 
### Retirement Projects

Charles Hibbard

### Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Charles B. Hibbard

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Chapter 1

Victor Carogna is the only man in my knitting group. Or I suppose I should say the only other man in my knitting group. Leilah always tried to tell me that it's not a girl thing, that lots of guys knit, too, and I suppose they do; but I still think knitting isn't a girl thing the way professional football isn't a guy thing. Sure, there are some women who like football, or profess to like it, who may get some enjoyment out of ogling all those visible jockstrap lines when the behemoths line up to bash each other. But whose butts are planted on the couch every Sunday, in overwhelming numbers? And who do you find in the yarn shops, fingering the Koigu with those fixed, alpha-wave looks in their eyes – the Oakland Raiders?

Nevertheless, there he is, Victor Carogna, the ex-cop, placidly knitting away every Saturday afternoon just as though he'd never tossed a drunk headfirst into a paddy wagon. You might think I'd be glad to have an ally in that group of females, but in fact I'd be happier if he wasn't there, since he turned out to be the architect or at least the facilitator of a lot of my post-retirement difficulties, some of which you'll soon hear about should you decide to read on. Indeed, he's currently on the disabled list, and his future status in the group is doubtful. I don't feel that I need any masculine moral support in that situation, or any other, really. Not that Victor Carogna would ever have given me any – quite the contrary, in fact. I've always gotten along fine with women, anyway, or so I used to think.

That I'm in the group at all is an anomaly – later I'll explain how it happened. I'm not a good candidate for most activities that involve manual dexterity, and I'm about as likely to injure myself or some innocent bystander with a pair of knitting needles as I am to produce anything resembling a garment with them. I learned, in a couple of months of diligent application and with the help of the knitting group, to produce a swath of more or less even stitches; but something always goes wrong, usually before I even reach the end of a row, but certainly before the end of a scarf, let alone a sleeve or a neckline, and I end up having to tear it all out and start over. I've been laboring over the same scarf for months now. (Philosophical question: Is it still the same scarf if it's been torn out and started over eight times?) This gives me a sense of comradeship with at least one other member of the group, kindly old Betty, who, although once a great knitter, has a touch of Alzheimer's and has been working on the same white afghan for years. She spends most of her time looking back and forth from the pattern to the yarn with a furrowed brow and shaking her flying white curls, trying to figure out where she is. I can relate. For Betty the problem is matching up the stitches she's actually completed with her place on the pattern. For me it's simpler – I can't really understand the damn instructions. For example: Rnd.1 [Ki, ssk, k6 (8,10), ssk, k1] six times – 60 (72, 84) sts. 2-4 Knit. 5 [K1, ssk, k4 (6,8), ssk, k1] six times, etc. etc. etc. It gives me a headache just to reproduce it on paper, let alone make needles and yarn comply with it. But that's OK, because for me, as for Betty, the knitting group is mainly a social thing, contracted in desperation when I unexpectedly found myself alone, a couple of months after I'd supposedly begun my golden years by retiring from high school teaching.

Chapter 2

During the months when I was trying to nerve myself to retire, Barbara, one of my fellow teachers, told me "I think if I retired, the first thing I'd do is nothing for a few weeks or months. I'd read the paper until 10 o'clock and walk the dog and work in the garden. Try to get all that oxalis out of my back yard." I liked the idea of trying not to do anything in particular, just hanging out for a while like a skinny Buddha, waiting for Enlightenment. The very first problem I encountered in retirement, before the venomous ex-cop Victor Carogna exploded my life, was the violent deceleration. One day you're a small part, however reluctant, of the teenage maelstrom of a modern high school, and the next you're an irrelevant old man, shuffling down the street with your hands in your pockets and nothing much to worry about except actinic damage on the back of your neck. It's like hitting a brick wall without your seatbelt.

There are a least a couple of different ways you can handle that situation, one being to generate a flurry of activity – obligations, deadlines, volunteer gigs, lunch dates, and other forms of self-imposed structure – that will keep you too busy to wonder why you're doing any of it. The other approach is to go with it; to bore as far as you can into the pulpy flesh of inactivity and irrelevancy. The more useless you feel, the _less_ you do, in that way drilling yourself mercilessly toward the core of Being and the ultimate question: Who the hell would I be if there weren't all these things that I _do_? Which – if you put aside eating, sleeping, elimination, breathing, and, if you can arrange any, sexual activity – are mostly things that human society imposes on you. Or that's the theory. I've been one of these people who devote most of their lives to avoiding the question of what their lives are really all about; i.e., making sure there's always an excuse not to examine things too closely. I've always felt a little guilty about that. I could see that retirement might give me a chance to strip away all the fluff of unreasoning responsibility that I'd wrapped myself in for more than a half-century; and what odd larva might then be exposed by the stark light of old age?

It's not that I've never made any efforts in that area. When I was much younger, for example, I believed it would be possible, if I just applied myself with enough determination, to understand what I was doing on this planet. I had an idea that the thing to do was to get as far away as possible from the endless wanking of humanity, plunk myself down on a rock, and just wait for the Spirit of the Universe to come flooding in. Once I'd become a proper Cosmic Receptacle the rest would take care of itself. I would be equipped to return to the ways of mankind and both live in peace and make my mark.

I therefore devoted a lot of effort to finding out-of-the-way places where there would be no other people to disrupt the subtle emanations of the Universe. For example, I toyed with the Walden idea, contemplated spending a winter in my parents' unwinterized cabin in northern Minnesota, went camping in the remotest places I could find on the map. I never did make contact with the cosmos in that way or, I have to admit, any other way. Some survival instinct for example, made me chicken out of the unwinterized cabin idea, which I now suspect would have left me either dead or insane if I'd managed to carry out the plan. Or I would have just gone running back to the central heating after three days, with my metaphysical tail between my legs.

As for camping, I discovered it was hard to find nobody for any length of time, at least in the eastern part of the country. There was always some parkway with commuters not very far off, or if you did find a remote spot, a crowd of teenagers would soon show up in somebody's father's SUV and start partying and shooting at endangered species. In a final desperation effort, I celebrated moving in with my wife-to-be, Leilah, by quitting my job at the bank, buying a car, and heading out, by myself you understand, for a long tour of the Great American Desert. I washed up about a week later in a state park somewhere in central Nevada, lovely place, nothing but pines and rock and the summer remnant of a little stream, finally the perfect camping spot I'd been searching for all my young life. I sat in my rusty '67 Plymouth Valiant for quite a while with the door open, listening to the trickle of the stream and thinking about setting up my tent. Mountains loomed in massive silence all around, the sun hammered down on me, and there was nobody, anywhere. After about 15 minutes of that, I slammed the door and drove back to Leilah and the other 8 million people of New York City. That was pretty much the end of my trying to find nobody.

The next 25 years I occupied with getting married, teacher training, finding and keeping a job, failing to have kids, and so on, all of which prevented me from thinking too much about cosmic emanations. But teaching is tiring and a little frustrating too, and there's always been that other pull, toward employment oblivion, the end of hurrying, the death of the alarm clock and all that. After 25 years, the conviction that I should give that lifestyle a try before it was too late became very strong. And at that point Barbara's suggestion rang a bell, for all the reasons mentioned above. So I took my little pension, paddled to the edge of the river, and got out to sit on the bank.

I put the Barbara Plan into operation: watch and wait. Watch the great River of Life and wait for it to bring something my way, a sun-bleached tree trunk or a floating cow that I could haul myself onto and drift with, watch my mind and wait for it to throw up a revelation about what it really wanted from life. This, I found, was not easy, but I stoutly persisted. I hung in there for weeks, which grew into a couple of months. Because I'm not capable of sitting still for whole days at a time, I became a homemaker. Working slowly and contemplatively, I penetrated the gloomy depths of the oven and some areas of the apartment that hadn't heard the roar of the vacuum cleaner for years, hoping to grasp the place of grease and dirt in the Universal Plan. I experimented with new dishes and fed them to my sometimes appreciative wife, who was still employed, being quite a few years younger than I am. I did minor repairs, and spent a lot of time petting, combing, and observing the cat, although I was never able to emulate her 20-hour-per-day sleep schedule. I cracked some books I should have read years ago – _Crime and Punishment_ , _Ulysses_ – and I read each new issue of the _New York Review of Books_ and the _New Yorker_ slowly from cover to cover. I smeared sunblock on my ears and took long walks over the eucalyptus hills and through the foggy valleys of San Francisco, went to an occasional matinee, sat for hours in coffee shops with my journal/sketchbook closed in front of me, idling and watching humanity bustling about its business, feeling guilty but bravely not giving in to it. I was determined to take this doing nothing thing as far as I could. It was as if, instead of fleeing like a dog from self-knowledge, I'd actually managed to sit in my car on that Nevada mountainside for a few days and nights, with the sun and stars wheeling over me, until my brain and body slowed down and I could begin to feel the messages seeping in, coalescing into a new worldview.

And it worked. Eventually my patience was rewarded, and the river threw up this surprising piece of flotsam, like the kind of rolling snag that could sink one of Mark Twain's steamboats: Leilah took off.

### Chapter 3

I came home from doing the laundry one afternoon to find her tossing her underwear and a few choice items of jewelry into her rolling suitcase. It occurred to me later that watching her life companion try to turn himself into a happy hydrangea might not have provided enough stimulation for a woman with a mind as sharp as Leilah's. However, though the timing is certainly suggestive, I believe my implementation of the Barbara Plan was probably more in the nature of a catalyst than the actual cause of her leaving. That she took just that one suitcase shows the kind of changes that have been happening to Leilah in the last year or two. She's always been a very careful and somewhat flamboyant dresser, lots of clothes in eye-catching patterns, bright colors, loose drapery blowing in the wind of her motion as she strides up Market Street. . . But when she pulled out, all she took was a couple of pairs of jeans, a sweatshirt or two, a few teeshirts, and her unmentionables. Her hiking boots, of course.

We lived in the same four-room apartment for 25 years, and in one sense her departure came just in time, because we were running out of space. Roughly half of the apartment was filled with our clothes (mostly hers) and our books (about equally split between us). The closets were bulging, the books were all double-shelved, and still I had to make periodic trips to our two storage lockers to relieve the overflow.

The other half of the apartment was filled with yarn. Leilah was a knitter, and anyone who has ever been a knitter or lived with one will know what that implies. Along with the clothes, the closets were stuffed with plastic bags of yarn, some in tight spools wound up on the wool winder that was one of my first presents to her, but mostly in those loose floppy wads or neatly twisted pretzels called hanks or skeins, bulging out of every cabinet and off every shelf, every cranny and nook, spilling out of the storage boxes I built, despite the heavy lids I'd put on them to hold the stuff down. And plus there was always the one string of yarn creeping out from under a closet door like a little trickle of mauve urine, to get sucked into the vacuum cleaner when I dared to do that part of the apartment. And on every floor the countless tote bags containing her ongoing projects. Real knitters are never working on one thing; they always have at least a half-dozen works in progress, many of which will never be finished, because the main thing is really shopping for the yarn, running your hands sensuously over it in the yarn store and drinking in the colors (beautiful stuff, I have to admit), plowing through the million knitting magazines to find a pattern that will show the new yarn off to the best effect, watching the one-dimensional string slowly morph into something totally different on your flying needles as the stitches build up and it turns into a plane or a cylinder and finally a sweater or a vest. But there are a lot of stitches even in a pair of socks, and even assuming you get them all done, then you have to sew whatever it is together, wash and block, all those less fascinating parts of the process. And sometimes it doesn't look as good as you thought it was going to. Meanwhile, in the yarn store, you've just noticed this gorgeous peach chenille that would make such a lovely scarf for Lester. . .

So the first real sign of change I noticed was not that she stopped finishing projects but that she stopped starting them. The same crumpled bags with the ends of skeins peeping out of them stayed on the floor next to the couch week after week, gradually slumping toward the carpet under the weight of the months and the dust. This was happening even before I retired. I furtively displaced some of them into her closets, or into the storage space under the bed: there was no reaction from her. I attributed this to a natural waning of interest in what had been her hobby and really her only passion for decades, but now I see that it was a sign she was being distracted by something important. This began to happen about the time she took the bird class in the mountains.

Ayn, our neighbor across the hall, a one-time workmate of Leilah's and a member of the knitting group, had started a fling with an X-treme trail biker. Rolf is a short, stocky guy with a shaved head and only one ear, the other having been removed in the course of a high-speed car crash by his cat, flying forward in accordance with Newton's first law from its spot under the rear window. The cat survived, but the ear was lost in the wreckage. Rolf wears headbands a lot.

Somehow the biker fling translated into a girl trip to the Sierra Nevada for Ayn and my very un-outdoorsy wife; I don't really understand how their minds work. They drove to the mountains, to this bird class up at some pass or other. There they camped out in ratty tents, sleeping on humid old mattresses, eating camp food and shivering in outdoor showers with inquisitive spiders hanging in front of their eyes. At 6 a.m. the head bird guy, whose name was Bill Beresford, would roust the dozen or so victims out of their warm sleeping bags and truck them off in a Chevy Suburban to deep woods and marshes joyous with mosquitosong, where they would stand with their mouths open, listening for singing birds, it being a birdsong ID class.

It should have been hell for Leilah, who as I've mentioned was at that time a very careful dresser and fastidious about personal hygiene, not to mention allergic to mosquito bites, which produce long sinuous ridges on her forearms and cheeks. More of a museum person than a hiker, which suited my tastes perfectly, once I'd given up my own efforts to find the unpopulated Center of the World. But from the time of the bird class on, I began to see fewer printed silk tops and more baggy sweatshirts, faded jeans, and hiking boots with bumpy soles that left big clods of dried mud all over my newly vacuumed carpets, plus slouch hats that sagged over her ears. Her huge, rather sexy hair like a chestnut mandela was now tied back in a dismissive ponytail. She reeked of DEET and sunblock.

And I further began to notice that at bedtime, when even an aging bald man might have been expecting an occasional romantic interlude, Leilah would be sitting in bed with her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, thumbing through her Sibley's guide. Sibley at least had color pictures, but they were all of birds lined up in profile like avian petty criminals. Much worse was _Pyle's Guide to Identification of North American Passerines_ , a black, priestly sort of volume that contained page after page of line drawings explaining how to blow the feathers back and then lick the skull of a bird to determine its age or state of sexual arousal. Leilah would make a great show of being deeply immersed in this stuff until I finally rolled over and tried to go to sleep, after which she would turn off the light and settle herself with stealthy wrigglings so as not to wake me. I'm no fool, and I got the picture, believe me; but I put it down to the clots of brown pigment aggregating on my once lily-white skin, along with my wrinkly neck and sagging boobs. As I've already mentioned, she's considerably younger than I am.

It soon became clear, though, that her obsession was not just with birds. There was also the chief birdman himself, whose main claim to fame, as far as I could determine, was that he knew the difference between an oracular thatch and a malar stripe and could pick out the sorry twerp of a ruby-crowned dingbat at a chainsaw convention. I met him once. Leilah dragged me to a party celebrating the end of the class he gave entitled "Dialects of East Bay White-crowned Sparrows: Avian Trash Talk and the Hermeneutics of Dishonest Advertising." I'm transcribing this exactly from the catalog she left behind in the recycling bin when she took off. It was a party of birdwatchers, and I was the only civilian in the crowd. There were lots of jokes about bird anatomy and behavior that I didn't understand. One truth, however, was self-evident at this event: that no relationship could permanently endure half-bird and half-nonbird. Every fowl freak at the meeting was either single or was matched up with another birdwatcher. This should have tipped me off, of course, but it didn't. Like Wile E. Coyote, I was too busy keeping my eyes peeled for the Roadrunner of Enlightenment to notice that I had run off the edge of a cliff. But as long as I neglected to look down, everything still seemed to be more or less all right.

Bill Beresford himself was quite pleasant, a tall, gangly guy with his own dishwater blond ponytail and a deeply sunburned face, and those white areas around the eyes that people have when they spend a lot of time outdoors and wear glasses. He was something of a giant in his field, I gathered, but wore his laurels, or plumes, modestly. He even had a sense of humor. But he had an intensity about his chosen field that, for Leilah, must have provided a strong contrast to the aimless drifter I'd become since retiring. Well, let's admit it: I've been pretty much of an aimless drifter all my life, although until retirement I'd only drifted after work hours.

I first began to realize I had a serious problem when she left me a phone message that she had to leave town suddenly. "There's a Masked Booby in Fort Bragg, and I've got to see it." That was the message. It's a good thing Homeland Security wasn't listening, or at least I assume they weren't. I was apparently supposed to know what a Masked Booby was. This is something birdwatchers like to do: they send each other emails or call their friends, or post a rare "sighting" on a website, and then everyone scrambles for their thousand-dollar binoculars and a couple of granola bars and they all rush off in their 4-wheel drive trucks to find this Little Stunt or Clam-Colored Robin – whatever it happens to be this time. It might mean a trip of hundreds of miles, driving with no sleep, stopping at 3 a.m. in lonely diners with tumbleweed piled up in their parking lots – all to get a 2.3-second glimpse of a dim, feathered bundle that they could then add to their "life list". Frankly, I think my own wobbling search for life's meaning compares favorably with this approach.

In this case the Masked Booby had failed to appear, despite the three-hour drive to Fort Bragg. "How many of you went on this wild goose chase," I asked her, when she finally returned, with her left eye swollen shut from mosquito bites, but glowing nevertheless. "It was just Bill and me," she replied, challenging me with a one-eyed stare. I'm suspicious of birdwatchers anyway, because they're always talking about sexing things, and immature boobies, and buffy rumps. And in the laser glare of Leilah's eye I woke up with a shock to find that I could imagine only too well Beresford and my wife on the clanging floor of his flatbed Toyota, sexing each other amid the gasoline fumes and the stink of pine needles, with the lonely call of the elusive Masked Booby in the night.

I don't know if anything happened between them that time, but eventually something certainly did happen. Possibly my retirement inactivity and melancholy were getting to her, and plus with the removal of work pressure I may have been harassing her a little more about our sex life, which as long I was preoccupied with teaching was no more than a sort of subliminal background hum, but began to foreground itself once teaching was over. This may have become an annoyance to her, or may have simply forced her to recognize that something was missing for her in that area. As mentioned above, my manual skills leave something to be desired. And then there was the example of neighbor Ayn, with her springy little biker dude. Ayn was a bit of a compulsive talker, at least about men, and from every meeting of the knitting group Leilah would bring home tales about the ups and downs, the ins and outs, of that new relationship. There were undoubtedly also girl-graphic psycho-erotic details that Leilah never told me, and that may have started her thinking along those lines. Then came the bird class and Beresford. And even before that, other things that I only found out about later. But obviously I'm grasping at straws here. I don't really know what happened, to tell you the truth, from beginning to end. I suppose that was the problem, wasn't it?

### Chapter 4

I met her in a bar in Abilene. She was perched on a tall stool with her crossed legs stressing the seams of a tight red silk dress, lazy coils of blue smoke from her cigar rising to linger in the fragrant mass of piled-up chestnut hair. . .

Just kidding. But it occurs to me that there's something wrong with you if you're not wondering how it is that a woman like Leilah – intelligent, attractive, kind, practical, and determined – ever ended up with a fogbank like me. Certainly I've had plenty of time to think about that since she left. With my eyes newly opened by shock, distress, pain, loneliness, and intimations of betrayal it was suddenly easy for me to see that we'd somehow grown apart. That's a cliche. Let's be more specific. She had changed and I hadn't, or not much anyway. My only excuse for not noticing what was happening is that all her changes were very gradual, and seem to have taken place internally, like the vast reorganization that goes on invisibly inside a cocoon before the butterfly bursts out. Only in this case, the fluttering and contented butterfly (here I'm thinking of those printed silk tops and flowered umbrellas) has metamorphosed into a determined caterpillar, munching on the bland foliage of scientific knowledge.

No, there were no bars in Abilene, although there was, one Halloween, a tight red dress and a cigar. But Leilah was a good old Midwestern girl, hatched and fledged on the short-grass prairies of suburban Indianapolis, North Side, where the winds swept down without hindrance all the way from Gary, the icy breath of the Rust Belt blowing over her girlish form as she walked the family dog on cold winter nights, under a pale moon imprisoned behind the jaggedy bars of the bare tree limbs. And in the equally quiet summer nights cottony with heat and humidity and bulging with the raunchy commentary of the cicadas.

After high school her horizons expanded to take in West Lafayette and the bricky campus of Purdue University, where she was at that time one of, like, 50 coeds in a student body of 15,000 engineering and ag students. But books told her the world had more to offer than Big Ten football, and she fled to New York with her sociology degree right after graduation, hoping to make something happen in her life. And things did happen. Specifically, she was almost immediately introduced to sex, drugs, and revolutionary politics by a newly minted anarchist from Lander, Wyoming.

Soon she moved into the anarchist's Avenue C tenement apartment. There they had to turn on the stove burners in the winter for heat, and in summer the place was regularly penetrated through the wide-open windows by cat burglars, whose stealthy rustlings were camouflaged by the rattling of an old box fan. At the same time she was hedging her bets by holding down a 9 to 5 stockings-and-high-heels job at a life insurance company, although it was the kind of bottom-feeder outfit that lives on the flakes of organic matter that drift down from the feeding frenzies of the big boys up above the thermocline. The anarchist worked in the mailroom of the insurance company. Meanwhile, one floor up from the mailroom, I was laboring in a cubicle, inventing creative ways to avoid paying claims.

The scarf of Leilah's life, I believe, has always been knitted from roughly equal strands of rebellion and conventionality. I suppose for a while she thought her rebel boy would be able to minister to both of them. Her restless side went for the fiery rhetoric, the demonstrations, the run-ins with the cops, the impromptu love-making in clothes still pungent with tear gas; the sober side of her was attracted to what she thought was her lover's passionate commitment to a vision of social justice. But he turned out to be committed mainly to his own rakish image and all the balling his Che Guevara beret made possible.

Once the anarchist strand began to fray, Leilah found herself, maybe unconsciously, looking for other options. And there I was, in my button-down collars and striped ties. I was her boss, in fact, not that that mattered to her. The point is, I was fleeing suburbia, too, but not all the way to Bolivia. She favored me with a couple of glances, and I followed her like a sleepwalker. We went to a couple of movies, cheap Indian dinners, trial sex in my bare 59th Street apartment. To me it felt like an extended job interview.

At the time Leilah may have thought she discerned a certain fire in me, because I was bored out of my mind with the insurance job and wanted to do something that meant something. That's what I told her – and myself – anyway. This was still before I'd given up on Enlightenment. And I was even ready to take the one major risk of my lifetime – quitting the insurance company – to drive myself into some more consequential occupation. Whatever it was, she stuck with me for several months, and because of (or despite, I now think) whatever she must have learned about me during that time, she married me. Or maybe she was so relieved to put some distance between herself and Avenue C that she didn't really look at the whole thing very carefully. I don't think Leilah ever expected very much for herself; she was actually a rather cautious person, and just getting out of Indiana was a big deal. Maybe she thought, That's enough experimenting; this one's good enough, he's reasonably intelligent, he's not too homely, although his hair could be a lot better. He may be compulsively neat, but at least he doesn't have any other girlfriends, let's get on with it. Maybe she saw kids, a house or at least a nice big Upper West Side apartment, trips to the beach and the autumn colors.

As for me, I didn't really think about any of those things. I didn't think about much in those days, being essentially on autopilot. For me it was fairly simple and visceral: the first night on Leilah's tender bosom was not like all other nights. If you know, you know. Otherwise there's not much I can say about it.

Once she left, though, and before the great fan of events began to spatter my walls in the ways I'm about to describe, I had lots of time to examine the relationship and think about things. One theory I have is that what I was to Leilah was mainly a huge detour. A detour that began with New York and ended with cancer. In some ways it was a disaster for her – 25 years of semi-vegetating, during which the rebellious strand was wrapped around so tightly by the conventional one that it became invisible. Despite the uneventfulness of our lives, the lack of kids or any other kind of adventure, she went off to work every day without a complaint. She was the kind of person who liked being in an office and didn't mind the tedium. She enjoyed the people there, made friends easily with all ages, got the work done fairly effortlessly, and still had time to hang out near the coffee maker, talking about relationships, boyfriends and girlfriends, and then kids, and still later butt enhancements, botox, and facelifts, although she never contemplated any of those things herself, as far as I know. She seemed contented. I was always the one with the nagging questions about what the hell I was doing. She would listen to my complaints, looking up from her knitting to indicate that she was paying attention, and although she was sympathetic, her only suggestion would be to DO something, to get into action: get a new job, start a new career, write a book, change my life. She couldn't understand the difficulty of that, had no experience with paralysis, because she seemed to have no need to move.

I suppose it was the cancer that changed everything for her. Or rather, the cancer peeled back the cocoon to reveal the new Leilah that had been silently reintegrating inside the placid exterior. I was good about it, I think. I paid attention to her, nursed her through the fear, and the fatigue, and the nausea, and the hair loss, and she survived. But meanwhile she had a lot of time by herself, to sit in the shadow of death and think things over, the fleetingness of time and all that, to examine what she'd been doing with her life. It was the cancer that gave her the motivation and the time to untangle those two constant threads of her life. Sure enough, the strand of restlessness was still there, stretching almost invisibly through the 25 years of our life together. At the New York end was Che Guevara; at the San Francisco end was. . . well, why should I let you in on what I didn't find out myself until it was much too late? No, you're going to have to work for it.

### Chapter 5

You may think that, having had my better half (and never was that designation more apt, I'm forced to admit, now that some of the pus has drained from my wound), my life's companion ripped away over fresh laundry during an afternoon argument lasting less than half an hour, I would immediately go into a steep decline. But for better or worse, the cannon shots we'd fired at each other, many of which had found their mark, on me at least, had left me awash in rage and despair. The result was an intense rush of adrenaline. And in fact my normally lethargic schedule under the Barbara Plan showed quite a spike of activity in the week or two after Leilah stalked out, with only her suitcase, plus the cat in her United Airlines pet carrier. At some point in the proceedings I'd heard myself screaming "Well take the fucking cat, then!" even though I knew on some level that I would thus be sending away the only other organism on the planet that had a real interest in me, based though it was on my expertise in opening cans.

My first impulse after she stomped down the stairs, yelling over her shoulder "I'll be back for my stuff. Just leave it alone!" was to rid myself of everything in the apartment that might remind me of her. By the time the anger and hurt had subsided a little bit I was already well embarked on this project, and it was too late to turn back. Probably I should just have moved, leaving all her possessions in their piles; but of course that wasn't an option, rents being what they are in this very popular city. Or I could have just put all her stuff in storage. But I was in a vengeful mood, and anyway this step did have the benefit of excising one major splinter that had been embedded in our relationship for 25 years: namely, her refusal to get rid of anything once it entered the apartment.

First to go were the slag heaps left behind by her routine daily activities. Leilah never stacked anything, or if she did, the iron rule was that bigger things should always be placed on top of smaller ones, so that her piles had the unnatural appearance of balancing boulders. But rather than the earth's old clay, worn into strange shapes by the patient strokes of sun and weather, her structures were made up of used kleenex and eraserless pencils, old ticket stubs, the opened envelopes of bills paid years before, post-its scribbled with cryptic reminders ("Myrtle bulky pickup"), strips of bubble wrap, computerized blood test results, unused postcards, packets of wildflower mix, worms of yarn, and the loosest, most corroded pocket change you can imagine. It's surprising how many unread books could hide in one of those piles; in fact, it was one of the small securities of our relationship that I could always be sure, when my own neat tower of current books had been pulled down one by one, that there would be something to read, somewhere, in one of Leilah's piles. I had to be careful not to move anything else when I removed a book, though, because she had a phenomenal ability to detect any change in the contours of any pile in the house. "Damn it, have you been going through my things?" With her hands on her hips. I can see that now. It was one of the few things that visibly annoyed her.

I stomped over to Safeway right after she left and bought several dozen giant black garbage bags and began just loading the piles into them wholesale. I had to work fast, because I discovered right away things I had never noticed before. For example, I found that the creases and curves of a used kleenex somehow embody the personality of the person who crumpled it, as the biologists are always telling us the particular bends and folds in a chain of amino acids reveal what protein it belongs to. Some of those piles went way back in our marriage, years even, and to examine them closely might have sapped my will to remove them. On the other hand, it was satisfying to see the lost horizontal surfaces of our apartment reappear, smooth and unscratched, preserved from the ravages of time by the overburden of Leilah's life. Over the next couple of days I hauled probably a dozen of the black bags down to the stinky garbage room and tossed them in the trash bin, in my fury not even trying to sort out the recyclables.

Once the piles had been cleared, I started on the clothes. Despite her storming out and her unkind parting words, I was afraid to take this step over the brink, which I knew would make her furious, even though I was also sure that in her new birdwatcher persona she would never wear any of those elegant duds again. Not to mention that clothes are even more personal than crumpled kleenexes. I started with the things that had the most dust on their shoulders, the ones hanging high up on the storage racks I'd built for her – too high for her to reach in fact, which suggested to me that Leilah herself had given up on them. I took them down, trying not to disturb the dust too much, and stuffed them into black bags. Then I moved lower, into the more recent epochs, the printed silk tops and jackets, a few sweaters she had knitted and only worn a couple of times, pants made out of thin stuff that had clung around her hips and then fallen loose to the tops of her feet. . . into the black bags. I had more trouble with the bottoms of the closets, where I might find, among the polar fleece jackets clotted with cat hair, a silk nightgown or two and some bras still billowing with ghostly curves. After a while, though, I was able to get into a rhythm of just grabbing and stuffing, so it went pretty fast.

My frugal nature would not allow me to just take all this down to the garbage room, so I had to make many trips to Community Thrift, with a couple of bags at a time, but I finally got it done. And then there was the jewelry, and the books, a weird combination of 19th-century French realist novels and field guides to the sparrows of Arizona. . . Well, what's the point in detailing all the stages? I cleared it all out, except for the yarn, don't ask me what premonition made me save that. With all the other stuff gone, however, the yarn wasn't a problem, because it all fitted in Leilah's now empty closets, after I vacuumed out the thick layers of dust and scrubbed down the walls. And the knitting magazines, of course. There were hundreds, and I left them, but now stacked neatly on the shelves and floors of the relatively bare closets. I bought a bunch of transparent plastic storage boxes at the Container Store and arranged the yarn neatly in them, where sunbeams from the forgotten window, now uncovered by the removal of all those silk tops and unencumbered by the cat, could pass slowly over all the surprisingly rich colors once a day.

It took me a couple of weeks to accomplish all this removal, storing, tidying, and cleaning, but when I got done the apartment looked as I had fantasized it should, through the 25 long years during which I had watched, with a gradually growing dread, the sediment of our lives, especially hers, accruing. By leaving, Leilah had at least solved one of my emotional problems, my uneasy imaginings about how we'd be living in another 25 years. How high would the piles be? How deep the parabolas in the wooden rods that supported her thousand garments on their hangers? How many shopping bags and tote bags could be crammed into one four-room apartment? Would we eventually live in a labyrinth of interconnected tunnels, like rodents, with walls that had to be braced and watchfully maintained to prevent dangerous cave-ins? These were the questions I would ask every time I vacuumed, after waiting for Leilah to go shopping for more clothes or off to her knitting group, while picking up the tote bags mounded around her chair to get the vacuum cleaner hose under them, and then trying to replace them in exactly their original orientations. Now the piles and tote bags were gone, the wadded kleenexes collected and thrown out, the cat hair all vacuumed up and never to be replenished, the closets empty except for their neat stacks of magazines and storage boxes full of yarn, all horizontal surfaces free of dust, the kitchen table swept clean of extraneous papers and little white pubic curls of dental floss. As the piles eroded, the half-obscured windows reemerged, and it was clear that they had to be washed. Once that was done, the whole quality of light in the apartment had changed, becoming whiter, purer, more sharp-edged. The sunbeams of advancing spring moved slowly, empty, invisible in the dustless air, sweeping for the missing cat across spotless carpets. It was magical.

The only problem being that, like all fantasies, the impeccably ordered living space was far better as a daydream than it could ever be as a reality. I guess I would have taken the whole mess back if Leilah had come with it. I know that's lame. But having had my beastly way with the apartment, I found that I no longer had any wish to be in it. All I wanted to do was roll over and go to sleep.

### Chapter 6

Have you ever noticed that the call of a distant fire engine can be mistaken for the crowing of a rooster, at least if you hear it while you're just waking up from a nap you didn't really need and the afternoon wind is pawing through the big pine tree outside the window? That's just one of the things I learned after I had finished cleaning out Leilah's stuff, and before new factors entered my life that left me less time to lie around apostrophizing fire trucks.

Sounds are a big part of solitude, I think. Although I gave up the search for nobody about the time I got really deeply involved with Leilah, in the next 25 years I spent a lot of time in places where there either was next to nobody, or there was a kind of loneliness despite the presence of other people. For example, I've heard the random bird chatter of the high desert at sunrise, which is a clinking and clattering like tableware in a crowded restaurant; and also the endless scarf of the wind pulled through poplar leaves, and behind that the stumbling of small waves on a rocky lakeshore for whole long afternoons. Not to mention the soft batter of shuffling soles, whispers, books closing or thudding back onto shelves, pages turning, pens scratching, 50 different chairs squeaking, and distant pigeons moaning that makes up the aural environment of the Reading Room in the British Museum.

All these are fairly lonesome sounds, but at the same time both thrilling and soothing, partly because they are absolutely unlike anything humanity is capable of producing deliberately, and so are able to rescue us temporarily from the noisy but puny rapids of human striving. For plain old loneliness, however, none of them can match the splash of orange juice into a glass, on a sunny morning, in an apartment occupied only by yourself. Normally you would never bother to listen to that sound, because you know, without really thinking about it, that Jean or Joe or Jill, whoever it is that's missing, will be home in a few hours or days or weeks at most, if in fact he/she isn't just in the bathroom taking a shower, soon to reappear with one towel wrapped around her damp body and another one piled on her head to draw the moisture out of her hair, and a smile, ready to put her glasses on and join you for coffee.

But once you're really alone, with no definite plans for ending that solitude, whole days stretching before you without real landmarks, the splash of the orange juice becomes psychologically deafening and will soon force you either to make some kind of contact with humanity, no matter how rudimentary, or else into the raiments of low-grade madness exhibited by the perennially lonely.

Faced with this situation once the cleaning program was over, I adopted a sort of emergency modification of the Barbara Plan, trying first to cultivate the therapeutic stillness of a wounded animal, like the pigeon I saw flattened into the corner of a doorway on Market Street, waiting for healing or death, or the haggard blackbird I watched in Golden Gate Park, leaning motionless over a mud puddle while his companions briskly bathed. Or I tried to pretend I was a sparrow on a branch, waiting out an interminable, icy winter night. I don't think they know the sun will eventually rise, so what is the faith that keeps them from just opening their wrists, if they had wrists? Something. (Yes, I know: suddenly there seemed to be birds everywhere I looked.) I sat around reading books, watching rented movies while working my way through cold burritos, only making it to Safeway when I'd reached that final, glued segment on the last roll of toilet paper. Waiting for the healing process to commence. But nothing seemed to happen.

Though I live in a building with four other apartments, I've never bothered to cultivate the other tenants – another failing that began to loom large in the wake of Leilah's abandonment. I have my reasons for this, some of which you will shortly hear, but I have to admit that it was mostly social laziness. The rest of the building was very quiet most of the time. I could often hear the footsteps and even the voices of the couple upstairs, along with lunatic yapping from the mid-sized canine who lived with the woman in the apartment below, and I would occasionally cross paths with people in the halls, say hello, maybe whine about the fog a little, but I never let things get any farther than that. The intermittent sounds of these people's lives therefore merely served to accentuate the silence of my own living space, once there was no one left in it to talk to, not even a cat.

Birds may not have wrists, but I do, and after a while they were starting to look a little too tempting as I perched on my couch in front of the TV, waiting for the dawn that didn't seem to come. I tried increasing my stimulus level by walking the streets, becoming a restless observer of the city, as I was once advised to do by the professor in a history class I took during my sabbatical year instead of traveling to Japan or Zimbabwe the way you're supposed to. He told the class to stand at the railing above the Muni underground entrances at rush hour or at one of the corners of Union Square and note the behavior and flow patterns of all the people hustling off to their jobs, or wherever they were going. Or to hang around the chess players hunched over in their clouds of cigarette smoke at Powell and Market and observe their different styles of pushing the buttons on the time clocks – some nervous and aggressive, like the knock-kneed streetwise blackbirds that circled their feet, others leisurely as a tramp steamer, as if to say, _you_ may need to conserve all your time, but I don't. And the Chinese men wearing tan windbreakers and baseball caps, the African-American players in dusty-looking suit jackets, the Hispanics denned up in their hooded sweatshirts to create a sort of privacy among the crowd of onlookers. Or I wandered the Civic Center farmer's market, with its piles of zucchini and corn being husked by old ladies determined not to buy an ear that had a single kernel out of place, while on the lawn nearby the homeless lounged and smoked, enjoying the brief San Francisco summer afternoon sunshine before the fog blew in again. Or, more frustratingly, the upscale strips of Union Street or Chestnut, with their throngs of prancing thoroughbred women with shopping bags, strips of tanned belly glowing and breasts bouncing.

The restless observer thing had a certain intellectual interest for me, but like the distant noises in my building it tended to increase my feelings of isolation and rejection instead of relieving them. All these people had places they were going and things to do, even the red-faced maniac pacing along the line of tourists at the cable car turnaround and threatening them all with hellfire in an angry roar, Bible in hand and index finger holding his place in Leviticus. And in among them all was me, Mr. Estranged Husband, without anything you'd even call a real hobby, just standing around watching, or striding along as if I knew where I was going. I'd run into my students from 10 years ago and wonder how I must look to them, in my stained slouch hat and shlubby jeans and T-shirt frayed around the neckline – this faded and shrunken demigod who had wielded the power of life, death, and college admission over them all those years ago. And then I always had to go home, to my now pristine apartment, with its unencumbered, echoing walls and the orange juice container in the refrigerator.

Luckily I finally remembered the knitting group.

### Chapter 7

They met pretty much every week, rotating from one apartment to the next. I'd met them all a couple of times, when Leilah had them at our place, but my usual tactic was to flee after perfunctory greetings and maybe a cookie or two. I told you – social laziness. They'd bring tons of food and pick at it all afternoon while they knitted and nattered. Once I came home early and found them all still there, a half-dozen or so, scattered comfortably around our small living room amid the wreckage of all the snacks. There was a powerful atmosphere of familiarity and contentment in the crowded space. They all smiled to acknowledge my arrival, but without interrupting the steady motion of their needles, which continued their rhythmic rise and fall like the wings of dragonflies drying in the morning sun.

I remembered that peaceful scene when I discovered, by opening the emails that continued to crowd our inbox even after Leilah left, that it was her turn to host the knitting group. She, being preoccupied with her affair with the birds and the birdman, or perhaps because Beresford spent so much time in regions with no cellphone network, had neglected to cancel the event or reschedule it. With the splashing of the orange juice ringing in my ears, I decided to let it ride, answered the email queries about starting time, and assigned food to bring, in what must have been a convincing imitation of Leilah's electronic voice, which I developed by studying the old messages in the outbox. On the appointed day all the knitters, including Victor Carogna, showed up on schedule.

It didn't take them very long to get out of me what had happened, and why my wife, their friend, was missing. While they mulled over that information without saying much about it, they were kind enough to pretend that my sudden interest in knitting was sincere, and gave generously of their time to get me started casting-on what would turn out to be my perpetual scarf. But though they listened with apparent sympathy to my personal problems involving Leilah, they were noncommittal in terms of advice. And really, what do you say to a guy whose marriage of 25 years has suddenly dissolved and run down the drain, and he doesn't have a clue as to why? Certainly they weren't going to tell me all the things I'm sure Leilah had told _them_ about our relationship. No doubt for them there were also concerns of sisterhood and personal loyalty. But I was equally sure that plenty of analysis would take place both in person and by all available electronic means as soon as I was out of the way; and my blood ran cold at the thought of how much damage could be done in a 140-character tweet.

So for a while Betty was my only pal in the knitting group. Or she would at least talk to me, I suppose because one of the things about memory loss is that everything's new every day, and to her I've always just been this nice boy (I'm 60, she's 85) who suddenly appeared next to her on the couch, struggling with a pair of #5 needles and tearing out a lot of yarn whose lovely, rich colors never failed to attract her attention. "Oh, look how beautiful that is," she'd say, every week when she saw it. She never seemed to notice that at one meeting the yarn was wrapped in a nice skein, at the next knitted into a narrow scarf-like band, then pulled out and rewound into a bedraggled ball, and then knitted back into another half scarf, but always the same yarn, which she'd fondle admiringly, saying "Oh, look how beautiful that is!"

The other person, of course, who really talked to me was Victor Carogna, but he was at the other end of the niceness spectrum from Betty. He's a stringy older guy with white hair, a yellowish, waxed handlebar mustache that sticks out beyond his sunken cheeks, and a steely glare behind thick lenses; sort of in the mold of what I imagine to be the older Wyatt Earp, in his Los Angeles, bare-knuckle-boxing referee days. Victor Carogna, to my surprise, is by far the most accomplished knitter in the group; but his talents are devoted to – or wasted on, I'd say – one bizarre project after another. When I joined the group he was working on a sweater that featured a handgun – a .357 Magnum, he let us know even before it began to take shape – slanted dramatically across the front and surrounded by a corona of what appeared to be flowers but were actually, upon closer examination, blooming exit wounds in a riot of carefully selected colors.

I've watched in vain for some element of censure in the way all the strong, independent women of the group treat Victor Carogna the ex-cop, gun nut, proud NRA member, staunch anti-feminist, and right-wing Neanderthal. Of course, the .357 Magnum didn't impress them qua gun, or at least they never talked about its length, thickness, heft, hardness, stopping power, or other gunny qualities. What impressed them was the incredible intricacy of Victor Carogna's work, the way the cables separated and rejoined around each of the encircling blossoms, the internal colors in the cylinder of the gun, all chosen with perfect taste, which gave it a spooky 3D appearance, and the way Victor Carogna did it all without referring to a pattern. There _was_ no pattern, since he designed the thing himself and kept it all in his head. When he finished that, he immediately started on a scarf bearing a romantic, high-angle representation of the Hiroshima A-bomb detonation. And meanwhile he'd sit there at every meeting, knitting tranquilly, sneering at the ladies' bleeding-heart liberal attitudes whenever they ventured onto social or political topics and holding forth on the need for a heavy military hand in foreign affairs, and domestic too, for that matter, and our culture's lamentable drift away from solid Darwinian principles.

"Afghanistan," he'd say with a faint smile, "wouldn't be particularly missed. And its destruction, or at least the leveling of a couple of the smaller cities, would send a very clear message to those towelheads. The way we're going now, that situation could drag on for years."

"Oh, come on, Victor," one of the younger women would giggle, her needles flying a little faster, "you're just saying that to get a rise out of us." Victor Carogna was totally serious, of course. But I do think he likes to stir up the women with his outrageous pronouncements. They tolerate him because of his knitting and, in my cynical view, because they all secretly want to sleep with him, despite his age, mustache, and general creepiness. Except for Betty, who doesn't want to sleep with anybody, and just thinks he's funny. "He doesn't care what anybody thinks, does he," she'll say, laughing, after Victor Carogna loads all his yarn and needles into his Soldier of Fortune tote bag, puts on his worn suit jacket, and takes his leave. "He just says what he wants. But I love the way he's so fascinated by afghans."

Yes, Victor Carogna always said what he wanted. None of the factors that restrained the women in the group were of any interest to him, and he was on my case right from the start. As soon as it became clear what had happened to me, his eyes narrowed and began to glitter behind the thick spectacles. Victor is considerably older than I am, and his irises, once I imagine a velvety black, have faded to the kind of smoky gray you might find in the shadow of an urban garbage can. He has the weather-beaten face and squint lines of your classic high-plains drifter, the result of too much time spent in his vegetable garden in Cupertino, where the merciless summer sun produces an abundant crop of supremely tasty heirloom tomatoes, along with a lot of skin cancer. For the August meetings he likes to bring a bag of his harvest for the girls, along with a single flawless and tasteless Safeway tomato for invidious comparison. And his remarks on almost any topic bear the same relationship to the careful, politically correct commentary of the rest of us as do his tomatoes to the Safeway variety. This contrast was particularly noticeable with regard to my Leilah troubles, since the rest of the group, as I've mentioned, was striving to maintain some kind of neutrality. He seemed to be offended by my abandoned state, and to hold me totally responsible for it. He wasn't at all sparing with his advice – later it occurred to me that he might have felt he owed me something, although Victor Carogna is not really the sort of man to acknowledge that sort of debt. He questioned my intelligence, my perspicacity, my courage, my compassion, my assertiveness, and the size of my reproductive equipment.

"You need to quit your whining and whimpering, Ducelis," he sneered as soon as the topic came up. "You got exactly what you deserve. The fact that she dumped you for a birdwatcher shows she's got some gumption at least; more than you do, for chrissake. She saw there was a problem and she DID something about it. You, on the other hand, are sitting on your ass waiting for someone to explain what happened. You're just validating all her complaints about you!" This was a bit of a surprise, because I naturally hadn't _told_ them any of Leilah's complaints, although I'm sure there were many. "And now you're moping around the house feeling sorry for yourself," he continued, "not doing shit, angling for sympathy from your friends. You think we want to hear about it? Jesus Christ man, it's been a coupla months, and what have you done with yourself? Why don't you at least go out and get laid? There's a ton of nookie hoofing it around the streets these days – I'm sure you've noticed. Go get some of it, that'll take your mind off your troubles, give you some new ones to worry about. Where's your balls, for chrissake." This made the rest of the group stir uncomfortably, but that's all. As I've mentioned, Victor Carogna can say virtually anything on knitting day without creating much more than a giggle.

The group's makeup is a testimony to the ability of the fiber arts to haul in all kinds of fish on its fuzzy lines. Betty is the oldest, of course, and, at 60, I come after Victor Carogna in the lineup. Then there's Janet, a little younger than me, plump and sharp-tongued. She favors purple clothes, garish fingernails, huge jewelry, and a lot of makeup. She's a rich divorcee, and Victor Carogna is always after her too, prodding her to find herself a man. "Oh PLEASE," she'll tell him, "I finally managed to get myself loose from one of those, and now you want me to hook up with another one? Give me a break." Victor Carogna will then sneer "What are you, a dyke? Don't you get a little itch every now and then?" And she'll reply, "That's why God made vibrators. They're a lot less muss and fuss. All you have to do is change the batteries now and then. And you can shut them up in the dresser drawer when you're done." Janet is one of several group members who met at the Wells Fargo branch where they all worked. She has since moved on to the office of my dentist, where she schedules the appointments and fills out insurance forms with negligent and lippy virtuosity.

After Janet there's a large jump in age, the other three women being in their 20s and 30s. Sharon is a redhead who is a good deal taller than she'd like to be and wears enormous hoop earrings to compensate. She's still behind the counter at Wells, claiming that the job is easy and leaves her plenty of time for her hobbies, like knitting, and her high-maintenance boyfriend, who raises show chickens when he's sober. She stays with him despite the chickens and his drinking and his failure to hold a job, because her height and her big body, slightly tilted around the hips, have given her a lifelong feeling of insecurity where men are concerned. Betty is her mother, by the way – that's how _she_ got in the group.

Ayn you already know something about. She's still at Wells, too, but she got herself trained and moved up to being a currency trader at a big downtown branch. She works long hours at the bank and makes lots of money, but her real love, other than Rolf the one-eared X-treme biker, is ironman competitions. Sometimes she'll show up at the knitting sessions with her powerful thighs still encased in spandex, stripping off her bike helmet and fingerless gloves to pick up her needles and start stitching.

And then there's April. She lived upstairs at the time Leilah left, with her boyfriend, Arthur, who she met at the bank. They're the couple whose conversations and footsteps I can sometimes hear through my ceiling. Even before the knitting group I had a little more of a relationship with her because Leilah and I sometimes took care of her giant black cat, Mitochondrion, while she and Arthur were out of town. She's a short blonde with the kind of round, compact body that makes men think of fertility and slow, luxurious sexual intercourse. At least, that's what she makes me think of, or used to. She recently quit Wells Fargo and has been working on freelance projects, as she puts it, for Arthur, who seemingly has another life outside the bank. She's the only one who ever defended me from Victor Carogna's attacks. "Come on," she'd say, laughing and completely unfazed by the scandalous nature of his remarks, "You're embarrassing the poor guy." And she'd turn her wide smile on me for maybe a little longer than necessary. "Poor guy my ass," Victor Carogna would growl, and I would blush, feeling a powerful desire to trim the ends off his handlebar mustache with an ax, because I was trying to impress everyone with my sorrow and sensitivity, whereas Victor Carogna, with his comment about getting laid, had of course exactly nailed my secret thoughts, some of them directed at people currently knitting a few feet away from me.

Plus I'm sure Victor Carogna himself, even at his advanced age, would take his own advice if his wife roared off on the back of somebody's Harley-Davidson, which was unlikely however because she had multiple sclerosis, and he waited on her hand and foot when he wasn't tending his tomatoes. He had left the San Francisco police 20 years before, disgusted by the ascendancy of bleeding-heart liberals in the department, the advent of sensitivity training, and the coddling of drunks, drug addicts, jaywalkers, and even hardened criminals. It had become department policy to understand the personal problems that had made such people what they were, and somehow to help them get treatment, instead of just whacking them around and taking them off the streets. Victor Carogna had protested vehemently, doubtless in the same blunt terms he used in the knitting group when political topics were discussed, and at some point it had been agreed that he would take early retirement. This had turned out to be a boon financially, because to supplement the generous police department pension he began to play the stock market, successfully of course – Victor Carogna did everything well, from gardening to high finance. Retirement also allowed him to devote more time to his wife, once her MS appeared with its attendant symptoms and obnoxious treatments. He remained a close and vocal observer of the political scene, however, and had been heartened in recent years by the shift in public opinion occurring around social issues and the reemergence of good and evil in the world, as exemplified by the World Trade Center events and the government's satisfyingly hard-line response to them. How knitting got into the picture I don't really know. It's hard to imagine Victor Carogna clacking away with his #5s at a SWAT team meeting. Possibly he didn't take up the needles until after retirement. All that is known for sure is that he was already highly adept by the time Leilah met him at the Peninsula Fiber Arts Symposium and invited him to join her knitting group.

One of the most annoying things about Victor Carogna and all his sarcastic advice, from my point of view, is that it's impossible for me to imagine him sitting around brooding about his fate the way I often do. "You gotta DO something, Ducelis," he's told me over and over. "It doesn't matter much what it is. Your real problem is you spend too much time whimpering about your problems. If you don't want to get laid, then get a Krispy Kreme franchise, or rob a bank or something. Paint this fuckin apartment." Looking around at the dingy walls of my living room. "When was the last time you painted this room?" And I'll mutter something about volunteer work or Oh yeah I should really do something about this place.

But the truth is, once Leilah took off I _was_ paralyzed. And despite his tough talk, Victor Carogna may have actually sympathized with me in some stripped-down Victor Carogna kind of way. The compassionate ladies of the club were willing to listen and maybe even feel what I tried to project as my pain, but aside from psychobanalities they had no suggestions and seemed, despite their formulaic murmurs of sympathy, largely indifferent to my plight. Victor Carogna, on the other hand, having identified my fundamental defect as a lack of masculine vitality, set about correcting it in his usual direct way: he taught me to shoot. Never mind that this ended up being just another part of my problem, rather than a solution. His intentions were good. Or they may have been.

### Chapter 8

Whatever the drawbacks of having to deal with Victor Carogna on a regular basis, I was somewhat heartened by my first experience with the knitting group. They had been tolerant, if not actually warm, and now at least my empty weeks swung at a kind of anchor. Besides which, knitting even a bad scarf is quite difficult and requires a lot of concentration; it's a welcome distraction for a person who's afraid of the sound of orange juice. I also noticed what was doubtless a false sense of belonging to a team, and I was able to bask in that illusion for a few days.

Not long after that first meeting, while I was sitting on the couch ripping out a few botched rows of The Scarf, the landlord, Mr. Clabber, rapped on my door, with the unexpected news that he was about to start renovating the building.

Mr. Clabber is roughly my age, shortish, with a shaved head, thick eyebrows riding uneasily above rimless spectacles, deep dark eyes, and a wide, drooping broom of mustache. Among landlords, Mr. Clabber is a paragon. Leilah and I have been living in his building since he bought it and renovated it for the first time, nearly 25 years ago. It's been a mutually satisfactory arrangement: we always paid the rent in full and on time and never asked him to paint, and he always left us alone, except for the rare emergency situations, such as when the toilet backed up in the middle of the night, causing water to run down between the walls. Routed out of his bed, Mr. Clabber drove all the way up from South San Francisco to deal with that situation.

He also only occasionally remembered to raise the rent, so that eventually we were paying about half market value. By the time of this story, in fact, Mr. Clabber didn't really care much about the rent or the mess in our four-room pad, because he'd parlayed his first building into a small real estate empire whose tentacles curled all the way to Vegas and even Phoenix. Early on he'd learned that it was a good idea not to scare off any tenants who always paid on time and didn't trash the apartment. He and his wife were recent immigrants from Djakarta when we first moved in, and they had a naive faith in their first few tenants. This led to a number of interesting and educational experiences for them and for his more conventional renters.

There had been, for example, what Leilah had sardonically identified as a troupe of Eastern European gymnasts who moved into the place above us early in our own tenure. There seemed to be dozens of them. We met them on the stairs, always smiling, but never the same ones. They lasted only for a few months before absconding; but during that time the ceiling above us resonated constantly with bumps, thumps, slidings, shouts, occasional screams, sexual groans and yelps, and atonal chamber music. It sounded as though the entire apartment was rotating like a musical laundry dryer with all its furniture and inhabitants, who first rode the turning walls upward, then crashed to the floor like huge clumps of damp underwear, only to repeat the process over and over, day and night, until Leilah and I were screaming for mercy and denting the ceiling nightly with a furious broom handle. Luckily, they never paid the rent, and left abruptly once Mr. Clabber began eviction proceedings.

Other unorthodox tenants flickered in and out over the years, with varying degrees of impact on us. There was the professional agitator who flushed bath towels and pots of spaghetti down his toilet and then complained to the health department that his plumbing didn't work. For him it was a matter of principle not to pay the rent, an ethical stand that eventually led to his eviction. And there was the amateur chemist who cooked up his methamphetamines in the bottom apartment. He's of interest only because when he was finally evicted, after numerous triggerings of the smoke alarm, he left behind a cat, the very same ill-tempered tabby that Leilah had recently carried out of the apartment in the United Airlines carrier when _she_ decamped (also not paying her share of the last month's rent, I feel I must add).

Each eviction cost Mr. Clabber thousands of dollars in legal fees and lost rent, and with every defeat he became more gun-shy, letting the apartments sit empty for months while he sat biting his fingernails over the sheaves of references from prospective new tenants and wondering which one was least likely to screw him. This is how Leilah and I finally began to look good to him despite our dwarfish monthly payments. Leilah in particular, being very sociable and no fool, was able gradually to install her friends in most of the other apartments by playing on his anxieties. By the time she left, the place was as quiet as a churchyard and Mr. Clabber's rent checks were coming in with gratifying punctuality. He was therefore somewhat distressed to learn that she had moved out. Although it was I who had always signed the rent checks, he preferred her on a personal level, having the good taste to recognize an unusual woman when he met one. He may also have viewed her disappearance and the unwonted tidiness of the apartment as disturbing signs of instability on my part; and I suppose he wasn't wrong about that.

The current lineup in the building looks like this: Across the hall from me is Ayn, whom you've already met. She lives alone with her bikes and an elliptical machine whose eccentric revolutions I can sometimes feel faintly in the floor at odd hours of the night. Upstairs are April and Arthur. They are, in my opinion – and this also had a part to play in my later discomfiture – an unlikely pair, Arthur being round and massive, bearded, very grave, invariably business-suited, and considerably older than his girlfriend. I've already outlined April's physical parameters. Finally, in the apartment below me dwell Julia the night nurse and her neurasthenic canine, Raton. I can often hear their conversations too, which are like arguments between two people speaking in different tongues, both trying to make themselves understood by talking louder than the other. Raton generally seems to get the last word.

On the bottom floor is the garden apartment, recently vacated by the meth chemist, and it was there that Mr. Clabber planned to begin his revolution. "You... feel noise" he told me in his still rudimentary English, "and the wall..." He held one hand up parallel to the wall and pumped it back and forth. "Don't want to worry."

After Mr. Clabber's visit, I was no longer troubled by the lonely sighs of the wind in the pine tree outside my window, because my days were now filled with the tramp of booted feet up and down the stairs, the banging of hammers and the screaming of tortured nails being torn from their ancient beds, the keening of a chorus of power tools, and deep seismic disturbances whose source I couldn't determine. Not to mention the shouted conversations in Indonesian and the clouds of cigarette smoke drifting through the hall from the workmen who had shouldered the burden of chain-smoking shrugged off by us clean-lunged Americans. I suppose the roar of activity in the building was an improvement of sorts. Coming upon one of the laborers in the hallway, I could smile and say hello and almost believe I belonged to the brotherhood of man, even though the connection was severed at 5 o'clock sharp every day. The bustle of construction, along with the knitting group and Victor Carogna's masculinization program, provided an illusion of community.

Although Victor Carogna believed that in me he was introducing a weapon-shy wimp to the manly world of firearms, guns in fact have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. There's at least one picture of me at age 3 or 4 in cowboy hat and holsters with twin pearl-handled .45s. They were cap guns, of course; but my point is that already at that age I was in training to assert my God-given rights under the Second Amendment. This seems a little odd to me in retrospect, given that my mother literally shrank from hurting flies and my father, while an anxious guardian of his maleness in other ways, had no real interest in weapons of any kind.

But guns were my favorite toys, and I remember getting new ones for almost every birthday and holiday: revolvers, automatic pistols, rifles, shotguns, Browning Automatic Rifles, burp guns, machine guns. If Mattel had produced an affordable howitzer that would fit in our garage, I would have requested one, and my pacifist mother would probably have given it to me. I will confess that there was and is something fascinating about the weight and silky metallic soul of a gun, and I subscribe also to the theory that whatever that something is, it has a particular grip on people who carry around a Y chromosome. I don't pretend to know why. Not that there couldn't be other reasons than biology for getting into guns, and I've heard that these days women too are learning the joys of blowing holes in cardboard silhouettes, if not in actual people.

In any case, by the time I was 14 or so my fascination with firearms was already beginning to fade, overshadowed by the usual adolescent biological concerns. I turned my back definitively on guns the day our neighbor Jonnie Lucero took me hunting with his new pellet gun and used it to shoot a bird. It was a hapless sparrow, pouring out his April heart on a budding tree branch, and I was astonished at how easily the feverishly singing wood sprite could be turned into a silent clump of feathers. Not that I have any particular sympathy for the avian world, you understand, especially in view of its recent impact on my life. But the thought of that martyred bird still makes me cringe, and it may have been that very cringe that Victor Carogna, with a sort of contemptuous resignation, recognized and determined to train out of me at the shooting range. He had some success, as it turned out, but at a cost to himself.

Victor Carogna's efforts in this area had been anticipated, in much more determined fashion, by the US Army. Drafted during the Vietnam years, I had been instructed in how to walk like a robot, crawl 40 yards through mud on my stomach, disembowel a rubber dummy with a bayonet, and – perhaps most usefully – clean the grease trap in the company kitchen. One of the drill sergeants had also demonstrated for our platoon, drawn up at attention one frosty morning, the approved army technique for eating pussy, a dry run so to speak, and we were reminded almost daily that it was our presumed taste for this activity that truly made us men. We were also taught to disassemble, clean, reassemble, and competently shoot an M-14 rifle at cardboard enemies that fell over backwards when hit by a bullet. No one seemed concerned that the rifle in use in Vietnam was not the M-14 but the M-16; and indeed, after basic training I did my time in a lab in Huntsville, Alabama, where the only weapon was a 2-kilowatt carbon dioxide laser, used to impress visiting brass by melting hacksaw blades with its invisible infrared beam.

After my army days, I don't believe I ever set eyes on another real firearm until Victor Carogna, shaking his head disgustedly, took me by the ear and marched me to the Lake Merced shooting range, where he first tried to teach me to use a shotgun. Like any good and thorough teacher, he spent a lot of time showing me the rudiments of skeet shooting: weapon safety first; then how to point the shotgun, proper hand and elbow position, how to lead the streaking disc, compensating for its distance by aiming high, clichéd instructions about how to "squeeze off" shots as though I were caressing female skin rather than triggering a swarm of destructive lead pellets. Of course he wanted me to learn to hit the targets; but the underlying goal was more cosmic – to help me take possession of my male inheritance. Victor Carogna saw right through my superficial manly bluster about Leilah's desertion to the limp, clueless soul that lay beneath, and whether because on some level he actually liked me (doubtful), or because he felt that such an abject specimen as I was threatened the virility of all mankind, he made me his project. The idea was not just to teach me to hit a silly clay frisbee with a shotgun but to release the inner savage that lay snarling even deeper in me than the worm Leilah had trampled.

The mere mechanics of shooting were thus strictly secondary; Victor Carogna wanted me to learn to destroy those clay pigeons not with good elbow position but with my mind, my WILL. I wasn't to aim at all, in fact. He taught me that it was possible to actually see the deadly squadron of pellets as it left the barrel, a slight, hurrying shimmer against the green background of trees, like a small, toxic cloud. The idea was to think of that cloud as being attached to the end of a long stick whose movements I controlled. The trick was not to aim when the pigeon was pulled, but simply to SEE the flying disc and then REACH OUT and DESTROY IT with a touch of the stick, which I was to regard as an extension of my arm, or really of my murderous intention.

I was quite taken with the whole concept, and spent several afternoons with Victor Carogna, REACHING OUT to disc after rocketing disc, thrilling to the report of the gun like a baseball bat on rotten wood and the acrid perfume of gunpowder, even enjoying the hammer of the recoil against my bruised shoulder. But somehow my little personal cloud of venom only rarely intersected the trajectory of the discs, and then probably by accident. I noticed that Victor Carogna himself, notwithstanding his steely eye and handlebar mustache, had some difficulty in whacking the elusive targets, and when he missed tended to fire off an ill-humored and unsportsmanlike volley of shots. Etiquette required, of course, that the shooter take only one shot, and merely puff a little faster on his cigarette if he missed. He could also say shit, but only once.

Victor Carogna was annoyed, but not dismayed, by the failure of his initial efforts to revive my primal hunter. After a few frustrating sessions he packed up the shotguns, got out his handguns, and took me to the police shooting range, where he still had some friends as bloody-minded as himself who allowed him the run of the place. There, his faith that the masculine _elan_ could be teased out of almost any man, even me, was validated.

Perhaps with the shotgun there still lurked in me some neural memory of Jonnie Lucero and his pellet gun, and the ghost of the glassy-eyed sparrow. Shotguns are, after all, designed primarily to kill birds, although used on larger game by the ungentlemanly heroes of gangster films. Handguns, in contrast, have no other obvious purpose than to kill human beings; no helpless birds or other cute animals are involved. Victor Carogna soon realized that he had no reason to be dissatisfied with the state of my soul in this area, at least in terms of my ability to plug paper targets.

You may suspect that the simple joys of revenge somehow catalyzed the immediate sympathy that sprouted between me and Victor Carogna's Glock 17. I have to admit that those cardboard hearts and foreheads I effortlessly peppered with 9-millimeter-diameter holes were sometimes replaced in my mind by the lanky contours of a certain pony-tailed birdwatcher. But the fantasies involving Beresford more often took the form of acupuncture with #6 aluminum knitting needles, tapped in just far enough to agonize but not to cause any major organ failure, thus side-stepping the US government's official definition of torture. Only after having had a smoke while savoring his screams would I lean over without taking the cigarette from the corner of my mouth and administer the coup de grace to this porcupine-like object. That sort of shooting requires no particular skill.

No, the truth is, some shadowy fish from the deeper waters surfaces when I get hold of a handgun. Personally I think it has something to do with the news of the world, which you can't read these days without seeing a story about the body of a man with a burning face flying into somebody's back yard in Iraq or someone else cutting off his best friend's leg with a hacksaw in the living room of his mother. Or there's just some asshole farting by on his unmufflered Harley-Davidson and mindlessly screwing up the world for everyone within a radius of a half-mile. These things make my palm, like Hermann Goering's in a different context, itch for the gnurly grip of Victor Carogna's Glock.

Blowing holes in a cardboard silhouette of a human being seemed a harmless enough way of venting those vengeful impulses. I was quite good at it, better than good in fact, and my blossoming skill seemed to go some way toward defusing Victor Carogna's contempt. He openly admired my knack with the pistol, to the point even of occasionally cracking his knife-edge smile, and flattered himself that he had at least sliced open enough of a rent in my soft metrosexual carapace to let out a small red glow from the primal inferno within. I believe he still doubted my ability to pull the trigger even if I did have in my sights a child rapist or Harley-Davidson driver, but he never lost hope. "The human race is a fuckin disaster," he kept chanting in my ear, in much the same way the army had tried to imbue me with the spirit of the bayonet. Despite his efforts, though, I continue to have trouble executing a cockroach, let alone a human being. Although I probably feel more sympathy for the roach, which is after all only trying to survive and would never cut off anyone's leg unless food was involved.

The shooting expeditions coincided with a period of thaw in my relations with Victor Carogna. After my bumbling attempts at skeet shooting he was generally in a bad mood, and would simply throw the guns in the trunk and take off, sometimes not even bothering to drop me at a bus stop. I don't attribute all his grumpiness to my failures. He wasn't very good with the shotgun himself, as I've mentioned, which doubtless left him in a bad mood; and then there was his immobilized wife waiting for him at home. I'm sure he loved her, whatever that meant to a caveman like him, but it must sometimes have been an effort to maintain his usual sarcastic good humor.

He softened a bit, though, once he began to appreciate my natural genius for firing a handgun, and once or twice drove me all the way to the J-car turnaround out by the Great Highway, and even treated me to coffee at the weatherbeaten pastry shop that crouches there in the lee of a sand dune. We could sit outside in the fog and sip our coffee (Victor Carogna's good mood always dissipated somewhat when I ordered my nonfat decaf latte) while he smoked a couple of cigarettes down to his sandpaper knuckles and regaled me with tales of the police department, hoping, I suppose, to further stimulate my testosterone production, or maybe just to help me construct a more realistic view of life. He had an endless supply of stories: girlfriends thrown down stairs, the dried brains of three-week-old suicides spattered on ceilings, police vans loaded with vomiting drunks and overdosed drug addicts, mothers watching TV while their battered babies died in the next room, and so on. I tried to match him with anecdotes from my classrooms, but it was an uneven contest, although I did have a hatchet incident and a gang fight or two to throw at him.

Once, in what must have been the high-water mark of his mentorship, he actually took me to Cupertino to meet his wife, Margaret. She was a far more pleasant and less embittered woman than I'd expected, and actually looked kind of happy. She served us coffee and home-baked cookies, slowly but quite efficiently I thought, rolling smoothly from room to room in her wheelchair on floors from which Victor Carogna had removed all the carpeting. She seemed a little younger than her husband, short-haired and big-earringed, and the difficulties presented by her condition had not prevented her from maintaining her eye makeup. As at the cafe, Victor Carogna sat smoking cigarettes, but he let her do most of the talking. Her obvious intelligence, rationality, compassion, and charm presented themselves to me as a puzzle: what was she doing riding through life in the turret of Victor Carogna's armored car? Just out of curiosity, I tried a couple of times to steer the conversation toward political topics. Once she sailed right over my reef without even dragging her keel; the other time she just laughed and said "Watch out now, we don't want my husband to swallow that cigarette, at least not until he finishes it." Victor Carogna merely smiled, but I could see from the glitter in his python eyes that he didn't appreciate my meddling.

Margaret insisted on giving me a motherly peck on the cheek as I left and made me promise to return. Victor Carogna, however, was ominously quiet on the trip to the train station, and I seriously doubted that I would be invited back. From that day on, the patch of open water in our relationship began to freeze over again. Although there may well have been other reasons for that, as you will soon hear, but not yet. And I did see the inside of Victor Carogna's house again, but by that time a lot of things had changed.

### Chapter 9

I spent my teaching career as a physicist, and my biology is a little weak, but the little I do know about evolution is enough to make me wonder, quite often, just what the various elements of my personal DNA are doing still dogpaddling around the gene pool after all these eons of natural selection. Let's take a little inventory, keeping in mind that reproductive success is supposed to be the criterion for continued membership in the Kromosome Klub. What you've got here are bald genes, skinny genes, and nearsighted genes; along with an absence of genes that might code for athleticism, for chiseled good looks, for unusual intelligence, musical or other artistic talent, personal charisma, sense of style in dress or behavior, self-confidence, aggressiveness, physical vitality, taste for predation. You've got genes for average height, irises of an indefinable shade somewhere between brown and beige, mousy hair (and not much of it, as noted above), narrow shoulders, knobby knees, wrinkly skin now beginning to hang loose when I do my gradually decreasing number of daily pushups. . . well, why go on?

Assuming I'm not just some kind of changeling, in which case all evolutionary bets are off, the question here has to be: What in the world were the ancestral females thinking of when they allowed my predecessors access to their precious eggs? Will this one give me beautiful children? No. Will he protect me from predators? Only if they're rodent-sized or smaller. Will he defend my chastity (assuming I want it defended) from all the gorillas out there? Look at those pipestem arms, those asparagus-stalk legs. Will he be a good provider? Doubtful, although he might at least be sneaky enough to squirrel away a few tasty grubs here and there. He's not much good at cave painting or beating on the hollow log. What then? Here's my current thinking.

Your TV screen, as I had noted even before Leilah left and I started spending more time than I wanted to on the couch watching sports, is running wild with commercials for drugs designed to stiffen the penises of America. Ciagra, Vitalis, guys throwing strikes with big balls through tight openings and leering at store windows full of lingerie while the "partner" (always female and highly attractive) stands by with a knowing and contented smile, what Leilah used to call a well-fucked look, back in the era of our relationship when she had one herself. I suppose it's a commonplace by now, but if you believe the ads, American males are suffering from a collective limp dick. Maybe there really is some connection with the 300 million guns we own and our lately very aggressive foreign policy. The proliferating symbols are too obvious to need listing.

The good-looking dudes in the ads are always fairly young, 30s I'd say, or at the most beginning to gray attractively — let's say 40s or early 50s. Their partners are always beautiful and, though wholesome-looking, obviously more than willing. I used to ask myself, back in the days when erections were a dime a dozen, what's these guys' problem? And are there really so many of them concerned about genital rigidity, or is it just that the profit margin on penile encouragement is so high that the pharmaceutical companies only need to sell those pills to a few dozen anxious men to make themselves even wealthier than they already are from selling overpriced mood enhancers? For a lot of men, I suspect, the mere mention of what is now known as erectile dysfunction is enough to produce the phenomenon, which of course may be just what the drug pushers have in mind. For me, on the other hand, there has never been any particular problem in that area. Not that, as I cross the bar into my 60s, I haven't noticed a certain abstraction seeping into the picture, a slight fraying at the fringes of my personal erotic tapestry. I'm not quite as easily fooled by my own hormones as I was at age 14.

Mind you, I don't see this phenomenon – sexual interest extended superfluously into old age– as representing any great pointer on the dial of masculinity. In fact, it might be quite the opposite. That's where the Ducelis Evolutionary Strategy comes into play. Here it is: The conventional studs, having advertised their maleness and fulfilled the strictly biological imperative by pairing off – or even, in the old days, compiling a harem – and reproducing, are now finding that they'd rather hang out on the couch with their pals, loading carloads of trans fats onto their beltlines and watching even bigger studs smash into each other like locomotives, than spend the 15 or 20 minutes that might be required to heat up their wives. Besides which, they're kind of tired from battling each other in the bearpits of commerce, the old dragon's not quite as fiery as it used to be and, what the hell, it's less demanding to watch Tiger Woods whacking his balls around than to do anything with their own.

Meanwhile, for their frustrated wives and "partners", waiting in the wings and still hungry could be someone like me, no longer young, bald but sensitive, skinny but still motile, sagging pectorals but eyes crinkly with maturity, wisdom, and wry understanding, an appreciation for the varieties of Koigu yarn, and gonads that seem gratifyingly interested in _their_ no longer exactly young bodies. This _might_ be a recipe for at least occasional procreation, if not for demographic domination. Enough to keep things going at least. That's all I'm saying.

In my life, which is now beginning to be a long one, I have "done" the following drugs, here listed in the approximate chronological order in which I first knowingly took them (or they were given to me) with the intent of altering my mental state:

aspirin

caffeine

tea

Coca-Cola®

coffee

No-Doz®

alcohol

sex

marijuana

hashish

Librium

Valium

cocaine

Quaaludes

chocolate

sugar

basketball

ibuprofen

Compoz

Benadryl

Sudafed

Tylenol with codeine

Vicodin

You may raise your eyebrows at some of these, like aspirin, ibuprofen, or Compoz; but I maintain that the lifting of a headache has major mood-enhancing effects, and a good night's sleep is for us insomniacs a jewel beyond compare. I've tried quite a few of the items on this list in combination: for example, alcohol and sex; marijuana and sex; alcohol, marijuana, and sex; Quaaludes and sex (that was sort of the point of Quaaludes, as I understood it); chocolate and sex; Sudafed and basketball. The combination of alcohol, Quaaludes, and sex was not a successful one for me.

I suppose it looks like a long list; but I doubt that the days, or even parts of days, of inebriation in my life, if totaled up, would come to more than maybe a couple of dozen out of some 22,000 so far. I now avoid nearly everything on that list, with the exception of caffeine and some of the food products (I'm including alcohol in that category, because I don't drink to drink) and the occasional hit of ibuprofen. Plus my doctor has advised a baby aspirin a day, to fend off strokes. All things considered, caffeine, with its pleasant neap tide of optimism, is probably the best of them, provided that I'm able to limit my intake enough not to become overly habituated.

Of the others, only sex has been at all important in my life and, along with Victor Carogna's shooting lessons, it plays a leading role in this particular tale. You probably noticed that it occurs prominently in my list of combination agents. That's because of all of them sex has been the most gripping, and still is, even though since retirement (is it a coincidence?) I've begun to get little hints that it's in the process of slipping away from me, as a physical activity if not a mental one. I'm not enough of a biochemist to know the particular suite of reagents that produces the physical changes and mood elevation that surround sex, along with the spectacular focusing of my normally fuzzy intention. Whatever it is, old age has not much dimmed its plumage, and it continues to ride my shoulder almost all the time, bright-eyed, like an annoyingly garrulous parrot.

Because of that, I suppose I could make a case for blaming the whole mess on Leilah if I were so inclined, and sometimes I am. Because she left me alone, a newly retired guy, unadapted to my new circumstances and with too much time on my hands. Because even before she left me, she pretty much cut off my favorite drug, and then later transferred what I had considered my personal supply to a birdwatcher with a 4-wheel drive truck. Because she created in me a need for revenge, or turnabout, whatever you want to call it. And because she introduced me to her knitting group, which included, along with a little old lady and the right-wing maniac who taught me how to shoot a handgun, a number of attractive young women, two of whom lived in this very building, although both of them already had boyfriends. The behavior of one of those two was unimpeachable.

### Chapter 10

Possibly it was my biological ponderings, along with subliminal fears that I might be moving into the Viagra crowd myself, that led me to imagine April was coming on to me at the knitting group meetings and even during our occasional encounters in the hallway of the apartment building. What could he have been thinking, you're asking yourself. Hold on – I'm going to tell you. There was no denying that she was smiling at me a lot in the meetings and laughing at witticisms that weren't that creative and taking extra time to explain this stitch or that, with our fingers making brief electrical contact as she demonstrated the proper movements with my needles. And maybe following me out to the kitchen to chat a little bit while I made coffee or, if the group was meeting in the strangely bare apartment she shared with boyfriend Arthur, asking me some trivial question just as the others were going out the door, so that I'd have to stay behind alone for a minute or two. There were also the occasional hallway meetings, the broad smile and the little extra swivel in her hips as she went up the stairs. . . That's what I thought, anyway.

I'm not crazy. Where women are concerned, however, I can be schizophrenic. In the real world I noted these smiles and tarryings, aligned them side by side with my personal statistics as described in the previous chapter, and decided they must all be perfectly innocent behaviors painted with an erotic wash by my endlessly hopeful mental brush. But there was also the realm of fantasy; and on that stage I had no trouble at all creating scenarios in which a juicy, elastic young thing like April would find reasons (although these had to be left suitably vague) for putting moves on a retired gentleman who was rapidly tipping over into old age.

And so in the days after the knitting group met I would find myself imagining some minor domestic emergency in the upstairs apartment: for example, the toilet won't stop running, and April will call down in a panic, afraid it's going to overflow. Arthur will be out of town, of course, so I bravely mount the stairs to take a look at the problem. April, surprisingly short and vulnerable without her shoes on, is waiting at the door in a flowered silk kimono, arms folded anxiously beneath her substantial breasts. She leads me to the bathroom, where a steady rush of water can be heard. I lean over to peer into the algal brown darkness of the tank, thinking I should have brought a flashlight. April, close behind me, leans over too, ostensibly to see what I'm doing, pressing softly against my back and shoulder. I jiggle the ball-cock mechanism, and the long arm of the float valve springs up abruptly, freed from whatever was pinning it against the wall of the tank. The flow of water stops. I straighten and turn to look at her. She looks back.

I believed none of this, of course. It was like the kind of bad movie whose embarrassingly lazy plot merely provides an excuse to screen a lot of shooting, exploding sports cars pinwheeling end over end, and profound cleavage. In my loneliness and sexual deprivation – which admittedly for a 60-year-old is more theoretical than real – I was happy enough to have April smile at me in what I could see as a provocative way if I squinted my eyes, and more than happy to usher her ahead of me into the front entrance in my gentlemanly way so I could follow her sashaying butt up the stairs. As far as I was concerned, it was all about screenplay. As long as she kept doing what she was doing (whether she was really doing it or not) – in fact, even if she didn't, because by now the idea was planted in my head – enough fresh pages would come rolling out of my mental printer to keep me insulated from the yellowing newsprint of reality.

In any case, there was boyfriend Arthur, whose combination of gravity and bulk gave him what could be interpreted as a slightly menacing air. He wasn't around a lot – he seemed to do a lot of traveling – but you got the feeling that he didn't miss much. And there was also Leilah, who, in the fantasy world at least, I hadn't quite given up on, although in my more realistic moments I knew that bird had flown. But there was an ambivalence there too, because, as hinted above, I wouldn't have minded getting back at her a little bit.

As I look back on it now, I believe there was a gradually escalating campaign for several weeks, and maybe even some impatience on April's part, while I, having already decided what the situation was, continued thoughtlessly in my role of creative director by night and passive spectator in the light of day. One evening, after a knitting group meeting at which Victor Carogna had bragged shamelessly about his success in teaching me to shoot, April telephoned down. The toilet had refused to stop running after she flushed it, and she was afraid it was going to overflow. Could I come up and take a look at it? She was waiting at the door in a flowered silk kimono, with her arms crossed anxiously beneath her bosom. In the bathroom I peered into the gloomy depths of the toilet tank, wishing I'd brought a flashlight. April leaned over close behind to see what I was doing, pressing her breast gently against my back and shoulder. I freed the float valve and straightened up to look at her.

It all seemed suspiciously easy, but my personal chemical factory, operating at maximum output, somehow made it believable, and I went ahead, because there didn't seem to be any good reason to resist. At my age, how many more Aprils are there, anyway? That's what I thought. Or that's what I thought I was thinking. But thought is not the name of the mental process that takes place in that sort of situation.

I did manage to bring up the name Arthur while she lit the candle next to the bed. April, I observed without noticing, was being very cool about this whole event. "What about him?" she replied. "Your boyfriend?" They didn't have that kind of relationship, she assured me. More of a business partnership. He traveled a lot – was out of town at that very moment, in fact. I didn't inquire further, although I was beginning to be interested in what kind of relationship they did have.

Everything went quite well, from the physical point of view at least, but after the storm surge of adrenaline I found to my disappointment, despite the luxurious heft of her body and an unexpected virtuosity, that April was not Leilah. The whole exercise in fact produced the sort of dry satisfaction you might expect from sanding a fine piece of furniture. That is, it was the kind of sex I'd more or less forgotten about in 25 years of married life, even after, or especially after, sex had become a side issue between Leilah and me – the kind of sex where on the whole you'd just as soon be somewhere else when it was over.

So I was kind of disconsolate, lying next to April on the platform bed that was the only item of furniture in the room, staring up toward the dark ceiling in the wavering light of the smoky candle. Part of the problem was that I was still feeling uncomfortable about the Arthur factor, since I don't believe you should trust a disclaimer from the mouth of only one of the partners in a relationship. I tried to bring up the subject by asking her about the business partnership.

"We have this other . . . studio that we operate out of," she told me. "That's why it's so bare in this apartment – we had to go into debt to furnish the other place. It's kind of hard to explain, what we do," she said, rather shyly it seemed to me. I waited, thinking about what would be a polite interval before I could leave. It had been a long time, and I'd forgotten the conventions. "Do you have my cell phone number?" she finally asked. "You could Google it and find our website. Actually, that's the best thing to do. It'll tell you everything."

She picked up my gloomy mood, or maybe she was just accustomed to that aftereffect, and turned cuddly. "Do you want to stay?" she said, with friendly hands traveling around. "Arthur won't be coming home, so we've got all night. We could take a shower, or get something to eat, whatever. Sleep for a while." But that's sex for you. The slope on the far side of the high is way steeper than it is for any of those other drugs I mentioned; it's a precipice, in fact. Especially for old men. I now had no interest in playing around. I felt slack and disillusioned and not at all cuddly. All I really wanted to do was go to bed, in my own bed, and sleep.

I told her I had to get up early in the morning, but I'm sure she knew it was bullshit. She probably wasn't sorry to see me go, as a matter of fact. At the door, wrapped again in the kimono, she pecked me on the cheek and giggled a little. "Google the cell phone," she said. "It'll be interesting." It was, too.

### Chapter 11

I think it's odd that by typing your upstairs neighbor's phone number into the little Google window you can find photos of her reading Madame Bovary in transparent underwear, or sunbathing naked except for a straw hat in prickly long grass while a bored horse looks on from its stall. Maybe it's even more startling that anyone else can do the same thing at an Internet cafe in Dakar or in the icy silence of the US Antarctic Research Station. Everything's right at your fingertips, with little sidebar ads for hot mortgage rates and I suppose encrypted instructions for suicide bombers. Sometimes I think there's recently been a proliferation of crazy behavior, maybe a signal that our culture has tipped over into decadence; but it's more likely that the Internet and other technological wonders, such as digital photography, have simply made it easier to disseminate our personal crazinesses to a fascinated world. Luckily I'm technologically ignorant, so my own weirdness has not yet been posted on the web, unless someone else has done it. Naturally I've Googled my own name, but all I've found out there are other Ducelises – customer service reps, editorial assistants, tofu freaks, conspiracy theorists, tofu/conspiracy theorists, and windsurfers. I remain anonymous in cyberspace, and will have to persist in alerting the world to my various quirks the old-fashioned way, face to face, one victim at a time.

April's business alias on the Web was Sunflower. The pictures were surprising enough, but the most interesting thing I learned from the website was that April's services, whose nature was implicit rather than described in detail, were not cheap. I thus learned that there was a level of disillusionment considerably lower than the one produced by lovemaking that didn't live up to one's fantasies. In the gray light of a San Francisco summer morning I wasn't really very surprised or even disappointed to have my imaginings about April's romantic interest in me dashed; it was the size of the bill that was stupefying. I had apparently allowed my senior gonads to talk me into a fling with a $2,000/night knitter. We're talking about someone whose previous largest expenditure on a sensual aid was $1.62 to rent "Caligula". The sum was so far outside my experience that I was prepared reflexively to resist. But since it was no easier to imagine kind-hearted April as a bill collector than as a call girl, the corpulent figure of Arthur immediately began to loom large in my imagination.

I spent a good part of the day fretting over my checkbook, while from the basement apartment came the scream of Mr. Clabber's Skilsaw, followed by heavy thuds, as though severed limbs were falling to the floor. By late afternoon I could hear April tromping around upstairs, so I went up to see her.

"You know, I really had no idea about this," I told her. She was wearing the silk kimono with nothing under it, and in keeping with our new intimacy wasn't being too careful about its openings and closings. "Aside from the fact that I'm a little surprised – a lot surprised, actually – I don't have 2,000 bucks." She had led me back to the kitchen, where she was dishing out canned food for Mitochondrion, but when she heard that, she came over with a dreamy smile and touched my arm.

"Well, let's not worry about that right now," she said. "I'm sure the money will work itself out somehow. The main thing is, how are you feeling? Was it OK? Did you enjoy yourself?"

"I guess so. I don't know. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it. How the hell did you get into this?"

"Are you shocked?" she said, returning to the catfood can. Mitochondrion was parading back and forth on stiff legs, wheeling impatiently at the limit of each excursion. She spooned food onto his dish and expertly scraped the inside of the can. "Sometimes I'm a little surprised myself. It doesn't seem quite real. But the money's good, the hours aren't very long, and the way we've got it set up, I only meet nice people, very well behaved."

"We?" I said.

"Well, Arthur. You know. He's my manager. I'm supposed to be available worldwide. It can be a pretty complicated booking problem, especially with all these security restrictions. Although so far I've only been to Sacramento. It takes time to build up a clientele, and we only started a couple of months ago."

I suppose being a client was better than being a John, but I wasn't too happy with the designation. I wondered how many clients there had been, but it didn't seem quite polite to ask. April put the food down on the floor and watched the cat attack it. He was a huge beast, built like a cement block with a tail, and he made loud smacking noises as he ate. "I do have a little trouble thinking of myself as a call girl." She giggled. "I guess I'll get used to it." She turned and smiled at me again. I was struggling with cognitive dissonance. Mingling in my head with last night's scene on the candlelit platform bed was still this image of her sitting and knitting on our living room floor.

She'd had a good job, or at least a decent one, I suggested. How had she gotten into this sideline? She laughed, thinking about her high swivel chair behind the bank counter I suppose, and probably feeling a little cognitive dissonance herself.

"It really wasn't enough money," she said, leading me back into the living room with swinging hips. She sat down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her. She explained about her once-rich parents in Winnetka, Illinois, ruined by some stock market belch or other. It was her fancy upbringing, she thought, sighing. She still had a taste for nice things, and the bank job just wasn't enough. She'd started by moonlighting a little bit here and there, in the fine old American workaholic tradition. It was amazing what you could pick up even in the bank, just by dressing a certain way. And she'd discovered that some men were prepared to pay absurd amounts of money for sex. She'd built up a little network. The bank job had begun to seem less and less relevant; in fact, it was getting in the way, so she dropped it.

Before that happened, though, there had been Arthur, her supervisor, rocking along behind the row of customer service representatives like a plump merchant ship. He had chatted her up, somehow divined her situation, and offered his services as business manager. For reasons of efficiency he had moved into her apartment. He knew how to exploit the opportunities presented by the new technology, and it was he who had set up the website, taken the photos, and posted them. April was in awe of Arthur, his Web savvy and his business acumen. He had some other things going besides the bank and his partnership with her, she let me know. He handled all the scheduling, leaving her free to apply herself to the work.

"It's more tiring than you'd think," she said. "It's tough playing a role so much of the time. It takes a lot out of you. That's why it was actually very restful to have you up here last night. I didn't have to be 'Sunflower'." I didn't bother to remind her that "April" would never have bothered to lure a man old enough to be her grandfather into her bed. But I was still having trouble dealing with her matter-of-factness. She seemed to be treating the whole thing as just another career move, without examining the practical aspects, the long-term outlook.

"What about health coverage and long-term care insurance, and all that?" I asked. Didn't she know that nearly 75% of all small businesses fail within a year?

"Arthur takes care of all that," she replied, waving a hand. "We've got some kind of insurance." She leaned back. "I kind of like it," she went on. "I'm meeting a lot of men, and they've all been very nice. So far. I like their vulnerability in that situation. Even though they all want you to think they're such studs. You'd be surprised how many problems there are. But I shouldn't be giving you all this . . . business talk," she said, sitting up straight again and looking deep into my eyes. "Are you really all right with it? I hope you don't think it means I was just faking, or I didn't have a good time last night. You're pretty amazing for a guy your age, you know."

"Right," I said.

"Ohhhh, you're kind of hurt, aren't you? You see what I mean?" She put her arms around me and pulled my head down against her.

"It's really 2,000 bucks?" I said into her clavicle. "I only stayed a couple of hours. And I fixed the toilet."

"Well you didn't have to leave so early," she protested. "I don't do hourly. But don't you think it was worth it?" It was her turn to be a little hurt. She was probably still insecure about her professional credentials.

"Oh come on, April. It would have been worth anything, you know, bald old fart and all that. But I really don't have that kind of money. I'm on a fixed income." I nuzzled her a little bit, to express my gratitude and regret.

"Don't worry, baby. You and Arthur can work that out. You could do installments or something. And maybe there could be a discount, since we were here instead of in the real apartment with the nice furniture and everything. Although you have to admit this is very convenient." April really was a nice woman, with genuine charitable impulses. She pulled my head tighter against her chest, consolingly. That's how I eventually ended up owing another 2,000 bucks. She said it was just between us, but Arthur didn't agree.

### Chapter 12

While I was slinking back down the stairs after my second encounter with April, I ran into Julia, the night nurse from the apartment below me, who was coming up to ask me a favor. With her was dog Raton. He was a detestable little creature, with the general size and shape of a cheap footstool, patchy hair, a voice like marbles bouncing on glass, and a tail that was no better than it should have been. Julia herself was quite presentable – a well-upholstered, fast-talking immigrant from the East Coast. Her eyes went well with her nurse's greens. Unfortunately, the favor she wanted to ask me was to walk Raton that night before I went to bed. She had to take a double shift, and she was afraid he'd destroy the apartment if she left him alone there for 16 hours. Not to mention the strain on his bladder and the guilt he would feel if hydraulic pressure finally got the better of him. Once we'd actually exchanged a few words I found Julia quite appealing, but I was anxious not to form any kind of relationship with Raton. On the other hand, there were neighborly good feelings to consider, and plus I was still humid and shamefaced from April's pricey embrace, and wanted to keep the conversation short. So I quickly caved in, accepted Julia's key, and fled before she could get too deeply into her complaints about the noise level from Mr. Clabber's refurbishing project. What to me were distant and mildly annoying rumbles and screeches were coming from only a few feet below her and driving her crazy. In addition to which, she worked at night and had to sleep during the day, when the workmen were at their exercise. I didn't want to listen to her laments, the green eyes not withstanding. I had enough problems of my own.

Other than the Raton walk – which was reasonably successful, involving only one hysterical attack on a bemused Rottweiler – I kept a very low profile for the next few days, hoping Arthur might realize I had no cash and just forget about the whole thing. I knew it was a forlorn hope, though, and there were times while I was waiting for him to show up – while I was dusting the door lintels, for example, or lying in bed in the pre-sunrise gray, awake but not looking forward to the sound of the orange juice splashing into the glass – that, taking stock of my whole situation, I longed for the relative simplicity of a terminal disease, which I felt would not only relieve me of the necessity of any action but would also absolve me of all blame. Or at least that people, if there were any people still around who cared enough to blame me for anything, would put it all on the back burner in deference to my pitiable condition. Advancing age, loss of wife, inability to finish even a basic scarf, and of course the looming settling of accounts with Arthur – all inspired nothing but a kind of weariness in me. Together they seemed to be organizing themselves into a lazy vortex with its narrow, dancing tail pointing inexorably down into the toilet bowl of life. Some kind of final heroic battle seemed preferable: a nice, clean cancer or a wasting disease that would leave my mind clear to make wise and stoic pronouncements to the friends (I might still have time to make some) gathered sadly around my bedside, at home of course, no hospitals with their bedpans, tubes feeding into bruised wrists, or raving roommates.

It was a good thing that I had only a couple of days to wallow in those fantasies – who knows where they might have led. But it was Leilah, not Arthur, who broke them up by knocking on the door, or rather using her key to open it without even warning me that she was coming. Luckily, she didn't find me lying in bed staring at the ceiling in the middle of the afternoon, as she might well have. Instead, feeling that I was not quite ready to pull the musty blanket of nihilism over my head, I had roused myself to wash the bathtub, so I was down on my knees in the bathroom, scrubbing away at a particularly stubborn hummock of mildew, when she walked in.

"What the hell happened to this place?" she said from the doorway behind me. For some reason I wasn't surprised to hear her voice. I rinsed the cleanser off the sponge and my hands without turning around, then stood up to face her in a pungent cloud of chlorine. Unfortunately, she looked great: very tanned and fit and attractive, despite the shapeless jeans and faded flannel shirt. Looking at this person, recently my life's companion, glowing with physical health, smiling a little pityingly, and completely lost to me, I was instantly seized with a spasm of jealousy and hopeless misery, as if no time at all had passed since she had left. I was conscious of how pale and puffy I must look in contrast to her, and to the birdman's wiry, vegan physique. I was also humiliated. She looked like a person with plans, places to go, a future; meanwhile, her expression made it quite clear that she had more or less expected to find me washing the bathtub or something even more ignominious, as if that was all I had to do with my life. Which wasn't far from the truth.

"Hello," I said, drying my hands and advancing to fill the doorway, so that she had to back out toward the living room. "What brings you back to the city? You look like you've been birding your ass off. I hope you're using sunblock."

She waved her hand. "I just came back to get a few things. We've pretty much been living in the truck all summer, so I haven't needed a lot. But now it's almost time to start preparing for the social season in Bridgeport, California." She laughed, a little uncomfortably I thought.

"Is that where he lives?"

"He has a little house there, up in the hills. Propane heat, solar electricity. He teaches all summer and then works on his books in the winter." I was trying to imagine Leilah skidding along the windy streets of Bridgeport, where snow would be banked up along both sides of the main drag and all the tourist shops would be closed for the winter.

"They have opera up there?" I asked.

"Very funny. It's a tradeoff. Life is tradeoffs." Implying that she was happy with this particular exchange.

"And what will _you_ be doing all winter, while he works on his books?"

"Lots of things. I'll be helping him with the proofreading, page layout, that kind of thing. Plus reading. Taking long walks. Cross-country skiing. It's quite beautiful up there. Knitting. That's one of the things I need to pick up – my knitting stuff."

"All of it?" I asked. "Did you rent a truck?"

"No, I just need needles and patterns, plus a lot of yarn. Bridgeport has a yarn store, but there's some special stuff I want to start with."

"I've been knitting. I got into it after you left. I've been hanging out with your group a little bit, too." That brought up thoughts of April and Arthur, and I had to restrain myself from blurting out the whole sordid tale to her. She'd been my only real confidant for 25 years, after all. But I'd have been embarrassed to confess that I'd already betrayed her, even though she was living in sin with the birdman and might even have been relieved to hear of my escapade. I couldn't bear to take the chance of sinking any lower in her esteem, if that was possible. She was making a shiny new life for herself, and all I'd been able to accomplish since she'd left was to get myself rolled on by the dark underbelly of this five-unit apartment building.

She wanted, or pretended to want, to see The Scarf, and tried to be encouraging, but for me it was just another humiliation, with its wavering edges and stitches all different sizes and tensions. I couldn't tell her, of course, that I was only doing it in order to have some social context, no matter how tenuous. Probably I didn't have to tell her. At least showing it to her occupied a few minutes, but we eventually had to get around to the subject of the clothes and everything else she'd left behind.

"You're kidding," she said at first. And later, after she'd stomped around the apartment opening closet doors and slamming them again, "You asshole! I can't believe it!"

"You left, for chrissake," I yelled at her. "I had no reason to think you were ever coming back. I got tired of looking at the fucking mess around here! Most of that shit you'd never have worn again anyway, so I'd still have had to get rid of it. Get some new clothes! How much does a pair of jeans cost? Most of what you had wasn't going to go over in Bridgeport, anyway."

"God DAMN it! What were you thinking about? What right did you have to just throw out all my things? That's my _property_. Couldn't you have waited a little bit? Were you really in such a hurry to eliminate me from your life?"

That, I thought, was unfair. "YOU eliminated yourself from my life," I told her. "As far as I was concerned, I was just cleaning up the wreckage."

"You've been wanting to do that for 25 years," she said. "And then you wait to do it behind my back. That's so YOU, Randall!" She put her hands on her hips and glared at me. "Are you doing _anything_ with your life?" she asked, almost softly.

"Not much," I admitted, lowering my voice too. "A few things. Knitting. Victor Carogna has been teaching me to shoot a handgun, so I've been doing a little of that." That and screwing your friend and knitting companion April.

"Victor?" She seemed surprised, and a little taken aback, to hear his name. "Why would you want to do that? You've never had any interest in guns. And you and Victor . . . it's an odd couple."

"It's not like we're great friends or anything. He's just taken me in hand. He's trying to pump up my male hormones. But I'm actually good at it, so why not?"

She shook her head and changed the subject. "I think you owe me a few thousand bucks."

"You and everyone else," I told her.

"What does that mean?"

"I don't HAVE any money! Why does everyone seem to have so much trouble understanding that? I'm retired, I took a big hit on my income. I have to pay the whole rent with you gone. I may have to move, in fact." Thinking that it might be a good idea at this point anyway. Move to Barrow, Alaska or anywhere beyond the likely reach of Arthur, and where my superannuated balls couldn't get me in any more trouble.

"Well, since you threw away all my stuff, you certainly don't need all this room. You _should_ move. Look at this place." Waving her arms at the bare walls and empty shafts of sunlight. "It looks like you _did_ move, frankly. It's a blank. Doesn't it depress you?"

She was right, and it did depress me. I could only shrug. "I know it's not really my place to be giving you advice," she went on, "but you've got to do something."

"You sound just like Victor Carogna," I told her. "That's how the handgun thing came up."

She ignored me. "You don't look good. You can't sit here knitting for the rest of your life. I know you don't even like knitting, and you obviously don't have any talent for it. Do you see anybody, besides the knitting group? They're not really your friends, you know. _Especially_ Victor Carogna. What happened to all your teacher friends?"

"All two of them, you mean? I don't see them too much. They're too busy, I guess."

"It's summer," she pointed out.

"Well, they're _going_ to be too busy. In the fall. What's the difference? Look, I was having enough trouble adapting to retirement. I kind of lost my identity, you know, and I haven't had time to build up a new one, or at least find out what the old one was, underneath the teacher veneer. And then _you_ took off. What do you think that did to the adjustment process? You've got your ready-made new thing going, but what do I have? I'm working on a few things, but it takes time. Nobody's dropping a new life in _my_ lap."

She stared at me, with her tan forearms crossed under her breasts that I couldn't believe were no longer mine. "I'll give you my cell phone number. His house doesn't have a phone. You probably wouldn't call me there anyway. Please call me when you've figured out what you're going to do with yourself. Or if you just need to talk. I don't like to see you kicking around this antiseptic environment." I wanted to think she was genuinely concerned, but I knew it was just a twinge of guilt, seeing me at loose ends. She pecked me on the cheek, and I managed not to respond.

"How's the cat doing," I asked her instead.

That set her back a bit. "I don't know," she admitted. "She got out of the tent one night out there in the Jeffrey pines at Mono Lake and didn't come back. I'm hoping she's just running wild out there, living off fieldmice."

"You mean the coyotes got her," I said, trying to be offhand. Well, the cat had been a sort of feline version of Raton. But I saw a big symbolic component there anyway.

"You owe me money, god damn it," she said as she went out the door, carrying several shopping bags filled with yarn. "I'm never going to be able to replace all those clothes. And what about all my papers? And my postcard collection?" But she wasn't really too hot about the whole thing any more. I think she was beginning to realize I'd done her a big favor.

### Chapter 13

Arthur did finally knock on my door a couple of days later. Looking out through the little peephole thing, all I could see was a broad expanse of business suit. I let him in.

"So, Rondelle," he said, dropping his vast bulk onto the couch. I couldn't tell whether it was a deliberate mispronunciation or a lame attempt at camaraderie. "How's retirement treating you?"

I had never really looked at Arthur before. We'd passed in the hallway or on the stairs a few times, but only once had I actually had a conversation with him. April had left a message on our machine, begging us to feed Mitochondrion for a few days, since she had to be out of town unexpectedly. Well, I guess now I knew what that had been about. I'd been kind of bent out of shape because when I went up there I found the cat box brimming with Mitochondrion's litter-encrusted turds, like a bowl of those little crunchy toffee logs, plus there was only enough food in the bag for a couple of days. I was annoyed at April's irresponsibility. She hadn't even told us when she was coming back. So I bought more food, sulkily ignored the turds, and kept going up there to feed poor Mitochondrion, who had taken to leaping up on me like a manic little terrier and digging his claws into my arm when he sensed it was time for me to leave. He was a very sociable feline, with an authoritative presence, and he was lonely.

Anyway, the last time I let myself into the apartment to feed him, I'd found Arthur there, half bathed in the golden light of a table lamp, like a gray 21st -century Vermeer. He was working at the desk that was, along with an aging leather couch, the only furniture in the living room. Doing the books, I suppose. At the time I had noted only that he wasn't the sort of physical specimen I would have picked out as a boyfriend for April. He made more sense as a business manager, although he didn't exactly fit the mold of procurer, either. We'd exchanged a few pleasantries, oohed and ahhed over Mitochondrion for a minute, and then I'd left.

But now he had developed a certain significance in my life, so I examined him closely as he sat quietly on my couch, heavy hands on his knees. The other P-word totally didn't fit – I couldn't have dreamed of applying it to him. He was round, middle-aged, grizzled of hair and beard, bespectacled, with a physical and mental gravity that seemed profound and unshakeable. I interpreted his supernatural calm as a sign of unusual intellectual acuity. The only colorful note, his necktie, featured a collection of smiley faces, not all smiling, on a shimmering black background. He looked at me, apparently waiting to hear about retirement.

"Oh, it's . . . fine, I guess," I told him. "I don't know that I've quite figured out what it's all about, this not working thing. But I'm getting there. I have my little projects."

He nodded. "I hear you're quite the knitter."

I demurred, citing my novice status. "It's a lot harder than you might think," I added. Retired, and knitting. I felt it was necessary to keep the crumbs of my manhood swept into as high a pile as possible.

He continued to stare at me, and finally nodded again. "Anything else good?" he asked. What was I going to say? I've been having sex with your girlfriend. Just a couple of times. Nothing too serious.

He took care of that problem for me. "April tells me you and she had a bit of a party the other night."

I didn't deny it.

"How was it? Meet your standards?"

"It was pretty standard, yes," I said. Which was true, as I've already mentioned, despite April's professionalism. That didn't sound properly enthusiastic, I suppose, but I wasn't going to start trying to explain to him the distinction I'd rediscovered while I was plugging his . . . employee? Business partner? I was sure that wasn't the point anyway. His expression became slightly pained, though still not at all perturbed.

"Not satisfied?" he said. "We haven't had any complaints heretofore. Quite the contrary, in fact."

"Oh no, I was!" I tried to think how to say it. "I just didn't think it was going to be a. . . business meeting." I felt that I was gesturing too much.

"What _were_ you thinking?" he asked. I had to admire the way he stepped lightly over the boundary of irony without forcing me to acknowledge it.

"The thing is, if I'd known. . ." I was still gesturing. "I don't have that kind of money. Or anything like it."

"You saw the website," he pointed out.

"Yes, but only afterwards."

"You went up there again the next day."

"I had to talk to her, for god's sake! I didn't know what was going on."

"You did more than talk, I heard."

"Well, that wasn't my intention. Anyway, she said that was just between the two of us."

"That's a decision that would have to be jointly made," he said. "She has a business partner." He sighed and leaned back, folding his heavy hands in his lap and gazing sadly at them. "So it seems that you're currently into us for 4,000 dollars," he said. I just looked at him, waiting. "How much _do_ you have? Liquid, I mean."

I was thinking fast, trying to decide what to tell him. "I have a couple of thousand in the bank," I said, "but that's it. My entire savings. Plus I get about 1,500 a month. Before taxes." The size of the pension check suddenly seemed pathetic to me. It was embarrassing to say the number out loud. "That's about three months of income we're talking about. I would never have paid three months of my income to get laid, for god's sake. If I'd known."

"You did get laid," he observed. His voice had not risen in response to my agitation. "By a professional. And on the second occasion you did know. Do you generally expect to receive services without paying for them, Rondelle?"

"I didn't know they were services!" I almost screamed. It sounded even more pathetic than the 1,500 dollars.

"You thought that April was romantically interested in you." That absurdity hung in the air while he sat silently for a time, thinking. Finally he said, "A transaction has taken place. There has to be a payment. The kind of business I'm in, it would be disastrous to let somebody use our services without paying. Regardless of any special circumstances, which I don't really think these are. The fact is, Rondelle, you got your ashes rather nicely hauled, and now you seem to be looking for some kind of compassionate exception. Or maybe the senior discount. But it can't work that way. You're a client like any other client. If anything, April should get combat pay for handling your account. An old-age pensioner. And word will get around if I let you off the hook."

I thought it best to ignore his sarcasm. "It's not like I'm going to tell anybody," I said. "Even if April had been . . . even if it had been what I thought it was, I wouldn't be telling anyone. And I'm certainly not going to go around bragging about visiting a prostitute." I didn't like to use the word with regard to April, but he was pushing me a little harder than I liked.

"Maybe not," he said, "but these things have a way of getting around. _I_ might even find it necessary to mention it here and there. I'm not sure how that would go over. You being a respectably retired teacher, presumably still a role model for our nation's youth. It might raise a few eyebrows among your friends. And affect your marketability as a substitute teacher."

I thought about the knitting group, who were all I had for friends these days. Victor Carogna's eyebrows would certainly be elevated by the news, but he'd be cheering me on, I was sure. As for the women: "You'd be informing her friends that she's a call girl. Do you really want to subject April to that?" Arthur was silent again, looking at me thoughtfully.

"I think we need to reach some compromise here," I said, pushing what I felt was my advantage. "Obviously I owe you something, but frankly, I don't really see how you can enforce this." I didn't add that he couldn't very well go to the cops, after all. I didn't really want to go to the cops myself, in case he had ideas of making something unpleasant happen to me, the way it did on TV; but that would undoubtedly go worse for him than for me, so he probably wouldn't do it. I felt I was playing my hand masterfully. "Look, I think I'm partly in the wrong here. Certainly the second time was. . . I shouldn't have done that, and I should probably pay for it. Although 2,000 seems like a lot. I could probably afford about 50 a month."

"Fifty a month," he said. "That's 40 months for 2,000 dollars. Eighty months for the full amount, which is really what you should pay. Almost seven years. Not to mention there'd have to be interest. I don't know that we want to wait that long to discharge the debt. It's a long time. Things could happen. To us – to any of us – and to the business. We're not General Motors, you know." He paused. "I've noticed you use a bike for transportation quite a lot. It's a dangerous way to get around the city. Bikers are always getting flattened by buses, or just hitting bad spots in the pavement and breaking a lot of bones. You could even have an accident just walking. Crossing the street. There are some pretty nasty intersections in this neighborhood. Then what happens to my money? It wouldn't be good business practice." He stroked his graying beard. "Possibly we need to find another way. Although I'm not enjoying the feeling of being taken advantage of, Rondelle."

"It's Randall," I said, trying to maintain my momentum. But what he'd said about the bike had suggested unpleasant possibilities I hadn't thought of.

"Randall." He hoisted himself off the couch. "Randall. I'll think about this and you think about it. Hopefully we can find a satisfactory arrangement that will cause a minimum of pain for all concerned." I stood at the door and watched him start wearily up the stairs. "I think you should steer clear of April," he added, without looking back. "Her artistic instincts have a way of getting the better of her judgment."

### Chapter 14

I took a lot of long walks the next couple of days, over the hills and dales of San Francisco, examining my new status. I discovered during my teaching years that walking is a marvelous way to free up the brain. The buildings, the traffic, the people glide by effortlessly like the banks of a slow river on which you drift. Or you climb a hill and you can't think about much besides the laboring of your lungs; you go down the hill and there's the stress and slight pain in your knee joints to contemplate; you cross the boundaries between sunlight and shade, half-noticing the sudden temperature changes of San Francisco. And while this is happening, ideas and connections appear in your head, as if from nowhere, and drift along with you, growing and evolving as you walk.

I wasn't bored or lonely any more; that was the most obvious thing. Arthur was like a new friend in my life, although he was a friend who might be contemplating breaking my legs. That was an interesting aspect of the relationship, not at all boring. Sex had given me problems before; in fact, as I shuffled through the dog-eared deck of my history it seemed to me that sex had nearly always had a negative effect on my productivity. But now my doddering testes had really dragged me into unknown waters, deep waters, I thought dramatically. And those blind organs were unrepentant! There had been that temporary dropoff after the encounters with April, but that was to be expected. It's only right after orgasm that you can see clearly what a drug trip sex is, and how the hormones erect a whole phony but totally convincing enchanted forest in your mind – a thousand native perfumes in the air, fluttering butterflies, warm sunlight filtering through the branches down to the soft, mossy earth where you lie, embracing the love of your life, and it's all hurrying you along to the Event that's finally going to resolve all your questions and doubts about the meaning of existence.

The Event, however, generally turns out to be a clearcut. In fact, how I knew things were going to be different with Leilah was that with her there would still be a few big trees standing afterwards and even a couple of butterflies. No point in talking about that, however. But since Arthur's visit I'd run into April in the hall a couple of times. She'd been as friendly as ever; and even though the clearcut had already happened twice with her, and what her smile now brought to mind was mainly the image of Arthur like a fallen boulder on my couch and the threat of imminent bodily injury, the slope of her breasts under the chaste white blouse immediately produced the usual tingle. I suppose it was even enhanced by my carnal experience with her, coupled with Arthur's prohibition.

Another topic that came up during my walks, of course, was the question of what it might feel like to get the shit beaten out of me or, more ambiguously, to be knocked off my bike by, say, a black Mercedes and then run over by a UPS truck. I've never had a high tolerance for pain, although I held my own reasonably well in the usual boyhood rough and tumble, played contact sports and all that. But I can still remember the first, and last, time I tackled somebody who was running full speed, head on. And although I had a few fights with the other kids, I never enjoyed it. That may have had less to do with the physical pain involved than with my instinctive distaste for conflict. I've always had what may be an excessive solicitude for the integrity of my skinny body. Along with the head-on tackle, I seem to remember every serious breech of its boundaries: the jacknife closing unexpectedly on my thumb, the edge of sheet metal slicing up through the flesh of my little finger during shop class in middle school, the front tooth broken off in the dish room at my college cafeteria, blood dripping down in front of my eyes from a tricycle accident when I was about 4, for god's sake. I cried bitterly at age 12 when I found out I had to have my bicuspids pulled for braces. I can't remember the actual pain from any of these events. No, it was always the damage to, or removal of, part of my body that bothered me. Reading descriptions of 15th-century Florentines getting flayed or drawn and quartered, the idea of the pain is abstract. What fascinates and horrifies me is the idea of looking down to watch some civil servant grab the end of your guts and haul them out onto the cobblestones, hand over hand. What would you be thinking at that moment?

Given this history, and that Arthur was threatening, however discreetly, to rearrange my limbs, I should have been more upset. And I certainly wasn't enjoying the idea. But running against that fear was this weird kind of fuck-all mood, a sort of bring-it-on attitude. There were even thoughts of sneaking upstairs to have another go at April; as if I wanted to really push things, to see how bad they could get. The body, after all, was beginning to disintegrate on its own, without any help from Arthur or anyone else: skin slackening, a bulge appearing around my waist, presbyopia, teeth lengthening and the gaps between them growing so that they trapped every maddening little broccoli floret, eskers of varicose vein meandering down my calves, toenails yellowing and corkscrewing, liver marks on my hands, massive actinic damage on my scalp and the tops of my ears, gray chest hair, gray pubic hair, pecs starting to droop, muscles melting away no matter how many pushups I did, arthritic twinges in my hands and feet, maddeningly erratic prostate, rampaging memory loss, and eyebrow hairs that Rapunzel would have found very useful. What, then, did I have to fear from Arthur's ministrations, or rather those of his angels? Of course it was impossible to imagine Arthur himself engaging in any strong-arm tactics.

The element of unreality in all of this was that I'd never had a serious injury or medical procedure in all my life, and took massive doses of ibuprofen at the first hint of a headache. The worst pain I'd ever felt had been a couple of sprained ankles. I knew that Arthur's associates could think up something for me that would feel worse than a sprained ankle, and I knew that getting hit by a black Mercedes would create a level of discomfort well beyond anything in my previous experience, but I pretended not to know it. As I stomped over the hills of SF I was enjoying thinking of myself as a man who didn't give a shit: a lonely, decaying, nihilistic bomb, finally ready, at the end of a fat and comfortable middle-class existence, to test the outer limits of sensation.

### Chapter 15

A couple of days after Arthur's visit my bike was gone from its spot in the hallway when I headed out to Framboise at a leisurely 9 in the morning. Framboise is the bakery a few blocks from my apartment where all the hip 20- and 30-somethings of San Francisco congregate every morning to have their coffee and croissant or sticky bun. It's an extremely popular and busy place, and as an antidote to loneliness I'd gotten in the habit of going over there myself some mornings for a latte and therapeutic disapproval of everybody who was there. Weekdays only. On weekends I don't even bother trying to go: I'd have to wait in line for half an hour and then do takeout, because there's never a place to sit. It's a small store with only a few tables inside, room for maybe 35 people if they don't mind sitting across from a stranger, and a dozen or so more outside, although the outside tables aren't very appealing because of the cold San Francisco mornings, the attentive pigeons, and the often too-interesting street activity. But even on a Tuesday, for example, you're likely to find every spot inside filled with svelte young mothers, strollers parked next to their chairs and jamming the aisles; and with young, hot-eyed, smooth-skinned guys, longish hair, sitting cross-legged at an angle with Framboise's huge coffee cups and mountainous, crumbly pastries in front of them and the _New York Times_ open to the international section, and looking around to see who's there that's cute. The staff meanwhile circulate through all this with people's orders: all busty young women with tattoos winking from the tanned space between their tight stretchy pastel tops and the apron strings tied just above jeans slung low on their butts.

I've lost several bikes in San Francisco during the 20 years I've been riding around the city. One, my favorite, with the dinosaur horn, disappeared from the rack in front of the main branch of the public library; another one was taken away from me on the street early one morning by two genial thugs; a third was lifted from the hallway of the apartment building by, I assume, one of the acquaintances of the meth dealer who that very evening was being evicted for nonpayment of rent. After that I began chaining the bike in the hallway, a habit that I'd neglected to change once Leilah left and there was plenty of room inside for the bike. I was therefore annoyed but not very surprised to see that it was gone. What _was_ surprising was to find it on the sidewalk right in front of the house, twisted and mangled into the kind of artistic sculpture that's supposed to make a statement about the incivility of modern life, its handlebars bent back in agony almost to the crossbar, like the neck of one of those archaeopteryx fossils you see on the Discovery Channel. It appeared to have been run over, perhaps several times, by a heavy vehicle, such as a moving van or a garbage truck. This discovery gave me a lot to think about at Framboise, beyond my usual sociological speculations.

Returning from the laundromat that evening I ran into Arthur in the hallway, as though by prearrangement. I was rolling my big laundry basket on a baggage cart; he was carrying his leather briefcase as usual.

"I've had some thoughts," he said in his quiet, rumbling voice, maintaining the physical stillness that was partly a product of his enormous mass and partly of his orderly mental processes. I admitted that I'd had some thoughts, too, as he held the door for me. "Let's talk," he said, motioning toward the stairs with his head. I deposited the laundry cart outside my door and followed him up the stairs, contemplating the laborious alternation of his hips under the gray suit jacket, as I had on other occasions observed April's more evocative rolling motion.

A half hour later I went back down the stairs and collected the laundry that was waiting patiently outside my door. I could hear Arthur's heavy tread in the apartment above as he busied himself in the kitchen, while I sorted my socks and underwear and mulled over what I'd just heard. The one thing he'd said that really stuck in my mind had come at the end of the conversation: "I know you don't think 'Tony Soprano' when you look at me, although I suppose we've got the same midsection. However, some of my business associates are more emotional than I am. I'm restraining them as far as possible." We were both thinking of the mutilated carcass of my bicycle, but nobody was saying anything about it.

After putting away the laundry I went on line again and looked at April's website. There she was all right, or at least I was pretty sure it was her. The face of the woman in the picture had been Photoshopped into a blur, and I had to admit that the rest of her body was sort of generically attractive, like the sexual experience itself. I also noticed that they'd lowered the price to only a thousand a night, two thousand for a weekend. Did that mean there weren't enough buyers at the higher price? The price change made the whole thing seem more tentative and embarrassing, almost touching, hard to take seriously. They really don't belong in that world, I was thinking. But there was the bike, and Arthur's insane proposal. And there on my computer screen April's round body, which still, stupidly, created some kind of preamble in my Joe Boxer shorts. It occurred to me that I might be able to afford it at the new prices.

Managing to collect my thoughts and recap my meeting with Arthur, I was able to piece together the following main points:

•Arthur was engaged in at least one other business beyond his partnership with April;

•He had recently taken shipment of some merchandise, some unspecified, expensive merchandise, from none other than our mutual friend, the ex-cop Victor Carogna;

•Arthur had been counting on the revenues from his partnership with April to pay off Victor Carogna;

•Because of my shiftlessness and that of a couple of other deadbeats who had spent time celebrating with April without first examining the state of their checkbooks, Arthur now found himself temporarily embarrassed in terms of cash flow;

•Regrettably, Victor Carogna (we know how impatient he can be) was not disposed to wait very long for his money, citing the ballooning medical expenses attendant to his wife's medical treatments;

•Some of Victor Carogna's business associates (why did everyone except me have these useful friends?) were apparently even more mercurial than Arthur's (the ones who had left me the bicycle message, although that was of course never mentioned); Arthur himself and, god forbid, even April had been threatened by them with bodily harm;

•Arthur had learned from April, who had picked it up at the knitting sessions, of my recently acquired facility with handguns;

•Arthur was proposing that I use my deadly new skills, which were of course well known to Victor Carogna, to persuade him to extend the payment deadline until the unspecified merchandise could be "moved" in accordance with Arthur's original plan;

•In exchange for these services, half my debt, let's say, would be cancelled, the remainder to be placed on an E-Z payment plan that wouldn't put undue strain on my pension check.

There were so many flaws in Arthur's proposal that I'd hardly known where to start. My initial impression of his razor intelligence was rapidly losing its edge on the stubble of his actual business practices. But there was still the mangling of the bike to consider, an operation which did not require much in the way of brains. I mentioned what to me seemed the most important difficulties.

"I don't have a gun," I told him. "I've been borrowing one of Victor Carogna's when we go to the shooting range. You're expecting him to lend me a gun so I can threaten him with it?" He sat like a gray-suited grizzly on the couch, with his hands on his knees, looking at me. Apparently that was exactly what he did expect.

I tried again. "Look, I can't threaten Victor Carogna, even if he doesn't mind lending me a gun to do it with. You've had business dealings with him; you know better than I do who he is. To me he's just a brilliant knitter with a past in law enforcement. But you say he's putting physical heat on you and even on poor April, who really doesn't have anything to do with your money-making schemes, or at least with your other ones. I may know how to shoot a gun, but Victor Carogna not only knows how, he's done it. At people. He's probably bumped off god knows how many perps and beaten the shit out of countless others. How am I going to scare him? Come on, Arthur. Look at me." Spreading my skinny arms.

"He's 70 years old. And you may have to do more than scare him to make your point," he said, without turning a hair.

It was my turn to stare at him. He seemed to be serious, although I noticed that his broad forehead above the thick glasses was glistening a bit. "Arthur." I finally said, getting a little angry. "This is not me. It's silly, can't you see that? I'm an innocent zhlub who's gotten stuck in the middle of this whole lowlife operation. No offense. I'm an asshole, and apparently I've let my dork get me into trouble, but I'm just not thug material. Look, I'll give you what money I have. I'll clean out my savings completely, but I'm not going to get any deeper into this than I already am."

He shook his head. "That's not really going to be enough. In any case, what you owe is at this point only a relatively small part of my shortfall. I need a more drastic intervention. I think you're the man for it."

"You're crazy," I said. "I'm a fucking school teacher, for christ's sake. Retired. The most violent thing I've ever done is refuse to give a kid the bathroom pass. Besides which, _you_ may be having problems with Victor Carogna, I don't know what his life is like outside the knitting group, but he's a friend of mine. Or sort of. I've met his wife. I've eaten her cookies, for god's sake."

"Is he a friend of yours?"

"As much as anybody, at this point."

"If he's a friend of yours, then you might be interested to hear that he's been eating your ex-wife's cookies, too."

"Wife," I said. "We're only separated. Anyway, she ran off with a birdwatcher. Victor?" The surprise and discomfort in my tone when I mentioned the name reminded me of a recent occasion when I had heard the same tone in someone else's voice.

"Why don't you ask the women in the knitting group? One or two of them might be honest enough to tell you the truth. Certainly April is well aware of what was going on."

I stared at him some more, speechless now. I was trying unsuccessfully to damp down an image of Victor Carogna's leathery face buried in Leilah's bosom, the waxy tips of his handlebar mustache tickling her nipples.

"I'll give you a day or two to think about it, but I don't have more than that," Arthur said. "You have to understand that you're at the bottom of a pecking order here. You're going to have to decide whether to step up, or to get pecked. I think you know what I mean."

I did know what he meant. But I was so busy trying to twist my world back into some recognizable shape that I couldn't be bothered to think about it just then.

### Chapter 16

When you were a kid, did you ever have a really nice coloring book, the kind with real pictures instead of happy-ass bunnies with human faces, the kind you sensed – maybe the first insight of this kind for 5-year-old you – was worth taking some pains with, choosing the colors with care and keeping them inside the lines as best a little kid can, really making it all look nice? And then one day you opened up the book to start picture No. 3, the one showing Saint George sticking his spear like a toilet plunger down the throat of the dragon with its scaly agonized coils, and found that someone had gone through the whole book, scrawling all over it with maybe two crayons, orange and green, not bothering with the lines, and even messing up the pictures you'd already finished?

I felt as though I were suddenly hearing Victor Carogna's name every few minutes, like an airport security announcement, and seeing his malicious crayon marks scrawled all over the outlines of my modest but previously well ordered life. Worse than my rage at the way he was wiping his feet on my meager existence, however, was a kind of deep mournfulness at the thought that I'd failed so completely with Leilah that she would flee into the arms of the likes of Victor Carogna, even if she'd ultimately left him behind for someone marginally more suitable.

My first impulse after the conversation with Arthur was to scurry back to my lonely cave and hide there, like Grendel nursing his empty shoulder socket, although the news about Victor Carogna and Leilah represented the removal of something other than an arm. Beresford the bird man was bad enough. But I felt that Beresford, beyond his ornithological expertise, was not in fact all that different from me. He had my reedy build and mousy hair (although more of it), the same deferential affect, unless the topic of birds came up, the same total lack of fashion sense, even the same rimless glasses. He also had crooked teeth, whereas mine are perfect. In Beresford, it seemed that Leilah had basically adopted a somewhat more accomplished version of myself – a man with four wheels instead of two, a 4Runner instead of a Trek 800 Singletrack, but still recognizably a member of the same species.

Getting involved "romantically" with Victor Carogna was, I thought, more like coupling with a demon. Victor Carogna, too, had rimless glasses, but his eyes glittered behind them like infernal sparklers. His hair, inappropriately thick for a 70-year-old, was of a blinding, glacial white, and the handlebar mustache had undoubtedly acquired its rich ivory stain in the practice of unspeakably lubricious rites. He had, superficially, the same wiry build, but, assuming you were able and willing to imagine Victor Carogna without clothes, you would certainly see the fibery greenish skin and sinews of some excessively fertile vegetative principle, along with a Beardsleyan sexual trunk. Not to mention the guns, the politics, the unfiltered cigarettes, the disdain for female pretensions of equality. Running off with Beresford was a statement of Leilah's not unreasonable faith that life owed her something more exciting than Randall Ducelis. Getting it on with Victor Carogna was, I felt, a rejection of our common humanity.

Naturally I spent quite a few of the hours that followed my meeting with Arthur trying to imagine the course of the seduction. I supposed it must have begun during one of the knitting sessions. Victor Carogna, with the diabolical insight that had led him straight to my own weaknesses, would have immediately recognized a restlessness that Leilah herself may have been unaware of. Something about the nervously acute angle at which she held the needles, or a subtle excess of tension in the yarn wrapped around her slim index finger; or maybe he read the very interference patterns woven by the particular colors she chose for her knitting. I wouldn't put it past him to possess senses beyond the normal five – the ability to see polarized ultraviolet light or something. She, in turn, would have felt the heat from those smoky pupils turned on her, perhaps without even knowing where the radiation came from, and shifted a little uncomfortably in her chair. He would have arranged to sit next to her, to stroke her front panels appreciatively, to help her finish the armhole that was giving her trouble. Then the little smiling conversations in the kitchen over the Levantine sandwiches. He would have started to arrive early, or stay a bit late, after everyone else had left. (Here I was reminded uncomfortably of April's methods with me.) I tried to remember whether I'd ever come home to find them alone, with their heads together, innocently cranking the wool winder. I'd made it easy for them, of course, by always rushing off as soon as the needles started clacking. One time or another the knitting session must have ended early, or they must have taken the chance that I'd come home late, and ended up molding lascivious shapes into our expensive viscoelastic mattress, the one major home investment Leilah and I had made together, other than the Taiwanese cookware. I had to resist the temptation to strip off the mattress cover and see if I could still discern, in that compliant surface, the faint shape of Victor Carogna's stringy body intertwined with her rounder, denser form. Although I could imagine the flirtation in great detail, I still found it impossible to imagine his body actually touching Leilah's familiar contours, let alone in intimate ways. She couldn't actually _like_ a person like that, right? So it must be that to be courted by someone with the unapologetic masculinity of Victor Carogna answered some mute and perhaps unacknowledged need to feel frilly, even in one of the brave products of the feminist revolution.

How many times had it happened? That son of a bitch! And there he'd sat, stitching an AK-47 into the sweater for his baby niece and telling me I should go out and get laid, asking me where my balls were. And the rest of the group – all Leilah's friends, sitting around knitting with faint smiles while Victor Carogna lectured me. His taunting was doubtless instrumental in alerting April to my status as a potential customer. Maybe he'd even suggested it to her directly, forecasting the financial benefits for his own shady business with Arthur. He was beginning to assume, in my mind, the outlines of a sardonic spider, with eight gleaming, all-seeing eyes behind eight rimless lenses, and sensitive furry pedipalps caressing the threads of all our lives – mine, Leilah's, Arthur's, even April's, ready to spring at our tiniest movements.

To add to my problems, Julia the night nurse knocked on my door the next afternoon, while I was trying to loosen up my thinking by washing the kitchen floor. This is a useful psychological trick that my mother taught me 50 years ago. Something about the rhythm of the mop, the intensity of the focus on those enigmatic little blobs that always seem to dot a kitchen floor, the warm water spreading and then being subsumed back into the sponge, carrying with it the taint of old food. . . Clarity would often arrive during the drying phase.

I looked out through the little peephole and saw only a blob of green, so I knew it couldn't be Arthur. Julia nodded approvingly at the sponge mop as she came in. Raton came trotting in right behind her, looking up out of the tops of his eyes without raising his head. After some brief salutations it quickly developed that Julia needed another favor. She was headed for London in a few days and had nobody to take care of Raton. She would have wanted to take him with her, but the Brits would quarantine him for god knows how long, he'd never flown before, etc. etc.

"He's a sweet dog, but he's a little neurotic, and he turns into an ax murderer if I try to board him. I know you're retired. I'm just wondering if you'd mind staying in my apartment with him for the week. Or at least spending a lot of time there. Since it's just downstairs. I mean, you could go out of course, but if you'd just be there part of the time. And sleep there. He gets particularly freaky at night."

Horrified, I tried to stall by asking her what was happening in London.

"I'm taking a design course at the Victoria and Albert Museum," she told me. "I'm already signed up and I've got the tickets and everything. I've been planning it for months. My usual dog sitter is a fugitive from justice." She laughed a little nervously. "They caught her trying to smuggle ferrets across the Nevada line, so now she's afraid to come back into the state. I'm leaving in a couple of days, and I don't know what to do."

The blue-green eyes really did look nice with the nurse's outfit, and I liked the laugh lines, but I had to nip this Raton thing in the bud.

"I don't mind walking him occasionally, but I'm not really a dog person," I said.

"Oh, I know, I'm not either. I wouldn't even _have_ a dog, except a friend of mine, this retired cop, had to get rid of him because his wife is sick, and I couldn't say no, he's just such a sweetheart."

"The dog or the cop?" I asked, dreading the answer.

"Well both, actually. But he was going to have to send Raton to the pound. I just couldn't stand the thought of them putting him down."

"I'm allergic to dogs," I lied.

"So am I," she said. "It wears off after a while."

"But he's _your_ dog!"

"I know, that's my problem. That's why I need somebody to take care of him for that week I'm gone."

The conversation was not, as I had intended, leading away from the dog. She scorched me with one more beseeching look, and I caved.

"Oh, thank you SO much! It'll be really easy, and I know you'll end up loving him. I'll return the favor sometime." There was no point in reminding her that I didn't have any animals for her to take care of. She left hurriedly, promising to give me a complete set of instructions and a supply of Benadryl for the week.

### Chapter 17

My mood was briefly lifted by the exchange with Julia, for various reasons, but once the glow of virtue faded, my anxiety and depression returned, nourished at least partly by the realization that Victor Carogna had apparently now penetrated my life from yet another direction, in the form of a yapping little rodent. And god knows what his relationship with Julia had been. I finished the kitchen floor without feeling any of the expected therapeutic effects kick in, so I decided to go out for a nice long walk.

I don't see myself as a bitter person. But there are days when the fog is in, the typical San Francisco summer pattern, and taking my bagel walk or whatever I'm up to just to get out of the apartment and away from the sound of splashing orange juice, I notice how really ugly this city can be, and I can get pretty bloody-minded. Those are the days – they can happen in any major US city – when practically everyone you meet on the street seems to be broken or damaged. Some are obvious cases, like the homeless in the doorways with the trickles of pee that lead back to their rag nests, and the emaciated, faded, and who-knows-how-old ladies hunched over their cigarettes and hacking on every street corner. But there are lots of other people out there with something indefinable about them that suggests their lives are in more disarray than your basic Monday morning should imply. Something about their clothes or their expression makes you give them a wide berth. And around and through and over them all the supposedly respectable bourgeois is driving his dumptruck-sized SUV like a getaway car, making 2-wheel cowboy left turns through the rush hour intersections and blowing his horn way too long at anyone who gets in his way, screaming out the window at the cowering pedestrians and the hacking old ladies without even bothering to take the cell phone away from his potty mouth, and running over pigeons (most of which seem to have one foot missing or deformed) that pop like exploding paper bags under his superfat radial tires. And the sky is gray and dirty, and the buildings are gray and dirty, and the streets are piled and stained with all the leavings of the uncivil human race: dried vomit in front of the bars; pizza crusts and unmatched sneakers and broken CD players where someone has camped for the night; the flattened cups and sticky fossilized ponds left behind by hoodwinked puppet consumers who found they couldn't finish that two-liter Slurpee after all; the constellation of black spots (gum? spit? blood?) on the sidewalks where the loiterers are wont to gather to watch the street go by; and everywhere the imprint of the human sole molded in rich chocolatey dogshit.

I'm just trying to lay the groundwork for what came next in my new life; the point being that I'm an unlikely candidate for homicidal maniac, and yet there are days when it's probably a good thing that I don't keep a gun in the house. The news about Leilah and Victor Carogna arrived on exactly one of those gray, ugly days. Or maybe it became that kind of day when I received the news. Was it enough to make me reach for my gun, or rather for _his_ gun?

That's what I was trying to decide during the walk that was supposed to soothe my racing pulse and create perspective. But there were those black spots all over the sidewalks, everywhere I went. Nor was my mood improved by finding my crushed bike out in front of the house again. After assessing the original damage, I had properly consigned it to the recycling bin; and yet, here it was again. Now it seemed to have another twist or two in the frame, and some brown stains on the seat that looked like blood. It was reassuring, in a way. If they were serious, why didn't they just, say, knock a few teeth out, or snap my left arm, leaving the right arm healthy to threaten Victor Carogna with? But no, they were like "I'm going to count to three, and then you'll have to have a time out." At one point, when the ragpicker/meth dealer was still living in the ground floor apartment, Leilah and I had gotten used to seeing our trash again after we'd thrown it away. The guy would be selling our old sofa cushions out on the front steps. But with the meth dealer having been evicted, I now had to imagine Arthur, in his business suit, lifting the crumpled bike fastidiously out of the recyling bin, carefully bending it or having his friends drive over it a couple of times in their Humvee, and then sprinkling goat's blood on the seat.

I left the bike where it was this time, and just kept walking. But someone was obviously trying to keep my mind focused on my problem, because I kept sensing that I was being followed, just like in bad movies. I'd look back over my shoulder, and an ornately sneakered foot would be disappearing into a doorway. Or I'd loiter in front of a vintage clothing store, and to my left, at the intersection, someone would. . . STOP. And I'd see the bill of a baseball cap, worn backwards, poking out from behind the light post. All this took its toll, and in my growing anxiety I began seriously to contemplate Arthur's proposal.

One problem was the lack of a gun. Would Victor Carogna really lend me one? I had no doubt that he would, and by now I was beginning to take some pleasure in the thought of threatening him with his own firearm, with the additional irony that it was he who had taught me to shoot. I tried to imagine the scene: a dark and narrow street, slick with rain and lined with old brick buildings, a single defective streetlight buzzing and flickering a tired orange light. Victor Carogna emerges from the back door of one of the buildings – his favorite Italian restaurant, whose owner knows him from his days on the police force and always saves him a prime table, from which he has a good view of any celebrities who might drop in for a quiet meal. On his skinny 70-year-old arm is a stunning young brunette in spike heels.

I'm waiting in a doorway a couple of buildings down the street, my borsalino pulled low over my eyes, against the rain and for anonymity. Victor Carogna gallantly holds open the door of the – what does he drive? I think it's an old Oldsmobile Cierra – while his shapely escort slips into her seat with a low, husky laugh and the provocative whisper of soft nylon surfaces rubbing together. The sharp click of Victor Carogna's heels as he walks around the rear of the car, opens the driver side door, and folds himself, somewhat creakily, into place behind the steering wheel. I pull my collar up and move forward, holding the Glock 17 out of sight against my right thigh. I tap on his window with the knuckles of the first two fingers of my left hand. A sardonic smile, weary with the knowledge of too much evil, twists the scar of his mouth as he recognizes me and lowers the window. The brunette draws in her breath sharply as she sees me aim the Glock directly between Victor Carogna's glittering eyes.

"Evening, Ducelis," he says, pulling an unfiltered cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and inserting it nonchalantly below the handlebar mustache. "I suppose you need a ride home."

I ignore his deliberate disrespect. "I've been asked to inform you that there are people who are deeply concerned about the threats you've been making to some friends of theirs. They're suggesting that it would be in your best interest to desist immediately."

"Who the fuck writes your dialogue," says Victor Carogna, cupping his hands to light the cigarette.

"You should think about your wife, Carogna." My next rehearsed line. "What would happen to her if you didn't come home some night." By now the brunette is huddled against the far door, her elegant bare shoulders shaking with silent sobs, or maybe laughter. Victor Carogna looks up at me, exhales a long sigh of smoke in my face, turns the key in the ignition. I reach through the window with my left hand and grab the front of his shirt, yank him forward until our faces are nearly touching. I can smell his rank Camel breath.

"Don't fuck with me, Carogna! You may think you know me, but you don't." I'm barely raising my voice, but making sure he can hear the menace in it.

"My shirt," he says. I let go, with a little push, keeping the Glock pointed just above the bridge of his nose. He takes a moment to readjust his collar and necktie, then pushes the window button. I have to yank my arm out, with the Glock, to keep it from getting trapped inside the car. Without looking at me again he puts the car in gear and begins to maneuver out of the parking spot. He's leaving me no choice. I point the Glock at a spot just above his left ear and squeeze off two quick shots. The car window spiderwebs, then sags like a thick, transparent fabric. Blood mixed with Victor Carogna's icky brain matter spatters the left shoulder and abyssal cleavage of the brunette, who's frozen in her seat, wondering who's going to take her home now.

Never mind. It was an impossible scenario, other than in its depiction of my total failure to intimidate Victor Carogna. For one thing, the idea of shooting someone in the head, even that bastard, didn't work for me. It was just too invasive. I could probably put a couple of slugs in his chest, though. I take the bus to Cupertino (is there one? Public transportation in that part of the world, with its herds of snorting SUVs, is very primitive) with all the commuters late in the afternoon, the Glock 17 tucked in the briefcase I haven't used since retiring from the classroom. Backpacks are too suspicious these days. Having located his house, I loiter until late at night in the local Subway, nursing a raspberry Snapple. At 11 pm I ring his doorbell, and when he opens the door, already unpacking the sardonic smile, I put two neat holes in his Arrow shirt, just above the left nipple. He falls backward without a word, like a tin soldier, and lies at attention on the thick carpeting, the smile still on his face. Margaret sits in her wheelchair, staring at me across his carcass, her hands pressed to her sunken cheeks. . . Shit.

The whole fucking thing was ridiculous, of course. The idea of me shooting or even scaring anybody was absurd. That's been the problem with my whole life, in fact – an inability to believe that I could do any of the things I really want to do. Other people seem to just assume they can become cardiac surgeons, high-profile trial lawyers, judges, politicians, superstar musicians, published poets, critically acclaimed novelists, and hit men, and a lot of them go out and do it, without apparently giving it too much thought. Not Ducelis, though. No matter how much I may have wanted to do some of those things, and even tried, lamely, to do one or two of them, in the landfill of my psyche there had always been the sad worm telling me that those things were for other people, not for me. For me, it was always enough of a victory just to pay the rent and have enough left over for burritos. Snagging a woman like Leilah had been a bit of a surprise, I must admit, but I still didn't know how it happened, and in any case it had now been revealed as the illusion it must always have been.

Or maybe it wasn't! Maybe Leilah had seen something in me, something stronger, more forceful than the mild-mannered schoolmarm, but after 25 years had finally gotten tired of waiting for it to express itself and had run off with the snaggle-toothed birdwatcher, who at least knew who he was. Maybe this was my wakeup call, I told myself.

I stood, transfixed, staring sightlessly at the covers of the books laid out in the window of a used bookstore. Sixty years old. If not now, when? Maybe it was time to take a few risks, to imagine a bigger future for myself and go after it. Not that I thought being a hit man represented a big future. But wasn't I being backed into a corner here? Fight or flight – that was the question.

Down the sidewalk to my left, the bill of the baseball cap still loitered behind the light post, trying to look innocent and waiting for me to move on. But suppose I failed to move on, and finally took a stand instead? If I was going to have _any_ future, the first step might have to be to shoot my way out of this saloon. Blowing away Victor Carogna, I told myself, or at least being MENTALLY PREPARED to blow him away, might not only get me out of the mess I was in but might have the side effect of snapping my psychic chains and opening whole new worlds. Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul! – another thing my mother always used to say. Time to ditch this dark room, the doubts and fears that had restrained me all my life, and move out into the next, more spacious, chamber of existence.

All this was in the nature of pumping myself up, of course, and I only half-believed any of it, probably less than half. But what was I going to do, sit grading metaphorical homework papers until the garbage truck rolled over me, instead of my bike? Better to take my fate in my own hands, I thought. More realistically, I'm afraid there was a part of me that resonated to the idea of grabbing the whole scraggy bundle, my life, with all its dangling loose ends, and tossing it in the trash can. What was in it that was worth saving, really – my inadequate pension check, my pointlessly clean apartment, my missing wife, the scarf I could never finish? That feeling, I suppose, was what allowed me to ignore the possible legal consequences of what I was planning.

The knitting group was due to meet at my place on Sunday afternoon, the day after tomorrow. I could call Victor Carogna up and ask him to bring the gun with him. That way, I'd at least have the option of following Arthur's plan and getting _him_ off my back. I might not do anything with it. But maybe I would, maybe desperation would drive me to it, and maybe Victor Carogna would surprise me and back off if I seemed determined enough. I knew I couldn't pull the trigger. He probably knew that, too. But would he be sure? I could pretend to be freaked out or on drugs. Or maybe I could actually take enough Sudafed to start tweaking. Tweakin'. That might put just enough doubt in his mind to make him cautious. In any case, once I had the gun I could plan how to confront him with it. I couldn't think any farther ahead than that. You may have noticed I'm not James Bond.

As I entered the hallway of the apartment, a sneakered kid in a baseball cap rolled by on a noisy skateboard, pointed at me with his finger and thumb, and made that shooting noise with his mouth.

### Chapter 18

I called up Victor Carogna.

"A gun, Ducelis? You want a gun? What happened – somebody cut ahead of you in line at Safeway?" The son of a bitch. Now that I knew, I could hear the smugness in his mucusy tobacco voice, the superiority that can be conveyed only by the carnal knowledge of someone else's wife, or so I assume. But I was cool, and stuck to my script. Just a little target shooting on the side, to keep my hand in. I didn't tell him what the projected target was, and how I was fantasizing about shooting his pendulous earlobes off.

"Well, let's get down to specifics," he said. I could hear the cigarette smoke curling around the telephone. "You won't be needing anything fancy, I assume, if you're just going to be blowing holes in paper."

"I'm fond of the Glock 17," I told him.

"Jesus Christ, Ducelis! Whatyya, got a gang war on your hands over there? That's way too much gun. You're going to draw a lot of unnecessary attention to yourself at the range. How about that little Saturday Night Special I took off the 6th grader at the bowling alley? It's a .22. Inexpensive ammunition, very little kick."

"Don't you have something bigger? I don't like those cheap little popguns. You know they're not accurate and they're not safe either. Don't they blow up a lot?"

He wouldn't budge, though. "No, no. I've fired this one myself. It's a nice little piece. I have no idea where the kid got a gun like that. Just the right size for you." Was he mocking me? "And I can't say I like the idea of you waving a Glock 17 around, or even some old .38. You've got a lot of buried resentment, Ducelis. We've talked about that. You're the kind of guy comes home from work, has a drink or two, and takes out his whole family. Luckily you don't have one."

"And I don't work, either," I reminded him. But all he would agree to was the .22. Well, I knew he knew I was a good shot, and that was the point. A .22 short in the right place will do just as well as a .357 Magnum, I reminded myself. Nothing wrong with a little finesse. Besides, I wasn't going to pull the trigger. All I had to do was convince him I was crazy enough or bitter enough to do it. I thought the remark about buried resentment was promising in that regard.

Once we got the gun thing decided, he wanted to talk about the doilies he was crocheting with a series of historic anti-personnel mines on them, like the legendary Claymore and the clever and lethal Bouncing Betty. Why is it so hard to get knitters to shut up about their projects? Then he had to put Margaret on the line for a chat. I felt a certain comradely connection as she rambled on about her new recipe for gnocchi, insisting that I had to come back to Cupertino to try it out. I wanted to ask her whether she knew her doting husband was out mulching illicit tomatoes when he wasn't devotedly rolling her wheelchair around their polished hardwood floors. But I liked her too much and she sounded too cheerful. I assured her we'd do it one of these days, although it seemed unlikely that she'd feel as friendly toward me once I'd set my plan for her husband rolling.

When I'd hung up, it felt as though something had been resolved, even though all the action was still to come. I was moving, at least, and there even seemed to be a kind of momentum, a tide sweeping me toward something definitive. It seemed that fate was about to crochet me into some pattern or other, and I was interested in how it would turn out. Better than The Scarf, I hoped. Although I was nervous, and still couldn't believe that anything would really happen, other than the usual inconclusive talk, I thought it was a better feeling than sitting around the apartment like another dusty ball of yarn.

### Chapter 19

Even though I had a lot on my mind, I took some care in preparing for the meeting of the knitting group. I suppose because I'm such a crappy knitter it's important to me that the other members at least have a good time when they come over, so they'll be in the mood to help me when they find out I don't know what it means to beg with p1, work 39 (44, 51) sts in Seed st, Inc 2, *beg with p1 (k1, p1), work 64 (73, 86) sts in Seed st and etc.

The main thing you have to do is put some thought into the food. You don't want to just have chips and cheese and crackers and Diet Pepsi. You have to line up something slightly exotic, like maybe tabouli with tiny dice of heritage tomatoes, plus whole wheat pita wedges to scoop it up with, and some of those crunchy little onion pancakes and maybe some potstickers, and then almond lemon bars and a couple of truffles to nibble as the shadows lengthen into the low blood sugar period, knitting problems begin to multiply, and the gossip grows correspondingly more intense. And then you need a variety of drinks, from raspberry lemonade to coffee to pure mountain water. Usually no one will drink anything alcoholic, quick reflexes and steady hands and a ready wit being essential in the fiber arts. The other members will bring a few things, too, sometimes a lot of things, but the host is responsible for the nutritional substrate, plus providing a clean, well-lighted place to knit. In the sudden press of events I'd been neglecting the apartment a little bit, so I had to rush around vacuuming and dusting and replacing a lightbulb or two. I'm a little short on furniture, so I had to move a couple of chairs in from the kitchen to supplement the couch.

Victor Carogna managed to increase my tension level, probably deliberately, by arriving late. I was bound to be a little jumpy anyway, because one of the first to arrive was April, looking demure in loose jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, no makeup. She seemed perfectly cool and normal, greeting everybody, including me, without a hint of embarrassment, chatting about work and her latest project just as if she'd never wound my Koigu at all. I tried to maintain a matching level of reserve, but my mind was of course tormented with a series of contrasting images, and it was difficult to talk to her as if nothing had happened between us. I was wondering if she'd told the rest of them anything, but decided I was safe: she'd probably rather keep her moonlighting quiet, especially in this group.

Everybody was curious about where Victor was. "I think Margaret may have taken a turn for the worse," said Ayn, who was still glowing from the morning's 20-mile ride to the top of Mt. Tamalpais and back, although she'd changed out of her spandex. "Victor said last time that she'd been having some attacks of mild paralysis." Everyone knitted silently and sympathetically for a minute or two.

"Well, you know if Margaret's having any problems at all, he won't be here," Sharon finally said. "He's such a sweet man, under that gruff exterior. He does _everything_ for her. You'd never expect it, from the way he talks, but there it is." Their expressions all softened as they nodded, thinking tender thoughts about Victor Carogna and his problems. I wanted to scream. Sharon I could understand at least: her boyfriend had not only lost another job but was now threatening to leave her if she didn't get her thighs vacuumed. But what about the rest of them? How could they be taken in by this animal? Had they all had such horrible experiences with men that even Victor Carogna looked good to them? April was actually wiping a tear from her eye as she ripped out her last 15 minutes of work. Only Betty remained unmoved. "He's a nice boy," she said, generically, but I suspected she was trying to remember who he was.

"Did he tell you about his doilies?" I asked. I described the doilies in detail, dwelling maliciously on the history and properties of some of the murderous devices depicted on them, with which I happened to be familiar because of my two years in the army. They listened attentively, impressed as always by the scale of the projects Victor Carogna undertook and immune to the vicious implications of his obsession. I couldn't detect the tiniest critical note for his fascination with all that machinery designed to explode human flesh into a cloud of bloody bubbles.

The conversation moved on. Ayn wanted all the gossip about the Castro Street Wells Fargo branch. She missed the homey, constricted politics of the small office, now that she'd moved down to the big Market Street temple of finance. Some young stud with a gleaming new MBA had apparently been transferred in at Castro and was trying to throw his weight around. "He's a man in a hurry," said Janet. "You notice how his tie is always blown back over his shoulder, even though there's no wind in there?" They all laughed. "He's trying to get Milton to put in a new procedure for recording transactions, now that we've finally got the old one figured out, which took us about two years. I don't think it's going to go over too well, though. It's the same thing Milton did when _he_ came in, so he's not about to let this dude change everything. You'll probably be getting him down on Market Street pretty soon, Ayn, thank God. Milton'll kick him down there and pretend it's a promotion." I got this vision of the row of women sitting on their teller stools behind the counter, revolving complacently in short arcs and tapping their little keypads instead of knitting – all sweet, reasonable, and absolutely immutable warehouses of office tradition. Of course they knew they were the people who actually kept the place going. Now they were discussing how the different amounts and quality of conversations they had with male customers correlated with their choice of necklines on a given day. It should have been very entertaining, but I was getting too antsy about Victor Carogna's absence to pay much attention.

He finally showed up close to an hour late, and I took him right out to the kitchen to get the gun from him.

"What's the hurry, Ducelis?" he said, unloading the barbecued ribs he'd brought. "Afraid those targets are going to run off somewhere?" I thought he seemed a little preoccupied, though, despite his usual contemptuous air.

"I just want to get it while the ladies are involved with their gossip. I'm sure they'll give me some shit about having a gun."

"Aw, it's just a _little_ one," he said. "Got ammo?" He handed me a little cardboard box, like a package of lozenges. As usual, I was inexplicably pleased by the weight of the lead in my hand. "I even brought you a holster. You better try it on." Despite my protests, he fastened the strap of the holster over my shoulder and shoved the little revolver into it. "There you go," he said. "Now you look like the real thing."

Naturally, while I was standing there like an asshole, Janet came in to refill the onion cake platter. "Oh for God's sake," she said. "What are you boys doing out here? Always playing with your weapons. I'm surprised at you, Randall," she went on. "After all you've been telling us about Victor's nasty doilies, and here you are waving your own thing around. You better come out and show the girls. They'll be interested."

So I had to go out and model the whole setup for the knitters.

"I don't like those things. They give me the willies." Sharon tossed her red hair and continued knitting. It gave her the willies on me, I thought; on Victor Carogna I'm sure it would have been quite pheromonal.

"Isn't it kind of small?" said Janet, nibbling suggestively on a stuffed grape leaf. "Cute though," she added kindly. "You planning to use it on anyone in particular?"

"Just target practice," I said, trying to maintain some shreds of dignity. I took the thing off and sat back down on the couch between Ayn and Betty. Victor Carogna took his usual spot in the chair next to the door and got one of his doilies out of his tote bag, with some nice cotton yarn and a crochet hook.

"Sorry I'm late," he said. "Margaret's a little under the weather today. I wanted to make sure she was comfortable before I left." Of course, he had to play the Margaret card the minute he got there. By now my thinking on the topic of Victor Carogna was not very charitable or even reasonable. Mainly I was thinking about how I was going to get him to stick around for a few minutes after everyone else had left, so I could menace him with his own little pistol. I still didn't believe it, but I was trying to will the event into existence, to convince myself that my time had finally come to take arms against a sea of troubles.

"Have you heard from Leilah at all?" Ayn asked me.

"Oh yes," I said. "She saw a Black-throated Sparrow." I didn't bother to explain that this meant she must be in Nevada or southern California – let 'em worry about it. I gave them a quick rundown on her visit, without mentioning the fight about all her stuff that I'd thrown out. They wanted to know what kind of yarn she'd taken with her, and chuckled over the idea of her knitting the winter away by a glowing wood stove in Bridgeport, CA.

"I wonder what the museums are like in Bridgeport," April mused.

"Who cares," said Victor Carogna. "She'll have a fine time. The point is, you got a different kind of people up there in the mountains. She'll meet some actual human beings, instead of a bunch of friggin bleeding-heart vegetarians. They might change her whole outlook on life."

"Right," I said. "The simple life. Just cows and the people who eat them." It grated on me even to hear him talk about her. And I eat just as much meat as he does, by the way, although I mostly stick to chicken.

As the afternoon wore on, there was gradually less knitting and more talking and eating. The tabouli and even the barbecued ribs disappeared, consuming most of my paper napkins in the process. Betty breached the almond lemon bars, which led to a general run on the desserts. I made coffee and brought it in on a tray with sugar and cream. I was just settling back onto the couch with my cup when there came a tentative knocking at the door.

"Are we expecting anyone else?" I said. "I'll get it," said Victor Carogna, standing up. He opened the door, then abruptly backed into the room, propelled by a hand against his chest. The hand was attached to a long, skinny arm; the other arm of the pair was holding an aluminum baseball bat. Between the two arms was a scrawny chest loosely draped with a tanktop. Above the tanktop was a rather narrow face with an irrelevant mustache and goatee, myopic eyes shrunk to the size of peas by frameless lenses, and a mouse-brown comb-over. The tanktop read "I'll Be Back". The hand gave Victor Carogna one final shove into the center of the room, then reached back to close the door.

"Good afternoon," said a nasal, caressing voice. The visitor looked around the room at the open-mouthed crowd, then back at Victor Carogna. "Who the fuck are all these people?" Victor Carogna pulled the cigarette pack out of his pocket and tapped out a Camel, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, took a leisurely puff or two. "What can we do for you?" he said.

"I think you know. You owe me money. Quite a lot of money. I need it. Now."

I had to admire Victor Carogna; he was pretty cool in the face of this invasion, but he smoked the Camel about halfway down in 30 seconds, and I noticed his hands were trembling a little bit. So were mine, but I could control them by keeping them planted at my sides on the couch, where I was also comforted by the chilly morsel of Victor Carogna's little pistol.

"Would you like an almond lemon bar?" Betty piped up.

"Shut up, bitch," snapped the intruder. The other women stirred disapprovingly but made no complaint. They were intimidated, even though this guy was physically an unlikely candidate for hooliganism, with those 10-inch pipestem arms and the sunken chest, not to mention the baggy shorts and a bad case of varicose veins, the kind that stick out in knots all over your calves. But the look on his face – determined, unself-conscious, half crazy – made up for any physical deficiencies. One look into those hazel eyes had made me a believer. I was sure he knew how to swing a bat.

Victor Carogna glanced at the rest of us as though looking for guidance on how to handle the maniac. "What money are you referring to," he said, tapping Camel ashes absent-mindedly on the rug.

I'll Be Back swung the bat sharply, backhanded. The sound was spectacular, more than just loud – what you might think a black hole would sound like as it wolfed down a red giant. It was almost enough to make me forget that the son of a bitch had just imploded my widescreen Sony TV. Flakes of glass dispersed around the room, tinkling down on the tops of the bookshelves, and the air filled with a luminous, acrid powder. I didn't want to think what it was doing to our lungs. The women all screamed, and I probably did too. Victor Carogna glanced at me and then took another long drag on the Camel.

"I don't think that kind of thing is going to resolve our problem here," he said. "Whatever it is."

The bat swung again, this time making a sharp crack as it contacted Victor Carogna's arm, sending the Camel flying. "Shit," he said, with real pain on his face and holding his arm, which hung limply like a broken branch. The skinny thug was drawing a bead on the other arm. Victor Carogna collected himself and looked over at me again – his usual sarcastic expression, but with something else mixed in, impatience maybe, a certain meaningful tilt of the gray eyebrows. So I shot him.

The guy with the bat, I mean. I didn't actually shoot him, I shot near him. And I don't even know why I did that, since I wasn't particularly unhappy to see Victor Carogna being humiliated and even hurt. Knitting group loyalty, I guess.

I shot near him because I was still having trouble – probably always will have – with the idea of rending someone's flesh by projectile or any other means. I shot near his head, because I thought that would make the biggest impression on him. Mind you, I didn't actually know whether the gun was even loaded, since I hadn't bothered to check when Victor Carogna gave it to me. Possibly I had registered the extra weight of the ammunition. Or maybe my subconscious had recognized some facts that my forebrain was unaware of. I was reassured by a loud pop and a modest recoil.

The bat guy seemed surprised but not at all daunted by the shot across his bow. "Woaaaiiii," he said – the kind of expostulation you might make watching careening cars nearly collide in a wild six-way intersection – and started for me with the bat raised. So then I really did shoot him. There were ladies in the room, after all; somebody might have gotten hurt. I aimed for his stomach, that being the biggest target, but off to the side, so as not to hit the spinal cord. He froze immediately, with the bat still raised above his head. Then he lowered himself carefully to the rug, stretched out with the bat beside him, put a hand over the little red hole in his shirt, and started groaning. Everyone else was silent. The suspended TV powder gave the whole scene a dreamy look.

The cops showed up about 15 minutes after April flipped open her cell phone and dialed 911. I had removed the aluminum bat from the reach of the thug as a precaution. He hadn't seemed to notice, and continued to groan, although he was having some trouble breathing. Along with instilling the spirit of the bayonet, the army had trained me to stop the bleeding, clear the airway, protect the wound, and prevent or treat for shock. Only the last of these seemed applicable here, so I had covered the guy with the blanket that the cat used to sleep on before the coyotes got her.

There were two cops: one giant, muscular guy who was just starting a pot belly, and a petite woman with her blond pageboy haircut sticking out from under the police hat. They took it all in – the smashed TV, Victor Carogna, who was smoking on the couch and trying not to move his smashed arm, the gun on the coffee table among the rubble of tabouli and ribs, and the guy still groaning on the floor – with that complete absence of expression that must be a major part of the training at the Police Academy.

"Who belongs to the gun?" said the big guy, in a voice so calm and low-pitched as to be almost inaudible. I looked at Victor Carogna. He didn't seem anxious to claim his gun, so I raised my hand.

"So what's going on?" asked his partner.

Betty looked up from the afghan she was puzzling over. "This is our knitting group," she said.

"OK," said the blond cop. "But what about him?" gesturing to the guy groaning on the rug.

"Well, _he's_ not a member," replied Betty. The cops glanced at each other.

I thought Betty's explanation was about as good as anything I could have dreamed up at that point. The cops, however, seemed to be reserving judgment on the knitting group hypothesis. The woman called an ambulance to remove the wounded, while the big cop gradually got the rest of the story out of us. He frowned a little when I explained that it was Victor Carogna's gun but that I had done the shooting.

"Why did you bring the gun to your knitting group?" he wondered. "Were you expecting trouble, or is it a normal precaution in these kind of groups?"

"I'm Victor Carogna, SFPD retired," said Victor Carogna. "My friend here wanted to do some target shooting. I loaned him one of my handguns."

"You're Carogna?" said the big cop. His lack of expression made it impossible to tell what he thought about that information, but it clearly had meaning for him. I was thinking something too; or rather, beginning to feel a vague uneasiness about my role in the afternoon's events, now that the Wild Bill Hickock adrenaline cocktail had dissipated. I was rather pleased that it had turned out I was able to shoot someone after all, even though it hadn't been Victor Carogna. On the other hand, I was interested and a little puzzled by the convenient presence of a gun – a loaded gun – lying on the couch next to me when the guy showed up with his bat. I didn't really know what to think. Where was the front end of this chain of fools? I wondered who was behind the guy I had plugged – who was trying to get money out of _him_?

The rest of us had to stick around for questioning after Victor Carogna and his attacker had left for San Francisco General. The cops asked me a lot of questions about the gun of course, and the blond woman even went out to the squad car to plug my name into Crooknet, or whatever they use to check up on people, but of course I was clean as a whistle. One thing about going through life without doing much one way or the other is that you can compile an impressively blank police record. That blankness seemed very convenient, too. I was wondering what they would have found if they'd run Victor Carogna's name through their database.

The knit women thoughtfully helped me tidy the place up after the cops had left, admonishing us not to leave town until further notice. Even with the vacuum cleaner it was almost impossible to get all the little flakes of glass from the TV out of the carpet, and the scent of that toxic stuff from the screen was still hanging in the air, mixed with a faint bouquet of gunpowder. "Poor Victor!" said Sharon, as she washed the platter he'd brought the ribs on. "After all he's been through, and now this."

"I wonder what kind of business he was doing with that guy," I ventured, trying to inject an element of reality under the skin of their sentimental mood.

"Oh! There are just _so_ many untrustworthy people in this world! Or just plain crazy. And everyone seems to be so ready to use violence to resolve things," said Ayn, glaring at me.

"Are you all right?" April asked me, as she trailed the rest of them out the door. I almost burst into tears, but managed not to throw myself on her attractive bosom, thanked her for asking, and kept my distance. There was still the 4,000 dollar debt and, upstairs, Arthur's brooding, gravid presence. I was no longer sure how April fitted into the whole picture, but I didn't want to take any more chances.

### Chapter 20

I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding in the apartment and thinking things over. My meditations were frequently interrupted by deep groaning and popping noises from the basement where Mr. Clabber's workmen were operating. The routine vibrations that I'd become used to had been replaced by a more disturbing phenomenon, a sort of minor lurching of the entire building, first on one side, then on the other. But I was too freaked out to go down there and see what was going on.

I started with the circumstance that Victor Carogna had given me the gun loaded, and had made sure that it got into the living room. From there I kind of worked backward and forward at the same time. I thought about Arthur, and I thought about Victor Carogna, and I thought about Arthur and Victor Carogna, and I thought about how Arthur had pointed me at Victor Carogna. And I wondered why the guy with the bat had happened to show up when he did. And then I thought about the cop's reaction when Victor Carogna had told him his name, and about my own spotless record as a solid, if boring, citizen. I was still thinking about all that and beginning in my slow way to come to some conclusions when Julia knocked on the door again.

"You must have had quite a party up here this afternoon," she said, after a brief hello. Raton was with her, of course, looking at me mistrustfully out of the tops of his eyes.

"Just the knitting group," I replied.

She looked at the silent scream of the destroyed TV with her hands on her hips.

"Commercials," I said. "One of our members overreacted a little to one of those beer ads. She thinks they're degrading to women."

"No doubt about that," said Julia. "But listen, I work from 8 at night to 4 in the morning, which means I'm usually trying to sleep in the afternoon. I'm not mad about it, but I'd like to ask you to try to keep your knitting group meetings a little more sedate."

"No problem. This is the first one that's really gotten out of hand. Must have been the phase of the moon. Or maybe it was the truffles."

She showed me the list of Raton-care instructions she'd typed up for me and naturally had to go over it with me in detail, so the ill-tempered little beast wouldn't lack for anything while she was gone. Everything was on the list, from the 60-40 ratio of turkey to veal in his breakfast (proportions reversed for the evening meal) to the schedule and length for his minimum of three walks per day, how much ball-throwing and how much canine socializing he had to have in the park, the names and potentially problematic traits of all the other dogs with whom he had relationships, the best technique for administering his anti-depressant tablet, and which TV shows he expected to watch.

"I know you're a responsible person," she told me, "but I've never left him alone before, and I'm feeling kind of guilty about it."

"He'll want to sleep with you, by the way," she said, adding, when she saw my expression, "He's very clean. I just gave him his bath. And here's the Benadryl." She gave me a week's supply.

Notwithstanding her attachment to her cranky little dog, I thought Julia was probably the most normal person I'd met in the days since Leilah had collapsed the foundations of my boring existence. I liked her fast way of talking and the laugh lines at the outside corners of her eyes and something about the precise set of her lips; also the fact that she would go to London to take a class in something that I didn't even really know what it was. After she and Raton left, though, I felt that I had to put all that out of my mind and keep turning over the soil that had produced this sudden rich growth of events. It seemed to me that I was beginning to discern a strong pattern of exploitation in the developments since my retirement, which already felt like years ago. The only thing I was unsure of was how far back the trail led.

It seemed pretty clear that once I'd joined the knitting group certain subterranean forces, whose visible outcrops were the kind and seductive April and the ancient reptile Victor Carogna, had been arrayed against me. And it seemed clear that, in a kind of psychological judo, my opponents had used my own atavistic sex drive to throw me. But I had to wonder whether they could really have predicted my responses so confidently and precisely, or if they had simply seized the opportunities I ignorantly provided for them. There was no doubt that April had put some pretty strong moves on me; but surely most antique males would have been too busy fine-tuning their prostate medication to follow that scent, so they wouldn't have been able to count on snagging me that way. On the other hand, if you were trying to build up a new business as a $4,000 a weekend hooker, why would you pick on a retired physics teacher? That argued for some kind of deliberate intent. But then maybe April had just been idly casting her commercial net, and my blundering into it like a barnacled old grouper, but one with handgun skills, had given them ideas. Or had it all been planned from the start? Had Victor Carogna really led me so sure-footedly into the skewed world of gun nuts and taunted me so skillfully that he knew I'd be ready to whack the bat guy when he showed up at the knitting group (prodded into the ambush by Arthur? Or by Victor Carogna himself?). It seemed like too much of a risk for them to take; and yet, I had indeed squeezed off not one but two shots, one of which had at least disabled the attacker. I was developing a grudging admiration for the accuracy of Victor Carogna's psychological perceptions. I wondered if they had really expected me to kill the guy, thus ridding them of an annoying problem. Or were they just trying to scare _him_ off, whoever he was?

And what about Leilah? That was the thought that really nagged at me. Could Victor Carogna really. . . No. Now I was just being paranoid, I was sure of that. Next I'd start imagining that Bill Beresford had been Victor Carogna's rogue cop partner and hard-drinking buddy before he reformed and became a bird man. That was going too far; the story was getting way too complicated, and the more I tried to sew all the pieces together, the more it looked like a turtleneck sweater for a giraffe. On the other hand, I had to admit it was the Victor Carogna/Leilah connection that had really put me over the top.

I began to entertain the silly wish that everything would just go back to the way it had been before, pre-Beresford, pre-Carogna, pre-April, pre-Arthur. I'd had enough of movement, momentum, tides in the affairs of men. Put me back on my couch and make my shattered TV whole again. Leilah would still be here with me, along with all the yarn and the rest of her mess. At this point I was thinking I'd even let her have Beresford on the side, if she wanted, during bird trips anyway. As it was, there was no Leilah, and the enjoyable part of the April adventure was history, leaving only the scary piper upstairs still to be paid. Despite having at least temporarily gotten the monkey off Arthur and Victor Carogna's backs, I was still under threat of getting my own frame bent like my bike's. Any foolish dreams I might have had of intimidating Victor Carogna had been trumped by the bat guy's performance. How could I possibly follow that act, which had barely made Victor Carogna blink? In any case, the cops now had the gun. And plus they were cocking a suspicious eye at me because I'd used it (like a puppet on a string!) to shoot a human being. What if he died? What if he _didn't_ die? Jesus Christ! I couldn't see any way out of the mess. And I was deeply concerned about the effect of all this on the dynamic of the knitting group, my only social framework.

It was a busy afternoon. Victor Carogna called from the hospital a couple of hours after Julia left. They'd finished setting his arm, and he wanted me to get his car, pick him up at the hospital, and drive him to Cupertino. Notwithstanding my many grievances against him, it seemed a request I couldn't decently refuse a crippled man.

As per his instructions, I found his keys in the Soldier of Fortune tote bag and the car parked next to the dog groomer's shop. I had to leave the windows open to air out the stench of stale cigarette smoke as I drove to SF General. Victor Carogna was waiting outside the main entrance, with his windbreaker draped over his shoulders and an L-shaped cast the size of Louisiana on his left arm. We drove south in the darkness. I wanted answers to all the mysteries I'd been contemplating since he and the bat guy had left for the body shop, but since I had only suspicions and no evidence, I wasn't sure how to ease into the conversation. I asked him about the arm.

"I won't be using it to whack my roger for a while," he told me. The bat had snapped his upper arm, necessitating the big cast to keep everything immobilized. His attacker, he informed me rather casually, had expired a couple of hours earlier; the little .22 slug had apparently found some important organ or other. So his dreams for me had come true: he had trained a killer.

As of now, I can't really say how that information affected me. Not as much as Jonnie Lucero's sparrow, I can tell you that. It didn't feel like something I had really done. It felt like the shooting had been performed not by me but by a character in a movie written by Arthur and his business partner Victor Carogna. And I obviously hadn't known the guy, but from my brief experience with him I doubted that anyone would miss him very much. I pegged him for one of the people who leave those little black spots on the sidewalk that depress me so much. On the other hand, he had been doing – admittedly in a much more blue-collar manner – no more than what Arthur had been doing to me, and presumably for similar base financial motives. I wasn't sure I'd shot the right person.

"He seemed to know you," I suggested.

"He knew he wanted to use that bat on _some_ body," Victor Carogna growled. "I happened to answer the door." I recalled, however, that he'd practically leaped for the door when the knock came.

"So you think he was a random crazy?"

"Or a random thief. I don't know what else to think." He stubbed out his cigarette in the reeking ashtray and lit another one. The cast forced him to strike the match at arm's length. I opened the passenger-side window surreptitiously and closed my own, to draw the smoke in his direction. "Apparently no one in the room knew him," he went on.

"He asked you for money," I pointed out.

"Isn't that what thieves do?"

"He asked _you_ ," I said, pointedly. "There are quite a few witnesses to that." He shook his head dismissively, and I knew he was right. None of those women would rat him out. Victor Carogna could do no wrong in their eyes. He wasn't going to budge, that was obvious.

"How long have you and Arthur been in business," I asked, trying the flank attack. He didn't even bother to take the cigarette out of his mouth.

"April's. . . manager? I haven't done any business with her, Ducelis. I don't do that kind of business. _You_ do that kind of business, is what I hear."

I took my eyes off the road to stare at him for a long moment, my head stuffed with a pudding of sarcastic responses: Leilah, Margaret, Arthur, the bat guy, even April – he was probably lying about her, too. I couldn't see his eyes, only the lenses of his glasses, blanked out by the reflected lights of oncoming cars.

I said, "Arthur seems to think there's a connection between you two."

"I've met him once or twice, socially. That's all." He continued to work on the cigarette, very calmly. The more he denied everything, the more I knew I was right about the way those two sons of bitches had set me up. The shooting lessons, April, the mysterious thug at the door, with the loaded gun conveniently at hand. At _my_ hand. Not to mention Leilah. I'd killed somebody for this guy, and he wasn't even going to give me any masculinity points for it. I was just hired help, as usual. Unpaid hired help, at that. So why, I wondered, glancing again at the opaque panes of his probably bulletproof glasses, given the moral tally here, was I unable to nail his shriveled old pelt to the ethical wall, or even to confront him with what I knew was his perfidy? His ascendancy over me was both inexplicable and total – the drug-dealing, philandering, sarcastic old motherfucker. And most humiliating of all was the realization that he'd known it from the moment he set eyes on me, and on my wife.

I wasn't quite ready to quit, however. "How fortunate that the gun was right there, and loaded," I mused.

"That was lucky, wasn't it?" He sat staring straight ahead, with his crooked fingers sticking out the end of the cast as though he was waiting for a vulture to land on them.

"What was your plan if I didn't shoot the guy," I asked him.

"There wasn't any _plan_ , Ducelis," he snarled. "But I'll tell you, I was getting fucking weary of waiting for you to pop the son of a bitch." I knew that was as close as he was going to get to admitting that the knitting group meeting had had an agenda beyond the usual needle and natter. I didn't ask him anything else, just kept driving.

Margaret met us at the door in her wheelchair. "Victor Carogna, _now_ what have you been doing!" I was surprised to see that she seemed more annoyed than worried. Victor Carogna didn't say a word. She escorted him gently to the back bedroom, leaving me shuffling my feet and examining the antimacassars, hand-knitted with whimsical scenes from famous massacres. Margaret rolled back out, silently, a few minutes later. "That man," she said, "is the biggest bullshitter in the world. Do you know what happened?"

I shook my head and gave her the sequence of events, without attempting any explanation. She sighed. "Another one of his drug deals, I suppose. He insists that we need the money, but really he just likes to think he's still got his finger on the pulse of the underworld. He's very bad at it, frankly. He usually loses money. But at least he's never gotten hurt before. I suppose I'm going to have to put a stop to it this time. He'll be so disappointed. But I don't want to start getting calls from the hospital all the time. And thank you for shooting that man. I hope you're not too upset about it."

"I'm looking at it as a learning experience," I told her. She gave me a warm smile and offered me tea. Margaret was quite sweet, and I still liked her, a lot better than I liked her husband, in fact. Thinking about Leilah, I wanted to at least stick around and flirt with her a little bit, especially with Victor Carogna out of action in the back bedroom. But I thought better of it.

Once I was out the door, I realized I had no way to get to the train station, since neither Margaret nor her husband was able to drive at that moment. I thought, Fuck it, got back in the car, drove to the train station, parked, and threw the keys as far as I could into the trees on the far side of the tracks. Let Victor Carogna worry about the damn car. I'd send him an email to tell him where it was. But I hoped somebody would steal it.

### Chapter 21

My brief, scary experiment with arming myself against my troubles seemed to be over, and all I was able to do was retreat into the familiar paralysis. I hung out for the next couple of days, knitting fretfully on The Scarf and idly writing physics problems about the muzzle velocities of guns, just waiting for something to happen. I tried not to draw any attention to myself, tiptoeing from room to room, turning the pages of my books with great care, and taking showers and flushing the toilet very late at night after everyone else in the building had presumably gone to bed. I went out only to buy yogurt and granola with dried raspberries at the fruit stand around the corner, and a newspaper, of course, so I could read about myself. I was disappointed to find that this whole hurricane in my life only rated one short paragraph on the police blotter. Just a garden variety shooting, it seemed, although the writer had some fun with the knitting group connection – "Friendly Needling Turns Ugly," that kind of thing.

The mysterious motions and strange moaning of the building continued. I had discovered during my first foray to the fruit stand after the shooting that Mr. Clabber had jacked the entire building up on some enormous rusty steel girders and had brought in a backhoe to excavate underneath it. That explained the lurching, at least; but the stench of diesel exhaust was now added to the already annoying hammerings, sawings, whinings, and Indonesian expostulations. "We make garage," Mr. Clabber said, gazing expectantly at me. Well, OK, but I don't have a car. In fact, I don't even have a bike at this point. And after he built the garage, he could probably raise the rent. He was also reinforcing the walls for earthquake protection, but it felt like he might destroy the building in the process. I really wished he hadn't picked this particular moment to make the place over.

Meanwhile, upstairs there was a lot of stomping around and loud talking, although as usual I couldn't quite make out any of it, plus sliding and thumping of heavy weights, doors opening and closing, incessant traffic on the stairs. I didn't dare look out to see what was happening. Soon enough, the dreaded knock came on my door.

But it was only April. I was actually kind of glad to see her. Looking back on the whole thing, I felt as if she was the only one – maybe even including Leilah – who had briefly seen me as an actual human being, instead of just some skinny pawn to be shoved around the board to wherever she needed me. True, she'd deceived me; but within that context, possibly because of our intimate moments, I felt as though there had been at least minimal human contact.

She looked a little hot and bothered, I thought, with damp tendrils of blond hair escaping from a businesslike ponytail to hang around her face. She sat down on the couch with a sigh and gazed at the TV's empty skull. "Well, we're leaving," she said.

"Really?" I asked, hardly daring to hope. "It's kind of sudden, isn't it?"

"We've actually been planning it for a while, but this seemed like the right time. I just wanted to come down and make sure you were all right, and say goodbye. That was quite a scene the other day. You must be kind of shook up."

I managed a shrug and asked about their new living arrangements.

"Just between you and me," she said, "we're leaving town." My heart leapt up.

"Arthur's quitting his job?"

"Actually he's working on a transfer. But we've both kind of had it with San Francisco, so he's going to take his vacation. We just want to get out of here."

This all seemed to be good news for me, but there were still some nagging questions. "What about your other business?" I didn't want to refer directly to the 4,000 dollars, but I was hoping for a hint as to where things stood with that. "Isn't that going to be disrupted?"

"Internet. Available worldwide," she said with a little smile. "It's not going all that well, anyway. I haven't really built up the right kind of clientele yet, so it won't hurt to start over somewhere else." I appreciated the delicate reference to the way her clients had disappointed her. She stood up and stretched, groaning. "I'm so tired from all that packing," she said.

At the door she paused and smiled, and stuck out her chest just a little. "I was wondering if you could lend us a couple of hundred bucks. Mitochondrion tore up all the rugs, so we had to forfeit our deposit. We're basically broke." She smiled into my eyes. I walked her over to the teller machine then and there.

The quiet from upstairs after they left was a little depressing, even though their departure had lifted all kinds of weight off my shoulders. Inexplicably, I missed them: their voices, their footsteps, the indecipherable conversations and faint music. I tried to imagine their life in Salt Lake City, or wherever the hell they were going to end up, but it was hard to picture. How would it all end? Arthur, I supposed, would stick with the bank unless one of his shady schemes came through, which seemed very unlikely. Or unless somebody shot _him_ , which seemed less unlikely, given his evident unfitness for life in the underworld. After all, I thought, he'd been reduced to recruiting _me_ to solve his problems for him.

Although I'd never seen any signs of it in her behavior, I thought drugs must somehow have been involved in April's career change, given Arthur's entrepreneurial activities and his unsavory relationship with the uxorious ex-cop Victor Carogna. Could you go back to Wells Fargo after being an internationally available escort and coke addict? She obviously had chosen her manager poorly, and I couldn't see her making enough money at it to retire comfortably. So then I had to try to imagine April at, say, 45. What would she be doing? Maybe she could latch onto some relatively decent guy she met in the course of her profession, marry him, and live happily ever after in a little white house in South Platte with sunflowers in the garden. I wished for something like that for her, but I didn't really hope for it. Still, what does happen to people who move out of our lives, in any case? If we never see them again, aren't we free to imagine whatever we want for them, the best or the worst?

Meanwhile, Nurse Julia had reappeared with Raton to give me a tour of her apartment, which was a godawful mess. "I've been so busy with work and packing, I haven't had time to tidy the place up," she apologized, but having lived with Leilah for 25 years I recognized the signs. "The bed's made up clean, though," she said.

She made me a cup of tea and we sat around chatting for a bit. Because of her odd schedule, I suppose, she didn't have much contact with the other tenants and really knew almost nothing about recent events in our strange building, although she'd somehow learned of Leilah's departure (maybe our big farewell fight had awakened her from her afternoon slumbers?) and had seen what she casually identified as obvious drug types going up or coming down the stairs. I was relieved to discover that she seemed to know nothing about April's moonlighting. It certainly wouldn't be me who told her about it.

"I'm glad we finally met," she said, as Raton and I walked her down to board the blue SuperShuttle van. "It's reassuring to have a contact in the building." She looked different, less clinical, in her civvies. "My mother taught me to knit, but I haven't done it since I was 8 years old," she told me. "I've been thinking of taking it up again."

"Do you like birds?" I asked shrewdly.

"Birds?" she said.

Raton stared, trembling slightly, as the van pulled away.

### Chapter 22

Here's my thinking now, in case you're interested. You've stuck with it this far, so you might as well finish. I quit teaching partly because I was tired of it and partly because I wanted to change some things in my future, which had become a boring prospect and much shorter than it once was, given that I was 60 years old. You have seen the following things change in the course of this story:

•I lost my wife of 25 years to an ornithologist.

•The apartment I once shared with my wife is now neat and clean. But I don't care.

•I have learned to knit, poorly.

•I have made a couple of new friends, one of whom has relentlessly, though perhaps unsuccessfully, attacked my masculinity, not least by sleeping with my wife of 25 years, and the other of whom presented me with a bill of $4,000 for two marginally enjoyable acts of sexual intercourse. A third friend may be the very pleasant spouse of the evil gnome who slept with my wife, and a fourth may be the night nurse who lives in the apartment below me.

•I have learned, under the tutelage of the friend who slept with my wife, that I have a talent for shooting a handgun, but no talent for shooting a shotgun.

•I have shot a menacing thug during a meeting of the knitting group. He died, my knowledge of human anatomy being apparently inferior to my skills with a handgun.

•I have belatedly and unhappily realized that several of the above changes in my life were brought about deliberately or at least collaterally by some of my new friends and their associates in pursuance of their own selfish interests.

As I sit propped up in Julia's bed compiling my notes of these happenings, it would be easy to feel melancholy about the whole sequence. Looking over the changes described above, I'd have to say that most of them are not the kinds of things that represent significant forward movement in a person's life. There are only two or maybe three that I can even identify as having some kind of permanence. One is that I am now officially a killer. It's in the police database and it's part of my reputation, for a few people anyway. What bothers me the most about that is that it doesn't bother me very much. In any case, I don't think it's anything I'm going to be building on for the future.

Another probably permanent change is the absence of Leilah. I don't think she's reached the point of never wanting to see me again, but I don't think she's coming back here to live, either, especially now that she knows all her clothes are gone. I've had thoughts of taking up birding myself, in hopes of running into her somewhere in the mountains or the marshes; but overall I think it's probably best to close off that chamber and move on into the next.

On the other hand, there have been a few modestly positive developments, or at least I'm taking an optimistic attitude toward them. One, again, is that I've officially become a killer. I was able to pull the trigger when I thought it was necessary, and then deal with the consequences, which so far haven't been much, for me anyway. I'm only mildly sorry that that particular person had to die in the interest of advancing my personal development. However, I believe he would have killed or severely injured me if it would have improved his financial situation. Fair is fair. But I don't see any more triggers in my future.

The other thing that gives me a glow of satisfaction is that I left Victor Carogna's car in the train station and threw his keys in the woods. I don't even know if he ever got the car back, and I don't care. This would be a trivial event in anyone else's life, but not in the life of someone who's always had a little trouble occupying his own parking space. It might represent the beginning of my learning not to take people like Victor Carogna at face value.

Both of those things are fairly theoretical. More concrete is the fact that I've actually made some progress lately with The Scarf. The edges still aren't quite parallel. The stitches don't all have exactly the same size and tension, and it's only about three-quarters the length it really should be, but it's all there. It holds together, it's long and thin like a scarf, and at some point I may even decide it's finished, and move on to the next project. By dint of mere persistence and repetition, my fingers have apparently learned something, even though my brain doesn't seem to know what it is.

More ambiguously, I currently find myself in the bed of an attractive woman, with a warm body snuggled comfortably against my side. Admittedly, the body is that of a hateful little dog, while the woman herself is half a world away, eating shepherd's pie and drinking foamy ale. Nevertheless, I consider it a hopeful sign that fast-talking Julia has entrusted me with her treasured companion and the rest of her apartment, which is encumbered with a mess that would make Leilah proud. I don't care about that, either. In fact, I'm finding it rather comforting to nestle into the encircling hills and ridges of Julia's landfill. This entire building, meanwhile, has a faint, disturbing tremble, even though it's after working hours for Mr. Clabber's agents. My plan is just to keep my needles moving and await developments.

###

About the Author

Charles Hibbard lives in San Francisco with his wife and no pets. You can connect with him by email at aintnorealfeline@yahoo.com
