future.

– It really would be.

The two of them, arms around each other, bright as beer, cheeky and charming, playing hide-and-seek with little Gin MacAdler, all three of them maniacally tickling each other. The bus driving, gliding, flying along the interstate, casting a shadow as long as a desert, as long as a continent, a shadow that spreads across the globe and kisses its creator. Pulling hard-earned dollars from the pockets of simple American workers over games of 9-ball, the old Paul Newman trick; empty beer bottles raining down behind them as they leave, but they are untouchable and just laugh, and their laughter spans an entire season, a season when adults are children and children don’t have to go to school.

– You know I’m going to stay here, so why talk about it.

In the meantime, Meggy goes over to the nightstand and picks up the book, which Miles has not yet opened.

– What you reading?

– Holly Cello’s new novel. You’re welcome to take it.

– Did you like it?

– Not really, no.

Broccoli Two

Meggy wakes up. She looks at the alarm clock, which is about to ring. Actually, she almost always wakes up before it rings. And if someone asks her for the time, she almost always knows what time it is without checking. She watches the minutes pass, though it’s more accurate to say that she’s watching a machine. Time cannot be seen nor experienced temporally. It’s dark outside, but not gloomy. Meggy guesses it’s several degrees below freezing. She doesn’t know why she set the alarm. There’s nothing to do. She doesn’t have to be awake at any particular time. But if she doesn’t hear an alarm in the morning, she feels useless. Three fingers are left on her hands: a thumb, a middle finger, and a pinkie. The alarm clock beeps for a fraction of a second before she slaps down the stop-button with her stumps, slamming down again and again, tired and full of resentment. She can’t remember how she lost her fingers, and wonders what will happen when she’s lost all of them. Will it mark the end of something? Or a new beginning? Is her body giving her some kind of countdown? She wonders how she’s going to put her pants on without any fingers. And what about bras, or socks? I’m a fat pig, she thinks. I’m a fat pig and my left eye is one centimeter further north than my right one. I like to think of myself as a map, but I’m just a fat pig. No one wants to discover me or explore me or stick small black and red flags in the places he’s been. Or she. No one. If I weren’t human, they’d take me to the slaughterhouse. My meat would be sold at discount because it contains so much fat. Maybe they could make bacon out of me, or mincemeat. Burger meat for cheap burgers that only taste of cheese — not even cheese but the industrial epiphany of cheese. Still, since I’m a human, I won’t be taken to the slaughterhouse. That’s just not going to happen. Because I’m human. Definitely. There’s a glass of tap water next to her bed — or, rather, next to her missing mother’s bed, the bed of her mother who may well be dead or down and out somewhere. Waking up always makes her so thirsty. She always has to pee so badly and she is always so thirsty. Ideally, she would spend the whole morning peeing. For now, though, she is still too lazy to get up. She drinks the glass of water in one gulp, and puts it back on the cardboard box next to her, which is not only a place to put stuff but a real little table. On the wall across from this box, to the right of her head, hangs a calendar from the year 1999. It’s a DIY calendar, the kind you’re supposed to stick photos in, or stuff that kids have drawn. Meggy has folded candy wrappers into battle scenes from the Pacific Theater. Some are quite good. Every day of every month of the year is crossed out. She’s puzzled by the date. Will it really be spring again soon? She can’t remember what happened last New Year’s Eve. Did she spend it in a hunter’s hide at the edge of town? She doesn’t really want to go to the party that the Party Party Club is throwing for all the High & Low High School alums. But, knowing herself, she will go. How long has it been since I spoke to someone? Seven days? Nine? They’re throwing the party on an old corn silo by the fields. And if no one from the old gang is there, or I don’t recognize anyone, I’ll just leave. Maybe I’ll just have a few snacks and drink my age in flutes of champagne and watch how my spit falls into the black night, though then I’ll get a cab; I’m old enough to order a cab to mark the passing of the year. Just in case she gets into an argument, she spends a while thinking about which of her former schoolmates might accuse her of something, what that might be, and what all their weaknesses are. She has spread towels over her woolen blanket. The Corey house is cold and heating expensive. She crawls out of her warm nest, puts on her thick, light-brown morning gown and a fur hat. In the right gown-pocket she finds half a pack of Camel Lights that she was smart enough to stash away yesterday. The first two cigarettes, which she smokes on the way downstairs to the kitchen, satisfy her nicotine cravings and are a poor stand-in for breakfast. No mail for her. Do they even deliver on New Year’s Eve? Not that she was expecting anything. Though, of course, there are letters that she would be happy to receive. A postcard would do just fine. Donna once told Meggy that he sometimes gets postcards from her mother. That would have been nice. If she’d maybe sent her a postcard for Christmas, to forgive her maybe, or to say something like My dearest daughter, We’ve been hurting and abusing each for a while, waiting to see who can go on longer without the other. That’s over now. We should join forces and become a family. Yours always, your mother. That would have been nice. Her New Year’s resolution is to clean up the kitchen.

Two thirds of the rooms in the house are inaccessible, overflowing with notes, newspapers, books, articles, and research, folders pertaining to particular subjects, folders pertaining to no particular subject. Some piles of paper have been tied into packages with string; next to them, a small industrial state with chimneys made of videotapes. Some of the material has never been read; some of it has notes in the margins, or yellow and pink Post-its on pages that merit review. Meggy suspects that a family of raccoons is living in her old bedroom. To avoid trouble, she sometimes tosses them her leftovers, which could in fact attract a family of raccoons, should one not already be living there. There’s no mail, so Meggy steps outside the door. Emitting a short cry, the half-smoked cigarette disappears in the snow. It’s so cold and dark that she can hardly see the smoke filling the air. Now it’s silent. Meggy considers it a luxury not to smoke cigarettes all the way to the filter. And she also feels that she deserves the odd luxury. She slinks off to the kitchen and performs the usual morning rites. Fire, water, Teflon. She sautées onions with plenty of oil and drinks her tea with plenty of milk and honey. She beats eggs, chives, mushrooms, potatoes, raisins, fresh mint, and Swiss cheese into an omelet, which she serves with any old pasta. Solitaire by The Carpenters is playing on the radio and the two kitchen windows are fogging up. The empty bottles of Widowed Bride on the marbleized countertop have candles wedged in their wide necks. She loves the smell of wax and the light of a flame in the early morning, so she lights them. Humans yearn for the four elements, a bearded prostitute once told her after they watched Brian De Palma’s Carrie together. Carrie is the story of a young girl who is harassed by everyone (particularly the director, who narrates her fate with endless sequence shots), develops telekinetic powers, and uses them to wipe out her entire grade and a couple of teachers. The only survivor has nightmares for the rest of her life. In any case, Meggy never understood why fire is considered an element, though that may be because she never grasped anything in chemistry class, despite her good grades. Karen Carpenter sings,

– A little hope goes up in smoke.

Meggy’s always found it easier to empathize with men, so she gets how this man feels as he plays solitaire, lonely and alone. He has lost his love due to indifference. His every move leads him further into solitude. Around him, there is life waiting to be lived, but he plays solitaire and that’s that. It’s remarkable how sad that song is, though it’s actually considered a happy pop song. On the other hand, Meggy cannot empathize with Karen Carpenter. Of all the tragedies in music history, she finds hers the most poorly conceived. That Phil Ochs would hang himself, for example, was entirely predictable. Depression, writer’s block, alcoholism — paranoia while actually being followed by the CIA. Impossible to live like that, fair enough. But just because that hussy thought she was too fat — that was her reason for diving into the pharmaceutical abyss? Meh. For a moment, she thinks about Joseph. She wonders whether she’d be happier as a fat man, and places her hand on the hot pan for a few seconds as punishment. Imagining life as a different gender is forbidden. She waits until she can smell her own burnt flesh. Then she recalls how her left pinkie broke off and bursts into tears. Then she remembers the fate of her left thumb and has to vomit. But she is so hungry, and so low on money and food, that she stops herself, no, forbids herself from opening her mouth, and, after a bead of sweat has rolled down her forehead to her chin, she finally chokes it all down again. Greedily, she thinks of something else and carries on eating. The first sunrays and patches of light fall almost imperceptibly on the city. Everything’s blue at first; then the night becomes brighter. She takes an untoasted piece of toast from the bag of toast, uses it to wipe all the food residue off her plate, and puts the plate back on the shelf. She licks the silverware clean and puts it back in the drawer. More thoughts about Joseph. How he shot himself on his estate. With Emily’s gun, a detail she found strangely reassuring. His hair had grown quite long, at least it looked that way on the news; long and fine, like the hair of a princess. Joseph is one of the few people that I really miss. Those few nights in Singapore. Striped shadows on the disheveled bed. It is hot. They lie there. Joseph has just come on Meggy’s breasts. She gasps for air.

– You know what,

he says,

– smoking would suit you. So would cherry wood and clear spirits.

– You really think so?

He lights one of the clove cigarettes that are sold there on every corner, drags a few times until it crackles, and stuffs it into Meggy’s half-open mouth. Her lips have never felt so mature.

– Suits you exquisitely.

Meggy gets smoke in her eyes and tears up, they both laugh, she throws the cigarette in a half-empty glass of Beefeater, and lies on his stomach.

– Your stomach’s making weird noises,

she says and fiddles with his pubes. And those sounds, that melody, returned to her at the funeral a few weeks ago. She and around a thousand others attended: music fans, gawkers, grievers, friends, relatives, lovers, Lenny, of course, and Nataly. Some parents, too. The MacNashs, Steve Albini, Stephen Malkmus, Eleonore and Rebecca Heithworth, Greg Sage, and a surprise appearance by Miranda Quickpath, who was there, above all, to speak to Nataly. Miranda and Joseph hardly knew each other. They had never been as close as they now were, by his grave. Afterward, Miranda told Meggy everything Nataly had told her about the past few years of her life. In the end, Nataly and Joseph found their way to each other, sometime after she lost her first child. First she followed him on tour (courtesy of the professor, who bought her everything she wanted, just so she might finally emerge from her sadness). She went to all his concerts in the United States, and in Europe and Asia. She became a real groupie, convinced that Joseph was singing only for her. And one day he finally recognized her, even though she was among all the other people at a concert. She appeared to him, he would tell her later. He called her onto the stage, hundreds of fingertips carried her over the entire audience all the way from the back, and he took her hand, which was hot and shaky, and simply stopped the show and kissed her. And the band, those crazy guys, that’s what Nataly called them, those crazy guys, played a wedding march and that was maybe the single best moment of her life. She moved in with Joseph and the crazy guys, dividing their time between the road and his estate, it was beautiful, real, but then, with a jolt, the old sadness overcame her. She couldn’t stop thinking of the child that had been stolen from her, snatched from its stroller. Joseph understood that they wouldn’t be happy until they had a new child and everything that reminded her of the old child was gone for good. So they went to Nataly’s old apartment together and stuffed everything that had anything to do with the child into a sack and burned it on the beach together, as a couple, and so Nataly could begin to forget — this is what they both assumed. But it didn’t work. The professor was still in the picture, he was never entirely out of the picture, but that wasn’t his fault, so they didn’t put him in a sack and didn’t burn him. Everyday life resumed, they came to an arrangement with the sadness, until one morning Nataly felt sick and had to vomit and they both knew that they would soon have a new child, a child of their own. A child that belongs to no one but us, Nataly and Joseph said again and again, no one but us. A child all to ourselves. And so the months slipped by, one after the other, and Nataly’s belly grew and grew, and she smiled so much, maybe too much, Nataly thought Joseph would think, but it wasn’t something she could control. She was smiling so much that she no longer knew whether she really had something to smile about or whether she just wanted Joseph to think she was happy, so damn happy; and every time she smiled, she thought about her old child and the professor, and so, in her mind, smiling was linked to her hatred of the professor, which grew and grew with every smile. She could only think about her hatred, rather than, say, the child kicking in her belly, and she also thought about the professor, who (as Nataly told Miranda) had to die. Then the contractions began, sometime in the middle of the night, and Joseph was by her side the whole time, and he called a doctor and the doctor came, or a midwife — Miranda doesn’t quite remember which Nataly said. And when the doctor or the midwife saw the child’s head, the expression on his or her face changed drastically, hardened suddenly. Nataly saw that clearly. And Joseph’s expression also changed abruptly. Nataly thought she saw fear in his face, fear of the child, although what came out of her abdomen was not a child but a stone. The child had turned into a stone in her stomach, the delivery was extremely painful, and afterward a stone lay in the middle of their bedroom, on Joseph’s estate, in a pool of watery blood. Nataly couldn’t do anything but stare at the stone, which looked a bit like a small rolled-up cut of meat. She stroked the stone, said that the stone should be called Benjamin and that the stone should be taken to his nursery. And then she fell asleep, calmly, with a smile on her face, with a real, deep smile, and all the horrible thoughts were purged from her body, and for the first time in a long time she dreamt a happy dream. And so she slept that way for a few days, just for a couple of days (Miranda said Nataly said), and those days were good. She remembered her sleep as a good and peaceful sleep, though everyone assumed she wouldn’t survive it. Joseph was so angry, he was so angry that his son was a stone and his beloved wife on her deathbed, that he didn’t know what to do with all his rage. He kept returning to one thought, that the person who was responsible for all this finally had to be done away with, that this person had to be done away with at once, plain and simple. And so Joseph took Benjamin and beat the professor to death with him. Again and again he smashed down on the professor’s hands that were raised to shield his head, and on the bald head itself. And when he got home and Nataly was awake and glared at him, at her own lover, with contempt, he knew that something was wrong with his life, that something had always been wrong with his life and that he would never be able to make it right, that Nataly would never forgive him for killing the professor, much less for turning little Benjamin into a murder weapon. She could not understand how one could do that to a child, how one could sully its innocence like that. Life itself will do that soon enough. It’s unavoidable that children become bad with time, but parents must protect them from life as long as possible, from its savagery and loneliness. And the sadness, Nataly had added, the sadness. Then Joseph screamed at Nataly — as she told Miranda and Miranda, tired from all the talking and crying, was now telling Meggy — he screamed at her, took Benjamin and screamed,

– This is not a child! This is a stone! Nothing more than a stone!

Joseph slammed Benjamin on the ground, the same way he slammed him down on the professor’s bald head. He didn’t shatter instantly, but only after a few attempts, which made an unbearable noise on the marble floor. Nataly couldn’t bear it, and held her hands over her face as Benjamin split in two. A viscous red liquid oozed from the splinters, like when you pick a dandelion and a viscous liquid drips out of the stalk. That, Nataly said to Miranda, is how it looked, like what happens to a dandelion stalk. And when Joseph saw that, he immediately walked into the garden. He immediately put on his sunglasses, took a small knife, and went into the garden. And he also took the Springfield Model 1855 down from its perch above the fireplace and went into the garden, and that’s when Nataly heard a shot, and just as her body wanted to transform itself into a swamp, she heard another sound, and that sound was the shrieking of a small child, and when she looked at the floor, she saw a baby boy, naked and smiling. And now Benjamin is a few months old and it’s all very nice, and they have enough money, too. Nataly has plenty to do, handling the estates of one professor and one musician, and that’s why she probably won’t have time to meet Miranda for a coffee in the near future. But maybe in the distant future, she said, and that, said Miranda, was kind of her and the only thing I have to hold onto at the moment. She watched the dwindling group of mourners for a while and didn’t say anything else. A few sparse trees in the graveyard. Meggy squeezed Miranda’s hand. There was nothing to say. She just squeezed that hand and hoped to be home again soon. What kind of trees are those, wondered Meggy, who has a very good home stereo system set up in her living room, a UK import. The roughly hip-high speakers have a dark wood chassis and a black net stretched over their membranes. They sit on small pyramids, which buffer the vibrations that the speakers would otherwise transmit into the ground, through which the bass tears up the mid-range frequencies. She likes that the amplifier looks a bit like a science lab and the record player like a contemporary tombstone. She places a first pressing of the Church Music LP on the turntable, switches the belt drive to 33 rpm, and lifts the diamond needle onto the innermost groove of the record. This is a particularly special pressing because the grooves, which is to say the sound, or perhaps the spiral of music, don’t run from the outside toward the label, but from the label, meaning the heart of the record, toward the outside, where they end in a loop of the final chord. She thinks that the last thing Joseph probably thought about before he shot himself in the head was Lenny. How they made music together, maybe, or went on a bender in the rehearsal studio. One of countless benders they went on together, not any one in particular, just one of the early ones, an innocent bender, back when they had neither dreams nor desires. When they were harmless. When they wanted to know where to score hash. And what it feels like when lips engulf a penis, or where they might find the money for an effects processor. When the world still consisted of kitchen chairs and carpeted flooring. When it was irrelevant whether one flicks the ash into plastic or stainless steel, when it was still about the cigarettes and not about the ashtrays. Meggy pours herself a glass of morning port as a salutation of the sun, which has finally dared emerge in full from behind the Atlantic. Since her dismissal from the New England Times, she hasn’t found a new job in journalism. Nowhere. She ekes out a living drawing cartoons and caricatures for smaller newspapers and magazines. She gave up on a graphic novel, a real work, after only a few weeks. This can be traced back to her inability to deal with schedules, lengths, arcs, and developments. Everything is short and concise to her; she can’t bear the degree of assertion that must set in after 15 or 30 pages. Not to mention that she has trouble drawing, which is to say that she’s no good at it. She has always been witty, that’s all; she loves punchlines, always has one handy, but she has never trusted stories. The directives of epic poetry are repellent to her, presumptuous, fraudulent. Full of slander. Protein lit. Holly Cello, it is said, once claimed that life writes the most boring stories while she writes the best ones. When her mom once told her, not long after the funeral of her father, that humans grow in wounds, Meggy had shot back that everyone will die in the end, and most of them will be Asian. Smiling, she sits down at her desk, one of those desks with an adjustable incline and a green leather top, and draws a comic. An endlessly sprawling cemetery, a mourning forest, crucifixes, and, in a small gap between the lines, the protagonist’s glasses. He himself has disappeared. The sun shines from top right to bottom left. Then, after a while, a box with a caption appears above it. ALL HUMANS WILL DIE IN THE END, AND MOST OF THEM WILL BE ASIAN. She only realizes now that the protagonist is not the protagonist any longer, but a cross. Without knowing it, she has drawn the last panel of the series. Underneath, she puts the date and her signature. She studies it calmly, checks the shadows and perspective, and then puts the sheet of paper onto the pile of material that’s suitable for sale and/or publication. Gradually it dawns on her what it means that she just drew the last panel of the series. Vita Diminutiva has concluded. She is pleased, and pours herself a congratulatory port and thinks about that fan who once wrote to tell her that Vita Diminutiva was the best thing since Matt Groening’s Life is Hell. Meggy has been to a lot of funerals. Is that a sign of a fulfilling life? Knowing a bunch of dead people? Have I done it all then? Or is that only true when I have been buried myself? Meggy hates priests more than anything. Rather than someone I don’t know speaking at my funeral — someone who might well spout utter nonsense, because he doesn’t know how to talk about me, doesn’t know how to hit the right notes, the right undertones — I’d prefer no one say anything. At most, they could screen the first three Gundam films: Mobile Suit Gundam I, Mobile Suit Gundam II: Soldiers of Sorrow, and Mobile Suit Gundam III: Encounters of Space, and that’ll be that. If people really want to cry, they can cry because a combat robot has been hit by a laser beam, and maybe because the combat robot reminds them a little bit of me — and not because someone is waffling on about what a considerate acquaintance I was. At my funeral, I want there to be explosions in space, galaxies that are ruled by tyrants, and swords of pure energy, not songs about a harbor, or any such dreadful imagery. Space harbors, for all I care, but for God’s sake no metaphorical harbors. Please just nobody use the word journey after my death. I don’t want to take any more journeys. I never wanted to go anywhere. That’s what makes Jesus so annoying — he was such a lowballer. All just trivial stuff and sleights of hand. Bread into wine, or bread for everyone, or plenty of fish, or walking on water, or healing the sick, or pardoning, or suffering, or dying and resurrecting. Bean-counting, I tell you! Compare that to a man like Moses, who parted a sea. Or summoned seven plagues. You could have been splashing around on a beach in Crete and lo and behold the locusts devour the land. When the whole Nile turned to blood, the Egyptians got the picture. But Jesus? Pettiness, nothing else. If there hadn’t been someone on-scene paying close attention, no one would’ve noticed that the extra helping of bread was a miracle. But then he went on to become the symbol of Christianity, a line in the sand, a cross on a hill. Why don’t we make a logo out of the monsters from the Book of Revelation? Why a fish? Why not a rain of frogs or four plague-bearing horsemen? That wouldn’t be any less morbid than the Son of God nailed to a plank. Meggy wants nothing to do with victims and lowballers. No, she wants none of that genteel central European understatement at her funeral; better go with the Gundam movies. Once the last sweet sip of port has trickled over her tongue, she turns off the sound system, the record turning slowly to a halt, and goes to the bathroom for her late-morning ablution. She showers in the bathtub, soaps herself up with real soap, and shampoos her hair. She eats a chocolate bar with peanuts while the foam soaks deep into her roots and ends. After rinsing, she sparks up a Camel Light and shaves the hair off her shoulders and knees. She also cleans the spaces between her toes with a small washcloth. She brushes her teeth. Meggy’s mother once told Meggy that teeth only count as brushed when the toothpaste has turned red. She uses this technique daily and it sometimes takes her twenty minutes to finally spit. She has excellent teeth and purple gums. She hates that she has to share the love of her life, Joseph, with so many other boys and girls. There are people like her, who have never been the love of anyone’s life and never will be, and there are others, like Nataly Hay, who are the loves of countless lives. There is some inequality there. An inequality that is clear to both the loved and the unloved. Humans were created unequal. But if no one seriously believes that all men were created equal, why is the constitution based on this misassumption? Wouldn’t it make more sense to establish a legal framework that defends the rights of the weak more than the rights of the strong? So many people are sick their whole lives, shattered and lonely, first hated and then dead. Meggy makes a fruit salad for lunch. The port has made her tired. Heavy and tired. And no vitamin is capable of lifting her back up. That is, if the vitamins have even a fighting chance against their opponents in the bowl: mayonnaise and syrup. She lies down on the couch by the stove, pulls a bed sheet over herself and breathes loudly, trying to sleep, but her own breath disturbs her immensely. The black-red tissue curtains of her eyes are coated in pictures from her youth. The couple that survived the truck accident. That peculiar accident. Her first feature piece. Why had the couple been so happy? She didn’t get it. The truck driver speaks to her.

– What did you see? What was the last thing you saw?

– Myself. As a little boy. I was in the man’s eyes and in the woman’s belly. I knew that if I caught them with my truck, I’d never have existed. It was me. I was the couple. Our fates are connected, Meggy; you must sacrifice yourself to be born. When you see the couple, you’ll understand.

Someone gives her a kiss. It’s the angry ginger, who has mutated into a man. He’s sporting a thick beard and eyeliner. His face is the color of the desert. The one-eyed girl is holding his right hand. She has grown younger. She is now a child and missing both eyes. But she’s not donning a patch or dark glasses; just the scars that were her eyes.

– We grow in wounds, Meggy,

she says, as fallen hazelnuts fill each step she takes in her red lace-up shoes. Meggy feels how the ginger’s tongue turns into two tongues, then into four and eight. Her oral cavity is a worm-infested apple. While she was sleeping she shoved a few pickles that were swimming in a jar on the table into her mouth. Dreaming is horseshit. Her greatest fear is that death heralds the beginning of an endless dream. Meggy’s bookshelf contains three books by Holly Cello: the two novels and a collection of vignettes, short stories, and poetic dabblings that was published under the title The Worst Poems. It is astounding how hard the critics were on Broccoli Two. Cello tried to dodge the well-known difficulty of a second novel by writing the sequel to a fictional novel called Broccoli, effectively skipping her second book to launch straight into the third, but it was no use. They stripped her of all credibility as a writer and compared her to a slew of Canadians. Not that Holly Cello doesn’t appreciate the work of her Canadian colleagues, but she knows it isn’t meant kindly. In the preface, she quickly sketches out the content of the first part. Broccoli or Broccoli One tells the story of a woman whose uterus doesn’t secrete blood during menstruation, but honey. For a long time she can hide this abnormality from her school friends and parents in Osaka, but her behavior seems odd and she soon becomes an outsider. She becomes estranged from friends and family. One day, life intervenes as it must, and, despite her condition, she falls in love with a man. At first, she refuses all intimate contact with him, out of shyness, shame, and fear, but seven months in, she gives in to her lust. One stormy night, as it’s raining, thundering, and the wind is smacking branches against the window, they undress each other to fiddle around. The man sticks his nose into her belly button. He fondles her hips and whispers commonplace-but-valid sweet nothings up her side. Then he kisses her between the thighs and it’s the greatest pleasure he’s ever known. He feels the unity of mankind, the great web of nature; he sees his past before him in total clarity, receives visions of the future and advice from his ancestors, mostly regarding familial duties. He knows the names of trees and speaks the language of birds. It’s a taste of God. And hence he spends hours licking until his jaw is numb and his tongue is raw. The woman enjoys this, too. For the first time in her life, she is really close to someone. But one night she has to rein him in. Her period is about to start and, as pleasant as it is, she needs some quiet now. The man accepts his lover’s decision, but on the third night that he is expected to lie quietly by her side, he can’t resist noshing on her honey. Never has he tasted any so fresh, never has he seen it flow as it does in the land of milk. So he spreads her legs and a golden gleam hits his eye, his nectar, and this is when he crosses a line. When the woman reawakens, she shoves the thief away. Like a madman, he jumps from one corner of the room to the other, his eyes deep-black with lust, his naked body smeared with something that looks like caramel. He has lost his mind. She glances down at her body and feels a dull pain. If she had woken up any later, the man would have devoured her. Word goes around the neighborhood that the woman has driven that kind man insane. Nobody knows why. Still, the woman has no choice but to turn her back on her family and friends and look for a home in another part of town. Unmarried and deflowered, the only place she finds any sympathy is a brothel. She quickly develops a reputation and everyone wants to sample her, men and women alike. Her only condition is that she needn’t work at a certain time of the month, and naturally the big-hearted madam grants her that wish, even if she can’t quite understand it. Unfortunately, all the other whores are envious of her success and wish her a gruesome death. They spread her secret, and at night, place a head of broccoli between her legs to steal her honey. After a while, they have so much broccoli that they throw a grand feast for all the house regulars, only leaving their declared enemy off the guest list. She stands in front of a locked door, rejected again, eavesdropping and sobbing. The guests give the steamed broccoli excellent reviews. They feel such an immense empathy for the world, such great love. The outcast knows her position, knows that she’s unwanted, knows that she has, without meaning to, made enemies and that she cannot stay. An all-encompassing sense of isolation, which she’s been carrying around her entire life, grabs her by the shoulders and tosses her out into the night. If she had stayed, she would have heard the screams. The guests started having sex and eventually ate each other up. The woman, though, is nowhere to be found. That, according to Cello’s preface, is the end of the story in Broccoli or Broccoli One. The second part is premised only vaguely on the first; one might say that it draws on its themes, or rather that it refers back to a few threads. The connections are never spelt out: the CEO of the company that sells broccoli-carrot baby food might, for example, be the unnamed woman from the first part.

Meggy puts on a winter jacket made of cowhide, along with her sturdy shoes. Her guest isn’t slated to arrive for another two hours, and she wants to swing by the diner to visit Bobby. She hopes that her mother might return one day, and in case she has forgotten her key, Meggy never locks the door. She isn’t afraid of burglars. To the contrary — a burglary might be just the thing. She could, for example, catch the culprit red-handed, with recourse to the stand-your-ground law. Or he might leave traces all around the house, from which she could build a psychological profile using the latest forensic techniques. There is even snow on the ground. Mainly on the spruces, not so much on the roofs. The entrances to Darkmart have been shoveled, salted pathways form a kind of grid or injunction to stroll. Meggy smokes in the icy air. From afar she looks a bit like a happy camel that has a hot piece of coal in its mouth. Cold has always been her favorite temperature. She gets red cheeks, never a fever. She smiles and walks all over the place. Her socks keep her feet warm. For the last time this year, she looks at Beetaville, at the bus stops, the vulgar graffiti, the mailboxes with the red streamers, the front yards and lawns, the football field with the GO HIGH & LOW HIGH SCHOOL! banner, the parents, the family homes and semi-detached houses. And the snow falls in a way that is merciless and gentle at once. A dog barks in the distance. The diner grins at her like a fridge at night. Meggy orders the Miles Meal, which Bobby introduced in honor of the crush he briefly had last fall.

– Would you like to share a bottle of sparkling wine with me?

– Gladly.

Holly Cello sits on the other side of the diner. She pays them no mind. She chews on her pencil, looks out the window, and takes no notes. She wishes she had a brain tumor, the kind that Charles Whitman had — an ailment that could explain everything. Apart from them, the diner is empty. People are out celebrating with their families and friends. Bobby is wearing a pointed hat.

– Every New Year’s Eve, I watch The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That isn’t meant to be a sob story, but when I saw the film for the first time, the year Benjamin MacNash was killed, I cried so hard. I really bawled. A little boy. But it was beautiful. There’s that one shot at the end, where the fat man with the chainsaw is backlit. He’s dancing around with the chainsaw, painting pictures with it in the air, and it’s like he’s very angry or very happy at that moment. We can’t see his face, after all, but the sky is the color of lilac. But no matter how bad things get, there’s hope for some.

– Sure.

– Look at me, how silly I am; now I have to cry. You know, sometimes I could cry all day long, and then everything is fine again and I laugh. Then I’m so cheerful and feel so light, but I don’t know why. Then I think about myself and about my dad, and, occasionally, Meggy Corey — do you know? — I think about you. The way you sit in that house, every morning, with your radio. You have a radio, don’t you? I’ve always wanted to know whether we live on a planet. On a real planet, like in books and films, with an atmosphere around us and maybe even an entire universe. But how can we know?

He knocks on the table.

– You hear that?

– Yes. Of course.

He knocks again.

– You hear that?

– Yes.

– Thing is, Meggy, I don’t, I don’t know if I can hear that. Do you know what I mean?

A black smell wafts from the kitchen into the diner. Bobby checks what’s happening. He forgot a root veggie burger on the grill. And for the first time in years, he curses in Swedish. Holly Cello dabs the corners of her mouth with a red plaid napkin. She picks up her mink coat and saunters over to Meggy’s table. The two women look at each other; neither really knows anything about the other, nothing at all. Meggy takes Holly’s hand. They leave the diner. Together, they walk into town. They wander around. And Holly’s strong fingers feel very solid. Meggy instantly offers Holly the gift of her last thumb, but Holly declines. Eventually they stop in front of Meggy’s house. Holly loosens her grip. And leaves. It’s good to be alone. Meggy thinks about something Bobby said. How stupid it was. She’ll forget it. Quietly above her, an airplane motor hums. The street lights. And where Holly Cello’s shadow passed a moment ago, turning into darkness, two lights approach. Tires compress and flatten the snow beneath them. Meggy goes inside. She doesn’t want him to think she’s been waiting outside for him. She loves the cold, but what does he know. In the mirror, full of spite, across a chasm, her own face looks at her like an old friend. She glows. The gleam of the headlights falls through the door, footsteps slowly drawing closer. A knock. Meggy waits three seconds and opens the door.

– Go ahead into the living room and undress. I’ll be there in a minute.

The man does as he is told. He finds the house a bit gloomy, but doesn’t say anything, not even when he bangs his shin on the coffee table. Meggy walks into the kitchen and gets a pair of scissors. She tosses a beer can into his lap, pours herself a port, then another. She wishes she were drunk. She rummages through her record collection and puts on an LP that features famous European church bells. Rome’s Campane di San Pietro, for example, the Lullus Bell in Bad Hersfeld, or the Emmanuel of Notre-Dame — mostly the Lullus Bell, however. That hard, millennium-old chime, monotonous and firm, is the Lullus Bell of Bad Hersfeld. The sound system is loud, unpleasantly so; when the needle glides over a fine hair or a dust-grain, one hears the clear sound of a spine snapping. Meggy orders him to cut her open. The man does as he is told. He cuts up Meggy’s clothes, her sweaters, her shirt and blouse, then her bra and pants, her longjohns — finally the underwear on her hips. Meggy feels the back of the blade on her skin, she’s freezing and orders him to cut her face open, but the man refuses. Meggy understands, and finds him repellent and ordinary, so they copulate on the chair and Meggy kicks him out.

– You want tips, you follow orders.

she calls after the man; he doesn’t answer. There are values she believes in. With her middle finger and pinky she pulls her mouth apart. It starts hurting, hurting a lot, but the flesh won’t give. She puts on a dress from her mother’s closet, one that almost fits, and makes prank calls. At Finley’s hotel reception, no one picks up; she hasn’t heard Donna’s slightly irritated Hello? in a while either. He must have been transferred. Finally. According to a recent article, the authorities have given the fencecutioner case the too tough classification and closed it. Specialists from abroad are going to take over. She tries ten, maybe 20 numbers; nobody picks up. She puts a frozen pizza in the oven. She knows that she has hardly any groceries left, she knows that she has no more money, and that the next few months won’t begin with a paycheck. She will have to sell some of the stuff in the house, probably the stereo, probably pretty much everything; it doesn’t matter what she parts with. The coming year will be the year of indifference. She can’t understand why Miles gave her that book as a present. It’s signed by the author, which is outrageously rare for that misanthrope. Anyway, she thought he revered Cello, that he was an unconditional admirer of hers. Had the plot of the novel disgusted him? But how could he have read it in such a short time, almost thirteen hundred pages in two, at most three days in the hospital. Now it’s too late to ask. If Meggy has understood correctly, Broccoli Two is, on the surface, about the father of a small child. That and countless marginal characters, timescales, pictorial puzzles, and treasure maps. The father in the book is a teacher at a German high school in Tokyo. He emigrated out of nervous love for his wife, turned his back on his homeland. But that woman leaves him and their daughter after a few days. You don’t find out exactly why, it’s like the teacher doesn’t want to talk about it. The author is interested in her disappearance, but the teacher is not. His problem isn’t that he’s struggling with alcoholism, but that his daughter suddenly disappears. That, in turn, doesn’t help his struggle with alcoholism. There are distressing scenes of him crawling around the classroom like a worm, yelling at his students, biting and touching them. He asks everyone he meets to have a drink with him. Concurrently the author tells the story of the city’s children, who are mysteriously disappearing from their parents’ homes and congregating in a sewer shaft, where they construct a kind of alternative to overground society. After he is kicked out of the school, the teacher discovers that several parents in his neighborhood have lost their children, and his conscience slowly begins to clear. He investigates the matter. Apparently, all the parents fed their little ones the same baby food from the same factory. Broccoli-carrot flavor. In the course of his investigation, he meets a single mother and drives with her to the address printed on the glass jars. Out to confront the manufacturer of the baby food, they find themselves in the middle of nowhere, tricked by a shadow company. That’s how far they’ve come. Frustrated, they lie next to each other in a motel bed and start having an affair. Meanwhile the situation escalates in the children’s state. There’s been a murder. To restore justice, a small girl assumes leadership, a girl that Meggy assumes is the teacher’s daughter. She says that there will be no equality until all citizens of the state are one thing. And so they form a huge pile of infants and become one thing — an amorphous body-monster, to be exact, which soon attacks the city. It grows skyscraper-high. It crushes the people and the city beneath it, trains crumple under its weight. And with every blow it delivers, hundreds of infant bodies burst open onto glass facades and neon billboards. The path of the monster leaves behind a river of blood and bones. Nobody dares to take up arms against the attacker, as that would kill all the children. If only they knew where its brain was, then they could launch a surgical strike, but it seems that it has no brain. Watching events from the sidelines, the teacher and his lover have an idea. One must neutralize the children without harming them. One must get them drunk. And so the Tokyo fire department fill up their water tanks with sake and shoot it at the monster. They use all the city’s sake reserves. But eventually the alcohol has its desired effect and the infants wither and lie peaceful and drunk in the street, with glowing red heads and glowing red bodies, and turn into magma. They seep into the ground and disappear entirely. A fountain of youth springs up underneath the city and henceforth all Japanese live forever, albeit in sorrow. The teacher and his new wife, now both childless and content, move to Düsseldorf together, to open a soba store. They fall short of eternal life, barely but decisively, and die as happy old restaurateurs. That, Meggy would say after her first read, is more or less what it’s about. Critics, however, point out that these kinds of gross horror stories are usually allegorical projections of a monstrous political body, and thus are untimely, as the political body hasn’t been monstrous for a while now, but spectral. How crushing such a verdict must be. Someone reads your book, which you have put everything into, year after year. They read it once — maybe once, maybe not — but certainly they read it in passing, more likely than not on a train ride, and then make a snap decision whether it’s good or bad. And then it is good or bad, and that’s that. But everyone knows that books are altogether different on second reading, not to speak of the third. This reminds Meggy of the time she shrieked at her mother that journalism should be banned, that, aside from real life, only the invented should be permitted, otherwise the boundaries would be blurred and everyone would turn crazy and cruel forever. She shoves the last eighth of pizza into her mouth. Her hands smell of sex. Only three hours left until zero hour. I’ll go to the corn silo anyway. I could just as well order myself a cab. She empties the bottle of port whose virginal seal she had cracked in the morning. The last bright black drop falls next to her glass. Aside from a few candles and the stereo display, there are no lights on in the house. Meggy has long gotten used to living without electric light. Anyway, rentboys are more relaxed with her in dimmed lighting. She lights a cigarette on one of the candles, blows them all out, takes another two packs — her last — from the kitchen drawer, along with all the cash she has left, which should be just enough for a cab to the corn silo — without tip — and leaves the house. She hails a cab. The taxi driver’s face is shrouded in a colorful scarf; Meggy can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman. Even the rearview mirror is fogged up. Luckily, the route is quite safe; no need to look out the window. Meggy draws stickmen on it. She plays a round of tic-tac-toe against herself and wins, just as she always beats herself at checkers. When the light goes on in the back, Meggy assumes that the ride is over and drops all her money in the coin tray in front of her. Without a word from her or the driver, she leaves the car. She has a bit further to walk, but she can already hear the sounds of the party, the muffled cheering and roaring, the way some people’s laughter can be recognized from a distance. The taxi driver dropped her off too soon, as if he or she knew that Meggy didn’t have enough money on her. She wants to complain, but the cab has long disappeared. It’ll be quite a trek back home, at least on foot, she thinks, and she doesn’t care. So she marches on toward the noise. She pats the inside pocket of her jacket and realizes that she forgot her matches. She tries to light a cigarette with a lighter she finds in the snow. She notices how unhappy she is and that she’s damn near losing her mind. She has to concentrate. She wishes she were drunk. She deserves to be drunk. On the way to the corn silo, there are more and more cigarette butts, champagne bottles, and yellow craters in the snow. She gets in the short line leading to the bouncers. She doesn’t know the people around her, they are younger — graduated this year, or maybe last. They’re returning over the holidays from campuses or military bases, or they still live with their parents. A group of young guys and girls climb out of a car. No way they’re 21, Meggy thinks.

– Year?

asks one of the bouncers.

– Class of ’96.

– Name?

– Corey.

– What’s that again?

– Meggy Corey.

– Nope, doesn’t say that here.

– But I was in that class. Just let me in.

– Your name isn’t on here, young lady.

– Show it to me. Has to be somewhere.

Some punches hit you harder than you think. No matter how many punches you’ve taken to the face, sometimes they hit you like it’s the first time. No matter how hard your shell is, no matter how high your walls are, sometimes, when you don’t expect it, punches hit you like a newborn.

– There. There it is. It says my name there. Fat pig. That’s me.

– Do you have ID?

Someone snickers behind her in line. Meggy turns around and grabs the first best person by the throat.

– I’ll kill you.

– It’s all good, ma’am. Was just a joke, a little joke. Come on now.

And the other bouncer drops a bunch of drink coupons into her hands, secretly. He has never felt so ashamed. He is going to walk off the job. He wants to become a saint. She rides the elevator to the roof of the silo. The music is loud and the night is so thick that Meggy can hardly see the floor. There are patio heaters here and there, small bright dots in green and blue and yellow and red, a lot of red, and white, maybe orange. She recognizes no one and yet she feels as if she knows everyone. Every person in the country. Every story in the country, too. Except one. She goes to the bar and orders a double Widowed Bride from the bartender. She asks for matches and finally lights a cigarette.

– How come everything is always the same?

– Sorry, what?

– Another two Brides.

It doesn’t matter anyway, Meggy thinks to herself. Her left silk stocking is darker and woven more finely than the right one. On closer examination, it looks like the boy in front of her is wearing a parka with a swastika on the shoulder. Bodies and words blend into each other. No knife can ever carve them up again. She is convinced that Benjamin MacNash is arguing with Nataly Hay a few feet away. It looks like he’s winning the argument. His freckles have faded over the years. He’s holding her by the forearm. She turns away from him, and he pulls her back toward him. She blushes, Benjamin pulls Nataly’s chin up to his. He whispers,

– Not everything is that awful, not everything.

Or is that Nataly standing on her own? Apart from the two of them, no one appears to be on the silo. There never was a party. Nataly had tricked her. She lured her into a trap. Meggy freezes for a moment, then their eyes meet. Hadn’t they liked each other? Hadn’t they been friends? Can’t people forget what happened long ago? They are the only survivors on this island. Nataly zeroes in on Meggy, she reaches toward her. To shake her hand? Or is she getting ready to attack? Is that a sword? Nataly is wearing mittens; no one can see that she’s missing a ring finger. Meggy has nothing; she isn’t wearing gloves. Her hands are so ugly. No, those aren’t even hands; she has no hands left. Nataly has mittens. Mittens — why didn’t she think of that? Why had she given up? Meggy doesn’t want to be there anymore, she doesn’t want anyone to see her. She wants to be a dwarf under a magic hat. She turns away, squeezes past dancing and huddling guests toward the toilets, where there is no free stall, and back to the bar. She switches to gin; clear spirits suit her better. She can’t feel her feet anymore. Back to the toilet, she pushes past girls.

– I’ve been waiting for longer!

and locks herself in. She can no longer feel her legs. She takes a pin out of her hair, heats up the tip and presses it into her knee. A drop of blood, no pain. What is she doing here? What did she want? What was the point of it all? No amount of knocking can get me out of this stall. Nothing. No one has power over me. What would Nataly have to say, anyway? Nothing. That someone snatched her baby out of its stroller, that she once gave birth to a stone, that she had fallen in love and fallen in love and fallen in love, and that none of her lovers had survived except for a stripper who now wants to poison her. And then there’s her son. She could have talked about him, the way he looks at her. How he smiles, how his feet taste of apples after he’s had a bath. Meggy wouldn’t have cared. Meggy is at the bar. Only a few minutes until midnight. With her last two coupons, she orders herself and the bartender two gin sodas. The glasses clink.

– To you, my friend and companion, may we never meet again.

She had a good rapport with the bartender; he’s her favorite person in the world right now. Second by second, she slides closer to the edge of the corn silo. She touches the railing and feels her hand locking around it. Single rockets are already shooting up into the sky, leaving colorful scratches on the night ceiling. Someone her age has found a spot next to her.

– You know what they wrote for me? Nothing. My name isn’t on the list. The bouncer didn’t want to let me in, but I told him: class of ’96. Then they showed me the list and I wasn’t on it. I am just not on it. I searched in ’95, I searched in ’97, even checked out ’98 and ’94, but no, I’m not there. They didn’t put me on the list. Nothing. They forgot about me. So I showed the bouncers our graduation photo; I always have it on me, you know, Meggy. I show them how I’m in the second-to-last row, standing there and smiling, maybe not very convincingly, but at least I’m trying. For a few dollars, they let me in. The audacity. The nastiness. Don’t you think? They just forgot about me.

He drinks a sip of beer. He’s smaller than Meggy.

– What was your name again?

– Alfred. Alfred Frederick Klekle, but my friends call me —

– Say again?

– I said: my name is Alfred Frederick Klekle.

– Never heard it.

– Doesn’t ring a bell? Small, shy, not too dumb, not too smart? Sometimes I wore a bow tie — yeah, already back then — but nobody made fun of me for it.

– Sorry, but —

– We had chemistry together. I think we were even in the same math class. I was also at the school newspaper, Meggy. I once shot the photos for an article you wrote. The article about the accident, you remember — the truck driver and the couple. I was with you the whole time, Meggy. Don’t you remember that?

– Alfred. No, hard as I try —

– I was so crazy about you. And, you know, my father says that it’s never wrong to be crazy about the right girl.

– Alfred, you said?

– You really don’t remember?

– I do, I do, I —

– You have no idea.

– The name certainly sounds —

– Really, that’s —

A firecracker explodes in front of their feet, but neither is startled.

– unfortunate.

– I’m sorry.

Alfred looks at her, says nothing.

– So, what are you up to these days?

Meggy isn’t entirely present anymore. It looks like Alfred has no face, just a big lump, blending in and out of itself, multiplying with itself, swirling. Distortions, cuts, layers of wallpaper under layers of wallpaper.

– Do you really want to know, Meggy?

– Yeah, I, yeah, tell me.

Meggy hears high-pitched squeals.

– I work for an insurance company.

The sound of napalm.

– But really, really I want to write screenplays. I wrote one already and I think its really good. It’s about a boy who lives in a small Danish town, right by the water, right by the ocean, right by the wind, how he grows up and loses all hope.

– And then?

– The end.

– You killed Miles.

Meggy registers the high voice and connects it to his face. Everything is clear now. If only she were drunk, but she’s not. She’s lucid, and she sees that he sees that she knows who he is:

– You killed Miles.

Or that he just stands there, flummoxed.

– Who? What are you talking about?

Meggy looks at the railing. It’s low. Voices around her begin counting down from 10. And without a word she pushes Alfred to the edge.

– Meggy, what, I —

He wants to put his arms around her. He wants to cling onto her, to share his warmth, to be with her.

– Let’s skip town. Let’s just disappear. Together.

He tries to hold onto something. He claws his fingers into her. She knocks him off her.

– You killed Miles. It must be you. It could only be you.

Alfred’s balance shifts. Gravity gives him a sharp kiss between the shoulder blades. Meggy knows that she has ceased to exist a long time ago, and another small slip, and Alfred is overwhelmed by sheer panic, a panic so complete that he loses all strength. His face is gray, his eyes black or silver. His lips try to form the word Meggy, maybe family, but they form a different word. She is certain he’s calling her a murderer, and like nothing is stopping her, she gives him another push and he’s gone, falling, weightless, breaking his neck on the cusp of the millennium. And Meggy knows that the earth will float alone in space, that morning will come and the sun will rise, and it will grow colder every day, and that the shining dot in the sky will get smaller until it disappears into a never-ending night. She feels the hands of all the people who have kept an eye on her, all the people who have been with her on her journey, how they hold her tight and safe, and she looks down and the corpse has disappeared or is bleeding away or is in a place beyond the reach of words. And she stands across from them and sees all their faces. They nod and smile, their teeth white as paper.