 
# NEVER TURN AWAY

## Stories, Excerpts, and Other Odds and Ends

### **Marshall Moore**

### Signal 8 Press

### Hong Kong
**Never Turn Away**

By Marshall Moore

Published by Signal 8 Press

An imprint of Typhoon Media Ltd

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Marshall Moore

eISBN: 978-988-15540-0-0

Typhoon Media Ltd

Signal 8 Press | BookCyclone | Lightning Originals | Scarlet Storm Press

Hong Kong

www.typhoon-media.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, except for brief citation or review, without written permission from Typhoon Media Ltd.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

Cover image: Cristian Checcanin

## Contents

THE CONCRETE SKY

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

BLACK SHAPES IN A DARKENED ROOM

The Right Way to Eat a Bagel

Sex and Dragons

AN IDEAL FOR LIVING

Chapter One: GRACE

Chapter Two: ROBERT

Chapter Three: GRACE

THE INFERNAL REPUBLIC

Urban Reef

Marble Forest, Karstic Heart

BITTER ORANGE

Chapter One

## THE CONCRETE SKY

### Chapters 1 - 3

Originally published:  
Binghamton, NY: Southern Tier Editions (Haworth Press), 2003

## PART ONE

## Chapter One

## Friday night.

Stranded at the sort of party where he'd have been happier investigating the titles on the bookshelves than talking to the other guests, Chad Sobran took another sip of wine and considered his options for escape. Conversations careened around him like bumper cars. He held himself in place on the sofa. He didn't know anybody the room and wasn't sure he wanted to. There were about ten people left, now that Dalton and that guy he'd been talking to had vanished into thin air. Chad gave up trying to achieve oneness with the overstuffed cushions on the sofa. Next to him, to a busty blonde girl named Reese had spent 15 minutes babbling as soon as they were introduced: _You 're gay, that's like so totally cool with me, so is my brother Julian, and like his boyfriend is this black guy named Dennis and they're so cute together. Julian says Dennis is a total top. So what is this top thing, anyway? I just don't get that. I mean, is it like one of you is the woman and the other is the man? Dennis, you know, he must be really big. Whatever. Have you ever done it with a black guy? _Reese looked 20 and talked like a woman half her age. Braces fenced her lower row of teeth, and she smelled like a strange cross between Juicy Fruit, cigarette smoke, and the red wine she was drinking. Irritated, Chad shocked Reese into a troubled silence by telling her he had just gotten out of jail the day before yesterday. He hadn't, but after three glasses of cheap Merlot he didn't care enough about Truth, Honor, and Good Social Graces to listen to another word in that breathy helium voice of hers.

"I was only in for a week, but... you know. It was rough. The other inmates." Chad drew a deep sigh and visualized the shower-room gang rapes, hoping a shadow of residual trauma would cross his face. "Really rough." He lowered his voice to a whisper: " _I dropped the soap._ "

Reese's lower lip trembled. She couldn't have looked much younger without splitting into an egg cell and a puddle of sperm. She slurped the remaining Merlot in her glass, then wiped her lips with the back of her hand, never taking her eyes off him. Chad refilled her glass from the bottle on the coffee table, careful not to burn his sleeve on any of the votive candles, then refilled his own. He looked at her with what he hoped was a criminal glare. Someone turned up the volume on the stereo loud enough to make Chad's eardrums pulsate to the beat, and his annoyance enhanced what he hoped was a sinister aura.

"What were you in for?" Movie lingo from Reese. Cute. Next time she went to a party, she'd pin some hapless person's ears to the wall with endless talk about her brush with the underworld. She'd cast herself as the heroine and stage a dramatic escape. Just what Chad was trying to accomplish.

"I'd rather not say. You might get the wrong idea about me. I'm trying to put it behind me, you know? So anyway, my point is, all those things that supposedly happen to young slim white guys in jail? They're all true." Chad fidgeted in his seat as if his ass hadn't quite recovered from the various uses to which it had been put.

Reese beeped. Chad couldn't think of any other word to describe the sound she made. He looked down at his hands. Tonight he had put on three silver rings - middle finger and thumb of his left hand, index finger of the right. He twisted the thumb ring, then turned the hoop in his left ear. Left the right one alone. He stared off into space for a second, letting a nobody's-home look settle across his face like a layer of dust, and crossed his eyes. Would that make her think he was shiftier?

"Oh my God."

Reese inched away from him. Now and then she'd dart a nervous glance his way. She fumbled around in her Gucci purse, withdrew a crumpled pack of Virginia Slims, lit one with a pink Bic lighter to which she had affixed a glittery red heart-shaped sticker, and alternated between sips of wine and drags on her menthol cigarette. Her hands were shaking.

Chad basked in mild surprise. In the dim light of the party, he knew Reese wouldn't see him blush. Strawberry blond himself, he was prone to turning deep scarlet at the slightest provocation. He excused himself to go to the bathroom and stayed in there a few minutes after he had vanished, watching his reflection in the mirror. He met his own gaze, giggled at what he had just pulled off, looked away, looked back.

"Cheers." He raised his glass to his reflection. "You hardened criminal, you."

Dalton, not exactly a friend from work but the kind of guy you have a beer with now and then, had convinced Chad to come. _Just a few people, couple of bottles of wine, really mellow, you 'll like the crowd_. Everyone Chad knew had left Washington for the summer: Jerry Glint, his closest friend, had gone to visit his parents in Augusta, Maine. A novelty, the Glint clan. They liked each other. Chad couldn't imagine what that must be like. Teresa and Audrey, the lesbians down the street, had rented a villa in Montenegro, somewhere on the Adriatic coast. _It 's the new Tuscany_, Audrey had babbled. He had known her longer than her girlfriend -- since his abortive attempt at college, in fact. _It 's hilly and gorgeous, and the tourists haven't discovered it yet! The war and the economic sanctions are still too recent! There's such energy there! _Energy, yes, but was there electricity? His friend Roger was on an internship in Atlanta and had e-mailed ominous hints about transferring to Emory. Too much fun down there, he said. Roger's tall tales about beer, boys, and bacchanalia made DC seem like the hidebound conservative fishbowl it, now that Chad gave the matter some thought, was. And Greg, his only friend acquired outside of his brief interlude at George Washington U., before a drunk SUV driver had sent Chad's life on a strange detour, had moved to Missoula, Montana, on a trial basis. To see if he'd like it. Maybe he'd move. Or not. With Greg, you could never tell. All of which left Chad somewhat socially bereft. His roommate Rose was travelling, somewhere in the Mediterranean, last he'd heard. Dalton, he liked well enough, cute in his earnest straight-boy-manque _All my friends are gay_ way, but this wasn't Chad's choice of Friday nights.

Dalton drove them from the bookstore to this place in one of the apartment towers in Rosslyn, just across the Potomac River from Washington. Chad's car had enough gas to get to the Chevron station at the end of the block, but his wallet was running on fumes until payday, still a few days away. Dalton worked at Borders part-time to meet people. Chad worked there full-time in addition to working full-time as a temp, a professional juggler of administrivia from 8 to 5 in various federal agencies and law firms downtown. He held down a second job to slow his financial hemorrhage, not to meet people.

And now Dalton had vanished, leaving Chad in this hopeless party full of people who were too young, too drunk, and too loud. He had been talking to some guy. Some hot, obviously interested, no doubt gay _guy_. (Damn him.) Dalton thought he was straight? He didn't have that femmy vibe some guys gave off, but he sort of lit up when you paid attention to him. He looked at men. Men looked back. Dalton was tall and rangy, rather well-built, and had intriguing dark red hair. Handsome. The cute Latino he'd been talking to clearly thought so. Neither one was anywhere in sight. Hadn't been for at least half an hour. Chad had checked both bedrooms. He didn't need an electric sign flashing the headlines off the side of the Goodyear Blimp to guess what they were up to.

In the background, he overheard Reese. She must have been standing just outside the bathroom door. _That guy, Chad? The one who came with Dalton? Kind of blond hair, wearing the rings? Oh come on, Jane, you know who I 'm talking about. I think he's in the bathroom. _A giggle. _You were talking to him when they arrived. He 's wearing a denim shirt. Yeah, he's cute, I know, but listen: he's like a criminal or something. He said he was in jail. _Another giggle. _I think he was, like, abused in there. And he might have liked it._

Another voice, a bit deeper: _I thought he was fucking weird. Guess I was right. He 's a fag, isn't he?_

Chad tried to remember who Jane was. He remembered speaking to a brown-haired girl when he and Dalton had arrived. Twenty-five or so (his own age), with plain features, nothing especially memorable about her. She lived here. This was her apartment.

The potpourri in the metal urn by the sink smelled fresh, floral. Rose petals, cloves, bits of citrus rind. The kind of thing large chain drugstores sell next to the cash registers, in shrink-wrapped packets. Chad emptied the mixture into the toilet bowl, flushed, waited for the tank to refill, flushed again.

_I am lost. How did I get here? Why am I still here? I am going to kick Dalton 's ass tomorrow at work. I hope he shows up tomorrow with a sore ass and a bitch of a hangover._

Chad opened the door, smiled at Reese, who jumped. Startled, she stammered a greeting and took a step back. Jane, the same woman he'd met in the kitchen with Dalton, regained her balance sooner.

"Your name is Chad, isn't it?" she asked. She spoke in the disinterested tone of a woman who has thrown too many parties.

He nodded.

"I was kidding about jail," Chad said. "The only place I've spent the last week was shuttling between home and my two jobs."

"I saw you in Borders on Wednesday night. You were working at the information counter. I asked you a question about a Barbara Kingsolver novel," Jane said.

"Did I answer it?" Chad wondered what she was implicitly accusing him of.

"After spending five minutes looking into your computer." She held her beer in front of her like a garlic bulb to ward off an advancing vampire. Through her T-shirt, Chad could see the sideways-8-shaped bulge of a pierced nipple.

"It was broken, if I remember." Chad drained the rest of his Merlot. He already needed the bathroom again, but this exchange - he couldn't call it a conversation - had a weird, compelling appeal. Once you have given up on playing by the rules you can have quite a lot of fun.

"You didn't have the book I was looking for."

"Popular book." Chad looked around. "Your bookcases are overflowing. Are you sure you don't already have a copy or two stashed away somewhere?"

"I'd know. So why did you tell Reese you went to jail?"

Chad shrugged. "The voices in my head commanded me to."

"Right," said Jane. "Next you're going to tell me the CIA beams microwaves into your brain, because you're part of a conspiracy. And everything on _The X-Files_ is true."

"I sleep with a foil-wrapped colander over my head," Chad said. "Cross my heart." He twisted his thumb ring.

"You're nuts. Against my better judgment, I think I like you. Let's open another bottle of wine and go out on the balcony for a cigarette," Jane said. "Come on, Reese." To Chad, she continued: "So this guy Dalton you came with. Were you, like, _with_ him, or did you just come together?"

"We work at Borders together. I don't know him well. Supposedly he's not gay, he says he's not, but I've think that's because he hasn't clued into reality yet. I think he's hooking up with the Latin guy I saw him talking to. Who is that?"

"Nobody could accuse Dalton of having bad taste," Jane said. "Enrique is a friend of mine from work, and as we speak, they're up on the roof deck licking each other's tonsils."

Chad had a flashback: his own hand releasing citrus potpourri into the blue swirl of the toilet bowl. Would he get out of here without Jane knowing what he'd done? She struck him as the sort of woman who might appreciate his attempts at sabotage and terrorism. Maybe the stuff had been a gift from an aunt she hated, and he had done her a favor.

"You're not seeing anybody, are you?" Jane, now motherly, led him to the kitchen. She opened a cupboard and surveyed her diminishing stock of wine. "Rosemount Shiraz, a Cab - Merlot blend, or this bottle of Penfolds."

"Like Australian wine, do you?"

Jane nodded. "It's one of my cleverer affectations. French wine is so... I don't know. French. Let's go with the Shiraz. I've been hiding cheese in the fridge, and there's a box of pepper crackers from Fresh Fields in that cabinet, if you'll look behind the boxes of cereal. Reese, would you get a couple of apples out of that bowl?"

Jane poured.

"Do you still think I'm weird?" Chad asked.

"Oh, definitely. You work at Borders like 90 hours a week," Jane said. "I've seen you in there. You obviously hate it. I don't see why you don't quit. And you never did tell me if you're seeing anybody. All of that makes you a very weird boy."

Chad shook his head No. "I was seeing someone," he admitted. "For a few months, kind of casually. It fizzled out at the beginning of summer."

"You like Dalton."

"Platonically. I don't want to get mixed up with some guy who's coming out and about to dive into the scene. I'm 25. I went through that shit in college. I'm kind of past that. Dalton is going to do what Dalton is going to do, and if he wants to hang out, great."

"You like him," Jane persisted, motioning for him to follow her.

Chad shrugged. "I'd fuck him," he said. "More than once. But if he's not sure whether he's gay or not, it would have to end there."

"Maybe I should introduce you to Enrique," Jane said.

A degree of tension left Chad. For a while there he had been wanting to dislike these people, but the tide had turned. He still owed Dalton an ass-kicking later, but it could wait until he'd divulged all the sordid details with Enrique, assuming there were sordid details to divulge.

"I have to go to the bathroom," Reese announced, waggling her empty wine glass. "Jane, want to come with me?"

"Yes, I really want to stand in the bathroom to hear you pee," Jane said, rolling her eyes. "Don't go anywhere, Charles."

Before Chad could correct her, she pushed open the sliding glass door and stepped inside. Reese followed.

Chad leaned against the balcony. From here, the view awed him as it always did. Washington lacks a skyline like Manhattan, Chicago, or San Francisco, in the sense that there are no skyscrapers. Two structures dominate the horizon within the federal district: the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument. All other buildings are low and rather squat in comparison. The office blocks cluster in the suburbs that ring the District: Rosslyn and Crystal City in Virginia, Bethesda and Silver Spring in Maryland. From Jane's balcony, the nearby towers of Rosslyn lent a glow to the background, washing out the sky a bit. The Monument soared. Federal Washington twinkled. The Potomac shimmered black off to the southeast, Chad's right. Overhead, a plane roared toward National Airport, coming in for a landing. The flight path followed the Potomac, more or less.

"Chad!"

Hearing his name, Chad looked around. Nobody inside had turned in his direction. Nobody appeared to have shouted his name.

"Chad!"

Chad looked down.

A figure stood on the street below. Half in shadow, half not.

Chad leaned forward, to make out who it was. His blood ran slow and cold like a glacier, calving icebergs, when he realized who was standing there: his brother Martin.

Martin bellowed, "Chad, what the fuck are you doing out this late?"

Chad inched forward to get a better look. There was no question whose voice it was. Three stories below, the parking lot to this building, a landscaped perimeter... but Chad couldn't see Martin's face.

The wine soaking his brain did something to his balance just then, because the next thing Chad heard was the door sliding open, followed by a loud gasp, and then he was airborne, head-first. He had just enough time to observe his flight and react - _SHIT!_ - and then he landed painfully in a hedge. Someone turned out all the lights.

## Chapter Two

## Friday night (late)

The ambulance ride passed in a blur of light and sound, EMTs clustered around Chad when, against the better judgment imposed by the crashing pain in his left arm and his head, he opened one eye. Martin's face appeared between two of the EMTs (how many were there? Chad couldn't tell) for a second, a disembodied evil presence, Oz the Great and Terrible, then disappeared again. _Don 't look behind that curtain. _Chad felt warmth flowing into him. The warmth chased the pain away, and it was good and clean and right, and Chad rode the rest of the way to the hospital in a state of anesthetic bliss.

When they set the bone in his wrist, the drugs weren't enough. He screamed.

Another shot, another bank of clouds rolled in, and Chad coasted for a while. He closed his eyes and the whole world went away again.

One member of the intake team leaned forward and looked over the frames of her little wireless glasses at Chad. He was janglingly awake this time. He'd tried, in his thick-tongued way, to get them to leave him alone, just call a cab and let him go home and get some sleep, but nobody would listen. Now this woman wouldn't give him a moment's peace. Her eyes were laser-beam blue. Despite the late hour - 1:30 a.m. - she projected an air of competence and clarity. Chad thought her name was Susan, but it might have been Sarah.

"We know it's late and you've had a difficult day," she said, "But we'd like for you to talk just a little about why you're here. In your own words. We have to make just a few decisions before we let you go to bed."

Chad nodded. In the hospital, he had been given several shots. Antibiotics, he supposed, and drugs. Great drugs. His head was full of beautiful billowing cumulus clouds. They looked great and felt wonderful, but they got in the way when he tried to think. His eyelids banged together like cymbals sometimes, and like a xylophone others, when he blinked. He blinked a couple of extra times, for the effect, and wondered if the Intake Team (they deserved capitals, he decided) could hear the musical noises coming from his face.

"Can you do that, Chad?" Sarah or Susan put her fingertips together in a temple-like gesture that suggested both that she was listening intently and setting boundaries. Chad saw boundaries blinking in front of him like the reflective spots between the lanes of highways at night. When he squinted, the spots united to form lines. Like speeding.

Chad nodded again.

"I'm pumped full of drugs. You know that, don't you?" Of course they knew that. They had done the pumping. "Of course you know that. It's in my chart."

Another member of the Intake Team chimed in. Chad thought she might be a nurse. She didn't look like a psychiatrist, although he wasn't sure what psychiatrists were supposed to look like.

The clouds in his head shifted, dissolved, reformed. The psychiatrist had a brainy chic look. Even this late at night, Susan or Sarah didn't look bedraggled. Chad didn't know much about women's clothing, but he thought she shopped at the better stores. Would nurses and counselors have the salary to be as nicely turned-out? His thoughts broke apart and scattered to the four winds.

"Chad?"

He had already forgotten someone had spoken. Not Susan or Sarah, but one of the other ones. He looked around at them and asked, "What?"

They looked at each other, then at him.

"Someone asked a question. I'm off in space. It's the drugs. I'm sorry. I'm not usually like this." Chad hoped they didn't think he was being rude. "Really, I'm not." That was polite enough, wasn't it? If he was polite, then they'd let him go home. Or at least let him get some sleep. In the morning, when everything made more sense, then they could get everything squared away. When he had slept this off.

"We understand, Chad," said the woman who had to be a nurse. She had pens in her shirt pocket, and scissors, and a lot of other things. That seemed nurse-like, having lots of things in your pocket, being ready for contingencies. Did nurses have extra pockets sewn onto their clothes? Contingency pockets? He should ask. He would ask. If he remembered. Which he probably wouldn't. "We know the basic reasons you're here, and we're sorry you found yourself in this situation. But if we could get a little more background information, then that will help us to know what medications to prescribe, what kind of treatment will work best for you, that kind of thing. We'll be able to make some calls tonight and get things lined up for the morning. If you're not up to it, we won't pressure you - you can go right to bed. But it would be very helpful if you can talk to us first."

Chad blinked at her and marveled at how loud his eyelids sounded. Waves of colorless disturbance rippled across the fabric of reality when he blinked. Everything around him looked like a special effect. And felt marvelous. If he didn't know better, he'd suspect this conference room was an image projected onto a body of water, and someone was throwing rocks in from somewhere just outside of his pool of vision.

Beyond the members of the Intake Team, Chad could see nothing but a white room with a print on one wall. He couldn't make out the name of the artist. Blotchy pastel colors might have been intended to represent a flower.

He tried to collect himself.

They wanted him to talk.

Now he felt a fraction less marvelous.

He looked down at the stitches on both of his arms, the cast around his left wrist and forearm. His face felt thick, as if his skin were a layer of stucco inexpertly plastered on. He had not inflicted as much damage as he had missed. Fucked up or not, he could tell. Everything hurt, but could have been worse.

Five years ago, he had been in much worse shape. After a year as an exchange student in Spain, he came back to the States, spent an endless and miserable couple of months with his mother in North Carolina, then returned to DC to find an apartment and a job. The drunk guy in the SUV who knocked Chad's Matchbox-car Honda across two lanes of traffic, into a tree, hadn't noticed the red light. Thought it was still yellow. Chad never saw him coming. He remembered sliding a tape into the stereo, wondering what that loud bang was, and that was it. Lights out. He woke up in Intensive Care.

Chad spent two weeks in the hospital - long enough to fall madly in hate with sterile rooms, all medical personnel, and their well-meaning, repeated invasions of his person. Broken arm. Dislocated shoulder. Three fractured ribs. Some torn ligaments. Whiplash. He was purple with bruises. He gave the docs plenty to do. And in the hospital, the food, the lack of sleep, the smell, the relentless pain, these things drove him crazier. Nobody would bring him anything decent to read. Discharged afterward, home to North Carolina, back to Mona's falling-apart-at-the-seams house, that pushed him right up to the edge. Mona was sick at the time, herself, always exhausted and short of breath, and the drive to Washington wiped her out. She recruited a friend, a balding man named Gunther Chad had never met, to do most of the driving. Chad spent the endless trek down I-95 curled up in the back seat, praying to the malign nothingness that turned the wheels of the universe to please let him trade in his life on a new one. Gunther and Mona chain-smoked. Chad rolled down the windows and tried to sleep, but he hurt everywhere. How he'd be ready for school when the fall semester started, he had no idea.

Recovery took months. In some ways he had never recovered: his academic career had been scuttled, as well as his finances. And now, here he was, back in the hospital again. Fucked up, busted up, out of luck. More poking and prodding, more needles.

When Chad hit the hedge three floors below Jane's balcony, he was dimly conscious long enough to hear Martin pronouncing it a suicide attempt when Reese, Jane, and the other guests ran downstairs screaming. Smug bastard. Chad had shut his eyes again.

"I'm sorry," Martin had told them. "He's like, unstable. You know? This isn't the first time."

When the ambulance arrived, Martin told the EMTs the same thing. They told the doctors who set the bone in the ER. Somebody in the ER called Psych.

Chad, stuck without a visa in the border state between reality and anesthesia, just nodded. Martin stood there glaring. He issued an unspoken dare for Chad to disagree. What the hell, why not. He couldn't win. Broken arm, drunk, kind of a loser to hear Martin tell it, why fucking argue?

Welcome to the psych ward.

Chad wasn't sure how he was going to talk his way out of this one. Life wasn't grand, and he had pounded at least a bottle of Merlot before going airborne, but it wasn't like he had broken the bottle and swallowed the shards.

Sooner or later he'd have to figure out where Martin had come from, how he'd found out about the party. What the fuck he was doing there.

"I was with a couple of friends, at their apartment out in Virginia. Which hospital is this, by the way? George Washington? OK, thanks. We were partying. You know, candles and wine. Talking. Hanging out. These two girls and I went out on the balcony for some fresh air and when I saw my brother down in the parking lot, I leaned too far forward and I fell over the side."

Susan or Sarah gave a pert frown.

"If I wanted to kill myself I would have picked a higher floor."

Susan or Sarah made a face. Chad caught a slight hardening of her expression. He felt less marvelous now than the first time he noticed that the sheer marvelousness of whatever he'd been injected with was tapering off. Whatever medication they'd given him, it couldn't have been much of a dose, because of the alcohol already in his system. Pity.

"Your brother expressed some concerns about your safety. He said there have been previous attempts to harm yourself. Is this true, that you've tried to harm yourself?" she asked. "If your brother hadn't been there, you might not have made it to the hospital. It's just not something to be cavalier about."

"I don't think you have a clear picture of what happened. I was with a couple of friends. One of them called 911, not my brother. He shouldn't have been there in the first place. He was skulking around outside like a stalker. I think he was following me."

"Oh..." Susan or Sarah looked at the other members of the Intake Team. She blinked like a frog contemplating a fly. Any second now, she would lasso his head with her nine-foot tongue and drag him into her slimy red gullet.

Chad looked at the ersatz O'Keeffe print on the wall. As his vision cleared, he could make out its design. One gigantic orange flower. Had O'Keeffe ever painted a gigantic orange flower? She must have. She painted gigantic flowers.

_Great drugs._

_More please?_ Chad didn't dare ask.

"So what do you want to know?" he asked. "What else did my brother tell you?" The cloudy loveliness in Chad's head was dissipating fast. Before giving her a chance to answer, he added "I broke my wrist. I'm kind of scratched up because of the shrubs I fell into. It's not like this is _that bad_."

Someone else spoke up: "OK, I'll level with you. We know that you attempted suicide two years ago. According to your brother, apparently there's a lot of drug and alcohol use. Overall, it seems like there's a lot going on with you. That's what we were hoping you'd tell us." Chad didn't remember who this other person was. The counselor, probably. A balding but kind-faced fiftyish man in a tweed blazer, his voice twanging like a Texan's. He looked like the sort of community college professor who gives mostly As and Bs, and has given up trying to memorize his students' names. His belt and his shoes didn't match. What his name was, Chad had no idea.

Chad took a deep breath. Darkness was beginning to tinge the remaining head-clouds around the edges. Dark colors were swirling into those fluffy white shapes. Inside, he had the same sensation he did when he was traveling and his plane began its descent toward the airport.

"OK, I admit, a couple of years ago I washed down a bottle of Sominex with a couple of bottles of wine. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I don't know if my brother gave you guys any information at all, but the gist of it all is this: I was at GWU on scholarship. After my sophomore year, I spent time overseas on exchange. Everything was going pretty well, and then I was involved in a car wreck right after I got back to the US. Busted me up enough that I had to drop out of school. I tried to stay in, but my grades went to hell. I was fucked up on painkillers for weeks. The scholarship board was sympathetic up to a point, but they opted to stick by the rules. So I ended up losing my scholarship and in major debt. I tried to go it alone, but tuition at GW is about as high as it gets. My student loans looked like the National Debt. I couldn't repay them with the kind of work I was getting once I got out. I maxed out half a dozen credit cards trying to hold onto my car and my apartment, and lost all of it. I got a settlement from the other driver's insurance, but that didn't last long. My credit report looks like Bosnia when the Serbs went on the rampage. I couldn't handle the calls from collections agents. It felt like my future had been taken away from me, though no fault of my own. And I had some other things going on at the time. I'm not sure I want to talk about all of that right now. I'm too fucking exhausted. In retrospect it all seems incredibly dumb. Does that make any sense?"

They nodded again. The moment had a Terry Gilliam feel to it. The Intake Team looked like characters in a surrealist movie, nodding like wide-eyed, well-costumed automatons. They had already asked him questions from a yard-long standard form, checking off little boxes for Yes or No more or less in unison. In a minute they'd bark "Next!" and push a big red button. His chair would tilt forward, and he'd plummet through trapdoor in the floor into an oubliette, where howling lunatics would eat him.

The clouds in his head were _gone_. Overbright blue skies jangled down at him from the heavens, like a sports car commercial with the volume up too loud.

The professorish one looked through a chart. "If, as you say, falling off a balcony while drunk was not a suicidal jump, then it's questionable whether you should be here. I know you're exhausted, but if you could bear with us and speak to a couple of other issues, we can make the best decision in terms of what to do with you."

Chad took a deep breath. All traces of his comfy interior fuzziness had departed. This story wasn't going to have a happy ending, he could tell, so he resigned himself to whatever horrors lay in wait.

"My brother and I do not get along, no matter what he told you. I'd bet he told somebody I am mentally ill. Or that I have a drug problem, or I'm an alcoholic. Or that I'm a depraved promiscuous homosexual pervert who is condomlessly fucking his way through the male population of the National Capital Area. My mother - our surviving parent, but not for long the way her lungs are going - has abandoned me because she's so appalled that I turned out queer. I have no meaningful friendships. I just hang out with fellow club kids and we all shoot crystal meth, go to circuit parties, and have anal VD. He said the warts in my ass look like a plate of sauteed cauliflower. Is that a safe guess?"

Delayed reaction. Blinks. Heads turning. Susan or Sarah started to say something, then checked herself. The nurse - Lucy? Linda? - stood up, wobbling as if she were about to lose her balance. She kneaded her calves as she struggled to cross the room. "Asleep," she said, by way of explanation, to no-one in particular. The door swung shut behind her.

"My brother is the one behind a lot of this. He's the one my mother has cut ties with, not me. For one thing, he's my half-brother, if you want to get technical about it. He's the one who has the big problem with the fact that I'm gay. He's in the Air Force, stationed at Andrews, and he's got that stereotypically brain-dead military view on how men are supposed to be. The way I turned out is not OK," Chad said. "It's like he's fixated on me. He interferes in everything I do. He shows up at my house whenever he feels like it." He stopped to collect his thoughts. "To be honest with you, he'd have pushed me over that railing if he'd been there and nobody was looking."

By now Chad was trembling. He felt hot and cold at the same time. When he brushed his fingers across his cheek, his fingertips came away with a sheen of oil. He stared at his shiny fingertips and felt queasy again. If he could wash his face, he'd feel better. When had he last eaten? Lunch? No. Couple of late-afternoon slices of pizza at Pentagon City, after a masochistic trip in search of a new shirt to wear to work. He couldn't afford anything he liked. Consolation took the form of two giant slices with extra pepperoni, and a large Coke.

"I don't feel so well," he said, clutching his abdomen. "If you have any meds that knock people out quickly, I'd like some. I don't think I can say anything else without losing it."

Looks of alarm.

"Are you safe?" asked Sarah or Susan quickly.

Chad's eyes widened. He was taking deep breaths and sitting as still as possible. He didn't want to start crying, because he didn't want to lose it in front of these people - however used to bawling patients they might be. His head pounded. He had passed beyond being exhausted into some new and uncharted territory: ashes. When people give up, they fade to an insipid shade of grey. He was a lifelike replica of himself, made of fine ash, like the cylinders ignored cigarettes turned into. One puff of wind, and he'd disperse into oblivion. Good night and good riddance.

Not such a bad idea, now that he thought about it.

"I really need to sleep. I can't..." Chad shook his head. "Can we finish this in the morning?"

"Sure," the professorish counselor spoke. "You've had a lot thrown at you, and we're certainly not going to make things worse by depriving you of sleep." His smile was so warm and genuine that Chad felt a tiny spark of - something - deep within himself. "Your bed is ready. You have a roommate, Henri, but he's being discharged tomorrow. Going back to Montreal, I believe."

They showed him to his room and gave him pills to swallow. Martin put in a brief appearance, made concerned faces, gave Chad a hug that seemed more for the nurses' benefit than for Chad's, then, just as the pills were kicking in, left. Chad stripped to his underwear, crawled under the covers, and fell asleep in seconds.

## Chapter Three

## Saturday morning

Pain woke Chad from an uneasy, nightmare-riddled sleep. When he opened his eyes, he found a handsome green-eyed boy standing by the bed staring down at him. Chad lay still, unsure what to do or say. Some instinct warned him the guy had been watching him sleep. Chad knuckled crusts of goop away from the corners of his eyes. He hurt too much to come up with a greeting ("Hi, nice to meet you; what are you in for?"), and if the kid was a full-blown lunatic, Chad didn't want to cross him. Chad's arms and head throbbed, and someone had battered him with a shillelagh in the night - there could be no other explanation for the skullquake he'd awakened with.

"I just came in here to see if you were awake yet," Green Eyes said in what might have been a British accent. What a great voice: husky, almost hoarse. He sounded much older than he looked. Chad wondered how many packs a day the guy smoked, or whether he was getting over a cold. And whether he had a driver's license yet. Wasn't this an adult ward? "Breakfast will be here in a few minutes. I thought I'd be a nicer way for you to wake up than the nurses."

"They seem nice enough," Chad bluffed. He couldn't remember.

"They'll do. There's nothing wrong with them, if you overlook the fact that they're our jailors." Green Eyes offered a wan smile. Cute. He had long-ish dark brown hair, almost black. He kept brushing has bangs out of his eyes. Clear porcelain skin. Hint of five o'clock shadow, but not dense enough to suggest he needed to shave every day. Compact and narrow-hipped, the guy was take-a-second-look cute.

Great, I'm attracted to another patient. We can go out for coffee and talk about the side effects from our meds. We'll live happily ever after.

"I'm Jonathan," Green Eyes - Jonathan - said, fiddling with earring. (He had two hoops in each ear; Chad wondered what else was pierced.) "And you are? I don't believe we've had the pleasure."

"Chad." His head was pulsating. He needed coffee, now. A cola at the very least. Was coffee permitted in the psych unit? God, to think that it might not be... were they prepared for what an irritable fuck he'd turn into, and the headaches he'd get? "If you really want to climb to the top of my list of favorite people, would you pull the blinds? The sunlight is way too goddamn bright."

Jonathan complied, affording Chad a view of narrow hips in baggy jeans. No way to tell what his ass looked like, but then, he supposed he ought not to be looking. Pedophilia didn't turn him on. This guy couldn't be old enough to have legal erections.

"I'm not Jon, by the way, or Johnny, or anything else with less than three syllables."

"I'm sure you're as complicated as your name. Look, Jonathan, I'll be honest -- I think it's too early in the morning for me to have a conversation. Really. I'm a dick when I haven't had caffeine, and if we're going to be stuck in this place together for a few days, you don't want to be around me when I'm a dick."

Chad's head felt like someone had pulled off the top of his skull and replaced his brain with tumbleweeds of rusty concertina wire.

"Duly noted. The pleasure was mine." And - for the love of God - Chad bowed slightly, palms together like Gandhi or something, before leaving the room. He backed out the door, his eyes never leaving Chad. One more subtle bow, and Jonathan slipped out the door.

"Crazy people," Chad muttered. "Jesus Christ."

He closed his eyes again, turned over on his side, and dozed. Crazy, but cute and appealing nonetheless. Before Chad could drop off all the way, the click of the door opening brought him back. Footsteps approached. Chad opened one eye, saw a stout shape in the doorway, shut the eye again. He'd have kept it open for Jonathan.

"What's your name?" a woman asked, in accented English. This time the music behind the words sounded Spanish.

Chad mushed his pillow over his ears. The woman, whoever she was, walked over to the bed and shook him gently by the shoulder.

"What's your name?" she asked again.

Chad peeked over the edge of the pillow and saw a round brown face. Her eyes pointed in different directions. One of them seemed to be focused on him, but the other one definitely had the door staked out for intruders.

"I'm Linda," Linda said.

She stared at him with one eye, saying nothing until a bubble of pressure burst within Chad. He introduced himself but did not offer to shake hands. He kept the pillow over most of his face, and his body beneath the blankets. Twenty-five is still young enough to remember the rules pertaining to beds and safety: the monsters won't get you if you keep everything covered up. You're allowed to peek, but not for long. If Chad continued to hide beneath the bedclothes, sooner or later a nurse would come along to save him. His head felt like a hundred car wrecks.

"You're a homosexual, aren't you?"

Chad woke up a fraction more.

"I heard them say you were a homosexual. That's OK. I've got death growing inside of me."

Chad couldn't quite see the connection, but he was in the psych ward. Who could say what would make sense to the other people here?

Linda went on, in a trembling voice: "It's black and purple, and it smells bad when I pee. Like asparagus, but darker."

Oh Jesus. Chad forced himself to take a closer look at the self-proclaimed death garden. He wondered, _Does pee normally smell good, then? Can I look for it in shower gel and shampoo at the Body Shop?_ Linda straddled the full-figure-gal borderline between _zaftig_ and just plain chubby. Latina? Filipina? Chad couldn't tell where she was from and didn't want to ask. She had red work-out gear with white racing stripes down the arms and legs, and a red Stanford baseball cap. Chad closed his eyes and willed her to disappear in a puff of smoke. His arms throbbed. Linda did not vanish.

"Death," she whined. "There are lumps and clots of it growing in me. Inside my vagina. I could show you. There's a flashlight at the nurses' station."

"No thank you," Chad said. The boner Jonathan's visit had inspired instantly wilted, like a salted slug. He hoped Linda hadn't noticed it tenting his blankets. His cranium pulsated. Could the hospital helicopter be dispatched to Starbucks? Would his HMO policy cover that?

"Linda, I don't think this gentleman wants to be waked up hearing your _I got death in my coochie_ story. Why don't you go get yourself a chair in the meeting room. Group starts in a few minutes. Let him get up and get dressed." Chad's saving angel took the form of a petite black woman in a sunny yellow dress and a dark blue cardigan. She shooed Linda out of the room (Linda wrapped her arms around herself and rocked in place for a few seconds before shuffling out) and offered Chad a warm smile.

"You must be a nurse," Chad said, feeling transparent, all of a sudden. All of the pigment in his body seemed to have leached into the sheets and mattress beneath him. He pictured stains formed by the red of his blood and his gashed arms, the crystallized ginger shade of his hair, the pinkish tan of his skin, a slippery sort of blue for his lungs...

"How can you tell?"

"You have pens and things in the pocket of your sweater. You look prepared for contingencies. I was thinking about that last night. Nurses and contingencies."

"Very good. How are you this morning?"

"Well, I'm in a psych ward after plummeting three floors from someone's balcony into a hedge, and I've been falsely labeled a failed suicide. By now, my asshole brother has probably convinced the entire hospital I'm a risk to self and society, so he can keep me here. I hurt everywhere. I'm dying for coffee. And the way people keep trickling into my room, I feel like the new llama at the petting zoo."

The nurse blinked a couple of times. The look on her face didn't change. Chad couldn't tell how old she was. "Just don't spit on anybody, OK? Those llamas can be pretty mean." She chuckled to herself. "Sounds like you've been better, but you still got your sense of humor, so things can't be all bad." She spoke with a terrific Southern accent: _can 't_ came out as _cain 't_. Chad decided he liked her. "Don't let Linda get to you. She's a piece of work, no doubt about it, but she's harmless. Who else was in here?"

"Jonathan. Young guy, green eyes?" Chad started to add, _You know, the cute one_ , but he managed to suppress it. "He woke me up. I think he was watching me sleep."

The nurse made an amused face. "Jonathan, huh? He's a trip." Like a flight attendant, the nurse handed him a tray of breakfast. "Tomorrow, when you're up and around a little better, you can join everyone else for breakfast, but this morning we decided you could eat in bed. Those are your meds. You'll want to swallow them after you finish eating." She dusted her palms together.

"What are they?"

"A painkiller and an anti-inflammatory. No psych meds yet. If you don't need them, we're not going to give them to you."

"That's encouraging."

She nodded. "Well, we could stand here and gossip about patients all morning if we wanted to, but I bet you really want your breakfast. The cafeteria here is OK, could be worse, could be better. You got eggs, bacon, a bagel, some fruit, and orange juice. Will that do?"

"If I don't get coffee I will die," Chad said. "My head will crack open and my brains will leak out like tufts of stuffed-toy fiber."

"Then we should make sure you get a cup of coffee. You take yours black, or do you like cream and sugar?"

"Sugar, no cream. And tell me your name before you go? I didn't get it."

"Valerie. Why don't you get up and get dressed, maybe eat a little. I'll be right back with coffee."

Valerie turned to leave the room.

Off in the distance, Chad heard a television turned up, canned applause, a game show buzzer, a laugh track. Somebody won, somebody lost; Chad couldn't tell and didn't care.

A question surfaced. He stopped Valerie on her way out, to ask about clothes. "I assume I'm going to be here a couple of days, at least. How do we arrange for me to get my clothes and toiletries here? My roommate Rose is out of town."

"Do you have a friend or relative in the area who wouldn't be embarrassed to go through your underwear drawer?" She smiled again.

"I'll have to think about that." Chad hoped the painkiller was a particularly strong one, but he didn't want to ask because he'd sound a little too eager. With Rose and most of Chad's friends gone, Martin was the obvious choice, but Chad wanted not to involve him, if possible. Wanted not to see him, if possible. "It's a big request. I have to do laundry - I'm not sure what's clean. Not much. Jesus. And there's the issue of getting into my place. My roommate is God knows where in God knows what country doing God knows what, so that's going to be a challenge."

_Martin has a key_.

No. Chad would wear his dirty clothes for three days. He'd wear a hospital gown. He'd go naked before he would call Martin.

"Well, try to think about who you can call. Here's some breakfast. You'll want to get up and get dressed; Group really starts in about 15 minutes, so you've got time."

Chad lay in bed another minute, shaking his head in amazement. _I 've fallen through the looking glass_. He looked at the tray again to see if any of the food was labeled _Eat Me_.

"I saved you a seat," Jonathan said, the second Chad stepped into the group room.

Chairs - the kind with vinyl seats and wooden arms, the kind your ass sticks to after 15 minutes - formed a circle in the center of the room. Other chairs had been pushed into corners. Chad counted seven other people, besides himself: Jonathan (the easiest to look at), Linda (arms wrapped around herself, sucking her thumb like a toddler), a girl about his own age (white, with brown hair pulled straight back in a ponytail, jeans and a sweater, pleasant on the surface), an older - fortysomething? -- black man in neat corduroy pants and a cardigan, a white man of about the same age (glasses, receding hairline, shabby clothes, waxy skin), a brittle-looking woman in her mid-30s (white, dressed in black, wide-eyed and trembling), and another guy in his 20s, also white, kind of nondescript but smiling at everybody.

"You have bed head," Jonathan said.

Chad sat down. Other people trickled in.

Three days in here with no decent food, no stereo, no Internet access. No clothes, yet. No way to leave. Meetings in this bland room with its dreary inspirational quotes taped to the wall on squares of construction paper. Welcome to the gulag.

On second thought, this meant no phone calls from creditors. No mail to collect. No bills. There was a bright side.

"I just got up," Chad said. "Didn't have time to take a shower."

"You'll have time for that after group, unless they take you downstairs to the surgery center and remove your brain. But don't worry, they probably won't do that. Happens with only one patient in a thousand. You have to have the right tissue types and measurements. Did you ever read _Coma_? Robin Cook based that book on this very hospital."

Chad recoiled.

"I'm _kidding_ , Chad. C'mon, it's not like you're in the loony bin surrounded by crazy people!" Jonathan punctuated this with a big wicked grin. Charmingly, he blushed.

"Oh, that's right, of course. What was I thinking? I'm on one of those all-gay cruises to the Caribbean, and I'm surrounded by hunky men in Speedos. Want a piña colada?"

Jonathan looked thoughtful, but the blush lingered. "There are cruises like that? Maybe I should go on one. But I don't know about the hunky men in Speedos. I'm not really into muscles."

"I guess that answers that question," Chad said.

"The tousled look works. You should stick with it," Jonathan said.

"Well, I've got to get somebody to bring all my shit from home first. Before I leave on any cruises to Acapulco. I came in wearing the clothes on my back. The stitches are the only thing that's new. I could make a really bad pun about not having a stitch to wear, but I won't."

Jonathan smiled at him. Chad squinted to see if the green of Jonathan's eyes came from tinted contacts, but no abnormal circles of color gave the game away. Had to be natural. Very appealing.

"I believe you just made the pun you said you weren't going to make, you goofball," Jonathan said. "But you went in the back door. Very sly."

The circle of chairs had filled, their occupants comprising men and women, young and old, all races, the rest of them apparently straight, as far as Chad could discern. Nobody but Linda rocked in their seats, muttered to themselves, _looked_ mentally infirm, but from the grizzled looks of one or two of them, they might have been living on the streets. Chad wondered where Valerie was, with that cup of coffee. He gingerly touched his stitches. When his fingers came into contact with the ugly black thread and the puffy red flesh beneath, he felt light-headed.

"Do you really want to be dead?" Jonathan asked softly, after watching Chad stare at his wounds for a few seconds.

"I'm not sure what I want. My life back, maybe. Not to be lost. I don't know. Ask me again in a few days, after I've been psychologized."

The room had fallen silent. Jonathan's voice carried. Chad felt conspicuous.

"Good morning, everyone!" piped a woman's voice, from the doorway.

A man in a wheelchair rolled into the room and took his place between two of the chairs. Rather dashing-looking guy, Chad thought, kind of an updated Errol Flynn. Behind him strode the blue-eyed woman from last night, Susan or Sarah.

"We're stuck in here for an hour," Jonathan whispered. "It's all this mushy _How does that make you feel_ horse shit. If you're not sick to your stomach now, give yourself 30 minutes, and I guarantee you'll blow chunks. I just learned that phrase, _blow chunks_. Isn't that hilarious?"

"Why are you in here, then?" Chad whispered back.

"Because I'm crazy, of course. Aren't you?"

"Umm... I guess that depends on how you define _crazy_." Chad considered Jonathan for a moment. He had to be older than he looked. He had on jeans and a plain black T-shirt. For the first time, Chad noticed Jonathan had a small tattoo on the web of his left hand, between the thumb and forefinger. "What's that?"

"A tattoo," Jonathan replied. "Ink? Patterned into the skin?"

"I know that, dummy, but what's it a tattoo _of_?"

"Just a lightning bolt."

"Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to get the group started now," said Errol Flynn. He had a movie star voice, too, manly and resonant. Chad suspected clients flocked to him just to listen to him speak. He probably made a fortune, if he had a private practice. "We also have a new person in the unit, and we're glad to say that Henri left this morning to go back home to Quebec. He's doing much better, and he said for us to thank you all for your support."

Susan or Sarah beamed at all of them, a smile that stretched her features like Play-Doh. She turned her head to zap everyone in the room with the radiance from her face, and started a sporadic fit of applause. She applauded with the most enthusiasm, followed by Linda, who lolled to one side and made a sort of cooing noise as she clapped. Everyone else offered desultory golf claps.

Even better, thought Chad. Errol Flynn pronounced _Qu ebec_ correctly, with the K sound instead of the typically American KW, and he didn't butcher the name _Henri_ too much.

"Introductions, first, since we have someone new in our group this morning. Why don't we start with... why don't we just start with you, Jonathan. Do you mind starting? Just say your name, and where you're from. Maybe a little bit about what brought you here, and what issues you're working on, if you're comfortable sharing that. And finish up with one positive thing you're going to do for yourself today."

Chad looked at the unsigned cast on his right wrist again. His fingertips poked out of the plaster and looked as forlorn as he felt. By the light of day, plunging off the balcony after slurping up enough wine to drown a dolphin seemed intensely stupid. The tectonic plates in his skull crashed together and the lump in his throat hurt like a tracheotomy. Chad forced himself to take one little breath at a time, until he regained a measure of equilibrium. Hell if he'd fall apart in front of all these people.

"... are you OK?" somebody was saying, when Chad's attention returned. It took him a moment to realize he was being addressed. "Chad, do you need a moment? You looked very pale, just now."

Chad swallowed and wondered if he could speak. "Sorry," he said. "Zoned out for a minute there."

"Did you hear a thing I said?" Jonathan asked him, smiling. He looked sympathetic. "Can't have you wandering around here today without having a clue what my issues are and what positive things I'm going to do for myself."

"Me too," said the woman on the other side of Jonathan, the wan chick dressed all in black. Her chin trembled. Stringy henna-tinted hair stuck to her face. Some got in her mouth and she left it there. She gave off a wounded-but-defiant image Chad found grating. "I really want to share my issues with the entire group. It's like so important that we all are here for each other." She had a cartoon quality: she tucked her lank bangs behind Dumbo ears - the hair fell back into place before her hands came to rest in her lap - and stared at Chad with Bambi eyes. Chad wanted an eraser.

"I'm fine," he said. "Just... dealing with it all. And jonesing for coffee. Supposedly Valerie was going to find me a cup of coffee, but I guess she got distracted." Once Chad started talking, the words became easier. He only had to force the first sentence and a half out of his mouth. Then the lump in his throat dissolved, and his mouth began to work again.

"If you need to step out for a moment, it's fine - there's no pressure," Errol Flynn said, wheeling his chair around a few degrees, to stare straight at Chad. "Would you like for Jonathan and Gracie to re-introduce themselves?"

Chad nodded. He didn't care about Gracie but wanted to hear what Jonathan had to say.

"Jonathan?" Errol Flynn's look served as instructions to proceed.

Jonathan stood and offered another of those Gandhi-esque bows, endearing himself to Chad as he did so. Chad wanted to kiss him, and felt himself blushing. Felt schizophrenic, to be quaking in pain one moment and thinking pornographic thoughts the next. "My name is Jonathan Fairbanks. Most of you know that already. My story's kind of complicated, and I don't feel like retelling it all right now - I'd put everyone to sleep, especially poor Chad here, because he hasn't had his morning coffee. Umm... it's enough to say that I'm in limbo right now while some decisions are being made about my life. And because I'm a homicidal maniac."

Two or three people gasped. Chad looked around. He heard a nervous note in the chuckles and titters that followed Jonathan's remark. In Chad's head, one or two red flags unfurled and started flapping in a fresh breeze. Jonathan continued: "The positive thing I'm going to do for myself today is... I don't know. I haven't decided yet. Maybe I'll spend some time online looking at college websites, and try to get a clue where I want to go, once I'm out of here."

Errol Flynn - Chad made a mental note to ask the man his name once he got the chance - looked pointedly at Jonathan for a beat, then nodded. "Very good, Jonathan. Thank you. Gracie?"

Chad tuned her out. He leaned toward Jonathan and whispered as quietly as possible, "Homicidal maniac?"

Jonathan winked dangerously and nodded. "That's for the future," he whispered.

"Sidebar conversations should be taken out into the hall," chirped Susan or Sarah. "It's important that all members of the group respect the person who is speaking. It's just really important that we show each person that level of respect. Is everyone in agreement on that?"

"Absolutely!" said Jonathan, a little too loud. Everyone looked at him.

"You are the devil," Chad whispered, as quietly as possible, once Marcus, the black man in the corduroy trousers, began to introduce himself.

Jonathan nodded, looking grave.

## **BLACK SHAPES IN A DARKENED ROOM**

### "The Right Way to Eat a Bagel"

  * _Outsider Ink_ , December 2002.
  * TheInsomniac Reader: Stories of the Night (Manic D Press, 2005). Kevin Sampsell, Ed.

### "Sex and Dragons"

  * _Suspect Thoughts Journal_ , July 2001

Originally published:  
San Francisco: Suspect Thoughts Press, 2004

## The Right Way to Eat a Bagel

_A gust of cold early-March air buffeted George, distracting him from his crossword puzzle. He looked up to see if Angela had arrived. She 'd said to expect a short black woman with shoulder-length braids and a brown leather jacket, glasses, but not wearing make-up, no way, not at this time of night. The diner door swung shut behind a chunky young white guy with acne. George turned his attention back to his half-empty pint of Guinness and the smudged newsprint on the table in front of him._

George hated crossword puzzles and wouldn't have been working this one if he hadn't been in a hurry to get out of his apartment. Meeting Angela like this, in the middle of the night, had to be the most impulsive thing he'd done in recent memory. On the other hand, why not? It had been her idea, and what exactly did he have to lose? He was desperate for a change of scene, some fresh air, a different perspective. A conversation with someone who had no vested interest in talking him into anything or out of it, either. He'd been a little stir-crazy, and not quite ready to close his eyes. Now here he was. A previous someone had left a dishevelled copy of today's _Post_ on the table; George had read the articles that interested him while draining his first pint, waiting. That left him two choices: staring out the window like a lost soul in an Edward Hopper painting, or attempting the crossword puzzle.

Why did the puzzles he worked call for words like _ennui_ and _narthex_ and _cedilla_? Case in point: this one featured celebrity trivia. George knew a bit about literature and film, yes, but he tuned out the gossipy media as much as possible. Especially now, during Oscar season. Off the top of his head, he could name the actor who had played the reporter in Fellini's _8 ½_, but could he name the seven-figure hunk who had played opposite Nicole Kidman in her last two films, and was there a reason why he should care?

The waitress stopped by.

"You want some chips or fries or a sandwich or somethin'?"

George shook his head.

"Just another one of these when I'm done," he said. "And a crossword puzzle dictionary if you've got one."

"Oh sure, no problem," the waitress, a cute but Q-tip skinny redhead named Elyce, said through her mouthful of gum. Her cinnamon-scented breath seemed to cling to him. "We keep two or three around for customers. They're by the cash register. I'll bring one right over."

"You're kidding," George said.

"Of course I am. This is a diner. I'll bring you some chips, though. You look like you could use a bowl of chips."

George shrugged. He clicked his fingernails on the tabletop, which was smeary from the moist bits of food and beverage splashes Elyce had no doubt been wiping away all day with an increasingly grimy hand towel: pale grey streaks over pink Formica gloss.

"I'm waiting for someone," he said.

"Who isn't?"

Elyce the waitress walked away and George studied the white squares on the crossword puzzle again, waiting for either Angela or some flash of verbal insight to arrive like a _deus ex machina_ in an ancient Greek tragedy.

**+**

**George** _: i don 't really understand why you're online... you know, in a chat room. you don't sound like someone who does this all the time._

**Angela** _: I 'm not, this is my first time, my husband is away on business and I just turned on the computer and here I am_

**George** _: had to talk to someone? had to make a connection? =)_

**Angela** _: I 'm not sure what I'm looking for, just to talk with somebody I suppose. What's that thing you did, with the equals sign?_

**George** _: this? =)? look at it sideways, it 's a smiley face. see?_

**Angela** _: That 's cute. You're cute. Thank you._

**+**

This is a bad idea. This whole thing has BAD IDEA written all over it in big red letters. I should pay for my beer and go home and just forget about Angela.

George's grip on the base of his beer mug would have strangled the glass if it had been alive. He twitched, from nerves he guessed, and his hand slipped on condensation. The glass pitched to one side and sloshed Guinness across the crossword puzzle. _Affleck hometown_ ( _Boston_ , number 29 Across) and _Fred and_ ( _Ginger_ , number 18 Down) and the empty stack of squares where Nicole Kidman's hot new romantic lead should have gone were all reduced to a Rorschach blotch of carbonated, alcoholic ink.

This did not make George entirely unhappy.

At least now I don't have to finish filling the goddamn thing out, not with two thirds of it soaked.

Another burst of cold air signalled the arrival of someone new, and when George looked up from the soggy mess of newspaper in front of him, he knew he'd lost his chance to slip away. A guilty blush warmed his face as Angela closed the distance between the door and his booth.

When she slid onto the bench opposite and extended a hand to shake, George's first thought was _She 's prettier than I expected_.

_George classified female attractiveness along three axes: Pretty, Cute, and Hot. Pretty women were the even-featured ones who had been the girls next door growing up, the ones his mother wanted him to take out on dates and marry and impregnate. They had clear skin and symmetrical faces and an air of steadiness about them. Cute women tended to be the shorter ones who seemed younger than they perhaps really were. The facial topology could be more varied but they smiled a lot and were easy to like. And the Hot women, well, they were the ones who smouldered like runway models with no panties on under their Prada. He would expect a Hot woman to snarl "Say my name, bitch!" in bed but not a Pretty one, for example._

_Julia, George 's ex-wife, had been a stunning amalgam of all three. She still was, he assumed. And she was gone now, wasn't she? George refused to let himself dwell on her. Enough damage had already been done._

And Angela? Pretty, yes, actually, somewhat to his surprise. Not for the first time, George suspected his rating system fell short when he tried to use it on non-white women. Black women, for example, could be Regal in a way that no white woman ever could. The towering cheekbones and the imperious bearing gave these women an air of being mistresses of all they surveyed.

This was probably the worst idea of my life, agreeing to come out on a night like this, tonight of all nights.

She's going to think I'm a loser.

By any objective standard, she wouldn't be wrong.

"Firm handshake," George said.

"I'm in upper management," Angela said. "I didn't get there by batting my eyelashes at people."

"Break many bones with that grip?"

"More balls than bones," Angela said. "Is the coffee here any good or should I just order a beer?"

"I guess it depends on the outcome you want," George said. "Caffeine or alcohol. Do you want to wake up or go to sleep?"

"Yes," Angela said.

This took George a second. "Right," he said. " _Yes_. That would be why we're here."

Angela stared at him. "I know why _I 'm _here," she said. She turned and looked around for the waitress, apparently saw her, raised her eyebrows, and nodded in a _Come over here_ way. "Are you sure _you_ do?"

_A darkness smiled in the center of George, and he filled it with his remaining two inches of Guinness._

"I don't want you to talk me into or out of anything," he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'm clear on that much."

"Oh you sounded pretty clear on what you wanted," Angela said. "I guess that's the real reason I'm here."

"You wanted to see my clarity for yourself?"

"You could say that."

"First time anyone's ever wanted me for my _clarity_ ," George said.

_Elyce returned to take their orders, two beers and a basket of fries to supplement the stale chips George hadn 't touched, and left an oily kitchen smell lingering in her wake. George knew he and Angela would leave this diner reeking of grease. Soon enough, they'd bundle up in their coats and leave, with the waxy stink of the griddle in their hair, their clothes, their pores. Despite the cold temperature and the blustery wind, their noses would still pick up the odor. In the grand scheme of things, he supposed it mattered very little. George had other things on his mind, and Angela could go back to her family and her life smelling like an artery-hardening midnight snack._

Number Eighteen Across: _lox_. George hadn't filled that one in ( _smoked and orange_ ) but an idle glance down at the dry half of the crossword brought the word to mind.

"What am I supposed to talk to you about, then?" asked Angela after a silence.

Their beers came.

"We should talk about normal things," George said. "Tell me the right way to eat a bagel. Do you toast yours and coat them with cream cheese? Do you like lox?"

"You're nervous," Angela said. "I don't think you're committed to seeing this through."

George knew his hands were shaking, and he couldn't warm up no matter how much beer he poured down his throat.

"I've come this far," he said, meeting her gaze.

She studied him a moment, then sipped her beer.

"I'm probably old enough to be your mother," Angela said.

"Don't say that," George said. "That's impossible."

Angela smiled and took another sip. Someone fed the jukebox, and an old Pink Floyd dirge filled the diner: _Set the controls for the heart of the sun..._

"OK, I won't say that. Maybe it's true and maybe it's not. Maybe I'm trying to shake you up a little. Is that such a bad thing?"

"I'm nervous." George looked down.

Angela reached across the table and took his hand.

"I hate lox," she said. "But garlic bagels are a weakness of mine. Lots of cream cheese. The kind with chives in it. We're going to be just fine, OK?"

**+**

**Angela:** _I 've never done this before. Is it OK for me to ask what you look like?_

**George:** _that 's fine, you can ask me whatever you want_

**Angela:** _Oh no, anything? I don 't think I want to go that far... besides, if you sent me a picture I wouldn't know what to do with it._

**George:** _it 's kind of funny_

**Angela:** _What 's funny about it?_

**George:** _my expectations, maybe. i just didn 't have this in mind when i signed on_

**Angela:** _So are you going to tell me what you look like? I want to know who I 'm talking to._

**George:** _late 20 's. red hair. freckles. kind of handsome i guess, depending on what you're into_

**Angela:** _You know I 'm married, don't you? With kids. And I'm an African American._

**George:** _great, good, cool. i had a wife once, for a few minutes._

**Angela:** _What happened?_

**George:** _i 'm still trying to figure that out but i guess it doesn't matter anymore, she's still gone_

**+**

"You loved your wife very much," Angela said, releasing George's hand.

"What makes you say that?"

"That lost look on your face. I think that's the real reason you wanted me to meet you here. I've been married a long time. Maybe you wanted my perspective as much as I wanted yours."

"Are you sure that's what this is about? Perspective?"

Angela nodded.

"All right then. Yes. I loved her."

"And that's why you're doing this?"

"No. I mean, maybe that's part of it, but there's so much..." George stopped to think. "It's not for just one reason. So my business failed and I'm bankrupt and my wife left me. For a woman, if you want to know."

Angela nodded again and sipped more beer. "Another woman. How about that. That's happened in my family too. Is she happier now?"

"She hasn't called to let me know. I'd like to know. I have to hope she is, after what she put me through."

"And where do I come in?" Angela asked.

"The door over there?" George smiled. "I think that's where you came in. Although I might have been hallucinating."

"Grief'll do that to you."

"I just want to feel _better_ ," George said. "I mean, I haven't been expecting to be on top of the world, but _better_? It's not unreasonable. It keeps not happening."

"You're trying to talk yourself out of it," Angela said softly. "Would it make you feel any better if I said I understood?"

"How could you?"

"I have a husband and great kids and a nice home, so my life must be perfect," Angela said. "That's why I came out on a night like this. Didn't it occur to you to ask where my kids were?"

George had to admit the thought had never crossed his mind. He had wanted to start a family with Julia. Once upon a time. Perhaps this proved he had never been cut out for paternity, that he didn't think to ask about her kids straight away? Did that indicate some deficit in his priorities, some inherent unsuitability? Or were kids something you had to get used to? If it was such a complicated thing, having a family, why did so many people do it? And how?

"With their aunt. Who would have me locked up if she knew I was out in the middle of the night like this. With a white guy at least 15 years younger than me." She smiled at him as if she'd made a very small joke.

"So your life is not perfect," George said. "Forgive me for assuming it was."

"It's not perfect," Angela whispered.

They looked at each other. Elyce broke the spell by asking if they were OK, did they need anything else, some coffee, a sandwich, some chicken nuggets? More chips?

_Strychnine_ , George thought. _Something very old-fashioned like that. Arsenic_.

_" We're just great, honey," Angela said._

She turned her head to watch Elyce walked away.

"How do you want to do it?" Angela asked.

"What?"

"You know what I mean. I want you to tell me what you have in mind."

George opened his mouth and closed it. A sourness crept up the back of his throat.

"You really want me to tell you. Right now. You actually want me to describe it."

"Yes," Angela said. "I do."

"What if I just wanted you to have a normal conversation with me?" George asked. This felt like treading water in a whirlpool: dark currents dragged him down. His palms filmed, and he wiped them against his jeans. The stickiness lingered.

"I already told you how I like my bagels."

"What's your husband's name? Your kids? How old are they? What grades are they in?"

Angela shook her head. "I don't know what to say."

"You don't know the names of your husband and kids?"

"Of course I do. But this is the last conversation you're ever going to have with another living human being, and you want to talk about bagels and my kids?"

"Yes. No. I don't know," George said. He drained his glass. Might as well optimize his alcohol intake. Look at it as getting things underway.

"Tell me how you're going to do it."

"I can't."

"You're not going to go through with it, then?" Angela asked. "You're going to lose your nerve?"

George shook his head. Tears stung the corners of his eyes.

"I just wanted to talk to someone," he said. "Someone _real_. Julia's gone. My family... I can't do that to them, call in the middle of the night like this, knowing what it'll be like for them afterward."

Angela took a deep breath. "Maybe I came here to meet you for inspiration," she said. "Maybe I'm braver than I knew."

"What do you mean?"

"There's a reason I asked how you were going to do it," she said.

"What do you mean?" George asked. Then it hit him. "Oh. _You?_ "

She nodded. She started to speak and seemed to get choked up, as if there were a word she couldn't force out of her mouth. She grabbed the pen and wrote something in the dry corner of the crossword puzzle, a terrible word that when he saw it, didn't fit with any of the clues he'd been given so far: _CANCER_.

**+**

**Angela:** _So why is it such a surprise, you 're talking to me?_

**George:** _i guess this makes it real_

**Angela:** _Makes what real?_

**George:** _last night on earth_

**Angela:** _I 'm sorry?_

**Angela:** _Hello? Are you there?_

**Angela:** _George? Hey, be nice to me, I 'm new at this, remember?_

**George:** _never mind, i 'm being cryptic. i shouldn't have dragged you into this_

**George:** _look, this is the last conversation i 'll ever have with anyone, as far as i know_

**Angela:** _Because?_

**George:** _think about it_

**George:** _you haven 't typed anything for a few minutes, does that mean you're thinking?_

**Angela:** _I think I 've figured it out. But why?_

**George:** _i should leave you alone. you have your own life. you don 't need this_

**Angela:** _Well, now that you 've done it, you can't back out now... We ought to talk._

**+**

"I got the idea from an old girlfriend," George said. He surveyed the beer left in his glass. "I've nicknamed it combo therapy. I bought a tank of carbon dioxide from a science supply store. When I get home, I'm going to seal up my bathroom to make it airtight, duct tape around the doorframe, and then I'm going to drink and take pills until I pass out. I won't wake up."

"Very elaborate," Angela said.

"How are you guys doing?" Elyce asked, from out of nowhere.

George jumped. Nerves, he supposed.

"Fine," Angela said.

"Another beer," George spoke up a bit as Elyce turned away. Then, to Angela, he asked, "You're going to?"

She looked down. Nodded.

"My church teaches that it's a sin. But what's right about putting my family through hell? There's no treatment for... what I have. The bills will ruin them. How is that the right thing to do?" Her voice hitched at the end. "Both choices are terrifying."

"I envy you in a way," George said.

Angela looked up sharply. "Why is that?"

"You have a family. You have the comfort of a church. Religion. I'm kind of flying solo, here."

"That's one way of looking at it," Angela said. "I'm not sure if that makes me feel better, but it's something to think about."

"I completely underestimated you," George said. A truck rumbled past, rattling the windows. He looked back at Angela.

"It wouldn't be the first time I've been underestimated," she said.

Were there bags under her eyes or was it the light? George scrutinized her face for signs of illness. How impolite would it be to ask what kind of cancer she had, where it was, why it couldn't be treated? Was she in pain? Could she feel the diseased cells crowding out the healthy ones? Weren't they kind of off the edge of the world now, where most rules and conventions no longer applied? Of course he could ask those questions, he concluded after a moment's thought. Those and many others. The thing was, did he really want to know? He'd come here to have a conversation about nothing, after all, before going home to his pills and his gas tank.

"I read about a medieval form of torture," Angela said. "The victim would be immobilized, tied to a chair or something. A rat would be put in a metal urn, with the mouth of the urn against the victim's belly. They'd heat up the urn until the rat freaked out. It would be so desperate to escape it would burrow into the only soft surface it could find..."

"Oh God stop," George said. His gorge rose.

"Cancer took my mother," Angela said. "It seems to run in our family, this particular kind. I know what I'm in for, and it's a lot like what I just described to you. I'm..." She trailed off, shaking her head. "I'm not going through that. I'm not going to do that to my husband and my kids."

George stared out the window again. He couldn't meet her gaze. The corners of his eyes stung. Outside, the corona of mist around the streetlight was the color of a candle about to gutter out. A truck rumbled by.

"I have no idea what to say," George said. "This almost makes me feel selfish. Petty."

"Maybe you don't have to say a word," Angela said.

"I don't have cancer."

"I didn't come here to talk you out of it," she said. "Nobody holds the exclusive rights to pain. It's not an absolute. You make your choices."

"But..."

Angela looked away from him and shrugged her shoulders. A certain tension seemed to leave her face, a certain heaviness. George couldn't be sure. She underwent some subtle shift, as if she'd made a decision, satisfied herself somehow. He looked around the diner: two college students in sparkly club-wear were staring into mugs of coffee; several men around a table by the door were having a loud conversation with their mouths full; one girl who looked too young to be out at this time of night was eating a sandwich and picking her nose as if she were alone - a bruise purpled one side of her face.

"Maybe we've said everything we need to say to each other," Angela said.

She stood abruptly, murmured something that sounded like _Good night_ , and strode toward the door. For a second or two, George watched her walk away, her braids bouncing, without the reality of her departure sinking in.

"Wait a minute," he said.

But Angela was already out of earshot.

"Wait a minute!"

Heads turned. The bruised girl withdrew the finger from her nose and stared at her nail as if she'd extracted a diamond instead of a moist crust of snot. The raucous discussion by the door stopped. George jumped to his feet, dashed across the diner, skidded in the slippery place by the front door.

"Hey!" He recognized Elyce's voice, calling after him.

"Just a minute," he said to her, flinging the door open.

Without his coat, the wind was a cold polar bear slap across the face. It had claws. A gust of wet rain stung his cheeks and forehead. His clothes were instantly soaked.

"Angela!"

She stood on the curb with her face in her hands, as if oblivious to the weather. Her shoulders were hunched up. She seemed to be crying.

"Angela!"

And, a second too late, he saw what she was about to do.

_I didn 't come here to talk you out of anything_, Angela had said.

She stepped off the curb.

The words reverberated in George's head as a horn blared and screams erupted through the night. With a screech of brakes and an horrific thud, Angela disappeared beneath a speeding pickup truck. He had a split-second image of her body being dragged, of a tire crossing her chest, sinking into her as if it were no more substantial than a heap of newspaper, and then both the truck and the night were still.

_Maybe I 'm trying to shake you up a little_, Angela had said. _Maybe I came here to meet you for inspiration. Both choices are terrifying._

_George ignored the screams and the cries of_ Sir! _ - he recognized the voice as Elyce's in some dim and unconcerned region of his brain - and set off at a brisk walk down the street in the direction of his apartment. He hunched forward to keep the drizzle out of his face. _

_Only a few hours left until sunrise. Better not to think about this too much._

Maybe I'm stronger than I knew, _Angela had said_.

_" Maybe so, maybe not," George said to himself, mostly to drown out the terrible soundtrack in his head: truck colliding with body, horns, screams. He took a deep breath, thrust his hands into his jacket pockets, and walked a little faster. _

Don't think about it, George, _he ordered himself_. Just go home and do it.

## Sex and Dragons

That forest fire a few weeks ago? The one that incinerated a substantial patch of forest along the Trans-Canada Highway? Blame Harry Potter for it, if you have to blame anyone.

I was reading the fourth book in the series at a sidewalk cafe in the West End, enjoying one of Vancouver's rare warm and dry fall days. It would probably be the last such day we'd have until spring. The weather forecast called for clouds and rain starting that same night, clamminess that would go unrelieved by much sun for the next few months. I couldn't pass up a last chance to bask in ultraviolet radiation. The waiter kept my mug coffee cup full and my ashtray empty. I got little read, with as much of my attention spent on passersby as the story in front of me.

All the coffee had made me kind of jittery. It's possible none of this would have happened if I'd been drinking wine.

This guy came up to my table and asked if I would mind him sitting down.

Because I am not Canadian in the sense of growing up here and knowing what to expect from the natives, his boldness surprised me. In a good way. When someone who looks like that comes up to your table and asks if you would mind him sitting down, unless you are terminally stupid you answer with something along the lines of "Sure, go ahead." If you're bolder, you ask, "That chair or my face?" I'm not that bold, but fortunately I am also not terminally stupid. Terminally single, maybe.

"Sure, go ahead."

I grew up in a small town in Minnesota. Nothing but white people. Pale ones. Everywhere you looked, skin with the same luminous quality as the glow-in-the-dark stars children stick to their ceilings. So when somebody as deliciously brown as this strolls by, I have to bite my tongue to keep it from lolling out like a spaniel's. Whether I like it or not, my first reaction is to wonder, _Where is he from?_ With the almond eyes, he could have been Asian, but with that snub nose and curly hair, there could have been some black or Latino in the mix. For a few seconds after he sat across from me I just let myself look. _Nice_. I imagined his skin would taste of cinnamon and allspice. Trite, I know, but that's what I imagined.

"You like Harry Potter?" he asked, eyeing my book.

"No, I'm reading it because this man in a black mask broke into my house last night, held a gun to my head, and said I was under surveillance. If I don't read the entire thing today, he's going to come back tonight with accomplices. They're going to take me off to a remote cabin and torture me for days, using techniques perfected in the Inquisition and patented by the Catholic Church."

He blinked, opened his mouth, made a sound that sort of resembled "ack" if it had to be spelled out, and closed his mouth again.

"Are you going to introduce yourself?"

"I shouldn't cut into your reading time. If that man comes back tonight and takes you away, it would be all my fault. I couldn't live with myself, knowing I had contributed to your demise."

I'm terrible with accents, so I could only identify the presence of one, not pinpoint its origin.

"You'd only be partially to blame. I chose a bad place to read. This is a nice day, and I don't have to work. So I'm enjoying the weather. Besides, for all you know, I have a death wish. I _want_ to be slowly disassembled, a gob of flesh at a time. Red hot pokers and electric probes turn me on."

"And you're reading a Harry Potter story. What a fascinating combination," he said. "I'm Mark."

He extended a hand. The skin on the back was darker than the skin on his palm. A handsome line separated the two areas of pigment: light sand on a tourist beach, dark sea calm against it.

"Erik," I told him. "With a K."

"If you're reading those books, then you must have at least a superficial belief in the unknown," Mark said.

"Of course I believe in the unknown. Without the unknown, most of the world wouldn't exist. I've never been to South Africa and don't know anything about it, but I know it's there. Existence is not predicated upon my perception and experience."

Mark smiled. "That was as subtle as a sledgehammer, but it made me laugh a little, on the inside, where you couldn't see. Let me try again. You must have some passing belief in the supernatural. Yes?"

I nodded. After a second's hesitation, I closed the book and gestured to him in invitation. He doffed his leather jacket (brown) then took a seat in the wrought-iron chair opposite mine. I savored little aromas in the air he displaced when he sat down, that new-leather smell mostly drowning out subtler tones like cedar and vanilla and something floral. Roses. _This is almost obscene,_ I thought. _I want to taste his skin like a Cabernet, and name all the notes he leaves on my tongue. Is he wearing cologne, or is this just how he smells?_

Mark asked, "If I were to tell you that dragons exist, what are the chances of you believing me?"

"I suppose you'll have to tell me, and see for yourself. Outcomes like that are hard to predict, because one never knows whether the question is actually going to be asked." I finished the half-inch of cool coffee left in my mug. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the waiter and lifted the mug at him as a signal to bring a refill. I popped a couple of Tums from the roll in my pocket to keep my piss from turning into battery acid after all the coffee, then said, "It could be you expect the _possibility_ of the question to function as a surrogate, as a means of leaving me hanging."

"You must believe very strange things about people, if that's how your mind works." Mark looked grave. "Either that, or you're a very strange person yourself."

I wanted to do something a bit vulgar, but for an instant couldn't figure out just the right gesture. Maybe scratching my ear and inspecting the flakes of wax beneath my nail. Or staring straight at him, without blinking, until he began to squirm. I was raised by immigrant Swedes, who have practiced cultural eugenics on such behavior for centuries. Being nasty took effort. I licked the rim of the coffee mug at Mark, never breaking eye contact, not too brazen, but just suggestive enough.

"I promise, I'm hopelessly bizarre," I assured him. "Despite the fact I look like the nice blond boy next door, I'm a goofball on the inside."

"Which would suggest you believe that dragons might, in fact, exist."

"Would you like for me to believe in them? If I clasp my hands together and say, _I believe!_ , then will they magically commence to exist? Would that make your day complete?"

Mark took advantage of the arrival of the waiter to ask for a coffee. For quite a long time, he said nothing. The waiter, a handsome South Asian, made the mug-retrieval trip in mere seconds, travelling faster than the laws of physics ought to have allowed, white ceramic mug in one hand, coffeepot steaming in the other.

"I'm not asking you whether you masturbate with your right hand or your left," Mark said. "That would be rude. But you're reading Harry Potter. It didn't seem like a bad idea, to ask whether you believe dragons exist, because I have one of my own. Perhaps you would like to see it."

I blew across the surface of my coffee after I emptied four packets of sugar into it and leaned close to hear the tiny tearing-paper sound the crystals made, plunging.

"I think you're trying to pick me up," I said.

"You would object?" came the wide-eyed response.

"Of course not. I may be odd but I'm not stupid."

Mark insisted on leaving a five on the table to cover the coffee I'd drunk and he hadn't. He told me he lived in North Vancouver, not far from the ferry terminal, but he had to keep the dragon at his uncle's house out in the woods east of the city. We walked side by side up the sidewalk, parting to let other pedestrians through, shoulders sometimes touching. Mark lit a cigarette for himself, and as an afterthought, offered one to me. When I accepted, he surprised me by lighting one in his own mouth and handing it over. Think of Claude Rains in _Now, Voyager_. Even the trace of moisture from his lips struck me as erotic, and I had to play a quick game of pocket-pool to avoid public embarrassment.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"My uncle's house."

"You want me to accompany you all the way out there." I stopped dead.

Mark took another couple of steps, realized he had left me behind, and turned around, eyes wide.

"Well, yes," he said. "Don't you want to see it?"

"You're sure there is a dragon. We're not going to get to your father's house, or your uncle's house, whoever it belongs to, and the only dragon will turn out to be a tattoo on your inner thigh?"

"You would object?" he asked again.

"No, but if that's what I'm in for, don't you think you should just tell me now, so there won't be any disappointments later? It would be criminal to build up my hopes of seeing this great, fire-breathing beast, then discover that the reality exists only in ink? Or, worse, is an exotic species of lizard you keep someplace both dramatic and faintly ridiculous, like a barbeque brazier?"

He closed the distance between us in one large step, leaned close, and whispered five things in my ear:

_I have a beautiful uncircumcised cock._

_I have a large, colorful dragon tattooed across my back, between my shoulderblades._

_And I have a real dragon in the woods behind my uncle 's house._

_How many of these things you get to see is entirely up to you._

_Do you have a car, or do you want me to drive?_

I drove. No matter how bright the sparks flying between us got, I couldn't lose sight of how stupid riding out into the middle of hilly suburban nowhere with a complete stranger would be. I drove with a sense of urgency, slaloming in and out of traffic, photo radar be damned. I wanted to maintain some sense of control, and to keep the trip as short as possible.

"I like your car," Mark said.

I have a newish Mercedes roadster. It's red. I drive it fast.

"Thank you."

He put his hand on my knee and adjusted his seat slightly, leaning back, spreading his legs a little. When he closed his eyes, he looked like a young boy.

I struggled to keep my eyes on the road.

"Don't fall asleep," I told him. "I don't know where we're going. I'd have no choice but to drive home and take you with me."

"You would object?"

Mark's uncle lived in a wooden A-frame house in the middle of nowhere. This wasn't even the suburbs. Vancouver and its satellites had long since petered out. After almost an hour on the highway, I began to think we really would cross the mountains and end up somewhere remote, like the Okanogan, before he told me to exit. As the last of my patience ebbed, he directed me to take this exit, then that road, then that unmarked gravel path leading into a forest.

"This is a good climate for dragons," Mark said as my car crunched along.

"I should have driven the Pathfinder today," I said. "Something told me to, and I didn't listen. Why is this a good climate for dragons?"

"Because we get so much rain here. If the dragons set the trees on fire, odds are, we would get rain before much damage is done."

"Now you're saying dragonS with an S instead of dragon_ with no S. Had you noticed? Do you have more than one dragon? Will this be frightening for me?"

"There's only one, now. The others are no longer here." Mark looked out the window. I imagined a pensive look on his face. "As they grew, they were setting things on fire, so we were forced to move them to other quarters. The novelty of having them was offset by gruesome practicalities. We had to take steps. You understand."

I parked near the house. The place looked deserted. If anyone still lived there, I couldn't tell.

"My uncle is in Toronto on business," Mark explained. "He should be back in a couple of weeks. I'm keeping the house for him."

"I see."

"He travels constantly. Follow me."

Mark led me behind the house, down a trail into the trees. I followed and watched his ass, perfectly round and framed by his jeans. What would it be like to pull down his pants and bite his buttocks down low, not too hard, just enough to make him writhe and gasp? Then to turn him around and...

"He must have taken it with him," Mark said, disappointment in his voice.

We had reached a clearing. Light filtered green through the leaves overhead. A strong smell of earth and forest surrounded us, rich soil underfoot, a very clean smell. Birds squawked. Scuffmarks in the carpet of leaves underfoot were the only sign anyone or anything had been here before us.

"Isn't that the sort of thing you would have known? Didn't your uncle say, _Mark, I 'm taking the dragon to Toronto with me, wish me luck because I want to carry it on instead of checking it. Do you think it will fit in an overhead bin?_"

"You're such a mean guy," Mark said.

"I think you like it. So is there really a dragon? Honest?"

He nodded. "Of course there is. I wouldn't have brought you here just for the sex. We could have done that closer to home."

"You seem to think it's _fait accompli_ that we're going to get naked. I think you dreamt up the bit about the dragon just to lure me out into the middle of nowhere, to molest me in this jungle."

"So what if I did?" Mark began to unbutton his shirt. He exposed a widening V of hairless, lightly developed brown chest. "You would object?"

For the next two weeks I couldn't get him out of my head. I didn't hear from him, not a word, not a phone call, nothing. This surprised me. He had seemed determined to prove a point. The encounter didn't feel like a pick-up with kinky supernatural overtones. As delicious as Mark turned out to be, I assumed I'd hear from him, and when I didn't, I went a bit stir-crazy. Nobody really noticed, and I didn't talk about the encounter with the friends who had convinced me to move up here. I'd have sounded obsessive. Like a movie playing on a screen behind my eyes, I kept seeing him leading me by the hand down the trail out of those woods. In the house, we spent hours doing everything we could think of to try. Later, spent, we raided his uncle's refrigerator, then returned to feasting on each other once our stomachs were full. I got home at 4.00 in the morning.

Finally, an e-mail:

_I have the dragon. Meet me at the pagoda in the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. Not the public park. I assume you have been here long enough to know which is which. The pagoda is off-limits to most visitors, so we will have to time this carefully. Tell me when you can be there. Mark_

This was Sunday. I could meet him no earlier than Tuesday.

His response came right away:

_Terrific. Can you arrive late in the day, when the park is about to close, and hide until everyone is gone?_

This sounded criminal. I loved it.

_You bet_ , I typed. _Be sure to bring the dragon this time_.

The Garden, a tiny gem tucked away in a corner of Vancouver's Chinatown, made no sense whatsoever as a place to meet Mark, but I showered and drove across town to the rendezvous, chanting _Suspension of Disbelief, Suspension of Disbelief_ as a mantra.

Little traffic, synchronized traffic lights, a parking spot next to the entrance to the Garden... all the signs portended a good afternoon, or evening, or whatever they call it here. Growing up in Minnesota, I'm used to long summer days, or rather, I used to be. I lived in San Diego for years before leaving the US. It gets dark there. North of the border, the sun continues to shine at 9.30 pm. What's the line of demarcation between afternoon and evening? I puzzled over this as I bought my admission ticket and entered the garden.

It's small. According to a brochure I picked up, a gang of artisans from Suzhou, a city in China, spent a year constructing it. _The materials, tools, and techniques used in the construction were almost identical to those used centuries ago in the building of the famous Suzhou gardens. Most of the elements were shipped from China in more than 950 crates containing the architectural components - hand-fired roof tiles, carved woodwork, lattice windows, limestone rocks, and even the courtyard pebbles. _Perhaps I was a clod for not having heard of the famous Suzhou gardens. I had only seen this garden mentioned in lists of Vancouver tourist attractions, along with the aquarium and a couple of suspension bridges in the mountains north of the city.

I liked the place. If it truly counted as one of Vancouver's top attractions, I wondered what that signified for the local tourism industry. The tourists must have finished their tours and retired to one of the nearby restaurants for dim sum, because I had the place to myself. I wandered the gardens, white pebbles crunching underfoot, bonsai jasmine treelets perfuming the air just enough to notice.

"Sir, we're about to close," said the woman from the Entrance Court.

"I'll just be a moment, thank you."

My brochure identified the only pagoda-like structure in sight as Ting. A ting? A Ting? The ting? To capitalize, or not to capitalize; that was the question. And which article to use? Shakespeare never faced that dilemma, to my knowledge, when confronted with a small but ornate Asian-esque building in which he hoped to view a real live dragon and then perhaps get laid.

To get to it I had to step over a rope, descend a few stone steps, and make my way into what looked like a cave. Water gurgled to my right, its source a small waterfall up ahead. I hoped I hadn't been seen. Being tossed out of the Garden would leave me feeling like the king of fools.

I climbed up.

"You're here," Mark said, looking surprised. I had caught him reading. John Grisham, of all things. I'd have expected something New Age, full of crystals and mysterious symbols. Kahlil Gibran, or maybe Shirley MacLaine. Mark had on jeans faded almost white, and a bulky grey McGill University sweatshirt.

Next to him, a metal mesh pet carrier. Empty.

"I am. It's nice to see you again. Show me the dragon."

"You frightened it," Mark said. "It's not here, exactly."

He took something out of his pocket. I envied his hand. The object he retrieved glinted when he held it up for me to see.

"This is a scale," he said. "The dragon is molting."

"Where is it?" I stopped to rethink my approach. "Jesus. Listen to me. It's nice to see you again - don't get me wrong. Even if the dragon is a fictional creature, I'm still glad to see you. I do have manners, really."

He nodded at me and looked pleased.

"Here." He gave me the scale.

It had the same iridescent quality as a circle of mother-of-pearl. When I looked at it more closely, other colors appeared: blues, purples, reds. When I scratched it with a fingernail, it felt like bone.

"How did the dragon become frightened of me? I'm not a frightening guy."

Mark shrugged, and gestured for me to sit beside him.

"Dragons are unpredictable, especially when they're young. You never know what to expect from them. I think this one couldn't figure out what to make of you, so he decided not to stay and find out for himself."

"Him?"

Mark nodded. He put his hand over mine. Despite the chill in the air, he felt warm.

"So where did he go?"

"He rotated. Have you ever read the book _Stranger in a Strange Land_ , by Robert Heinlein?" When I shook my head No, Mark explained: "Heinlein knew a few things before his time, or he guessed well. The main character in that book had an ability to get rid of people and things: he didn't make them disappear, exactly, but he _rotated_ them. My uncle explained this to me. The physics involved goes over my head. I still doubt I understand it fully, but the idea is, the universe is a mathematical construct, and objects can be rotated in relation to their current position, and they leave this plane for another one, which is both very close and very distant, and we have no access to them."

"Sounds like Heathrow," I said, lost.

"Something like that. In any case, the dragon can rotate himself and come back. Sooner or later he'll make up his mind to return to me, and then I'll have to find some hens for him to eat." Mark shrugged again. "He often stays away for days on end."

I sensed a game being played with me.

"Are you at least glad to see me?" I asked, trying not to sound as petulant as I felt.

He leaned over and kissed me, his tongue slipping between my teeth. His mouth tasted like electricity and peppermint. After a breathless minute, he pulled away.

"Of course I am."

"We're going to get caught, you know."

"No. I bribed the admissions lady. What will it take to get you out of those clothes?"

"The magic word," I said with a grin. "That's what you brought me here for, isn't it? There's no dragon." I couldn't help grinning at the silliness of it all: my own, for believing I might see a dragon, and his, for thinking I would believe it, and for choosing this place for a tryst. Layers upon layers of quivering, gelatinous silliness. "You just want to ravage me."

"So what if I do?" Mark asked, unbuttoning my pants without first saying Please. "You would object?"

This time Mark accompanied me to dinner after we had enjoyed each other in various ways, as the sun set. We toweled off as best we could with Handi-Wipes I kept in my backpack, then drove to a Spanish place in the West End near my apartment. Drunk on sangria, he told me his mother was Puerto Rican and his father, a Straits Chinese from Malaysia. He had grown up in Montreal. Typical Canadian, in his way: he spoke French because of his Quebec origins, Spanish because of his mother, Cantonese because of his father, and English because... well, that part's obvious. Degrees in English literature and French. He had moved to Vancouver for grad school, realized he hated his program, and dropped out to travel. Money didn't seem to be a problem. I didn't ask why.

I told him my own strange tale: the tightly wrapped Swedish childhood in Minnesoooooota, college in the Twin Cities, the job in San Diego I took only because I needed to experience warmth in January.

"Why Canada, though?" Mark helped himself to seconds from the vat of paella we had ordered. "If you want to experience warmth in January, there are many other countries where you're more likely to find it."

"My parents were killed last year on a flight to visit me. I lived near the airport. The plane crash-landed into a building down the street. I had ended a relationship not long before that, and all my friends were people I'd met through him. I lost my appetite for San Diego. Taxes would have eaten up a lot of the estate if I had stayed in the US, but I talked to a couple of immigration lawyers, got a couple of foreign passports, and left. Now I'm here." I shrugged. It no longer hurt to talk about this. I hoped I wasn't giving him the impression that I might be about to succumb to grief and leap from the Lions Gate Bridge. "No particular reason. I'd heard it was beautiful. I have a couple of friends here, and they invited me to stay with them until I either got my own place or moved to another city."

"Are you going to move to another city?"

"I doubt it."

"But if I fail to show you the dragon, then you might get the wrong idea about us Canadians. I might end up driving you away. That would be most unpatriotic of me."

"Then I guess you owe it to your country to make sure I see the dragon as soon as possible. Many things are hanging in the balance."

"I will have to put extra effort into it, definitely. Have you finished eating? Unless you want to drive me home, we should get going: it's almost midnight, and the ride home will take all night."

"You're staying at my place tonight," I told him. "Unless you have to be somewhere first thing in the morning."

I woke up to an empty apartment: no Mark. His half of the bed still felt warm, and smelled like him. I rolled over and pressed my nose into his pillow.

In the kitchen, a note:

_I have an appointment today at noon. Call me later, and we can get together again. I will try to convince our mutual friend not to disappear this time. XO, Mark._

Questions surfaced:

Had he really taken a pet cage containing a dragon across the water from North Vancouver on the ferry, transferred to the SkyTrain, then walked the three or four blocks through Chinatown with it, to meet me?

Hadn't anyone noticed? Or could the thing turn invisible, in addition to _rotating_ conveniently out of view just before I arrived?

Did the dragon, in fact, exist? And if so, how had he acquired it? Why? Of what use was a baby dragon, anyway?

Had I picked up a lunatic? Was I becoming one?

Was this an elaborate seduction or a complete crock of shit?

No answers revealed themselves. I spent the day in a stew, trying to piece together a puzzle with no clue what the final picture ought to look like.

Three days later, another e-mail came, as oddly formal as its predecessors, and as sweet in its off-center way:

_Hi Erik... if you can be persuaded to drive out to my uncle's house again, then I will finally be able to show you the dragon. Not just the one on my back, either. I think we will be forced to turn the real one over to other caretakers, since it is growing rapidly. We would rather not be roasted. So come while you can. Let me know if this weekend will be a good time. Looking forward, Mark_.

Dragon or no dragon, I decided I'd be a fool to miss this. Boys like Mark only come along every so often. It is important to pounce on them when they do.

The column of smoke above the horizon announced disaster, even from a distance. This could not be good. I remembered seeing no other homes or buildings in the area, as we had approached.

As I crunched up the track leading to the property, sirens wailed and lights flashed. Flames roared around Mark's uncle's house, and a firefighter standing guard waved for me to pull over. Amid the panic at the sight of the house ablaze, my mind went down stranger pathways. What is it about Canadian men in public service positions? Are they genetically engineered to be square-jawed and handsome?

"You ought to turn around and leave," he advised. A bead of sweat dripped off a towering, smoke-smudged cheekbone. Through my open window, the stench from the fire pummeled my face. The roar of the flames sounded like a giant machine eating the landscape. "We think we've got this contained, but just in case we don't, you'd be safer somewhere else. You're surrounded by trees, up here."

"Thanks," I told him, amazed that he had stopped to talk. In the States, someone would have angrily waved me away, maybe shouted. Further proof I'm living on the more civilized side of the border.

One week, two weeks, three weeks: nothing. No word from or about Mark. What to feel? I hadn't been in love with him. Strange cocktails of emotions made me drunk: Concern with undertones of curiosity and dark notes of self-doubt. A double-shot of disappointment with a small bitter garnish of embarrassment. Brooding, neat.

Two months passed, then three.

I haunted the cafe where I met Mark - nothing new in that, though, since I'd haunted the place _before_ I met him. The servers and both hostesses knew my name. I chose a table by the window and typed ramblings into my laptop, drinking cup after cup of coffee and sometimes staring out at the constant pall of dark rain.

One dry-ish afternoon, he showed up.

"What happened to Harry Potter?" He slid into the other side of my booth.

"J. K. Rowling is deciding that, as we speak. Ask _her_."

"She's in Scotland."

"My mobile phone is equipped to make international calls. But I doubt she's listed. It was worth a try. How was Toronto?"

"Pleasant. I always enjoy myself there."

"I'll have to go sometime. Never been there. What kind of Canadian has never visited Toronto?"

"The American kind with a Canadian passport," Mark said. "I was hoping you'd be here."

"You were?"

Mark's face seemed distorted for a second, and he clamped a hand over his mouth and nose. I noticed a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

"Almost sneezed," he said. "That would have been somewhat inauspicious of me."

"Look into the sunlight if you can find any," I said with a gesture out the window. "Sneeze and get it out of your system."

"No, really."

"Go ahead!"

Mark looked outside. That scrunching-up facial expression came back: his nose quivered, he shut his eyes tight, and his mouth puckered as the urge overtook him. He took a deep sharp breath and sneezed.

Several sparks shot out of his nose.

They landed on the tablecloth, which commenced to smoulder.

For a second I didn't believe what I was seeing, but Mark poured water over the burning spot, then concealed it beneath the salt and pepper shakers.

"Fuck," he said, wiping his nose. "That wasn't supposed to happen. I really do need to leave, and you should come with me, or at least leave, yourself, if you don't want questions. I can't assume nobody saw that."

The decision took two whole seconds. I turned off my laptop, thankful it hadn't been scorched, and hurried out of the cafe behind him. Heads turned. Who had seen?

We walked down the sidewalk.

"You did that on purpose, you fucker," I told him.

"Doesn't seem to bother you."

"Never slept with someone I knew was a dragon."

Mark shrugged.

"You did that to pick me up again, didn't you?"

"You would object?"

## **AN IDEAL FOR LIVING**

### Chapters 1 - 3

Originally published:  
Maple Shade, NJ: Lethe Press, 2010

## **Chapter One:** GRACE

## _Palo Alto. Spying in Sphere City. What pasta sounds like._

Grace White gathered her thoughts, clambered out of her car, and took a deep breath: the Palo Alto breeze smelled like eucalyptus overlaid with the merest whiff of jet fuel from SFO. The sky was a fierce shade of turquoise. Well-tended pots of flowers exploded with color at every corner. How long could she gaze at a pot of shocking pink impatiens before her eyeballs burst in their sockets? Before the intense orange of nasturtiums microwaved her retinas? Palms swayed in the breeze; she stood close enough to one to hear it creak. Fronds rustled. Cell phones warbled. She was going to meet a detective in less than ten minutes. In some smoggy Eastern metropolis like Washington or New York, this would all make sense. Even San Francisco, just an hour (or two, depending on traffic) up the Peninsula, she could picture herself in a coffee shop, wearing a big hat with a floppy brim, half-hiding behind a newspaper, and simmering as she waited for Rich and his hussy to appear. The lifeblood of San Francisco, like that of Las Vegas and New Orleans, may run thick with debauchery, but Palo Alto put her more in mind of palm trees, Prada, and particle accelerators. As a place for covert humping, it was just absurd.

You'd think he wouldn't do it so close to home. You don't shit where you eat. It's just tacky.

Grace stayed by her car for a moment, at loose ends with herself. She hadn't come downtown to purchase anything, and had no bags (but plenty of baggage) to stash in the trunk before meeting Mike. Perhaps all she wanted was to maintain a sense of contact with something familiar, to brace herself up for what she was about to see and hear - better to center herself with her Volvo than nothing at all. Her own center would not hold, not for much longer.

Grace wondered if she deserved this. She hadn't discussed it with her mother because she didn't have to. Gloria would say, _That 's what you get for letting yourself go. Not even 35 and he's already running out on you. Welcome to womanhood. Get lipo. _Grace knew things weren't so cut and dry. Rich had had little affairs here and there. Once or twice, years ago, so had she. Nobody in their right mind had ever called marriage easy. Grace thought it was more like driving through New Jersey: when you come to an ugly stretch on the turnpike, you turn your head and look the other way for a while. With patience, you'll be rewarded with greener vistas soon enough.

Rich had never been so open about his dalliances before, so disinclined to care if she found out. He didn't come home with lipstick on his collar or his cock, and he never reeked of Miasma or Effluvium or whatever Calvin Klein's newest migraine in a bottle was called. Rich's attitude shift appalled her more than anything: his coolness, his lack of engagement, the way his face no longer softened when he looked at her. His genuine smiles had been replaced by a tight and straining variant that told her volumes more than she wanted to hear.

_I am still an attractive woman. No, omit_ still _. I am an attractive woman, period. Or no period. That 's not for another couple of weeks. So I've got junk in my trunk. Maybe there've been too many trips to Ben & Jerry's. Whatever. Big fucking deal. I'm natural. I'm real. I'm not that peroxided slut of a paralegal. And I deserve better than this. Don't I?_

_Enough of that_. Grace couldn't tell whether the voice belonged to her mother or herself. She walked reluctantly away from her car, running her hand along the side as if trying to decide among the sedans on a sales lot.

Mike looked inconspicuous in his Stanford t-shirt and jeans: just another brown-haired white guy in grad student drag. An unzipped blue backpack next to his coffee table contained a couple of books, but when she looked closer, she saw a rainbow tangle of wires. She thought about asking him to move to a table nearer the door, where the scorched-coffee smell wouldn't be as overwhelming, but she assumed he must have had his reasons for choosing a spot so near the back. Better reception or something. Invisibility. She had no idea.

"Hi Grace."

"Hi Mike. Do I have time for a soy chai latte, or do..." She trailed off. In spite of her desire to appear collected, calm, and above all this, she looked through the coffee shop window as if the Grim Reaper might be outside, staring back. At twenty minutes 'til noon, a line of people already snaked out the trattoria's front door. Rich and his whore must have arrived early. No doubt they were canoodling in an intimate booth, over calamari and a bottle of Montepulciano.

"They just ordered their appetizers. I've already checked."

Grace hated her vulnerability and the way it defined her life. No matter how much she tried to conceal it with venom and assorted bitchery, it wouldn't go away. Shouldn't she be past this insane dependency on Rich by now? Shouldn't she have reached that point where he could no longer surprise her? Sooner or later, shouldn't she cease to care? _He_ obviously had. She blinked several times. A twinge of concern for her mascara distracted her for the microsecond she needed. Fishing in her purse for a hand mirror so she could fix her makeup allowed her to break eye contact with Mike. _Get your shit together, Grace._

"How?" she asked.

"Detectives move in mysterious ways, their wonders to perform," Mike said.

"I'm not sure you got that quite right, but nice try. So how did you do it?"

"I bribed the hostess and bugged a booth," Mike said.

"You're worth every penny I'm paying you," Grace said.

"Are you going to use the evidence?"

Grace nodded. "When the time is right."

"When you've figured out where his offshore accounts are located?"

"No, they're in Zurich and the Caymans, just like everybody else's," Grace said. "I'm not worried about that. He's not hiding money from me..."

_Which almost makes it worse. He just doesn 't care_. _He thinks he can just carry on like this and you won 't suspect, or won't notice, or something. "Dumb blonde fat Grace, she used to be pretty and now see what she's become." That's what people are saying, dear. "Her husband's bonking a paralegal with a name like Morgan or Britney, and do you blame him? If I woke up one day with an ass the size of two coach class seats, I'd pay for my husband's condoms."_

Grace loathed the unwelcome visitations of her mother's voice at moments like these. Some people had superegos. Grace had Gloria.

"You okay?"

"Not really," Grace said. "I'm trying to be, but I'm not. You know. Fake it 'til you feel it."

Mike nodded. "I know."

Grace tried to pull herself together. The cogs and gears in her mind needed WD-40. She asked the first coherent question that occurred to her: "What kind of appetizers did they order?"

"Mozzarella sticks."

"How phallic," Grace said.

Mike shook his head. He needed to shave, Grace noticed. She didn't feel the remotest twinge of attraction to him, but he did have a certain endearing quality - some intangible something. Some men don't look like much at first glance, lack the all-American male swagger, and drive a nondescript domestic sedans with three or four empty plastic Coke bottles in the back seat next to a disintegrating gym bag full of clothes still damp from yesterday's workout. Mike was like that, the kind of man she wouldn't look twice at, except in random lost moments when she felt out of sync with herself and the rest of the world. At times like these, she'd think things like _I bet he eats pussy brilliantly_ , shock herself out of her funk, and smile again... for a little while.

"This is never easy," Mike said. "Don't be too hard on yourself. This isn't your fault."

Grace flapped a dismissive hand at him and shook her head. Her eyes stung. "Too much water under the bridge."

"And too many dead fish floating in it. Go order that latte, and I'll set everything up."

How many college romances last until old age? _Not nearly enough of them_ , Gloria said. _Or maybe far too many, depending on how you look at it._

Grace felt a twinge of self-conscious idiocy as she waited in line. She stared at the barista's eyebrow piercing and fluorescent pink hair and wondered where the last ten years had gone. She heard the wind howl in the halls of lost time. Nobody at Saint Mary's would have even considered facial piercings, back in her day. ( _God, and it wasn 't that long ago_.) A discreet tattoo under several layers of clothing, _maybe_. That would have been considered racy and titillating, almost trashy but still respectable in a rebellious way. Nowadays people walked around punctured and perforated and decked out in more glitter than a Christmas display in Las Vegas...

"Can I help you with something?"

The barista lisped. Tongue piercing. Grace felt like somebody's dowager aunt.

"Chai," she said.

The barista gave her a complicated stare. The gold stud nailed through the girl's arched left eyebrow punctuated her expression of _What crawled up your ass and died?_ The girl was a lesbian, Grace realized. She appreciated being checked out - _At least somebody 's looking at my tits _- but was so taken aback that her jaw dropped open. She fumbled in her purse for cash, found a couple of bills, and dropped them on the counter without looking at their denominations.

"Was that as weird as it looked?" Mike asked, when Grace returned to the table.

"Is there anything you don't notice?"

"Not if I can help it. That's why you're paying me the medium-sized bucks."

Mike handed her a gizmo. It looked like an iPod, or perhaps a very small cell phone. He then handed her a wire with a single earbud dangling from one end.

"Does it have a nice beat? Can I dance to it?"

"It's more of a waltz tempo," Mike said. "Not too fast, but predictable. If you plug this in..." (He took it back from her and clicked the thing into place.) "You can hear some of their conversation. The restaurant's pretty loud, so don't expect it to sound like your TV."

Grace listened. "I don't know. The girl sounds like Bette Davis after smoking a crate of cigars."

She strained to hear. Bursts of static pummeled her eardrum. She pressed the earphone close, attempting to make sense of the words she could hear, but the signal kept cutting out in a shower of painful audio confetti.

"This is worse than my cell phone," Grace said.

"Who's your carrier?"

When Grace named her mobile telecommunications provider, Mike chuckled into his glass of water. Bubbles formed, then popped. Grace pictured him as a little boy with a milk mustache.

"Digitally enhanced silence," he said. "You never know whether you're getting that famous crystal-clear sound or whether your call's been dropped."

"I know. Rich says the three letters stand for Perpetually Crappy Service. Oh wait, I hear something - they're talking about briefs," Grace said.

"Sounds risque."

"They're lawyers," Grace said. "Legal briefs, not those Armani things he pays too much for. I know at heart I'm just a small-town girl from North Carolina, but why on earth would anybody pay that much for something you're going to spend all day farting into?"

Mike shrugged. "Because you can?"

Grace drank chai, licked foam off her upper lip (to hell with her lipstick), and listened. She could hear the woman better than she could hear Rich. Their talk of some case that would involve several attorneys and paralegals traveling to France and Belgium sparked interest in Grace. She hadn't heard about this trip, what a surprise. She heard the names of a few cities: Brussels, Liege, Paris. Sounded like Rich might be going, but not the girl.

"I think she's whining because he's going on a trip to Europe and she isn't," Grace told Mike. "Poor thing, can't get porked by my husband in Paris. Awww. I'm gonna shed a little tear for her pain."

"Grace, are you sure you're up for this? We don't have to go. They'll be back for more some other time."

"I'm fine," Grace said. "I'm fine." She repeated the lie to make it feel more like the truth. "I'm fine. Look, let's just get this over with, all right? Wait, their food has arrived. I don't want to listen to them slurping pasta. We'll hear enough of that back at the hotel when he goes down on her. Should we get going?"

"You're paying the bill," Mike said.

Grace had been brought up to trust everyone and no one. Every imaginable permutation of social doublethink had been drilled into her platinum-blonde head from an early age. As a Southern woman she knew that _no_ usually means _no_ but not always, _yes_ means _maybe_ , definite affirmatives can only be communicated by gushing something along the lines of _Why yes, I 'd love to, that just sounds divine!, _and the lady's right to change her mind trumps all. And when you suspect your husband of putting it where it doesn't belong, you take his denials at face value. With all your heart. Even as you scour his mobile phone bills, his laptop, and the contents of his wallet. Even as you program your detective's number into the speed dial on your own cell phone.

Rich's affair would have been easier to swallow (or spit) if, during one of the rendezvous Grace had on tape, he had confessed his reasons. Something like _I still love her but I 'm not attracted to her anymore, now that she's put on so much weight_ would have at least put some perspective on his behavior, even as the words sent her into a towering, righteous fury. Grace wanted him to say _Ever since her ass got so big, she doesn 't know how to move in bed; she just lies there and expects me to do everything_ because on some level she knew it to be the truth. She wanted the perfect incriminating excuse: a statement that would simultaneously explain everything, let him off the hook, hang him out to dry, portion out a large helping of blame (with sprinkles and a cherry on top) to her, and yet be lethal in court if she opted to divorce him, which was, in truth, the last goddamn thing she wanted to do.

"You've got more than enough evidence for divorce," Mike kept telling her.

On the phone this morning, when she'd called him to confirm the time and place of their meeting, doubt had stained his voice. Grace had three manila envelopes thick with incriminating photos, plus logs detailing the times and locations of her husband's hook-ups over the last six months. Receipts for hotel rooms, with corroborating credit card statements. Sublime fodder for any of a dozen trashy talk shows.

"Grace, listen. If you don't do something with all that evidence, Rich could argue that you're implying consent," Mike had argued. "Don't forget he's a lawyer. You've gotta act on this, strike while the iron is hot."

_You mean, strike while the dick is hard._

Grace and Mike had squinted and strained through the static of half a dozen tapes of Rich on his romantic interludes, and he had barely spoken a word about her. He and his ho (her name was Natalie but Grace could not stand to say it out loud or even think it any more than necessary) seemed to accept the arrangement as fact, as _fait accompli_. Or perhaps they never felt the need to question it. Attraction blazed between them, so they'd acted on it. What was there to discuss?

_You 're married?_

_Yes. She has a ginormous ass and I 'm not sure I still love her._

_Fuck me now, you stallion!_

Only that's not what they said to each other. Rich didn't mention her at all, and the Other Woman didn't ask.

Sometimes Rich spanked his girl. Sometimes he made her play secretary, and when he found errors in her dictation, he would punish her by tying her hands together and peeing on her in the bathtub. One time, from the sound of things, he'd even tried putting it up her ass. From the swearing, the attempt hadn't worked out. That they'd immediately taken a shower afterward had filled Grace's head with a million morbid imaginings. Rich had always been just kinky enough... physically perfect on the outside, a strapping blond-haired blue-eyed specimen of American vigor, and inside, much the same way except for this one thing - the crack in his porcelain veneer that a Zen aesthete would label perfection.

"You know what good sex is?" Rich had asked on their second or third date. Grace, still naive enough to believe that the achievement of penetration and at least one orgasm had to be good sex because what else was there to do?, asked him to tell her. He said, "A little bit stinky and a little bit kinky."

Grace had collapsed into embarrassed giggles.

Rich went on: "It's all about bodies, baby. It's natural. I'm ugly when I fuck, and that's how it's supposed to be."

"You've never been ugly in your life," Grace had said.

Back in the present, Grace spoke up. They were walking out to Mike's car, which Rich wouldn't recognize. Grace had parked the Volvo on a nearby residential street, to avoid any risk of Rich seeing it.

"Rich has never been ugly. He doesn't know what it's like."

"Does he have to?" Mike asked.

Grace sighed at him, exasperated. She'd intended for him to say _You 're not ugly_, or offer some other compliment, and he didn't fall for it. She wondered if he was gay. (Her brother Robert would know but she couldn't call him to ask.) Mike kept not following the scripts she gave him. Maybe his propensity for the unexpected was what made him an effective detective.

"I guess not. Some people never do..."

Mike pressed the gizmo closer to his ear.

"They're leaving," he said.

"That was quick," Grace observed. Nausea bloomed in her belly. "My God, they're like a pair of cats in heat. Let's get going, shall we?"

The health of a marriage, Grace's mother had once claimed, can be measured by squeaking bedsprings. The noisier the bed frame, the happier the couple. Grace, eleven at the time, had been mortified. She had seen her father naked a few times. Something that big stabbing her _down there_ , rhythmically, and it was supposed to feel good? Better than anything else in the world? Her mother often wore an outwardly cheerful but subtly disturbing expression that Grace later in life had relabeled a leer. _Better than anything else in the world_ , _that 's right_, her mother confirmed. _There 's nothing like it. _And now that Gloria had gone on to her reward - plastic surgery and a three-bedroom condo in a gated beachfront Fort Myers development, with stunning views of the Gulf - Grace didn't feel as inclined to seek her advice. Why bother? She was going to get it anyway, from the depths of her subconscious.

Gloria had embraced widowhood the way troubled teens embrace crystal meth. Grace doubted her father's ashes had had enough time to sink to the bottom after being scattered at sea before her mother commenced an affair with a Cuban bartender in his early forties. Gloria and Juan made several semi-illegal trips to Havana each year, checking out investment opportunities and guzzling mojitos. Her mother was the last person who needed to hear about Rich's adulterous antics. For one thing, she had probably already guessed. She'd say, _Just you wait, honey. It gets much better after the first one 's dead. _And that would be the end of the conversation.

Grace called Robert, who had no business advising on anyone's love life. He walked around in a state of free-floating misery. They'd always gotten along as kids, more so than they had with Flora Trust, their older sister. In adulthood they clicked like Lego blocks on the body issues thing: he was advancing toward sphericity at an alarming rate, just as the growth rate of Grace's behind was only rivaled by remote Bay Area suburbs like Benicia and Vallejo. One of these days Robert's boobies were going to be bigger than her own, not that she'd dare point this out. He was perpetually mooning over his friend James, a little Latin hottie from law school who'd bonked him once or twice before deciding he liked Robert better with clothes on. At times his yammering about James got old but Grace felt she had no choice but to listen. He'd encouraged her to have affairs but she just wasn't good at them. For a married woman who wanted her husband back, even if she had to blackmail him to achieve it, there was no satisfaction in wiping a stranger's jism off her belly.

The conversation turned around to his hairstyle and glasses. Grace couldn't stomach telling him how she'd spent the afternoon - spying on the straying son of a bitch she'd married. (Grace heard her mother's voice: _And so close to home_ , _too! Grace, you ought to put a leash around his thing, and don 't let him out of your sight! Men used to put women in chastity belts and now it's our turn!­_) She could handle talking about Robert's miseries because they took her mind off the upscale but vaguely mediocre suburban horror that passed for her life. Her red Volvo. Rich's Land Rover, and the classic Lancia sports car he kept in the garage. The jacarandas in front of their home. The little ants that invaded every winter, during rainy season. The individual elements of her life didn't add up to a very rewarding _Gestalt_.

_Your whole life has been one long attempt to be someone you 're not_, Gloria said. _You want to be Suzy Suburbanite worse than anyone I 've ever met. You can't change who you are, Grace. Quit trying, already!_

Hell, maybe that was why Rich was shagging this woman from the office. For the adrenaline. For the novelty. To stir things up.

Grace couldn't follow a word Robert was saying. She sipped from a cup of green tea and grimaced: it tasted like scorched rice. She'd let the bag steep too long. She should pour it out and try again. Robert droned on. Thank God he didn't have one of those overly emphatic faggoty voices - then she'd really have been forced to hang up. He had a good courtroom voice, though; it was one of his better qualities.

"I hate the way I look, Grace. I'm sitting here in my office, looking at this pile of work, and it's hopeless. Why am I even here? Why do I bother coming in? You know who I'm thinking about, and it's fucking not fair."

"The fair is where you eat cotton candy and show off your prize billy goats," Grace said. "We live in the Bay Area, not Mayberry. We lead aesthetically pleasing but hollow lives. Fairness doesn't figure into it. At all."

"So I probably shouldn't tell you I'm having a fat day."

Grace, lounging in her boudoir, surveyed her body in a mirror. She didn't like much of what she saw below her breasts. Above, yes, not bad, nice rack, daring cleavage, peaches and cream, lot of potential, but if her suburban sprawl got much worse, eventually some developer would apply for a permit to build condos on both of her butt cheeks and a light rail line across her crack.

She needed to expunge these thoughts from her head. She also needed to have her _chaise longue_ reupholstered, maybe in green velvet. Something opulent. She needed to buy new bedroom furniture, in fact, and possibly give some thought to repainting. She needed a drink. Above all, she needed not to be having this conversation.

"No, you shouldn't, because I'm going to give you tough love," Grace said. "You don't like tough love. You like, _Let 's go to Krispy Kreme and drown our sorrows in crullers_. You like, _Let 's stay in and be miserable together and eat frozen pizzas and drink three bottles of Merlot. _And when you get what you deserve, you feel even worse."

"That was low, even for you," Robert said.

"I can't listen to it today," Grace said. "I love you, honey, but I just can't. This afternoon my detective and I listened in on one of Rich's lunch dates with his paralegal. I lost it when they started eating pasta because it sounded too much like oral sex. Can you imagine my frame of mind right now?"

"No, but I'll never be able to eat linguine without thinking of cunnilingus, which is to say I'll never be able to eat it again, period." Silence followed. "Maybe I should thank you for eliminating all those carbs from my diet."

"Hate me now, thank me later," Grace said.

"So what do I do?"

"Cut your hair. You're balding. Accept your fate and buzz it off. The color you've dyed it is for middle-aged doctors' wives who play too much tennis," Grace said, reveling in the cruelty of bluntness. She heard Robert suck in his breath and felt moist. Finally, something was going right today. "Get different glasses. Expensive ones that don't look make you look like somebody's dad. Get your nose pierced or something. Blow off the dust. Every time you tell me you haven't gotten laid lately, I want to tell you the blowjobs are in the details."

"But I'm supposed to be the gay guy here," Robert protested.

"Life is cold and hard and lonely sometimes," Grace said.

She hung up on him.

## **Chapter Two:** ROBERT.

## _Avoirdupois. Steroids and psychic healers. Cold clear glass._

A black epiphany struck Robert at work: he couldn't breathe when he sat down. He needed yet another pair of trousers an inch larger in the waist. Just six months had passed since the last upgrade. Robert believed he looked like a snake digesting an egg, and his favorite coping mechanism, red wine, only exacerbated the problem. At these moments, too early in the day to start drinking, his sister usually provided the best comfort.

Today she provided cobra venom.

He had it coming, he supposed. When your husband fucks every woman in sight, just because he can (and Grace had no idea the extent of it), you're bound to be irascible at times. On top of that, the upcoming business trip to Europe provided a fresh load of angst. Grace knew Robert would be there. Robert knew Grace wanted him to spy. Grace knew better than to ask Robert to do it. Their relationship, while close, was laden with topics they could never discuss, and overt spying was near (but not at) the top of the list.

Robert decided to push her nastiness out of his head, take her advice, and update his appearance. At lunch, he dashed out to Union Square to buy a pair of trousers he could wear without blacking out. If he was going back to Paris, he deserved to enjoy himself, didn't he? And wouldn't an unimpeded flow of oxygen contribute a lot to the trip? Especially on the flight across the Atlantic? He also visited his barber and left with his hair mown down to the scalp. After that, he darted into an optical shop and purchased new glasses. Considering how many of the partners took long lunches to fuck people they weren't married to, Robert had no compunction about his time away from the office. When he got back, Davies didn't comment on the new frames (stylish red rectangles), and Robert didn't point them out. Let the asshole overlook the obvious in order to dwell on the mundane.

"Buzz cut. Nice. Going for that Folsom look?" asked Steve Davies, one of the firm's founders (and a bloated prick of a contracts lawyer), when Robert returned to the office after lunch. Davies had lived with his partner Bruce, a photographer, for a couple of decades. They vacationed at their flat in Paris several times a year and had sex with everyone but each other.

"Wait till you see the piercings," Robert said. "Or on second thought, maybe not."

Robert had no intention of getting his parts pierced, but the idea popped into his head. Why not? What did he have to lose? Self-respect? If the big boss wanted to believe Robert had a Christmas tree ornament hanging off the end of his penis, great. Deck the balls with boughs of holly.

Legalese and jet lag are a lethal mix. On his last trip to the Paris office, Robert had subsisted on strong coffee and sticky, disgusting pastries. In the depths of his fatigue, he hallucinated rainbow colors on sheets of paper that contained nothing but rows of numbers. Livid ink from the yellow highlighter pens seemed to hum under the ultraviolet lights. He kept getting paper cuts.

Robert had moved back to the States from Brussels five years ago this week. He looked back on his return as a dreary downward spiral, with himself as the bob weight at the end of a very long pendulum. Reverse culture shock only explained so much of it. The bigger he got, the more his life felt _on hold_. There were so many things he wanted to do... later, when he was skinny again. Robert wanted to unzip his fat suit to let the thin guy inside stretch out and get some air and get on with the business of living... somewhere other than in San Francisco. The thing was, Grace wanted him nearby. He couldn't decide whether he was her security blanket or her increasingly overstuffed psychological teddy bear.

Mentally bleeding from the phone call to his sister, even if he could breathe now, Robert called James. James worked at a nonprofit organization South of Market, earned almost enough money to get by on in this gilded cage of a city, and seemed much happier than Robert would have thought possible in the legal profession. How could James not be happy, though? He was cute, and more importantly, he could still see his own dick when he looked down in the shower.

"I need a drink. It's already been that sort of day."

"Robert, it's not even ten AM."

"Like I said: it's already been that sort of day. Don't tell me you're doing something after work."

"Okay, I won't tell you I'm doing something after work."

"But that would be a lie, because you're having a drink with me after work."

"Just one?"

"Dozens of them. Gallons. We'll pickle ourselves from the inside out."

"Name the place."

Six PM couldn't come soon enough, so Robert skated out a few minutes early and walked from his Embarcadero office to the W, located enough long blocks away that when he arrived, panting and filmed with a light sheen of sweat, he knew his latest attempts at the gym had accomplished big fat nothing.

James, aw-shucks cute and permanently tan, made Robert want to tweak his cheek or his adorable cleft chin every time they got together. James spent enough time outdoors to keep his Mexican skin crisped to a shade of gold most porn stars would envy. Next to him, Robert felt as handsome as a pumpkin rotting on a porch three weeks after Halloween.

"I already have a glass of wine for you," James said when Robert arrived and took his seat. "At first the waitress didn't want to bring two glasses but I told her not to worry, I'd drink it myself if you didn't show up."

"You're so cute," Robert said. "I just want to pinch your cheeks."

James leaned forward, offering the side of his face.

"No, the lower ones."

James pretended to scowl but couldn't maintain the façade. He didn't do annoyance well. His type couldn't. The natural effervescence always won out.

James had heard about a new plague. A repository of vile biomedical information, not the kind you'd want to hear about while eating sushi or rare beef, nothing amused him so much as an article about cloning failures, replete with lurid pictures of deformed foetuses. An epidemic of some exotic airborne jungle rot in Kinshasa or Yaounde made his day. Tubercular preschoolers in American slums, flesh-eating bacteria, superbugs in Britain's NHS hospitals, hepatitis Z: if somebody just died of it, James could be trusted to know every suppurating detail. Today it was the antibiotic-resistant staph infection nibbling its way through the gay male communities of Southern California. It was spreading. He'd heard rumors of cases in the Bay Area, Las Vegas, and Sacramento. Wasn't that just fascinating? Weren't imminent doomsday scenarios always _just fascinating_?

"I may need a third glass of wine before we move on to the next venue," Robert said, swallowing his gorge. "Assuming the germs on the stemware don't kill me."

James gave a sweet kindergartner's smile. With the innocence of a little boy frying ants under a magnifying glass, he summarized what he'd read. Robert feigned interest and finished his wine. All the more reason not to bother attempting to get laid: he could spare himself the twin terrors of rejection and penile rot.

"Get us another drink, and let's get a taxi down to the Castro. Dinner's on me," James said.

Robert opened his mouth intending to suggest any neighborhood but that one, but he couldn't force the words out. He could only keep recommending places in the Mission and the Haight and even the bloody Avenues for so long. San Francisco is not a large city.

_Why do I subject myself to the Castro? Now there 's a question for my shrink_, he thought. When he first moved to San Francisco, he marveled at the diversity: men and women of all races, ages, body types, and sexual orientations made the Bay Area their home, and more or less got along. He'd never lived in a city where people truly seemed capable of looking past the surface. Now that he'd been here a while, he decided he still hadn't found such a place. The gay-ghetto pecking order pervaded San Francisco just as it does every other zone of concentrated homosexuality Robert knew of: wealthy older men and beautiful young ones called all the shots, with the former doing their best (and spending untold sums of money) to look like the latter for as long as possible. Robert's view on all this was _Strap on the tusks and I could pass for a walrus_. At first he had enjoyed living there, but as time passed and his belly expanded, he burned out on looking at other men the way Alcatraz prisoners used to look at San Francisco's lights twinkling across the Golden Gate. Hence the move over to the East Bay. Inasmuch as he had free time, he spent it on mundane errands on that side of the bridge, in Oakland and neighboring Berkeley. Renting videos, buying groceries, borrowing library books - at least these things didn't involve the ritual mortification that accompanied life in the City.

Without much waiting, they got a table at a noodle restaurant Robert liked. If there was no escaping the Castro, he might as well enjoy one aspect of the evening.

"Check out the two Chinese guys that just came in," he said to James, who discreetly turned to look.

"How can you tell?"

"Tell what? That they're Chinese and not like Korean or something? I don't know. Chinese just have that Chinese look. Their faces are different. The taller one in the black leather jacket, wouldn't you love to suck his balls until his moans wake the neighbors?"

"I don't think sperm mixes well with styling gel," James said. "I think it forms a cement, and you have to cut out that part of your hair. If there's a patch of my hair missing the next time you see me..."

"It's because you had dim sum? I thought you weren't into Asians," Robert said.

"Any race is fine. To be honest, I've been noticing black guys lately. I didn't know you were so much into Asians, yourself," he said.

"Well, I wasn't until I met Lawrence Zhou, and..."

"That was a year ago and you haven't been laid since," James said. "Unless you've been holding out on me."

Robert did not want to get into this. He actually _had_ had sex in the meantime. For pay. Several times, at intervals of two or three months, when his pent-up sexual energy overpowered his guilt, he'd ordered in. A smiling boy with would turn up a couple of hours later to relieve the tension.

"Why don't we order our food now?"

James remained silent for the rest of the meal. Several times, he seemed to be about to say something. Robert didn't push. Some instinct suggested he'd annoyed James somehow, but how, exactly? _What did I say?_ Robert couldn't pinpoint what he'd done wrong. He tried dumping his usual conversational landfill into the empty spaces: idiocy at the office, the novel he'd just given up on despite the author's reputation, the new one he'd started. James offered a few desultory remarks about an Australian film that had just opened at the Embarcadero. Did Robert want to see it over the weekend? How about the Pendulum later?

Because James had been _noticing_ black men lately, naturally they had to stop by the Pendulum, which was the best place in San Francisco to notice a black guy or be noticed by one. Fine. James got noticed by a handsome doctor named David, spent 20 minutes chatting with him while Robert stood a few steps out of earshot, overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise in the bar, half smiling in all directions but avoiding eye contact. James got a phone number when David the Doctor had to run. Early night. Hernia repair tomorrow morning, couldn't have him nodding off while slicing some guy's belly open, could they? Robert, James, and the surgeon left together, and a moment later David waved goodbye to James from - Robert winced - a new Audi Cabriolet.

" _You always get the good ones._ " James imitated Robert's voice. As a boy in North Carolina, Robert had bristled when anyone imitated his speech, but now, hearing his vestigial drawl as filtered through James's accent - Latino Lite, he called it - it was hard not to laugh at himself. A little. In his own voice, James asked, "Why do I see you crashing on my couch tonight?"

"Because you have a flair for the inevitable. I'm not driving back to Oakland in this state, so why stop now?"

"I don't know. Maybe we should call it a night."

"You never lose your capacity to surprise me."

They rode the streetcar up to James's apartment in Noe Valley. Robert leaned against the window and stared out into the darkness of Dolores Park as the tram ascended.

"I have a question for you," James said. He finished unfolding his sleeper sofa and sat on the mattress.

Robert looked around the room. James hadn't spent much on furniture - he didn't have much to spend - but he had taste. Robert wished he knew how to replicate this air of comfortable funkiness. No matter what he tried, the results looked like he'd bought the contents of his home in a single trip to a Scandiwegian interior store: sort of a cross between an airport departure lounge and an upscale psych hospital. It wasn't that Robert had no taste. He just didn't know what he liked.

He brought himself back to the present tension: "After all this time, you've come to your senses and fallen in love with me."

The look on James's face put a stop to further joking. Robert's feelings had receded but he could still see the emotional scar: it resembled the high-water line left by an outgoing tide.

"There's this guy," James said, looking down.

"Okay," Robert said. He didn't want to hear this at all. "Out with it."

James looked up, startled. Watching him struggle to regurgitate whatever he wanted to say about _this guy_ , Robert felt dark waves of pleasure lapping against the shores of his soul. Whatever it was, it was going badly, and that was a good thing.

"It's not what you think. It's not about sex. I'm not dating him. It's not... he's not a regular guy."

"He's irregular? Tell him he needs more fiber in his diet."

"He's a healer," James said. "More like a shaman."

"Oh Christ."

One thing you can't avoid, living in Northern California, is the social detritus from the Sixties. The astronomical cost of living didn't force all the crystal-worshipping druids to pack their rusting Volkswagens and flee the Bay Area. A lot of the hippies whose brains weren't too scorched from all that LSD and patchouli had bought houses in the Haight and settled down. Since then, the region had seen a proliferation of New Age healers, shamanic drumming circles, tantric masseurs, and sacred mind-body integration retreats (which is to say, a group of men with too much body hair go up to the Sierra for a weekend to dance around in the nude, make animal noises, and jerk each other off). Robert thought it was all bullshit but had learned to keep his mouth shut. Most of the time.

"This guy at my gym recommended him," James continued.

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to think I'm fucking nuts."

"Being nuts is usually my role. I'm enjoying the change." Robert started to say more but James glared at him.

"He's... it's like..." James looked at his hands. He looked at the wall. His face turned the color of a bad sunburn. "The guy at the gym had a weight problem."

"Am I about to hear a parable?"

"Shut up, Robert, will you?"

Robert nodded. James looked perfectly miserable... and in his misery, he looked perfect.

"Carlos, the guy from the gym, he's been dieting and everything. He's lost hella weight just from that..."

"Good for him," Robert interrupted. He winced. Too harsh.

James put a SHH finger over his lips, then resumed kneading his hands. "He's lost weight but he developed stretch marks where his belly used to be. He sagged. He told me stopped drinking alcohol completely, not even a glass of wine with dinner, and he cut way down on the carbs. No processed sugar, no fries, no entire bag of potato chips with a couple of beers in the afternoon, nothing."

"That sounds like a fate worse than death," Robert said. "Why not just switch to the Broken Glass Diet and get it over with?"

"Are you going to let me finish this?"

"The room isn't spinning yet, but I think it's going to. Wanna fix me some toast and a pot of coffee?" Robert asked.

James jumped off the bed. Robert followed him to the kitchen.

"Carlos heard about Stefan, the healer, from some other guy at the gym. He wouldn't tell me any more than that. Apparently it's like a secret society. You have to be referred. He has to like you. But if he's willing to work on you, he's fucking amazing."

"He sounds like a televangelist," Robert said. "I'm picturing whole stadiums of fainting Christians in Charlotte, North Carolina."

"Stefan is real. Televangelists aren't. Carlos went to see Stefan and those deflated love handles _went away_ after three sessions. Carlos told me Stefan could have done it in one, but too many people would ask questions."

"Why? Who'd notice?"

"It's a gym, and it's in the Castro," James talked as if Robert were the stupidest person in the room. At that moment, he supposed he was. "The locker room's a meat market. If someone's a regular, you get used to what his body looks like, even if you're not interested in him sexually. Over time, you see how people progress. I've been working out there for three years, and some guys have bulked up in that time. A lot. Others look about the same. You just notice."

"Like you notice black guys lately," Robert said.

"Something like that. If you were more of a regular, you'd know what I mean." He looked away, pretending to check the coffee. Robert thought James regretted the jab... as well he should. Robert's weight was not a subject they could safely discuss. "Carlos's skin smoothed out. He's one of those Latinos without any body hair, and he's got that broad-chested Indian build, if you know what I mean. I swear, he's _narrower_ now than he used to be. He says it's from all the weight he's lost, but I think his frame's not as big around as it used to be."

"You like him, don't you?"

James shrugged. The toaster ejected two golden slices of bread, and James used tongs to maneuver them onto a plate.

"Margarine or strawberry jam?" he asked.

"Yes."

Robert helped himself to a cup of coffee while James produced the condiments.

"I decided I should see this guy for myself," he said.

"What on earth for? I knew that's where you were going, but you're fine, James. You've got a fantastic body. You don't even have any funny-looking birth marks to get rid of."

"I have that scar on my chest." As a little boy, James had knocked a pot of boiling soup off the stove. He hadn't been wearing a shirt. He got lucky - most of the scalding liquid landed on the floor, but he did get splashed. Robert thought the resulting scar looked like a goldfish, a description that horrified James, who wore his shame like a burlap undershirt. Even now, Robert wondered how much the goldfish had to do with them not dating. He had made the mistake of liking it.

"Fuck the scar on your chest. I look like blue cheese when I take off my clothes. What the fuck do you need a supernatural plastic surgeon for? And why isn't he in Beverly Hills or West Hollywood? LA's bimbos would make him richer than Bill Gates times George Soros." Robert glared at James. "There is nothing wrong with you physically."

"Thank you," James said. His eyes misted over, and he looked down again. After a moment, he finally spat it out: "It's my... you know, my _size_."

"I've seen that too, James. There's nothing wrong with it."

"It's too small. It's too skinny, and it's kind of ugly. Jesus, I don't believe I'm saying this out loud. I've never liked it, okay? It's an aesthetic thing. I'm not a bad-looking guy, I know that, but like..." He looked down. "It's my worst feature, you know? I've got enough foreskin to make a wallet with, and my balls are way too small, and they don't hang right..."

"So what you're saying is, you're quitting the law and becoming a porn star," Robert said.

"Fuck you, Robert."

Robert nodded in the direction of the bedroom. "The bed's in there."

"Can we not talk like this? I'm fucking serious, Robert. I've always been embarrassed by my equipment. I was even kind of weird about it when... you know... back in 2L."

Robert remembered, all right. James couldn't do it with the lights on.

"This guy Stefan can change all that."

"Your embarrassment or your bits?"

"Both. Carlos said it's like he has power over the body, to work flesh like clay. He resculpts you."

"And you believe this?"

"I've seen the results. Carlos's body is _different_ , Robert. My eyes don't lie. Look, let's be totally honest, here. I know you've kind of got a weight problem..."

" _Kind of_? I _kind of_ have a weight problem? James, have you looked at me recently? Most Soviet-era statues are skinnier than I am. I look like something pigeons shit on in front of the Kremlin."

"I'm trying to be kind, Robert. Yes, you've gotten heavy in the last few years, and I know you're frustrated. But you're also pretty well hung, too, okay? I know we don't talk about that any more, but I'm trying to be honest. This is embarrassing. Please don't make it worse, please?"

Robert nodded.

"It's different for guys who aren't ashamed of their equipment..."

Robert couldn't keep listening to this. "And this Stefan person is going to magically give you a big swinging _chorizo_?" he asked. "You'll be the envy of all the guys in the locker room."

"It won't be gross," James said. "I don't want to be a freak of proportion. Just... bigger."

"You believe this. You're seriously going to go through with it."

James nodded. "I told you," he said. "I've seen. Not just Carlos, but others too. A couple of other guys. Carlos told me who they were. Then I could see the change. You know, things I thought were different, but chalked up to not paying close attention before. There's this Asian guy in his late forties or early fifties, and like his body fat has completely gone away. He started working out a year ago and nobody gets that ripped that fast."

"They do if they're on steroids," Robert said.

James shook his head. "Steroids make you bloat. I've seen that too. You swell up and you get zits on your back."

"Remember when gay men used to be delicate little sissies?" Robert asked.

James shook his head again.

"I don't either," Robert said.

"He's sporting a bigger dick, too," James said. "He's kind of a medium-okay-looking guy and he's always been nice to me. So I've kept an eye on him. He never used to parade around the locker room in the nude, but these days he's showing his shit off to anyone who walks in."

"So this guy Stefan is like the Dick Doctor."

"It's happened to these other two guys. They're bigger down there, or they've gone from skinny to ripped in the space of a couple of months. It's unreal. This one white guy named Arnold had a face like a train wreck: eyes bunched really close together, brow ridge like a helmet, no chin, bad teeth..."

"That's not very nice, James."

"So it's not nice, but it's the truth. If you dipped the Creature from the Black Lagoon in Clorox, you'd get Arnold. He looks completely different now. He's still the same guy but all his features are less extreme. His eyes are farther apart, his brow doesn't jut out like the bill of a baseball cap, and he's got a chin. He's still no prize but now he doesn't curdle all the milk when he walks into Safeway, either."

"How much does this Stefan guy charge?"

"I don't know yet, but I'm going to meet him tomorrow and find out."

"So you're going to show him your...?"

James nodded. "I've talked to him on the phone already. He told me he negotiates terms individually, in person, once he's seen you."

"So you get naked and let him look at you all over?"

"Yeah. He said he's really thorough. He touches you everywhere to find out what your internal organs are like, what their energies are like, whether they're healthy or not, stuff like that. He can tell just from touching your skin."

"Does he charge extra for a hand job?"

"Fuck you, Robert! You don't believe a word I've told you, do you?"

"I'll believe it when you show me proof," Robert said. He sipped coffee and felt his mind turn to cold clear glass. "You show me the before and after, and I'll believe it."

James looked out the window. House lights sparkled on hillsides. Robert wanted to see his face but James had turned away.

_I 've stepped in shit this time_, he thought. But on an atavistic level he knew he hadn't.

"This is strictly scientific, right?" James said after an excruciating silence.

"Absolutely."

"We're never going to do this again," he said.

"Never," Robert agreed.

If he crossed his fingers behind his back, would that make it not a lie? He didn't think this approach would hold up in court, but just the same, he crossed them and followed James into the bedroom.

## **Chapter Three:** GRACE.

## _Paris. Gilded surveillance. Name That Expressionist._

No matter how uplifting travel may be, even in first class, the soul-deep drone of jet engines pulps your guts and sets your brain to buzzing inside your skull. No matter how flat the seats fold, no matter how clever the partitions between passengers are, you're still trapped in an immense cylindrical second-run cinema that flies through the air at seven hundred miles an hour. You're still breathing lung-backwash and other people's gas. Grace prepared as best she could: Valium to stay serene, a bottle of Evian to stay hydrated, a portable DVD player to stay entertained, a bottle of multivitamins to stay nourished, and a bottle of goldenseal capsules to stay healthy. On boarding, she washed down a handful of optimism with a swig of Alpine spring water, then accepted a whiskey and 7-Up from the runway-model flight attendant.

_It 's not a phobia; it's just discomfort. _Grace reminded herself of this but it didn't mitigate her fears; it just reframed them. _I have to be cosseted in first because I can afford it and because I won 't fit into a coach class seat without a crowbar and a tub of Vaseline._

Gloria had relented to Grace's request to invade the principal on her trust fund. Grace didn't want Rich to know about this trip. She wanted no record of it on the credit cards. (A girl's got to have a few secrets.) She went so far as to type an e-mail to Mike, inviting him along, but she deleted it before clicking on Send. He'd love the trip, no doubt. How many private detectives could claim whirlwind trips to Paris among their perquisites? Plus, she could use the company, or so she told herself. When she broke things down honestly, she knew better. She was on her own this time.

_What 's the line between surveillance and stalking? _Grace wondered. Robert could explain it to her, if she wanted to know badly enough, which she didn't. If the definition became important, she could always knock on his door in Paris and, when he'd recovered from the shock of seeing her, ask. He'd jabber about precedents and tort law, misdemeanors and felonies, the terrible behavior of the tragically jilted. It probably boiled down to some simple concept like intent, an illegitimate pregnancy, or VD.

Earlier in the year, her girlfriend Mary Rose had come home from a weekend visit to her parents in Tucson to find her condo half-empty, as opposed to half-full. All traces of her husband Kevin gone, Mary Rose had first suspected foul play - burglary, abduction, murder. Order emerged from chaos: Mary Rose realized she'd been dumped. Kevin had been acting more and more withdrawn in the months leading up to his disappearance. She hadn't recognized the steps in the dance couples do when they're about to break up. She thought he'd been more polite lately because he'd been in a better mood. She didn't see his politeness for what it was: floral air spray to mask the carrion smell of their dead relationship.

_Look on the bright side,_ Grace said. _He could have taken everything. Count yourself lucky._

Mary Rose wailed, _Sure, we 'd been having some hard times, but oh my God, Grace, how could he? _

During the first month, Mary Rose produced monsoons of tears. Time heals all wounds, except for the fatal ones, and soon enough her damp histrionics subsided. In need of some other vehicle for gushing, Mary Rose purged her soul by writing reams of execrable poetry: _He never gave me anything/ He took/ He tore my heart out with/ One look. He took. He took._ Worse, Mary Rose tracked down the name and address of Kevin's new girlfriend and parked outside the woman's house all night, watching their silhouettes through the blinds. She'd caress the hood of Kevin's car, choking on nostalgia as the ticking sound of the cooling engine reminded her of happier times, when they had shared a driveway. She left her poems under his wiper blades until his attorney told her to stop. Grace resolved never to be that pathetic, and reminded herself of this when she asked Mary Rose to water the plants and collect the mail.

"Paris," Mary Rose had said, her eyes misting over. "How romantic."

"Paris," Grace now said under her breath. "How pathetic." Were they there yet? No, coach class had just commenced boarding.

The flight attendant - a slender brunette thing whose trim waistline and pert bosom inspired loathing in Grace's heart - raised an eyebrow at her but, being French, declined to comment. She looked down her perfect narrow nose at Grace and asked if she might like another drink.

"You seem very thirsty," the flight attendant said.

_Fucking skinny Mediterranean bitch_ , Grace thought. _You can live on brie and Bordeaux and not gain a pound._

"I'd love one."

Grace repeated affirmations, to brace herself up:

_I 'll be fierce and justified._

_I am large; I contain multitudes._

_He 's sleeping with his paralegal, for fuck's sake._

After nine or ten years on the clogged, almost-fogged-in SFO runway, the plane took off.

Travelling depressed Grace. Always had, always would. After a turbulent eternity aloft, the pilot came on and yapped in French before switching to English and announcing their descent into Roissy - Charles de Gaulle Airport. Grace tried not to think about the air she had been breathing on this flight. How many passengers had tuberculosis? The flu? _Nothing like a transatlantic flight to make a girl feel alive_ , she thought. _And occasionally give her a bitch of a yeast infection_. Terrible airplane food, even in first class, left her trembling. The alcohol gave her headaches. Sure, she had Evian and pills for everything, but they could only do so much. Fatigue still crept in. Reality darkened. Rich was fucking a slut and now what was Grace supposed to do? Put on a brave face (How did one do that, anyway - was it like a masque? Did it harden, and when you no longer needed artificial fortitude, could you wash it off again? Would it also cleanse and tighten the pores?) and make the best of it?

Grace laughed out loud. The joke of her life had no punch line.

_Stop wallowing, for one thing. You 're in Paris. Go to Tati and buy cheap panties to wear under an exorbitant dress from Chanel. Or, better still, wear no panties under an exorbitant dress from Chanel. Pick up a studly African somewhere, or maybe an Arab, and spend the weekend riding his big fat dick._

Grace thought, _Shut up, Gloria._

Grace took a taxi to her hotel on the Place Concorde. The tour-guide sights awed her as they always had: the Eiffel Tower, the spires of Notre Dame, the pounded-sugar architecture of Sacre Coeur perched atop Montmartre, the Arc de Triomphe, the broad boulevards, those lovely yellow limestone buildings. Even the novelty of riding inside a Citroen taxi and not a rattling piece of crap from Detroit brightened her spirits. Grace listened to Malcolm McLaren on her iPod and scoured her soul for traces of joy.

_Everybody pees on Paris, watch me now_ , sang Malcolm.

Joy? Okay, perhaps not. She'd settle for vindication.

"He's toast," Grace said.

" _Excusez-moi?_ "

"Nothing," Grace said. "Just talking to myself. I'm sorry." She supposed she should use her rudimentary French but after spending half a day trapped inside a monstrous Airbus vibrator, her social skills had eroded just the tiniest bit.

" _Voila._ Here we are, Madame."

After navigating the disturbing-to-Americans ritual of checking in and arranging for her bags to be sent upstairs, finally she was installed in her suite. Whom to tip? How much? And how did one keep track of the countries in which tipping was and wasn't obligatory? Grace had long since concluded that one didn't, unless one worked for the State Department. She offered tips to everyone who seemed helpful and permitted them to accept or decline. Being American, she had the coarse luxury of presumptive ignorance about local customs. Being tired, she took advantage of her cultural boorishness and tossed euro notes around like confetti. Better to be taken for a vulgar bitch with too much money and no manners than to stiff someone for a tip.

From the minibar, she fixed an overpriced vodka and tonic. How much was that, ten euros? Twenty? And what was the exchange rate, anyway? Maybe she should have arranged this trip with Robert. He always knew things like the exchange rate and how to ride the metro. She couldn't deny the benefit of having a brother who both gay and kind of a geek. No matter. She downed her drink, and followed it with a second in less than twenty minutes. Even though it was only lunchtime here, and every travel book she'd ever read warned against this kind of thing, Grace stretched out on her extravagant bed and let the alcohol, fatigue, and Valium traces wash her away.

A million writers have raved about Paris, but it has avoided becoming a geographical cliche like New York and San Francisco. Paris is uniquely itself. The average Jean-Jacques or Jeanne Marie on the street walks around with what Grace interpreted as a subtle smile, just a few watts cooler than the Mona Lisa's. Even when the nation is gripped by crisis, there must be a certain smugness in waking up each morning and still being French. You can eat nine buttery meals a day and smoke cigarettes made of pure tar and look forward to living until you're 100, with your final four decades financed by a fat government pension. You get to bask in not being English, Belgian, or, of all things, American. Why _not_ smile all day, just because you can?

According to Robert, the contingent from Dufferin & Smuck should be in Paris by now. The three gay ones were staying at the apartment of Steve Davies, a partner who sounded like a clump of slime mold with a Juris Doctor. Grace wondered how Robert could put up with the man at such close proximity. _Because of his apartment in the Tenth_ made no sense. Did owning a vacation home somehow make him unique? Robert tried to explain further: _The tiles and the balcony and the French doors._ So? _It 's right around the corner from Key West_. So was Cuba, and who wanted to go there, other than the Canadians? And Gloria? _Key West is the best sauna in Europe._ And here she'd thought it was a little town on a spit of land south of Florida. Grace didn't get it and finally quit asking. She told him to stop talking, and fixed herself another drink. Maybe the flat had a bidet with water pressure like the fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, turning every act of personal hygiene into a self-pleasure extravaganza. There was no way of knowing. In any case, Rich would be staying with four or five heterosexual colleagues at some little _boutique alberge_ a couple of blocks above the Champs Elysees.

Just a couple of metro stops away.

Or a short walk, if she was in the mood to exercise off a few of the calories she'd sucked down, upon her arrival.

She wasn't.

Instead, she rang the concierge and asked for a taxi.

" _Oui, Madame._ "

Grace loved Paris. On a certain level, she hated it too, but there was room for that in the expanses of her psyche.

And she didn't need to concern herself too much with the comings and goings of Robert and his gay colleagues. She'd hear all the sordid stories later.

_How does this make me different from Mary Rose_ , Grace wondered. She surveyed the ornate lobby of Rich's hotel, decided the adjacent cocktail lounge offered a better view, or at least as good, selected a richly upholstered red chair where she'd be able to see Rich arrive or depart before he saw her, and seated herself. Her father had been an avid hunter. Still would be, if...

Grace shuddered. Better not to dwell on it.

A tuxedoed waiter glided up and asked in English, "Some champagne?"

_Do I have AMERICAN_ _tattooed across my forehead, then?_

Grace nodded. "And something to eat." Christ, it was almost time for brunch. How long had she _slept?_ "What's your favorite thing on the menu? Bring me that. And some coffee. I just got off a plane, and I'm dying."

"Right away, Madame."

_I should be shot for this_ , Grace thought. _Or lipo-sucked until my titties implode._

A few hours crept by. Grace couldn't focus on her book. It's impossible to read when one is scanning passersby, so she gave up and ordered a cheese plate - lavish French delicacies she didn't know the names of. Weren't French cheeses supposed to smell like fermented crotch sweat? These didn't. Some fruit - apples, pears, tiny grapes. More champagne. Caviar on buttery little toast things. Asparagus drizzled with a tangy sauce. She devoured everything and her arteries screamed like lobsters in a pot.

_I have no idea how to be alone_.

She wanted to talk to Robert about this right now, and even pulled out her cell phone to call him. Then she remembered they were in Paris. Their phones wouldn't work. The conversation would have to wait.

_I just want to see Rich_ , Grace thought. She looked around the lobby. She didn't see him. Dusk gilded everything. She'd spent all afternoon in this hotel, in this very chair (except for trips to the ladies' room), nibbling. Some alchemy happened: the food, the champagne, the nervous desperation of this not-so-clandestine surveillance, and the jet lag all combined to form this one revelation. She had to see him. She knew she should just present herself to the registration desk as Rich's wife, show her ID, and ask to be shown to his (" _their_ ") room. She could do that. And she would. But she wasn't ready yet. She wanted to see him without him knowing. Maybe she'd just have another drink first. For courage.

Her mother's voice again: _You 're spying, Grace, and it's beneath you. Why not just admit it? You want to catch him with his bimbo, either that paralegal he's screwing or some piece of French trash as big around as a Gitane, and you want to make him suffer. You want to take him to the cleaners, don't you?_

Grace protested out loud, as if Gloria were sitting across the table: "But I don't!"

"Madame?" asked a passing waiter.

"Nothing," Grace said.

_I just want to see him_ , she thought again. _I have to make it happen before I leave. That 's not too much to ask, is it?_

A full day of surveillance, wasted. Waiters came and went, bringing more food and drink. She suspected they were talking about her, back in the kitchen: _That bizarre American woman, she 's eaten more food today than a horse. You can see where she puts it. We should bring her a trough. What is she doing here, anyway? What if her credit card is declined? _Grace rejoiced in not knowing more French. They could say whatever they wanted about her, and as long as she couldn't understand them, it didn't matter. It didn't exist. She decided to stick her head in Rich's room after all, just to look around. Then she'd call it quits for the day. She simply could not camp out here until he arrived because she simply could not stay awake that long. She was drowning in the quicksand of jet lag and alcoholic excess. One quick look at Rich's room, she promised herself, and she'd cab back to her hotel to collapse.

It didn't take much to convince the hotel staff. Some crocodile tears that weren't entirely false. _I 'm supposed to be meeting my husband. He's a lawyer, in meetings. I thought he'd be here by now. _Grace told herself she was above reproach. With the next breath, she told herself she was beneath contempt.

She found Rich's two suitcases, one open on a luggage stand, the other on a dresser. His underwear and T-shirts lay strewn across the unmade bed and floor like body parts after a bombing. He was never this sloppy at home. Grace wondered if he'd just fucked someone amid all this mess. She tossed clothes and linens aside in search of telltale pecker tracks. She surveyed the debris for signs of unfamiliar and unwelcome femininity - a tube of lipstick, a pair of panties, a tampon still cocooned in its paper wrapper. She found none of these things, just souvenirs of her husband. The pillowcases smelled like his shampoo; the garments in his suitcases smelled like their brand of fabric softener. She sat back on the bed, pressed one of the T-shirts to her face, and breathed in: _Rich_. Her throat tightened; her eyes stung.

The words _I deserve this_ flitted through the undersurface of her mind like subtitles in this awful French film her life had turned into. She tried to turn them off, but they wouldn't cooperate: _I deserve this I deserve this I deserve this_.

"But I don't," she said out loud. "It's not fair."

Gloria's voice again: _What is fair, honey? You just tell me that, and then we 'll both know. I seem to remember something about cotton candy and prize billy goats?_

Grace rushed out of the room and cabbed back to her hotel.

Drunk on fatigue and champagne, and with a sense of loss gnawing her hollow, she tossed and turned on the bed for half an hour before the dam broke. She curled into a fetal ball and sobbed herself to sleep.

Jet lag is a harsh mistress, and Grace woke up with a start at 4.00 in the morning feeling even more wretched than when she'd gone to bed. She hadn't brushed her teeth, hadn't taken a shower, hadn't undressed. She wanted her husband or at least a teddy bear. (How old had she been when she got rid of her last teddy bear? What a stupid thing to do. She should buy another one at once. If you can't have your husband back, you should at least have a big cuddly teddy bear. And a good vibrator, as Flora Trust, her harridan of an older sister, would no doubt add.)

"Fuck," Grace muttered.

She squinted up at the black ceiling. Vague rectangles of yellowish light seeped through the crack between the curtains. In the hallway, the elevator door opened and closed. Outside, she heard the two-tone caterwaul of a European siren. She tried to block out the sound with a pillow, but it didn't work.

Grace itched in half a dozen places. A dying planet's atmosphere of metabolized alcohol surrounded her. She could smell herself - boozy morning breath, unwashed pits, sweat from sleeping in her clothes, cigarette smoke adhering to the remains of her hair products. Her stomach hurt. Lying there, she felt an alarming rumble in her gut. She knew she wouldn't get much surveillance done today because she was going to spend a lot of time in the bathroom losing the wrong kind of weight.

"I wish I hadn't left home."

The Gloria-voice tried to speak up again. Grace could tell her phantom mother had something catty to say. She'd agree: Grace should never have left home. What kind of woman flies all the way to Paris to stalk her husband? What kind of woman actually wants to catch her man red-handed - or red-dicked, not to put too fine a point on it - in the act with some French tramp? Gloria would imply that if Grace had wanted a quiet, normal life so badly, then she should never have left North Carolina. She should have married one of her boyfriends from college (pre-Rich) and lived an uncomplicated life in some charming Southern city like Asheville or Savannah. Magnolias in the front yard, iced tea on the porch, and a mess of greens and ham hocks simmering on the stove. So far from the palmy Palo Alto lifestyle she'd ended up with.

Grace wondered, _How did I end up with this as my life?_

At home, she couldn't nap in the afternoon. Naps, while often necessary and occasionally decadent, ruined her ability to fall sleep. This was the same thing in reverse: she'd dropped unconscious like a stone down a well once her head hit the pillow, but now a hideous energy coursed through her veins. She tossed. She turned. She couldn't stand this bed, these sheets, the clothes she had slept in, and the reek of her unwashed body. A bath in a vat of strangers' sweat wouldn't have left her smelling any worse.

Other people must love travel opportunities like this, Grace supposed. She hauled herself out of bed and made her careful, hung-over way to the bathroom. Her legs ached from disuse: too much time on the plane, too much time in that chair yesterday afternoon and evening.

_I 'm like the poster child for deep vein thrombosis_, she thought. _It 's a fucking miracle I didn't fall over dead when I stepped off the jetway at Charles de Gaulle. If I'd flown in economy class, I probably would have. Knowing Rich, he'd sue the airline, win, and get even richer. _

Later, when she felt more lifelike, she'd need to go for a walk. Much later. After nine cups of coffee and various analgesics. She peed for a long time and found herself half-hypnotized by the pattern of tiles on the floor. Shooting pains lanced her guts as if someone had crimped various points in her intestines shut with heavyweight binding clips.

But I'm in Paris! There are no evil days in Paris. The Fifth Republic put an end to that.

Other people love moments like this. You get to watch the city wake up. Funny-looking foreign street sweepers and delivery trucks that look like toys for the children of giants zoom around; empty taxis cruise the streets looking forlorn; yawning waiters set up tables and chairs at sidewalk cafes. Familiarity among all that foreignness. Grace supposed she could go for a stroll and watch Paris open its eyes. It might not be torture to watch sunrise over the Seine. She could pretend she was in a Seurat painting, or depending on the sort of neighborhood where she ended up, a Toulouse-Lautrec. On the other hand, she felt like she'd lost a wrestling match with a wrecking ball. Sunrises over the Seine are best shared with loved ones, and the loved one in question was out getting a blowjob from some random Monique or Babette.

Grace started crying on the toilet. She flushed it to hide the sound of her own sobs. She had money but what the fuck was she supposed to _do_ with herself? Why didn't she have a kid or two already, and some semblance of stability? The toilet bowl beneath her emptied with a wet gurgling roar. She felt worse and cried harder.

_Pathetic in Paris_ , she thought. _I am despicable. I deserve everything that happens to me._

She lasted two more days, failed to see her husband, then stopped at an Air France ticket office and changed her flight home.

## **THE INFERNAL REPUBLIC**

### "Urban Reef (or, It's Hard to Find a Friend in the City)"

  * _The Barcelona Review,_ March 2005

### "Marble Forest, Karstic Heart"

  * _Asia Literary Review_ , June 2009

Originally published:  
Hong Kong: Signal 8 Press, 2012

## **Urban Reef**

## **_(or, It 's Hard to Find a Friend in the City)_**

The sky above Portland held Liesl's attention and her lunch date did not.

"I think it's going to rain," Joanna said.

_We 're in Portland,_ Liesl thought. _Of course it 's going to fucking rain._

After three months in the Northwest, Liesl questioned her decision to leave Los Angeles. LA offered the depth of a wading pool and the culture of a petri dish, but she had never lacked friends there. In a megalopolis of fifteen or twenty million people, it's impossible not to connect. Cozy, scenic Portland overflowed with tattooed hipsters too busy self-publishing poetry chapbooks and getting loaded on local microbrews to bother returning calls from a new arrival. When the walls closed in and the phone didn't ring and her e-mail box contained no new messages, she contemplated dyeing her hair blue and getting a labret. Thinking she'd have better luck when she lingered in bookstores and cafes, she wrote her first poems since high school. They'd give her something to talk about with Portland's cigarettes-and-Sartre set. In theory, it should have worked; in practice, she still got blown off. Creative enough to know that her poems sucked but not creative enough to know how to fix them, she burned her notebook and passed the time watching rented DVDs and reading library books by the dozen.

Within three weeks of her move, she noticed a chill when she tried to strike up a conversation outside of the office. She asked a friendly coworker (also a fairly recent California refugee), _Is there something wrong with me?_

_This city 's grown too fast,_ Ed explained. _It thinks it 's still a small town. Even the new people want to think they're in a small town. So they circle the wagons and keep to themselves. The Scandinavian roots don't help. People with centuries of cold in their genes take a long time to thaw out. But don't worry, they're much worse in Seattle. You'll get used to it._

_Thanks, I feel so much better now,_ Liesl said.

Ed said, _I have a friend you should meet. You 'll like her._

Liesl made a mental list of things she liked about Portland: the clean air, the mild weather, the rain, the misty hills west of the city, the mellow skyline (skyscrapery enough to keep the eye busy but not overwhelming like Manhattan or San Francisco), the relative lack of traffic, and the sheer retropolitan loveliness of the place. The coffee shop across from her apartment served espressos just the way she liked them, blacker than Satan's cough syrup. She enjoyed the walkable nature of the city. You could spend all afternoon reading at a snug sidewalk cafe, and when it was time to go home, you could jump on a streetcar. Not once had she heard a horror story about a two-hour commute under baking brown skies.

The words _Grind your teeth and remind yourself you 're happy_ popped into her head. Who had said that? Her mother? Her sister? Ed?

Joanna asked her a question.

_You 'll like her_, Ed had said. Liesl kept waiting for it to happen.

"What?" Liesl blinked. "I'm sorry," she lied. She returned to the truth: "I was watching a man across the street. I thought he was going to drop the package he was carrying."

Joanna turned to look.

"He's inside that shop now. He almost didn't make it, though."

"Portland is so amazing, in terms of people-watching!" Joanna said. "There's always something to see here, especially when you're in the Pearl."

_You haven 't traveled much, have you? Once you've seen one tongue piercing, you've seen them all._

Portland's Pearl District had been transformed overnight, more or less, from a derelict patch of brick warehouses north of downtown into an upscale wonderland of condos and cafes. Liesl wanted to buy a loft in the area but prices had wafted out of her reach. After the endless pavement of Los Angeles, her soul craved cobbled streets and convenience. Yes, Portland had a lot to offer in terms of people-watching, but Liesl felt jaded after the nonstop human freak show offered up by Southern California.

"I think I'm going to have a Caesar salad," she said, giving in to a moment of nostalgia for the Golden State.

"White wine with that?" Joanna asked. "Oregon Pinot gris is some of the best in the world. The climate here is very similar to Bordeaux. Grapes that grow well in Bordeaux grow well here too. Did you know that most red Bordeaux is really Pinot noir? I didn't know that until I moved here. Isn't that just fascinating?"

"Will anybody ever understand France?" Liesl asked, thinking, _Burgundy, you dumb bitch. Not Bordeaux._

She spoke French fluently. Joanna didn't need to know that. When would the waitress come back? Maybe a glass or two of Pinot gris would be just the thing. Liesl intended to work from home this afternoon, so her jet fuel breath wouldn't attract managerial notice. Make that three glasses. She could stand in front of her bathroom mirror, twist blonde knots in her hair, and ask herself what the hell had ever made her think leaving Los Angeles would be a good idea.

"I want geoduck chowder," Joanna announced. "I know it tastes like sperm but... well, you know. Is that such a bad thing?"

" _De gustibus non disputandum est,_ " Liesl said, knowing Joanna wouldn't get it.

"Was that Italian?"

"Romanian," Liesl said. "Oh look, here's the waitress."

They placed their orders.

"How long have you lived in Portland?" Liesl asked. The distant whirr of a streetcar distracted her.

"Oh, about ten years, I think." Joanna looked into space and counted time on her fingers. She mumbled something and nodded to herself. "I grew up in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Can you imagine that?"

"No," Liesl said. "It sounds like a medication. Coeur d'Alene, cortisone, Dramamine... when I was a kid I thought dopamine was a drug. Imagine how disappointed I was to learn it's a neurotransmitter!"

"There's not much neurotransmission going on in Coeur d'Alene, believe me," Joanna said. "I went to college in Boise and it was better, you know, it was bigger, but it wasn't what I wanted."

"I've never been to Boise," Liesl said. She wondered about her own neurotransmitters. Did they need amplification or sedation? Both? Maybe all they needed was more wine. She thought, _Something from Napa, damn it!_

Joanna shrugged. "It's a town that wants to be a city. Give it another five years. Let the annual murder rate and the average commute time rise, and it'll be a better place to live."

Except for the bit about the murder rate, Ed had said something similar about Portland. He had moved up from Sacramento three years earlier. _At first, most displaced Californians feel that way about this place_ , he'd added. _As small towns go, this one 's as urban as they come._

"I thought art galleries and Thai restaurants were the usual indicators," Liesl said. Faint hope bloomed within her. Not showy camellia blossoms, no ostentatious pink rhododendrons, more of a ground cover. Emotional vetch. Good enough; she'd take it. After prattling on about nothing their first twenty minutes together, Joanna was finally becoming interesting. "Unless the restaurants are run by cannibals, I guess. Or unless you're one of the corpses."

"To corpses!" Joanna raised her glass.

"Do people get murdered in Boise?"

"They must," Joanna said. "I don't know. Arguments about sheep, maybe."

"So where did you live after Boise?"

"New York."

Liesl thought she'd misheard. "Upstate?"

"Brooklyn. I started law school at Hofstra and quit after my first year. I double-majored in business and IT, and after I graduated, I went into the Peace Corps and taught entrepreneurship skills in Ukraine. It wasn't gritty enough, so once my gig was up, I moved to Cambodia and taught English. Sometimes I miss the smell of Phnom Penh. Urine, fish sauce, and hot dust. How's that for a leap? Phnom Penh to Portland?"

_Law school? The Peace Corps? Ukraine wasn 't gritty enough? But you were supposed to be a vapid brunette,_ Liesl thought. _You 're making my preconceptions hurt. The stretch marks will never fade, not even if I soak my brain in Clorox._

"Sounds unappetizing, but I bet the people-watching was better there," Liesl ventured.

"Not really. Not better. Just different. People here usually have all their limbs still attached. Stumps have their appeal as long as they're not still bleeding, but... I don't know. I like the way people look here."

"Like they overslept and put on the cleanest things they could find on the floor before running out the front door?"

"Something like that. Except for the junkies around the Lloyd Center, nobody looks like a poster child for a UN campaign against land mines."

"This is the kind of town where Elmer's School Glue is popular as a hair-styling product."

"You have no idea," Joanna said. "At least the people here use it to fix their hair and not to glue their body parts back on." She rolled her eyes, then stopped and seemed to be staring at something overhead. More clouds, Liesl assumed. People here found the cloudscape endlessly fascinating. If you stared at them long enough, you could almost hear them say _baaa_. Who had told her that? Ed?

"Do I want to have an idea?"

"Is there a man balancing on top of that ledge?"

Liesl looked up. She squinted into the bright silver glare of the clouds and saw an outline standing at the building across the street.

"That's not a ledge. It's the roof."

"He looks like he's going to jump," Joanna said. "Did you know some high school kids out in the suburbs formed a Suicide Club? They even tried to get it officially recognized. This place does that to people. Do you think he's really going to jump?"

"He'd have done it by now if he really wanted to kill himself," Liesl said.

"Are you ready to order?" The waitress startled Liesl. "What are you looking... _oh my God! Somebody call 911!_ "

She raced inside, trailing a cloud of flowery perfume Liesl couldn't identify. _Must have just started her shift_ , she thought. _It hasn 't worn off yet._

"Do you think the cops'll come before he jumps?" Joanna asked.

"Do they ever?"

"I don't know. I've never seen anybody leap off a building before."

"And I bet you've never done it, either," Liesl said.

"Not since I was a little girl. I followed my big brother around all the time. He and his friends liked climbing up on the roof of the house. One day they decided it was low enough to the ground for them to jump. It was autumn, so first we all raked up a huge pile of leaves to land in. Up we went, and everybody jumped. I went last. I got scared, but I did it anyway."

"And did you break any bones?"

"No, but this one boy named Kenny fractured something in his foot. We all got yelled at but my father had that look in his eye. I think he wished he could get away with jumping into a pile of leaves, you know?"

"Look!"

The man tottered. His arms pinwheeled. Liesl held her breath, waiting to see whether he'd plummet. She scanned the cafe and the sidewalk to see whether anyone else had noticed, but apart from their waitress, no one had.

From this angle, Liesl couldn't tell what type of clothes the man was wearing, how old he might be, or anything. She searched his outline for clues. Backlit by the sky, he didn't offer much information, just a dark shape against blue and puffs of white. Maybe a baseball cap, maybe loose pants and a jacket. What could his motivation be, she wondered. He wasn't screaming for attention but he wasn't choosing the most private way to dispatch himself, either.

Prior to her move, several friends had warned her, independently of each other, to avoid the Northwest. Visit in midwinter, they said. You'll understand why so many antidepressants are prescribed up there. Why the suicide rate's so high. The unremitting clouds and rain make people lose their shit in a dark and fatal way. Someone even did a study of serial murderers and found that a disproportionate number of them grew up in the Northwest. There's not enough sunlight there. Don't go. It messes people up.

Liesl searched her soul for murderous urges. Finding none, she concluded she hadn't lived in Portland long enough. Maybe after a few more years of snubs from the hipper-than-thou locals, she'd want to eviscerate a few with dull cutlery.

"If he lands on his legs," Joanna said, "he might live. But if he dives, he's toast. The only question left is how much of a mess he'll make."

"He's wearing a baseball cap, isn't he?"

Joanna squinted.

Sirens droned in the distance, coming closer.

"Yes, I think so. Where's the waitress? I need more alcohol."

"Want to bet the impact will knock his cap off?" Liesl finished her drink. "Fuck, I shouldn't have said that. You must think I'm a ghoul."

A man's voice broke her concentration: "She may not, but I do. You both are."

Liesl had forgotten other people might be sitting within earshot. She turned to see the offended party. The man looked like a rumpled college lecturer, the sort whose suits are always a decade out of date and whose trousers float an inch above his ankles. He had a bad case of what the Japanese call _bar-code head_ , arguably the best euphemism ever for an uneven comb-over. His face burned with outrage.

She enjoyed the moment like a fine Pinot noir from Oregon or Bordeaux or Zimbabwe or the Gobi Desert or wherever the hell Joanna had said was climatically ideal for that type of grape. She held Bar-Code Head's shock on her tongue and rolled notes of flavor back and forth like oenological marbles: black cherries, horror, vanilla, dismay, and luxurious tannins.

Their offended fellow diner threw a few bills at his plate and stormed off. A five blew off the table and landed on Liesl's foot. No one but Joanna was looking. All heads strained toward the sky. The man's arms pinwheeled again. He tottered. And Liesl pocketed the money. Let the waitress think she'd been stiffed.

"He was thinking _How could a little blonde piece like her have such ghoulish thoughts in her head_?" Joanna said. "It was written all over his face."

Liesl shook her head. "You left out one part. He would have prefaced it with _Fuck, man_. Don't all straight men start sentences that way? Like, when they're appalled or grossed out or whatever?" She flapped a well-manicured hand at the empty chair where the offended party had been sitting. "I don't know. There are women and there are women. I used to want to be a doctor. As an undergrad I took mortuary science because the courses were never full, and I thought they'd be more practical than the usual biology dreck, so..."

"You changed your major?" Joanna seemed intrigued and surprised in equal measure.

Liesl nodded. "I got tired of stitching anuses shut."

Joanna shook her head. "I can see that becoming tiresome." She raised her glass, and said "To anal needlepoint!"

"Anal cross stitch!" They clinked glasses. Liesl looked around to see whether she was offending anybody else. When nobody recoiled in righteous horror, she felt pins and needles of disappointment. "So not to go too far off the point, but, like, do you think he's really going to jump?"

They squinted up. Liesl had a brief image of new buildings being constructed over the streets and sidewalks, forming bridges overhead. Ultimately the city would be a solid reef of brick and glass and mortar. People would move among the conjoined buildings like tiny fish through coral. The thought of the crowds gave her the horrors. She watched the would-be jumper totter again, flailing to keep his balance.

"It's a bit windy," Liesl said.

"A bit. You know, he's kind of a pussy, isn't he?" Joanna asked.

Liesl opened her mouth to agree but the screeching arrival of two police cruisers interrupted her. Four officers leapt from their cars. Two took positions on the sidewalk, gesturing for the flock of rubberneckers to move away. The other two raced inside, one barking into his walkie talkie. A cloud of noise and turbulence lingered in their wake.

"How exciting," Liesl said. "Isn't this exciting?"

"Moist panty alert!" Joanna said. "I think he's going to jump. Look at him... you can tell."

"You can?"

Liesl had to admit, something in the man's posture had changed. He looked over his shoulder as if to see what was making a noise behind him. Liesl's neck began to cramp from looking up, and the squinting was going to give her a headache sooner or later. She wished the guy would either climb down or jump and get it over with. _Does this make me a bad person?_

"I'll make you a bet," Joanna said.

"That he jumps? Foregone conclusion," Liesl said. "The only worthwhile bet is how long it takes him to get airborne."

Joanna shook her head. "The cops'll rig up a safety net first. Isn't it funny how the law tries to prevent you from ending your own life, as if it doesn't belong to you? I think people who want to kill themselves should be left alone to do it. It's not like you do it on a whim, you know? _Hmm, it 's double coupon day at Safeway but they're out of 1% milk. Should I buy a different brand instead or kill myself? Guess I'll open a vein. Hmm, what aisle are the box cutters in? _People don't operate that way. They don't."

"I bet he'll jump before... _fuck, he 's gonna do it..._"

But the man regained his balance. A collective sigh of relief ( _or disappointment?_ ) rose from the gaggle of onlookers who had drifted up in ones and twos to watch the drama. A third police car arrived, distracting Liesl for a moment. Portland's police cruisers didn't look austere, as she expected them to. They were basic white sedans with a rose logo painted on the sides and PORTLAND POLICE spelled out in a simple font. In a place as huggy-friendly as the City of Roses purported to be, she supposed it made sense, but she wanted police cars to look like they'd been manufactured in the Death Star. She directed her attention upward again. The clouds had parted, revealing a slice of diluted sunlight. Liesl blinked. Her eyes stung. Not wanting to miss anything, she fought an urge to rummage in her purse for Visene. The black outline tottered again.

"The cops won't make it," Joanna said. "And the angle's wrong to shoot him with a beanbag gun. That would only work if there's a marksman in an elevator now, in one of these buildings." She gestured at the midrises around them. "Put a guy with a rifle on about the third floor, and he could get a clear shot. But they won't do that. I think this asshole's going to jump."

"How far will he splatter?"

_There, that 's what we've been coming toward, isn't it? _Liesl looked down--to hell with the jumper--and stared into the bottom of her wine glass. The waitress had obviously forgotten about them. Like everybody else, she was staring at the suicide wannabe up above.

"That depends," said Joanna, and her tone of voice made Liesl look up. Joanna shrugged. "You studied mortuary science. You've seen people make a mess of themselves before. Does he dive or does he jump feet first? If he decides to be Greg Louganis, we'll be wiping blood and brain matter off our faces..."

"But if he jumps feet first, he might not make such a mess. You're right," Liesl said. "For a second there I was afraid I'd gone too far."

"I just went through a bad breakup," Joanna said. "Did Ed tell you that? I walked in on him--my boyfriend, not Ed--screwing my best friend. Who is also a guy. Is. Was. As in, _was_ my best friend. Whatever, fuck verb tenses, I'm not a big fan of men right now. I hope the motherfucker jumps, and the sooner the better."

"Which is all a long way of saying I didn't go too far," Liesl said. "Thanks for easing my mind. So you're saying you think he's going to jump before the cops get to him, right?"

Joanna nodded. She looked like a lioness about to rip the throat out of a gazelle. Liesl had never gone on safari but she imagined it must be something like this. You don't have to go to Botswana to see blood lust.

"Lunch is on you if he jumps and splatters, then?"

Joanna shook her head. "Lunch is on me if he jumps. If we get splashed, we're both calling in sick and getting wasted this afternoon. Drinks are on me, too. But only if we get splattered."

"Cool," Liesl said. She wondered if gore would ruin the color of her hair. No big deal. It was time to see her stylist. He'd ask what on earth happened and she'd say something like _I went to a sex party in an abattoir_ because sometimes the truth is just too weird. "But what if he doesn't jump? Guess that means I'm buying, then?"

Joanna smiled and nodded. "Works for me. I hope you're not disappointed to be the loser if he lives?"

"It's not the worst thing in the world. Guess that means we'll have to do this again sometime, and I'll buy the drinks?"

"Do you really think we'll find another place with a suicidal loser on a roof?"

"I don't know. It's Portland. Who can say?"

Joanna looked up. "Either way, I guess we both win. You haven't been in the Northwest long, have you? It's hard to find friends here. I know what it's like, so..." She raised her glass, which contained as little wine as Liesl's. "Is this enough for a toast?"

"If you don't mind toasting with backwash, I don't."

They clinked glasses.

And at that precise moment, the man on the rooftop jumped.

This made Liesl happier than she'd been in weeks.

## **Marble Forest, Karstic Heart**

Clouds look soft, but they're not. As relieved as I felt to be getting home--even after living in Hong Kong for seven years, it still seems odd to regard this relentless skyscraper-pincushion of a city as home--I also dreaded the final approach and the bumpy surprises lurking under the uppermost layer of fluff.

"I hate this part," groaned the boy in the seat next to mine.

The Airbus A340 lurched and dropped through a patch of empty air. During the interval of hideous bouncing that followed, the boy groaned, shut his eyes, and put his head back, teeth in a clench. His forehead shone with sweat. He'd been a polite passenger most of the trip, having plugged in a pair of earphones and become one with his handheld media player as soon as we'd reached cruising altitude. At one point, my curiosity had gotten the better of me; I'd glanced over to see what movie he was watching. When I didn't recognize any of the actors, I gave up and largely ignored him for the last five hours of the flight.

He'd caught my eye in the boarding queue because he seemed familiar. I'd been a guest lecturer at a couple of universities during my first year in the territory: Western art, conservation, that kind of thing. Hong Kong has plenty of experts on all aspects of Chinese art, but conservators with my background are fewer and farther between. Had he been a student, or had I seen him on the cover of a magazine? If he was a student, he'd either tell me or not. Also, even in ostentatious Hong Kong, where banks push wealth management services as vigorously as American banks thrust unlimited credit at the borderline-destitute, it was unusual for a young Chinese--I guessed seventeen or eighteen, although he could have been older--to travel alone. Affording it wasn't the issue. It just wasn't _done_.

Nor do well-groomed young Chinese tend to _twitch_. I'd initially thought he was coming off a speed-enhanced hedonism spree. He seemed unable to stay still, jumping up every thirty minutes or so to use the washroom. Two hours into the flight, I suggested we swap seats. Better to surrender the aisle than have him constantly climbing over me after the lights went down.

Everything about him said money: the Dolce & Gabbana cardigan over a T-shirt from agnes b., the Marc Jacobs bag at his feet, the accent that was more London than local. His fashionably tousled hair was too symmetrical to be the result of a bad night, too perfect. Marmoreal skin worthy of the light in a Vermeer completed the effect: he knew he was flawless, and exfoliated accordingly. I saw rebellion in one detail, however. Gold studs adorned his left ear, nailed through the earlobe and along the cartilage as well, which had to have hurt. Basically, he could afford to do whatever he damn well pleased. Yet, far from carefree, he resembled a small animal in the jaws of a predator.

"Shit," the boy said through his teeth as the aircraft hit another patch of dead air.

"Couldn't have put it better myself," I said, white-knuckling the armrest.

The aircraft steadied and the captain announced that he had commenced our descent and we were on our approach into Hong Kong International Airport. I instinctively tightened my seatbelt.

"We're going to be early," I said.

The boy visibly relaxed. "Well, that's good news. I thought I'd be facing a tight connection."

I nodded, recalling the self-inflicted torture of trying to run a mile with a laptop and a carry-on in under fifteen minutes. I pondered one of life's little mysteries: why do connecting flights always depart via the gate farthest from the one through which you arrive? My own travel agent knows better than to cut it so close. Not everyone is so fortunate. I see the sweaty, gasping evidence every time I travel.

"I like your accent," I said. "Are you local? I had you pegged for a Hong Kong guy until you opened your mouth."

"No _lah_! Not Hong Kong boy _lah_ , I grew up in Lon Don and speak the queen's Eng Lish _lor_ ," he said in a perfect singsong Hong Kong staccato, exaggerating the Cantonese particles for effect.

I started laughing. He did too.

"If my parents heard me talk like that, they'd both die on the spot. Or they'd kill me. Or both. Maybe they'd die first and then kill me."

I'm not the type to jabber at strangers: a friendly word or two, sure, but I won't offer heart and soul to someone with whom I have nothing in common but proximity. But he did remind me of a former student and he seemed to want to talk a little. We'd part company in a few minutes anyway, in all probability never crossing paths again, so why not chat with the guy?

"So," I asked him. "Where are you off to next?"

"Seoul," he said. "It's about a four-hour flight. Then I've got another connection, to Vancouver. Then Calgary."

"Jesus!" Airline travel makes people look older, not younger, but I remained convinced he could not yet be out of his teens. This alarmed me. "Are you a student... doing a term paper on masochism or something?"

"No, no. Nothing like that," he said, laughing again. "I'm just, I don't know. Do you ever have that feeling you'll die if you slow down for too long? That you'll be in danger if you stop?"

I shook my head. "Ancient Chinese curse? Hungry ghosts will eat you up if they catch you?"

"No, it's more modern than that," he said.

He didn't elaborate. A silence grew between us.

"I travel a lot too," I ventured. "But for work. I'd just as soon stay home and watch _Lost_ on DVD. I never get any time for television. The thing is," and I lowered my voice to a confidential tone, "it's my passport. If it isn't stamped often enough, it feels neglected. Then it develops emotional problems and starts acting out, and I have to send it back to therapy, which isn't cheap. Neither are the antidepressants. So it's not about me; it's about the mental health of my passport."

He laughed again, which made me feel good. The thing about hitting 40 is that while you feel young, others don't see you that way. One measure of youth is the ability to make young people laugh, not out of politeness or pity but because you genuinely cracked them up. It helps if you know how hard it is to be young in Hong Kong: parents brandishing rusty, austere ideals about tradition, filial piety, and duty to the family; kids desperate to get away but unable to afford the ridiculous rents; marriage not desired for its own sake but seen as the only way out. I don't envy them their futures.

He had wide eyes that should have been furrowed at the corners from smiling a lot, but instead looked sad. Or maybe he was mad because his father had forbidden him to party in Ibiza or Ko Samui or Punta del Este or wherever gap-year kids were getting fucked up or just fucked these days. I made a living focusing on miniscule details, however, and I could see a lot was going on with him, none of it good.

I hadn't noticed that we'd stopped talking until he cleared his throat and asked, raising his voice to be audible over the pre-touchdown instructions, "So you were on holiday in Dubai?"

"No, just transiting. A good friend of mine, a South African guy, used to live there. Hated it. Said it was apartheid all over again, but with all the prejudice directed at the workers shipped in from developing countries to do the dirty work. I kind of wanted to see the workers' camps, but I also knew I'd get depressed. Anyway, after he moved back to Cape Town, I didn't see the point. No, I was in Rome and Milan."

When the wheels hit the tarmac, I thought of Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport, which had been decommissioned a few years before my arrival. I've always wondered what it would be like to come in for a landing so close to all those tall buildings. Legend has it that passengers could almost count the T-shirts and brassieres drying on people's balconies, or see into apartment windows and tell what the inhabitants were having for dinner. That sounds a bit farfetched but I'd like to have seen for myself.

As we taxied toward the terminal, he mentioned transiting Rome, on his way to Athens from Madrid. Picking Alitalia had been a mistake, he said. In Italy, he'd encountered strikes, incompetence, indifferent airline staff, and mountains of unclaimed luggage.

"As if all that weren't enough, the check-in person put the wrong tags on my bag. ATH is Athens. AUH is Abu Dhabi. I don't even know if they fly to Abu Dhabi, but I wasn't going there. So I jumped onto the conveyor belt and grabbed it before it was too late. They called security, but when I told him what the Alitalia people had done, the guy just laughed and walked away." He shrugged. "We might have been in Rome at the same time."

"Then Athens to Dubai?"

He shook his head. "Athens to... Belgrade? Yeah. Belgrade. Nice coffee, very sweet. And then, umm. I get mixed up when I fly too many short hauls in Europe. You know: _If it 's Wednesday, I must be in_..., and you can't remember, so you have to look at your itinerary. Long haul's better."

"When was the last time you were home?"

He needed to think for about ten seconds.

"A month?"

At least now I knew why he wasn't in business class, or first: if someone in his family had been indulging him, he'd given himself a much longer leash this way. Circling the world in first class for a month, no matter how much money Daddy had, would get him yanked home a lot sooner.

"So when does this journey of yours end?"

"It doesn't," he said. He stabbed at the home button on his iPhone. "Shit. Battery's dead again." A sigh. "Whatever. I'll charge it in the lounge."

The second the plane came to a stop, passengers leapt up from their seats, and there was a clatter as overhead bins opened to disgorge their contents onto the heads below. The South Asian woman two rows up from us was nearly brained by a Vuitton bag large enough to carry a Great Dane. She ducked just in time to avoid a concussion.

I extended a hand. "Good luck on your travels. I hope you're able to catch up with yourself. My name's Robert Rivenbark." Out of habit I took a card from the case I kept in the inside pocket of my jacket. He accepted it straight-backed with both hands. The sudden formality, a Hong Kong tradition I rather liked, embarrassed neither of us; in fact, we both smiled when we recognized the cultural shift we'd just done.

"Jason Chiu," he said. Although he didn't comment on the quality of the paper ( _washi_ , oyster grey, engraved not printed) I could tell he knew what he was holding and roughly how much it had cost. He proffered one of his own expensive cards--it said merely JASON CHIU on one side and the Chinese characters for his name on the other. This confirmed my impression of wealth: he had Daddy's platinum card and had gone on the lam. He didn't strike me as spoiled or obnoxious, just a kid who'd gotten fed up with the never-ending stream of tutors, household staff, and other busybodies who herded him through life. "Art conservator? That's impressive."

"Nah, it's just me, my assistant, and a part-time receptionist. Anyway, take care. Enjoy... wherever you′re going."

My partner Kai Ming was still in Milan on his own business trip. These were grim, frenzied occasions for him: endless meetings, stupidity in three or four languages, sleep deprivation. Being an art dealer sounds more uplifting than it is. The glamour exists mostly in the minds of people who, if asked, would credit Gerhard Richter with the invention of the earthquake magnitude scale. Despite Kai Ming's immersion in auctions, museums, galleries, masterworks, and restaurants that featured world-famous chefs, the concentrated vapidity of the people _around_ the art could leach the cobalt blue right out of a Raoul Dufy sky.

I hadn't been to Italy in years. Since Kai Ming's associations with that country were of fatigue, meetings with morons, and the grey industrial blah of the north, he'd never consent to returning there on a vacation. Rather than waiting forever to see the Eternal City again, I'd taken matters into my own hands. I had stayed in his room in Milan, joined him for dinner the one night he could carve out of his schedule, explored the city for a few days, and flown down to Rome on my own.

It took me three days for my internal clock to approximate that of my watch, and I was still a little off-kilter when my assistant Ada came into the work room of our office in an anonymous Wan Chai office tower and read from a Post-It: "She says she's the personal assistant to a Mrs. Chiu, who needs to talk to you urgently about her son Jason. Does any of that make sense?" Ada tapped the note on her paint-stained thumbnail. "She's on hold." Then my memory clicked.

"Robert Rivenbark," I said into the cordless Ada handed me.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Rivenbark. My name is Beatrix Wong." Her English given name rhymed with _theatrics_ (in Hong Kong, one gets used to that sort of nominative surrealism), but I still needed an extra half-second to decode her pronunciation.

"You sat next to my employer′s son on a recent flight back from Dubai, if I′m correct?"

Light dawned. "Yes, I did. Why, has there been any trouble? Is he all right?"

"That's the subject his mother would like to discuss with you. He seems to be a little unwell, and we were hoping you might tell us what you talked about."

He must not have made his connecting flight, then. I figured he had been intercepted. His parents had probably made a call and had him picked up by airport security. Easier than ordering take-out. "What's the matter with him?"

"We don't know. We do know you are the last person he met before we located him. Mrs. Chiu would appreciate a few moments of your time."

Jaded long-time expats are often heard to remark upon how the quality of spoken English in Hong Kong is not what it used to be since the 1997 handover. Even so, certain words are weighed with the degree of care one associates with gold. _Appreciate_ is one such word. I agreed and Beatrix said a car would be in front of my building momentarily.

"Sure," I said. "No problem."

I found Jason's mother and her impatience in a Bentley at the curb when I stepped outside. She must have been in the area when her assistant had placed the call. Hell, she could have already been in front of my building. My surprise flared and faded. Where _else_ would she be? Too many staff at the house, too many people in public who'd recognize her with an unknown Caucasian. She couldn't rent a hotel room without somebody thinking we were there for the bed. In a city as insular as Hong Kong, the rich have to take their privacy where they can get it. Questions and rumors spread like new strains of the flu. No-parking zones are popular for meetings. After all, what's a ticket to someone whose investments yield more than the GDP of a small country?

"You could say he's driving us insane," she said, after polite but terse introductions. Her American accent surprised me. I listened for hints of her origins: was she an ABC, or had she lived outside of Hong Kong for a long time? I can usually tell.

"Sorry to hear that. What's he doing?" The driver pulled away from the curb with such yacht-like smoothness that I had to look out the windows to be sure we were moving.

"Driving," she said. "All over Hong Kong. As soon as we took him home from the airport, he started driving. He didn't stay home long: he just ate a meal and took a shower. Then he got in his car and started driving... all over the Island, Kowloon, the New Territories, everywhere. I'm afraid he'll cross into the mainland, which scares the hell out of me. It's so lawless there, and he has a nice car."

"Driving? For three days?" None of this made sense to me, but that might have been a symptom of my jet lag. Hong Kong is a place where anything can and does happen. "He must stop _somewhere_ to sleep."

"He says he hasn't slept in more than a month."

I watched the play of light and shadow on her face. She had the looks of a pop star who'd matured without Botoxing herself into unrecognizability along the way. I didn′t see any hint of the vapidity or craziness I'd been looking for. I wanted some explanation for Jason's condition, but she gave nothing away. When I'd mentioned my encounter with Jason to Kai Ming over the phone, he'd surprised and unsettled me by disgorging a wealth of information gleaned from the local gossip magazines to which he was only slightly ashamed to be addicted. The Chius were rich, obscenely so. He was in his sixties and had come out of nowhere to build a hugely profitable jewelry chain. Perhaps more importantly, he was renowned by knowledgeable parties on both sides of the law for the rarity and quality of his gemstones. No dabbler in fake jade, Chiu had business interests throughout mainland China and Southeast Asia: gold, gems from Burma, teakwood. The tabloids had speculated for years about the source of his wealth, but he kept meticulous records and nothing had ever been proven.

Kai Ming had more. Originally from a village southeast of Kunming, near Yunnan Province's famous Stone Forest, Chiu had come to Hong Kong in the early 1950s, just another refugee from the upheaval in the People's Republic. He told one reporter he had "seen the writing on the Great Wall"--crackdowns, mass starvation, unimaginable suffering. In his heart, he wanted to be a businessman, not a Party official, so he left his family with promises he'd get rich and send for them. The ones he left behind all died in the famine that accompanied Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. Chiu has returned to his village at least once a year ever since, to pay his respects. His was not an unusual story, nor even close.

The current Mrs. Chiu was the third, the previous two having absconded with staggering amounts of treasure, never to be heard from again. For all his towering achievements, the plutocrat had been unlucky in love. The woman sitting next to me on the hand-tooled calf-skin upholstery didn't seem like the gold-digger type. According to Kai Ming, she took her social duties seriously, had mothered Chiu's only child, and clearly saw herself as a future matriarch, not an easy task given her origins as an American-born Chinese who couldn't have been much older than me.

"You believe him?"

"You've met Jason. He's a well-mannered boy, but he can be a little intense."

Jason had walked out of his French class at HKU, gone straight home, packed a couple of bags, and had the driver take him to the airport. At the Cathay Pacific ticket office, he bought a ticket to Bangkok. From there he flew to Amsterdam, criss-crossed Europe, and eventually settled into a long-haul routine: Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Montreal, London... he circled the globe several times. His mistake? Returning to Asia. The family had been keeping close tabs on his movements and pounced as soon as he deplaned in Hong Kong.

"You said he's still out there driving?"

"Not now. He was out all night for two nights in a row. This morning, our household manager took his car keys away."

"So where is he now?"

"At home?" She fished in her purse--presumably for a mobile phone, to get an answer to her own question. Then she stopped herself. "Do you know anything about this? Did he say anything on the plane?"

"Nothing at all, I'm afraid. He was anxious about turbulence as we were landing. I got the feeling he'd had a few rough flights. But he didn't say anything about... any of this. I'm sorry if I've wasted your time."

She shook her head and looked out the window for a few seconds before speaking with a haunted expression similar to the one I'd seen on Jason's face: "Nobody told me there would be times like this." The car inched forward. I'd long since quit trying to figure out where we were, because if you're not paying attention, one block of office buildings and local shops can look much like the next. "I can tell you this because you're a stranger and you're riding in my car. I came from a rich family and married into a richer one. I thought that meant I'd be insulated from..."

"Reality?"

She turned back to look at me. "You could say that, yes. But raising a kid... it's not what you expect. It's never what you expect. He says he hasn't slept in over a month and I think I believe him. Do you know how frightening that is?"

I told her I couldn't begin to guess. I've never had kids and never wanted them. They require you to be _on_ at all times. They require you to strike an impossible balance: devoting yourself without becoming their servant. They leave you more vulnerable than I am willing to be. They take time and money that, in all honesty, I don't have. So while I could see the anguish on her face and hear it in her voice, I couldn't say yes without lying.

"I won′t keep you," she said. "I've taken up more than enough of your time as it is."

I was reaching for the front door of my building, but someone else got there first, opened it, and held it for me: Jason Chiu, looking poster-boy sharp for someone who hadn't slept in a month.

"I've just come from a mobile meeting with your mother," I said.

"I know. She almost lives in that Bentley. And our household manager told me where my mother was going. I was hoping you'd tell me what she said."

"This is almost funny. She wanted to know what I talked about with you on the plane. Is spying on each other what your family does for fun?"

He frowned, as if giving the question serious thought. People passed us in the lobby, on their way from the entrance to the elevators. Heels clicked on the tile floors. A breeze had sprung up outside and when the lobby doors swung shut, they produced a low, weird howl. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the two uniformed security guards watching us.

"No. My father works. That's what he does for fun. He makes money. That's all he's ever done, and it's all he cares about. And my mother spends it. That′s what she does for fun."

"Sounds exciting. So how'd you get down here? Your mother said she had taken the keys to your car."

"I discovered there's something called the MTR," he said, laughing in rich-boy self-deprecation. I couldn't tell the extent to which he was joking.

"Look, I've got to admit I'm curious about you. You won't come into my office to talk?"

"No," he said. "I don't like to stay in any one place for too long."

"Who are you? Is your real name Jason Bourne?"

We both laughed.

"I just wanted to tell you to be careful. I'll be in touch. Gotta go."

"This is all getting a little melodramatic, isn't it?"

"You don't know the half of it," he said. "See you." The crowd of pedestrians on the sidewalk swallowed him up.

The avalanche of work that buried me for the next couple of weeks provided a welcome distraction from life. I finished a Carrie Graber for a local businesswoman who'd discovered the artist at an exhibition in San Francisco and amassed a significant collection of her work. The painting had been knocked off the wall by a new cleaning lady (now unemployed), the impact deforming both canvas and frame very slightly. Next, bizarrely, a mainland plutocrat wanted me to touch up an enormous Rothko that had fallen during a party at his penthouse. The fate of his clumsy, drunken guest was not known, but had I been asked, I'd have happily made a few recommendations. Immurement, perhaps behind the masterwork he had damaged. The plutocrat wanted me to fly up to Shanghai to undertake the restoration work there, and I had tasked Ada with finding a suitable site there. There are times when it's a blessing to be too busy to slow down and think. This was one of them. Despite the economic turmoil in the world, there was still a demand for my services. Wealth can be fleeting but art is eternal. For me, that means coffee and late nights, antacids and anxiety.

I'd completely forgotten about the wandering Chiu until I got an e-mail from him:

_They didn 't like me taking buses and walking around all night. Sometimes I didn't come home. I hiked the Dragon's Back trail a couple of times. Ruined a good pair of shoes that way. Dumb, huh? The sidewalks in some parts of HK are really bad, but Stanley is a good place to walk. I like Stanley. It's touristy but I still like it. Now I'm under house arrest, so to speak. They won't let me go out. I'm not feeling so great, anyway. Must have picked up something on the plane. So I'm e-mailing everybody I ever met. It's like being in jail but the food is better and nobody's molesting me. My father's doctors are always here. So I'm e-mailing and writing and playing games online all day. I watch a lot of TV. The staff bring me pirated DVDs from Shenzhen. I don't sleep. Do you remember when I said it felt like I would die if I slowed down or stopped? It's true. I don't know why, but I can feel it. It's like I′m getting slow and cold. I think I'll start painting..._

He went on like this for several more paragraphs. I dashed off a short, friendly response. His reply came less than twenty minutes later:

_I 've painted myself into a corner. Literally. My parents are pissed. I ran out of canvas. So I painted the floors and the walls. Now I can't leave my room because the pictures on the floor are wet. I'd get paint on my feet. What should I do? My mother says she's going to call a doctor. She thinks I should sleep. Whatever's wrong with me, a good night's sleep will cure it. I don't know._

I leaned back in my chair and looked through the doorway into my work area: cardboard boxes of assorted solvents, the ventilation hood, a mad spectrum of paint in tubes and pots and bottles, jars of brushes, stacks of trays, all the paraphernalia I'd accumulated over the last few years. For most of my life I'd struggled to make ends meet. Now I'd call myself comfortable, but not rich. I didn't have a Bentley and a driver waiting downstairs. Kai Ming and I owned an apartment in North Point, not a penthouse in Jardine's Lookout. We didn't have staff, just a cleaning lady who came in once a week. What is it about wealth that seems to generate lunacy?

In my reply to Jason, I recommended galoshes. He could touch up his handiwork later. No one is meant to stay awake for weeks on end, I told him. Maybe there was something to his mother's insistence on staying home and getting some sleep. When I didn't hear back from him before close of business, I shut down my PC and went home. I didn't check that e-mail address again until the next morning: no message from him, and none the next day. My job consumed my attention. Jason and his affliction faded back out of my mind.

"Are you going to turn off your laptop and watch this movie with me?" asked Kai Ming. He had brought back a stack of DVDs from the mainland--all the latest Hollywood movies, minus the fancy packaging, for a fraction of the price demanded elsewhere. Piracy? Intellectual property is a relatively new concept in Asia. I'd learned to regard our movie collection as a novel hallmark of Hong Kong life I'd not anticipated prior to moving here. Besides, Hollywood isn't exactly running out of money.

He was watching the news on one of the terrestrial Hong Kong channels. Now and then, when I understood what the newscasters were saying, I looked up. I'd have preferred quiet, but his Chinese love of background noise usually overruled my Western silence paradigm.

"Yeah. I think I've hit the wall for the day." I closed my Vaio and opened the bottle of Shiraz on the coffee table. I was unscrewing the Stelvin cap when something on the TV distracted me; I recognized a name and caught enough for a red flag to start waving. "Holy shit, is she saying what I think she's saying?"

Kai Ming nodded. "His mother, earlier today. They're saying it was a reaction to some medication she took."

"In other words, she took the whole bottle."

"And washed it down with alcohol, I bet," said Kai Ming.

Not one to be paralyzed by grief, Chiu Senior phoned me himself the next morning. Next to me, Kai Ming grumbled, still half asleep. His hair had left an ampersand-shaped indentation on his forehead. I wanted to ask why Mr. Chiu didn't just speak with his son, but some instinct compelled me to stop. I had a feeling Jason had been shipped off again, this time to an expensive private clinic, or wherever weary tycoons put troublesome kids in cold storage. Faking coherence at nine on a Saturday morning, prior to caffeination, would have taken more energy than I had, so I shut up and let the man talk. He outlined the situation much as his late wife's assistant had: I was one of the last people she'd spoken to, and I'd also spent time with their son. He wanted to meet with me, at their home. Now, of course.

"I'm still in bed. I'll need a couple of hours to get ready. If you know my home phone number, you also already know where I live. Why don't you have your driver pick me up downstairs at..." (I squinted to see the clock on the bedside table) "Noon?"

Without waiting for him to say yes, I thanked him, hung up, turned off the phone, and trudged through my morning ablutions too preoccupied to taste the coffee or appreciate the shower. I left our flat at the appointed time and found the same Bentley waiting downstairs. Oversight, happenstance, or psychological warfare? When dealing with people like these, mere mortals could never hope to know. The same driver greeted me, pale and quiet today; he nodded in curt acknowledgment when I offered my condolences. During the drive uphill to the Chiu residence, I wanted to say more to him, as if I needed to ameliorate things somehow. Although I had only a tangential role in all this, I felt as if I'd been the match that lit a stack of dynamite: agency without responsibility.

The house seemed bigger on the inside than it looked from outside, all polished timber hallways and closed doors and high ceilings. My shoes, which I was not asked to remove, echoed as I followed a succession of near-silent staff to a room of cavernous dimensions. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases overflowed with what appeared to be valuable English first editions; a handsome desk backed onto a window that framed, or would have framed if the air had been clearer, the cityscape below. I was offered tea and seated in a hand-crafted leather armchair in the antechamber outside Chiu Senior's office. I flashed back to the sixth grade, when I'd set a garbage can on fire half by accident and half not, playing with a cigarette lighter I'd found on the way to school. The janitor had seen me and put the fire out before anything bad could happen, and the anxiety of waiting outside the principal's office stayed with me as a sense memory. The squeak of Chiu's leather chair brought it all back.

"I'm so sorry," I said right away, when I was escorted inside.

He nodded as curtly as his driver had, half an hour earlier.

"I have a long day ahead of me, so I'd like to keep this short. I believe you′re a man who appreciates art. Is that correct?"

"I'm a conservator," I said. "Paintings and paper, mainly. And my partner's an art dealer. I know the difference between a Mondrian and a place mat, if that's what you're asking."

"How about sculpture?" Clearly he'd found the beat and liked dancing to it. We'd get to papier-mache and pipe cleaner art sooner or later.

"Less. It's not really my thing, but I know what I need to know. Henry Moore, Rodin, Claes Oldenburg. The obvious ones. Miro did some that I like. Calder's mobiles and stabiles, if those count."

"Why not." He made it a sentence, not a question. "And I trust you're keeping up with the economy."

"Who isn't? We're all surfing the financial tsunami, aren't we? Trying not to drown?"

"Clever," he said. "Yes, the crisis has made surfers of us all. I like that better than _armchair economists_ , which seems to be the Western media's favorite phrase at the moment."

I waited for something to happen.

"Has my son ever mentioned a curse?" Chiu asked.

I nodded.

"I do not know how much you know; nor do I care. I have learned that curiosity, particularly in a curious person such as yourself, Mr. Rivenbark, can be difficult to control. It tends to lead to questions, and questions seek answers. My son, and my wife, chose to talk to you. Perhaps they told you things they should not have."

"Do you have a point, Mr. Chiu? You said you have a long day ahead. So do I." My long day ahead involved going back to bed, but he didn't need to know that. Hubris annoys me. I find it easier to deal with the rich if you come at them with the same level of self-importance. He clearly saw me as no threat but wouldn't have heard a word I said if I hadn't spoken to him with impatient condescension.

"Indeed," he said. "Very well. I would rather tell you this myself than be investigated. The tabloid rumors I can ignore. Anyone who finds a degree of success in this tiny city will encounter the same treatment. However, you are not a tabloid journalist, and you have access to resources that could uncover things better left out of the public eye. I made a bargain in my youth, Mr. Rivenbark, a bargain far worse than your culture allows you to imagine. Others before me struck a similar deal. It was a terrible time to be in China, and I wanted to be something other than a nameless peasant boy with no future."

"You sold your soul to the devil," I said without thinking.

"China was old before your culture's absurd red imp was ever dreamt up to scare little children. No. It wasn't my own soul that I sold. And now I enjoy considerable benefit from this youthful... arrangement that I made. Instead, others pay the price."

"I'm not sure I believe in curses," I said.

"You will."

He indicated for me to follow him through a narrow doorway set between two of the bookcases. In the adjoining room, with a vaulted ceiling and a skylight for illumination, there was a large object covered with a sheet.

"If you look under the sheet, you will find a sculpture, or a statue. Please forgive me for not being entirely clear on the difference."

When I did, the resemblance didn't strike me at first. As I studied it, familiarity emerged: a feature here, a feature there, a truly impressive likeness, in fact; a work of genius.

"Look at the left shoulder," Chiu said from much closer behind me. I hadn't heard him walking across the room. "Do you see it?"

I squatted down and looked. I couldn't see much at first, just marble with a lunar sort of luminosity, free from veins. It wasn't chipped anywhere that I could see. Whoever had sculpted this deserved medals, prizes, standing ovations. The suggestion of tousled hair and slight gap in the mouth: the details hinted at a young man who'd just dozed off but wasn't resting easily.

Then I saw what Chiu had been talking about: a faint indentation.

"Yesterday afternoon. I think the doctor gave him diazepam, to relax his muscles and... let nature take its course."

"How... did the artist carve it in after? I don't get it."

Deeply disturbed, I stood up and turned back to look at Chiu. The man's face was as stony as the marble visage beside me.

"Jason refused to fall asleep. How he lasted as long as he did, I'll never know. In the past, they would give in once they understood what was going to happen. They'd take opium or drink wine to accelerate the process and get it over with. Older generations understood the inevitable, I think. They understood the necessity of submission. Of surrender. But times change, don't they? I thought his mother would understand. She was prepared to do anything to have the lifestyle I offered. There's a rare disease that causes the body to produce bone where there should be muscle tissue. That's what our family doctor thought he was dealing with. He gave Jason a shot, and he fell asleep, and as you can see... my wife was a bit upset by what she saw."

I couldn′t speak: white noise roared through my head. _This must be what a lobotomy feels like_ , I thought with a terrible randomness and certainty. I couldn't believe it, and yet here it was, unarguable and self-evident.

"We spoke, and Jason said he couldn't fall asleep, but he never hinted..."

Chiu waved a hand. "Sleeplessness is a stage. As the brain tries to resist the change, it produces a state of constant mental alertness and no longer requires sleep to regenerate. What is there to regenerate? Jason didn't know, but I believe he guessed. Traveling against the Earth's rotation helps slow things down. Not an option until the jet age. I can't say I'm surprised he worked that out. He was a remarkably intelligent boy. I shall miss him."

We both stood looking at what Jason had become.

"Jason is now lost in China," Chiu said, "or should I say, lost _to_ China. He crossed the border at Lo Wu late last night, intending to go to Shanghai. People disappear in the mainland all the time. We hold out hopes for a ransom demand, or news of a sighting, but we can only fear the worst. Pragmatism will prevail and all will be forgotten."

"What about this? You're not going to smash it to bits and pretend it never existed." I was torn between fury and fascination at Chiu for what he had authored.

"I'll arrange for him to be transported back to Yunnan. There's a place in the Stone Forest where... quite a few of the karst formations look... almost human. He'll be right at home there."

Before I left, I scribbled a note and left it on Chiu's desk for him to find later. Riding back, I wasn't sure I'd done the right thing. The image of a forest of Chiu's ossified offspring horrified me. Imagine: becoming your own tombstone. It wasn't a fate I would want.

We can only do so much in any given moment. If something seems like a good idea at the time... sometimes it _is_. We can always torture ourselves with doubts and second-guessing later.

I left him Kai Ming's private number at the gallery. Jason made an exceptional statue, and Chiu was clearly a man who believed in the virtues of commerce.

## **BITTER ORANGE**

### Chapter 1

Publication date: June 2013

Hong Kong: Signal 8 Press

## Chapter One

## Saturday, Sunday

The wine bottle slipped out of Seth Harrington's grasp, but his left hand was faster: he snatched it out of midair by the neck. Sweat filmed his palms. For half a second he thought he was going to drop it, but his grip held. A dull ache flared in his wrist.

"Shit!" he said under his breath. "Close call."

Then he backed into the wine display behind him and, with his backpack, knocked two bottles off the shelf. Green glass and red wine splashed his legs, instantly soaking through the fabric of his jeans.

The woman behind the counter--Seth had never known whether she owned the convenience store or just worked there--leapt to her feet and hurried down the aisle toward him and his mess, swearing in a language he couldn't identify. Middle-aged and Middle Eastern, she'd always looked a second away from slapping anybody who provoked her. Seth found this confusing: didn't scowling at customers for counting out their change too slowly or dithering over purchases leave them disinclined to come back? And now she was charging toward him like a entire battalion of...

_Fuck_ _it._ Seth hated feeling six years old again. The first time around, he hadn't liked being six, and he preferred to keep his subsequent visits to childhood brief and infrequent. He set the bottle back on the nearest flat surface--carefully, slowly, because his hands were shaking. He thought of bulls and china shops. Was every Taurus such an ox in public? If he'd been born an Aquarius, for example, would he move with more grace and less damage?

"You are going to pay for those bottles of wine," said the woman.

A poison bouquet of Merlot and brown floor muck bloomed in Seth's nose. It's one thing to sniff a freshly decanted red and another thing to shower in it. As for the rain, San Francisco in mid-January is indistinguishable from Seattle: wet roads, wet floors, grey skies, grey moods. As if that weren't enough, the woman's breath smelled as if she had never flossed. She might take a swipe at her incisors with a spavined brush and some Colgate now and then, but Seth was afraid to look too closely when she opened her mouth. He didn't want to see the fossilized clots of food like grout between her teeth.

"Sure," he said. He tried not to inhale. He couldn't take a step backward for fear of glass piercing the sole of his (once blue, now sopping purple) Converse low-tops. When had he last updated his tetanus vaccinations? If he couldn't remember the date, then he probably needed the shot. "I'm really sorry."

She flapped a hand at him and muttered something else in that language of hers. Was it Farsi, maybe? Maybe not. Weren't Persians supposed to be delightful, civilized people? Maybe she was from somewhere else, somewhere with more machine guns and suicide bombers. Iraq? Waziristan? Hades? This wasn't the right time to ask. Seth strained to make sense of what he heard: was it a dismissal, or was she swearing at him?

The electronic door chime beeped, signifying entry. Seth saw his roommate Sang-hee approaching with a _whatthefuck?_ look splashed across his face.

"I can't leave you alone for a minute," Sang-hee said.

"Your friend is clumsy!" the woman said. "I should make you pay for three bottles, because of the time it will take me to clean the floor! Have you thought about that? I'm here alone! All alone!"

_Except for your imaginary friends,_ Seth thought.

The woman turned and shoved her way past Sang-hee. Not a large man to begin with, about five foot five and skinny in a muscular way, Sang-hee was the last pin standing and the livid shopkeeper was the bowling ball. She knocked him against a shelf of soft drinks and bottled water. The collision sent several flavors of Perrier flying, and more fizzy explosions ensued. Seth caught a whiff of muddy citrus.

"I'm sorry!" Sang-hee looked stricken. "I didn't mean to..."

"Clumsy!" screamed the woman. "Both of you! I should call the police! It should be against the law!" At this, she broke off with dark mutterings about _People in this country..._ and switched back to her native tongue.

She huffed and puffed her way into a back room, presumably either to blow the house down or find a mop. Or a shotgun.

Sang-hee squatted and began to pick up shards of pale green glass. Seth felt boorish for not having immediately done the same thing, when he'd knocked the wine off its shelf... but then, the cascade of imprecations had begun right away. Vulgarity tended to stifle his nobler impulses.

_The aisles are too narrow and there 's too much merchandise on the shelves_, he thought. _I couldn 't help it. And we're in California. What happens when there's an earthquake? Is she going to scream at the ground when it shakes?_

Sang-hee looked up. He'd finished collecting the pieces of Perrier glass big enough to pick up without cutting his fingers. Seth, needing to do something, scanned the fizzing gunk on the floor for more shards.

"I'm going to get her garbage can for this glass," Sang-hee said. "It's like a car wreck in here."

"But without the body parts," Seth said.

"And the skid marks."

"After this? Speak for yourself."

Sang-hee's back was turned and the shopkeeper hadn't emerged from her lair. Seeing no video cameras overhead, no dome of mirrored glass, nothing to suggest surveillance, Seth unshouldered his backpack, unzipped the largest compartment, and slipped the bottle of Merlot--the one he'd meant to buy--inside. A line had been crossed. He understood being annoyed because a customer had smashed merchandise by mistake, but her verbal abuse was uncalled for.

_She brought it on herself,_ he thought. He didn't know where the urge had come from, and he knew he'd have to keep telling himself that until he'd drunk two or three glasses of stolen vintage. _I 'm not a thief. I wouldn't normally do this kind of thing. Justice is a strange octopus._

Besides, he and Sang-hee didn't usually shop here.

"I see what you're doing!"

Seth almost pissed down his leg.

How she'd snuck up on him without making a sound, he had no idea: she was close enough that she must have seen him stashing the wine in his backpack. He hadn't even slung it over his shoulder again. But no, she was yelling at Sang-hee behind the checkout counter.

"What the hell are you doing back there?"

Sang-hee looked up in alarm.

"Your garbage can is too full. I wanted to bring it back there for the broken glass..."

"GET OUT!" she screamed. "GET OUT OF MY STORE, BOTH OF YOU!"

Seth and Sang-hee fled the shop, ducked their heads in the drizzle, and hurried across the street to a coffee shop to relax with caffeine.

"So much for buying a bottle of wine for dinner," Sang-hee said, when their drinks came.

"It's the Bay Area," Seth said. "There's a wine shop on every other block."

"I thought her selection was pretty good. Somebody told me she had a Merlot from Tunisia that was worth trying."

"Is that what this is?" Seth unzipped his backpack and reached inside. He withdrew the bottle and inspected the label. "Tunisia. Wonder if it's any good. Date wine, I'd have expected. Fermented camel sweat, maybe. Does camel sweat ferment?"

"Did you pay for that?"

"No," Seth said. "She did." __

_Poor Sang-hee: too many surprises in one day,_ Seth thought.

"Oh." Sang-hee looked troubled. His hands shook: he'd been trying to quit smoking. Seth had doubts about how well it was working out. Grad school is like that. "Does that make it okay? Two wrongs make a right?"

Seth shrugged. "The voices in my head commanded me to do it. They were speaking Korean, though, so I had to guess what they were saying. I didn't have time to write it down so you could translate it, and that woman was in my face yelling..."

"You don't hear voices in your head, do you?"

"Only on the second and fourth Mondays of each month."

"It's Saturday," Sang-hee said.

"You see my point."

Seth's roommate looked outside at the rain, falling harder now. He seemed to have resolved something for himself, because he looked back at Seth with an odd sideways smile and said, "Let's drink the whole bottle when we get home."

+

Seth woke up Sunday morning with a headache from the wine and almost choked on the scent of scorched coffee. Sang-hee, an early riser, kept forgetting to rinse the pot before brewing their morning fix. Seth wrinkled his nose. Although he needed to take a bladder-busting leak, he stopped to open both of the windows in his bedroom a couple of inches. The bathroom could wait _;_ the __air quality couldn 't.

Solicitous in a tone-deaf way, Sang-hee had been blackening dinners and breaking dishes ever since moving in at the start of the semester, six weeks back. Although they had met in college as backpackers in Europe, meeting again two months ago in one of life's freakier coincidences (when Seth had advertised on Craigslist for a roommate), Sang-hee was still a bit of a wild card. He'd managed not to ruin any clothing in the washing machine but had compensated by incinerating a load of laundry in the dryer. This broke Seth's head. In theory, your basic Korean guy--from a nation of people who splice genes and make semiconductors and eat with fiddly flat metal chopsticks--ought not to be a total klutz. Sang-hee had to be the exception that proved the rule, then. Seth could find no other explanation for him.

_Besides, I 'm supposed to be the clumsy one_, he thought, pissing mostly in the bowl.

No matter. Sang-hee fit into Seth's lopsided social circle well enough that the occasional shattered bottle of beer could be overlooked. And he was kind of hot.

"The woman at the convenience store," Seth said between bites of eggs and sausage. Sang-hee had cooked a substantial Sunday breakfast (plus rice, for himself). Seth wished his head would stop hurting, but the coffee would take care of the worst of it. "How did she not see me steal the wine? She must have been right next to me when I put it in my backpack."

"Why didn't you put it back?"

"Taking it was the lesser of two evils. If I'd put it back, she'd have seen me for sure. You must have distracted her somehow."

"I'm so dangerous," Sang-hee said. "The government should never have approved my visa."

"Yup. You should have stayed in Melbourne for grad school instead of coming here. Let the Australians worry about you. Did you see her face just before we left the store?"

"Yes, unfortunately. I'll have nightmares about her until I'm an old man."

"Me too, if I live that long. The thing is, her expression didn't change. At all. There I was, stuffing a bottle of wine into my backpack, and she didn't even blink. It makes no sense."

"Consider it from her perspective," Sang-hee said. "She's disturbed. The only difference between her and the people you see on the street, communicating with unseen presences... is that she isn't on the street. I believe she spends half the day talking to Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley."

"Don't forget the merchandise. When she gets bored, I bet she can talk the chewing gum and the chocolate bars into doing a little song-and-dance number for her. Kind of like her own little _American Idol_ , but with more calories."

"I wonder if she has children," Sang-hee said.

"If she does, they'll grow up to be either ax murderers or psychiatrists."

"Psychiatrists," Sang-hee said. "Definitely psychiatrists."

+

The relentless rain washed away Seth's plans to meet a couple of friends for an afternoon drink. Having grown up in Portland, where locals disregard gloomy weather, Seth was waterproof. However, the less drizzle-resistant of his friends--the California natives and the long-time residents--hid under their sofas the first time they saw a cloud in the sky. The next time Jason and Sanjay gave him crap about dropping off the face of the Earth now that he had a new roommate, he had an excuse. (Besides, he saw them on campus two or three times a week.)

_Maybe it 's a sign I'm supposed to stay in and write that damn paper._

However, afternoons like this were better slept through. He'd done the reading, taken pages of notes, finished the outline, and written about half of the first draft. His wrists ached almost as much as his cranium did. Besides, with three weeks left before the deadline, he had no reason to rush, and no motivation.

_In any case, I 'm in my thirties and not my twenties. I'm too old to study until my eyes cross and I can't think anymore._

Nothing else compelled him: he'd cleaned his bedroom, and the rest of the apartment looked all right. Visitors could show up unexpectedly and he wouldn't have to make them wait in the hall while he raced from room to room stashing clutter in closets and empty drawers. (The best thing about his oven, apart from the fact that it worked, was the impressive mound of dirty dishes it could hide on a moment's notice.) With household drudgery out of the way, he didn't know what else to do with himself.

_You could call Elizabeth,_ said a guilty inner voice that sounded a lot like hers. _You haven 't seen much of her since the semester started. Remember, you're Handling This Like Adults and Working on Being Friends._

A small solar system of distractions orbited around him.

_You should read a good book on a rainy day,_ his mother used to say. In Portland, that meant he'd constantly be reading, maybe nine months out of the year. Today, his mother's advice didn't apply: Calvino's _Invisible Cities_ , while interesting, didn't demand that he pick it up.

He found Sang-hee in the living room, his nose in a textbook.

"Want to catch a movie?"

"I can't run fast enough," Sang-hee said without looking up. "Sorry, mate. I can't go anywhere until I've read this. Then I have a few thousand vocabulary words to memorize. I think Russian was invented by Satan. He got bored one day and put English in a blender. Maybe afterward?"

"After Satan makes English margaritas?"

"English margaritas? Let me guess: gin and Pepto-Bismol instead of tequila?"

Seth thought of Bulgakov and chose not to persist. Not only would it be rude, but his previous attempts had ricocheted off his roommate's cast-iron work ethic. Before tests, Sang-hee would stay up all night cramming. He'd walk into class reading from a textbook, only closing it when the instructor threatened to toss him out a window. (Seth was in the counseling MA program at San Francisco State and Sang-hee was doing linguistics at Berkeley.) Already terrifyingly fluent in six languages, Sang-hee had resolved to acquire two more by the time he finished this degree.

"I'll be back in a couple of hours, then," Seth said.

Seth went to his bedroom to retrieve his backpack and his iPod. He put on a jacket. Outside, the wind whipped him and drenched him and slapped him around. He held his umbrella in front of himself like a riot cop's shield (though it didn't repel much of the horizontal rain), and waded down Mission toward the BART station.

+

On a whim, Seth stopped in the corner store again, half hoping and half fearing he'd see the madwoman from yesterday. He objected to needing a mortgage for the popcorn and the soft drinks at the cinema; better to stock up on junk food beforehand.

He also wanted to check the lines of sight. What if he'd failed to notice a video camera? How could he know what the woman had or hadn't seen until he stood in the same spot one more time and took another careful look around?

In the back of the store, by the rack of wine he'd bumped into yesterday, he saw no sign of surveillance equipment. A vinegary whiff of red wine remained in the air. He lifted one foot and then the other, testing the floor's new adhesive qualities. The madwoman must not have mopped thoroughly, then. Maybe her hallucinations got in the way. You can't do much cleaning with a million pink bunnies underfoot. Seth wanted a bunny. He also wanted to get out of the shop, _now_ , but not before checking the other possible vantage points in the store.

"Can I help you?" asked a young man's voice.

Seth looked up from the bottles of wine. The speaker had a similar complexion and a lighter version of the same accent. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, some years younger than Seth and Sang-hee. Perhaps he was the madwoman's son, or her nephew. No insanity capered on his face, however. Seth doubted the guy even knew about yesterday's incident, or if he did, who the perpetrators were.

"Trying to decide," he said. "You've got some pretty good stuff here, but I don't know..."

"My uncle doesn't sell much California wine," the guy said, smiling. "We keep telling him he should, but he's proud of this stuff. Merlot from Tunisia, and here's one from Lebanon. We've got a few from Greece, if you like dry wine."

"Italy's covered," Seth said. Montepulciano, Barbera, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, Nero d'Avola, Chianti... where did anyone even start? He picked up a bottle of the Montepulciano and looked at it, as if the label might say anything he could understand. Sang-hee would know, but he was at home being a nerd. "I don't know anything about wine. Not much, anyway."

"I just work here on Sundays," the guy said. "But I have to know a _little_." He paused. "But nobody expects the people who work in convenience stores to know about wine, so I don't get many questions."

Seth turned the bottle of Montepulciano around to read the label on the back. The Italian words meant little to him, although he'd studied Latin and French and could puzzle out some of the meaning. He liked the intricate typeface on the label, if nothing else.

_Steal it,_ whispered an atavistic voice.

The Middle Eastern guy's eyes had glazed over. Seth looked at him carefully and had a distinct sense of being... invisible? No, that didn't quite describe it: he hadn't literally vanished, but _something_ had happened. He could stash the new bottle of wine in his backpack and walk out with it, right in front of this guy. And no one would know.

Seth didn't know that for sure, though.

_But you do know it,_ the same voice insisted. _You 'd get away with it._

Seth refused... for now, because one theft was enough. The guy had been friendly, unlike his aunt or his mother yesterday. Seth couldn't justify ripping off a second bottle of wine from this shop, especially not in the middle of a conversation with the owner's nephew. He knew the difference between boldness and stupidity. The devil on his shoulder disappeared, but Seth knew the little bastard would be back, and might have a more convincing argument next time.

Elbowing philosophy aside, he bought a canister of Pringles and a cold bottle of Snapple lemonade. Maybe the megaplex would be a better target for his larcenous urges. Evil corporate empires and whatnot. But by the time the nice friendly corner shop guy with the crazylady relative offered Seth a coupon for the dry cleaners down the block, he'd forgotten the issue altogether. He was just worried about getting to the Metreon early enough to get a decent seat.

+

"One for Harry Potter..." Seth said.

Several of his friends would have lectured him in agonizing detail about the evils of paying to see a Hollywood blockbuster, even if the film itself hadn't been made in the US and featured no famous American faces. Any movie whose production costs exceeded the gross national product of most African countries deserved to be boycotted: burn the celluloid; break the projectors; shoot the actors; chain the producer to to the bumper of a Prius and drag him to a gravelly death. The price of living in San Francisco was higher than just the astronomical rent: you also had to endure the strident, righteous politics of your friends and neighbors. How much malaria vaccine could his matinee dollars buy? How many Third World orphans could eat for a week on the money he saved by seeing the three o'clock show and the similar amount he expected to spend on a coffee at Starbucks afterward? Seth surrendered the admission fee with a twinge of West Coast remorse.

_I 've been in San Francisco too long_, he thought. The realization made him strangely happy, as if he'd just eaten a Whitman's Sampler of opium-laced chocolates. _I 'm ruined on other places. I need help._

His mind was in Tanzania when he presented his ticket to enter the cinema. A high school friend and her husband had gone on safari a few months back. Seth had been hearing about the trip ever since. Lions and tigers and springbok, oh my. Did he want to go to Africa? Not really. Cape Town, maybe, or Zanzibar. Otherwise, no. Could he even get there from here? How many connections would there be, how long would the jet lag last, and how many intestinal diseases would he catch from tainted food?

The movie engrossed him as each new installment always did. Later, when he found the untorn movie ticket in his pocket, he thought some of the magic had seeped out of the screen. He rummaged. The girl behind him in line at Starbucks shuffled, sighed loud enough to make sure he could hear her self-important irritation, and cleared her throat. Seth compared his movie ticket (intact) and the dry-cleaning coupon from the corner store (ripped in half). How had the cineplex drone overlooked _that_?

"That'll be $3.74?" said the green-haired barista. "Sir?"

"Are you going to _pay_ for your coffee or just _stand_ there until your meds kick in?" asked the exasperated girl.

How satisfying would tossing hot coffee at her face be, and would it get him arrested? Seth thought about jail: boredom, bad food, anal gang rape, and nothing to read. _Almost_ worth the price of admission... but the coffee could stay in its cup.

"Sorry," he said, still distracted.

He handed over the movie ticket instead of the five-dollar bill in his other hand. When he caught his mistake and reached out to take back the slip of cardboard, the barista merely smiled and handed him his change.

"That'll be a dollar twenty-six." She looked relieved. The sunny smile lost a little wattage when she gestured toward the far end of the counter. Seth noticed an orange triangle of food between two of her front teeth. Carrot cake? "Your drink will be over there!"

The exasperated girl behind Seth sighed again and demanded her grande americano __in a louder voice than necessary. Would she scream much if he were to stomp on the arches of her feet? A bored barista handed him his drink, yawning, and when Seth reached out to take it, he still had the five in hand. He 'd forgotten to put it away.

"Oh!" he said. He shoved the money back into his pocket. "Sorry. Umm. Thanks."

Seth's coffee burned the roof of his mouth.
