Chapter One

Nordeen was right to send me. I feel three heartbeats at the ridges of the ancient crater we’re resting in. Snipers. I don’t know for sure, but their hearts are tense and their trigger fingers twitchy. As soon as I got out of the car their right eyes all zoomed in on something. If they’re not snipers then they’re one-eyed caffeine freaks with muscular dystrophy in their fingers. At least they’re smart enough to know not to shoot me right away. Their boy, my date, Omar, wants what we have. If it’s not in the car and they shoot us, they’re shit out of luck.

“Stay in the car, no matter what,” I say, leaning into the passenger side of the twelve-year-old Mercedes-Benz that has dragged me to this ancient and massive hole in the ground. The meteor that crashed here centuries ago is as cold as Fou-Fou’s response to my command. His steady sub-Saharan heartbeat is the only answer I get from the 240-pound menace. He’ll play it smart. Always does. The kid in the back is who I’m really speaking to. Nineteen, can’t pee straight, and ready to scrap, the native Moroccan looks more spooked than ready. “Understand?” I bark at him in his native Berber instead of the usual French patois we play with.

“I got your back.” He says. His blood pressure is pumping a steady drum and bass beat. His rank breath is stinking up the car. I guess his family had the Third World dental plan: eat for a month or get one of your children’s teeth fixed. I know which one his parents chose. Maybe when we’re done with all of this, I’ll help him.

“Get my back by staying in the fucking car, man. Keep with the package until I call for you. Yes?”

“Yes. Yes. But if that fucker Omar starts anything . . .”

“I’ll finish it.” I barely get the words out before two heartbeats enter the gully from the opposite side. Before I get up I close my eyes. I envision the three ridge heartbeats. They’ve been waiting for this a long time. Too long. They’re tired. It doesn’t take much to nudge them into sleep. It takes a little more effort to put them into the REM state needed so that they’ll stay down, so I release the brain’s native marijuana, anandamide, into their minds in P-Funk-size quantities. With one person it would have been easy. Three folks, far away, hurt a little. Knew it would. That’s why I didn’t bother to use my abilities to warm myself up. I’ve got limits just like everyone else.

I read bodies the way pretentious, East Coast Americans read the New Yorker. With a little focus, I can manipulate my body and others’ on a molecular level. With a lot of focus, I can push organs and whole biological systems around. But if I do it too much, I get tired and hungry. I’ve got skills. What I don’t have is patience.

“Taggert.” Hate the way Omar says my name. Hate the way he slams his fucking door all the time. Hate the way his heart is always skipping like it’s lying. Hate the way he smells. Hate his Third World breath as I give him the mandatory three kisses business partners expect in this part of the world. Hate this fucking man.

“You’re late.”

“Don’t be mad, Taggert. These things take time.”

“What things?” His heartbeat is as erratic as I expected. He thinks he’s got us in a trap. It’s not the first time someone has thought that.

“Finances, my friend. We have many investors. Some are not so much forthcoming with the funds as you asked. . . .” His bad English irks me almost as much as this crap-ass play.

“I didn’t ask for anything. You know who I represent, and he doesn’t ask for anything. You don’t got the funds, we don’t have any drama. We’ll take our product back to Maximus and—”

“You are so harsh, Taggert. This is not Marseilles, this is Morocco. You must . . .” I open my jacket quickly and brace myself against the cold mountain air. Omar’s new trigger boy is as twitched as my foul- mouth nineteen-year-old. Either that or he really has no idea who I represent; he actually palms his .45. Omar—who has sense enough to know what a bad play that would be—tells him to calm down with a wave of his hand. For my part I just hold up the razor-blade necklace my boss gave me.

“Razor-neck crew,” I say in the hill language of the Berbers. “That’s who you’re dealing with. This ain’t the medina. This should be a simple exchange. It’s not. I’m not in a position to negotiate and neither are you. So we back out of this. Let our betters talk to each other and make another meet time. That’s the smartest play for you.”

“Hey, French boy! How about you don’t tell me what the smart play is?” Omar shouts like he owns something. I don’t know who told him I was from Marseilles, but I’ve never tried to change his mind. I do know why he’s so mad. At five-three he’s got the Napoleon complex bad. Anytime anyone tells him what he can’t do, it’s like setting off a firecracker. I didn’t do it on purpose, but I’ll be damned if I let some midget with an attitude and nothing but new booty for backup bark at me.

“How about you fuck the dumb shit, you son of a maggot-ridden whore, and make your move. Come on, you want to pull something. Want to try and jack the shipment? Make your play!” I open my arms wide and make a grand circle, inviting the unconscious snipers to take their shots. Halfway through it occurs to me that there might be more than three snipers, or that the new booty might be dumb enough to shoot one of the razor-neck crew in the back even with God knows who still hiding in the car. Luckily, I make my round with no shots fired. Omar’s face finally reflects what his pulse has been telling me all along. He’s scared shitless. I march up close, a nose hair away, before I start speaking again. At the same time I’ve increased the pressure on the new booty’s bladder three times over. He’s afraid to move for pissing himself.

“This is your play, ain’t it, Omar? Your bosses don’t know anything about this, do they?”

“Can you forgive your brother for—” I crack him on the jaw hard with my fist. Before he reaches the ground my elbow gets a piece in, too. Now that he’s pissed himself, the new booty feels totally ineffective, even with the .45 in his hand. Who am I to tell him he’s wrong?

“You are not my brother.” It’s a chore to keep it French. That’s how I know I’m mad. I only want to speak English when I’m pissed off. “Don’t ever let those words pass your lips again.” I look up quickly at the new booty. He almost jumps. “Go get what cash you brought. Now.” Less than a minute later, a briefcase with six hundred thousand euros is at my feet and the smell of piss has invaded my nostrils. This guy needs to drink more water.

“So we can do the deal?” Omar asks, still trying to salvage something.

“You’re short. For every day we have to wait for full payment, it’s ten percent marked on. We hold on to the product until then. If it’s over a week, we start selling it off, ten percent at a time, to your competitors, and you still owe for the full amount.”

“Taggert.” He tries to think of some way to convince me to do something else but then realizes I’m holding all the cards. To reward the comprehension I throw him a handkerchief.

“Your betters won’t be mad at you for trying to trick us. That’s the name of the game. But it was that you didn’t have a Plan B. You might lose a finger or thumb or something because you didn’t have a way to cut your losses and just do the damn thing the way it’s supposed to be done. Don’t take it personal. Just the cost of doing business.”

My back’s to them and I’m heading to the car. Neither one of them will move on me. Omar is dialing right now, trying to ring in on his snipers. I can “feel” a phone vibrating in one of their pockets now. Doesn’t matter. We got the money and held the hashish. Plus we didn’t leave any bodies behind. Nordeen will be as happy as he gets.

Chapter Two

I wake to the smell of fish, and I know I’m home. Biya, or Al Hoceima, isn’t too far from us, but the underground regiment I live with likes to stay away from there. Most of our business goes through that port, which makes it better to not be seen anywhere near by. I leave Fou-Fou in charge of the money and the kid in charge of the hash. Kif, or hash, in the Rif mountains is like water in the ocean. There’s no value in it. Six hundred thousand euros, however, is something most people in Morocco can’t even imagine. I don’t know if Fou-Fou has ever imagined it, but his heartbeat doesn’t change. I trust him to get it to the boss. For the past six years I’ve been living here. My passport works for Nordeen. In exchange I get a nice, three-bedroom, sky-blue house with a rooftop that overlooks the ocean, and peace. By peace I mean I get enough cash to buy anything I want, a beautiful young girl to clean my apartment twice a week, cooked meals, good friends, and even vacation when I want it. As I ascend my ocean-colored stone steps into my spot I can’t help but smile a little bit. This home has been a long time coming. I’m glad that it feels like a place to come home to. I don’t have a door. Everyone here knows who I work for. They know who I am. At least they think they do—and even that reputation is enough to keep people out. Still, it’s a comfort to come home and find a box filled with “supplies’ from Spain. It’s mostly American comics, chocolate, and books I’d ordered online. I’m already on the roof reading and drinking some tea when I see something that doesn’t belong. A voice recorder. The type that records onto chips, with no tape. It’s Suleiman’s. He’s recorded something for me, despite the fact that he lives a two-minute walk away. Suddenly my chocolate doesn’t taste so sweet. There’s an ugly pit in my stomach. It hurts as it expands. There’s only one way to get it to shrink. I have to listen. I don’t want to. I can tell already. Fuck.

“I’m calling.” I’m gasping for air as I hear the voice. “You said to call if I ever needed you. You said you’d come. You said if I used this number then to not use my name and that you’d find me. Find me. I need you. I need you now.”

Yasmine. Damn.

———

The second person like me I ever met was in college. Her name was Yasmine Petalas. A year older than me, and she was gorgeous. If she ever weighed more than 110 pounds I never saw it or felt it. She stood a good four inches shorter than me but could bring down the house with her lungs. Her British-born, Ugandan mother gave her excellent bronzed skin while some recessive gene from her Greek father gave her deep, red, long, straight hair. I knew her for a year before she even knew my name. When I say I fell in love with her, don’t understand it as some fantasy made flesh, or some adolescent reciprocal fascination. I would have died for her. She says she needs help, and if I’m the man I want to be then I’m dropping everything and getting on the first thing steaming out of Biya. But I am not that man. Before I leave, think of leaving, I have to get Nordeen’s permission.

———

Suleiman is Nordeen’s right-hand man. He knows Nordeen and I have a special relationship but doesn’t know what it’s based on. Nordeen likes it that way. Still, I show the man respect by never meeting with the big boss until I clear with Sully first. Otherwise he may think I’m making a play for his spot, which I am most definitely not.

Nordeen is like me. I read bodies but I’m not exactly sure what he can do. I know for sure that he can always tell when someone is lying to him. It’s a great talent for an international drug dealer, and a fucking annoying trait in a boss. But even that’s not Mr. Maximus’s real power.

In comics there’s this bit character called the Question. He’s got no face, and no powers. He’s kind of like a brokeass Batman without the Robin. I like him because of the concept of a man with no face being called the Question. It’s good in comics. It’s bad in your boss. No one knows where he’s from. Not me, not Suleiman or any of the other fifteen people he’s got working for him. Maybe Fou-Fou knows, but he’s not talking. One night we all got drunk in Segovia and tried to piece together the bits of our mystery leader. All we got was a colossal-sized riddle. He won’t leave Morocco anymore, but has bank accounts, which have to be set up in person, in his name in the U.A.E, the Cayman Islands, Scotland, and South Africa. All the royalty of Malaysia sends him birthday cards, all at different times of the year. At least five women claim to be his first daughter, he has no sons, and his grandchildren range in age from six months to thirty-five years old. We’ve never seen any of his wives. His English, French, and Berber tongues are incredible, but he massacres Arabic as though it were a heathen in the noose of the Lord. Yet he’s a devout Muslim. By the end of the night of speculation, I was more fearful of the man than I had ever been before.

“Suleiman.” I find him with his family, his wife, and his two children ages three and seven. His tastes lean toward the moderate: not a lot of foreign products in the house aside from the expansive television. Minus the drug running, and Suleiman would be the perfect model for the modern Morocco. I take my shoes off before entering his house and wave my hand at his wife, letting her know it’s OK to keep the veil down.

“Taggert, say hello to my children,” Suleiman commands. He thinks I’m from London so he speaks with a fake Cockney accent. He wants his children to speak English, so I’m put through this cross-generational farce every time I come by. I hate children. Luckily, I don’t have to tolerate them for much longer than it takes Suleiman’s wife to make the customary tea. We are left in the kitchen alone.

“Was Omar so bad?” he says, examining the scowl on my face.

“He tried to swindle. The boss will have to talk to his people; don’t be surprised if the guy comes up missing,” I say in rapid-fire Arabic only to be interrupted by Suleiman’s brief but fervent prayer for the idiot’s soul. The rumor goes that Suleiman used to be in training a mullah before the boss got a hold of him. “This isn’t about that.”

I pull out the recorder and slide it back to him. Already erased. Sully looks at it suspiciously, then brings his long-scanning, desert eyes up to meet mine. “You asked me to check it once a month when you first came to us. But we haven’t used that safe house for a few months now.”

“I’m not mad,” I lie. “I just want to know if you played it for anyone else.” Has he told Nordeen?

“I’ve only been home twenty minutes. I haven’t even had time to see the Old Man yet,” he says slowly.

“If it’s OK with you, I’d like to tell him about it myself.”

“Can I help?” I forgot that Suleiman likes me. His wife has a hard time bringing babies to term. She’s lost more than she has. I lied and told her of a tea that would help. In truth I just worked with her body. That’s the only reason they have the three-year-old. Suleiman thinks he owes me for the tea. But I don’t delude myself about his loyalties. He will check to see if I’ve told Nordeen.

“If it comes to it, yes. But for now let me see what the boss says.”

Chapter Three

Nordeen Maximus lives in the biggest house in the city, the closest to the beach. We can almost see Italy from his roof. Everyone here hangs out on their rooftops looking someplace else: Europe, a ship leaving for the States, or places they can’t see. Everyone wants to get away from here. Everyone but Nordeen. He hates the cold air on his naked skin with the vitriol of a mongoose in a cobra’s nest. Most people think he’s frail because on those rare occasions he leaves the house he’s always bundled up in layers of Berber sweaters and jackets. That’s the way he likes it, people underestimating him.

———

I never announce myself in his presence. He hates it. I just walk in to his huge living room and sit in a corner. If he’s not talking to someone else he’s either watching TV or reading. Interruptions cause this blind irritation to rise in him; even to me they come out of the blue. His heart rate doesn’t increase, his breathing remains steady, his eyes don’t even twitch. He just yells with a fury my brother could only muster when he was truly afraid. Sometimes I love Nordeen and sometimes I wish he’d just die. I’ve yet to find a subject that he doesn’t know nearly everything about, including myself. But he takes the whole “knowledge is power” thing to phenomenal heights. It doesn’t make sense to ask the man for anything without giving something in return. Not if you’ve grown accustomed to a fully functioning reproductive system, that is. He is brilliant and deadly, a combination often hard to like. But I always respect him.

An Al Hoceima whore plays housewife and offers me tea before scampering into the back room. He’s always got a parade of them. As he reclines on his floor pillows with shirt proudly open I can almost see why. I don’t know how old he is, but he looks to be able to give the nineteen-year-old a challenge. The tea I use like a prop, downing it quickly and healing my scalded throat before the shock has time to set in. It’s the type of subtle move only he’ll notice.

“You almost broke Omar’s jaw for mentioning your brother,” he says in the Rif tongue, and I’m mad. Of course he wants to talk business first. I’m gonna sidestep it, then remember he knows when I’m lying.

“He had three men on a ridge for an ambush.” True. I’ve never told him about my brother.

“You handled them?” A question. Luckily I can answer without lying.

“Put them to sleep right before he came. I needed to give him something to know me by. If I used my . . . thing, in that scenario I’d have to . . .”

“The youngster.” He smiles, finally putting down the French fashion magazine he was reading. “How’d he fare?”

“Stupid and young. But followed directions well enough. We’d both appreciate any dental care he could get. Pretty sure the Geneva Conventions outlawed that breath.” My boss laughs, and I know I’m not in the doghouse for the arrangement I’d reached with Omar.

“I doubt we’ll see Omar again. The deal’s gone sour with his people. But the parting gift of the cash was appreciated. Now, what’s this recording all about?”

“I’m asking for permission to take the razor off temporarily.” I don’t dare meet his eyes when I ask. Membership in the razor-neck crew is for life. We all have small nicks and scratches on our breastbones from where the razor scrapes our chest. They’re never to be taken off. Even when we’re having sex. I’m scared shitless that somehow he knows whenever we even think about trying to take them off.

“Ya’llah.” If that’s all the mangled Arabic I get in this consultation I might make it out of Morocco. But I know enough of my boss to know that if he ever decides I need to go, it won’t be him that’ll do it. He owes me too much.

“Tell me about it.” He says. Good. Not a question.

“I don’t know what it is. Maybe something minor, but I doubt it. In any case, it predates my association with you and the crew. I don’t want to track mud through your house.” I use French because it sounds prettier. He knows I’m not French and appreciates the sentiment.

“What will you do?”

“Find the sender. Do what I can. Get back to my life here as soon as possible.” All truth. I’m not gone yet and already I’m missing my house—my fried-fish dinners every night, tea on Suleiman’s porch, fantasies about Fou-Fou’s past. All of it. I don’t want my world to change. I’m hating Yasmine right now. But she dialed a number I swore she’d never use.

“The one who called. She is like us?” The question I was hoping he wouldn’t ask. There’s no way out of it.

“Yes.” This time I’m looking him in his eyes. Any more questions about Yasmine and I’m out the door and dodging bullets. Nordeen has an unusual obsession with people like us. I’ve never met anyone else who knows more about people with our type of abilities. I don’t want to know how he came to his knowledge. But he’s not getting any more from me about Yasmine than the sound of her voice and that she’s got power.

“Keep the razor on,” he says with no change in his face. “Fou-Fou will give you sixty thousand euros from the take. Call back if you need more.” He beckons me close, and I’m scared. I’ve healed him three times from lethal gunshot wounds. Those were the only times I was allowed to touch him. I keep low, making sure my head is never higher than his. I’m expecting a hand to kiss; his deceptively powerful arms embrace my body. Even so, I still can’t see him or feel him like I do everyone else. It’s like hugging a ghost.

“Remember, what we have is rare.” I realize he’s speaking English in that no-accent way he does when he’s trying to show me compassion. “People like us tend to stay away from each other.” I nod. I’m like a cat being held by a kid known to abuse animals. I can’t give him any reason to be pissed at me or he’ll kill me. I don’t know how he’ll do it, but it’ll be bloody and sadistic. I know because I’ve been his instrument for such tortures in the past, waiting in shadows and silence for him to finish an embrace just like this before I struck.

“But before you go”—Nordeen breaks his lips apart in an attempt to smile and reclines back to his pillows—“tell me about your brother.”

Fifteen muscles in my back spasm, arguing the pros and cons of flight and fight until I consciously remind my body that neither is truly an option. This is Nordeen at his worst, picking at my scabs. And I’ve just asked for a favor and been given finance and permission for it. All he requires is a story. By the ancient rules of friendship and service, Nordeen is in his rights to hear the whole story. I’m too tired, physically and emotionally, to think of any way out of this. So I speak the truth.

“My brother was like us,” I say and wait for a response. Nordeen takes a drag from a nearby hookah. “Only, he could push things with his mind. Make things move. He was strong with his power but weak in morality. I . . . he was four years older than me. I idolized him. Despite what he did to my family. . . .”

“What did he do?” Nordeen asks with the voice of a sadistic psychotherapist.

“He was a bully. My father couldn’t stand against him and wouldn’t report to anyone what my brother could do. My mother was sick. Depressed. She spent her days washing down Thorazine and Seconal with gin and tonics. But it wasn’t just my parents that suffered. The whole town quietly cowered in front of my brother.”

“But you didn’t?”

“I did!” I say, realizing I’m way too excited by what I’m saying. “I cowered until he ignored me. Then I tried reintroducing myself into his vision, making myself useful. But I had nothing to offer until the day he ‘pushed’ me out of the second-story window of our house. I broke my arm, then instinctively healed it. He felt it, felt me use my power, and became interested in me.” I pause, hoping it’s enough. Another damn drag off his hookah, and he’s still waiting for more.

“He let me follow him around for a few years. The understanding was simple: I healed him and only him from whatever hurts his bullying got him, and I would get his discards—money, girls, drugs, whatever. None of that mattered. I . . . he let me hang out with him. His company was the biggest prize. At fifteen, I thought I was on top of the world—”

“Until you healed your mother?” Nordeen interrupts me with a truth I’ve never told him. I know what it feels like when someone picks up a stray thought from my brain: this is not that. I can’t get bogged down wondering how Nordeen knows. He does.

“Yes. It was a tumor resting in her brain, causing pain and confusion. I didn’t mean to go against my brother. It was just an instinctual healing once I had cultivated my eyes to see illness. The tumor was the size of a quarter and took five minutes to dissipate. My mother’s tongue-lashing afterward took longer.”

“She chastised you for being morally weak,” Nordeen says looking into the corner of nowhere, eyes now milky white, voice now the sound of a whale’s cry. “She was disgusted that her womb could produce such bastards, such powerful creatures incapable of compassion.” His voice changes, as does the air in the room. My mother’s voice comes from his mouth. “Shut up. You bully. You . . . my mind is finally clear. I don’t understand any of this. But I know bad, wrong, when I see it. I could barely see for the pain I was in every half an hour for . . . years. But even in that state I knew evil when I saw it. Your brother is definitely evil. But you are not exempt, Taggert. Do you hear me?”

He waits until I wipe the tears from my face before silently demanding I go on. “She went out on her own for the first time in about ten years that day. My dad, a military man, was at the base. I waited in the dark until my brother got home, the whole time breaking and healing my bones, compacting them to be as dense as they could get. I grew extra layers of skin around my knees, knuckles, neck, anywhere my body thought calluses could grow. I hardened my body. And when my brother came home I set about beating him. I punched and kicked and battered him while he threw every part of the house at me. But as quick as he wounded me, I healed and was back on him. In his final fit of rage he brought the house down on both of us.”

“He survived.” Nordeen speaks. Knowing, not asking.

“Yes, but it takes a team of specialists to teach him how to tie his shoes each day. I caused permanent brain damage.” Nordeen nods, giving me tacit permission to leave. I hear his closing sentiment as I walk through his door.

“People like us tend to stay away from each other for good reason, Taggert.”

———

I’m out the house and I’m still alive. What does it mean? Nothing. Only that he doesn’t care if Suleiman knows that he wants me dead. Most likely he’ll have Suleiman do the deed. If not him then the stink mouthed kid. Doesn’t matter. If they come, I’ll feel them. And if they come I’ll kill them. I’ll have to.

My house feels less secure now. The walls are just as sturdy. There’s food in the fridge. I could watch satellite TV if I wanted. The crew got it as a gift for me last year. I try to read comics. I try and smoke the product that keeps us all fed. Nothing. I even think about drinking. I could ride into Al Hoceima and hit one of the hotels. Or one of the local whores, even. It wouldn’t be the first time, just something I haven’t done in a few years. But alcohol just makes it harder for me to use my power. And whores, now they just make me sad. It’s too late to get on the road now, even if I wanted to. And with sixty thousand euros in my pocket, I don’t even need to pack. I need to just relax in my home, say good-bye to it. I’ll need lots of sleep for whatever comes next, and this is the only place I know I can rest well. So I’ll sleep because I won’t be back here for a while.

———

The sun came before I realized the moon had left. All hopes of sleep were dashed by memories. And thanks to Nordeen, my memories of Yasmine were clashing with my memories of my brother. Both people like me, but both rejected me. Maybe both for valid reasons. Maybe my brother rejected me because somewhere he knew our relationship had to come down to some serious sibling rivalry. And maybe Yasmine knew I was a freak all along.

Suleiman calls ten minutes after my girl comes through with some apricots, juice, and nuts for breakfast. He lets me know Fou-Fou just dropped off a cash card for me, along with a set of keys. He’s asking where he’s supposed to take me. If Nordeen is setting me up, he’s doing a lot to make sure I don’t suspect it. I tell the right-hand man to grub with his family and then pick me up when he’s ready.

We’re about twenty minutes away from Europe. But it’s a different type of Europe. It’s filled with hash and illegal immigrants. I could get to Yasmine that way, but then I’m under the radar and still identifiable as Nordeen’s. So I take my breakfast slow and then go to the drawer I never use. The drawer from my past, in the closet. It holds the last Italian suit I ever bought and my American passport, the real one. I put both of them on, and it feels like I’m regressing a good ten years. Yasmine better be in real trouble.

———

Suleiman enters my house with a pulse that’s pounding so hard I’m thinking I’m hearing it with my ears. I can imagine his thought process. Maybe Omar made some deal that required Suleiman’s head and maybe I was the one who had to do it. It’s that kind of thinking that makes him Nordeen’s Number 1.

“How do I look?” I ask, showing him open hands as soon as he comes in. It relaxes him somewhat.

“Like a bullshit Frenchie.” He’s never seen me in civilian gear. “What’s the plan?”

“I’ve got to catch a flight from Fez.”

“And then?” Like I know.

———

I don’t even pretend to sleep until I’m installed on the plane. It’s less than an hour flight to Marseilles, but it feels like another planet. Planet Old Life.

———

From The Liminal People, by Ayize Jama-Everett. Published in trade paperback and ebook by Small Beer Press in December 2011.

The Value of X

“Awright,” said Mrs. Reilly to her eleventh-grade algebra class, “if Y equals thirty-six, who can tell me what X equals?”

Surveying the class slumped in their desks, she could not blame them for their apathy. Though it was only April, the weather was already hinting at another brutal New Orleans summer. For public schools to be without air conditioning in 1990 was a disgrace, but such things were usual in this little corner of the United States that might be more properly called part of the Third World. Mrs. Reilly suddenly felt hopeless and decided to call on her one dependable student. “Gary?”

But this time there was no answer.

“Gary Stubbs? Are you paying attention?”

Gary Stubbs, who in another couple of years would be known to one and all as G-man, didn’t even glance her way. He was a tall, rangy sixteen-year-old with eyes so weak and light-sensitive that he liked to wear dark glasses in class when he could get away with it. Mrs. Reilly did not let him get away with it, and today he wore a regular pair of thick spectacles that only somewhat camouflaged his good looks. Thanks to the clear lenses, she could see where his eyes were aimed. He wasn’t looking at Mrs. Reilly or at the blackboard. He appeared to be staring at his best friend, John Rickey, an indifferent math student who sat across the aisle a few rows ahead of him.

“Gary,” she said again. Some of the other students laughed, but Gary’s gaze never wavered. Magnified behind his glasses, his eyes were soft, almost dreamy. Maybe he wasn’t looking at John Rickey at all. Maybe he was just daydreaming about some girl. He looked very much like a boy in love.
Mrs. Reilly walked to his desk and rapped on it with her knuckles. She expected him to jump, but he only blinked rather slowly, then looked up at her. “Sorry, Mrs. R,” he said. “I kinda forgot where I was for a minute.”

She pointed at the problem on the board. Gary squinted at it, then said, “X equals six.”

He really was an excellent student, and Mrs. Reilly decided to let the matter slide. “Try to pay closer attention,” she said, returning to the front of the room.

Gary looked at the open algebra textbook in front of him. He wasn’t even on the right page—they’d finished with triangles a month ago. Usually he liked math pretty well. Where had his mind been? No, scratch that; he knew where it had been. He flipped to the next chapter and tried to focus on the blackboard. His face felt hot. In another month this classroom would be a furnace. Now it was just warm, tropical … languorous. He found his gaze returning to Rickey’s profile, to his straight nose and strong chin, to the longish light brown hair at the back of his neck. He imagined running his fingers through that hair, imagined putting his mouth there, and he shuddered a little. It was so bad. Every day he sat here and had these thoughts, and every day he hung out with Rickey for hours and hours after school and tried not to show any sign that he was having them. He couldn’t quite believe that Rickey would hate him if he knew, but that was only because he couldn’t conceive of Rickey ever hating him. They’d been best friends since fourth grade. Why was he thinking such things now?

Mrs. Reilly was writing on the blackboard, her back to the class. Rickey turned to look at his friend. Gary wasn’t sure whether the thoughts he’d been having could be seen on his face. He was afraid they could, because Rickey’s eyes widened as they met his. Rickey didn’t look mad, though, only a bit puzzled. Then he smiled. It was a gorgeous, heart-lifting smile, and Gary knew he wasn’t the only one who thought so; adults were always remarking on what a beautiful smile Rickey had. It transformed his already handsome face and lit up his blue-green eyes. You couldn’t help smiling back, and Gary did.

Rickey raised one eyebrow. With the semi-telepathy they’d developed from spending so much time together over the years, Gary understood its message: What’s with you today?

He shrugged, hooked a finger into the collar of his shirt: Don’t know. Hot in here.

Rickey mimed a scrubbing motion, one hand against the other: You want to go wash dishes later? They didn’t have regular jobs, but the owner of a greasy-spoon diner near the school would sometimes pay them a few bucks an hour to work off the clock.

Gary made a little seesawing motion with his hand: Maybe.

“John Rickey!” said Mrs. Reilly, and Rickey swiveled back around in his seat. He couldn’t get away with woolgathering like Gary could; he never knew the value of X.

——

“Sorry, kids,” said Sal Keller. “I ain’t got no work for you today.” Sal had owned the Feed-U Diner in the heart of the Lower Ninth Ward for twenty-three years, and had been cooking there for seven years before that. In all this time, no one could remember seeing him without his dirty white apron or the cigar (currently unlit) that jutted out of his stubble-ringed mouth. He spoke in a gritty baritone that even the bums who frequented the Feed-U didn’t dare argue with.

“We’ll check back tomorrow,” Rickey said.

“You do that,” Sal agreed. He sounded sarcastic, but that was pretty much his normal tone of voice. “Probably I’ll letcha take over the grill tomorrow.”

“Really?” said Rickey eagerly. He was always bugging Sal to give him a crack at the grill.

“Hell, no. Young kid like you, be liable to burn the burgers, bust the yolks on the sunny-side-up, God knows what. Working the grill takes a talent.”

“I got a talent.”

“You got a talent for scrubbing grease out my pots. Come back by tomorrow—if I don’t hear no more of this smart talk, I might have some work for you.”

They left the diner, rode the city bus down St. Claude Avenue, and walked to Rickey’s house near the corner of Tricou and Royal Streets. Rickey’s mother had left a long list of chores under the sugar bowl. The list ended with the words “Fix Supper”—she was a horrible cook, and Rickey was getting to be a pretty good one. Gary offered to help with the chores, but when Rickey told him not to worry about it, he didn’t insist. Truth be told, he wanted to get off on his own and think about things.

His house was only a few blocks away from Rickey’s, over on Delery near the Jackson Barracks prison complex, so he took a roundabout way home. There was never much chance of being alone in the Stubbs household. Gary was the youngest of six children. The older ones had moved out, but last year his second-oldest sister had left her husband and moved back home with her two little kids. It was basically a happy place, but it was kind of a madhouse.

Rickey was an only child whose parents had divorced years ago, so now it was just Rickey and his mom living in the house on Tricou. Gary had always been glad of the refuge. He still was, but lately he felt a little weird at Rickey’s place. Hanging out in Rickey’s room, sitting on Rickey’s bed, made it almost impossible to control these thoughts he’d been having. The last couple of times Rickey had invited him to sleep over, Gary had said no. He didn’t want to hurt Rickey’s feelings, but he’d gotten to the point where he could no longer stand sleeping on a pile of quilts on the floor, listening to Rickey’s breathing, wondering if Rickey was really asleep, wondering what would happen if he just crawled into bed—

Well, this wasn’t helping. He shook his head and quickened his pace on the uneven sidewalk. He needed to keep a better eye on his surroundings anyway. The Ninth Ward wasn’t as dangerous as people elsewhere in the city believed it to be, but when it started to get dark, you had to watch your back. Particularly if you were a scrawny white kid with Coke-bottle glasses, you had to watch your back.
He glanced at the shabby old houses around him, Victorian gingerbread cottages, camelbacks, doubles. Some were decorated with rusting wrought ironwork, some with Christmas lights even though it was April. One house he’d admired since he was very small had shards of colored tile pressed into the cement stoop, forming an intricate design. People who didn’t live here only seemed able to see the trash on the street and the possibility that somebody might ride up on a bike, smash your head open, and steal your wallet. They felt safe in their big Uptown houses and Metairie condo-warrens, but Gary thought his neighborhood was a lot more interesting than Metairie, not to mention friendlier. Everyone here smiled and spoke to you. He’d never seen strangers smiling at each other in the suburbs.

He wouldn’t mind living Uptown, though, someday. He and Rickey could get one of those little shotgun houses near the river; the rent was cheap and they’d only need a one-bedroom place …

Damn. The thing just kept sneaking up on him. Thinking about it rationally didn’t help; giving it free rein always exhausted him; trying not to think about it was about as effective as willing himself to have 20/20 vision. So what was he supposed to do?

He’d always known, in a rather vague and purposeless way, that he liked boys. He’d learned to hide it early on, too: growing up in a tough neighborhood, in a Catholic family, you just didn’t tell anybody that you had a crush on Han Solo or Michael Jordan. He’d even hidden it from Rickey, from whom he’d never hidden anything else. Every kid they knew thought fags were gross; how could he dare to think Rickey might be any different? The height of devastating wit was to accuse another kid of going to a gaybar in the French Quarter—that was how they said it, gaybar, as if it were one word. Insults like homo, queer, and the strangely popular doughnut-puncher had little to do with the perceived sexual habits of the insulted; they worked because that was the worst thing a boy could be. Rickey never said shit like that, but then Rickey had a smart mouth and seldom stooped to garden-variety epithets.

Thinking about it before, when he had done so at all, Gary had told himself he would deal with his sexuality at some unspecified time in the years ahead. His peaceful soul counseled him to watch and wait. He had no taste for conflict; Rickey was the shit-disturber of the pair. Once he got out of school and didn’t have to face the same bunch of people every day, he would figure out what to do. He might even go to one of those gaybars—not necessarily looking for anything, just to see what went on there. When he was still only a theoretical queer, he hadn’t given that much thought to his future.

But his theoretical days were gone—forever, he was pretty sure. There was that line you could only cross once, the line between trying to imagine a thing—in this case, a touch that would thrill every nerve in your body—and actually feeling it. Gary knew it was laughable that he should feel he had crossed that line, because nothing out of the ordinary had even happened. Nevertheless, he was very conscious of the moment he had crossed it.

The thing had happened after they finished work at the Feed-U one day. They had gotten off the bus and were sprinting toward Rickey’s house, excited because of the money in their pockets or maybe just galvanized by one of the last cool spring evenings before another long summer set in. When their feet hit the grass of a little corner park (really just a well-kept vacant lot) near Rickey’s house, Rickey ran up behind Gary and clamped an arm around his neck, pretending to throttle him. It was just horsing around, something they’d done a million times before. Being a little taller, Gary usually leaned forward, lifting Rickey’s feet off the ground until Rickey let go. This time a shock went through him, a powerful wave that was more than mere sensation but too primitive to be called emotion. It was as if two things, previously incompatible, had meshed to form a perfect design: he felt Rickey’s familiar, playful touch, but all at once he was also conscious of another body touching his, a smooth, strong, warm-skinned body that had him securely in its arms, and he didn’t want it to let go.

The feeling ended up somewhere in the pit of his stomach, twisting there in a way that was sort of pleasurable but intense enough to edge toward pain. Instead of leaning forward and pulling Rickey’s feet off the ground, he pretended to stumble and fall, dragging them both down but managing to hide his sudden, appalling boner.

“Dude!” Rickey had said, climbing off him and trying to help him up. “Sorry about that. You OK?”

“Just lemme lay here a second,” Gary had mumbled into the hot grass, wondering if he’d ever be able to get up without giving the whole neighborhood an eyeful of his tented pants.

He’d thought maybe it was just one of those hormone things. His mother was always cracking jokes about hormones, about how foolish they would make him act once he started liking girls. In the past year or so these jokes had taken on a slightly desperate quality. Gary didn’t understand exactly what hormones were, but he gathered that they had to do with sex. Maybe they would have caused him to feel that way if any guy touched him, and he’d just felt it with Rickey because he was around Rickey more than anybody else. But he couldn’t convince himself. He felt that way the next time Rickey jumped on his back. He felt it when Rickey slung a casual arm around his shoulders as they ambled through the grocery store, one of the places they liked to go to escape the afternoon heat. He felt sad all the time. Eventually, certain that he would betray himself, he began shying away from Rickey’s touch. He did this until he saw the puzzled hurt in Rickey’s eyes, and he couldn’t stand that, so he started forcing himself to think of basketball statistics every time Rickey’s elbow so much as brushed his. Pete Maravich had had a career high of 68 points playing against the New York Knicks. Karl Malone had averaged 27.7 points per game last season. That kind of thing.

It worked, sort of. At any rate, he didn’t have to fling himself to the ground again. But now he spent countless hours wondering if the things he thought about before he went to sleep at night, when basketball stats were far from his mind, could ever come true. Was he crazy to think, sometimes, that Rickey might want to be with him? Was anything really there, or was it just wishful thinking?

Only negatives gave him hope. Rickey didn’t talk about fags, homos, or doughnut-punchers. Rickey had never had a girlfriend even though he was unquestionably a good-looking kid. That might have been because most of the girls they went to school with weren’t interested in white boys, but Gary wondered. Unlike the other boys they knew, who were always bullshitting about pussy they’d had or pussy they’d like to have, Rickey didn’t talk about girls. He didn’t talk about boys either, but of course you couldn’t do that even if you wanted to.

Gary rounded the corner of his block and saw his father sitting on the stoop. That was nothing unusual; only a couple of rooms in their big old clapboard house were air-conditioned, and the family often sat outside as twilight fell. It wasn’t the safest habit in the world, but as Elmer Stubbs was fond of saying, you couldn’t let the criminals control your life.

“Hey, Daddy,” he said.

“Hey, Gary. How you doing? Y’all worked at the diner today?”

“Nuh-uh. Sal didn’t have anything for us to do.”

“Where you been, then?”

“Just over by Rickey’s.”

“You seen his momma?”

“She wasn’t home yet.”

“She’s usually home when y’all over there, ain’t she?”

“Not always,” said Gary, wondering at all the questions. “You know she does the books for Lemoyne’s Restaurant. She gets home around six most days, I guess.”

“Huh,” said Elmer, and leaned back on the stoop to light a cigarette. The flaring lighter illuminated his pale blue Irish eyes and picked out reddish highlights in his close-cropped brown hair. For a New Orleanian, Elmer Stubbs was a skinny man. He had wed Mary Rose Bonano, a girl from one of the city’s old Sicilian families, and their first five children had stocky builds, glossy black hair, and a touch of olive in their complexions. Gary looked a lot like his father; all he’d gotten from the Bonanos was his dark eyes.

“How was work?” Gary asked. Elmer managed the shipping department of Tante Lou’s Confections, a candy factory near Bayou St. John.

“Aw, the usual shit. Some squirrel calls up from New York City, says, ‘Hey, Elmer, I need another case of those PRAY-lines—’”

“He said PRAY-lines?” At this point in his life, Gary had not had much contact with tourists, and this pronunciation was as foreign to his ears as Arabic.

“Sure he said PRAY-lines. What, you think that’s how I say it all of a sudden? I say PRAH-lines, like a normal person. Anyway, this squirrel, he goes, ‘I need another case of those PRAY-lines but can you make ’em with macadamia nuts instead of pecans this time? We’re having a luau party and we think that would be really special.’”

“Jeez,” said Gary. “So did you tell him you’d do it?” He knew the answer, but he wanted to keep his father talking about the annoying customer, maybe get him started on customers in general, or his co-workers, or something. Anything would be preferable to another round of questions about whether Rickey’s mother was usually home when they were at Rickey’s house. He hadn’t liked that at all. It gave him an uneasy feeling in his gut, rather like the feeling he got whenever Rickey touched him, but not as pleasant.
Elmer shot the shit with his son for a few more minutes, then said, “Your sister’s making spaghettis. You better go on in, see if she needs any help.” As Gary got up from the stoop, his father caught hold of his wrist and looked up at him. Even in the fading light, Gary could see that Elmer’s eyes were very clear, almost naked-looking. “Son?” he said.

“What, Daddy?”

“You and Rickey don’t go messing around in the French Quarters, do you?”

Oh, shit. “Well,” said Gary, trying to sound as if he had no idea why his father would ask him such a thing. “I mean, we’ve been to the Quarter, sure, but we don’t go a lot. It’s pretty far.”

“Good. Y’all don’t need to be going up there. Your momma doesn’t want you to. It’s … it’s dangerous.”

His father’s eyes had been locked on his. Now Elmer looked away. Feeling released, Gary went into the house and walked down the long hall to the first-floor bathroom. Only when he got to the sink and turned on the water to wash up did he realize that his hands were shaking.

It didn’t necessarily mean anything, all those questions. Nobody’s parents wanted them to go to the Quarter. Black kids weren’t supposed to go because their parents thought they’d get in trouble with the police, who would assume they were there to pick tourists’ pockets. Girls weren’t supposed to go because their morals would be corrupted, or something. It didn’t necessarily mean his folks thought he had been going to gaybars. But when you’d grown up in the Ninth Ward and your father tried to tell you the French Quarter was dangerous, what else were you supposed to make of it?

He briefly considered calling Rickey up and telling him about the conversation. “I think my parents think I’m a homo,” he would say. And then Rickey might say, “Well, are you?” And … what then?

Gary looked down and saw that the bar of soap had turned to mush in his hands. He rinsed it off and went to help his sister finish making dinner. She never put enough seasoning in the red gravy, and it wouldn’t be any good unless he got to it pretty soon.

——

For Rickey, the realization had been somewhat easier. It was not in him to believe he could be completely wrong about anything, and he knew with a clear adolescent fervor that there was nothing wrong in how he felt about Gary.

It was hard to know exactly how to act on his feelings, though. He knew a little more about sex than Gary did—not having been raised Catholic, he had no compunctions about pornography or masturbation—and he had heard about some boys who had gotten drunk and jerked each other off. That much, apparently, could happen. But what if you wanted a lot more than that? Not just in the way of sex, but actual love? There were books about how to be gay; he’d seen them in stores and libraries. Some of them even had diagrams. But there weren’t any diagrams about how to fall in love with your best friend and not fuck everything up.

Once or twice he’d almost said something to Gary, but he always stopped at the last possible second, thrown off by a small perverse voice in his head. What if you’re just kidding yourself? the voice said. You think he feels the same way you do, but what if you’re wrong?

He had convinced himself of things before, only to find out that they weren’t true at all and he’d just believed in them because he wanted them so badly. The thing he kept flashing back to—it was so stupid that Rickey cringed whenever he thought of it—was the time he had convinced himself it was Christmas in March. Five years old, and he’d woken up in the middle of the night with that Christmas feeling, wondering how he had missed all the holiday preparations and decorations but purely certain that it must have just slipped by him. His mother had found him in the living room at the crack of dawn, glassy-eyed but determined that the tree, the stockings, and the heaps of presents would be making their appearance at any moment. Only when she showed him the calendar and reminded him of the recent passage of Mardi Gras did Rickey believe he was wrong, and even then he had been one pissed-off kid, sure he’d been gypped somehow.

He was pretty sure this was different. After all, he wasn’t five years old any more. On the other hand, this was a lot more important than Christmas. So beneath his natural confidence was the fear that he might just be kidding himself. He didn’t really believe it, but he believed it enough to keep quiet; saying anything to Gary would be the biggest risk he’d ever taken, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that. Had it been anyone else, Rickey was certain that he would have already made his move, gotten shot down or gotten some action, and dealt with it either way. Sometimes he wished he had fallen for someone besides his oldest friend. He’d even tried to think about other people, but it didn’t work.

Then today he had turned around in math class and seen the look on Gary’s face, a look he’d never seen there before, a look he could interpret in only one way. It wasn’t the look itself that kicked him in the ass, exactly. It was the thought that, if he didn’t do something, Gary might eventually look at another person that way. This was an idea Rickey could not stand, not under any circumstances. He still wasn’t sure exactly what he was going to do, but he figured he would recognize his chance when it came to him.
He had finished all the other chores and was chopping onions and celery for a chicken dish when his mother got home. She’d given her hair a fresh color rinse the previous night, bringing it up to a wholly artificial, almost fluorescent orange, and her eyes were nearly as bright as the rhinestones that decorated the upswept corners of her glasses. “Johnnie, guess what!” she said.

Rickey’s mother had dropped her husband’s name years ago, and now went by her maiden name, Brenda Crabtree. Furthermore, she insisted on addressing her son as Johnnie. He was resigned to this but not especially pleased by it. Everyone else had been calling him Rickey since the day he’d started kindergarten and found himself in a class with four other boys named John.

“What?” said Rickey, using the dull side of his knife to scrape the chopped vegetables into a skillet.
“Claude invited me to spend the weekend at Grand Isle. He and his brother got them a beach house out there.” Claude was her new boyfriend, a nice retired man who seemed to have a little money.

“That’s nice, Momma. You gonna go?”

“I sure would like to, babe. I ain’t been out of New Orleans in years. But I hate to leave you all by yourself. You think you could stay by Gary’s for the weekend?”

“You know how crowded their house is,” Rickey said casually. “Why don’t I ask him to stay over here? We’re old enough to stay by ourselves.”

“Well, I don’t know …”

“Sure,” said Rickey, trying to sound as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “We’ll be here to watch the house, and I’ll have it all nice and clean when you get back.”

There might be a little more discussion of the matter before his mother gave in, but seeing the look on her face, Rickey already knew he had won. She loathed housework, and by promising to do it, he had always been able to get almost anything he wanted.

—

From Second Line by Poppy Z. Brite.

Chapter One

Death was, after all, the way Henry made his living.
The books he sold were most often the recent property of people who had died. Book lovers never gave up the good ones without cause. But then, the books which people sold willingly were not the ones Henry really wanted. The monthly public library sales were stacked high with those—the usual titles for a dollar apiece, yesterday’s best sellers, last year’s hot topics.
But not always. Occasionally, some relative—often the child who never cared much for Dad’s preoccupation with medieval history or Mom’s obsession with old cookbooks—would drop the burden their parents had so selfishly placed upon them by dying, and there they would be, in great careless mounds on the folding tables in the library basement or conference room. Always dumped too quickly by a “volunteer” from the “friends” committee, with the old dust jackets tearing one against the other.
Like encounters with sin, Henry had occasions of luck at yard sales, though not often enough to waste a weekend which might better be spent at home reading. His favorite haunts were the estate auctions, and the best of these were the ones held at the very house where the old geezer had kicked the bucket. And there was always that thin network of friends who knew Henry was a bookman—who heard of book lots being sold and passed the word on. Albert, of course, had been a regular source for this, simply because his trash-removal business so often involved houses being sold where the books had accumulated over the years and the dead were recently departed.
Henry had spent the half hour since they had first arrived at the Blue Thorn talking about death. Albert had said nothing in response. He would not be provoked. Tim had busied himself counting receipts.
Henry studied Albert’s darker reflection next to his own pale face in the mirror across the bar. There was no visible reaction. Albert’s eyes were down on his glass. Henry knew that look from a thousand glances over a chessboard. That stolid brown face might not give much away, but his eyes were his weakness.
Henry pursued, “You know, the end might come too late for some people. They stay too long. All the good is over for them. With others, killing would be a kindness. I’ve seen them. Dying can be such an ignoble event. I go into their houses afterward. I see the decay of the things that once made them proud. No one really wants to die, I guess, until it’s past their time and all the dodging is over. Dying is just the final alternative.” Then he moved his thought at an angle, like an overlooked bishop from a neglected corner. “Maybe that’s what makes murder the solution to so many problems.”
Albert ordered a second pint before heaving an unhappy breath at the subject matter.
Tim wiped up the tale of the glass after he set the ale down, and then stopped, a frown of thought wrinkling his open forehead. Smaller than either Albert or Henry, he leaned over the bar between them, on his forearms, as if suddenly wanting to express a confidence. Henry looked down on the freckles scattered over the bald center of Tim’s head and thought of islands on a pink sea.
Tim tapped the counter in front of his nose with his crooked index finger. “My uncle Jerry died in an accident on the job. Steel beam caught him the wrong way. But get this. Only the day before, he called my Aunt Deirdre into the dining room and asked for a sheet of the special paper they kept for answering invitations and the like. Then he sits down and, out of the blue, he makes out his will. Even calls my cousin Frankie over to notarize it. Can you believe that? He must have had a premonition.”
The subject of death had only occurred to Henry because everyone seemed to be dropping dead lately—or nearly everyone. He had heard from his dad last week about Mrs. Levine, a childhood neighbor. She was a large-breasted woman Henry always pictured with half-framed glasses hanging on a silver chain around her neck—the glasses in constant danger of being swallowed in her cleavage. And then “little” Greg Dunne, who had run the Gulf station for as long as Henry could remember, had passed away the week before. People had been telling Greg to lose a hundred pounds or so for years. Now Henry’s favorite gas station was closed. Where else was he going to get gas when the book orders were light and he needed credit?
Finally, this morning, Henry had been awakened by a commotion downstairs as they carried away Mrs. Prowder, his landlady. Her arthritis had turned out to be more than just that. In any case, death did not seem like an uncalled-for line of thought while drinking with his friends.
Albert suddenly nudged him with his shoulder and spoke in a scold as Henry fought to keep his balance on the stool. “Mrs. Prowder wouldn’t hold with an attitude like yours, Henry. She knew her time was coming. There was no fear in her eyes. She just enjoyed each day’s chance to observe whatever came her way. She could see the pattern to things. She cared for the living and let death be damned.”
To Henry, Mrs. Prowder was now a piece fallen off the table, where the puzzle of his own life was already in disarray. He was being pushed. Shoved. Like a kid in the schoolyard. He was supposed to be more mature. Grown-up. Adult. Even though the slightly out-of-place, off-center, ill-fitting, everyday discomfort he had first felt as a kid in high school was still with him. He was getting close to forty, for Christ’s sake.
He looked at Albert in the mirror. “Jeez, that’s just like you, Albert. It all makes sense to you. Just a part of life, right? It’s like you have this root that goes down into the earth so deep you never get off balance. Why can’t I see it that way? To me it’s like something was stolen.”
He shut up at the whine in his own voice. But it was true. It was something that had gone missing. Something not where it belonged. What was the pattern to that? He’d spent twenty years trying to stay out of the shadow of the frickin’ Catholic Church and managed to run right into it again and again. Not that he was going religious. No. Not that. He had just turned around and noticed the empty space there behind him and wondered what the hell he was doing with his own life. Yes. It was as if he were living in a dream world. He played with his books and the years went by. And who cared, anyway? Did anybody actually read the stuff? They just collected it. Most of his clients were damned speculators. They didn’t love books, much less what they contained. What good was there in that? His old boss, Barbara, had it all over him on that score. The ones who really loved the books liked to browse, dip into a page here and there, and feel the cloth and smell the paper.
Henry heard the whine in his brain now.
His eye caught Albert’s in the mirror. His friend scanned the scene at the bar for anyone who might hear. The stools to either side had emptied since they arrived.
Albert spoke in a voice that barely reached Henry’s ear. “You remember Patty?”
Henry leaned in. “Your first wife, Patty?”
Albert adjusted himself on the stool. “I got word from her brother that she died last year.”
Henry put down his glass, his mouth open.
Tim moved in close again as well, already speaking. “Albert. You never said anything.”
Henry said, “I’m sorry.”
Albert shook his head. “I had nothing to tell. Alice knows. But I haven’t even told Danny and Junior yet. I don’t know how to tell them.”
Albert sat back on his stool now until the wood popped.
Henry asked, “What happened?”
With Henry’s face just over Tim’s shoulder in the mirror, Albert looked at Tim. “Drug overdose, probably. You don’t want the details. Let me say that .… But that’s not the point. I didn’t bring it up for that reason. Henry thinks I’m the Rock of Gibraltar. The big guy. He’s been coming to me like I’m his stand-in parish priest since we started playing chess together back in the seventies. I’ve always got all the answers, right?”
Henry studied his glass self-consciously.
Albert nudged him again. “He doesn’t remember. Back then it was different. Back then we used to argue politics all the time. I was angry at the world. I was blaming everybody else for what was happening to me. I was a piece of bad work. That was when I was with Patty.”
Henry said, “I remember,” and offered a smile.
Albert turned to him. “You remember. You remember holding me up when she left. You used to babysit Junior at five in the morning so I could do my rounds with the truck.” He wiggled a finger at Henry while looking again at Tim. “This man changed Junior’s stinking diapers. Junior still remembers when Henry walked him to school. …” Albert sat forward on his stool again, looking through the mirror, only at Henry now. “You want answers to things you don’t even have questions for, son. Hear me? And when I have a problem like that, I go ask Alice.… And she tells me to sit on it.”
Tim said, “Alice is a rock.”
Albert said, “Alice is the hard place.” But he let a smile slip after he said it.
There was more to it, though, for Henry. More even than the passing of Mrs. Prowder.
Henry had just gone to another auction the day before, this one in Connecticut. Mostly furniture, but a fine collection of books as well. He had missed out on several lots of mysteries—Hammetts and Chandlers and Cains. He seldom had that kind of money to spend anyway, but he had gotten what he could realistically have hoped for—three lots of lesser-known authors in dust jackets from the same period. The Mission-style table the books had been stacked on had sold for eight thousand dollars. Henry paid eight hundred for the books.
He should have been satisfied. Reasonably satisfied. Resigned, in any case. He could not easily dismiss from his mind seeing Dashiell Hammett hardcovers in that kind of condition. He had never even seen a first printing of The Glass Key in the dust jacket before, much less held it. But the three lots he had gotten were good enough. He was still busy convincing himself of that when he had gotten home the previous evening.
Mrs. Prowder leaned forward from her chair and looked out the open door of her apartment on the first floor as he passed in the hall, the white of her hair like a flag where it had come loose from the comb.
As always, she asked, “You were successful?”
She loved to hear reports of his adventures. She did not care so much for the accounting of books he had found as for descriptions of the homes he had been into and people he had seen.
He had answered, “Not as much as I hoped. Enough, I guess.”
She appeared to be tired. She had asked none of her usual questions, but said, “Don’t be discouraged. It’s more important to keep trying. Sometimes the success is hidden in things, and you only find it out later on.”
Henry’s mind had been on the books, and he was not sure he had even said good night to her. He would miss that.
“Miz Prowda,” as she always introduced herself, owned the narrow four-floor brick on Chestnut Street. It was just one in the row of close single-family town houses built while John Quincy Adams was still president. Henry liked the simple and unpretentious brick faces. They were classic now, but once they were only average in a time when averages were higher. Mrs. Prowder lived alone on the first floor and rented the rooms above to single men. Her door was always open—she had said that the first day—and it was, with a clear view of the front door and the stairs. She appeared to know everything that went on in the lives of her tenants and was not shy with her comments. She was a Yankee, with a touch of Down East in her voice and a no-nonsense approach to any subject.
No more than a week ago she had remarked, “Did Eliot and his acrobatic girl friend disturb you? He’s a lot healthier than he looks, isn’t he? I wish he was more considerate. He kept me awake all night.”
Eliot lived below Henry on the second floor, but thankfully he heard little of that.
Mr. Elwin Prowder had been dead for twenty years but lived on in continued anecdote as Mrs. Prowder compared observations of her tenants to incidents in her husband’s life. Those comments usually involved something small, like a better way to carry the boxes of books Henry was often moving in or out the door to the street where the inclined brick sidewalk passed the bottom of the steep granite steps. The week, years ago, when he first moved in, the comments had started.
Those steps could be a logistical challenge, with Henry’s van parked illegally to the side of the narrow street, blinkers on, and nowhere to leave the books in the close passage of the halls above. Every armload had to be carried all the way to his third-floor apartment.
She studied his frenzied unloading and spoke to him as he passed. “My Elwin would make a pile on the sidewalk first, hikers be damned.” Then, “My Elwin would put the smaller boxes down first so you can level out those stairs to one side and stack quite a bit all at once.” Then, “Once my Elwin used a straight-backed chair to carry up all my mother’s china to the attic after she passed. He put his belt through the slats and held the top rung like this against his back.” She demonstrated, her arm crooked over her opposite shoulder. This suggestion was ingenious, a kind of rigid backpack that might work for large boxes of books as well, and Henry decided to put a version of it to use on some later occasion.
A few years ago Mrs. Prowder had called to him from her chair as he came in the door. Her arthritis was keeping her from getting up that day, but she adjusted some white strands of hair over her ear in a gesture of civility.
“You know, a young man like yourself should be careful. When you hit your thirties you can get lonely without knowing it, because you’re working harder just to keep busy. I know you don’t have a girlfriend. You never go out on Saturday night. You go to the movies alone. If it wasn’t for that friend of yours—Albert, is that his name?—you’d never go out at all.… You know, once my Elwin was set upon by an older woman. She wasn’t as old as I am now. She was fifty or so, the wife of a State Street banker, and they lived just up the way near where the little grocery used to be on the corner of Revere Street. Elwin was a good-looking fellow, much like yourself. Much like yourself in many ways. Same chocolate hair. Always a little surprise in his eye over what the world was offering. And I was awful big just then with Mary, my youngest, and had to be careful. At that time…” She looked toward the window to find the thought. “Truman was having his hissy fit with MacArthur, I believe. Well, some women can just smell a man who hasn’t spent his passion lately. She came to see Elwin at his office. As you know, Elwin was a lawyer and had his office just down on Charles Street, where the liquor store is now. She stopped him in the street on the way to the grocery store to talk, and then she had him in for tea one Saturday afternoon so that he could look at some family papers. She was a marvel. Well, poor Elwin didn’t know what hit him. He was the guiltiest man I ever saw. All the while he was giving me more attention than I could handle. He was as sweet as a puppy. But I knew something was wrong. He started to whistle. Do you whistle? Elwin whistled when he had something on his mind. He was whistling up a storm for the short while it lasted.” Mrs. Prowder pursed her lips and blew a thin note that became a silent mime before she gave it up. “Well, then it all came out about two years later. There was a scandal. Mrs. Sears—oh, I shouldn’t be telling you her name, should I?” She paused with mischief in her eye. “Oh, well. Too late. Mrs. Sears was caught in bed with one of the grocers, by her own husband. It became a scandal because her husband immediately had the grocery shut down for a permit violation. The grocer fought back, and it got into the papers. I read the story to Elwin out of the newspaper over breakfast and saw him turn a shade of color. I knew my Elwin. It didn’t take long to get some details out of him.” She held up her hand like a traffic cop. “This is just a bit of caution. You have to watch out for older women. Especially at your age. They will have their way.”
This was all said to Henry with no real prompting. She could not have known he had been seeing Morgan Johnson. The Johnsons lived blocks away on Marlborough Street. In any case, he had only gone there to deliver the books Morgan purchased at the auctions. With Mrs. Prowder’s caution, Henry could not escape the thought that there was some hidden power possessed by older women—an ability to read a man’s mind—which was passed on through the generations and unbeknownst to mere men.
Sitting in the Blue Thorn, staring at their reflections in the mirror across the bar, Henry reviewed much of this in his head as he had done many times since the morning. Now there was the news of Patty. Poor Patty. Lost Patty.
He felt more than slightly maudlin and tried to shake it off by speaking up loudly. “A good pint of ale is worth living for.”
Tim shouted, “Hear, hear!” from a table where he was serving someone else.
Albert nudged Henry with his shoulder and spoke in lower tones. “All you need is a woman of your own. All you need is a hug, but I’m not about to give you one. Alice would object—” He stopped short and turned to Henry on the stool. Henry could feel Albert’s eyes directly on him. “Shit. This isn’t just about old Mrs. Prowder, is it ? Does all this have anything to do with a woman? Are you having problems with a woman again?”
Henry opened his mouth and let it hang as he tried to find the right words, knowing Albert would interpret them the way he wanted. “Morgan Johnson called me last night. She wants me to look at her husband’s books.”
Albert turned to the reflection in the mirror, then heaved another sigh. “You need a younger woman. At least pick on someone your own age. It’s healthier.”
Henry defended himself. “I’m just looking at the books.”
Albert said, “Then stay away from the books in the bedroom.”

Chapter Two

The books he had purchased at the auction had cost Henry twice what he had wanted to spend, but then they were still worth a great deal more. He would just have to find a way to get his money back a little faster. There were several ways he could think of to accomplish that in how he presented the goods. He had played with this in his imagination as he unpacked them onto what would be called his kitchen table if he had a kitchen and not a kitchenette. He seldom used the space for eating, and his desk was already occupied with the remains of a previous batch.
He first organized the books in short stacks, faceup, directly below the ceiling light which illuminated the whole of his apartment. He could offer them as a group, as authors of the 1930s. Most were women, like Bess Streeter Aldrich, Vicki Baum, Dorothy Canfield, and Fanny Hurst. He could offer those separately as key figures in twentieth-century women’s literature. He could even ignore the content and offer some of them for their Deco dust jackets and design.
He had speculated about this into the late hours, recombining the blunt colors of the covers and the bold typography of the titles for the visual effect that might be most eye-catching on his web site, until he was interrupted by the ringing of his phone.
He had not even said hello before she spoke.
“Henry?”
Her voice was just the same, as if he had spoken to her only the day before.
He managed to say, “Hello.”
Her voice lowered with recognition. “Hello.”
The moment was short, but many thoughts ran together.
“Morgan. How are you?”
She let one of her brief silences go by. She had always been good with silences. “Fine. A little lonely.”
He said the obvious. “I heard. I’m sorry.”
Her husband, Heber Johnson, had died some months before—was it in the early summer? Henry could not remember in the confusion of the moment. He seldom read the newspapers, and someone had told him after the fact. Heber had been eighty-four; once the most fearsome literary agent in Boston at a time when Boston bank money still financed the films made in Hollywood. A bullish figure in a silk suit and black felt fedora, Heber always had the ever-present cigar in hand, and by the late 1950s he had made the New York writers come to him. Even in his old age, his name had commanded respect. His authors were always published, because his authors always sold well.
She said again, “I’m fine.” And then, as if to convince him, “It was a long time coming. How are you?”
“The same. Of course. You sound good.” That was not what Henry meant to say. He added, “It’s good to hear your voice.” But she was not calling for a chat. “Tell me what I can do.”
She might be over sixty now. Henry had never known her age. Heber Johnson had married her when she was still in her early twenties.
She answered, “You can look at Heber’s books.… I’m not selling them. I’m donating them—to Boston University. But I need them appraised. Honestly appraised. Not to scam the insurance company or the IRS. I need to know what they’re really worth. A fellow from the university was over last week, and they have agreed to keep the collection together. It would be an appropriate memorial to Heber . And I hate those weaselly appraisers. The fellow from the auction house who looked at the furniture yesterday turned my stomach. He was practically begging for me to pay him off for a lower estimate so I could cheat on the estate taxes. You know how it is. …” He could hear a weary breath in the pause. “Sure, I’ll be taking a tax deduction. Certainly. But we haven’t been doing well for some time, so there isn’t a lot we need in the deductions department. You know Heber had gotten worse. He was bedridden for the last year.”
Henry told the lie. “No. I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Of course he had known. Why hadn’t he called her? Why hadn’t he offered some moral support, at the least? But she let him get by with it.
“I don’t know exactly why it matters now. I just thought …” Her voice disappeared again.
He could not remember that voice ever sounding weak. The point was that she wanted his advice. She wanted his help, now.
He said, “If you need the money, you should sell them.” He had to say that much. He was pretty sure the money made no difference to her. He waited for her to answer.
Her voice lifted at the thought. “I don’t. Not really. I have some family problems to take care of—nothing I can’t handle. And my son Arthur is doing well. He’s made another film. He’s managed to stay off drugs and stay married, and he has two kids now. I’m a grandmother! How unlikely is that! And he wants me to come out there to live. I put the condo up for sale, and I’m going out to California officially for a visit. If I like it, I’ll stay. When I’ve paid all the bills and the government gets through with me, I’ll still have more than enough, I think.”
Henry had met the son once. More like his father than his mother.
“Okay. Sure. When do you want me to come over?”
Her voice regained the positive control he’d always admired. “Well, that’s the problem. I thought I had lots of time. But I received a good offer on the condo last week. That means I’ll have to be out of there a little sooner. With the holidays coming, it could be confusing if we wait till next month. I’m guessing it would be best done this coming week. Can you manage that?”
He could. Oddly, the first thought which occurred to him was that he should quit smoking immediately, so she would not be disappointed in him. The thought was broken by the sound of a voice in the background.
Henry said, “Where are you now?” His eyes went to the clock by his bed. It was after ten.
She answered, “In the house on the Cape. I haven’t stayed in Boston since Heber died.” But he could tell she was distracted by something else.
It was odd how things happen. He had even been thinking about Morgan at the auction that day. But then, he often thought of her.
He had first met her as Mrs. Johnson when he still worked for Barbara at the bookshop. Morgan had come into Alcott & Poe looking for “yards of books” to fill the shelves in Back Bay condominiums owned by people who did not read. Barbara ran the best used bookshop in Boston and understood the need to sell stock in quantity—she was always struggling with the Newbury Street rents—but she hated interior decorators. She called them “furniture dealers” and passed the job of helping Morgan off on him.
Henry had liked Morgan immediately for her forthrightness.
She directed him to “Skip the best sellers. I want copies of the good books by the midlist authors who earn a living, day in, year out, with their typewriters.”
Henry liked the arch of her eyebrow, which made her skepticism at some of his choices seem so obvious without a word. He had liked the agate green and brown of her eyes. She used them to see and not just look, and this had made him uncomfortable on a few occasions.
Morgan once asked him, “What kind of books do you keep at home?” after rejecting one of his recommendations.
He had fumbled for the right explanation. “Favorite authors—but only in editions I like. Reference books, of course.…  I don’t collect, really. I don’t care much for the untouchable quality of first editions.”
She liked that answer and added, “An untouchable book is worthless. Who do you read? I bet what I’m looking for is exactly what you read.”
No. His habits were rather parochial, he knew. But that was that.
He had confessed his orthodoxy. “Mark Twain. Trollope. Yeats. Robert Graves.” Then he had told her hesitantly, “I’ve just begun to read all the Shakespeare plays, first to last . I’ve always meant to.”
She looked at him very seriously, as if her words should not be ignored. “You must read your Shakespeare out loud. It is the only way to understand the brilliance. There is music in the language that gives it meaning. You don’t want to miss that. Pretend you’re John Gielgud. If it drives your roommate crazy, find a new roommate. Shakespeare is more important.”
Like a teacher, he thought.
He defended himself too quickly. “I live alone, so that’s not a problem. I’ll give it a try. I’ve actually never thought to read it aloud.”
She had backed away then and looked at him from head to toe. “I’m surprised you live alone. You’re smart. You’re a very handsome man. You shave. I notice you bathe regularly. You stand up straight. You laugh at my little jokes. All you need is someone to show you how to dress . Go to London and live for a year. You’ll find a good English girl there who’ll fix your wardrobe right up.”
Morgan was a lean woman, arms slender with muscle showing instead of loose flesh. She stood very straight herself, almost soldierlike, he had thought before learning that her father had been a career naval officer. She was strong and enjoyed showing it, the same way Henry’s sister, Shelagh, used to rebuff his help. Morgan carried her own choices to the register, grasped in stacks between her sagging hands and raised chin. And there was always her voice—her voice so very sure of itself.
The very first day she had explained it all shamelessly. “These people I buy for don’t read. They are cretins. But I have to buy good books for them anyway. I have to make it appear that they have taste. I’ll give them credit for that. At least they want to appear civilized, and they have an idea what that looks like. So that’s my job. If I buy a lot of leather bindings, then everyone will know they’re phonies. They really want to be taken for what they are not. They want the books to look used and appear that they’ve been read, but in a condition that says they take care of them. These are not the intellectual slobs who hold a book with one hand while eating dinner with the other. These are people who buy five-thousand-dollar dresses to go out to fund-raisers for the poor, where they write a check for five hundred bucks so they can congratulate themselves on their generosity. … I’m sorry. I apologize for sounding so cynical. But I need your help. Who knows? Maybe some rainy day, they’ll read one of these books and it will change their lives—or at least make them want to read another. It’s possible.”
He had gotten to know her then, and on her repeat visits, but not well until several years later. After Henry had left Alcott & Poe and was selling books on his own, he had encountered her at an auction. Then it was like meeting a lost friend on the field of battle.
She immediately made her case. “Your old boss, Barbara, wouldn’t help me. She tried, but she doesn’t think like you. She started picking out a bunch of classics. I tried to tell her how that would look artificial. I think she took it the wrong way. So now I’m out here trying to buy books just like you.”
In fact, she had not really been looking for the same kind of lots. He had no use for the common good books. He only wanted the unusual and uncommon things he could sell in his catalogue to other book dealers. When she started showing up at one of the larger auctions in Northampton, they sat together. They began having dinner together after previewing the lots and before the actual auctions began. The auctions were held at the old hotel there, and often ran late.
It was on a rainy night in January, when Henry had worried out loud about driving back to Boston on icing roads, that she had simply stated the fact.
She said, “I’m staying put. I’ve rented a room. And I think it would be very nice if you would stay as well.” With her eyes fixed on his own.
Because of her style, the way she walked, the words she used, he had assumed she had come from old wealth.
He had known people born and raised in wealth all his life. It was the nature of his hometown, divided as it was between the Village and South Brookline. Growing up in Brookline meant that he had been in the homes of the rich with friends from high school long before he was a book dealer. And more importantly, he had seen their books. Henry had observed their indulgences and divided them into two types. There were the ones who reacted against their breeding by becoming rude and arrogant slouchers, who assumed too much and expected everything. Morgan was the other type.
She wore clothes he thought were high fashion until a remark he made about a green dress he liked, when he had learned it had been bought in Paris almost twenty years before. She wore jewelry, a diamond ring which had belonged to her grandmother, and sometimes her mother’s favorite pearl necklace. She wore no perfumes, but he could not forget the scent of her for days after they had been together.
It was an odd and disquieting relationship, which had only lasted a year. He never really saw her in Boston, but often at the auctions. When she ended it, she had done it in the kindest way.
“I love you. You’re a foolish book hound to have gotten involved with an old bitch like me. You’re really too innocent for a man your age. But my first love is my husband. I’ve been selfish enough. Being unfaithful has been a little harder on me than I thought it would.… I’m not saying that to make you feel guilty. This was my doing. I needed you more than you needed me. But it has gotten to be more than I can handle.”
Her husband needed her care. He had suffered another stroke. He was incontinent. They had not slept in the same room for years because of his coughing and fitfulness at night, but Heber needed her to be there now.
In fact, it was Henry who had been wrought with guilt.
He had never really thought about marriage. He had, in fact, purposely avoided thinking much about it. His life was simple and peaceful, and he had liked it that way. He had been in love before—passionately enough to want to be with someone all the time. He had survived those experiences—though he was not really sure he had survived his relationship with Barbara yet. He was still feeling like an escaped prisoner who might be tracked down.
Now he had been responsible for the unfaithfulness of another man’s wife. He could not excuse himself for acting out of love. Not love as he wanted it to be. He certainly liked Morgan more than any woman he had met since Barbara. He liked being with her. And he enjoyed her—like a dessert, he thought. One could live without dessert. One should not break moral codes for the pleasure of dessert.
But his feelings for Morgan had been new to him. He might have loved her if she had wanted him to. She was an extraordinary woman. But she had never allowed any real intimacy beyond the physical. She had kept the greater part of her life separate from him, seldom speaking of it more than was necessary. And he was happy to have her companionship. He had not spent time with a woman since leaving Alcott & Poe.
Unfortunately, they had too little time together. She was always rushed. He never saw her when he delivered the books at her apartment building—only Fred, the useless superintendent, who stood and watched while holding the door—except for the last time, when her son, Arthur, had been there visiting and had helped Henry unload. Arthur had been inquisitive about his mother’s new profession. Henry had said little and played the part of delivery boy.
Henry drove to the auctions in his rusting blue Ford van, arrived early, and examined each lot in the preview carefully, taking notes even on things he knew he would not buy, if only just to learn a little more about them. Morgan arrived in her Jaguar with little time left, walked around the room at a steady pace, and took no notes. It was completely a matter of first sight with her.
At dinner they spoke about films or books they liked, or some gossip she had heard about an author. She enjoyed gossip. She seemed to have read everyone. These were untold stories, some she had witnessed, and others from her husband, about writers and other agents and publishers. He had suggested more than once that she should write a book of her own.
Her opinions were far more defined than his, and always had the sound of finality.
Once, she surprised him with “Updike will be forgotten within a few years of his inevitably overblown obituary notices. The term ‘a writer’s writer’ really means he holds little interest for the general public, and I don’t even think the high-lit types really like him. For a writer so proud of his stylistic control, he seems to have a limited idea of what he’s writing about.”
Henry had read no more than a few short stories by Updike and had little luck over the years selling his work. His own judgments were more practical. Because he had not really gone to college, beyond a few night classes at Northeastern, he had never taken any stock in those authors who were the darlings of academia. And over time he had found, without exception, that the writers he was most passionate about were also the ones he sold most easily.
Another time she said, “Who’s good?” And he had answered without thinking, because it was the book he was reading then.
“Nick Tosches. Have you read him? He’s very good. Edgy.”
“Difficult man,” she answered. “I’ve met him.”
This had sparked him. “The good ones are all difficult, aren’t they? Each in their own way. But they’re difficult for a reason. Tom Wolfe. Harlan Ellison. They’re not alike. They’re fighting for their lives. Everything is FDA-approved now. Homogenized. Pasteurized.”
To Henry’s bewilderment, Morgan found this kind of off-the-cuff criticism enchanting. She seldom argued with his pronouncements, especially after encouraging him to talk about the authors he read and to explain the reasons he liked them. To entertain her—to see the curve of amusement in her eyes—he stretched his opinion in hyperbolic flares of dissatisfaction with the current state of literary affairs, making high crime out of lapses in creative effort, and capital offense from a waste of talent.
One night he had brought a bellman to their door because he had spoken too loudly for too long. “Where is our Dickens? Where is our Trollope? What challenge is there to investing supernatural powers in an automobile when the world is in need of explanations and our religions have failed to answer? Where are Tolstoy and Dostoevsky when the dating habits of an air-head sell in the millions? What pleasure is there in a Cold War fantasy about the life and death struggle of a cardboard spy when the intrigue and game of our time needs a Dumas and the upheaval of history cries for a Victor Hugo? Why are we cursed with mediocrity and obsessed with the dissection of literary mice just as we stand on the doorstep of the stars?”
He could bring the smile to a laugh if he worked at it long enough.
At first she appeared surprised that there was a rationale beyond the accepted judgments of the literary establishment. She took his homegrown opinions as interesting vernacular aberrations—even cute. Why was Kipling so underrated and James so favored by the critics? Why was Thornton Wilder so often ignored? Was it impossible to overrate Mark Twain?
Once when they were together, he had stood up on the mattress above her and posed with his hands in the air as if holding an imaginary book to the light.

Study is like the heaven’s glorious sun
That will not be deep-search’d with saucy looks,
Small have continual plodders ever won,
Save base authority from others’ books.

He had said it to show off his attention to her sincere advice of long ago. He had finished his set of the Yale Shakespeare and had already begun rereading the ones he liked best. Love’s Labour’s Lost had become his favorite. He should have been embarrassed at his poor delivery, but she sat up from the bed, one hand extended dramatically toward him, and hardly missed the beat.

These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights
That give a name to every fixed star
Have no more profit of their shining nights
Than those that walk and wot not what they are.

He took her hand and kissed it. She was so much brighter than he was ever going to be.
His anger had brought him to his knees then. “Then why read? Why care about them? What does it matter what they write? Isn’t it just for the little pieces of the puzzle that might be found there? For the little pleasure of another voice? Why do books matter at all? If the godfather’s only search is for fame, what does it matter what name they give the stars? It’s all a waste of time. We’re better off wallowing naked in the grass by day and huddling in caves at night. The light of a television is more than enough to have sex by.”
But she had picked up the quote again. “‘How well he’s read, to reason against reading!’”
He was astonished, as he often was. “It’s only wonder, not reason. I’m in awe. I lie on my bed at night and read as if my life depended on it. And it does, even if it’s a mundane life—but I’m talking about what goes on in my head. It doesn’t matter whether it makes me laugh or cry, so long as it fascinates me. It doesn’t even matter if I agree with what the author is saying, so long as I can talk back. There is no conversation with most of them. It’s all one way. ‘Now listen here. Hear me, and shut up!’ But with the good ones, I lie there and wonder at all the things the words have made me think about that I never would have imagined before. I’ve even thought —once, when I was reading a book by Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether, I think; a dark little story—and suddenly he said something. I can’t remember the line exactly, but the old captain sits down with his Bible—no, his dead wife’s Bible, with his finger in the leaves, but closed and held on his knee, and begins to remember her.… I had just done that. The very same thing. I had just been reading Yeats and stopped to hear my own mother’s voice in my head. It’s like having a conversation with someone without the rush of time.”
Soon enough, she became intrigued by his explanations, and then fascinated with the connections she could see between Henry’s dismissal of New York literary judgment and her husband’s dislikes for the people for whom he worked.
She often quoted her husband’s words. She called the literary establishment “The Self-Obsessed” because Heber did, and Henry adopted the term as his own. She held her own opinions as only that—opinion—subjective personal reactions. She never defended them afterward and wasted little time in explanation.
Once she told him that, inexplicably, Heber had always liked Westerns, but she had never developed a taste for them. Henry, who had been introduced to Western fiction by his buddy Albert, tried to convince her to read a few of his favorites, which finally she did, and admitted reluctantly she liked them. Soon he had her reading Elmer Kelton novels, and Clair Huffaker and Jack Schaefer. He had even persuaded her to read Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and then she wanted to talk about it all night, like a girl with a crush. She had a way of suddenly seeming very young.
She had said, “It’s a better world they’re in. It’s a world of men and women and right and wrong. It’s so civilized. It makes me want to cry.”
It interested him when it came out that she seldom saw any manuscripts for Westerns these days—probably because so few Western movies were being made.
“Hollywood matters,” she answered. “What’s good for Hollywood is good for America. The books are not bought for themselves, but because of what they can be used for.”
Morgan Brown had started working for Heber Johnson as a reader soon after getting her master’s in literature at Boston University. She had worked as his assistant for the rest of his life. It had only been in the last ten years, as Heber’s schedule slowed down, that she began to look for other work.
“I really hated being an agent. I hated making decisions about people’s lives. Heber depended too much on me. If I said no, he said no. I never negotiated any deals. I just made the decision that made the negotiations necessary. I think Heber started hating the authors, though he never said so. It wasn’t like the way I feel about the people who own the homes I decorate. That’s more disdain, not hate. Heber simply didn’t want to read the work of his clients anymore, with all the complaining and the moneygrubbing afterward. He would get them a hundred thousand dollars more than they had ever made in their lives, and they would whine about his fifteen percent. Their greed colored his view of them.”
Then her face had changed with an urgency, as if she had not said all that she meant and to get it right mattered. “But Heber hated the publishers who encouraged it all even more. ‘It’s all about the money,’ he said. They could be marketing breakfast cereal. They all used nice words to the feature reporters to explain how they loved books and the romance of publishing and then turned around to their desks and signed another author who could churn out thrillers by the half dozen, or a self-help book which just happened to be like one already on the best-seller list, all the while some sap in Poughkeepsie slaves away at night trying to write the next great American novel, never knowing there is no chance in hell it will ever get published without passing muster in the marketing department—you know, the marketing department: where they tell him that the woman Raskolnikov kills has to be young so the story will appeal to the right demographic.”
Her voice had wavered with the kind of passion he wanted to hear. He could feel it in his spine when she broke through the reserve and her words came more quickly. She paused as if to contain the memory, but could not. “Though I seldom saw all that. I always loved the other part—not talking with the authors—just reading their work when it was still new and no one but they and I knew yet how wonderful it was … or how bad. …” She took a breath, and then another, and the words slowed again. “When he stopped negotiating as often, I had less to read. Getting into a new line of work was natural. And you know, we had moved so often over the years. New York. Beverly Hills. Back to Boston. We even lived in Vermont for two years. I had decorated at least twelve homes just for ourselves. It was the only other thing I knew about. And it has paid so well since.”
Henry knew, from very early on, that theirs was not a permanent relationship. But he had ignored the thought. The kind of matter-of-fact affair he had with Morgan seemed almost perfect to him. Until it was over.
The end had been unexpected. Her announcement had come one morning, after little sleep and much talk. He was not sure he truly understood then, even as she drove away.
Afterward, he endured the first bout of depression he had ever known. He had not wanted to get out of bed in the morning, and was too tired to read at night. His appetite for food disappeared. He stopped going to the Blue Thorn and nursed his bottled beer at home. Albert had shown up at Chestnut Street several times—spending more time talking to Mrs. Prowder than to Henry.
Gently mocking, Mrs. Prowder had frowned at Henry as he passed. “You are getting too thin. And you are smoking again. I thought you had given up that nasty habit. You need to find yourself a good Italian girl … I know that Lisa, who works at the Finnian’s Drug Store. She’s a pharmacist. Very pretty. Very patient. She puts up with me well enough. You must have noticed her. She was dating a doctor, but that’s over. …”
In time, Henry had solved the problem with a daily walk from Beacon Hill to the Blue Thorn in Inman Square, and a liberal application of fresh ale. He had begun to smoke again, and lingered longer at the book sales.
But the thought had occurred to him often since, that he was living an apparently pointless life. Morgan had gone back to caring for her husband, after years of being instrumental in the publishing of the very books Henry sold—and he would continue selling them, making a basic living with just enough left over for gas.
What did he do that could not be done by others? The pleasure he felt before in his job was suddenly ephemeral. He liked to think he had some hand in preserving good literature for future generations. A high cause. But this sounded better than it felt. He never blamed his depression directly on his loss of Morgan. He had always thought of her as a catalyst.

———————–

From Hound, by Vincent McCaffrey, published in hardcover and ebook in September 2009.

“As wealthy as Cambodia.”
Traditional Chinese saying

Awakening

You could very easily meet William.

Maybe you’ve just got off the boat from Phnom Penh and nobody from your hotel is there to meet you. It’s miles from the dock to Siem Reap.

William strides up and pretends to be the free driver to your hotel. Not only that but he organizes a second motorbike to wobble its way round the ruts with your suitcases.

Many Cambodians would try to take you to their brother’s guesthouse instead. William not only gets you to the right hotel, but just as though he really does work for it, he charges you nothing.

He also points out that you might need someone to drive you to the baray reservoir or to the monuments. When you step back out into the street after your shower, he’s waiting for you, big for a Cambodian, looking happy and friendly.

During the trip, William buys fruit and offers you some, relying on your goodness to pay him back. When you do, he looks not only pleased, but also justified. He has been right to trust you.
If you ask him what his real name is in Cambodian, he might sound urgent and threatened. He doesn’t want you think he has not told the truth. Out comes the identity card: Ly William.

He’ll tell you the story. His family were killed during the Pol Pot era. His aunty plucked him out of his mother’s arms. He has never been told more than that. His uncle and aunt do not want to distress him. His uncle renamed him after a kindly English aid worker in a Thai camp. His personal name really is William. He almost can’t pronounce it.

William starts to ask you questions, about everything you know. Some of the questions are odd. Is Israel in Europe? Who was Henry Kissinger? What is the relationship between people in England and people in America?

Then he asks if you know what artificial aperture radar is.

“Are you a student?” you might ask.

William can’t go to university. His family backed the wrong faction in the civil war. The high school diplomas given by his side in their border schools are not recognized in Cambodia.

William might tell you he lived a year in Phnom Penh, just so that he could talk to students at the Royal University, to find out what they had learned, what they read. You may have an image of him in your mind, shut out, desperate to learn, sitting on the lawn.

“My uncle want to be monk,” he says. “My uncle say to me, you suffer now because you lead bad life in the past. You work now and earn better life. My uncle does not want me to be unhappy.”

This is how William lives.

He sleeps in his uncle’s house. It’s on stilts, built of spare timber. His eldest cousin goes to bed late in a hammock under the house, and the candle he carries sends rays of light fanning up through the floorboards. The floorboards don’t meet so that crumbs can be swept through them.

There is a ladder down to the ground. There are outbuildings and sheds in which even poorer relatives sleep. There is a flowerbed, out of which sprouts the spirit house, a tiny dwelling for the animistic spirit of the place.

William and two male cousins sleep on one mattress in a room that is partitioned from the others with plywood and hanging clothes.

William is always the first awake.

He lies in the dark for a few moments listening to the roosters crow. The cries cascade across the whole floodplain, all the way to the mountains, marking how densely populated the landscape is. William is himself in those moments. At every other time of the day he is working.

William looks at the moon through the open shutters. The moonlight on the mosquito net breaks apart into a silver arch. This is his favourite moment; he uses it to think of nothing at all, but just to look.

Then he rolls to his feet.

The house is a clock. Its shivering tells people who has got up and who will be next.

One of his cousins turns over. In the main room, William steps over the girls asleep in a row on the floor. He swings down the ladder into his waiting flip-flops and pads to the kitchen shed. Embers glow in moulded rings that are part of the concrete tabletop. William leans over, blows on the fire, feeds it twigs, and then goes outside to the water pump.

Candles move silently through the trees, people going to check their palm-wine stills or to relieve themselves. A motorcycle putters past; William says hi. He boils water and studies by candlelight.
He has taught himself English and French and enough German to get by. Now he is teaching himself Japanese. He needs these languages to talk to people.

On the same shelf as the pans is an old ring binder. It is stuffed full with different kinds of paper, old school notebooks or napkins taken from restaurants. Each page is about someone: their name, address, e-mail, notes about their family, their work, what they know.

William has learned in his bones that survival takes the form of other people. They must know you, and for that to happen you must know them. Speak with them, charm them, and remember them.

A neighbour turns on her cassette player. Sin Sisimuth purrs a gentle yearning pillow of a song. The working day has begun in earnest. William snaps on the kitchen’s fluorescent light, attached to a car battery.

Sometimes at this quiet hour, William is seized by a vision. A vision in which Cambodia is a top country. Like Singapore, it is a place of wealth and discipline. To be that, Cambodia will need different leaders, people who are not corrupt, and who do things well. Who remember other people.

William is possessed of a thought that is common among the poor, but seldom expressed: I know who I am.

And I am as good as anyone.

He discovered that as he hung around the university students. He had one pair of shoes, but they were spotlessly white. He’d sit down with a group and smile and get their names and give them his own. What do you study? they’d ask. Politics, he’d reply. He would find out what books they had to read for their courses.

The university students talked about fashion and machines and motorbikes, just like anyone else. They looked soft and grumpy and made less effort than country people. Some of them made fun of his regional accent and didn’t listen to what he said. That’s okay, I learn from you, but you won’t learn from me. He kept smiling.

There is a grunt and William’s cousin Meak stomps into the kitchen. William calls him Rock Star. He has long hair and a torn T-shirt that says we’re so full of hope, and we’re so full of shit.

“Hey, coz,” Rock Star murmurs.

William makes a joke and passes him his breakfast. Breakfast is a cup of boiled water. Rock Star is always smiling. He plays air guitar at parties, but he is the one family member who truly loves being a farmer. He loves his pigs. He even looks a little like them, smiling, short and bulky.

“I’m going out towards the Phnom for feed this morning. I could go and pay the families out that way for you.”

William’s uncle and aunt are getting too old to work in the rice fields, so he pays other families a dollar a day to help with the harvest. But he must give them their money all at the same time, or there could be jealousy.

“Cool, cousin, thanks,” he says.

Rock Star grins sleepily. “I know you can’t wait to get to your foreign friends.”

Working for the UN dig team brings in seven dollars a day during tourist season. William has a contract with them; he shows up there first to drive one of them if they need him. That money pays for many things.

Outside, as tall and handsome as William, his cousin Ran goes to wash. He is so proud of his artificial leg. It is one of the best. He goes to wash at the pump wearing only a kramar round his waist so that everyone can see that he is not angry at life and very grateful to William. He waves and smiles. William sold all his ten cows to buy the leg.

William must always prove his value to the family.

Aunty comes next. Even first thing in the morning, she does not wear traditional dress. She is a modern woman, with curled hair and lipstick. She smiles at William and takes over in the kitchen. She is as kind and loving to him as if he were her son. William goes back to learning kanji. Outside on a bamboo pole are his clean clothes for the day, washed by his cousin. In his baseball cap, trousers with big pockets, and track shoes, he will look like a teenager in any suburb of the world.

My family, William thinks with fondness and gratitude. Where would I be without my family?

* * *

You would meet Map easily as well. Or rather, you would not be able to escape him.

He would scare you at first. Map is forty-four years old and smells of war. His face is scarred, and his smile looks like a brown and broken saw.

But he is wearing a spotlessly clean brown police uniform, and he seems to be patrolling Angkor Wat in some official capacity. As if in passing and wanting nothing from you, he starts explaining the pools to you in good English. The four dry basins you see so high up in Angkor Wat symbolize the four great rivers flowing from Mount Meru.

The information is of better quality than you expected. You smile, say thanks and try to edge away, dreading another request for money.

“You’ve missed the main bas-reliefs,” he warns, again as if in an official capacity. “Come this way.”

He leads you down steps, to the bas-relief gallery. The stone is polished, the detail amazing. Map explains scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. He turns a corner and explains that the roof of this gallery is how all the galleries would have looked.

You might ask him if he is a trained tourist guide. He tells you, “I work for Professor Luc Andrade of the United Nations dig team. I do their Web site.”

That throws you for a moment. Who is this guy?

He points to carved soldiers in strange uniforms. “These are mercenaries. Nobody trust those guys,” he says. “Like me. I used to be Khmer Rouge, but I changed sides and joined Hun Sen. They made me march in front, to step on landmines.”

Then he tells you, smiling, that he guarded a Pol Pot camp. It wasn’t a camp; it was a village, in a commune; but Map knows what Westerners expect. He knows he has you hooked.

He takes you on a tour of hell, the long bas-relief of people being tortured. Map lists them all for you.

The frying pan, for people who kill embryos.
Pot baking for trusted people who steal from gurus.
Forest of palm trees for people who cut down trees unduly . . .

“We need that in Cambodia now,” he says and smiles. “People cut down all our forest.”

He points to someone hammering nails into people’s bones. “I was that guy there,” he says.

Howling, for those who are degraded . . .

Today, April 11, Map gets up later than William does, but then he worked all night. He’s a Patrimony Policeman, protecting Angkor from art thieves. He sleeps off and on in a hammock strung across the doorway of the main building.

Then he works all day as well, anything to add to his salary of sixteen dollars a month.

This morning, he has persuaded an adventurous barang to sleep alongside him in another hammock. The foreigner, a German, is swathed in mosquito nets and smells of something chemical. He is pink and splotchy and still has on his glasses.

Map rocks him awake. “Come on,” Map says in German, “it is time to see the sunrise.” The man has paid him ten dollars for the privilege but like all tourists is so scared of theft that he has hidden his tiny digital camera in his underpants. Can you imagine how it smells? Map thinks to himself. I wonder if it’s taken any pictures inside there by mistake.

The German sniffs, nods.

Map chuckles. “You never been in a war.” The German looks miffed; he thinks he’s a tough guy. “You wake up in the morning in a war, pow! Your eyes open, wide, wide, wide, and you are looking, looking, looking.” Map laughs uproariously at the idea of the huge German on Highway 6 pulling up his trousers in the line of fire.

In the early morning mist, the five towers of Angkor Wat look magnified, as if the air were a lens. Map leads the German up steps, past scaffolding to the empty pools. He considerately takes hold of his elbow to lead him up onto the next level.

Then come the long staircases to the top. They taper to give the illusion of even greater height, and they are practically vertical, more like ladders than staircases.

“People say these steps are narrow because Cambodians have small feet.” Map grins. “We’re not monkeys! We don’t like pointing our bums at people. These steps make people turn sideways.” He shows the German how to walk safely up the steps.

Then, as a joke, Map sends him up a staircase that has worn away at the top to a rounded hump of rock with no steps or handrails.

The German finds himself hugging the stone in panic. From here, the drop looks vertical. Map roars with laughter. The German looks back at him, and his eyes seem to say: this wild man wouldn’t care if I fell!

He is not wrong. There is something deranged about Map. He has been shooting people since he was twelve years old.

Map chuckles affectionately and nips around him and up and over the stone on his thick-soled policeman’s shoes. He crouches down and pulls the German up.

“You have a lot of fun! You don’t want to go up the staircase with a handrail.”

“Uh,” says the German, just grateful to be alive. He turns and looks down and decides that, after all, he has just been very brave. Adventure was what he wanted. “Not too many old ladies do that!”

Even at this hour, the pavilion around the main towers is full of people. Other Patrimony Policemen greet Map with a nod and a rueful smile at his tourist catch. A large image of the Buddha shelters in the main tower, robed in orange cloth. Black-toothed nuns try to sell the German incense sticks. He buys one and uses that as an excuse to get a series of shots of an old woman with the Buddha.

Map leads the tourist through a window out onto a ledge high up over the courtyard, which is itself above ground level. It is what, a hundred, two hundred feet down to grass?

The ledge is wide — twenty people could easily sit down on it. The German grins and holds his camera out over the edge to take a picture. Over the top of the surrounding wall, trees billow like clouds, full of the sounds of birds and smelling like medicine.

“So,” says the German, fiddling with his automatic focus. “There are many bas-reliefs on Hindu themes. Did Cambodians become Buddhist later?”

“There was a king,” says Map. The morning is so quiet and bright he wonders if he can be bothered trying to make this foreigner understand who Jayavarman was and what he means to Cambodia.

“When Angkor Wat City is conquered, he takes it back from the foreigners. He make many many new temples. Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Neak Pean, Preah Kahn, all those temples. He make Cambodia a Buddhist country. After there is Hindu revolt, but Cambodians still remember him.”

Map says the King’s name, feeling many complex things: respect, amusement, love. The German asks him to repeat it.

“Jayavarman Seven.” Map can feel his smile stretch with sourness.

He thinks about the five-hundred-dollar bribe he paid a few years ago to get a job removing landmines. He bribed the wrong person and didn’t get the job. He’d sold his motorbike to get the money. Originally he wanted to use it to pay for his wedding, but he thought the job would be a better investment. His fiancee left him.

He thinks of all the so-called leaders and the tangled, self-serving mess they are making of the country. “Now we need Jayavarman.”

The gold leaves have slept for a thousand years.

Two metres down, below the range of ploughs and metal detectors, they lie wrapped in layers of orange linen and pitch.

They were carried at night, hurriedly, jostled under a bridge and plunged down into the mud by the canal to keep them safe. They were cast in imitation of a palm-leaf manuscript, inscribed and inked.

The leaves still yearn to speak, though the ink has long since soaked away.

The canal overhead simmered in the heat, then silted up. The water ceased to flow. The soil was parched and inundated by turns for centuries. Rice reached down, but never touched the leaves or their linen wrappings.

Gold does not rust. Insects and rodents do not devour it. Its only enemy is greed.

On April 11, in a version of 2004, something fiercely invasive drives itself into the Book. A corer grinds its way down through five packets of leaves. Then it hoists part of them up and out of the ground.

For the first time in a thousand years, light shines through the soil, linen, and pitch.

The Book is awake again.

Light shines on a torn circle of gold. It shines on writing. The words plainly say in Sanskrit, “I am Jayavarman.”

There’s always a moment where everything changes. A great photographer — someone like Diane Arbus, or me during that fraction of a second when I was great — she sees that moment coming, and presses the shutter release an instant before the change hits. If you don’t see it coming, if you blink or you’re drunk or just looking the other way — well, everything changes anyway, it’s not like things would have been different.

But for the rest of your life you’re fucked, because you blew it. Maybe no one else knows it, but you do. In my case, it was no secret. Everyone knew I’d blown it. Some people can make do in a situation like that. Me, I’ve never been good at making do. My life, who could pretend there wasn’t a big fucking hole in it?

I grew up about sixty miles north of the city in Kamensic Village, a haunted corner of the Hudson Valley where three counties meet in a stony congeries of ancient Dutch-built houses, farmland, old-growth forest, nouveau-riche mansions. My father was — is — the village magistrate. I was an only child, and a wild thing as the privileged children of that town were.

I had from earliest childhood a sense that there was no skin between me and the world. I saw things that other people didn’t see. Hands that slipped through gaps in the air like falling leaves; a jagged outline like a branch but there was no branch and no tree. In bed at night I heard a voice repeating my name in a soft, insistent monotone. Cass. Cass. Cass. My father took me to a doctor, who said I’d grow out of it. I never did, really.

My mother was much younger than my father, a beautiful Radcliffe girl he met on a blind date arranged by his cousin. She died when I was four. The car she was driving, our old red Rambler station wagon, went off the road and into the woods, slamming into a tree on the outskirts of town. It was an hour before someone noticed headlights shining through the trees and called the police. When they finally arrived, they found my mother impaled on the steering column. I was faceup on the backseat, surrounded by shattered glass but unhurt.

I have no memory of the accident. The police officer told my father that I didn’t cry or speak, just stared at the car’s ceiling, and, as the officer carried me outside, the night sky. Nowadays there would have been a grief counselor, a child psychologist, drugs. My father’s Irish Catholic sensibility, while not religious, precluded any overt emotion; there was a wake, a funeral, a week of visiting relatives and phone calls. Then my father returned to work. A housekeeper, Rosie, was hired to tend me. My father wouldn’t speak of my mother unless asked, and, forty-odd years ago, one didn’t ask. Her presence remained in the framed black-and-white photos my father kept of her in his bedroom. While Rosie vacuumed or made lunch I would sit on his bed and slowly move my fingers across the glass covering the pictures, pretending the dust was face powder on my mother’s cheeks.

I liked being alone. Once when I was fourteen, walking in the woods, I stepped from the trees into a field where the long grasses had been flattened by sleeping deer. I looked up into the sky and saw a mirror image of the grass, black and yellow-gray whorls making a slow clockwise rotation like a hurricane. As I stared the whorl began to move more quickly, drawing a darkness into its center until it resembled a vast striated eye that was all pupil, contracting upon itself yet never disappearing. I stared at it until a low buzzing began to sound in my ears. Then I ran.

I didn’t stop until I reached my driveway. When I finally halted and looked back, the eye was still there, turning. I never mentioned it to anyone. No one else ever spoke of seeing it.

My sense of detachment grew when I started high school, but as my grades were good and my other activities furtive, my father never worried much about what I did. Our relationship was friendly if distant. It was my Aunt Brigid who worried about me on the rare occasions she paid us a visit.

Brigid was like my father, stocky and big boned and red haired. I resembled photos of my mother. Tall and angular, narrow hipped, my mother’s soft features honed to a knife-edge in my own. Pointed chin, uptilted nose, dirty-blond hair and mistrustful gray eyes. If I’d been a boy I might have been beautiful. Instead I learned early on that my appearance made people uneasy. There was nothing pretty about my androgyny. I was nearly six feet tall and vaguely threatening. I wore my hair long but otherwise made no concessions to fashion, no makeup, no lipstick. I wore my father’s white shirts over patched blue jeans or men’s trousers I bought at the Junior League Shop. I wouldn’t meet people’s eyes. I didn’t like people looking at me. It made me feel sick; it reminded me of that great eye above the empty field.

“She looks like a scarecrow, Dad,” Brigid said once when I was sixteen. She and her husband were in Kamensic for a rare visit. “I mean, look at her –”

“I think she looks fine,” my father said mildly. “She’s just built like her mother was.”

“She looks like a drug addict,” Brigid snapped. She was sensitive about her weight. “We see them out where we live.”

I pointed out to the bird feeder at the edge of our woods. “What, like the chickadees? We see them too,” I said, and retreated to my room.

Several months later I had this dream. I was kneeling in the field where I’d seen the eye. A figure appeared in front of me: a man with green-flecked eyes, his smile mocking and oddly compassionate. As I stared up at him, he extended his hand until his finger touched the center of my forehead.

There was a blinding flash. I fell on my face, terrified, woke in bed with my ears ringing. It was the morning of my seventeenth birthday. My father gave me a camera. I sat at the breakfast table, turned it in my hands, and remembered the dream. I saw my face distorted in the round glass of the lens, like a flaw; like an eye staring back at me.

I took an introductory photography class in high school and was encouraged to take more.

I never did. I quickly learned what I needed to know. I liked a slow lens. I liked grainy black-and-white film and never worked in color. I liked the detail work of creating my own photographic paper, of processing then developing the film myself in the school photo lab. I loved the way the paper felt, soft and wet in the trays, then the magical way it dried and turned into something else, smooth and rigid and shining, the images a mere byproduct of chemistry and timing.

I didn’t care if the pictures were over- or underexposed, or even if they were in focus. I liked things that didn’t move: dead trees, stones. I liked dead things: the fingerless soft hand of a pheasant’s wing, mouse skulls disinterred from an owl pellet, a cicada’s thorax picked clean by tiny green beetles. I liked portraits of my friends when they were sleeping. I’ve always watched people sleep. When I occasionally babysat, I’d go into the children’s rooms after they were in bed and stand there, listening to their breathing, waiting until my eyes adjusted to the soft glow of nightlight or moonlight. I liked to watch them breathe.

When I was seventeen I fell in love with a boy from a neighboring village. He was a year younger than me, fey, red haired, with sunken, poison green eyes: a musician and a junkie. I’d hitch to his town and sit on the library steps across the street from his big Victorian house and wait there for hours, hoping to see him but also wanting to absorb his world, clock the comings and goings of his younger siblings, parents, his golden retriever, his friends. I wanted to see the world he knew from inside his junkie’s skin, smell the lilacs that grew outside his window.

One day his sister came out and said, “My brother’s inside. He’s waiting for you to come over.”

I went. No one else was home. We crawled underneath the Steinway Grand in the living room, and I sucked him off. Afterward we sat together on the front porch while he smoked cigarettes. This pattern continued until I left high school. One night we broke into the village pharmacy and stole bottles of Tuinals and quaaludes before the alarm went off then ran laughing breathlessly back to his house, where he pretended to sleep while I hid in his closet. We weren’t caught, but I was too paranoid to ever try it again.

I liked to watch him sleep; I liked to watch him nod out. I took pictures of him and got them processed over in Mount Kisco. At night in my room I’d look at those photographs — his eyes closed, cigarette burning in his hand — and masturbate. I told him I’d do anything for him. A few years later, he got caught burglarizing another drugstore up in Putnam County. His parents bailed him out and he wrote to me, desperate and lonely, while he was awaiting sentencing. I never wrote back. His family moved to the Midwest somewhere. I don’t know what happened to him.

He was the only person I ever really cared about. I still have those photos somewhere.

In 1975 I graduated from high school and started at NYU. I had vague plans of studying photojournalism. That all changed the night I went over to Kenny’s Castaways to hear the New York Dolls. The Dolls never showed, but someone else did, a skinny chick who screamed at the unruly audience in between chanting bursts of poetry while a tall, geeky guy flailed around with an electric guitar.

After that I quit going to classes. I took up with a girl named Jeannie who waitressed at Max’s Kansas City. For a few months she supported me, and we lived in a horrible fourth-floor walkup on Hudson Street. The toilet hung over a hole in the floor; the clawfoot tub was in the kitchen. We put a sheet of plywood over the tub and on top of that a mattress we scrounged from the street. I didn’t tell my father I’d been suspended from NYU. I used the checks he sent to buy film and speed, black beauties, crystal meth. There was a light that fell on the streets in those days, a light like broken glass, so bright and jagged it made my eyes ache, my skin. I’d go down to see Jeannie when she got off work at Max’s and take pictures of the people hanging out back. Some of those people you’d still recognize today. Most you wouldn’t, though back then they were briefly famous, just as I was to be. Most of them are dead now.

Some of them were dead then. I shot an entire roll of film of a kid who’d OD’d in the alley early one morning. No one wanted to call the ambulance — he was already dead, why bring the cops down? So I stood out there, shit-colored light filtering from the streetlamp, and photographed him in closeup. I was nervous about bringing the film to the place I usually went to. I had a friend at the university process the film there for me.

“This is sick stuff, Cass,” he said when I went to pick it up. He handed me the manila envelope with my contact sheets and prints. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You’re sick.”

I thought they were beautiful. Slow exposure and low light made the boy’s skin look like soft white paper, like newsprint before it’s inked. His head was slightly upturned, his eyes half-open, glazed. You couldn’t tell if he’d just woken up or if he was already dead. One hand was pressed upon his breast, fingers splayed. A series of black starbursts marred the crook of his bare arm; a white thread extended from his upper lip to the point of one exposed eyetooth. I titled the photo “Psychopomp.” I decided it was strong enough that I should start assembling a portfolio, and so I did, the pictures that would eventually become part of my book Dead Girls.

People used to ask me what it was like to take those photographs.

“How do you think it feels?” I shot back at the guy from Interview.“How do you think it feels? And when do you think it stops?”

He didn’t get it. No one does. I can smell damage; it radiates from some people like a pheromone. Those are the ones I photograph. I can tell where they’ve been, what’s destroyed them, even after they’re dead. It’s like sweat or semen or ash, and it’s not just a taste or scent. It shows up in pictures, if you know how to catch the light. It shows up in faces, the way you can tell what a sleeping person’s dreaming, if they’re happy or frightened or aroused. I don’t know why it draws me; maybe because I dream of leaving this body the way other people dream of flying. Not flying to a sunny beach or a hotel room, but true escape, leaving one body and entering another, like one of those wasps that lays its eggs inside a beetle so a wasp larva grows inside it, eating the beetle until the new wasp emerges.

It sounds creepy, but I always liked the idea of disappearing then becoming something new. That of course was before I disappeared.

But taking a picture feels like that sometimes. When I’m getting it right, it’s like I’m no longer standing there with my camera, with my eye behind the lens, looking at someone. It’s like it’s me lying there and I’m seeping into that other skin like rain into dry sand.

Sometimes it happens with sex. Once I brought a sixteen-year-old boy back to the apartment. I’d picked him up at a club, dark eyes, curly dark hair, a crooked front tooth, tiny scabs on the inside of his arm where he’d been popping heroin, still too scared to mainline.

The tooth is what got me. I’m still sorry I didn’t shoot him. He was beautiful, one of those Pasolini kids who absorbs light then shines it back into your eyes and blinds you. But I left my camera on the floor, and instead I just fucked him, more than once. Then I lay awake and watched him sleep. When he woke in the morning he looked at me, and I saw what had happened to him: his mother’s death, the small apartment in Queens where he lived with his father and sister, the after-school job at a pet shop. Cleaning fish tanks, measuring out birdseed. He told me all this, but I already knew; I could see the light leaking from his eyes. I wanted to photograph him, but suddenly I felt real panic. I gave him coffee and money for a cab and literally pushed him out of the door. The look he gave me then was crushed and confused, but that I could live with. What I couldn’t deal with was the knowledge that he was so close to dead already. The only thing that had made him feel alive was fucking me.

I tried to explain this to Jeannie. She looked at me like I’d spit in her face.

“You’re crazy, Cass. You’re, like, a nihilist. You’re in love with annihilation.”

“Yeah? So is that a bad thing?”

She didn’t think that was funny. She left me soon after and got a job at a massage parlor. I didn’t care. I stayed in the apartment. By then I’d gotten messed up with a rich girl from Sarah Lawrence who liked slumming with me. She split when the school year ended, by which time my father had figured out what was going on — that I’d been kicked out of school and was no doubt spending the checks he sent on drugs. He was surprisingly calm. He made sure I knew he wouldn’t give me another dollar until I straightened out and earned enough to put myself back through school, but he also let me know I was always welcome back home. I thanked him and kept in touch intermittently, usually by postcard.

I bought a tripod and began doing a series of pictures, black-and-white photographs of me dressed and posed like women in famous paintings. I called the series “Dead Girls.” There was me as Ophelia, wearing a thrift-shop bridal gown and ribbons, floating in a tenement bathtub filled with black-streaked water — dye bled from the ribbons so that it looked as though blood flowed from my dress. There was me topless, sprawled in a Bowery alley on my back as Waterhouse’s dead “St. Eulalia.” For Munch’s “The Next Day” I lay on top of my plywood bed with empty wine bottles scattered around me. I used a similar setup for Walter Sickert’s “The Camden Town Murder.”

It took me five months. I got a job at a wino’s liquor store on the Bowery to get by. There were twenty-three photos when I was done, enough for a show.

My central image derived from a lithograph from Redon’s “La Tentation de Saint-Antoine”: a life-sized human skeleton, a plastic model I had a friend borrow for me from the NYU art department. I draped it with a white sheet and posed beside it, naked, my hand clutching its bony plastic fingers. I set the shutter so that the image was so underexposed as to be almost indiscernible, deliberately out of focus. All you saw was the skeleton, seeming to fall forward through the frame, and floating beside it a face suggestive of a skull: mine. I translated the drawing’s original caption into English.

Death: I am the one who will make a serious woman of you; come, let us embrace.

I added these to my portfolio, and a few portraits I’d done of Jeannie and her friends hanging out in the apartment and the back room at Max’s. The pictures were harsh and overlit, but they had a scary energy, most of it supplied by Jeannie herself in torn fishnets and smeared eye makeup, her works on the floor beside her, the glare of a naked hundred-watt bulb making Gillette blades glow like they were radioactive.

It didn’t hurt that some of the figures lurking in the background were starting to get written about. Back in January I’d begun seeing flyers stapled to telephone poles around town: PUNK IS COMING. I bought the first copy of the magazine for fifty cents at Bleecker Bob’s not long after. A month later, the first copy of New York Rocker came out, and I bought that too. When I got off my night shift at the liquor store I’d walk over to CBGB’s and get trashed and dance. I’d take my camera and shoot whatever was going on, speed, smack, sex, broken teeth, broken bottles, zip knives. People laughing while blood ran down their face, or someone else’s. Some people didn’t like getting their picture taken while having sex or shooting up. I got good at throwing a punch then running. I started wearing these pointy-toed black cowboy boots that weren’t good for dancing, but I could kick the shit out of someone if he lunged for me and be gone before his knees hit the floor. I loved the rush of adrenaline and rage. It was as good as sex for me.

“Scary Neary!” Jeannie shouted when she saw me coming. By then people were getting used to me. And other people were starting to take pictures too.Punk and New York Rocker didn’t create the scene, but they gave it a name, and we all knew where it lived.

By now I’d made some contacts in the city’s photography scene. I brought my photos to the director of the Lumen Gallery, and he agreed to give me a small show in the back room. Three years earlier, Robert Mapplethorpe had begun to win a following among Warhol acolytes and some prescient artworld types. The same thing was happening now with the downtown scene. I sent out a hundred xeroxed invitations to everyone I vaguely knew and scattered another hundred at the clubs where I hung out. I made sure all the musicians knew they were featured in the photos. Then I bought myself a bottle of Taittinger Brut, got smashed, and went to my opening.

It was the right place at the right time. “Dead Girls” bridged the gap between two camps, photography and punk, my staged self-portraits and documentary images of the downtown scene. The dreamy kitsch of photos like “St. Eulalia” melded into the shock of seeing Jeannie nod out while the lead singer of Anubis Uprising masturbated onto her face. I could hear the buzz as I stumbled into the back room at Lumen.

I was a hit, and I wasn’t yet twenty years old.

WHO ARE THE MYSTERY GIRLS? ran the Voice headline a week after my show opened. CASSANDRA NEARY’S PUNK PROVOCATIONS. They used a detail of “St. Eulalia,” cropped so you could see my bare foot and the Canal Street sign. It looked like a crime-scene photo. This wasn’t a bad take, since I was being castigated in the press for everything from pornography to drug dealing.

I didn’t care. I was safe behind my camera at CBGB’s. I loved the rituals of processing film. I had an instinctive feel for it, how long it would take for an image to bleed from the neg onto emulsion paper. I loved playing with the negs, manipulating light and shadow and time until the world looked just right, until everything in front of me was just the way I wanted it to be.

But best of all I loved being alone in the dark with the infrared bulb, that incandescent flare when I switched the lights back on and there it was: a black-and-white print: a body, an eye, a tongue, a cunt, a prick, a hand, a tree; drunk kids racing through a side street with their eyes white like they’d seen a ghost with a gun.

This is what I lived for, me alone with these things. Not just knowing I’d seen them and taken the picture but feeling like I’d made them, like they’d never have existed without me. Nothing is like that: not sex, not drugs, not booze or sunrise off the most beautiful place you can imagine. Nothing is like knowing you can make something like that real. I felt like I was fucking God.

You read a lot of crap about photographic craftsmanship in those days, and technique; but you didn’t hear shit about vision. I knew that I had an eye, a gift for seeing where the ripped edges of the world begin to peel away and something else shows through. What that whole downtown scene was about, at least for a little while, was people grabbing at that frayed seam and just yanking to see what was behind it; to see what was left when everything else was torn away.

My story was picked up by the Daily News. Then the Sunday Times Magazine interviewed me for a very brief piece. And there were the “Dead Girls” photos, and there was me, smoking a Kent and wearing beat-up black jeans and red Keds and a MC5 T-shirt filigreed with cigarette burns, my hair a dirty blond halo around a pale face with no makeup. I looked like what your mother dreams about in the middle of the night when you don’t come home.

I was actually a little worried about what my father would think. He finally called me after the Times Magazine story ran. He made it clear that he had no interest in seeing the show — a relief to both of us — but he also wanted to make sure I wasn’t in any legal trouble.

“Anything comes up, call Ken Wilburn over in Queens,” he said and gave me the number. “He represents some guys, they’ll help you out if you get into trouble. I don’t know how the hell you can make money out of this stuff, Cass, but I hope to God you do. Especially if you need Wilburn.”

I never did need to call Wilburn. But I didn’t make much money, either. The Times article did its business, and all the photos sold; but I had only set the price at seventy-five bucks a pop. Jeannie bought most of them — God knows where she found the money — but about six months later they were destroyed when her apartment flooded. The girlfriend of Anubis Rising’s lead singer bought the picture of him with Jeannie then proceeded to set it on fire with her Bic lighter in the gallery, screaming “Fucking cunt!” until someone threw her out. John Holstrom bought a picture that had Johnny Thunders in the corner.

And the last photo went to Sam Wagstaff, which is how I got a book deal. I’d met a literary agent at my opening, a petite red-haired woman in a red latex miniskirt named Linda Kalman.

“This is very interesting,” she said, peering at “Psychopomp.” She was older than most of the people at the show, in her mid-thirties, and wore expensive gold jewelry and stiletto-heeled boots. I pegged her for a socialite slumming among the barbarians. She glanced at the crowd drinking white wine in plastic cups, Jeannie and her friends hooting raucously as a reporter took notes. “Do you know which one’s the artist?”

I dropped my cigarette and stubbed it out with my sneaker. “That would be me.”

“Really.” Her eyes narrowed. She gave me a small smile then extended her hand. “Linda Kalman. I’m working on a book right now with Chris Makos. Do you know him?”

“Yeah,” I lied and shook her hand. “Cass Neary.”

“Cass. Are you with a gallery?”

“No.”

“Mmmm.” She looked at me sideways, opened a little red clutch purse. “Well. Here. Take my card. Call me. Let me know who buys your pictures. And good luck.”

As it turned out, she got in touch with me when she read the piece in New York Rocker.

“So.” I could hear her drag deeply on a cigarette on the other end of the line. “Have you sold any photographs yet? Do you know who bought them?”

When I named Wagstaff, she sucked her breath in sharply. “Sam Wagstaff?”

“Yeah.”

“You know who he is, right?”

“Yeah.” A collector and curator with deep pockets; Mapplethorpe’s lover, though I’d heard they were on the outs.

“Well, Cass. Are you interested in putting a book together? Because I have an editor who’s very interested in what’s happening downtown. She can get someone to write an introductory essay, I think she said Macey Claire-Marsden from the Eastman Foundation might do it. It’s not huge money, but it would be good exposure for you.”

She hesitated. “I think you should do it. Not just for me. This kind of opportunity doesn’t come that often, Cass. Not for someone as young as you. You don’t want to blow it.”

“Let me think about it.” I didn’t say anything, didn’t hang up. I counted to five then said, “Yeah, okay. Sure. I’ll do it.

But you know what?

I blew it anyway.

It is said that when the new Queen saw the old Queen’s baby daughter, she told the King that the brat must be got rid of at once. And the King, who by now had almost forgotten the old Queen and had scarcely looked at the baby, agreed and thought no more about it. And that would have been the end of that baby girl, but that her nurse, Matulli, came to hear of it. Now this nurse was from Finmark, and, like many another from thereabouts, was apt to take on the shape of an animal from time to time. So she turned herself into a black bear then and there and picked up the baby in her mouth, blanket and all, and growled her way out of the Bower at the back of the King’s hall, and padded out through the light spring snow that had melted already near the hall, and through the birch woods and the pine woods into the deep dark woods where the rest of the bears were waking up from their winter sleep.

Now when anyone changes into a bear, it is bearish they become, and the nurse Matulli was the same. Little Halla crawled around with the bear cubs, and many a knock she got from hard claws and many a lick from rough tongues. She learnt to fight the other cubs, and, having the use of her hands, she would get her own back from time to time, pulling ears and scrambling on to black backs, and sometimes she wondered when her claws would grow. She got to know the thought and language of the bears. It was a language that did what it wanted to do well enough, so that there were many ways of showing the difference between one taste and another, the taste of crunched mice, the taste of many different berries and roots and the taste of honey either on the front, back, or sides of the tongue. It did the same for smells, and the forest was always speaking in smells to the bears. It did much for hearing and something for sight, but there was no way, for instance, to think about clouds or the flying of eagles, because the bears did not look up into the sky. And if anyone had wanted to explain to the bears about Halla and her stepmother, they would just not have been able to do it at all.

There were plenty of other wild beasts in the woods, wolves and foxes and martens, reindeer and elks and roe deer and hares. But most of them kept clear of the bears. In summer the woods were full of tangles and hollows and mosses, scented with crushed ferns, rich earth scooped for sweet shoots and young mushrooms, birds’ nests full of warm eggs, and the thick friendly fur of bears. Matulli-bear looked after Halla-baby as well as any bear can be expected to look after any baby. Halla had plenty to eat, a long tongue to wash her and a warm bear to cuddle against all night. But Matulli was a fine figure of a she-bear and the he-bears all wanted her to keep house for them. It came on for winter, and behind rocks and under fallen fir trees were deep and cozy dens waiting for Matulli and her bear husband. The nights got longer and colder and every morning Matulli found it harder and harder to wake up. But Halla woke and fidgeted and pulled Matulli’s whiskers and wanted her breakfast. And it came back to Matulli that one of the queer things about human beings was that they did not sensibly sleep all winter, but instead went to a great deal of trouble to cut fuel and shear sheep and weave blankets and thick cloaks and make themselves hot soup. And Halla, in spite of her excellent upbringing, was going to take after the rest of them. What was a poor bear to do?

And then a very fortunate thing happened. Matulli and her bear husband were walking through the woods, looking for the last of the wild bees’ honey or a late fledgling from a nest, and Matulli’s husband was grumbling away to himself because he could feel that the snow was not far off and it was time to go home to the den and sleep and sleep. But Halla was running around like a crazy butterfly and clearly had no intention of sleeping. Sometimes the he-bear thought it would be both nice and sensible to eat Halla, but he did not dare because of Matulli.

And suddenly a deer came galloping past them, looking back over its shoulder in a terrible fright. And after that a badger which was in a hurry too. But the badger had time to tell the two bears that there was a dragon coming along and they had better get out of the way. The he-bear turned round at once and went galumphing back; never had his den seemed so desirable. But Matulli sat back among the cranberry bushes in the wet moss and pulled Halla down beside her. Sure enough, in a little while the dragon came along, puffing and creaking and rattling. Matulli in the bushes coughed and said: “My Lord.” For she knew in her mind that dragons appreciated politeness from the rest of the world.

This dragon was somewhat startled and blew out a flame which singed the tops of the cranberry bushes and the tips of the fur all along Matulli’s back. But he had meant no harm, and he stopped and listened very graciously to Matulli’s story about Halla Bearsbairn. Matulli was speaking in the language of humans, since the thing could not be explained in bears’ language. But dragons are, within their limits, very intelligent, and most of them understand, not only the language of several kinds of animals, including the birds who have beautiful feelings but few facts, but also the languages of trolls, dwarfs, giants and human beings.

Now, if there is one kind of human being which dragons dislike more than another, it is the kind commonly called kings or heroes. The reason is that they are almost always against dragons. So when the dragon, whose name was Uggi, heard that the poor little pink human had been so badly treated by a king and a queen, he did not hesitate, but said at once that he would adopt Halla Bearsbairn and see that she grew up in all the right principles of dragonhood. “And you will see that she gets regular meals, my lord?” said Matulli.

“Have you ever heard of dragons going hungry?” said Uggi.

“And you will see that she doesn’t fall into the fire, my lord?”

“I will fire-proof her myself,” the dragon said.

“And you will comb her hair every night, my lord?”

“I will comb it with my own claws,” said the dragon, “for I see that the child has hair the colour of gold, which is the only right colour for hair.”

“And you will dry her eyes when she cries, my lord?”

“I will dry her eyes with the silken scarf of the Princess of the Spice Lands who was so thoughtfully offered to my cousin, the Dragon of the Great Waste. For I see that the child has eyes the colour of sapphires, which is the only right colour for eyes.”

“What happened to the Princess of the Spice Lands, my lord?” asked Matulli, for she thought that this princess might be a nice playmate for her Halla.

The dragon coughed behind his claw. “The Princess of the Spice Lands was offered to my cousin by the populace. It was a very suitable and acceptable idea on their part. Unfortunately there was a hero sent to interfere with everybody’s best interests. In the result the princess – and the hero — perished. My poor cousin had a nasty jag over one eye. He gave me the scarf in exchange for a duplicate bracelet which I had acquired. Yes, yes.” And Uggi the dragon held out a glittering claw to Halla who caught hold and swung.

“And you’ll see she’s warm at night, my lord?” said Matulli, anxious to do her duty but thinking more and more pleasantly of the comfortable den and the uninterrupted sleep that waited for her.

“She will be quite warm, and what is more,” said the dragon, “she will always have a night-light, because I am proud to say that we dragons always breathe out of our noses while we are asleep.” He then put Halla up on to his back, where she held on by the spikes and shouted with pleasure because now she could see right up into the trees.

Suddenly the thought of her den and her husband and her long sleep was too much for Matulli-bear, and she tried to curtsey to the dragon, but that is too difficult for bears. So she just turned her large black back and went crashing back through the cranberry bushes and into the forest. Uggi the dragon raised his eyebrows and looked over his shoulder at Halla and winked slowly from the side of his eye across, in the same way that a crocodile winks, and then quickly up and down, the same way as an eagle, for he had something of the nature of both.

But Halla was delighted with it all and dug her bare heels into the scaly sides of the dragon, who went slithering and crackling off through the forest, every now and then accidentally setting fire to a bush or a drift of dry birch or oak leaves, or singeing the fur of one of the animals which was too proud or too stupid to get out of the way.

Chapter Two
The Dragons

On his way home that evening Uggi took a short flight to the top of Signal Hill, whose summit was all scorched and scarred so that not even the stillest stones grew moss on them. Here he gave a great blast and flames like enormous golden lilies shot out of his nostrils and vanished into sudden dusk. His cousins, Bauk, Gork, Hafr and Hroar, came flying over, creaking with their wings like a thousand flights of geese. They were told the whole story, while Halla Bearsbairn drummed her bare feet on her own dragon’s back. Very sensibly, they decided to fire-proof her at once, before anything awkward could happen.

The ceremony of fireproofing is a very old and beautiful one, which can only be performed by the Goddess Demeter or by not less than three members of the Ancient Order of Dragons, of whom one at least must be a Master Dragon. Halla, who was used to being licked by bears’ tongues, thought nothing of being licked by the forked-flame tongues of dragons. For a short while afterwards everything that she looked at appeared to have a fine fringe of flame, and indeed this would come back to her afterwards, when she was much older, if ever she got angry.

All that evening and far into the night and long after Halla was asleep, the dragons moved and danced round her in an earnest excitement, spiring up from Signal Hill towards the stars, shooting out bursts of flame which reflected from polished scales and claws and multiplied themselves into hundreds of flashes and twinkles. Sometimes they would spring into the air, clapping their wings together and undulating downwards. Sometimes they would shoot away till they were as tiny as rockets and then come thundering back. And they determined that they would bring up the maiden Halla to do credit to every kind of dragonhood and to be a bane to kings and heroes and all such enemies of true dragons. And carefully, before morning greyed the night sky, or dimmed the frosty stars, Uggi the Master Dragon carried back the sleeping child in his great claws, and her pale gold hair swished and feathered in the flame of his breathing, but was never singed.

And so Halla was brought up by the dragons, and year after year she learnt to think of things in the dragonish way. She had long lessons, specializing in geology, arithmetic, especially multiplication, which led in turn to economics, always an important part of dragon history, and also of course in such elements of magic as were thought suitable for her. When lessons were over she was allowed to play with Uggi’s treasure, go sliding down heaps of pearls and build towers of gold and ivory boxes. She could dress herself up in ropes of jewels and look at herself for as long as she liked in polished silver mirrors; these were held up for her by an admiring young dragon with a fiery smile but only recently hatched and still soft-scaled. She wore cloth of gold, or cloth of silver when she went blackberrying. For, try as the dragons would to get rid of such tastes, she was bearish about berries and honey. Still, she learnt to enjoy dinner parties of over-roasted joints, chops grilled hard, blazing plum pudding and ginger snaps. And of course she had as much snapdragon as she liked.*

Dragons like to live on blasted heaths and desolate, snow-capped, igneous mountains, but Bork or Hafr, who were young dragons, not many centuries old, would often take her for rides down to the deep woods or the rivers and, from a distance, they would point out to her the dwellings of men, the halls with the fields and barns and stockades round them at the head of the fjords, and the boats moored at the jetties or drawn up on land in times of storm. The biggest of these were called dragon ships, but the dragons themselves were never certain how to take this. It might, of course, and properly should be, a form of worship, but with the race of men one never knew.

In summer Dragon Mountain was hot and stuffy, and the Desolate Heath made prickly walking. But in winter all was snow-covered and the enormous northern lights drew curtains of shimmer between earth and upper air or stilt-danced round the Pole Star. The dragons rushed through them, crackling with static. In winter, too, they heard the Fenris Wolf howling, far, far away, yet too near for comfort. But Halla knew that nothing could hurt her so long as she was with the rest of the dragons and diligently guarding a treasure.

In her history lessons she learnt, first, about the beginnings of things, the tree Yggdrasil growing above the first dragon’s nest, before the first dragons had chipped their milky eggs: about the weaving of the Norns and the peculiar habits and preferences of All-Father, who had made men in order to amuse himself. And then she learnt about the rebellion of men against dragons: how men had been taught by the Great Dragon to keep sheep and cows for dragon dinners and not to complain if an occasional shepherd was eaten with his flocks, since that was all to the good when looked at the right way. When flocks and herds increased and over-production was threatened, dragons stepped (or more usually flew) into the breach and disposed of the surplus with no trouble at all. Occasionally, and for everyone’s good, mankind were instructed to offer a fresh and juicy princess to their own particular dragon. It was said that the princesses enjoyed the experience. Certainly the dragons did.

But mankind became rebellious. Kings and champions and heroes, unfairly armed with flame-resisting armour and unpleasant lances, were encouraged by certain underground elements and against the wishes and interests of the bulk of the population, to interfere between princess and dragon. Occasionally this resulted in tragedies, as in the case of the good dragon who was killed by the man George, or of the dragon so cruelly done to death by Perseus when about to make the acquaintance of Andromeda. It could be verified that no princess was ever asked whether she wanted to be rescued and carried off by a dragon-slayer to a fate (no doubt) worse than death. Sometimes, too, a dragon was murdered in cold blood, as happened quite recently to the dragon Fafnir, an uncle of Gauk’s and a Master Dragon, who was rudely awakened and brutally stabbed by a young man called Siegfried, who, however, came to no good end himself.

But more often in the stories the dragon made good and all ended for the best. Sometimes Halla played at Princesses and Dragons, pretending to be tied to a tree and then waiting for one of the young dragons to rush at her with his mouth open, drenching her in delightful, tickly flames. And there would be no horrible hero to interfere. Sometimes Halla found herself wishing she was a real princess, so that it could all genuinely happen.

But the economics were more serious. Briefly, they came to this. The dragons gathered gold. The kings and heroes squandered it. Among kings, the shocking name of praise was bracelet-giver. And from where did the golden bracelets come? Why, from the treasure that some dragon had painstakingly amassed, with what care and thought and industry! Then, in some low way, a dragon would be attacked and murdered and the gold dispersed into the hands of those who had done nothing to earn it. Heroes prided themselves on a thing called generosity. And what was generosity? It was the giving away of something to those that had not earned it, and it was usually done by those that had not earned it. What sentiment or practice could be more revolting to dragons of right feeling? It would then be necessary for the robbed dragon to go over the whole process of collecting, storing away and cataloguing and finally guarding — even with his life, remember! — a new treasure. Every dragon had his cave and, in the order of nature, every cave had its treasure; for was not the sparkle of treasure implicit in the velvet darkness of a cave? This was part of the order and pattern of life, as laid down since the beginning of time.

“Where does the gold come from first?” asked Halla, frowning over it, sitting there on a rock with her hands round her knees and her golden, dragon-combed hair pouring down over her cloth of gold school frock with the great rubies round the neck and weighting the hem.

“It is melted out of the rocks by the dwarfs,” said Uggi, “and in the old days it was only the dwarfs who could work it. But now unfortunately they have taught the art to men. Yet it was always the men who won it from the dwarfs by force and trickery, which is the kind of thing mankind is clever at. And it is always through men that it comes to its home and safe-keeping in some dragon’s cave.”

“Why don’t the dragons get it straight from the dwarfs?” asked Halla, “then there needn’t be men.”

“Because,” said Uggi patiently, “dwarfs live in cracks and holes into which dragons, being of a proper size, cannot get. But men, being halfway to dwarfs, wriggle in after them.”

Halla stretched her arms and the bracelets clinked and the rings flashed in the sunshine. “I’m glad I’m a dragon,” she said.

“Never forget, child,” said old Uggi, “not only to think dragon thoughts, but also that you are part of a dragon’s treasure. My treasure. And remember, if a man were to see you, he would immediately try to steal everything you are wearing and carry it away and probably murder you as well.”

“I’d breathe fire on him,” said Halla, “when will you teach me to breathe fire? I’m tired of history.”

“It is very sad,” said Uggi, “but I cannot teach you to breathe fire.”

“Why not?” asked Halla. “Is it because I was a bear once? If only you would show me how to breathe fire, I would try to stop eating berries and getting my paws full of earth!” For the dragons were always speaking to her about these habits.

Uggi sighed, a hot, hot sigh that burnt a small patch of lichen that had survived so far on the side of the rock. He felt that, in spite of the way he had brought Halla up as a dragon, the moment was come when she must learn the facts of life, hard though it would be for him to tell them to her. He went on: “It is time, my child, that I told you something. Have you noticed, when you look at yourself in the shining mirror, that you are not like me nor indeed like any of the dragons?”

“Not very like,” said Halla, admiring her long toes, which were decorated with gold and emerald toe-rings, but which were not quite long enough, nor nearly sharp enough for claws. “Perhaps I shall be more like you when I am older. I think I can feel my wings growing,” she added, looking backwards over her shoulder and scratching her back.

Uggi the dragon wept a sizzling tear. “My child, I am afraid you will never grow to look like a dragon, for the truth is, you are not a dragon.”

“But–” said Halla, and her lip trembled, “I feel like a dragon. You always tell me I’m a dragon. Oh, I know I’m a dragon!”

“Alas!” said Uggi. “That is not enough. Though it is something. I am afraid that what I have to say will upset you very much, my dear. You must be brave, brave as a good dragon. The truth is that you are a child of man and only by adoption one of us. But never mind,” he said eagerly, “you are quite safe. You shall never go back to them. Unless, that is, you want to do so.”

Halla burst into tears and threw her arms round Uggi’s neck. “I could never possibly want to go back, never!” she said. “Why did you have to tell me? Why can’t you turn me into a dragon?”

“Even the Norns, or All-Father himself, could not do that,” said Uggi gravely.

“But why not?” asked Halla. “You taught me magic. I can make magic frogs out of stones, after all! Can’t I?” It was one of her best learned lessons in magic.

“But think,” said Uggi. “Those frogs only do what you want. Unless you say the Word to them, they cannot jump. If I were to turn you into a dragon — and I very much doubt if I could — you would only be able to fly or breathe fire or gather treasure or do any other dragonish thing if I said the Word to you. You would not be a dragon in your own mind and heart — in the way, my dear, that I believe you are now!” And he planted a fiery kiss on her forehead, and then bethought himself of an ancient carved emerald at the very back of his treasure cave which Halla had never seen. They would go and find it together. So she cheered up, for she was dragon-minded enough to find the thought of treasure above all elevating.

* In case you have never eaten snapdragon, this is how it is made. You get a shallow metal tray (real dragons always have gold) and you scatter blanched almonds and raisin clusters on it, then you pour brandy all over and set it alight. Then you pull out and eat as many almonds and raisins as you can. As I remember it, there used to be a lot of nasty juice left at the end, but it is more than forty years since I ate it last, for people have forgotten to honour the dragons.

The answer we arrived at was a qualified yes; some things about writing can be taught. Possibly there were shortcuts, methods to reduce that long learning period. Anyone with fair talent, a great deal of determination and perseverance, and some luck, can become a publishable writer, and what we could do was teach technique. We believed we could help emerging writers become better writers sooner.

Anyone who is literate can write, after all, and if all one wants to do is keep a diary without planning to share it with anyone else, that person does not need help, and studying technique would be wasted effort. Why bother? Write the diary, and be done with it. But as soon as publication is the goal, then technique becomes necessary.

That was our starting point. We talked about the kinds of writers we had met and how they worked. Although possibly there are as many methods of writing as there are writers, there is one dichotomy that cannot be denied. There are natural storytellers and then there are word smiths and their methods are quite different. I walked in on a conversation one time between two professional writers in which one was saying she agonized over the words to use. Even getting someone up from the table and out the door was difficult. The other one said, “Just say he got up and walked out. It’s that simple.” She looked at him in amazement. For her it certainly was not that simple. There was the difference between a storyteller and a word smith on display.

Damon and I made a pretty good team; he was a word smith and I’m a storyteller. I think of it as surface and depth, with the full understanding that it is much more complex than that. But it was a starting point. Damon was a master with the surface, but sometimes if the surface was too bad he failed to see beyond it to the depth. And often I ignored the surface to explore a story I found below it.

We realized early that we had to cope with both kinds of writers at Clarion, and what was effective with one was not necessarily effective with the other.

A good story is one in which the surface and depth are fused into one inseparable whole. Beautiful language, unique imagery, subtle symbolism over nothing is not a good story. Neither is a story obscured by bad word choices, awkward phrases that conceal meaning rather than reveal it, inappropriate symbolism or metaphors. We often encountered both types.

Having a group of twenty-five or more people critique a story, pointing out what was good and what was bad was extremely helpful, of course. But the students needed methods they could apply to achieve fusion after they left the group. Too often at home mother, spouse, beloved other all thought whatever came out of the typewriter–I’m talking BC here, before computers–was wonderful while the beginning writer was contemplating papering a room with rejection slips.

Those who were blind to the prose had to retrain their brains to look at and consider words instead of yielding to the impulse to write as swiftly as possible and think of the story as done when they reached the end. Continue to write at whatever speed is comfortable, we said, but then apply reason. For those who were blind to the fact that no story lay behind gorgeous language the message was harder: use the language you love, but then search for the meaning. We devised methods for each group to try without ever mentioning the dichotomy we had seen and were working with. We wanted everyone to try everything.

There is an adage: the more bitter the medicine the quicker the cure. The exercises that follow are laborious and time consuming; everyone hated doing them, but presumably, after enough doses, they helped cure the problem, or at the very least alleviated it.

Using a finished story, take clean paper and cover everything except one sentence at a time and read that one sentence. Does it say exactly what you intended and nothing else? That’s the test. For example: “Don’t do that!’ he exploded.” Looks okay? Wrong. You can’t explode words. You can utter them, say them, mutter, murmur, yell, shout, whisper, and so on. You can’t laugh words, or giggle words, or ejaculate words, or jump up and down words. Use “say.” If something stronger is needed, go to “yell” or “shout.”

“He looked at the book sitting on the table.” Pretty innocuous? Wrong. Inanimate objects don’t sit. Damon used to draw funny little pictures of things sitting around, books with legs dangling over the edge of the table, coffee cups with legs, plates, papers, guns. . . .

Consider a sentence like: “Her snakelike walk, gliding sinuously among the tables, was alluring.” Look up sinuous. Snakelike? Why repeat it? Rephrase.

Or: “The ringing of the bells, clanging in his head, was giving him a headache, and sent him packing.” Too many sounds. Rephrase.

Consider: “Running down the stairs he put on his shoes and opened the door.” I doubt it.

You can’t do all those things simultaneously.

Forget the story line, the plot, everything about the story except the sentences, and examine them one at a time, and then one word at a time.

Another exercise we tried was meant to curb a tendency toward purple prose, that is prose in which the modifiers–adjectives and adverbs usually–overwhelm the nouns and verbs. Take them out. All of them. Each and every one of them. Not just the immediate modifiers, but also the modifiers of the modifiers. For example: “The full, ballooning moon, glowing as if alive with white-hot fires forged in an unworldly icy hell, rose serenely with its majestically imperial presence over the harsh, frozen and hostile tundra.” Three or four sentences like that in a row can make the reader lose the story line altogether. Sensory overload sets in with too many images, too many contrasting and competing ideas. Where is the focus of that sentence? What does it actually say and mean? The moon rose.Okay, but you might need a little more than that.

After you strip the entire story down to its bare bones, start at the beginning and see just how many of the modifiers you must restore. The full moon rose over the frozen tundra. If that is what you need to convey, stop there. Sensory overload can be more deadly to a story than minimalist prose. You may be surprised to find a much stronger story than you started with once it’s relieved of its overwhelming finery.

If most of your verbs are paired with adverbs, use stronger verbs. They should not need crutches.

Another exercise we tried is as follows. The story has a surface that is as flawless as you can make it, and yet the story is unpublishable. One way to find out why not is to examine it with a different set of tools. Start with the first paragraph, read it several times, just that one paragraph, and then write in the margin what happens in it or what it is about. You may decide it’s a description of the place, the setting. Write “setting.” Next paragraph, do the same thing. More setting? The next and next. You may find that by the end of the story you have written setting over and over. Or perhaps it was character description, or something else repeated time after time with different phrases but the same basic meaning. The story is static, giving the reader more and more of the same thing glossed with beautiful language. Or maybe there is a character moving through the setting. Same diagnosis: a static story, nothing happens.

A walk through a park, no matter how lovely or dreary the park, is not a story. A character study is not a story. Impeccable language, beautiful imagery will not make them turn into stories. Something has to happen; something has to change. Equilibrium must be upset, either within the story, or in the reader experiencing the story. The end of a story signifies that a new equilibrium has been achieved.

Think of a Pooh stick tossed into a stream where you can watch its progress without knowing if it will land or if it will be destroyed, tumbling this way and that, caught in eddies and swept faster, then slower, but moving until it finishes its journey, always in sight. It has arrived at a new destination, achieved a new equilibrium. There is movement, something happens, and there is an end. The motion is visible, the action is within the story.

There is another kind of story, however, where the stick is tossed into a body of water and there is no apparent motion except for a gentle bobbing. But the currents are strong beneath the surface of the water, and when you turn your gaze away, you realize that the movement, the change has been within you, not in the stick. Something happens; at the end of the story you arrive at a new destination, a new understanding or a new insight, a revelation about an event, a world, or a person. The story of revelation can be extremely powerful, and the appearance of stasis is deceptive. The stick is unmoved; the reader is moved instead. Something happens.

Either of the above two examples could be made into stories if the writer knows in advance what is to be revealed by the end. The walk in the park could be a story if it is revealed that without an exit, an escape route, Eden can be a prison. The character sketch could turn into a story if it is revealed that someone altogether different from the public face lives behind the mask the character wears. But you have to know what the story is about and not simply hope that enough lovely prose will cause something to develop. That takes the guiding hand and head of a writer.

Damon and I lived in a huge, unmanageable house: a circa 1890 Victorian, with a huge, equally unmanageable-at-times family. On cold nights with snow piling up deeper and deeper, the thermometer plunging to zero or lower, we sat near a fire in a fireplace big enough to roast a pig on a spit, something we discussed doing now and then but never got around to. We talked about everything, including the twists and turns our lives had taken to put us in the role of teachers. How strenuously we both had worked to avoid what we considered to be the teacher trap.

Immediately after graduating from high school Damon left Hood River, Oregon, the small town where he grew up. His father was principal of the high school, his mother had been a teacher; he fled and joined the Futurians, a group devoted to science fiction, in New York. The group broke up, each member going his own way after a time, but Damon remained a Futurian in spirit for the rest of his life. He had sidestepped the teacher trap. He knew from an early age that he had to become a writer.

All through my childhood I told stories, and then wrote stories in high school. Several different teachers said I would be a writer and I didn’t understand why they did. I knew that writers were magical, god-like, and dead, at least the ones we studied were dead. I did not qualify on any count. Wanting to write stories and becoming a real writer were so far apart I didn’t see how anyone could bridge the gap. I was good in chemistry and math, and I decided to be a chemist until the advisor told me that I would end up as a man’s lab assistant or else I would teach. By then I had a college scholarship, but I didn’t take advantage of it; instead, I got a job, married, started a family and tried to read every book in the Louisville Public Library. Ten years after graduating from high school, I was reading an anthology and finished a story I thought was quite bad. I closed the book and said, “I can do that.” I wrote a story, rented a typewriter to copy it, mailed it, then wrote another one. I sold them both and bought the typewriter with my first check. I’ve been writing ever since. I too had avoided the teacher trap.

Yet, there we were, Damon and I, sitting by the fire, planning our next two weeks as teachers at Clarion, both of us eager to do it again, determined to try harder and do better next time. We had entered the teacher trap unaware; the trap had sprung, and we were captured.

Chapter 1: Outlandish Changes

There is more matter in the universe than we at first thought.
–CBS newscaster

“The beast changes to a woman or the woman changes to a beast,” the doctor says. “In her case it is certainly the latter since she has been, on the whole, quite passable as a human being up to the present moment. There may be hundreds of these creatures already among us. No way to tell for sure how many.”

The husband feigns surprise. Actually he’s seen more than he’s telling, and right in his own home.

“But they are, it is clear, here among us now in many varied forms and already voicing strange opinions: some in love with water, rain, the tides; breathing heavily (as she does); while others quite the opposite, more like birds or foxes. Yesterday I saw one I thought quite like a giant sloth, upside down in the lower branches of a tree. Some are, you know, on the way up, others the reverse. As I said: woman to beast, beast to woman, and not much point to it all it seems to me. Marcus Aurelius wrote, and I quote: ‘Is the ball itself bettered by its upward flight? Is it any worse as it comes down?’ When did you first suspect your wife?”

“. . . her mouth grown wide, lips dark, her eyes suspicious. She smells — I don’t know — like something from a marsh. Has become irritable. More so than usual. Whimpers. Drops things. Or, on the other hand, like a snapping turtle, sometimes won’t let go. Drinks too much. . . .”

“Of course all this would be perfectly normal in a woman twice her age, but since she’s only thirty-four, I think it’s a good idea to see a psychotherapist at once, both of you. You say she was a fairly good wife and mother, though somewhat irritating at times, and you want her back that way as soon as possible? You must realize, however, that she is at this very moment in a period of profound change, both physical and psychological. Be surprised at nothing. To my mind it is as if they all had eaten an apple from the tree of a different kind of knowledge and have seen with new eyes, not that they are naked, but have seen that they are clothed.”

What the doctor doesn’t mention is how many similar cases he’s seen and just how far some of them have progressed. He doesn’t realize that the husband wouldn’t be a bit surprised, that the husband realizes from personal experience that some of the women are already talking in grunts (if at all), while others, who used to speak only in guttural mutterings, are now mouthing long, erudite words such as teleological, hymenopterology, omphalos, and quagmire.

Christine, for instance, red-headed, plump Christine, who had several times been taken for an orangutan, can now argue her way out of any zoo no matter what the educational level of the keepers. Mona, on the other hand, can almost fly (though it is unlikely that she ever really will). Her husband complains that she makes funny noises, but her children like her all the better for it. John is divorcing Lucille in order to marry Betty (quite bearish still, but evidently what John wants). Mabel has only recently been given a name at all.

This is not the case with Pooch, who has had a name from the start and who now finds herself taking over more and more of the housework and baby-sitting, yet continues to be faithful. Her mistress is deteriorating rapidly — mouth grown wide, eyes suspicious. Her master (the man who visited the doctor, as mentioned a moment ago) has tried all the experts he can afford and they are now, both of them, in psychotherapy, as the doctor recommended, but it looks as though the marriage can’t last.

In other homes, similar dramas are playing themselves out in various ways. A guinea pig named Cucumber (because of her shape, and sometimes affectionately referred to as “Pickle”), although not very smart, is taking over several of the easier tasks in the house next door. Cucumber has spoken to Pooch on several occasions, but Pooch finds it hard to be with her because she feels that she, Pooch, needs to hold herself back. Sometimes she feels she’d like to grab hold of Cucumber by the back of the neck and give her a good shake. And for no reason. Phillip, the king snake down the block, has turned out to be female after all, as has Humphrey the iguana. Neither of them, it is clear, has much maternal instinct, though, and they were last seen heading south on Route 95 with not so much as a good-bye kiss to the little ones who had watched over them tenderly, albeit not very consistently.

On the other hand, Pooch is doing the best she can for her foster family. (The mistress has taken to drink and sleeps a good bit of the day, but bites out viciously if provoked. Not that she hasn’t done something of the sort to some degree all her life, but before it had usually been a quick slap.) Pooch now does the shopping as well as the laundry, diapering, and much of the cooking, though she is hardly as old as the oldest child she’s looking after. Pooch, who had always been smiling and playful, now has become serious and sad, watching over everything with her big, golden-brown, color-blind eyes.

The psychologist has counseled patience and forbearance on the part of the family toward the mistress, wife, and mother. Pooch, who has never been patient, realizes the importance of this and conducts herself with a quiet dignity far beyond her years — always her mouth half open, always a little breathless. It’s not unattractive.

Lately she has been yearning to see the psychologist herself. After all, it is she who has taken on more of the burdens of the family than could ever have been expected. But a visit is out of the question: the therapy is already straining the family’s finances to the limit, even though the therapist is giving them a discount and the first few months were paid for by insurance. But at last the day comes when the psychologist himself asks to see Pooch. He has, no doubt, come to realize that she is a key figure in the dynamics of this tormented nuclear family and that she is probably the most stable element in it.

He understands a lot of things about her just by looking. Right away he senses her suffering (how she sits, demure, her arms around herself, held in, or rather, held together). And right away he guesses that she has been dependent all her life. Guesses, also, that there was some sort of break with her mother at an early age (how her hands hover around her mouth, her bitten nails), and that her toilet training may have been inordinately severe, possibly involving corporal punishment (her guilty look and the fact that, at first, she cannot talk to him at all). Of course these are only conjectures.

He asks her for her dreams. She remembers only a short one of rabbits. He asks her about her hopes and fears. . . . And has she no ambitions, no hobbies, no interests beyond the immediate family? It seems not. He asks about her youthful indiscretions. She says, None, but what she doesn’t tell him is her sudden guilty yet happy memory of having pulled woolen caps and mittens off the heads and hands of small children or grabbing the fringe of their scarves. At the end of the session he tells her to do something for herself every day, if only just one small thing: take half an hour off to do something she wants to do, eat a tidbit of a favorite food, buy a small, inexpensive gift for herself, or perhaps even something expensive. Play a game of frisbee. This is orders, he says, doctor’s orders.

Psychologically he cannot be sure that he is giving her the proper advice. It is clear that Pooch has always wanted to be of service to mankind in any way that she possibly can. From the general look of her, he guesses that her retrieving instincts are strong and that she might be passionately interested in swimming. Perhaps she can have no other joys but these.

For the first few days after this session, Pooch does not dare follow his advice. Besides, she can’t think of anything she wants or wants to do. But on the fourth day, on a whim, she buys herself a three-dollar bunch of daisies.

Had she a room of her own she would have put the daisies there, but she sleeps on the doormat. No one has thought to change this situation. No one has noticed her budding femininity . . . no one in the family, that is. And after all, the house issmall. Hardly enough room for the parents and the three children. So there’s nothing for it but to put the daisies in the kitchen, where she spends most of her time anyway. But later on her mistress comes in and eats the heads off all but one, leaving only an ugly bunch of stems. Pooch blames herself for this, for having been a little late in preparing supper. She props up the remaining flower in a small glass, but it’s too damaged to stand straight. Pooch gives up and eats the last flower herself. She is the one, then, caught with leaves sticking out of her mouth and accused by her master of ruining the whole bouquet. He slaps her several times with a rolled-up newspaper and does not wonder where the flowers came from in the first place.

The psychologist sees Pooch for another session. This time he draws a picture for her of her id, ego, and superego, and explains to her that she should let the id have a little fun now and then. It’s hard for Pooch to understand any of this, but she takes the diagram home and puts it in the only safe place she has, under the doormat. At night, when everyone is in bed, she takes it out and puzzles over the three circles that are supposed to represent herself, and the squiggles under them that are words.Id, then, is one of the first words she learns to read. After that, her reading progresses rapidly.

A few weeks later the mistress bites the baby. Not only bites it, but refuses to let go until Pooch puts a lit match to her neck. Now the baby’s arm has a large, V-shaped wound. Pooch is terrified. First of all, she knows that she will be blamed and that this is a serious offense that calls for more than a few taps on the head with a newspaper — which Pooch has never resented, knowing full well that, in some sense, she deserved them even when she hadn’t done anything wrong. (Of course she deserved no such thing, but low self-esteem has always been one of her main problems, as the psychotherapist well knows.) But now she is sure that a few slaps will not suffice. Also she has heard about neighboring creatures who were taken to the pound and never came back. Recently several of her rapidly changing friends have suffered just such a fate (whatever it is), having become too hard to handle at home in all sorts of ways. However one may enjoy the possession of an intelligent animal, too much intelligence, too many pertinent and impertinent questions, and too much independence are always hard to put up with in others, and especially in a creature one keeps partly for the enhancement of one’s own self-image.

And then, of course, Pooch is worried about the baby. What will the mistress do next? Pooch knows that she must not let the baby out of her sight even for a minute. She has always had deep feelings for the baby, above all the other children. The psychologist would certainly say that it is because she was taken from her own mother at such an early age and that she needs to mother the baby to make up for her sense of loss. A fairly common reaction.

After seeing that the mistress, looking even darker and more bloated than ever, has fallen asleep in the bathtub, as is usual at this time of day, and that the baby, also as usual, is down for its nap, Pooch sits in her master’s favorite chair to think things out. She has, from the beginning, been forbidden the use of this chair, but now she deliberately curls up in it. She longs to lay her head on her master’s knee and to look up at him, letting all her yearning speak out to him from her eyes as she used to do. She wonders if all these new words she’s learned are getting in the way. Life was so much happier before she knew so many of them. It was at just such times as those, her head on his knee, that the master used to talk and talk, stroking her and telling her that she alone understood him and accepted him just as he was. And she did, if not understand completely, at least accept completely, and still does, though it’s been a long time since he has sat here with her on the floor beside him. Perhaps she knows too many words now for him to speak so frankly. Perhaps he suspects that, now that she knows the words, she may not understand and may judge him more severely. But perhaps she, too, has played a part in the fact that this no longer goes on, both of them, on some deep level, realizing the impropriety of the stroking of the head and the scratching behind the ears of a nubile young woman by the man who is, even if not a blood relative, to some degree in the role of her father.

And Pooch is growing into a fine young woman: slender fingers where her paws once were, cheeks covered with little more than a peachy down. She is, after all, pedigreed, which is more than one can say for her adopted family. She was born on a farm, but no ordinary farm — as a matter of fact, a very famous farm in Virginia. Her father was from England and of impeccable bloodlines and her mother’s family had been registered for generations. Also the psychologist is right, she had been torn from her mother at quite an early age by her master and mistress. They had been on a vacation trip to Florida and had stopped off at the farm to pick up Pooch on their way home to Long Island; they could not have been expected to wait until she was of a proper age to leave her mother.

Pooch is aware by now that she has been living not far from a major urban center that is full of opportunities as well as dangers. She thought about this when the psychologist asked her what she wanted to do with her life, because immediately the idea popped into her head that she wanted some sort of career in music and that she lived not far from some of the best singing coaches in the world. She isn’t sure if she has any musical talent, even though from an early age she took every opportunity she had to listen to good music and to sing along with it. Her master and mistress soon put a stop to that, however, commenting on her terrible voice, which made her feel very sad. But the yearning still remains, if anything all the stronger for being suppressed, though she had put it completely out of her mind until the psychologist asked her what sort of (happy) future she envisioned for herself.

What she saw for just an instant was herself as Carmen, all in red, the rose in her mouth, dancing the seguidilla, though Carmen is quite the opposite of Pooch’s general personality, which is basically (and becomingly) modest. (She is also petite; what’s left of her fur, mostly white with flecks of black; long silky ears, one golden; small feet; noble head. She has a slight stutter, though never when she sings. Sometimes the words won’t come at all. It is at these times that her eyes speak most eloquently, as though just by staring and cocking her head she could make herself understood. Her feelings about sexuality and loyalty are decidedly old-fashioned. Once she marries, one can be sure that she will never stray.)

Now, however, it is clear that she must leave her beloved master and it is clear that there is nothing for it but that she take the baby with her.

What Pooch doesn’t realize is that, at this very moment, there is nothing in the bathtub but a very large, very vicious, and very drunk snapping turtle and that when the husband comes back in the evening he will understand the whole situation at a glance and will consider his marriage vows to be henceforth invalid and also his financial obligation to his wife at an end. Their bickerings had degenerated to incomprehensible mouthings anyway, and their lovemaking, though they had kept on with it in spite of increasing difficulties, had become mutually dissatisfying. So it will be with a sense of relief that he will take the creature to the nearest aquarium. And rather proudly, too, to be able to contribute what may be perhaps one of the largest snapping turtles in the world, a gift from him to the community at large. Also he wonders about her dollar value, whether she might be some sort of tax write-off and, if so, how much?

Pooch had run away a few times before, but that was when she was much younger. She had always been found in the neighborhood, her master driving around block after block until he discovered her in some backyard not far from home. After disposing of his wife, he proceeds to search for Pooch in his usual way, little dreaming that she is already in New York. After an hour of fruitless circling, he finally realizes that this time she is not to be found in this manner. His feelings for her begin to change as he realizes that she would no longer, could not possibly any longer, be wandering about in someone’s yard behind the lilacs.

He understands finally that it is a desirable young woman he is looking for, and the more he thinks about it the more desirable she becomes. What’s more, she’s his. He picked her out, bought her, trained her, taught her everything she knows (or so he thinks, anyway), disciplined her, took her — or used to take her — for walks. . . . And what a good hard worker she has turned out to be in the end! How sweet and uncomplaining! Just the sort of wife he always wanted. Never once an argument the whole of her life with him. He is thinking how all might be, at last, harmonious. Life could begin again with her beside him. Perhaps it could be a time of new and strange excesses he never dared even to think about, let alone perform when he was younger or with his wife (who always rather frightened him) for, after all, Pooch is another kind of creature entirely. Courage would hardly be needed with such as her. If, for instance, he wanted to tie her, spread-eagled, to the bed, she would not wonder at this behavior. He decides to call the police as well as missing persons and tell them that it is his wife who has run off with their child . . . his beautiful young wife.

Why is it, the doctor has been wondering (along with many other professional people), why is it that only the females of the various species are affected by all this changing? Why have no males, as far as has been ascertained, been changing too? Surely if extraterrestrial dust or some such substance had dropped from distant stars, the men could not have avoided it. Perhaps it isn’t of stellar origin at all, but atomic radiation, or maybe it’s simply industrial waste. But the doctor and other professionals would rather think about the stars, and do — or else about the moon, for haven’t women always been influenced by it? Perhaps it has changed in some way since being stepped on, especially a giant step by a man. Specialists in women’s problems have been called upon, ad hoc committees set up. The scholarly journals are full of conjectures, but no good answers or solutions have been forthcoming except that perhaps all the women should be inoculated with male hormones.

The doctor thinks it is a simple question of willpower . . . a case of mind over matter (males), or matter over mind (females), and this very lack of willpower, he believes, is a form of aggression. Females, then, the worm in the apple, as ever; or rather, the first bite into it. Always — even before all this happened — in a state of disequilibrium; exaggerating themselves and their plight, sighing, braying, little cries of ai, ai, vey, vey, piu, piu, oh, ow, poo, and so forth. What difference does it make, when all is said and done, he is thinking, that they take the shapes when they already have had the sounds down pat for so long? And what passionate undercurrents in all these voices! (He has often found them downright embarrassing . . . even his own mother, though not, thank God, his wife.) Passion has always been their undoing, while he himself has always been ruled by the intellect. More even than most men, so perhaps (he thinks) he is the one uniquely chosen to return the world to its former comfortable dependability.

A few simple experiments may suffice to prove his willpower theory. Then it would simply be a matter of finding the leaders — those who have instigated the others in this lack-of-willpower behavior — and retraining them with electric shocks or any sort of aversion therapy. Perhaps it can be done in his large, airy basement. Put up a few cages and section off a laboratory. Take in several homeless waifs and wives. Make sure they get a good breakfast. Surely many would be happy with little more than a roof over their heads. It’s spring but it’s still pretty cold outside at night. Certainly they won’t cost much. It’s the equipment that will be the major expense. He decides to apply for a grant at once.

He has read in Marcus Aurelius that “Matter in the universe is supple and compliant, and the Reason which controls it has no motive for ill-doing; for it is without malice, and does nothing with intent to injure, neither is anything harmed by it.”

No, it is clear that it is not the fault of Matter at all, but of the female.

Lincoln Center on a Friday evening. The several audiences are strolling about in front of the fountain; have not, in fact, collected themselves into audiences at all, but still function basically as individuals or as couples. What a wonderful diversity exists among the women! What feathers, scales, and furs! What sounds! Laughs and shrieks that reach the highest C. Seeing them, one might wish also for banana women, apple women, pine-tree women, but one can’t have everything and this suffices to all but the greediest seekers after life.

Pooch, before the splendor of Lincoln Center, watching the elegantly dressed women, is reminded of a Japanese poem:

Butterfly
Or falling leaf,
Which ought I to imitate
In my dancing?

and also a line from another poem: “Very little happiness would be enough.”

She’s had nothing to eat since morning, but, though it certainly would help to lift her spirits, food is not what she hungers for. As it happens, she receives exactly what she wants most of all. Or rather, the second best thing. Someone hands her a ticket he can’t use. Not for the Metropolitan, but for the New York City Opera. Yet even this is beyond her wildest dreams, and by some strange quirk of fate, the opera is to beCarmen.

Pooch thanks God that the baby has had a hard day and is sound asleep. She tucks it under her arm much as one would carry a bunch of books and enters the theater panting slightly, short of breath from the excitement of it all. Her simple elegance belies her inappropriate clothes (ill-fitting jeans and torn, discarded sweater that once belonged to the oldest child of the family). She carries herself well and people notice her, though inside she is feeling small and spotted.

And so the opera begins, Pooch whimpering occasionally with a pleasure that cannot be contained. When Carmen sings: “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle . . . that nobody can ever tame,” Pooch is enraptured. Yes, it’s so true, so true. That’s just the way love is. She is thinking of the only males in her life (not counting the oldest child): her master and the psychotherapist, for whom she already has a full-blown transference.

But of course (as could have been predicted) it is Micaela’s song that moves her most of all, even though her French is rudimentary. “Je dis que rien ne m’épouvante” and “Seule en ce lieu sauvage . . . j’ai tort d’avoir peur; . . .” bring tears to her eyes. Pooch might be said to be in somewhat the same fix that Micaela is in. Suddenly she can no longer contain herself and raises her voice in a mournful obbligato to that of the soprano on stage.

Everyone turns to look at the rear of the balcony, wondering where this strange sound is coming from. Pooch has the words all wrong, but they are emotionally correct and full of homesickness and fear. Her voice is obviously untrained but has a surprising power. Something spellbinding about it. Something wild. It has what Roland Barthes calls “grain”: “(One hears only that),” he writes, “Beyond (or before) the meaning of the words . . . from deep down in the cavities, the muscles, the membranes, the cartilages . . .” The audience is, for just a moment, won over. The Micaela on stage stops singing, confused, and Pooch goes on by herself, her trembling audible. But this lasts only a minute, for the baby begins to cry. Of course Pooch is quickly hustled out amid catcalls, boos, and hisses. She hunches over in shame, the baby screaming.

Shortly afterward, and perhaps precipitated by the unforeseen commotion, the Carmen on stage begins to limp and whinny in a very strange manner. It is clear to all that she cannot be counted on to finish the opera. In truth, the impresario has been worried of late, wondering how to replace these highly trained but changing women. He has even, just for a moment, thought of castrating little boys to ensure a crop of sopranos for the future, but now he realizes that there is a better source he hadn’t recognized. He rushes to the lobby to try to intercept Pooch before she can get away. Here, he is thinking, is something wild and new to work with, though will she be able to practice as hard as necessary, and with a baby no less? No doubt she is poor, but he will finance the training. He will put his foot down, though, on helping with day care. She will have to find resources of her own where that is concerned. Yes, there is power here that he has not heard before. But she’s already gone by the time he gets to the door. “Find that woman,” he yells to a ticket taker; but the young man is running off in the wrong direction.

It is unlikely that he would find her, anyway, since she is soon to be netted by the dog catcher; for, as she flies from the scene of her humiliation, she runs unthinking down the middle of the street, hardly aware of the honking. She is booked for chasing cars, though of course that was the farthest thing from her thoughts, but her protests are in vain. The pound is not exactly the place for a trial by a jury of one’s peers, so she is summarily found guilty as charged. And as usual, she does have that guilty look. If only she had twenty-five dollars instead of two seventy-five in quarters (laundry money she hadn’t even meant to take, but found in her pocket after she’d left — she would never take money on purpose, even when running away and even when it might have helped to feed the baby). Twenty-five dollars and she could buy her way out and no problem.

Worse yet, they know who she is and will notify her master first thing in the morning, for Pooch is still wearing her collar with the license on it. Being a law-abiding creature, she had not even considered taking it off.

• Carol Emshwiller
• Carmen Dog

Excerpted from Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller. Copyright 1990 by Carol Emshwiller. All Rights Reserved.

The Mount

We’re not against you, we’re for. In fact we’re built for you and you for us — we, so our weak little legs will dangle on your chest and our tail down the back. Exactly as you so often transport your own young when they are weak and small. It’s a joy. Just like a mother-walk.

You’ll be free. You’ll have a pillow. You’ll have a water faucet and a bookcase. We’ll pat you if you do things fast enough and don’t play hard to catch. We’ll rub your legs and soak your feet. Sams and Sues, and you Sams had better behave yourselves.

You still call us aliens in spite of the fact that we’ve been on your world for generations. And why call aliens exactly those who’ve brought health and happiness to you? And look how well we fit, you and us. As if born for each other even though we come from different worlds.

We mate the stocky with the stocky, the thin with the thin, the pygmy with the pygmy. You’ve done a fairly good job with that yourselves before we came. As to skin, we like a color a little on the reddish side. Freckles are third best.

Your type is called a Seattle. I hope to find other Seattles to mate with you, and soon.

Your young will stay with their mothers until weaning. We’ll stroke them all over to make them love us. Four months is the crucial time for imprinting you predators. And your young do love us. You all do. We’re the ones with the treats. Leather straps will help keep you in line and help us keep our seat. There will sometimes be prickers on our toes. How and if these are used, and when, depends, of course, on you.

You are the recipient of our kindness, our wealth and knowledge, our intelligence, our good growth of greens. Without us you’d not exist. Remember that. Though it’s true a few of you still survive in the mountains. We care nothing for mountains. What can you grow in the mountains that’s not better grown in the valleys? Or build?

There is no need for you, or any of you, to learn how to count. And why read? We like you well-muscled. Reading is not conducive to muscles. We prefer that you hook yourself to the go-round instead.

My offspring will be pleased with you. They already know good lines: Slope of shoulders, rise of chest, slim waist, more so in your females. And, and most important, sturdy legs. Legs are what we’re taught to notice first. Hands last. Compared to ours, your hands are so small and weak. Then there’s the look in the eye. You should have a kind eye. Many things depend on such knowledge, or else there would be more danger than there already always is.

Our young adore you. They even adore your straps and buckles. They keep your pictures above where they curl up. They hang your worn-out shoes over their doorways. They save apples for you that they feed you piece-by-piece — and strawberries and chocolate.

As we go along on your shoulders, head to head (so sweetly!), cheek to cheek, our sun hats cover you also, and our rain hats. Some of us whisper our most secret secrets into your ear as we go.

Though I have prods and poles, I believe in explaining. Even to you, though you are as children. I believe it is safer that you understand — at least in part. You will never fully understand, but you must trust us, that we always have our reasons.

So I speak. “Tomorrow I will attach you to a circling line. You will be strapped up for the journey after the friskiness is taken out of you.” We prefer that there be no fight left and no ideas.

There are reasons for all this — all this from the start, I mean, and how we came to be on top. First, of course, there’s the fact that we’re superior in every way. You should be happy to serve such as we. And we can tell if you’re not. We have studied diagrams of your facial expressions. We can read your forehead and your lips, the wrinkles at the outsides of your eyes. Do not squint. It is unsightly.

You have a good life here. And, and most important, you are free — free in your stalls for a part of every day. You may rest and recuperate. If you have a book, and know how, you can read.

This is a case of prey over predator. You must admit, it’s only fair. Since we are prey, we can see, as you might put it, around corners, though that is not true. We simply see behind as well as in front. We know when a bug moves in a bush.

Now is the time for the willingness that is in you, since you are bred for it. We count on you for crossing whatever needs to be crossed without hesitation. Try to look good as you do it. Sweep ahead and don’t glance to the side. It’s our job to do the seeing. If danger lurks, we will let you know when to beware — when to jump back — when to turn around and run. Our senses are keener and we judge better than you can. A little tickle on the ear…you could decide on that as the signal. The choice is yours, of course. You are free. After our trip we’ll give you a good rubdown and lots of pats. (We like strokes — it reminds us of the lickings of our ancestors — butyou like pats, so thinking only of you, we’ll pat.)

And so we will enter the forest. Those of your kind who might be hiding there are few and should not be a trouble.

Already my heart is with your heart. We are two of one single kind, companions about to take a companionable outing. Surely as much fun for you as for me.

The meaning of life, yes, yes, and of butterflies. You would say they are two separate questions. We say they’re the same one.

“Wake up. It’s time. Kneel. This sack isn’t heavy. You’ll hardly notice it. Turn to your near side so I may mount. Near, I say. Near, near, near!”

Enter the forest. Appreciate the trees. Sure-footed friend. The ground is rough. My balance will help to hold you steady. When have I ever fallen, even when mounted on the very young? And here you are at the peak of your strength.

Oh, a day like this! One mountain would be enough, yet here are many. A dozen flowers, a dozen butterflies are all I would ask for, yet here are many dozens. And you, swinging along so lively, as if as new as the day.

Trust me, that I will lead us to a happy meadow where there will be a stream. Then I will give you a treat. “Have you your comb? My kind sees all sides and could be anywhere. I want you to look good.”

The social consequences of the journey must be taken into consideration. There is the mess that may inadvertently be made, if, that is, we encounter any of them — your sort. Should we see any, we will be obligated to round them up and bring them in, out of kindness and for their own safety. (That’s the reason for this pole.) The forest is cruel and dangerous, and there are no medical services available. It’s a wonder you survive there, those few of you that do. I’ve heard you eat acorns and the roots of Solomon Seal.

So, “Go, go, go!”

We go.

Trot and again trot, and I, by the motion of the stepping…I, as if having jumped back into the womb as I used to love to do. In those days any womb would do. Lulled, therefore, into a half-sleep — a half-dream — of mothers. We follow a paved way towards a mountain, though we’ll turn before we get there.

Pat your shoulder. “Good boy.” Praise is better than punishment.

“Don’t be afraid of the river. I know this river. One such as you can cross it easily. You’re a heavy and a tall. That’s why I chose you. Your head will be above it. See if it isn’t. Even my toes will stay dry. See if they aren’t.

“Cross the river, shake out. Comb your hair. Isn’t that refreshing?”

“Go, go, go along and go along. Knees high. Head up. Points off for slouching. I have a thought to feature you.” I would be much admired if you were high-stepping and had your hair slicked up and out. “Up and out, chest also. Chin in.”

The morning is so sweet I will sing of it and of love. “La, la, la, love. Lee, la, love.” And of you, my sturdy. We haven’t been together long, but you will know how I love you already.

Keep on. The work of the world is always done by creatures too tired to do it.

“Jump that log.” I will lean forward to help. “Lovely, lovely.” (Pat, pat, pat.) All so far, and the world, and the ways of it. “Be happy.”

Hear. Our ears are better. See, smell. Ours are better. How could we not have come to be your masters? Let us show you the way. From sun to shade to sun again, to shade. They say you cannot even smell the sun.

“Go,” I say out loud. “And go,” I say.

Here the remains of a primitive fire. I pull you to the side around it. I cover your eyes. “Go, my steady. Go, go. Well done.” (Pat, pat, pat.) “We’ll not rest until another length or so.”

That way you’ll be too tired to notice if another primitive fire spot turns up.

And it does. And another. I cover your eyes each time. Perhaps we’ve lost our way. I drop my hands from your eyes as if scales after moltings. I let my hands hover around your throat. It’s as a warning. “Peace,” I say. “We have always been peaceful creatures, as you well know. And you also, peaceful creatures, too.”

Down a steep bank, you, slipping and sliding. I don’t want any mud on me or my whites. I pull, this side and that. You throw your head as if to escape my pulling. You grunt. Thank goodness you have been well-trained in not making inappropriate noises.

“Good job. Did you hurt yourself?”

You know better than to answer.

I have two spots of mud. Best be uncomplaining. That’s always peaceable.

A stream. And another. A place where it’s hard to push through the brush. I wish I’d thought of your leggings. I don’t want unsightly scratches on your legs.

Perhaps we really are lost. I have my fix-upon and here is a good place to separate myself from you.

“Kneel. Near side. Near! Near! Are you listening, or don’t you yet know your near from your far? Hush. You know better than to answer. Some of you never seem to be able to learn near from far. Why is that? Hush. You know better than to speak.”

This is a good time for a treat. One bite. You don’t smell well enough to know I have lots more.

“You may squat.”

“Here is a sip and a bite.”

I love to watch your muscles. I love to see you move with the spots of sun shining down.

But I’m tired, I will mount again and rest on your warmth. Let me look at you first…again and yet again. The shine of you with sweat! What a magnificent creature!

“Near. Near!” And, “Go, go, go. My steady. Hurry.”

But what can you know of time, poor, dear creature? Though many’s the time I wish I had your notion of it.

Somebody watches. My better ears, my better nose…. You don’t know. I’m sorry for your kind and your dull senses. I will do my best to keep you safe.

You shake your head. You thrust your elbows out and back. I suppose the straps bother you. I say, “Next stop I’ll look at those straps. Hurry now. The faster we go, the sooner we stop. That’s always the way.” I don’t say, but I want to get rid of the watchers. There is now more than one.

“Save your breath. Save your muscles. We’ll rest at the next knob. Trust me.” I say that last in case you, also, are aware of watchers. I say, “I have your best interests at heart. Without you, happy and healthy and strong, where would I be?”

Here by myself, helpless on my wobbly legs, but I don’t say that.

“I count on your good will,” I say, and, “We are all free, as you well know.”

We should have turned long ago. I had not meant to get this close to the mountains. We’re climbing. Is that your fault? Did you miss a turn on purpose? Perhaps you’re a Wild? One who knows the mountains? You’ve been branded as Tame. You were stable-raised. I chose you specifically for your lineage — a long line of Seattle heavies. But there are some of us who are unscrupulous. Who change brands and lineage. Therefore you may be someone else entirely.

I unfold my pole. I spark it, one spark on each side and two in back.

Next knob.

“You may squat, my steady.”

I dismount. I will sit here and sing. “La, la, low, lee.” I’ll save fear for another time, another place. My mothers told me that, and it stands me in good stead. Oh, the memory of mothers!

I say out loud, “I will sing, yet again, of love.”

You are not, as a group, mean-spirited. Hardly ever. Perhaps they, hiding there (of your kind, if such they be), will feel sympathy when they hear my song. But your ears hear coarsely and cannot fathom overtones and undertones to any great extent. I suppose none of you will be able to tell anything important about an important song.

I hear them. They pretend to be birds. Do they think we can’t tell? You silly, sillies, with your childish games.

“Ho. And yet again, Ho.” And, “What a beautiful day.” Snap of my pole here and there. Spark a tree. Spark a bush. Spark as if a star overhead. You flinch. You shy. Have you been mistreated?

I ask you out loud then. “Have you been mistreated? You may nod.”

But you do not. You look away. You have an air of listening. We have become adept at reading your faces: The furrows of your frowns, the rictus of your smiles, but we also know sometimes you frown when you’re puzzled, and sometimes when you turn up your mouth it is not a pleasant thing.

“If you’ve been mistreated, I’m sorry if such is the case.”

I really am sorry. Such treatment is unforgivable when another creature is entrusted to our care. Can such as that breed trust and affection?

“Let me see the marks, if marks there be.” Though there need be none. We have our ways. Also we never want to spoil a perfect body with ugly scars. Yours has scars, but it is especially perfect even so.

Things are there behind the underbrush, tweeting.

“Ho!” Ho is not a word we use when speaking to you. It resembles go, but you are able to distinguish between them.

I stand up to my full height. Our legs wobble, and standing straight takes willpower, but it’s important at a moment like this one might become. But size and legs aren’t everything, as look at us, you and me. Which rides the other?

Such a thing should stay in my thoughts. I don’t say it. I remind myself: Be kind.

“See the berries? You may pick yourself a treat.”

They will see my kindness. And I will take this opportunity to watch your muscles as you move. It’s always a pleasure and a reassurance.

I’ll curl up for a while, though I prefer to do my resting with my legs crossed across your chest, and when you are full of mother motions, back-and-forthing on the trail.

I will tell you again what a good and noble steady you are — noble eye and noble brow. A look of circumstance regardless of the circumstances. I will tell you this out loud.

“I said pick, and if you have the urge to lie down, you may, as long as you do not crease the surcingle.”

Now a warm wind. “Rest, my sturdy steady, and let your sweat dry.”

That I say out loud. “Rest. You may pick flowers or pick up feathers if you’re so inclined.” I know the simple pleasures of your kind.

“Are you happier out here among the trees, my faithful? If so, we’ll come from time to time. You may nod.”

But your only answer is to show your noble profile as you listen still. (I would have preferred your nose be not quite so long. Perhaps it can be fixed. But I did not choose you for your face.) You haven’t even picked a berry. Perhaps we do wrong in teaching you silence, though I’ve heard that if we don’t, you do nothing but chatter and squawk.

And here, suddenly, a female of your kind. A Sue, partly hidden in the scrub willow. Stringy and muscular, but not at all as muscular as you, and definitely not another Seattle. Her hair is neither black nor blond nor red but a nondescript in-between. She’s a freckled and I would guess badly sunburned. No wonder the freckled are third best.

Why would she suddenly appear? And at such a time as this? I pretend I don’t notice, though you must know I do, since I always notice everything before you. When have I ever not?

‘Tis said, The happier the creature, the less to fear.

I say out loud, “Do you have a love life — a wishful mating of your own determination? Something could be arranged. You may speak.”

I unfold my pole.

No answer.

“Your hair. See to your hair.”

No answer. Perhaps he is mute. I’ve heard that some of you, when trained for silence too brutally, lose your voices altogether. (Silence is important for many reasons. Your kind has a tendency to have ideas.)

Not only no answer, but you haven’t combed yourself, either.

The female stands so still I have a hard time picking her out when I look again, though I know she’s there. I smell her. She’s wearing a sort of sack thing exactly the same color as bark and leaves. But she has it belted with silver links from fancy old surcingles. That is a mistake unless one wants to be noticed. I presume she wants her waist to be noticed.

Her hair is not combed nor has it any shine.

I say, “Beware.” I point the pole at her.

Something will happen because this Sam is a brave and noble creature. He would save her at his own expense.

She speaks. She calls him Heron. I had been told his name is Beauty.

You finally notice. I can tell your smile is a real smile this time.

What would happen if everybody mated with everybody else? I shudder at the thought. We don’t stoop to that. It has been said, if you were let loose, there would be nothing but chaos.

“Would you like me to find you a mate?” I say.

And then, “We are two of one kind. Comrades in mutual admiration.”

Then I say, and I say it firmly, “One way to live is not as good as another.”

But the self will know another of its own kind. The self will see its other self in another self’s eyes. This can’t be helped.

The Sue talks too much. As do all your kind. Even if you could hear as well as we do, how could you hear when you’re always chittering? I see how she is healthy in spite of how she must live out here. I don’t want to think about it, the dirty food and the raw, or, on the other hand, the burnt. Can there ever be anything — even one thing — really white in a place like this?

And now here comes another one, a Sam this time. Not a handsome one. Not like you, my steady. His chest is narrow and concave. He hasn’t even the look of a sprinter. You must be more than twice his weight. I would pit you against him and watch you win. Though sometimes the Sues fight alongside their Sams.

Why is this Sue calling you Heron? What is the meaning of that with reference to the past, and what does that portend?

Well, now and now. Look. See what you do. You are removing your harness as easily as can be, as if it had never been buckled behind your back where none of you can reach. You whistle. I have heard that tune before. It is simple, as everything in your lives is. You whistle and hiss between your teeth. I have not studied what that might mean, but I think it does have meaning.

You turn. You….

I cannot even think such a thing. I refuse to think it, but!

You pick me up! One hand under where I sit and one hand under my heavy head. My legs dangle. My arms dangle. I would let my long fingers curl around your throat, and don’t think it would be the first time I’ve done it to your kind. We may be weak, but our hands are strong. They were made for just this purpose. They were used from the start for leaping into wombs and from the start for strangling an unruly or a panicked mount, but you hold me low as if you know that.

You don’t even take my pole. You don’t even tie me up. You put me on a patch of scratchy sand.

The others of you talk, but you do not. There is something wrong with you. If I’d known that, I would never have asked you to speak. I would have been kind. That is our way.

“Kindness is our way,” I say.

You all three move from me, to another knob, and sit, knees almost touching. You whisper. Even with my long sharp ears turned towards you, and even with my hands cupped around them to gather yet more sound, I can’t hear what you’re saying. I say a few Hos. None of you pay attention. Though I have cared so much for you, even you don’t care.

I droop. I let my ears dangle against my cheeks. I look down at my whites. They’re dirty all over and your sweat has dulled them. I have to study to find a pure spot with any glow to it. What you all must think of me, crumpled here and no glow?

It’s time for a meal. Could it ever come to pass that I would have to eat your dried treats for my dinner?

But….

Are they leaving? The Sam and Sue and my Sam, too? This is preposterous. It is not to be contemplated. Not to be experienced.

I call a real ho. HO! with all the overtones I can muster. I feel it rattle in my cheek bones, trumpet in my nose. I stand up. I call out everything I can think about to call.

“You can’t leave me out here helpless. I’m a pregnant female, or what you might call female…or might call pregnant. What will become of my little ones? They even have their names. I had thought we would have a future together, where my young would play on your shoulders.

“And what about all the things I wanted to tell? Teach? Wisdom and lore? My head is full of what you need to know. Come back. My heart is with your heart. It always is. You may speak. Tell me what you want.”

My Sam, my faithful steady — he doesn’t even look back.

But I can set your forest blazing, which is your forest, not ours. Except I couldn’t flee my own fire. My little wobbly legs…must they carry my heavy head? I might go a pace or two.

“Help me. I will show you the secrets of my pole. It isn’t much of a secret once you know it. Even you will understand.

“What I want to tell you has to do with the meaning of life. And most especially with the meaning of your life — all of you together and you in particular.

“I said so before. The meaning of life and of butterflies. Yes, yes, I did say it. Though perhaps not out loud. And the knowledge of time. Which few of you have because it goes on and on into a far future you cannot conceive of and begins in a year which is already ten thousand years old. But I will tell you, and only once, and then you will know it. We will ride in the forest together, backing-and-forthing. That was not the last time.

“Not the last time,” I say. “Not! It was not!”

Chapter Two

• Carol Emshwiller
• The Mount

Excerpted from The Mount by Carol Emshwiller. Copyright 2002 by Carol Emshwiller. All Rights Reserved.