If It Bleeds / Если оно кровоточит (by Stephen King, 2020) - аудиокнига на английском

My home town was just a village of six hundred or so (and still is, although I have moved away), but we had the Internet just like the big cities, so my father and I got less and less personal mail. Usually all Mr. Nedeau brought was the weekly copy of Time, fliers addressed to Occupant or Our Friendly Neighbors, and the monthly bills. But starting in 2004, the year I turned nine and began working for Mr. Harrigan up the hill, I could count on at least four envelopes hand-addressed to me each year. There was a Valentine’s Day card in February, a birthday card in September, a Thanksgiving Day card in November, and a Christmas card either just before or just after the holiday. Inside each card was a one-dollar scratch ticket from the Maine State Lottery, and the signature was always the same: Good Wishes from Mr. Harrigan. Simple and formal. My father’s reaction was always the same, too: a laugh and a good-natured roll of the eyes. “He’s a cheapster,” Dad said one day. This might have been when I was eleven, a couple of years after the cards began arriving. “Pays you cheap wages and gives you a cheap bonus—Lucky Devil tickets from Howie’s.” I pointed out that one of those four scratchers usually paid off a couple of bucks. When that happened, Dad collected for me at Howie’s, because minors weren’t supposed to play the lottery, even if the tickets were freebies. Once, when I hit it big and won five dollars, I asked Dad to buy me five more dollar scratch-offs. He refused, saying if he fed my gambling addiction, my mother would roll over in her grave. “Harrigan doing it is bad enough,” Dad said. “Besides, he should be paying you seven dollars an hour. Maybe even eight. God knows he could afford it. Five an hour may be legal, since you’re just a kid, but some would consider it child abuse.” “I like working for him,” I said. “And I like him, Dad.” “I understand that,” he said, “and it’s not like reading to him and weeding his flower garden makes you a twenty-first-century Oliver Twist, but he’s still a cheapster. I’m surprised he’s willing to spring for postage to mail those cards, when it can’t be more than a quarter of a mile from his mailbox to ours.” We were on our front porch when we had this conversation, drinking glasses of Sprite, and Dad cocked a thumb up our road (dirt, like most of them in Harlow) to Mr. Harrigan’s house. Which was really a mansion, complete with an indoor pool, a conservatory, a glass elevator that I absolutely loved to ride in, and a greenhouse out back where there used to be a dairy barn (before my time, but Dad remembered it well). “You know how bad his arthritis is,” I said. “Now he uses two canes instead of one sometimes. Walking down here would about kill him.” “Then he could just hand the damn greeting cards to you,” Dad said. There was no bite to his words; he was mostly just teasing. He and Mr. Harrigan got along all right. My dad got on all right with everyone in Harlow. I suppose that’s what made him a good salesman. “God knows you’re up there enough.” “It wouldn’t be the same,” I said. “No? Why not?” I couldn’t explain. I had plenty of vocabulary, thanks to all the reading I did, but not much life experience. I just knew I liked getting those cards, looked forward to them, and to the lottery ticket I always scratched off with my lucky dime, and to the signature in his old-fashioned cursive: Good Wishes from Mr. Harrigan. Looking back, the word ceremonial comes to mind. It was like how Mr. Harrigan always wore one of his scrawny black ties when he and I drove to town, even though he’d mostly just sit behind the wheel of his sensible Ford sedan reading the Financial Times while I went into the IGA and got the things on his shopping list. There was always corned beef hash on that list, and a dozen eggs. Mr. Harrigan sometimes opined that a man could live perfectly well on eggs and corned beef hash once he had reached a certain age. When I asked him what that age would be, he said sixty-eight. “When a man turns sixty-eight,” he said, “he no longer needs vitamins.” “Really?” “No,” he said. “I only say that to justify my bad eating habits. Did you or did you not order satellite radio for this car, Craig?” “I did.” On Dad’s home computer, because Mr. Harrigan didn’t have one. “Then where is it? All I can get is that damn windbag Limbaugh.” I showed him how to get to the XM radio. He turned the knob past a hundred or so stations until he found one specializing in country. It was playing “Stand By Your Man.” That song still gives me the chills, and I suppose it always will. On that day in my eleventh year, as my dad and I sat drinking our Sprites and looking up at the big house (which was exactly what Harlowites called it: the Big House, as if it were Shawshank Prison), I said, “Getting snail-mail is cool.” Dad did his eye-roll thing. “Email is cool. And cellular phones. Those things seem like miracles to me. You’re too young to understand. If you’d grown up with nothing but a party line and four other houses on it—including Mrs. Edelson, who never shut up—you might feel differently.” “When can I have a cell phone?” This was a question I’d asked a lot that year, more frequently after the first iPhones went on sale. “When I decide you’re old enough.” “Whatever, Dad.” It was my turn to roll my eyes, which made him laugh. Then he grew serious. “Do you understand how rich John Harrigan is?” I shrugged. “I know he used to own mills.” “He owned a lot more than mills. Until he retired, he was the grand high poobah of a company called Oak Enterprises. It owned a shipping line, shopping centers, a chain of movie theaters, a telecom company, I don’t know whatall else. When it came to the Big Board, Oak was one of the biggest.” “What’s the Big Board?” “Stock market. Gambling for rich people. When Harrigan sold out, the deal wasn’t just in the business section of the New York Times, it was on the front page. That guy who drives a six-year-old Ford, lives at the end of a dirt road, pays you five bucks an hour, and sends you a dollar scratch ticket four times a year is sitting on better than a billion dollars.” Dad grinned. “And my worst suit, the one your mother would make me give to the Goodwill if she was still alive, is better than the one he wears to church.” I found all of this interesting, especially the idea that Mr. Harrigan, who didn’t own a laptop or even a TV, had once owned a telecom company and movie theaters. I bet he never even went to the movies. He was what my dad called a Luddite, meaning (among other things) a guy who doesn’t like gadgets. The satellite radio was an exception, because he liked country music and hated all the ads on WOXO, which was the only candw station his car radio could pull in. “Do you know how much a billion is, Craig?” “A hundred million, right?” “Try a thousand million.” “Wow,” I said, but only because a wow seemed called for. I understood five bucks, and I understood five hundred, the price of a used motor scooter for sale on the Deep Cut Road that I dreamed of owning (good luck there), and I had a theoretical understanding of five thousand, which was about what my dad made each month as a salesman at Parmeleau Tractors and Heavy Machinery in Gates Falls. Dad was always getting his picture on the wall as Salesman of the Month. He claimed that was no big deal, but I knew better. When he got Salesman of the Month, we went to dinner at Marcel’s, the fancy French restaurant in Castle Rock. “Wow is right,” Dad said, and toasted the big house on the hill, with all those rooms that went mostly unused and the elevator Mr. Harrigan loathed but had to use because of his arthritis and sciatica. “Wow is just about goddam right.” Before I tell you about the big-money lottery ticket, and Mr. Harrigan dying, and the trouble I had with Kenny Yanko when I was a freshman at Gates Falls High, I should tell you about how I happened to go to work for Mr. Harrigan. It was because of church. Dad and I went to First Methodist of Harlow, which was the only Methodist of Harlow. There used to be another church in town, the one the Baptists used, but it burned down in 1996. “Some people shoot off fireworks to celebrate the arrival of a new baby,” Dad said. I couldn’t have been more than four then, but I remember it—probably because fireworks interested me. “Your mom and I said to hell with that and burned down a church to welcome you, Craigster, and what a lovely blaze it made.” “Never say that,” my mother said. “He might believe you and burn one down when he has a kid of his own.” They joked a lot together, and I laughed even when I didn’t get it. The three of us used to walk to church together, our boots crunching through packed snow in winter, our good shoes puffing up dust in summer (which my mom would wipe off with a Kleenex before we went inside), me always holding Dad’s hand on my left and Mom’s on my right. She was a good mom. I still missed her bad in 2004, when I started working for Mr. Harrigan, although she had been dead three years then. Now, sixteen years later, I still miss her, although her face has faded in my memory and photos only refresh it a little. What that song says about motherless children is true: they have a hard time. I loved my dad and we always got along fine, but that song’s right on another point, too: there’s so many things your daddy can’t understand. Like making a daisy chain and putting it on your head in the big field behind our house and saying today you’re not just any little boy, you’re King Craig. Like being pleased but not making it out to be a big deal—bragging and all—when you start reading Superman and Spider-Man comic books at the age of three. Like getting in bed with you if you wake up in the middle of the night from a bad dream where Dr. Octopus is chasing you. Like hugging you and telling you it’s okay when some bigger boy—Kenny Yanko, for instance—beats the living shit out of you. I could have used one of those hugs on that day. A mother-hug on that day might have changed a lot. Never boasting about being a precocious reader was a gift my parents gave me, the gift of learning early that having some talent doesn’t make you better than the next fellow. But word got around, as it always does in small towns, and when I was eight, Reverend Mooney asked me if I would like to read the Bible lesson on Family Sunday. It might have been the novelty of the thing that fetched him; usually he got a high school boy or girl to do the honors. The reading was from the Book of Mark that Sunday, and after the service, the Rev said I’d done such a good job I could do it every week, if I wanted. “He says a little child shall lead them,” I told Dad. “It’s in the Book of Isaiah.” My father grunted, as if that didn’t move him much. Then he nodded. “Fine, as long as you remember you’re the medium, not the message.” “Huh?” “The Bible is the Word of God, not the Word of Craig, so don’t get a big head about it.” I said I wouldn’t, and for the next ten years—until I went off to college where I learned to smoke dope, drink beer, and chase girls—I read the weekly lesson. Even when things were at their very worst, I did that. The Rev would give me the scriptural reference a week in advance—chapter and verse, as the saying is. Then, at Methodist Youth Fellowship on Thursday night, I’d bring him a list of the words I couldn’t pronounce. As a result, I may be the only person in the state of Maine who can not only pronounce Nebuchadnezzar, but spell it. One of America’s richest men moved to Harlow about three years before I started my Sunday job of delivering scripture to my elders. The turn of the century, in other words, right after he sold his companies and retired, and before his big house was even completely finished (the pool, the elevator, and the paved driveway came later). Mr. Harrigan attended church every week, dressed in his rusty black suit with the sagging seat, wearing one of his unfashionably narrow black ties, and with his thinning gray hair neatly combed. The rest of the week that hair went every whichway, like Einstein’s after a busy day of deciphering the cosmos. Back then he only used one cane, which he leaned on when we rose to sing hymns I suppose I’ll remember until the day I die . . . and that verse of “The Old Rugged Cross” about water and blood flowing from Jesus’s wounded side will always give me chills, just like the last verse of “Stand By Your Man,” when Tammy Wynette goes all out. Anyway, Mr. Harrigan didn’t actually sing, which was good because he had kind of a rusty, shrieky voice, but he mouthed along. He and my dad had that in common. One Sunday in the fall of 2004 (all the trees in our part of the world burning with color), I read part of 2 Samuel, doing my usual job of imparting to the congregation a message I hardly understood but knew Reverend Mooney would explain in his sermon: “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.” When I sat down in our pew, Dad patted me on the shoulder and whispered You said a mouthful in my ear. I had to cover my mouth to hide a smile. The next evening, as we were finishing up the supper dishes (Dad washing, me drying and putting away), Mr. Harrigan’s Ford pulled into the driveway. His cane thumped up our dooryard steps, and Dad opened the door just before he could knock. Mr. Harrigan declined the living room and sat at the kitchen table just like home folks. He accepted a Sprite when Dad offered, but declined a glass. “I take it from the bottle, the way my pa did,” he said. He got right to the point, being a man of business. If my father approved, Mr. Harrigan said he’d like to hire me to read to him two or perhaps three hours a week. For this he would pay five dollars an hour. He could offer another three hours’ worth of work, he said, if I would tend his garden a bit and do some other chores, such as snow-shoveling the steps in winter and dusting what needed dusting year-round. Twenty-five, maybe even thirty dollars a week, half of it just for reading, which was something I would have done for free! I couldn’t believe it. Thoughts of saving up for a motor scooter immediately rose to mind, even though I would not be able to ride one legally for another seven years. It was too good to be true, and I was afraid my father would say no, but he didn’t. “Just don’t give him anything controversial,” Dad said. “No crazy political stuff, and no overboard violence. He reads like a grownup, but he’s just nine, and barely that.” Mr. Harrigan gave him this promise, drank some of his Sprite, and smacked his leathery lips. “He reads well, yes, but that’s not the main reason I want to hire him. He doesn’t drone, even when he doesn’t understand. I find that remarkable. Not amazing, but remarkable.” He put his bottle down and leaned forward, fixing me with his sharp gaze. I often saw amusement in those eyes, but only seldom did I see warmth, and that night in 2004 wasn’t one of them. “About your reading yesterday, Craig. Do you know what is meant by ‘the daughters of the uncircumcised’?” “Not really,” I said. “I didn’t think so, but you still got the right tone of anger and lamentation in your voice. Do you know what lamentation is, by the way?” “Crying and stuff.” He nodded. “But you didn’t overdo it. You didn’t ham it up. That was good. A reader is a carrier, not a creator. Does Reverend Mooney help you with your pronunciation?” “Yes, sir, sometimes.” Mr. Harrigan drank some more Sprite and rose, leaning on his cane. “Tell him it’s Ashkelon, not Ass-kelon. I found that unintentionally funny, but I have a very low sense of humor. Shall we have a trial run Wednesday, at three? Are you out of school by then?” I got out of Harlow Elementary at two-thirty. “Yes, sir. Three would be fine.” “Shall we say until four? Or is that too late?” “That works,” Dad said. He sounded bemused by the whole thing. “We don’t eat until six. I like to watch the local news.” “Doesn’t that play hell with your digestion?” Dad laughed, although I don’t really think Mr. Harrigan was joking. “Sometimes it does. I’m not a fan of Mr. Bush.” “He is a bit of a fool,” Mr. Harrigan agreed, “but at least he’s surrounded himself with men who understand business. Three on Wednesday, Craig, and don’t be late. I have no patience with tardiness.” “Nothing risqu?, either,” Dad said. “Time enough for that when he’s older.” Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free. There was certainly nothing risqu? in Heart of Darkness, which was the first book I read for him. When we finished, Mr. Harrigan asked me if I understood it. I don’t think he was trying to tutor me; he was just curious. “Not a whole lot,” I said, “but that guy Kurtz was pretty crazy. I got that much.” There was nothing risqu? in the next book, either—Silas Marner was just a bore-a-thon, in my humble opinion. The third one, however, was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and that was certainly an eye-opener. It was 2006 when I was introduced to Constance Chatterley and her randy gamekeeper. I was ten. All these years later I can still remember the verses of “The Old Rugged Cross,” and just as vividly recall Mellors stroking the lady and murmuring “Tha’rt nice.” How he treated her is a good thing for boys to learn, and a good thing to remember. “Do you understand what you just read?” Mr. Harrigan asked me after one particularly steamy passage. Again, just curious. “No,” I said, but that wasn’t strictly true. I understood a lot more of what was going on between Ollie Mellors and Connie Chatterley in the woods than I did about what was going on between Marlow and Kurtz down there in the Belgian Congo. Sex is hard to figure out—something I learned even before I got to college—but crazy is even harder. “Fine,” Mr. Harrigan said, “but if your father asks what we’re reading, I suggest you tell him Dombey and Son. Which we’re going to read next, anyway.” My father never did ask—about that one, anyway—and I was relieved when we moved on to Dombey, which was the first adult novel I remember really liking. I didn’t want to lie to my dad, it would have made me feel horrible, although I’m sure Mr. Harrigan would have had no problem with it. Mr. Harrigan liked me to read to him because his eyes tired easily. He probably didn’t need me to weed his flowers; Pete Bostwick, who mowed his acre or so of lawn, would have been happy to do that, I think. And Edna Grogan, his housekeeper, would have been happy to dust his large collection of antique snow-globes and glass paperweights, but that was my job. He mostly just liked having me around. He never told me that until shortly before he died, but I knew it. I just didn’t know why, and am not sure I do now. Once, when we were coming back from dinner at Marcel’s in the Rock, my dad said, very abruptly: “Does Harrigan ever touch you in a way you don’t like?” I was years from even being able to grow a shadow mustache, but I knew what he was asking; we had learned about “stranger danger” and “inappropriate touching” in the third grade, for God’s sake. “Do you mean does he grope me? No! Jeez, Dad, he’s not gay.” “All right. Don’t get all mad about it, Craigster. I had to ask. Because you’re up there a lot.” “If he was groping me, he could at least send me two-dollar scratch tickets,” I said, and that made Dad laugh. Thirty dollars a week was about what I made, and Dad insisted I put at least twenty of it in my college savings account. Which I did, although I considered it mega-stupid; when even being a teenager seems an age away, college might as well be in another lifetime. Ten bucks a week was still a fortune. I spent some of it on burgers and shakes at the Howie’s Market lunch counter, most of it on old paperbacks at Dahlie’s Used Books in Gates Falls. The ones I bought weren’t heavy going, like the ones I read to Mr. Harrigan (even Lady Chatterley was heavy when Constance and Mellors weren’t steaming the place up). I liked crime novels and westerns like Shoot-Out at Gila Bend and Hot Lead Trail. Reading to Mr. Harrigan was work. Not sweat-labor, but work. A book like One Monday We Killed Them All, by John D. MacDonald, was pure pleasure. I told myself I ought to save up the money that didn’t go into the college fund for one of the new Apple phones that went on sale in the summer of 2007, but they were expensive, like six hundred bucks, and at ten dollars a week, that would take me over a year. And when you’re just eleven going on twelve, a year is a very long time. Besides, those old paperbacks with their colorful covers called to me. On Christmas morning of 2007, three years after I started working for Mr. Harrigan and two years before he died, there was only one package for me under the tree, and my dad told me to save it for last, after he had duly admired the paisley vest, the slippers, and the briar pipe I’d gotten him. With that out of the way, I tore off the wrappings on my one present, and shrieked with delight when I saw he’d gotten me exactly what I’d been lusting for: an iPhone that did so many different things it made my father’s car-phone look like an antique. Things have changed a lot since then. Now it’s the iPhone my father gave me for Christmas in 2007 that’s the antique, like the five-family party line he told me about from back when he was a kid. There’s been so many changes, so many advances, and they happened so fast. My Christmas iPhone had just sixteen apps, and they came pre-loaded. One of them was YouTube, because back then Apple and YouTube were friends (that changed). One was called SMS, which was primitive text messaging (no emojis—a word not yet invented—unless you made them yourself). There was a weather app that was usually wrong. But you could make phone calls from something small enough to carry in your hip pocket, and even better, there was Safari, which linked you to the outside world. When you grew up in a no-stoplight, dirt-road town like Harlow, the outside world was a strange and tempting place, and you longed to touch it in a way network TV couldn’t match. At least I did. All these things were at your fingertips, courtesy of ATandT and Steve Jobs. There was another app, as well, one that made me think of Mr. Harrigan even on that first joyful morning. Something much cooler than the satellite radio in his car. At least for guys like him. “Thanks, Dad,” I said, and hugged him. “Thank you so much!” “Just don’t overuse it. The phone charges are sky-high, and I’ll be keeping track.” “They’ll come down,” I said. I was right about that, and Dad never gave me a hard time about the charges. I didn’t have many people to call anyway, but I did like those YouTube videos (Dad did, too), and I loved being able to go on what we then called the three w’s: the worldwide web. Sometimes I would look at articles in Pravda, not because I understood Russian but just because I could. Not quite two months later, I came home from school, opened the mailbox, and found an envelope addressed to me in Mr. Harrigan’s old-fashioned script. It was my Valentine’s Day card. I went into the house, dropped my schoolbooks on the table, and opened it. The card wasn’t flowery or sappy, that wasn’t Mr. Harrigan’s style. It showed a man in a tuxedo holding out a tophat and bowing in a field of flowers. The Hallmark message inside said, May you have a year filled with love and friendship. Below that: Good Wishes from Mr. Harrigan. A bowing man with his hat held out, a good wish, no sticky stuff. That was Mr. Harrigan all over. Looking back, I’m surprised he considered Valentine’s Day worth a card. In 2008, the Lucky Devil one-dollar scratchers had been replaced by ones called Pine Tree Cash. There were six pine trees on the little card. If the same amount was beneath three of them when you scratched them off, you won that amount. I scratched away the trees and stared at what I had uncovered. At first I thought it was either a mistake or some kind of joke, although Mr. Harrigan was not the joke-playing type. I looked again, running my fingers along the uncovered numbers, brushing away crumbles of what my dad called (always with the eye-roll) “scratch-dirt.” The numbers stayed the same. I might have laughed, that I can’t recall, but I remember screaming, all right. Screaming for joy. I grabbed my new phone out of my pocket (that phone went everywhere with me) and called Parmeleau Tractors. I got Denise, the receptionist, and when she heard how out of breath I was, she asked me what was wrong. “Nothing, nothing,” I said, “but I have to talk to my dad right now.” “All right, just hold on.” And then: “You sound like you’re calling from the other side of the moon, Craig.” “I’m on my cell phone.” God, I loved saying that. Denise made a humph sound. “Those things are full of radiation. I’d never own one. Hold on.” My dad also asked me what was wrong, because I’d never called him at work before, even on the day the schoolbus left without me. “Dad, I got my Valentine’s Day scratch ticket from Mr. Harrigan—” “If you called to tell me you won ten dollars, it could have waited until I—” “No, Daddy, it’s the big prize!” Which it was, for dollar scratch-offs back then. “I won three thousand dollars!” Silence from the other end of the line. I thought maybe I’d lost him. In those days cell phones, even the new ones, dropped calls all the time. Ma Bell wasn’t always the best mother. “Dad? Are you still there?” “Uh-huh. Are you sure?” “Yes! I’m looking right at it! Three three thousands! One in the top row and two in the bottom!” Another long pause, then I heard my father telling someone I think my kid won some money. A moment later he was back to me. “Put it somewhere safe until I get home.” “Where?” “How about the sugar cannister in the pantry?” “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, okay.” “Craig, are you positive? I don’t want you to be disappointed, so check again.” I did, somehow convinced that my dad’s doubt would change what I had seen; at least one of those $3000s would now be something else. But they were the same. I told him that, and he laughed. “Well, then, congratulations. Marcel’s tonight, and you’re buying.” That made me laugh. I can’t remember ever feeling such pure joy. I needed to call someone else, so I called Mr. Harrigan, who answered on his Luddite landline. “Mr. Harrigan, thank you for the card! And thank you for the ticket! I—” “Are you calling on that gadget of yours?” he asked. “You must be, because I can barely hear you. You sound like you’re on the other side of the moon.” “Mr. Harrigan, I won the big prize! I won three thousand dollars! Thank you so much!” There was a pause, but not as long as my father’s, and when he spoke again, he didn’t ask me if I was sure. He did me that courtesy. “You struck lucky,” he said. “Good for you.” “Thank you!” “You’re welcome, but thanks really aren’t necessary. I buy those things by the roll. Send em off to friends and business acquaintances as a kind of . . . mmm . . . calling-card, you could say. Been doing it for years. One was bound to pay off big sooner or later.” “Dad will make me put most of it in the bank. I guess that’s okay. It will certainly perk up my college fund.” “Give it to me, if you like,” Mr. Harrigan said. “Let me invest it for you. I think I can guarantee a better return than bank interest.” Then, speaking more to himself than to me: “Something very safe. This isn’t going to be a good year for the market. I see clouds on the horizon.” “Sure!” I reconsidered. “At least probably. I have to talk to my dad.” “Of course. Only proper. Tell him I’m willing to also guarantee the base sum. Are you still coming to read for me this afternoon? Or will you put that aside, now that you’re a man of means?” “Sure, only I have to be back when Dad gets home. We’re going out to dinner.” I paused. “Would you like to come?” “Not tonight,” he said, with no hesitation. “You know, you could have told me all of this in person, since you’re coming up, anyway. But you enjoy that gadget of yours, don’t you?” He didn’t wait for me to answer that; he didn’t need to. “What would you think of investing your little windfall in Apple stock? I believe that company is going to be quite successful in the future. I’m hearing the iPhone is going to bury the BlackBerry. Pardon the pun. In any case, don’t answer now; discuss it with your father first.” “I will,” I said. “And I’ll be right up. I’ll run.” “Youth is a wonderful thing,” said Mr. Harrigan. “What a shame it’s wasted on children.” “Huh?” “Many have said it, but Shaw said it best. Never mind. Run, by all means. Run like the dickens, because Dickens awaits us.” I ran the quarter of a mile to Mr. Harrigan’s house, but walked back, and on the way I had an idea. A way to thank him, even though he said no thanks were necessary. Over our fancy dinner at Marcel’s that night, I told Dad about Mr. Harrigan’s offer to invest my windfall, and I also told him my idea for a thank-you gift. I thought Dad would have his doubts, and I was right. “By all means let him invest the money. As for your idea . . . you know how he feels about stuff like that. He’s not only the richest man in Harlow—in the whole state of Maine, for that matter—he’s also the only one who doesn’t have a television.” “He’s got an elevator,” I said. “And he uses it.” “Because he has to.” Then Dad gave me a grin. “But it’s your money, and if this is what you want to do with twenty per cent of it, I’m not going to tell you no. When he turns it down, you can give it to me.” “You really think he will?” “I do.” “Dad, why did he come here in the first place? I mean, we’re just a little town. We’re nowhere.” “Good question. Ask him sometime. Now what about some dessert, big spender?” Just about a month later, I gave Mr. Harrigan a brand-new iPhone. I didn’t wrap it up or anything, partly because it wasn’t a holiday and partly because I knew how he liked things done: with no foofaraw. He turned the box over a time or two in his arthritis-gnarled hands, looking bemused. Then he held it out to me. “Thank you, Craig, I appreciate the sentiment, but no. I suggest you give it to your father.” I took the box. “He told me you’d say that.” I was disappointed but not surprised. And not ready to give up. “Your father is a wise man.” He leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands between his spread knees. “Craig, I rarely give advice, it’s almost always a waste of breath, but today I’ll give some to you. Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs. It makes me think of Jacob Marley telling Scrooge, ‘These are the chains I forged in life.’ I don’t have a television, because if I did, I would watch it, even though almost all of what it broadcasts is utter nonsense. I don’t have a radio in the house because I would listen to it, and a little country music to break the monotony of a long drive is really all I require. If I had that—” He pointed to the box with the phone inside. “—I would undoubtedly use it. I get twelve different periodicals in the mail, and they contain all the information I need to keep up with the business world and the wider world’s sad doings.” He sat back and sighed. “There. I’ve not only given advice, I’ve made a speech. Old age is insidious.” “Can I show you just one thing? No, two.” He gave me one of the looks I’d seen him give his gardener and his housekeeper, but had never turned my way until that afternoon: piercing, skeptical, and rather ugly. These years later, I realize it’s the look a perceptive and cynical man gives when he believes he can see inside most people and expects to find nothing good. “This only proves the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. I’m starting to wish that scratch ticket hadn’t been a winner.” He sighed again. “Well, go ahead, give me your demonstration. But you won’t change my mind.” Having received that look, so distant and so cold, I thought he was right. I’d end up giving the phone to my father after all. But since I’d come this far, I went ahead. The phone was charged to the max, I’d made sure of that, and was in—ha-ha—apple-pie working order. I turned it on and showed him an icon in the second row. It had jagged lines, sort of like an EKG print-out. “See that one?” “Yes, and I see what it says. But I really don’t need a stock market report, Craig. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, as you know.” “Sure,” I agreed, “but the Wall Street Journal can’t do this.” I tapped the icon and opened the app. The Dow Jones average appeared. I had no idea what the numbers meant, but I could see they were fluctuating. 14,720 rose to 14,728, then dropped to 14,704, then bumped up to 14,716. Mr. Harrigan’s eyes widened. His mouth dropped open. It was as if someone had hit him with a juju stick. He took the phone and held it close to his face. Then he looked at me. “Are these numbers in real time?” “Yes,” I said. “Well, I guess they might be a minute or two behind, I don’t know for sure. The phone’s pulling them in from the new phone tower in Motton. We’re lucky to have one so close.” He leaned forward. A reluctant smile touched the corners of his mouth. “I’ll be damned. It’s like the stock tickers magnates used to have in their own homes.” “Oh, way better than that,” I said. “Tickers sometimes ran hours behind. My dad said that just last night. He’s fascinated with this stock market thingy, he’s always taking my phone to look. He said one of the reasons the stock market tanked so bad back in 1929 was because the more people traded, the farther behind the tickers got.” “He’s right,” Mr. Harrigan said. “Things had gone too far before anyone could put on the brakes. Of course, something like this might actually accelerate a sell-off. It’s hard to tell because the technology is still so new.” I waited. I wanted to tell him some more, sell him on it—I was just a kid, after all—but something told me waiting was the right way to go. He continued to watch the miniscule gyrations of the Dow Jones. He was getting an education right in front of my eyes. “But,” he said, still staring. “But what, Mr. Harrigan?” “In the hands of someone who actually knows the market, something like this could . . . probably already does . . .” He trailed off, thinking. Then he said, “I should have known about this. Being retired is no excuse.” “Here’s the other thing,” I said, too impatient to wait any longer. “You know all the magazines you get? Newsweek and Financial Times and Fords?” “Forbes,” he said, still watching the screen. He reminded me of me at four, studying the Magic 8 Ball I’d gotten for my birthday. “Yeah, that one. Can I have the phone for a minute?” He handed it over rather reluctantly, and I was pretty sure I had him after all. I was glad, but I also felt a little ashamed of myself. Like a guy who’s just clonked a tame squirrel on the head when it came up to take a nut out of his hand. I opened Safari. It was a lot more primitive than it is today, but it worked just fine. I poked Wall Street Journal into the Google search field, and after a few seconds, the front page opened up. One of the headlines read COFFEE COW ANNOUNCES CLOSINGS. I showed it to him. He stared, then took the newspaper from the table beside the easy chair where I’d put his mail when I came in. He looked at the front page. “That isn’t here,” he said. “Because it’s yesterday’s,” I said. I always got the mail out of his box when I came up, and the Journal was always wrapped around the other stuff and held with a rubber band. “You get it a day late. Everybody does.” And during the holiday season it came two days late, sometimes three. I didn’t need to tell him this; he grumbled about it constantly during November and December. “This is today’s?” he asked, looking at the screen. Then, checking the date at the top: “It is!” “Sure,” I said. “Fresh news instead of stale, right?” “According to this, there’s a map of the closing sites. Can you show me how to get it?” He sounded positively greedy. I was a little scared. He had mentioned Scrooge and Marley; I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, using a spell he didn’t really understand to wake up the brooms. “You can do it yourself. Just brush the screen with your finger, like this.” I showed him. At first he brushed too hard and went too far, but he got the knack of it after that. Faster than my dad, actually. He found the right page. “Look at that,” he marveled. “Six hundred stores! You see what I was telling you about the fragility of the . . .” He trailed off, staring at the tiny map. “The south. Most of the closures are in the south. The south is a bellwether, Craig, it almost always . . . I think I need to make a call to New York. The market will be closing soon.” He started to get up. His regular phone was on the other side of the room. “You can call from this,” I said. “It’s mostly what it’s for.” It was then, anyway. I pushed the phone icon, and the keypad appeared. “Just dial the number you want. Touch the keys with your finger.” He looked at me, blue eyes bright beneath his shaggy white brows. “I can do that out here in the williwags?” “Yeah,” I said. “The reception is terrific, thanks to the new tower. You’ve got four bars.” “Bars?” “Never mind, just make your call. I’ll leave you alone while you do it, just wave out the window when you’re—” “No need. This won’t take long, and I don’t need privacy.” He touched the numbers tentatively, as if he expected to set off an explosion. Then, just as tentatively, he raised the iPhone to his ear, looking at me for confirmation. I nodded encouragingly. He listened, spoke to someone (too loud at first), and then, after a short wait, to someone else. So I was right there when Mr. Harrigan sold all of his Coffee Cow stock, a transaction amounting to who knows how many thousands of dollars. When he was finished, he figured out how to go back to the home screen. From there he opened Safari again. “Is Forbes on here?” I checked. It wasn’t. “But if you’re looking for an article from Forbes you already know about, you can probably find it, because someone will have posted it.” “Posted—?” “Yeah, and if you want info about something, Safari will search for it. You just have to google it. Look.” I went over to his chair and entered Coffee Cow in the search field. The phone considered, then spewed a number of hits, including the Wall Street Journal article he’d called his broker about. “Will you look at this,” he marveled. “It’s the Internet.” “Well, yeah,” I said, thinking Well, duh. “The worldwide web.” “Yeah.” “Which has been around how long?” You should know this stuff, I thought. You’re a big businessman, you should know this stuff even if you’re retired, because you’re still interested. “I don’t know exactly how long it’s been around, but people are on it all the time. My dad, my teachers, the cops . . . everyone, really.” More pointedly: “Including your companies, Mr. Harrigan.” “Ah, but they’re not mine anymore. I do know a little, Craig, as I know a little about various television shows even though I don’t watch television. I have a tendency to skip the technology articles in my newspapers and magazines, because I have no interest. If you wanted to talk bowling alleys or film distribution networks, that would be a different matter. I keep my hand in, so to speak.” “Yeah, but don’t you see . . . those businesses are using the technology. And if you don’t understand it . . .” I didn’t know how to finish, at least without straying beyond the bounds of politeness, but it seemed he did. “I will be left behind. That’s what you’re saying.” “I guess it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Hey, you’re retired, after all.” “But I don’t want to be considered a fool,” he said, and rather vehemently. “Do you think Chick Rafferty was surprised when I called and told him to sell Coffee Cow? Not at all, because he’s undoubtedly had half a dozen other major clients pick up the phone and tell him to do the same. Some are no doubt people with inside information. Others, though, just happen to live in New York or New Jersey and get the Journal on the day it’s published and find out that way. Unlike me, stashed away up here in God’s country.” I again wondered why he’d come to begin with—he certainly had no relatives in town—but this didn’t seem like the time to ask. “I may have been arrogant.” He brooded on this, then actually smiled. Which was like watching the sun break through heavy cloud cover on a cold day. “I have been arrogant.” He raised the iPhone. “I’m going to keep this after all.” The first thing that rose to my lips was thank you, which would have been weird. I just said, “Good. I’m glad.” He glanced at the Seth Thomas on the wall (and then, I was amused to see, checked it against the time on the iPhone). “Why don’t we just read a single chapter today, since we’ve spent so much time talking?” “Fine with me,” I said, although I would gladly have stayed longer and read two or even three chapters. We were getting near the end of The Octopus by a guy named Frank Norris, and I was anxious to see how things turned out. It was an old-fashioned novel, but full of exciting stuff just the same. When we finished the shortened session, I watered Mr. Harrigan’s few indoor plants. This was always my last chore of the day, and only took a few minutes. While I did it, I saw him playing with the phone, turning it on and off. “I suppose if I’m going to use this thing, you better show me how to use it,” he said. “How to keep it from going dead, to start with. The charge is already dropping, I see.” “You’ll be able to figure most of it out on your own,” I said. “It’s pretty easy. As for charging it, there’s a cord in the box. You just plug it into the wall. I can show you a few other things, if you—” “Not today,” he said. “Tomorrow, perhaps.” “Okay.” “One more question, though. Why could I read that article about Coffee Cow, and look at that map of proposed closing sites?” The first thing that came to mind was Hillary’s answer about climbing Mount Everest, which we had just read about in school: Because it’s there. But he might have seen that as smartass, which it sort of was. So I said, “I don’t get you.” “Really? A bright boy like you? Think, Craig, think. I just read something for free that people pay good money for. Even with the Journal subscription rate, which is a good deal cheaper than buying off a newsstand, I pay ninety cents or so an issue. And yet with this . . .” He held up the phone just as thousands of kids would hold theirs up at rock concerts not many years later. “Now do you understand?” When he put it that way I sure did, but I had no answer. It sounded— “Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?” he asked, reading either my face or my mind. “Giving away useful information runs counter to everything I understand about successful business practices.” “Maybe . . .” “Maybe what? Give me your insights. I’m not being sarcastic. You clearly know more about this than I do, so tell me what you’re thinking.” I was thinking about the Fryeburg Fair, where Dad and I went once or twice every October. We usually took my friend Margie, from down the road. Margie and I rode the rides, then all three of us ate doughboys and sweet sausages before Dad dragged us to look at the new tractors. To get to the equipment sheds, you had to go past the Beano tent, which was enormous. I told Mr. Harrigan about the guy out front with the microphone, telling the passing folks how you always got the first game for free. He considered this. “A come-on? I suppose that makes a degree of sense. You’re saying you can only look at one article, maybe two or three, and then the machine . . . what? Shuts you out? Tells you if you want to play, you have to pay?” “No,” I admitted. “I guess it’s not like the Beano tent after all, because you can look at as many as you want. At least, as far as I know.” “But that’s crazy. Giving away a free sample is one thing, but giving away the store . . .” He snorted. “There wasn’t even an advertisement, did you notice that? And advertising is a huge income stream for newspapers and periodicals. Huge.” He picked the phone up, stared at his reflection in the now blank screen, then put it down and peered at me with a queer, sour smile on his face. “We may be looking at a huge mistake here, Craig, one being made by people who understand the practical aspects of a thing like this—the ramifications—no more than I do. An economic earthquake may be coming. For all I know, it’s already here. An earthquake that’s going to change how we get our information, when we get it, where we get it, and hence how we look at the world.” He paused. “And deal with it, of course.” “You lost me,” I said. “Look at it this way. If you get a puppy, you have to teach him to do his business outside, right?” “Right.” “If you had a puppy that wasn’t housebroken, would you give him a treat for shitting in the living room?” “Course not,” I said. He nodded. “It would be teaching him the exact opposite of what you want him to learn. And when it comes to commerce, Craig, most people are like puppies that need to be housebroken.” I didn’t much like that concept, and don’t today—I think the punishment/reward thing says a lot about how Mr. Harrigan made his fortune—but I kept my mouth shut. I was seeing him in a new way. He was like an old explorer on a new voyage of discovery, and listening to him was fascinating. I don’t think he was really trying to teach me, either. He was learning himself, and for a guy in his mid-eighties, he was learning fast. “Free samples are fine, but if you give people too much for-free, whether it’s clothes or food or information, they come to expect it. Like puppies that crap on the floor, then look you in the eye, and what they’re thinking is, ‘You taught me this was all right.’ If I were the Wall Street Journal . . . or the Times . . . even the damn Reader’s Digest . . . I’d be very frightened by this gizmo.” He picked up the iPhone again; couldn’t seem to leave it alone. “It’s like a broken watermain, one spewing information instead of water. I thought it was just a phone we were talking about, but now I see . . . or begin to see . . .” He shook his head, as if to clear it. “Craig, what if someone with proprietary information about new drugs in development decided to put the test results out on this thing for the whole world to read? It could cost Upjohn or Unichem millions of dollars. Or suppose some disaffected person decided to spill government secrets?” “Wouldn’t they be arrested?” “Maybe. Probably. But once the toothpaste is out of the tube, as they say . . . i-yi-yi. Well, never mind. You better go home or you’ll be late for supper.” “On my way.” “Thank you again for the gift. I probably won’t use it very much, but I intend to think about it. As hard as I’m able, at least. My brains aren’t as nimble as they once were.” “I think they’re still plenty nimble,” I said, and I wasn’t just buttering him up. Why weren’t there ads along with the news stories and YouTube videos? People would have to look at them, right? “Besides, my dad says it’s the thought that counts.” “An aphorism more often spoken than adhered to,” he said, and when he saw my puzzled expression: “Never mind. I’ll see you tomorrow, Craig.” On my walk back down the hill, kicking up clods of that year’s last snow, I thought about what he’d said: that the Internet was like a broken watermain spewing information instead of water. It was true of my dad’s laptop as well, and the computers at the school, and ones all over the country. The world, really. Although the iPhone was still so new to him he could barely figure out how to turn it on, Mr. Harrigan already understood the need to fix the broken pipe if business—as he knew it, anyway—was going to continue as it always had. I’m not sure, but I think he foresaw paywalls a year or two before the term was even coined. Certainly I didn’t know it then, no more than I knew how to get around restricted operations—what came to be known as jailbreaking. Paywalls came, but by then people had gotten used to getting stuff for free, and they resented being asked to cough up. People faced with a New York Times paywall went to a site like CNN or Huffington Post instead (usually in a huff), even though the reporting wasn’t as good. (Unless, of course, you wanted to learn about a fashion development known as “sideboob.”) Mr. Harrigan was totally right about that. After dinner that night, once the dishes were washed and put away, my dad opened his laptop on the table. “I found something new,” he said. “It’s a site called previews.com, where you can watch coming attractions.” “Really? Let’s see some!” So for the next half hour, we watched movie trailers we would otherwise have had to go to a movie theater to see. Mr. Harrigan would have torn his hair out. What little he had left. Walking back from Mr. Harrigan’s house on that March day in 2008, I was pretty sure he was wrong about one thing. I probably won’t use it very much, he’d said, but I had noted the look on his face as he stared at the map showing the Coffee Cow closings. And how quickly he’d used his new phone to call someone in New York. (His combination lawyer and business manager, I found out later, not his broker.) And I was correct. Mr. Harrigan used that phone plenty. He was like the old maiden aunt who takes an experimental mouthful of brandy after sixty years of abstinence and becomes a genteel alcoholic almost overnight. Before long, the iPhone was always on the table beside his favorite chair when I came up in the afternoon. God knows how many people he called, but I know he called me almost every night to ask me some question or other about his new acquisition’s capabilities. Once he said it was like an old-fashioned rolltop desk, full of small drawers and caches and cubbyholes it was easy to overlook. He found most of the caches and cubbyholes himself (with aid from various Internet sources), but I helped him out—enabled him, you might say—at the start. When he told me he hated the prissy little xylophone that sounded off when he had an incoming call, I changed it to a snatch of Tammy Wynette, singing “Stand By Your Man.” Mr. Harrigan thought that was a hoot. I showed him how to set the phone on silent so it wouldn’t disturb him when he took his afternoon nap, how to set the alarm, and how to record a message for when he didn’t feel like answering. (His was a model of brevity: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.”) He began unplugging his landline when he went for his daily snooze, and I noticed he was leaving it unplugged more and more. He sent me text messages, which ten years ago we called IMs. He took phone-photos of mushrooms in the field behind his house and sent them off via email to be identified. He kept notes in the note function, and discovered videos of his favorite country artists. “I wasted an hour of beautiful summer daylight this morning watching George Jones videos,” he told me later on that year, with a mixture of shame and a weird kind of pride. I asked him once why he didn’t go out and buy his own laptop. He’d be able to do all the things he’d learned to do on his phone, and on the bigger screen, he could see Porter Wagoner in all his bejeweled glory. Mr. Harrigan just shook his head and laughed. “Get thee behind me, Satan. It’s like you taught me to smoke marijuana and enjoy it, and now you’re saying, ‘If you like pot, you’ll really like heroin.’ I think not, Craig. This is enough for me.” And he patted the phone affectionately, the way you might pat a small sleeping animal. A puppy, say, that’s finally been housebroken. We read They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in the fall of 2008, and when Mr. Harrigan called a halt early one afternoon (he said all those dance marathons were exhausting), we went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Grogan had left a plate of oatmeal cookies. Mr. Harrigan walked slowly, stumping along on his canes. I walked behind him, hoping I’d be able to catch him if he fell. He sat with a grunt and a grimace and took one of the cookies. “Good old Edna,” he said. “I love these things, and they always get my bowels in gear. Get us each a glass of milk, will you, Craig?” As I was getting it, the question I kept forgetting to ask him recurred. “Why did you move here, Mr. Harrigan? You could live anywhere.” He took his glass of milk and made a toasting gesture, as he always did, and I made one right back, as I always did. “Where would you live, Craig? If you could, as you say, live anywhere?” “Maybe Los Angeles, where they make the movies. I could catch on hauling equipment, then work my way up.” Then I told him a great secret. “Maybe I could write for the movies.” I thought he might laugh, but he didn’t. “Well, I suppose someone has to, why not you? And would you never long for home? To see your father’s face, or put flowers on your mother’s grave?” “Oh, I’d come back,” I said, but the question—and the mention of my mother—gave me pause. “I wanted a clean break,” Mr. Harrigan said. “As someone who lived his whole life in the city—I grew up in Brooklyn before it became a . . . I don’t know, a kind of potted plant—I wanted to get away from New York in my final years. I wanted to live somewhere in the country, but not the tourist country, places like Camden and Castine and Bar Harbor. I wanted a place where the roads were still unpaved.” “Well,” I said, “you sure came to the right place.” He laughed and took another cookie. “I considered the Dakotas, you know . . . and Nebraska . . . but ultimately decided that was taking things too far. I had my assistant bring me pictures of a good many towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, and this was the place I settled on. Because of the hill. There are views in every direction, but not spectacular views. Spectacular views might bring tourists, which was exactly what I didn’t want. I like it here. I like the peace, I like the neighbors, and I like you, Craig.” That made me happy. “There’s something else. I don’t know how much you’ve read about my working life, but if you have—or do in the future—you’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless as I climbed what envious and intellectually clueless people call ‘the ladder of success.’ That opinion isn’t entirely wrong. I made enemies, I freely admit it. Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place. But when the game is over—and mine is, although I keep my hand in—you take off the uniform and go home. This is now home for me. This unremarkable corner of America, with its single store and its school which will, I believe, soon be closing. People no longer ‘just drop by for a drink.’ I don’t have to attend business lunches with people who always, always want something. I am not invited to take a seat at board meetings. I don’t have to go to charity functions that bore me to tears, and I don’t have to wake up at five in the morning to the sound of garbage trucks loading on Eighty-first Street. I’ll be buried here, in Elm Cemetery among the Civil War veterans, and I won’t have to pull rank or bribe some Superintendent of Graves for a nice plot. Does any of that explain?” It did and didn’t. He was a mystery to me, to the very end and even beyond. But maybe that’s always true. I think we mostly live alone. By choice, like him, or just because that’s the way the world was made. “Sort of,” I said. “At least you didn’t move to North Dakota. I’m glad of that.” He smiled. “So am I. Take another cookie to eat on your way home, and say hello to your father.” With a diminishing tax base that could no longer support it, our little six-room Harlow school did close in June of 2009, and I found myself facing the prospect of attending eighth grade across the Androscoggin River at Gates Falls Middle, with over seventy classmates instead of just twelve. That was the summer I kissed a girl for the first time, not Margie but her best friend Regina. It was also the summer that Mr. Harrigan died. I was the one who found him. I knew he was having a harder and harder job getting around, and I knew he was losing his breath more often, sometimes sucking from the oxygen bottle he now kept beside his favorite chair, but other than those things, which I just accepted, there was no warning. The day before was like any other. I read a couple of chapters from McTeague (I had asked if we could read another Frank Norris book, and Mr. Harrigan was agreeable), and watered his houseplants while Mr. Harrigan scrolled through his emails. He looked up at me and said, “People are catching on.” “To what?” He held up his phone. “To this. What it really means. To what it can do. Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world.’ This is that lever.” “Cool,” I said. “I have just deleted three ads for products and almost a dozen political solicitations. I have no doubt my email address is being bandied about, just as magazines sell the addresses of their subscribers.” “Good thing they don’t know who you are,” I said. Mr. Harrigan’s email handle (he loved having a handle) was pirateking1. “If someone is keeping track of my searches, they don’t have to. They’ll be able to suss out my interests and solicit me accordingly. My name means nothing to them. My interests do.” “Yeah, spam is annoying,” I said, and went into the kitchen to dump the watering can and put it in the mudroom. When I came back, Mr. Harrigan had the oxygen mask over his mouth and nose and was taking deep breaths. “Did you get that from your doctor?” I asked. “Did he, like, prescribe it?” He lowered it and said, “I don’t have a doctor. Men in their mid-eighties can eat all the corned beef hash they want, and they no longer need doctors, unless they have cancer. Then a doctor is handy to prescribe pain medication.” His mind was somewhere else. “Have you considered Amazon, Craig? The company, not the river.” Dad bought stuff from Amazon sometimes, but no, I’d never really considered it. I told Mr. Harrigan that, and asked what he meant. He pointed to the Modern Library copy of McTeague. “This came from Amazon. I ordered it with my phone and my credit card. That company used to be just books. Little more than a mom-and-pop operation, really, but soon it may be one of the biggest and most powerful corporations in America. Their smile logo will be as ubiquitous as the Chevrolet emblem on cars or this on our phones.” He lifted his, showing me the apple with the bite out of it. “Is spam annoying? Yes. Is it becoming the cockroach of American commerce, breeding and scurrying everywhere? Yes. Because spam works, Craig. It pulls the plow. In the not-too-distant future, spam may decide elections. If I were a younger man, I’d take this new income stream by the balls . . .” He closed one of his hands. He could only make a loose fist because of his arthritis, but I got the idea. “. . . and I would squeeze.” The look came into his eyes that I sometimes saw, the one that made me glad I wasn’t in his bad books. “You’ll be around for years yet,” I said, blissfully unaware that we were having our last conversation. “Maybe or maybe not, but I want to tell you again how glad I am you convinced me to keep this. It’s given me something to think about. And when I can’t sleep at night, it’s been a good companion.” “I’m glad,” I said, and I was. “Gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Harrigan.” So I did, but he didn’t see me. I let myself in through the mudroom door like always, calling out, “Hi, Mr. Harrigan, I’m here.” There was no reply. I decided he was probably in the bathroom. I sure hoped he hadn’t fallen in there, because it was Mrs. Grogan’s day off. When I went into the living room and saw him sitting in his chair—oxygen bottle on the floor, iPhone and McTeague on the table beside him—I relaxed. Only his chin was on his chest, and he had slumped a little to one side. He looked like he was asleep. If so, that was a first this late in the afternoon. He napped for an hour after lunch, and by the time I arrived, he was always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I took a step closer and saw his eyes weren’t entirely closed. I could see the lower arc of his irises, but the blue no longer looked sharp. It looked foggy, faded. I began to feel scared. “Mr. Harrigan?” Nothing. Gnarled hands folded loosely in his lap. One of his canes was still leaning against the wall, but the other was on the floor, as if he had reached for it and knocked it over. I realized I could hear the steady hiss from the oxygen mask, but not the faint rasp of his breathing, a sound I’d grown so used to that I rarely heard it at all. “Mr. Harrigan, you okay?” I took another couple of steps and reached out to shake him awake, then withdrew my hand. I had never seen a dead person, but thought I might be looking at one now. I reached for him again, and this time I didn’t chicken out. I grasped his shoulder (it was horribly bony beneath his shirt) and gave him a shake. “Mr. Harrigan, wake up!” One of his hands fell out of his lap and dangled between his legs. He slumped a little farther to one side. I could see the yellowed pegs of his teeth between his lips. Still, I felt I had to be absolutely sure he wasn’t just unconscious or in a faint before I called anyone. I had a memory, very brief but very bright, of my mother reading me the story of the little boy who cried wolf. I went into the hall bathroom, the one Mrs. Grogan called the powder room, on legs that felt numb, and came back with the hand mirror Mr. Harrigan kept on the shelf. I held it in front of his mouth and nose. No warm breath misted it. Then I knew (although, looking back on it, I’m pretty sure I actually knew when that hand fell out of his lap and hung between his legs). I was in the living room with a dead man, and what if he reached out and grabbed me? Of course he wouldn’t do that, he liked me, but I remembered the look he got in his eyes when he said—only yesterday! when he’d been alive!—that if he was a younger man, he’d take this new income stream by the balls, and squeeze. And how he’d closed his hand into a fist to demonstrate. You’ll find many of the opinion that I was ruthless, he’d said. Dead people didn’t reach out and grab you except in horror movies, I knew that, dead people weren’t ruthless, dead people weren’t anything, but I still stepped away from him as I took my cell phone out of my hip pocket, and I didn’t take my eyes off him when I called my father. Dad said I was probably right, but he’d send an ambulance, just in case. Who was Mr. Harrigan’s doctor, did I know? I said he didn’t have one (and you only had to look at his teeth to know he didn’t have a dentist). I said I would wait, and I did. But I did it outside. Before I went, I thought about picking up his dangling hand and putting it back in his lap. I almost did, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to touch it. It would be cold. I took his iPhone instead. It wasn’t stealing. I think it was grief, because the loss of him was starting to sink in. I wanted something that was his. Something that mattered. I guess that was the biggest funeral our church ever had. Also the longest cortege to the graveyard, mostly made up of rental cars. There were local people there, of course, including Pete Bostwick, the gardener, and Ronnie Smits, who had done most of the work on his house (and gotten wealthy out of it, I’m sure), and Mrs. Grogan, the housekeeper. Other townies as well, because he was well liked in Harlow, but most of the mourners (if they were mourning, and not there just to make sure Mr. Harrigan was really dead) were business people from New York. There was no family. I mean zero, zilch, nada. Not even a niece or a second cousin. He’d never married, never had kids—probably one of the reasons Dad was leery about me going up there at first—and he’d outlived all the rest. That’s why it was the kid from down the road, the one he paid to come and read to him, who found him. Mr. Harrigan must have known he was on borrowed time, because he left a handwritten sheet of paper on his study desk specifying exactly how he wanted his final rites carried out. It was pretty simple. Hay and Peabody’s Funeral Home had had a cash deposit on their books since 2004, enough to take care of everything with some left over. There was to be no wake or viewing hours, but he wanted to be “fixed up decently, if possible” so the coffin could be open at the funeral. Reverend Mooney was to conduct the service, and I was to read from the fourth chapter of Ephesians: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you.” I saw some of the business types exchange looks at that, as though Mr. Harrigan hadn’t shown them a great deal of kindness, or much in the way of forgiveness, either. He wanted three hymns: “Abide With Me,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and “In the Garden.” He wanted Reverend Mooney’s homily to last no more than ten minutes, and the Rev finished in just eight, ahead of schedule and, I believe, a personal best. Mostly the Rev just listed all the stuff Mr. Harrigan had done for Harlow, like paying to refurbish the Eureka Grange and fix up the Royal River covered bridge. He also put the fund drive for the community swimming pool over the top, the Rev said, but refused the naming privilege that went with it. The Rev didn’t say why, but I knew. Mr. Harrigan said that allowing people to name things after you was not only absurd but undignified and ephemeral. In fifty years, he said, or even twenty, you were just a name on a plaque that everyone ignored. Once I had done my scriptural duty, I sat in the front row with Dad, looking at the coffin with the vases of lilies at its head and foot. Mr. Harrigan’s nose stuck up like the prow of a ship. I told myself not to look at it, not to think it was funny or horrible (or both), but to remember him as he’d been. Good advice, but my eyes kept wandering back. When the Rev finished his short talk, he raised his palm-down hand to the assembled mourners and gave the benediction. Once that was done, he said, “Those of you who would like to say a final word of goodbye may now approach the coffin.” There was a rustle of clothes and a murmur of voices as people stood. Virginia Hatlen began to play the organ very softly, and I realized—with a strange feeling I couldn’t name then but would years later come to identify as surrealism—that it was a medley of country songs, including Ferlin Husky’s “Wings of a Dove,” Dwight Yoakam’s “I Sang Dixie,” and of course “Stand By Your Man.” So Mr. Harrigan had even left instructions for the exit music, and I thought, good for him. A line was forming, the locals in their sport coats and khakis interspersed with the New York types in suits and fancy shoes. “What about you, Craig?” Dad murmured. “Want a last look, or are you good?” I wanted more than that, but I couldn’t tell him. The same way I couldn’t tell him how bad I felt. It had come home to me now. It didn’t happen while I was reading the scripture, as I’d read so many other things for him, but while I was sitting and looking at his nose sticking up. Realizing that his coffin was a ship, and it was going to take him on his final voyage. One that went down into the dark. I wanted to cry, and I did cry, but later, in private. I sure didn’t want to do it here, among strangers. “Yes, but I want to be at the end of the line. I want to be last.” My dad, God bless him, didn’t ask me why. He just squeezed my shoulder and got into line. I went back to the vestibule, a bit uncomfortable in a sport jacket that was getting tight around the shoulders because I’d finally started to grow. When the end of the line was halfway down the main aisle and I was sure no one else was going to join it, I got behind a couple of suited guys who were talking in low tones about—wouldn’t you know it—Amazon stock. By the time I got to the coffin, the music had stopped. The pulpit was empty. Virginia Hatlen had probably sneaked out back to have a cigarette, and the Rev would be in the vestry, taking off his robe and combing what remained of his hair. There were a few people in the vestibule, murmuring in low voices, but here in the church it was just me and Mr. Harrigan, as it had been on so many afternoons at his big house on the hill, with its views that were good but not touristy. He was wearing a charcoal gray suit I’d never seen before. The funeral guy had rouged him a little so he’d look healthy, except healthy people don’t lie in coffins with their eyes shut and the last few minutes of daylight shining on their dead faces before they go into the earth forever. His hands were folded, making me think of the way they’d been folded when I came into his living room only days before. He looked like a life-sized doll, and I hated seeing him that way. I didn’t want to stay. I wanted fresh air. I wanted to be with my father. I wanted to go home. But I had something to do first, and I had to do it right away, because Reverend Mooney could come back from the vestry at any time. I reached into the inside pocket of my sport coat and brought out Mr. Harrigan’s phone. The last time I’d been with him—alive, I mean, not slumped in his chair or looking like a doll in an expensive box—he’d said he was glad I’d convinced him to keep the phone. He’d said it was a good companion when he couldn’t sleep at night. The phone was password-protected—as I’ve said, he was a fast learner once something really grabbed his interest—but I knew what the password was: pirate1. I had opened it in my bedroom the night before the funeral, and had gone to the notes function. I wanted to leave him a message. I thought about saying I love you, but that would have been wrong. I had liked him, certainly, but I’d also been a bit leery of him. I didn’t think he loved me, either. I don’t think Mr. Harrigan ever loved anyone, unless it was the mother who had raised him after his dad left (I had done my research). In the end, the note I typed was this: Working for you was a privilege. Thank you for the cards, and for the scratch-off tickets. I will miss you. I lifted the lapel of his suit coat, trying not to touch the unbreathing surface of his chest beneath his crisp white shirt . . . but my knuckles brushed it for just a moment, and I can feel that to this day. It was hard, like wood. I tucked the phone into his inside pocket, then stepped away. Just in time, too. Reverend Mooney came out of the side door, adjusting his tie. “Saying goodbye, Craig?” “Yes.” “Good. The right thing to do.” He slipped an arm around my shoulders and guided me away from the coffin. “You had a relationship with him that I’m sure a great many people would envy. Why don’t you go outside now and join your father? And if you want to do me a favor, tell Mr. Rafferty and the other pallbearers that we’ll be ready for them in just a few minutes.” Another man had appeared in the door to the vestry, hands clasped before him. You only had to look at his black suit and white carnation to know he was a funeral parlor guy. I supposed it was his job to close the lid of the coffin and make sure it was latched down tight. A terror of death came over me at the sight of him, and I was glad to leave that place and go out into the sunshine. I didn’t tell Dad I needed a hug, but he must have seen it, because he wrapped his arms around me. Don’t die, I thought. Please, Dad, don’t die. The service at Elm Cemetery was better, because it was shorter and because it was outside. Mr. Harrigan’s business manager, Charles “Chick” Rafferty, spoke briefly about his client’s various philanthropies, then got a little laugh when he talked about how he, Rafferty, had had to put up with Mr. Harrigan’s “questionable taste in music.” That was really the only human touch Mr. Rafferty managed. He said he’d worked “for and with” Mr. Harrigan for thirty years, and I had no reason to doubt him, but he didn’t seem to know much about Mr. Harrigan’s human side, other than his “questionable taste” for singers like Jim Reeves, Patty Loveless, and Henson Cargill. I thought about stepping forward and telling the people gathered around the open grave that Mr. Harrigan thought the Internet was like a broken watermain, spewing information instead of water. I thought of telling them that he had over a hundred photos of mushrooms on his phone. I thought of telling them he liked Mrs. Grogan’s oatmeal cookies, because they always got his bowels in gear, and that when you were in your eighties you no longer needed to take vitamins or see the doctor. When you were in your eighties, you could eat all the corned beef hash you wanted. But I kept my mouth shut. This time Reverend Mooney read the scripture, the one about how we were all going to rise from the dead like Lazarus on that great gettin-up morning. He gave another benediction and then it was over. After we were gone, back to our ordinary lives, Mr. Harrigan would be lowered into the ground (with his iPhone in his pocket, thanks to me) and the dirt would cover him, and the world would see him no more. As Dad and I were leaving, Mr. Rafferty approached us. He said he wasn’t flying back to New York until the following morning, and asked if he could drop by our house that evening. He said there was something he wanted to talk about with us. My first thought was that it must be about the pilfered iPhone, but I had no idea how Mr. Rafferty could know I’d taken it, and besides, it had been returned to its rightful owner. If he asks me, I thought, I’ll tell him I was the one who gave it to him in the first place. And how could a phone that had cost six hundred bucks possibly be a big deal when Mr. Harrigan’s estate must be worth so much? “Sure,” Dad said. “Come to supper. I make a pretty mean spaghetti Bolognese. We usually eat around six.” “I’ll take you up on that,” Mr. Rafferty said. He produced a white envelope with my name on it in handwriting I recognized. “This may explain what I want to talk to you about. I received it two months ago and was instructed to hold it until . . . mmm . . . such an occasion as this.” Once we were in our car, Dad burst out laughing, full-throated roars that brought tears to his eyes. He laughed and pounded the steering wheel and laughed and pounded his thigh and wiped his cheeks and then laughed some more. “What?” I asked, when he’d begun to taper off. “What’s so darn funny?” “I can’t think of anything else it would be,” he said. He was no longer laughing, but still chuckling. “What the heck are you talking about?” “I think you must be in his will, Craig. Open that thing. See what it says.” There was a single sheet of paper in the envelope, and it was a classic Harrigan communique: no hearts and flowers, not even a Dear in the salutation, just straight to business. I read it out loud to my father. Craig: If you’re reading this, I’ve died. I have left you $800,000 in trust. The trustees are your father and Charles Rafferty, who is my business manager and who will now serve as my executor. I calculate this sum should be sufficient to see you through four years of college and any postgraduate work you may choose to do. Enough should remain to give you a start in your chosen career. You spoke of screenwriting. If it’s what you want, then of course you must pursue it, but I do not approve. There is a vulgar joke about screenwriters I will not repeat here, but by all means find it on your phone, keywords screenwriter and starlet. There is an underlying truth in it which I believe you will grasp even at your current age. Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it. You have read me many good ones, but others are waiting to be written. That is all I will say. Although your father has power of veto in all matters concerning your trust, he would be smart not to exercise it concerning any investments Mr. Rafferty suggests. Chick is wise in the ways of the market. Even with school expenses, your $800,000 may grow to a million or more by the time you reach the age of 26, when the trust will expire and you can spend (or invest—always the wisest course) as you choose. I have enjoyed our afternoons together. Very truly yours, Mr. Harrigan PS: You are most welcome for the cards and the enclosures. That postscript gave me a little shiver. It was almost as if he’d answered the note I’d left on his iPhone when I’d decided to slip it into the pocket of his burial coat. Dad wasn’t laughing or chuckling anymore, but he was smiling. “How does it feel to be rich, Craig?” “It feels okay,” I said, and of course it did. It was a great gift, but it was just as good—maybe even better—to realize Mr. Harrigan had thought so well of me. A cynic would probably believe that’s me trying to sound saintly or something, but it’s not. Because, see, the money was like a Frisbee I got stuck halfway up the big pine in our backyard when I was eight or nine: I knew where it was, but I couldn’t get it. And that was okay. For the time being I had everything I needed. Except for him, that was. What was I going to do with my weekday afternoons now? “I take back everything I ever said about him being a tightwad,” Dad said as he pulled out behind a shiny black SUV some business guy had rented at the Portland Jetport. “Although . . .” “Although what?” I asked. “Considering the lack of relatives and how rich he was, he could have left you at least four mil. Maybe six.” He saw my look and started laughing again. “Joking, kiddo, joking. Okay?” I punched him on the shoulder and turned on the radio, going past WBLM (“Maine’s Rock and Roll Blimp”) to WTHT (“Maine’s 1 Country Station”). I had gotten a taste for candw. I have never lost it. Mr. Rafferty came to dinner, and chowed down big on Dad’s spaghetti, especially for a skinny guy. I told him I knew about the trust fund, and thanked him. He said “Don’t thank me” and told us how he’d like to invest the money. Dad said whatever seemed right, just keep him informed. He did suggest John Deere might be a good place for some of my dough, since they were innovating like crazy. Mr. Rafferty said he’d take it under consideration, and I found out later that he did invest in Deere and Company, although only a token amount. Most of it went into Apple and Amazon. After dinner, Mr. Rafferty shook my hand and congratulated me. “Harrigan had very few friends, Craig. You were fortunate to have been one.” “And he was fortunate to have Craig,” my dad said quietly, and slung an arm around my shoulders. That put a lump in my throat, and when Mr. Rafferty was gone and I was in my room, I did some crying. I tried to keep it quiet so my dad wouldn’t hear. Maybe I did; maybe he heard and knew I wanted to be left alone. When the tears stopped, I turned on my phone, opened Safari, and typed in the keywords screenwriter and starlet. The joke, which supposedly originated with a novelist named Peter Feibleman, is about a starlet so clueless she fucked the writer. Probably you’ve heard it. I never had, but I got the point Mr. Harrigan was trying to make. That night I awoke around two o’clock to the sound of distant thunder and realized all over again that Mr. Harrigan was dead. I was in my bed and he was in the ground. He was wearing a suit and he would be wearing it forever. His hands were folded and would stay that way until they were just bones. If rain followed the thunder, it might seep down and dampen his coffin. There was no cement lid or liner; he had specified that in what Mrs. Grogan referred to as his “dead letter.” Eventually the lid of the coffin would rot. So would the suit. The iPhone, made of plastic, would last much longer than the suit or the coffin, but eventually that would go, too. Nothing was eternal, except maybe for the mind of God, and even at thirteen I had my doubts about that. All at once I needed to hear his voice. And, I realized, I could. It was a creepy thing to do (especially at two in the morning), and it was morbid, I knew that, but I also knew that if I did it, I could get back to sleep. So I called, and broke out in gooseflesh when I realized the simple truth of cell phone technology: somewhere under the ground in Elm Cemetery, in a dead man’s pocket, Tammy Wynette was singing two lines of “Stand By Your Man.” Then his voice was in my ear, calm and clear, just a bit scratchy with old age: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.” And what if he did call back? What if he did? I ended the call even before the beep came and climbed back into bed. As I was pulling the covers up, I changed my mind, got up, and called again. I don’t know why. This time I waited for the beep, then said, “I miss you, Mr. Harrigan. I appreciate the money you left me, but I’d give it up to have you still alive.” I paused. “Maybe that sounds like a lie, but it isn’t. It really isn’t.” Then I went back to bed and was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. There were no dreams. It was my habit to turn on my phone even before I got dressed and check the Newsy news app to make sure no one had started World War III and there hadn’t been any terrorist attacks. Before I could go there on the morning after Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, I saw a little red circle on the SMS icon, which meant I had a text message. I assumed it was either from Billy Bogan, a friend and classmate who had a Motorola Ming, or Margie Washburn, who had a Samsung . . . although I’d gotten fewer texts from Margie lately. I suppose Regina had blabbed about me kissing her. You know that old saying, “so-and-so’s blood ran cold”? That can actually happen. I know, because mine did. I sat on my bed, staring at the screen of my phone. The text was from pirateking1. Down in the kitchen, I could hear rattling as Dad pulled the skillet out of the cabinet beside the stove. He was apparently planning to make us a hot breakfast, something he tried to do once or twice a week. “Dad?” I said, but the rattling continued, and I heard him say something that might have been Come out of there, you damn thing. He didn’t hear me, and not just because my bedroom door was closed. I could hardly hear myself. The text had made my blood run cold, and it had stolen my voice. The message above the most recent one had been sent four days before Mr. Harrigan died. It read No need to water the houseplants today, Mrs. G did it. Below it was this: C C C aa. It had been sent at 2:40 A.M. “Dad!” This time it was a little louder, but still not loud enough. I don’t know if I was crying then, or if the tears started when I was going downstairs, still wearing nothing but my underpants and a Gates Falls Tigers tee-shirt. Dad’s back was to me. He had managed to get the skillet out and was melting butter in it. He heard me and said, “I hope you’re hungry. I know I am.” “Daddy,” I said. “Daddy.” He turned when he heard what I’d stopped calling him when I was eight or nine. Saw I wasn’t dressed. Saw I was crying. Saw I was holding out my phone. Forgot all about the skillet. “Craig, what is it? What’s wrong? Did you have a nightmare about the funeral?” It was a nightmare, all right, and probably it was too late—he was old, after all—but maybe it wasn’t. “Oh, Daddy,” I said. Blubbering now. “He’s not dead. At least he wasn’t at two-thirty this morning. We’ve got to dig him up. We have to, because we buried him alive.” I told him everything. About how I’d taken Mr. Harrigan’s phone and put it in the pocket of his suit coat. Because it came to mean a lot to him, I said. And because it was something I gave him. I told him about calling that phone in the middle of the night, hanging up the first time, then calling back and leaving a message on his voicemail. I didn’t need to show Dad the text I got in return, because he’d already looked at it. Studied it, actually. The butter in the skillet had begun to scorch. Dad got up and moved the skillet off the burner. “Don’t suppose you’ll be wanting any eggs,” he said. Then he came back to the table, but instead of sitting on the other side, in his usual place, he sat next to me and put one of his hands over one of mine. “Listen up now.” “I know it was a creepy thing to do,” I said, “but if I hadn’t, we never would have known. We have to—” “Son—” “No, Dad, listen! We have to get somebody out there right away! A bulldozer, a payloader, even guys with shovels! He could still be—” “Craig, stop. You were spoofed.” I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. I knew what spoofing was, but the possibility that it had happened to me—and in the middle of the night—had never crossed my mind. “There’s more and more of it going around,” he said. “We even had a staff meeting about it at work. Someone got access to Harrigan’s cell phone. Cloned it. You know what I mean?” “Yes, sure, but Daddy—” He squeezed my hand. “Someone hoping to steal business secrets, maybe.” “He was retired!” “But he kept his hand in, he told you that. Or it could have been access to his credit card info they were after. Whoever it was got your voicemail on the cloned phone, and decided to play a practical joke.” “You don’t know that,” I said. “Daddy, we have to check!” “We don’t, and I’m going to tell you why. Mr. Harrigan was a rich man who died unattended. In addition to that, he hadn’t visited a physician in years, although I bet Rafferty gave him hell on that score, if only because he couldn’t update the old guy’s insurance to cover more of the death duties. For those reasons, there was an autopsy. That’s how they found out he died of advanced heart disease.” “They cut him open?” I thought of how my knuckles had brushed his chest when I put his phone in his pocket. Had there been stitched-up incisions under his crisp white shirt and knotted tie? If my dad was right, then yes. Stitched-up incisions in the shape of a Y. I had seen that on TV. On CSI. “Yes,” Dad said. “I don’t like telling you that, don’t want it preying on your mind, but it’s better that than letting you think he was buried alive. He wasn’t. Couldn’t have been. He’s dead. Do you understand me?” “Yes.” “Would you like me to stay home today? I will if you want.” “No, that’s okay. You’re right. I got spoofed.” And spooked. That too. “What are you going to do with yourself? Because if you’re going to brood and be all morbid, I should take the day off. We could go fishing.” “I’m not going to brood and be all morbid. But I should go up to his house and water the plants.” “Is going there a good idea?” He was watching me closely. “I owe it to him. And I want to talk to Mrs. Grogan. Find out if he made a whatchacallit for her, too.” “A provision. That’s very thoughtful. Of course she may tell you to mind your beeswax. She’s an old-time Yankee, that one.” “If he didn’t, I wish I could give her some of mine,” I said. He smiled, and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good kid. Your mom would be so proud of you. Are you sure you’re okay now?” “Yes.” I ate some eggs and toast to prove it, although I didn’t want them. My dad had to be right—a stolen password, a cloned phone, a cruel practical joke. It sure hadn’t been Mr. Harrigan, whose guts had been tossed like salad and whose blood had been replaced with embalming fluid. Dad went to work and I went up to Mr. Harrigan’s. Mrs. Grogan was vacuuming the living room. She wasn’t singing like she usually did, but she was composed enough, and after I finished watering the plants, she asked if I’d like to go into the kitchen and have a cup of tea (which she called “a cuppa cheer”) with her. “There’s cookies, too,” she said. We went into the kitchen and while she boiled the kettle, I told her about Mr. Harrigan’s note, and how he’d left money in trust for my college education. Mrs. Grogan nodded in businesslike fashion, as if she’d expected no less, and said she had also gotten an envelope from Mr. Rafferty. “The boss fixed me up. More than I expected. Prob’ly more than I deserve.” I said I felt pretty much the same way. Mrs. G. brought the tea to the table, a big mug for each of us. Between them she set down a plate of oatmeal cookies. “He loved these,” Mrs. Grogan said. “Yeah. He said they got his bowels in gear.” That made her laugh. I picked up one of the cookies and bit into it. As I chewed, I thought of the scripture from 1 Corinthians I’d read at Methodist Youth Fellowship on Maundy Thursday and at Easter service just a few months back: “And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.” The cookies weren’t communion, the Rev would surely have called the idea blasphemous, but I was glad to have one just the same. “He took care of Pete, too,” she said. Meaning Pete Bostwick, the gardener. “Nice,” I said, and reached for another cookie. “He was a good guy, wasn’t he?” “Not so sure about that,” she said. “He was square-dealing, all right, but you didn’t want to be on his bad side. You don’t remember Dusty Bilodeau, do you? No, you wouldn’t. He was before your time.” “From the Bilodeaus over in the trailer park?” “Ayuh, that’s right, next to the store, but I ’spect Dusty isn’t among em. He’ll have gone on his merry way long since. He was the gardener before Pete, but wasn’t eight months on the job before Mr. Harrigan caught him stealing and fired his butt. I don’t know how much he got, or how Mr. Harrigan found out, but firing didn’t end it. I know you know some of the stuff Mr. H. gave this little town and all the ways he helped out, but Mooney didn’t tell even half of it, maybe because he didn’t know or maybe because he was on a timer. Charity is good for the soul, but it also gives a man power, and Mr. Harrigan used his on Dusty Bilodeau.” She shook her head. Partly, I think, in admiration. She had that Yankee hard streak in her. “I hope he filched at least a few hundred out of Mr. Harrigan’s desk or sock drawer or wherever, because that was the last money he ever got in the town of Harlow, county of Castle, state of Maine. He couldn’t have landed a job shoveling henshit out of old Dorrance Marstellar’s barn after that. Mr. Harrigan saw to it. He was a square-dealing man, but if you weren’t the same, God help you. Have another cookie.” I took another cookie. “And drink your tea, boy.” I drank my tea. “I guess I’ll do the upstairs next. Prob’ly change the sheets on the beds instead of just strippin em, at least for now. What do you think’s going to happen with this house?” “Gee, I don’t know.” “Neither do I. Not a clue. Can’t imagine anyone buying it. Mr. Harrigan was one of a kind, and that goes the same for . . .” She spread her arms wide. “. . . all this.” I thought about the glass elevator and decided she had a point. Mrs. G. grabbed another cookie. “What about the houseplants? Any idears about them?” “I’ll take a couple, if it’s all right,” I said. “The rest, I don’t know.” “Me, either. And his freezer’s full. I guess we could split that three ways—you, me, and Pete.” Take, eat, I thought. This do in remembrance of me. She sighed. “I’m mostly just dithering. Stretching out a few chores like they were many. I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself, and that’s the God’s honest. What about you, Craig? What are you going to do?” “Right now I’m going downstairs to spritz his hen of the woods,” I said. “And if you’re sure it’s okay, I’ll at least take the African violet when I go home.” “Course I’m sure.” She said it the Yankee way: Coss. “As many as you want.” She went upstairs and I down to the basement, where Mr. Harrigan kept his mushrooms in a bunch of terrariums. While I spritzed, I thought about the text message I’d gotten from pirateking1 in the middle of the night. Dad was right, it had to be a joke, but wouldn’t a practical joker have sent something at least half-witty, like Save me I’m trapped in a box or the old one that went Don’t bother me while I’m decomposing? Why would a practical joker just send a double a, which when you spoke it sounded kind of like a gurgle, or a death-rattle? And why would a practical joker send my initial? Not once or twice but three times? I ended up taking four of Mr. Harrigan’s houseplants—the African violet, the anthurium, the peperomia, and the dieffenbachia. I spotted them around our house, saving the dieffenbachia for my room, because it was my favorite. But I was just marking time, and I knew it. Once the plants were placed, I got a bottle of Snapple out of the fridge, put it in the saddlebag of my bike, and rode out to Elm Cemetery. It was deserted on that hot summer forenoon, and I went right to Mr. Harrigan’s grave. The stone was in place, nothing fancy, just a granite marker with his name and dates on it. There were plenty of flowers, all still fresh (that wouldn’t last long), most with cards tucked in them. The biggest bunch, perhaps picked from Mr. Harrigan’s own flowerbeds—and out of respect, not parsimony—was from Pete Bostwick’s family. I got down on my knees, but not to pray. I took my phone out of my pocket and held it in my hand. My heart was beating so hard it made little black dots flash in front of my eyes. I went to my contacts and called him. Then I lowered my phone and put the side of my face down on the newly replaced sod, listening for Tammy Wynette. I thought I heard her, too, but it must have been my imagination. It would have had to’ve come through his coat, through the lid of his coffin, and up through six feet of ground. But I thought I did. No, check that—I was sure I did. Mr. Harrigan’s phone, singing “Stand By Your Man” down there in his grave. In my other ear, the one not pressed to the ground, I could hear his voice, very faint but audible in the dozing stillness of that place: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.” But he wouldn’t, appropriate or not. He was dead. I went home. In September of 2009, I started school at Gates Falls Middle along with my friends Margie, Regina, and Billy. We rode in a little used bus which quickly earned us the jeering nickname of Short Bus Kids from the Gates kids. I eventually got taller (although I stopped two inches short of six feet, which sort of broke my heart), but on that first day of school, I was the shortest kid in the eighth grade. Which made me a perfect target for Kenny Yanko, a hulking troublemaker who had been kept back that year and whose picture should have been in the dictionary next to the word bully. Our first class wasn’t a class at all, but a school assembly for the new kids from the so-called “tuition towns” of Harlow, Motton, and Shiloh Church. The principal that year (and for many years to come) was a tall, shambling fellow with a bald head so shiny it looked Simonized. This was Mr. Albert Douglas, known to the kids as either Alkie Al or Dipso Doug. None of the kids had ever actually seen him loaded, but it was an article of faith back then that he drank like a fish. He took the podium, welcomed “this group of fine new students” to Gates Falls Middle, and told us about all the wonderful things that awaited us in the coming academic year. These included band, glee club, debate club, photography club, Future Farmers of America, and all the sports we could handle (as long as they were baseball, track, soccer, or lacrosse—there would be no football option until high school). He explained about Dress-Up Fridays once a month, when boys would be expected to wear ties and sport jackets and girls would be expected to wear dresses (no hems more than two inches above the knee, please). Last of all, he told us there was to be absolutely no initiations of the new out-of-town students. Us, in other words. Apparently the year before, a transfer student from Vermont had wound up in Central Maine General after being forced to chug-a-lug three bottles of Gatorade, and now the tradition had been banned. Then he wished us well and sent us off on what he called “our academic adventure.” My fears about getting lost in this huge new school turned out to be groundless, because it really wasn’t huge at all. All my classes except for period-seven English were on the second floor, and I liked all my teachers. I had been scared of math class, but it turned out we were picking up pretty much where I’d left off, so that was okay. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing until the four-minute change of classes between period six and period seven. I headed down the hall to the stairs, past slamming lockers, gabbing kids, and the smell of Beefaroni from the cafeteria. I had just reached the top of the stairs when a hand grabbed me. “Hey, new boy. Not so fast.” I turned and saw a six-foot troll with an acne-blasted face. His black hair hung down to his shoulders in greasy clumps. Small dark eyes peered out at me from beneath a protruding shelf of forehead. They were filled with bogus merriment. He was wearing stovepipe jeans and scuffed biker boots. In one hand he held a paper bag. “Take it.” Clueless, I took it. Kids were hurrying past me and down the stairs, some with quick sideways glances at the kid with the long black hair. “Look inside.” I did. There was a rag, a brush, and a can of Kiwi boot polish. I tried to hand the bag back. “I have to get to class.” “Uh-uh, new boy. Not until you shine my boots.” Clueless no more. It was an initiation stunt, and although expressly forbidden by the principal just that morning, I thought about doing it. Then I thought about all the kids hurrying downstairs past us. They would see the little country boy from Harlow on his knees with that rag and brush and can of polish. The story would spread fast. Yet I still might have done it, because this kid was much bigger than I was, and I didn’t like the look in his eyes. I would love to beat the shit out of you, that look said. Just give me an excuse, new boy. Then I thought of what Mr. Harrigan would think if he ever saw me down on my knees, humbly shining this oaf’s shoes. “No,” I said. “No’s a mistake you don’t want to make,” the kid said. “You better fucking believe it.” “Boys? Say, boys? Is there a problem here?” It was Ms. Hargensen, my earth science teacher. She was young and pretty, couldn’t have been long out of college, but she had an air of confidence about her that said she took no shit. The big boy shook his head: no problem here. “All good,” I said, handing the bag back to its owner. “What’s your name?” Ms. Hargensen asked. She wasn’t looking at me. “Kenny Yanko.” “And what’s in your bag, Kenny?” “Nothing.” “It wouldn’t be an initiation kit, would it?” “No,” he said. “I gotta go to class.” I did, too. The crowd of kids going downstairs was thinning out, and pretty soon the bell was going to ring. “I’m sure you do, Kenny, but one more second.” She switched her attention to me. “Craig, right?” “Yes, ma’am.” “What’s in that bag, Craig? I’m curious.” I thought of telling her. Not out of any Boy Scout honesty-is-the-best-policy bullshit, but because he had scared me and now I was pissed off. And (might as well admit it) because I had an adult here to run interference. Then I thought, How would Mr. Harrigan handle this? Would he snitch? “The rest of his lunch,” I said. “Half a sandwich. He asked me if I wanted it.” If she had taken the bag and looked inside, we both would have been in trouble, but she didn’t . . . although I bet she knew. She just told us to get to class and went clicking away on her medium just-right-for-school heels. I started down the stairs, and Kenny Yanko grabbed me again. “You should have shined em, new boy.” That pissed me off more. “I just saved your ass. You should be saying thank you.” He flushed, which did not complement all those erupting volcanos on his face. “You should have shined em.” He started away, then turned back, still holding his stupid paper bag. “Fuck your thanks, new boy. And fuck you.” A week later, Kenny Yanko got into it with Mr. Arsenault, the woodshop teacher, and hucked a hand sander at him. Kenny had had no less than three suspensions during his two years at Gates Falls Middle—after my confrontation with him at the top of the stairs, I found out he was sort of a legend—and that was the last straw. He was expelled, and I thought my problems with him were over. Like most smalltown schools, Gates Falls Middle was very big on traditions. Dress-Up Fridays was just one of many. There was Carrying the Boot (which meant standing in front of the IGA and asking for contributions to the fire department), and Doing the Mile (running around the gym twenty times in phys ed), and singing the school song at the monthly assemblies. Another of these traditions was the Autumn Dance, a Sadie Hawkins kind of deal where the girls were supposed to ask the boys. Margie Washburn asked me, and of course I said yes, because I wanted to go on being friends with her even though I didn’t like her, you know, that way. I asked my dad to drive us, which he was more than happy to do. Regina Michaels asked Billy Bogan, so it was a double date. It was especially good because Regina whispered to me in study hall that she’d only asked Billy because he was my friend. I had a hell of a good time until the first intermission, when I left the gym to offload some of the punch I’d put away. I got as far as the boys’ room door, then someone seized me by the belt with one hand and the back of my neck with the other and propelled me straight down the hall to the side exit that gave on the faculty parking lot. If I hadn’t put out a hand to shove the crash bar, Kenny would have run me into the door face-first. I have total recall of what followed. I have no idea why the bad memories of childhood and early adolescence are so clear, I only know they are. And this is a very bad memory. The night air was shockingly cold after the heat of the gym (not to mention the humidity exuded by all those adolescent fruiting bodies). I could see moonlight gleaming on the chrome of the two parked cars belonging to that night’s chaperones, Mr. Taylor and Ms. Hargensen (new teachers got stuck chaperoning because it was, you guessed it, a GFMS tradition). I could hear exhaust banging away through some car’s shot muffler up on Highway 96. And I could feel the hot raw scrape of my palms when Kenny Yanko pushed me down on the parking lot pavement. “Now get up,” he said. “You got a job to do.” I got up. I looked at my palms and saw they were bleeding. There was a bag sitting on one of the parked cars. He took it and held it out. “Shine my boots. Do that and we’ll call it square.” “Fuck you,” I said, and punched him in the eye. Total recall, okay? I can remember every time he hit me: five blows in all. I can remember how the last one drove me back against the cinderblock wall of the building and how I told my legs to hold me up and they declined. I just slid slowly down until my butt was on the macadam. I can remember the Black Eyed Peas, faint but audible, doing “Boom Boom Pow.” I can remember Kenny standing over me, breathing hard and saying, “Tell anyone and you’re dead.” But of all the things I can remember, the one I recall best—and treasure—is the sublime and savage satisfaction I felt when my fist connected with his face. It was the only one I got in, but it was a hell of a shot. Boom boom pow. When he was gone, I took my phone out of my pocket. After making sure it wasn’t broken, I called Billy. It was all I could think of to do. He answered on the third ring, shouting to be heard over the chanting of Flo Rida. I told him to come outside and bring Ms. Hargensen. I didn’t want to involve a teacher, but even with my chimes rung pretty good, I knew that was bound to happen eventually, so it seemed best to do it from the jump. I thought it was the way Mr. Harrigan would have handled it. “Why? What’s up, dude?” “Some kid beat me up,” I said. “I don’t think I better go back inside. I don’t look so great.” He came out three minutes later, not only with Ms. Hargensen but Regina and Margie. My friends stared with dismay at my split lip and bloody nose. My clothes were also speckled with blood and my shirt (brand new) was torn. “Come with me,” Ms. Hargensen said. She didn’t seem upset by the blood, the bruise on my cheek, or the way my mouth was fattening up. “All of you.” “I don’t want to go in there,” I said, meaning back into the gym annex. “I don’t want to get stared at.” “Don’t blame you,” she said. “This way.” She led us to an entrance that said STAFF ONLY, used a key to let us in, and took us to the teachers’ room. It wasn’t exactly luxurious, I’d seen better furniture out on Harlow lawns when people had yard sales, but there were chairs, and I sat in one. She found a first aid kit and sent Regina into the bathroom to get a cold washcloth to put on my nose, which she said didn’t look broken. Regina came back looking impressed. “There’s Aveda hand cream in there!” “It’s mine,” Ms. Hargensen said. “Have some if you want. Put this on your nose, Craig. Hold it. Who brought you kids?” “Craig’s dad,” Margie said. She was looking around at this undiscovered country with wide eyes. Since it was clear I wasn’t going to die, she was cataloguing everything for later discussion with her gal pals. “Call him,” Ms. Hargensen said. “Give Margie your phone, Craig.” Margie called Dad and told him to come pick us up. He said something. Margie listened, then said, “Well, there was a little trouble.” Listened some more. “Um . . . well . . .” Billy took the phone. “He got beat up, but he’s okay.” Listened and held out the phone. “He wants to talk to you.” Of course he did, and after asking if I was all right, he wanted to know who had done it. I said I didn’t know, but thought it was a high school kid who might’ve been trying to crash the dance. “I’m all right, Dad. Let’s not make a big deal of this, okay?” He said it was a big deal. I said it wasn’t. He said it was. We went around like that, then he sighed and said he’d be there as fast as he could. I ended the call. Ms. Hargensen said, “I’m not supposed to dispense anything for pain, only the school nurse can do that, and only then with parental permission, but she’s not here, so . . .” She grabbed her purse, which was hanging on a hook with her coat, and peered inside. “Are any of you kids going to tell on me, and maybe cause me to lose my job?” My three friends shook their heads. So did I, but gingerly. Kenny had caught me with a pretty good roundhouse to the left temple. I hoped the bullying bastard had hurt his hand. Ms. Hargensen brought out a little bottle of Aleve. “My private stock. Billy, get him some water.” Billy brought me a Dixie cup. I swallowed the pill and felt better immediately. Such is the power of suggestion, especially when the one doing the suggesting is a gorgeous young woman. “You three, make like bees and buzz,” Ms. Hargensen said. “Billy, go in the gym and tell Mr. Taylor I’ll be back in ten minutes. Girls, go outside and wait for Craig’s father. Wave him over to the staff door.” They went. Ms. Hargensen leaned over me, close enough so I could smell her perfume, which was wonderful. I fell in love with her. I knew it was sappy but couldn’t help it. She held up two fingers. “Please tell me you don’t see three or four.” “No, just two.” “Okay.” She straightened up. “Was it Yanko? It was, wasn’t it?” “No.” “Do I look stupid? Tell me the truth.” How she looked was beautiful, but I could hardly say that. “No, you don’t look stupid, but it wasn’t Kenny. Which is good. Because, see, if it was him, I bet he’d get arrested, because he’s already expelled. Then there’d be a trial and I’d have to go in court and tell how he beat me up. Everyone would know. Think how embarrassing that would be.” “And if he beats somebody else up?” I thought of Mr. Harrigan then—channeled him, you could even say. “That’s their problem. All I care is that he’s done with me.” She tried to scowl. Her lips curved in a big smile instead, and I fell more in love with her than ever. “That’s cold.” “I just want to get along,” I said. Which was the God’s honest truth. “You know what, Craig? I think you will.” When my dad got there, he looked me over and complimented Ms. Hargensen on her work. “I was a prizefight cut-man in my last life,” she said. That made him laugh. Neither of them suggested a trip to the emergency room, which was a relief. Dad took the four of us home, so we missed the second half of the dance, but none of us minded. Billy, Margie, and Regina had had an experience more interesting than waving their hands in the air to Beyonc? and Jay-Z. As for me, I kept reliving the satisfying shock that had gone up my arm when my fist connected with Kenny Yanko’s eye. It was going to leave a splendid shiner, and I wondered how he’d explain it. Duh, I ran into a door. Duh, I ran into a wall. Duh, I was jerking off and my hand slipped. When we were back at the house, Dad asked me again if I knew who had done it. I said I didn’t. “Not sure I believe that, son.” I said nothing. “You just want to let this go? Is that what I’m hearing?” I nodded. “All right.” He sighed. “I guess I get it. I was young once myself. That’s a thing parents always tell their kids sooner or later, but I doubt if any of them believe it.” “I believe it,” I said, and I did, although it was amusing to visualize my father as a five-foot-five shrimpsqueak back in the age of landlines. “Tell me one thing, at least. Your mother would be mad at me for even asking, but since she’s not here . . . did you hit him back?” “Yes. Only once, but it was a good one.” That made him grin. “Okay. But you need to understand that if he comes after you again, it’s going to be a police matter. Are we clear?” I said we were. “Your teacher—I like her—said I should keep you up at least an hour and make sure you don’t go all woozy. Want a piece of pie?” “Sure.” “Cup of tea to go with it?” “Absolutely.” So we had pie and big mugs of tea and Dad told me stories that weren’t about party telephone lines, or going to a one-room school where there was just a woodstove for heat, or TVs that only got the three stations (and none at all if the wind blew down the roof antenna). He told me about how he and Roy DeWitt found some fireworks in Roy’s cellar and when they shot them off one went into Frank Driscoll’s kindling box and set it on fire and Frank Driscoll said if they didn’t cut him a cord of wood, he’d tell their parents. He told me about how his mother overheard him call old Philly Loubird from Shiloh Church Big Chief Wampum and washed his mouth out with soap, ignoring his promises to never say anything like that again. He told me about fights at the Auburn Rollodrome—rumbles, he called them—where the kids from Lisbon High and those from Edward Little, Dad’s school, got into it just about every Friday night. He told me about getting his bathing suit pulled off by a couple of big kids at White’s Beach (“I walked home with my towel wrapped around me”), and the time some kid chased him down Carbine Street in Castle Rock with a baseball bat (“He said I put a hickey on his sister, which I never did”). He really had been young once. I went upstairs to my room feeling good, but the Aleve Ms. Hargensen had given me was wearing off, and by the time I got undressed, the good feeling was wearing off with it. I was pretty sure Kenny Yanko wouldn’t come back on me, but not positive. What if his friends started getting on his case about the shiner? Teasing him about it? Laughing about it, even? What if he got pissed and decided Round 2 was in order? If that happened, I would most likely not even get in one good blow; the shot to his eye had been kind of a sucker punch, after all. He could put me in the hospital, or worse. I washed my face (very gently), brushed my teeth, got into bed, turned off the light, and then just lay there, reliving what had happened. The shock of being grabbed from behind and shoved down the hallway. Being punched in the chest. Being punched in the mouth. Telling my legs to hold me up and my legs saying maybe later. Once I was in the dark, it seemed more and more likely that Kenny wasn’t done with me. Logical, even, the way things lots crazier than that can seem logical when it’s dark and you’re alone. So I turned on the light again and called Mr. Harrigan. I never expected to hear his voice, I only wanted to pretend I was talking to him. What I expected was silence, or a recorded message telling me the number I’d called was no longer in service. I’d slipped his phone into the pocket of his burial suit three months previous, and those first iPhones had a battery life of only 250 hours, even in standby mode. Which meant that phone had to be as dead as he was. But it rang. It had no business ringing, reality was totally against the idea, but beneath the ground of Elm Cemetery, three miles away, Tammy Wynette was singing “Stand By Your Man.” Halfway through the fifth ring, his slightly scratchy old man’s voice was in my ear. The same as always, straight to business, not even inviting his caller to leave a number or a message. “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.” The beep came, and I heard myself talking. I don’t remember thinking about the words; my mouth seemed to be operating completely on its own. “I got beat up tonight, Mr. Harrigan. By a big stupid kid named Kenny Yanko. He wanted me to shine his shoes and I wouldn’t. I didn’t snitch on him because I thought that would end it, I was trying to think like you, but I’m still worried. I wish I could talk to you.” I paused. “I’m glad your phone is still working, even though I don’t know how it can be.” I paused. “I miss you. Goodbye.” I ended the call. I looked in Recents to make sure I had called. His number was there, along with the time—11:02 P.M. I turned off my phone and put it on the night table. I turned off my lamp and was asleep almost at once. That was on a Friday night. The next night—or maybe early on Sunday morning—Kenny Yanko died. He hung himself, although I didn’t know that, or any of the details, for another year. The obituary for Kenneth James Yanko wasn’t in the Lewiston Sun until Tuesday, and all it said was “passed away suddenly, as the result of a tragic accident,” but the news was all over the school on Monday and of course the rumor mill was in full operation. He was huffing glue and died of a stroke. He was cleaning one of his daddy’s shotguns (Mr. Yanko was said to have a regular arsenal in his house) and it went off. He was playing Russian roulette with one of his daddy’s pistols and blew his head off. He got drunk, fell down the stairs, and broke his neck. None of these stories was true. Billy Bogan was the one who told me, as soon as he got on the Short Bus. He was all but bursting with the news. He said one of his ma’s friends from Gates Falls had called and told her. The friend lived across the street and had seen the body coming out on a stretcher with a passel of Yankos surrounding it, crying and screaming. Even expelled bullies had people who loved them, it seemed. As a Bible reader I could even imagine them rending their clothes. I thought immediately—and guiltily—of the call I’d made to Mr. Harrigan’s phone. I told myself he was dead and couldn’t have had anything to do with it. I told myself that even if stuff like that were possible outside of comic book horror stories, I hadn’t specifically wished Kenny dead, I just wanted to be left alone, but that seemed somehow lawyerly. And I kept remembering something Mrs. Grogan had said the day after the funeral, when I called Mr. Harrigan a good guy for putting us in his will. Not so sure about that. He was square-dealing, all right, but you didn’t want to be on his bad side. Dusty Bilodeau had gotten on Mr. Harrigan’s bad side, and surely Kenny Yanko would have been, too, for beating me up when I wouldn’t shine his fucking boots. Only Mr. Harrigan no longer had a bad side. I kept telling myself that. Dead people don’t have bad sides. Of course phones that haven’t been charged for three months can’t ring and then play messages (or take them), either . . . but Mr. Harrigan’s had rung, and I had heard his rusty old man’s voice. So I felt guilty, but I also felt relieved. Kenny Yanko would never come back on me. He was out of my road. Later that day, during my free period, Ms. Hargensen came down to the gym where I was shooting baskets and took me into the hall. “You were moping in class today,” she said. “No, I wasn’t.” “You were and I know why, but I’m going to tell you something. Kids your age have a Ptolemaic view of the universe. I’m young enough to remember.” “I don’t know what—” “Ptolemy was a Roman mathematician and astrologer who believed the earth was the center of the universe, a stillpoint everything else revolved around. Children believe their entire worlds revolve around them. That sense of being at the center of everything usually starts to fade by the time you’re twenty or so, but you’re a long way from that.” She was leaning close to me, very serious, and she had the most beautiful green eyes. Also, the smell of her perfume was making me a little dizzy. “I can see you’re not following me, so let me dispense with the metaphor. If you’re thinking you had something to do with the Yanko boy’s death, forget it. You didn’t. I’ve seen his records, and he was a kid with serious problems. Home problems, school problems, psychological problems. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t want to know, but I see a blessing here.” “What?” I asked. “That he can’t beat me up anymore?” She laughed, exposing teeth as pretty as the rest of her. “There’s that Ptolemaic view of the world again. No, Craig, the blessing is that he was too young to get a license. If he’d been old enough to drive, he might have taken some other kids with him. Now go back to gym and shoot some baskets.” I started away, but she grabbed my wrist. Eleven years later I can still remember the electricity I felt. “Craig, I could never be glad when a child dies, not even a bad actor like Kenneth Yanko. But I can be glad it wasn’t you.” Suddenly I wanted to tell her everything, and I might have done it. But just then the bell rang, classroom doors opened, and the hall was full of chattering kids. Ms. Hargensen went her way and I went mine. That night I turned on my phone and at first just stared at it, gathering my courage. What Ms. Hargensen had said that morning made sense, but Ms. Hargensen didn’t know that Mr. Harrigan’s phone still worked, which was impossible. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her and believed—erroneously, as it turned out—that I never would. It won’t work this time, I told myself. It had one last spurt of energy, that’s all. Like a lightbulb that flashes bright just before burning out. I hit his contact, expecting—hoping, actually—for silence or a message telling me the phone was no longer in service. But it rang, and after a few more rings, Mr. Harrigan was once more in my ear. “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.” “It’s Craig, Mr. Harrigan.” Feeling foolish, talking to a dead man—one who would be growing mold on his cheeks by now (I had done my research, you see). At the same time not feeling foolish at all. Feeling scared, like someone treading on unhallowed ground. “Listen . . .” I licked my lips. “You didn’t have anything to do with Kenny Yanko dying, did you? If you did . . . um . . . knock on the wall.” I ended the call. I waited for a knock. None came. The next morning, I had a message from pirateking1. Just six letters: a a a. C C x. Meaningless. It scared the hell out of me. That autumn I thought a lot about Kenny Yanko (the current story making the rounds was that he had fallen from the second floor of his house while trying to sneak out in the middle of the night). I thought even more about Mr. Harrigan, and about his phone, which I now wished I’d thrown into Castle Lake. There was a fascination, okay? The fascination with strange things we all feel. Forbidden things. On several occasions I almost called Mr. Harrigan’s phone, but I never did, at least not then. Once I’d found his voice reassuring, the voice of experience and success, the voice, you could say, of the grandfather I’d never had. Now I couldn’t remember that voice as it had been on our sunny afternoons, talking about Charles Dickens or Frank Norris or D. H. Lawrence or how the Internet was like a broken watermain. Now all I could think of was the old-man rasp, like sandpaper that’s almost worn out, telling me he would call me back if it seemed appropriate. And I thought of him in his coffin. The mortician from Hay and Peabody had no doubt gummed down his eyelids, but how long did that gum last? Were his eyes open down there? Were they staring up into the dark as they rotted in their sockets? These things preyed on my mind. A week before Christmas, Reverend Mooney asked me to come into the vestry so we could “have a chat.” He did most of the chatting. My father was worried about me, he said. I was losing weight, and my grades had slipped. Was there anything I wanted to tell him? I thought it over and decided there might be. Not everything, but some of it. “If I tell you something, can it stay between us?” “As long as it doesn’t have to do with self-harm or a crime—a serious crime—the answer is yes. I’m not a priest and this isn’t the Catholic confessional, but most men of faith are good at keeping secrets.” So I told him that I’d had a fight with a boy from school, a bigger boy named Kenny Yanko, and he’d beat me up pretty good. I said I never wished Kenny dead, and I’d certainly not prayed for it, but he had died, almost right after our fight, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I told him what Ms. Hargensen had said about how kids believed everything had to do with them, and how it wasn’t true. I said that helped a little, but I still thought I might have played a part in Kenny’s death. The Rev smiled. “Your teacher was right, Craig. Until I was eight, I avoided stepping on sidewalk cracks so I wouldn’t inadvertently break my mother’s back.” “Seriously?” “Seriously.” He leaned forward. His smile went away. “I will keep your confidence if you will keep mine. Do you agree?” “Sure.” “I’m good friends with Father Ingersoll, of Saint Anne’s in Gates Falls. That is the church the Yankos attend. He told me that the Yanko boy committed suicide.” I think I gasped. Suicide had been one of the rumors going around in the week after Kenny died, but I had never believed it. I would have said the thought of killing himself had never crossed the bullying son of a bitch’s mind. Reverend Mooney was still leaning forward. He took one of my hands in both of his. “Craig, do you really believe that boy went home, thought to himself, ‘Oh my goodness, I beat up a kid younger and smaller than me, I guess I’ll kill myself’?” “I guess not,” I said, and I let out a breath it felt like I’d been holding for two months. “When you put it like that. How did he do it?” “I didn’t ask, and I wouldn’t tell you even if Pat Ingersoll had told me. You need to let this go, Craig. The boy had problems. His need to beat you up was only one symptom of those problems. You had nothing to do with it.” “And if I’m relieved? That, you know, I don’t have to worry about him anymore?” “I’d say that was you being human.” “Thanks.” “Do you feel better?” “Yes.” And I did. Not long before the end of school, Ms. Hargensen stood before our earth science class with a big smile on her face. “You guys probably thought you were going to be rid of me in two weeks, but I have some bad news. Mr. de Lesseps, the high school biology teacher, is retiring, and I’ve been hired to take his place. You could say I’m graduating from middle school to high school.” A few kids groaned theatrically, but most of us applauded, and no one clapped harder than I did. I would not be leaving my love behind. To my adolescent mind, it seemed like fate. And in a way, it was. I also left Gates Falls Middle behind and started the ninth grade at Gates Falls High. That was where I met Mike Ueberroth, known then—as he is in his current career as a backup catcher for the Baltimore Orioles—as U-Boat. Jocks and more scholarly types didn’t mix much at Gates (I imagine it’s true at most high schools, because jocks tend to be clannish), and if it hadn’t been for Arsenic and Old Lace, I doubt if we ever would have become friends. U-Boat was a junior and I was just a lowly freshman, which made becoming friends even more unlikely. But we did, and we remain friends to this day, although I see him far less often. Many high schools have a Senior Play, but that wasn’t the case at Gates. We had two plays each year, and although they were put on by the Drama Club, all students could audition. I knew the story because I’d seen the movie version on TV one rainy Saturday afternoon. I enjoyed it, so I tried out. Mike’s girlfriend, a Drama Club member, talked him into trying out, and he ended up playing the homicidal Jonathan Brewster. I was cast as his scurrying sidekick, Dr. Einstein. That part was played by Peter Lorre in the film, and I tried my best to sound like him, sneering “Yas! Yas!” before every line. It wasn’t a very good imitation, but I have to tell you that the audience ate it up. Small towns, you know. So that’s how U-Boat and I became friends, and it’s also how I found out what had really happened to Kenny Yanko. The Rev turned out to be wrong and the newspaper obituary turned out to be right. It really had been an accident. During the break between Act 1 and Act 2 of our dress rehearsal, I was at the Coke machine, which had eaten up my seventy-five cents without giving me anything in return. U-Boat left his girlfriend, came over, and gave the machine’s upper right corner a hard whack with the palm of one hand. A can of Coke promptly fell into the retrieval tray. “Thanks,” I said. “No prob. You just have to remember to hit it right there, in that corner.” I said I would do that, although I doubted I could hit it with the same force. “Hey, listen, I heard you had some trouble with that Yanko kid. True?” There was no sense denying it—Billy and both girls had blabbed—and really no reason to at this late date. So I said yeah, it was true. “You want to know how he died?” “I’ve heard about a hundred different stories. Have you got another one?” “I’ve got the truth, little buddy. You know who my dad is, don’t you?” “Sure.” The Gates Falls police force consisted of fewer than two dozen uniformed officers, the Chief of Police, and one detective. That was Mike’s father, George Ueberroth. “I’ll tell you about Yanko if you let me hit your soda.” “Okay, but don’t backwash.” “Do I look like an animal? Give it to me, you fuckin cheesecake.” “Yas, yas,” I said, doing Peter Lorre. He snickered, took the can, downed half of it, then belched. Down the hall, his girlfriend stuck a finger in her mouth and mimed puking. Love in high school is very sophisticated. “My dad was the one who investigated,” U-Boat said, handing the can back to me, “and a couple of days after it happened I heard him talking to Sergeant Polk from the house. That’s what they call the cop-shop. They were out on the porch drinking beers, and the Sarge said something about Yanko doing the chokey-strokey. Dad laughed and said he’d heard it called a Beverly Hills necktie. The Sarge said it was probably the only way the poor kid could get off, with a pizza-face like that. My dad goes yeah, sad but true. Then he said what bothered him was the hair. Said it bothered the coroner, too.” “What about his hair?” I asked. “And what’s a Beverly Hills necktie?” “I looked it up on my phone. It’s slang for autoerotic asphyxiation.” He said the words carefully. With pride, almost. “You hang yourself and beat off while you’re passing out.” He saw my expression and shrugged. “I don’t make the news, Dr. Einstein, I just report it. I guess it’s supposed to be an extremely big thrill, but I think I’ll pass.” I thought I would, too. “What about the hair?” “I asked my dad about that. He didn’t want to tell me, but since I’d heard the rest, he eventually did. He said half of Yanko’s hair had turned white.” I thought about that a lot. On the one hand, if I had ever considered the idea of Mr. Harrigan rising from his grave to extract vengeance on my behalf (and sometimes at night when I couldn’t sleep, the idea, however ridiculous, would creep into my mind), U-Boat’s story seemed to put paid to those thoughts. Thinking about Kenny Yanko in his closet, pants around his ankles and a rope around his neck, face turning purple as he did the old chokey-strokey, I could actually feel sorry for him. What a stupid, undignified way to die. “As the result of a tragic accident,” the Sun obituary had said, and that was more accurate than any of us kids could have known. But on the other hand, there was that thing U-Boat’s dad had said about Kenny’s hair. I couldn’t help wondering what might cause such a thing to happen. What Kenny might have seen in that closet with him as he swam toward unconsciousness while pulling his poor old pudding for everything he was worth. Finally I went to my best counselor, the Internet. There I found a difference of opinion. Some scientists proclaimed that there was absolutely no evidence that shock can turn someone’s hair white. Other scientists said yas, yas, it really could happen. That a sudden shock could kill the melanocyte stem cells that determine hair color. One article I read said that actually happened to Thomas More and Marie Antoinette before they were executed. Another article threw shade on that, saying it was just a legend. In the end, it was like something Mr. Harrigan sometimes said about buying stocks: you pays your money and you takes your choice. Little by little, these questions and concerns faded, but I’d be lying if I told you that Kenny Yanko ever completely left my mind, then or now. Kenny Yanko in his closet with a rope around his neck. Maybe not losing consciousness before he could loosen the rope, after all. Kenny Yanko perhaps seeing something—only perhaps—that had frightened him so badly that he had fainted. That he had actually been scared to death. In daylight, that seemed pretty stupid. At night, especially if the wind was high and making little screaming sounds around the eaves, not so much. A FOR SALE sign from a Portland realty company went up in front of Mr. Harrigan’s house, and a few people came up to look at it. They were mostly the kind who fly in from Boston or New York (some of them on charter jets, probably). The kind who, like the business folks who had attended Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, pay extra to rent expensive cars. One pair was my first married gay couple, young but clearly well-to-do and just as clearly in love. They came in a snazzy BMW i8, held hands everywhere they went, and did a lot of wow and amazing over the grounds. Then they went away and didn’t come back. I saw a lot of these potential buyers because the estate (managed by Mr. Rafferty, of course) had kept Mrs. Grogan and Pete Bostwick on, and Pete hired me to help out with the grounds. He knew I was good with plants and was willing to work hard. I got twelve bucks an hour for ten hours a week, and with the big trust fund out of reach until I was in college, that money came in very handy. Pete called the potential buyers Richie Riches. Like the married couple in their rented BMW, they went wow but didn’t buy. Considering the house was on a dirt road and the views were only good, not great (no lakes, no mountains, no rockbound seacoast with a lighthouse), I wasn’t surprised. Neither were Pete or Mrs. Grogan. They nicknamed the house White Elephant Manor. In the early winter of 2011, I used some of my gardening money to upgrade my first-generation phone to an iPhone 4. I swapped in my contacts that same night, and when I scrolled through them, I came across Mr. Harrigan’s number. Without thinking too much about it, I tapped it. Calling Mr. Harrigan, the screen said. I put the phone to my ear with a combination of dread and curiosity. There was no outgoing message from Mr. Harrigan. There was no robot voice telling me the number I’d called was no longer in service, and there was no ring. There was nothing but smooth silence. You could say my new phone was, heh-heh, as quiet as the grave. It was a relief. I took biology my sophomore year, and there was Ms. Hargensen, as pretty as ever, but no longer my love. I had switched my affections to a more available (and age-appropriate) young lady. Wendy Gerard was a petite blond from Motton who had just gotten rid of her braces. Soon we were studying together, and going to movies together (when either my dad or her mom or dad would take us, that was), and making out in the back row. All that sticky kid stuff that’s so absolutely fine. My crush on Ms. Hargensen died a natural death, and that was a good thing, because it opened the way for friendship. I brought plants into class sometimes, and I helped out cleaning the lab, which we shared with the chem kids, after school on Friday afternoons. On one of those afternoons, I asked her if she believed in ghosts. “I suppose you don’t, being a scientist and all,” I said. She laughed. “I’m a teacher, not a scientist.” “You know what I mean.” “I suppose, but I’m still a good Catholic. That means I believe in God, and the angels, and the world of the spirit. Not so sure about exorcism and demonic possession, that seems pretty far out there, but ghosts? Let’s just say the jury’s out on that one. I’d certainly never attend a s?ance, or mess around with a Ouija board.” “Why not?” We were cleaning the sinks, something the chem kids were supposed to take care of before they left for the weekend but hardly ever did. Ms. Hargensen paused, smiling. Maybe a little embarrassed. “Science folks aren’t immune from superstition, Craig. I don’t believe in messing with what I don’t understand. My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. I’ve always thought that was good advice. Why do you ask?” I wasn’t going to tell her Kenny was still on my mind. “I’m a Methodist myself, and we talk about the Holy Spirit. Only in the King James Bible, it’s the Holy Ghost. I guess I was thinking about that.” “Well, if ghosts exist,” she said, “I’ll bet not all of them are holy.” I still wanted to be some kind of writer, although my ambition to write movies had cooled. Mr. Harrigan’s joke about the screenwriter and the starlet recurred to me every now and then, and had cast a bit of a pall over my show biz fantasies. For Christmas that year Dad got me a laptop, and I started to write short stories. They were okay line by line, but the lines of a story have to add up to a whole, and mine didn’t. The following year, the head of the English Department tapped me to edit the school paper, and I got the journalism bug, which has so far never left me. I don’t think it ever will. I believe you hear a click, not in your head but in your soul, when you find the place where you belong. You can ignore it, but really, why would you? I started getting my growth, and when I was a junior, after I had shown Wendy that yes, I had protection (it was U-Boat who actually bought the condoms), we left our virginity behind. I graduated third in my class (only 142, but still), and Dad bought me a Toyota Corolla (used, but still). I got accepted at Emerson, one of the best schools in the country for aspiring journalists, and I bet they would have given me at least a partial scholarship, but thanks to Mr. Harrigan I didn’t need it—lucky me. There were a few typical adolescent storms between fourteen and eighteen, but actually not that many—it was as if the nightmare with Kenny Yanko had in some way frontloaded a lot of my adolescent angst. Also, you know, I loved my dad, and it was just the two of us. I think that makes a difference. By the time I started college, I hardly ever thought of Kenny Yanko at all. But I still thought of Mr. Harrigan. Not surprising, considering that he had rolled out the academic red carpet for me. But there were certain days when I thought of him more often. If I was home on one of those days, I put flowers on his grave. If I wasn’t, Pete Bostwick or Mrs. Grogan did it for me. Valentine’s. Thanksgiving. Christmas. And my birthday. I always bought a dollar scratch ticket on those days, too. Sometimes I won a couple of bucks, sometimes five, and once I won fifty, but I never hit anything close to a jackpot. That was okay with me. If I had, I would have given the money to some charity. I bought the tickets to remember. Thanks to him, I was already rich. Because Mr. Rafferty was generous with the trust fund, I had my own apartment by the time I was a junior at Emerson. Just a couple of rooms and a bathroom, but it was in Back Bay, where even small apartments aren’t cheap. By then I was working on the literary magazine. Ploughshares is one of the best in the country, and it always has a hotshot editor, but someone has to read the slush pile, and that was me. I liked the job, even though many of the submissions were on a par with a memorably, even classically bad poem called “10 Reasons Why I Hate My Mother.” It cheered me up to see how many strivers out there were worse at writing than I was. Probably that sounds mean. Probably it is. I was doing this chore one evening with a plate of Oreos by my left hand and a cup of tea by my right when my phone buzzed. It was Dad. He said he had some bad news and told me Ms. Hargensen had died. For a moment or two I couldn’t speak. The stack of slush pile poems and stories suddenly seemed very unimportant. “Craig?” Dad asked. “Are you still there?” “Yes. What happened?” He told me what he knew, and I found out more a couple of days later, when the Gates Falls Weekly Enterprise was published online. BELOVED TEACHERS KILLED IN VERMONT, the headline read. Victoria Hargensen Corliss had still been teaching biology at Gates; her husband was a math teacher at neighboring Castle Rock. They had decided to spend their spring vacation on a motorcycle trip across New England, staying at a different bed and breakfast every night. They were on their way back, in Vermont and almost to the New Hampshire border, when Dean Whitmore, thirty-one, of Waltham, Massachusetts, crossed the Route 2 centerline and struck them head-on. Ted Corliss was killed instantly. Victoria Corliss—the woman who had taken me into the teachers’ room after Kenny Yanko beat me up and gave me an illicit Aleve from her purse—had died on the way to the hospital. I’d interned at the Enterprise the previous summer, mostly emptying the trash but also writing some sports and movie reviews. When I called Dave Gardener, the editor, he gave me some background the Enterprise hadn’t printed. Dean Whitmore had been arrested a total of four times for OUI, but his father was a big hedge fund guy (how Mr. Harrigan had hated those upstarts), and high-priced lawyers had taken care of Whitmore the first three times. On the fourth occasion, after running into the side of a Zoney’s Go-Mart in Hingham, he had avoided jail but lost his license. He’d been driving without one and operating under the influence when he struck the Corliss motorcycle. “Stone drunk” was the way Dave put it. “He’ll get off with just a slap on the wrist,” Dave said. “Daddy will see to it. You watch and see.” “No way.” Just the idea of that happening made me feel sick to my stomach. “If your info’s correct, it’s a clear case of vehicular homicide.” “Watch and see,” he repeated. The funerals were at Saint Anne’s, the church both Ms. Hargensen—it was impossible for me to think of her as Victoria—and her husband had attended for most of their lives, and the one they had been married out of. Mr. Harrigan had been rich, for years a mover and shaker in the American business world, but there were a lot more people at the funeral of Ted and Victoria Corliss. Saint Anne’s is a big church, but that day it was standing room only, and if Father Ingersoll hadn’t had a microphone, he would have been inaudible beneath all the weeping. They had both been popular teachers, they were a love-match, and of course they had been young. So were most of the mourners. I was there; Regina and Margie were there; Billy Bogan was there; so was U-Boat, who’d made a special trip from Florida, where he was playing single-A ball. U-Boat and I sat together. He didn’t cry, exactly, but his eyes were red, and the big galoot was sniffling. “Did you ever have her for class?” I whispered. “Bio II,” he whispered back. “When I was a senior. Needed it to graduate. She gave me a gift C. And I was in her birdwatching club. She wrote me a recommendation on my college app.” She had written me one, too. “It’s just so wrong,” U-Boat said. “They weren’t doing nothing but taking a ride.” He paused. “And they were wearing helmets, too.” Billy looked about the same, but Margie and Regina looked older, almost adult in their makeup and big-girl dresses. They hugged me outside the church when it was over, and Regina said, “Remember how she took care of you the night you got beat up?” “Yes,” I said. “She let me use her hand cream,” Regina said, and began to cry all over again. “I hope they put that guy away forever,” Margie said fiercely. “Roger that,” U-Boat said. “Lock him up and throw away the key.” “They will,” I said, but of course I was wrong and Dave was right. Dean Whitmore’s day in court came that July. He was given four years, sentence suspended if he agreed to go into a rehab and could pass random urine tests for those same four years. I was working for the Enterprise again, and as a paid employee (only part-time, but still). I’d been bumped up to community affairs and the occasional feature story. The day after Whitmore’s sentencing—if you could even call it that—I voiced my outrage to Dave Gardener. “I know, it sucks,” he said, “but you gotta grow up, Craigy. We live in the real world where money talks and people listen. Money changed hands in the Whitmore case somewhere along the line. You can count on it. Now aren’t you supposed to be giving me four-hundred words on the Craft Fair?” A rehab—possibly one with tennis courts and a putting green—wasn’t enough. Four years of piss-testing wasn’t enough, especially when you could pay someone to provide clean samples if you knew ahead of time when the tests were going to come. Whitmore probably would. As that August burned away, I sometimes thought of an African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns. Victoria and Ted hadn’t been old, but somehow that was worse, because any potential they might have had was never going to be realized. All those kids at the funeral, both current students and recent graduates like me and my friends, suggested that something had burned, and could never be rebuilt. I remembered her drawings of leaves and tree branches on the blackboard, beautiful things done freehand. I remembered us cleaning the bio lab on Friday afternoons, then doing the chem half of the lab for good measure, both of us laughing about the stink, her wondering if some Dr. Jekyll chemistry student was going to turn into Mr. Hyde and go rampaging through the halls. I thought of her saying Don’t blame you when I told her I didn’t want to go back into the gym after Kenny beat me up. I thought of those things, and the smell of her perfume, and then I thought of the asshole who’d killed her graduating from rehab and going about his business, happy as a Sunday in Paris. No, it wasn’t enough. I went home that afternoon and dug through the drawers of the bureau in my room, not quite admitting to myself what I was looking for . . . or why. What I was looking for wasn’t there, which was both a disappointment and a relief. I started to leave, then went back and stood on tiptoe to explore the top shelf in my closet, where junk had a way of accumulating. I found an old alarm clock, an iPod that had busted when I dropped it in the driveway while skateboarding, a tangle of earphones and earbuds. There was a box of baseball cards and a stack of Spider-Man comic books. At the very back, there was a Red Sox sweatshirt much too small for the body I now inhabited. I lifted it and there, underneath, was the iPhone my father had given me for Christmas. Back in my shrimpsqueak days. The charger was there, too. I plugged the old phone in, still not quite admitting what I was up to, but when I think of that day now—not so many years ago—I believe that the motivating force was something Ms. Hargensen had said to me while we were cleaning the chem lab sinks: A person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer. That day I wanted one. It probably won’t even take a charge, I told myself. Been up there gathering dust for years. But it did. When I picked it up that night, after Dad had turned in, I saw a full battery icon in the upper righthand corner. Man, talk about your trips down Memory Lane. I saw emails from long ago, photos of my dad from before his hair started to go gray, and IMs back and forth between me and Billy Bogan. No news in them really, just jokes, and illuminating information like I just farted, and incisive questions like Did you do your algebra. We’d been like a couple of kids with Del Monte cans connected by a length of waxed string. Which is what most of our modern communications amount to, when you stop to think of it; chatter for the sake of chatter. I took the phone to bed with me just as I had back before I needed to shave and when kissing Regina was a huge deal. Only now the bed which had once seemed big seemed almost too small. I looked across the room at the poster of Katy Perry I had put up when she had seemed, to junior high school me, the epitome of sexy fun. I was older than that shrimpsqueak kid now, and I was just the same. Funny how that works. If ghosts exist, Ms. Hargensen had said, I’ll bet not all of them are holy. Thinking of that almost made me stop. Then, once more thinking of that irresponsible asshole playing tennis in his rehab, I went ahead and called Mr. Harrigan’s number. It’s okay, I told myself. Nothing will happen. Nothing can happen. This is just a way of clearing your mental decks so you can leave the anger and sorrow behind and move on to the next thing. Except part of me knew something would happen, so I wasn’t surprised when I got a ring instead of silence. Nor was I when his rusty voice spoke in my ear, originating from the telephone I’d put in his dead man’s pocket almost seven years before: “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.” “Hello, Mr. Harrigan, it’s Craig.” My voice was remarkably steady, considering that I was talking to a corpse and the corpse might actually be listening. “There’s a man named Dean Whitmore who killed my favorite teacher from high school and her husband. The guy was drunk and hit them with his car. They were good people, she helped me when I needed help, and he didn’t get what he deserved. I guess that’s all.” Except it wasn’t. I had at least thirty seconds or so to leave a message, and I hadn’t used them all. So I said the rest of it, the truth of it, my voice dropping lower still, so it was almost a growl: “I wish he was dead.” These days I work for the Times Union, a newspaper that serves Albany and the surrounding area. The salary is peanuts, I could probably make more writing for BuzzFeed or TMZ, but I have that trust fund as a cushion, and I like working for an actual paper, even though most of the action these days is online. Call me old-fashioned. I made friends with Frank Jefferson, the paper’s go-to IT guy, and one night over beer at the Madison Pour House, I told him I’d once been able to connect with the voicemail of a guy who was dead . . . but only if I called from the old phone I’d had when the guy was still alive. I asked Frank if he’d ever heard of anything like that. “No,” he said, “but it could happen.” “How?” “No idea, but there were all sorts of weird glitches with the early computers and cell phones. Some of them are legendary.” “iPhones, too?” “Especially them,” he said, swigging his beer. “Because they were rushed into production. Steve Jobs never would have admitted it, but the Apple guys were scared to death that in another couple of years, maybe only one, BlackBerry would achieve total market dominance. Those first iPhones, some of them locked up every time you typed the letter l. You could send an email and then surf the web, but if you tried to surf the web and then send an email, your phone sometimes crashed.” “That actually happened to me once or twice,” I said. “I had to reboot.” “Yeah. There was all kinds of stuff like that. Your thing? I’d guess the guy’s message somehow got stuck in the software, same way you can get a piece of gristle stuck between your teeth. Call it the ghost in the machine.” “Yes,” I said, “but not a holy one.” “Huh?” “Nothing,” I said. Dean Whitmore died on his second day in the Raven Mountain Treatment Center, a luxury spin-dry facility in upstate New Hampshire (there were indeed tennis courts; also shuffleboard and a swimming pool). I knew almost as soon as it happened, because I had a Google Alert on his name, both on my laptop and my Weekly Enterprise computer. No cause of death was given—money talks, you know—so I took a little trip to the neighboring New Hampshire town of Maidstone. There I put on my reporter’s hat, asked a few questions, and parted with some of Mr. Harrigan’s money. It didn’t take long, because, as suicides went, Whitmore’s was more than a bit out of the ordinary. Kind of like strangling to death while beating off is out of the ordinary, you could say. At Raven Mountain the inpatients were called guests instead of dopers and alkies, and each guest room had its own shower. Dean Whitmore went into his before breakfast and chugged down some shampoo. Not to commit suicide, it seemed, but to grease the runway. He then broke a bar of soap in two, dropped half on the floor, and crammed the other half down his throat. I got most of this from one of the counselors, whose job at Raven Mountain was to work at breaking drunks and druggies of their bad habits. This fellow, Randy Squires by name, sat in my Toyota drinking from the neck of a Wild Turkey bottle purchased with some of the fifty dollars I’d given him (and yes, the irony was not lost on me). I asked if Whitmore had perhaps left a suicide note. “He did,” Squires said. “Kind of sweet, actually. Almost a prayer. ‘Keep giving all the love you can,’ it said.” My arms broke out in gooseflesh, but my sleeves covered that, and I was able to manage a smile. I could have told him that wasn’t a prayer, but a line from “Stand By Your Man,” by Tammy Wynette. Squires wouldn’t have gotten it, anyway, and there was no reason why I’d want him to. It was between Mr. Harrigan and me. I spent three days on that little investigation. When I got back, Dad asked me if I’d enjoyed my mini-vacation. I said I had. He asked me if I was ready to go back to school in a couple of weeks. I said I was. He looked me over carefully and asked if anything was wrong. I said there wasn’t, not knowing if that was a lie or not. Part of me still believed that Kenny Yanko had died accidentally, and that Dean Whitmore had committed suicide, possibly out of guilt. I tried to imagine how Mr. Harrigan could have somehow appeared to them and caused their deaths, and couldn’t do it. If that had happened, then I was an accessory to murder, morally if not legally. I had wished Whitmore dead, after all. Probably in my deepest heart, Kenny too. “You sure?” Dad asked. His eyes were still on me, and in the old searching way I remembered from early childhood, when I had done some small thing wrong. “Positive,” I said. “Okay, but if you want to talk, I’m here.” Yes, and thank God he was, but this wasn’t a thing I could talk about. Not without sounding like a lunatic. I went into my room and took the old iPhone off the closet shelf. It was holding its charge admirably. Why, exactly, did I do that? Did I mean to call him in his grave to say thank you? To ask him if he was really there? I can’t remember, and I guess it doesn’t matter, because I didn’t call. When I powered up the phone, I saw I had a text message from pirateking1. I tapped with a trembling finger to open it and read this: C C C sT As I looked at it, a possibility that had never so much as touched my mind before that late summer day dawned on me. What if I were somehow holding Mr. Harrigan hostage? Tying him to my earthly concerns by way of the phone I had tucked into his coat pocket before the lid of his coffin went down? What if the things I had asked him to do were hurting him? Maybe even torturing him? Not likely, I thought. Remember what Mrs. Grogan told you about Dusty Bilodeau. She said he couldn’t have gotten a job shoveling henshit out of old Dorrance Marstellar’s barn after stealing from Mr. Harrigan. He saw to it. Yes, and something else. She said he was a square-dealing man, but if you weren’t the same, God help you. And had Dean Whitmore been square-dealing? No. Had Kenny Yanko been square-dealing? The same. So maybe Mr. Harrigan had been glad to pitch in. Maybe he even enjoyed it. “If he was ever there at all,” I whispered. He had been. In my deepest heart I knew that, too. And I knew something else. I knew what that message meant: Craig stop. Because I was hurting him, or because I was hurting myself? I decided that in the end it didn’t matter. It rained hard the next day, the kind of chilly no-thunder downpour that means the first autumn color will begin to show in a week or two. The rain was good, because it meant that the summer people—those who remained—were all tucked up inside their seasonal hideaways and Castle Lake was deserted. I parked in the picnic area at the lake’s north end and walked to what we kids had called the Ledges, standing there in our bathing suits and daring each other to jump off. Some of us even did. I went to the lip of the drop, where the pine needles gave out and the bare rock, which is New England’s ultimate truth, began. I reached into the right pocket of my khakis and brought out my iPhone 1. I held it in my hand for a moment, feeling its weight and remembering how delighted I’d been on that Christmas morning when I unwrapped the box and saw the Apple logo. Had I screamed for joy? I couldn’t remember, but almost certainly. It was still holding its charge, although it was down to fifty per cent. I called Mr. Harrigan, and in the dark earth of Elm Cemetery, in the pocket of an expensive suit coat now speckled with mold, I know Tammy Wynette was singing. I listened to his scratchy old man’s voice one more time, telling me he would call back if it seemed appropriate. I waited for the beep. I said, “Thank you for everything, Mr. Harrigan. Goodbye.” I ended the call, cocked my arm back, and threw the phone as hard as I could. I watched it arc through the gray sky. I watched the small splash as it hit the water. I reached into my lefthand pocket and brought out my current iPhone, the 5C with its colorful case. I meant to throw it into the lake as well. Surely I could make do with a landline, and surely it would make my life easier. So much less chitter-chatter, no more texts reading What are you doing, no more dumb emojis. If I got a job on a newspaper after I graduated and needed to keep in touch, I could use a loaner, then give it back when whatever assignment had necessitated it was finished. I cocked my arm back, held it that way for what felt like a long time—maybe a minute, maybe two. In the end I put the phone back in my pocket. I don’t know for sure if everyone is addicted to those high-tech Del Monte cans, but I know that I am, and I know Mr. Harrigan was. It’s why I slipped it into his pocket that day. In the twenty-first century, I think our phones are how we are wedded to the world. If so, it’s probably a bad marriage. Or maybe not. After what happened to Yanko and Whitmore, and after that last text message from pirateking1, there are a great many things I’m not sure of. Reality itself, for a start. I do know two things, however, and they are as solid as New England rock. I don’t want to be cremated when I go, and I want to be buried with empty pockets. THE LIFE OF CHUCK ACT III: THANKS, CHUCK! 1 The day Marty Anderson saw the billboard was just before the Internet finally went down for good. It had been wobbling for eight months since the first short interruptions. Everyone agreed it was only a matter of time, and everyone agreed they would muddle through somehow once the wired-in world finally went dark—after all, they had managed without it, hadn’t they? Besides, there were other problems, like whole species of birds and fish dying off, and now there was California to think аbout: going, going, possibly soon to be gone. Marty was late leaving school, because it was that least favorite day for high school educators, the one set aside for parent-teacher conferences. As this one had played out, Marty had found few parents interested in discussing little Johnny and little Janey’s progress (or lack of it). Mostly they wanted to discuss the probable final failure of the Internet, which would sink their Facebook and Instagram accounts for good. None of them mentioned Pornhub, but Marty suspected many of the parents who showed up—female as well as male—were mourning that site’s impending extinction as well. Ordinarily, Marty would have driven home by way of the turnpike bypass, zippity-zip, home in a jiff, but that wasn’t possible due to the collapse of the bridge over Otter Creek. That had happened four months ago, and there was no sign of repairs; just orange-striped wooden barriers that already looked dingy and were covered with taggers’ logos. With the bypass closed, Marty was forced to drive directly through downtown to reach his house on Cedar Court along with everybody else who lived on the east side. Thanks to the conferences, he’d left at five instead of three, at the height of rush hour, and a drive that would have taken twenty minutes in the old days would take at least an hour, probably longer because some of the traffic lights were out, as well. It was stop-and-go all the way, with plenty of horns, screeching brakes, bumper-kisses, and waved middle fingers. He was stopped for ten minutes at the intersection of Main and Market, so had plenty of time to notice the billboard on top of the Midwest Trust building. Until today, it had advertised one of the airlines, Delta or Southwest, Marty couldn’t remember which. This afternoon the happy crew of arm-in-arm flight attendants had been replaced by a photograph of a moon-faced man with black-framed glasses that matched his black, neatly combed hair. He was sitting at a desk with a pen in his hand, jacketless but with his tie carefully knotted at the collar of his white shirt. On the hand holding the pen there was a crescent-shaped scar that had for some reason not been airbrushed out. To Marty he looked like an accountant. He was smiling cheerfully down at the snarled twilight traffic from his perch high atop the bank building. Above his head, in blue, was CHARLES KRANTZ. Below his desk, in red, was 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK! Marty had never heard of Charles “Chuck” Krantz, but supposed he must have been a pretty big bug at Midwest Trust to rate a retirement photo on a spotlit billboard that had to be at least fifteen feet high and fifty feet across. And the photo must be an old one, if he’d put in almost forty years, or his hair would have been white. “Or gone,” Marty said, and brushed at his own thinning thatch. He took a chance at downtown’s main intersection five minutes later, when a momentary hole opened up. He squirted his Prius through it, tensing for a collision and ignoring the shaken fist of a man who squelched to a stop only inches from t-boning him. There was another tie-up at the top of Main Street, and another close call. By the time he got home he had forgotten all about the billboard. He drove into the garage, pushed the button that lowered the door, and then just sat for a full minute, breathing deeply and trying not to think about having to run the same gauntlet tomorrow morning. With the bypass closed, there was just no other choice. If he wanted to go to work at all, that was, and right then taking a sick day (he had plenty of them stacked up) seemed like a more attractive option. “I wouldn’t be the only one,” he told the empty garage. He knew this to be true. According to the New York Times (which he read on his tablet every morning if the Internet was working), absenteeism was at a worldwide high. He grabbed his stack of books with one hand and his battered old briefcase with the other. It was heavy with papers that would need correcting. Thus burdened, he struggled out of the car and closed the door with his butt. The sight of his shadow on the wall doing something that looked like a funky dance move made him laugh. The sound startled him; laughter in these difficult days was hard to come by. Then he dropped half of his books on the garage floor, which put an end to any nascent good humor. He gathered up Introduction to American Literature and Four Short Novels (he was currently teaching The Red Badge of Courage to his sophomores) and went inside. He had barely managed to get everything on the kitchen counter before the phone rang. The landline, of course; there was hardly any cell coverage these days. He sometimes congratulated himself on keeping his landline when so many of his colleagues had given theirs up. Those folks were truly hung, because getting one put in this last year or so . . . forget about it. You’d be more likely to be using the turnpike bypass again before you got to the top of the waiting list, and even the landlines now had frequent outages. Caller ID no longer worked, but he was sure enough about who was on the other end to simply pick up the phone and say, “Yo, Felicia.” “Where have you been?” his ex-wife asked him. “I’ve been trying to reach you for an hour!” Marty explained about the parent-teacher conferences, and the long trip home. “Are you okay?” “I will be, as soon as I get something to eat. How are you, Fel?” “I’m getting along, but we had six more today.” Marty didn’t have to ask her six more of what. Felicia was a nurse at City General, where the nursing staff now called itself the Suicide Squad. “Sorry to hear that.” “Sign of the times.” He could hear the shrug in her voice, and thought that two years ago—when they’d still been married—six suicides in one day would have left her shaken, heartbroken, and sleepless. But you could get used to anything, it seemed. “Are you still taking your ulcer medication, Marty?” Before he could reply, she hurried on. “It’s not nagging, just concern. Divorce doesn’t mean I still don’t care about you, y’know?” “I know, and I am.” This was half a lie, because the doctor-prescribed Carafate was now impossible to get, and he was relying on Prilosec. He told the half-lie because he still cared about her, too. They actually got along better now that they weren’t married anymore. There was even sex, and although it was infrequent, it was pretty damn good. “I appreciate you asking.” “Really?” “Yes, ma’am.” He opened the fridge. Pickings were slim, but there were hotdogs, a few eggs, and a can of blueberry yogurt he would save for a pre-bedtime snack. Also three cans of Hamm’s. “Good. How many parents actually showed up?” “More than I expected, far less than a full house. Mostly they wanted to talk about the Internet. They seemed to think I should know why it keeps shitting the bed. I had to keep telling them I’m an English teacher, not an IT guy.” “You know about California, right?” Lowering her voice, as if imparting a great secret. “Yes.” That morning a gigantic earthquake, the third in the last month and by far the worst, had sent another large chunk of the Golden State into the Pacific Ocean. The good news was that most of that part of the state had been evacuated. The bad news was that now hundreds of thousands of refugees were trekking east, turning Nevada into one of the most populous states in the union. Gasoline in Nevada currently cost twenty bucks a gallon. Cash only, and if the station wasn’t tapped out. Marty grabbed a half-empty quart of milk, sniffed, and drank from the bottle in spite of the faintly suspicious aroma. He needed a real drink, but knew from bitter experience (and sleepless nights) that he had to insulate his stomach first. He said, “It’s interesting to me that the parents who did show up seemed more concerned about the Internet than the California quakes. I suppose because the state’s breadbasket regions are still there.” “But for how long? I heard a scientist on NPR say that California is peeling away like old wallpaper. And another Japanese reactor got inundated this afternoon. They’re saying it was shut down, all’s well, but I don’t think I believe that.” “Cynic.” “We’re living in cynical times, Marty.” She hesitated. “Some people think we’re living in the Last Times. Not just the religious crazies, either. Not anymore. You heard that from a member in good standing of the City General Suicide Squad. We lost six today, true, but there were eighteen more we dragged back. Most with the help of Naloxone. But . . .” She lowered her voice again. “. . . supplies of that are getting very thin. I heard the head pharmacist saying we might be completely out by the end of the month.” “That sucks,” Marty said, eyeing his briefcase. All those papers waiting to be processed. All those spelling errors waiting to be corrected. All those dangling subordinate clauses and vague conclusions waiting to be red-inked. Computer crutches like Spellcheck and apps like Grammar Alert didn’t seem to help. Just thinking of it made him tired. “Listen, Fel, I ought to go. I have tests to grade and essays on ‘Mending Wall’ to correct.” The thought of the stacked vapidities in those waiting essays made him feel old. “All right,” Felicia said. “Just . . . you know, touching base.” “Roger that.” Marty opened the cupboard and took down the bourbon. He would wait until she was off the phone to pour it, lest she hear the glugging and know what he was doing. Wives had intuition; ex-wives seemed to develop high-def radar. “Could I say I love you?” she asked. “Only if I can say it right back,” Marty replied, running his finger over the label on the bottle: Early Times. A very good brand, he thought, for these later times. “I love you, Marty.” “And I love you.” A good place to end, but she was still there. “Marty?” “What, hon?” “The world is going down the drain, and all we can say is ‘that sucks.’ So maybe we’re going down the drain, too.” “Maybe we are,” he said, “but Chuck Krantz is retiring, so I guess there’s a gleam of light in the darkness.” “Thirty-nine great years,” she responded, and it was her turn to laugh. He put the milk down. “You saw the billboard?” “No, it was an ad on the radio. That NPR show I was telling you about.” “If they’re running ads on NPR, it really is the end of the world,” Marty said. She laughed again, and the sound made him glad. “Tell me, how does Chuck Krantz rate this kind of coverage? He looks like an accountant, and I never heard of him.” “No idea. The world is full of mysteries. No hard stuff, Marty. I know you’re thinking of it. Have a beer, instead.” He didn’t laugh as he ended the call, but he smiled. Ex-wife radar. High-def. He put the Early Times back in the cupboard and grabbed a beer instead. He plopped a couple of hotdogs into water and went into his little study to see if the Internet was up while he waited for the water to boil. It was, and seemed to be running at slightly better than its usual slow crawl. He went to Netflix, thinking he might re-watch an episode of Breaking Bad or The Wire while he ate his dogs. The welcome screen came up, showing selections that hadn’t changed since last evening (and the stuff on Netflix used to change just about every day, not so long ago), but before he could decide on which bad guy he wanted to watch, Walter White or Stringer Bell, the welcome screen disappeared. SEARCHING appeared, and the little worry circle. “Fuck,” Marty said. “Gone for the ni—” Then the worry circle disappeared and the screen came back. Only it wasn’t the Netflix welcome screen; it was Charles Krantz, sitting at his paper-strewn desk, smiling with his pen in his scarred hand. CHARLES KRANTZ above him; 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK! below. “Who the fuck are you, Chuckie?” Marty asked. “How do you rate?” And then, as if his breath had blown out the Internet like a birthday candle, the picture disappeared and the words on the screen were CONNECTION LOST. It did not come back that night. Like half of California (soon to be three quarters), the Internet had vanished. The first thing Marty noticed the next day as he backed his car out of the garage was the sky. How long had it been since he had seen that clear unblemished blue? A month? Six weeks? The clouds and the rain (sometimes a drizzle, sometimes a torrent) were almost constant now, and on days when the clouds cleared, the sky usually remained bleary from the smoke of fires in the Midwest. They had blackened most of Iowa and Nebraska, and were moving on to Kansas, driven by gale-force winds. The second thing he noticed was Gus Wilfong trudging up the street with his oversized lunchbox banging against his thigh. Gus was wearing khakis, but with a tie. He was a supervisor at the city’s public works department. Although it was only quarter past seven, he looked tired and out of sorts, as if at the end of a long day instead of just starting one. And if he was just starting one, why was he walking toward his house next door to Marty’s? Also . . . Marty powered down his window. “Where’s your car?” Gus’s short laugh was humorless. “Parked on the sidewalk halfway down Main Street Hill, along with about a hundred others.” He blew out his breath. “Whoo, I can’t remember the last time I walked three miles. Which probably says more about me than you want to know. If you’re going to school, buddy, you’re going to have to go all the way out Route 11 and then hook back on Route 19. Twenty miles, at least, and there’ll be plenty of traffic there, too. You might arrive in time for lunch, but I wouldn’t count on it.” “What happened?” “Sinkhole opened up at the intersection of Main and Market. Man, it’s huge. All the rain we’ve been having might have something to do with it, lack of maintenance probably even more. Not my department, thank God. Got to be twenty cars at the bottom of it, maybe thirty, and some of the people in those cars . . .” He shook his head. “They ain’t coming back.” “Jesus,” Marty said. “I was just there last evening. Backed up in traffic.” “Be glad you weren’t there this morning. Mind if I get in with you? Sit down for a minute? I’m pooped, and Jenny will have gone back to bed. I don’t want to wake her up, especially with bad news.” “Sure.” Gus got in the car. “This is bad, my friend.” “It sucks,” Marty agreed. It was what he’d said to Felicia last night. “Just got to grin and bear it, I guess.” “I’m not grinning,” Gus said. “Planning to take the day off?” Gus raised his hands and brought them down on the lunchbox in his lap. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll make some calls, see if someone can pick me up, but I’m not hopeful.” “If you do take the day, don’t plan to spend it watching Netflix or YouTube videos. Internet’s down again, and I’ve got a feeling it might be for good this time.” “I’m assuming you know about California,” Gus said. “I didn’t turn on the TV this morning. Slept in a bit.” He paused. “Didn’t want to watch it anyway, to tell you the truth. Is there something new?” “Yeah. The rest of it went.” He reconsidered. “Well . . . they’re saying twenty per cent of northern California is still hanging in there, which means probably ten, but the food-producing regions are gone.” “That’s terrible.” It was, of course, but instead of horror and terror and grief, all Marty felt was a kind of benumbed dismay. “You could say that,” Gus agreed. “Especially with the Midwest turning to charcoal and the southern half of Florida now basically swampland fit only for alligators. I hope you’ve got a lot of food in your pantry and freezer, because now all the major food-producing regions of this country are gone. The same with Europe. It’s already famine-time in Asia. Millions dead there. Bubonic plague, I’m hearing.” They sat in Marty’s driveway, watching more people walking back from downtown, many dressed in suits and ties. A woman in a pretty pink suit was trudging along in sneakers, carrying her heels in one hand. Marty thought her name was Andrea something, lived a street or two over. Hadn’t Felicia told him she worked at Midwest Trust? “And the bees,” Gus continued. “They were in trouble even ten years ago, but now they’re completely gone, except for a few hives down in South America. No more honey, honey. And without them to pollinate whatever crops might be left . . .” “Excuse me,” Marty said. He got out of the car and trotted to catch up with the woman in the pink suit. “Andrea? Are you Andrea?” She turned warily, lifting her shoes as if she might have to use one of the heels to ward him off. Marty understood; there were plenty of loosely wrapped people around these days. He stopped five feet away. “I’m Felicia Anderson’s husband.” Ex, actually, but husband sounded less potentially dangerous. “I think you and Fel know each other.” “We do. I was on the Neighborhood Watch Committee with her. What can I do for you, Mr. Anderson? I’ve had a long walk and my car’s stuck in what appears to be a terminal traffic jam downtown. As for the bank, it’s . . . leaning.” “Leaning,” Marty repeated. In his mind he saw an image of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. With Chuck Krantz’s retirement photo on top. “It’s on the edge of the sinkhole and although it hasn’t fallen in, it looks very unsafe to me. Sure to be condemned. I suppose that’s the end of my job, at least in the downtown branch, but I don’t really care. I just want to go home and put my feet up.” “I was curious about the billboard on the bank building. Have you seen it?” “How could I miss it?” she asked. “I work there, after all. I’ve also seen the graffiti, which is everywhere—we love you Chuck, Chuck lives, Chuck forever—and the ads on TV.” “Really?” Marty thought of what he’d seen on Netflix last night, just before it went away. At the time he’d dismissed it as a particularly annoying pop-up ad. “Well, the local stations, anyway. Maybe it’s different on cable, but we don’t get that anymore. Not since July.” “Us, either.” Now that he had begun the fiction that he was still part of an us, it seemed best to carry on with it. “Just channel 8 and channel 10.” Andrea nodded. “No more ads for cars or Eliquis or Bob’s Discount Furniture. Just Charles Krantz, thirty-nine great years, thanks, Chuck. A full minute of that, then back to our regularly scheduled reruns. Very peculiar, but these days, what isn’t? Now I really want to get home.” “This Charles Krantz isn’t associated with your bank? Retiring from the bank?” She paused for just a moment before continuing her homeward trudge, carrying high heels she would not need that day. Perhaps ever again. “I don’t know Charles Krantz from Adam. He must have worked in the Omaha headquarters. Although from what I understand, Omaha is just a great big ashtray these days.” Marty watched her go. So did Gus Wilfong, who had joined him. Gus nodded at the glum parade of returning workers who could no longer get to their jobs—selling, trading, banking, waiting on tables, making deliveries. “They look like refugees,” Gus said. “Yeah,” Marty said. “They kind of do. Hey, you remember asking me about my food supplies?” Gus nodded. “I have quite a few cans of soup. Also some basmati and Rice-A-Roni. Cheerios, I believe. As for the freezer, I think I might have six TV dinners and half a pint of Ben and Jerry’s.” “You don’t sound concerned.” Marty shrugged. “What good would that do?” “But see, it’s interesting,” Gus said. “We were all concerned at first. We wanted answers. People went to Washington and protested. Remember when they knocked over the White House fence and those college kids got shot?” “Yeah.” “There was the government overthrow in Russia and the Four Day War between India and Pakistan. There’s a volcano in Germany, for Christ’s sake—Germany! We told each other all this would blow over, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, does it?” “No,” Marty agreed. Although he’d just gotten up, he felt tired. Very. “Not blowing over, blowing harder.” “Then there’s the suicides.” Marty nodded. “Felicia sees them every day.” “I think the suicides will slow down,” Gus said, “and people will just wait.” “For what?” “For the end, pal. The end of everything. We’ve been going through the five stages of grief, don’t you get it? Now we’ve arrived at the last one. Acceptance.” Marty said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. “There’s so little curiosity now. And all this . . .” Gus waved an arm. “It came out of nowhere. I mean, we knew the environment was going to the dogs—I think even the right-wing nutjobs secretly believed in it—but this is sixty different varieties of shit, all at once.” He gave Marty a look that was almost pleading. “In how long? A year? Fourteen months?” “Yes,” Marty said. “Sucks.” It seemed to be the only word that fit. Overhead they heard a droning sound and looked up. The big jets flying in and out of the municipal airport were few and far between these days, but this was a small plane, bumbling along in the unusually clear sky and belching a stream of white from its tail. The plane twisted and banked, rose and fell, the smoke (or whatever chemical it was) forming letters. “Huh,” Gus said, craning. “Skywriting plane. Haven’t seen one since I was a kid.” CHARLES, the plane wrote. Then KRANTZ. And then—of course—39 GREAT YEARS. The name was already starting to fuzz out as the plane wrote THANKS, CHUCK! “What the fuck,” Gus said. “My sentiments exactly,” Marty said. He had skipped breakfast, so when he went back inside, Marty microwaved one of his frozen dinners—a Marie Callender’s Chicken Pot Pie, quite tasty—and took it into the living room to watch TV. But the only two stations he could pull in were showing the photograph of Charles “Chuck” Krantz sitting at his desk with his pen at the eternal ready. Marty stared at it while he ate his pot pie, then killed the idiot box and went back to bed. It seemed the most sensible thing to do. He slept for most of the day, and although he didn’t dream of her (at least that he could remember), he woke up thinking of Felicia. He wanted to see her, and when he did he would ask if he could sleep over. Maybe even stay. Sixty different varieties of shit, Gus had said, and all at once. If this really was the end, he didn’t want to face it alone. Harvest Acres, the tidy little development where Felicia now lived, was three miles away, and Marty had no intention of risking the drive in his car, so he put on his sweatpants and sneakers. It was a beautiful late afternoon for walking, the sky still an unblemished blue, and plenty of people were out and about. A few looked as if they were enjoying the sunshine, but most just looked down at their feet. There was little talk, even among those who were walking in pairs or trios. On Park Drive, one of the east side’s main thoroughfares, all four lanes were jammed with cars, most of them empty. Marty wove his way between them, and on the other side encountered an elderly man in a tweed suit and matching trilby hat. He was sitting on the curb and knocking his pipe out into the gutter. He saw Marty watching him and smiled. “Just taking a rest,” he said. “I walked downtown to look at the sinkhole and take a few pictures with my phone. Thought one of the local television stations might be interested, but they all seem to be off the air. Except for pictures of that fellow Krantz, that is.” “Yes,” Marty said. “It’s all Chuck, all the time now. Any idea who—” “None. I’ve asked two dozen people, at least. Nobody knows. Our man Krantz appears to be the Oz of the Apocalypse.” Marty laughed. “Where are you heading, sir?” “Harvest Acres. Nice little enclave. Off the beaten track.” He reached into his jacket, produced a pouch of tobacco, and began reloading his pipe. “I’m going there myself. My ex lives there. Maybe we could walk together.” The elderly gent got up with a wince. “As long as you don’t rush along.” He lit his pipe, puffing away. “Arthritis. I have pills for it, but the more the arthritis sets in, the less they do.” “Sucks,” Marty said. “You set the pace.” The old guy did. It was a slow one. His name was Samuel Yarbrough. He was owner and chief undertaker of the Yarbrough Funeral Home. “But my real interest is meteorology,” he said. “Dreamed of being a television weatherman in my salad days, perhaps even on one of the networks, but they all seem to have a pash for young women with . . .” He put his cupped hands in front of his chest. “I keep up, though, read the journals, and I can tell you an amazing thing. If you want to hear.” “Sure.” They came to a bus bench. Stenciled on the back was CHARLES “CHUCK” KRANTZ 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK! Sam Yarbrough took a seat and patted the space next to him. Marty sat. It was downwind of Yarbrough’s pipe, but that was okay. Marty liked the smell. “Do you know how people say there’s twenty-four hours in a day?” Yarbrough asked. “And seven days in a week. Everybody knows that, even little kids.” “Well, everybody is wrong. There were twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes in a stellar day. Plus a few odd seconds.” “Were?” “Correct. Based on my calculations, which I assure you I can back up, there are now twenty-four hours and two minutes in a day. Do you know what that means, Mr. Anderson?” Marty thought it over. “Are you telling me the earth’s rotation is slowing down?” “Exactly.” Yarbrough took his pipe out of his mouth and gestured at the people passing them on the sidewalk. Their numbers were thinning now that afternoon had begun to edge into twilight. “I’ll bet many of those folks think the multiple disasters we’re facing have a single cause rooted in what we have done to the earth’s environment. It’s not so. I would be the first to admit that we have treated our mother—yes, she’s the mother of us all—very badly, certainly molested her if not outright raped her, but we’re puny compared to the great clock of the universe. Puny. No, whatever is happening is much larger than environmental degradation.” “Maybe it’s Chuck Krantz’s fault,” Marty said. Yarbrough looked at him in surprise, then laughed. “Back to him, eh? Chuck Krantz is retiring and the entire population of earth, not to mention the earth itself, is retiring with him? Is that your thesis?” “Got to blame something,” Marty said, smiling. “Or someone.” Sam Yarbrough stood up, put a hand to the small of his back, stretched and winced. “With apologies to Mr. Spock, that’s illogical. I suppose thirty-nine years is quite a span in terms of human life—almost half—but the last ice age happened quite a bit longer ago. Not to mention the age of the dinosaurs. Shall we mosey?” They moseyed, their shadows stretching ahead of them. Marty was mentally scolding himself for having slept away the best part of a beautiful day. Yarbrough was moving ever more slowly. When they finally reached the brick arch marking the entrance to Harvest Acres, the old mortician sat down again. “I think I’ll watch the sunset while I wait for the arthritis to settle a bit. Would you care to join me?” Marty shook his head. “Think I’ll go on.” “Check the ex,” Yarbrough said. “I understand. It was nice speaking with you, Mr. Anderson.” Marty started beneath the arch, then turned back. “Charles Krantz means something,” he said. “I’m sure of it.” “You could be right,” Sam said, puffing on his pipe, “but the slowing of the earth’s rotation . . . nothing’s bigger than that, my friend.” The central thoroughfare of the Harvest Acres development was a graceful tree-lined parabola from which shorter streets diverged. The streetlights, which looked to Marty like those in illustrated Dickens novels, had come on, casting a moonlight glow. As Marty approached Fern Lane, where Felicia lived, a little girl on roller skates appeared, banking gracefully around the corner. She was wearing baggy red shorts and a sleeveless tee with somebody’s face on it, maybe a rock star or a rapper. Marty guessed her age at ten or eleven, and seeing her cheered him enormously. A little girl on roller skates: what could be more normal in this abnormal day? This abnormal year? “Yo,” he said. “Yo,” she agreed, but turned neatly on her skates, perhaps ready to flee if he turned out to be one of the Chester the Molester types her mother had no doubt warned her about. “I’m going to see my ex-wife,” Marty said, standing where he was. “Felicia Anderson. Or maybe she’s back to Gordon now. That was her maiden name. She lives on Fern Lane. Number 19.” The little girl pivoted on her skates, an effortless move that would have left Marty flat on his ass. “Oh yeah, maybe I’ve seen you before. Blue Prius?” “That’s me.” “If you come to see her, why’s she your ex?” “Still like her.” “You don’t fight?” “We used to. We get along better now that we’re exes.” “Miz Gordon gives us ginger snap cookies sometimes. Me and my little brother, Ronnie. I like Oreos better, but . . .” “But that’s the way the cookie crumbles, right?” Marty said. “Nah, ginger snaps don’t crumble. At least not until you crunch em up in your mou—” At that moment the streetlights went out, turning the main drag into a lagoon of shadows. All the houses went dark at the same time. There had been outages in the city before, some as long as eighteen hours, but the power had always come back. Marty wasn’t sure it would this time. Maybe, but he had a feeling that electricity, which he (and everyone else) had taken for granted all his life, might have gone the way of the Internet. “Booger,” said the little girl. “You better go home,” Marty said. “With no streetlights, it’s too dark for skating.” “Mister? Is everything going to be all right?” Although he had no kids of his own, he’d taught them for twenty years and felt that, although you should tell them the truth once they reached the age of sixteen, a kind-hearted lie was often the right way to go when they were as young as this girl. “Sure.” “But look,” she said, and pointed. He followed her trembling finger to the house on the corner of Fern Lane. A face was appearing on the darkened bay window overlooking a small patch of lawn. It appeared in glowing white lines and shadows, like ectoplasm at a s?ance. Smiling moon face. Black-framed glasses. Pen poised. Over it: CHARLES KRANTZ. Below it: 39 GREAT YEARS! THANKS, CHUCK! “It’s happening to all of them,” she whispered. She was right. Chuck Krantz was rising on the front windows of every house on Fern Lane. Marty turned and saw an arc of Krantz faces stretching out behind him on the main avenue. Dozens of Chucks, maybe hundreds. Thousands, if this phenomenon was happening all over the city. “Go home,” Marty said, not smiling anymore. “Go home to your mom and dad, poppet. Do it right now.” She skated away, her skates rumbling on the sidewalk and her hair flying out behind her. He could see the red shorts, then she was lost in the thickening shadows. Marty walked quickly in the direction she had gone, observed by the smiling face of Charles “Chuck” Krantz in every window. Chuck in his white shirt and dark tie. It was like being watched by a horde of ghost-clones. Marty was glad there was no moon; what if Chuck’s face had appeared there? How would he deal with that? He gave up walking at number 13. He ran the rest of the way to Felicia’s little two-room bungalow, pounded up the front walk, and knocked on the door. He waited, suddenly sure she was still at the hospital, maybe working a double, but then he heard her footsteps. The door opened. She was holding a candle. It underlit her frightened face. “Marty, thank God. Do you see them?” “Yes.” The guy was in her front window, too. Chuck. Smiling. Looking like every accountant who ever lived. A man who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. “They just started . . . showing up!” “I know. I saw.” “Is it just here?” “I think it’s everywhere. I think it’s almost—” Then she was hugging him, pulling him inside, and he was glad she hadn’t given him a chance to say the other two words: the end. 2 Douglas Beaton, associate professor of philosophy in Ithaca College’s Department of Philosophy and Religion, sits in a hospital room, waiting for his brother-in-law to die. The only sounds are the steady bip . . . bip . . . bip of the heart monitor and Chuck’s slow and increasingly labored breathing. Most of the machinery has been turned off. “Unc?” Doug turns to see Brian in the doorway, still wearing his letter jacket and backpack. “You left school early?” Doug asks. “With permission. Mom texted me that she was going to let them turn off the machines. Did they?” “Yes.” “When?” “An hour ago.” “Where’s Mom now?” “In the chapel on the first floor. She’s praying for his soul.” And probably praying that she did the right thing, Doug thinks. Because even when the priest tells you yes, it’s fine, let God take care of the rest, it feels wrong somehow. “I’m supposed to text her if it looks like he’s . . .” Brian’s uncle shrugs. Brian approaches the bed and looks down at his father’s still white face. With his black-framed glasses put aside, the boy thinks his dad doesn’t look old enough to have a son who’s a freshman in high school. He looks like a high school kid himself. He picks up his father’s hand and plants a brief kiss on the crescent-shaped scar there. “Guys as young as him aren’t supposed to die,” Brian says. He speaks softly, as if his father can hear. “Jesus, Uncle Doug, he just turned thirty-nine last winter!” “Come sit down,” Doug says, and pats the empty chair next to him. “That’s Mom’s seat.” “When she comes back, you can give it to her.” Brian shucks his backpack and sits down. “How long do you think it will be?” “The doctors said he could go anytime. Before tomorrow, almost certainly. You know the machines were helping him breathe, right? And there were IVs to feed him. He’s not . . . Brian, he’s not in any pain. That part is over.” “Glioblastoma,” Brian says bitterly. When he turns to his uncle, he’s crying. “Why would God take my dad, Uncle Doug? Explain it to me.” “I can’t. God’s ways are a mystery.” “Well fuck the mystery,” the boy says. “Mysteries should stay in storybooks, where they belong.” Uncle Doug nods and puts an arm around Brian’s shoulders. “I know it’s hard, kiddo, it’s hard for me, too, but it’s all I got. Life’s a mystery. So is death.” They fall silent, listening to the steady bip . . . bip . . . bip and the rasp as Charles Krantz—Chuck, to his wife and his wife’s brother and his friends—takes one slow breath after another, his body’s last interactions with the world, each inhale and exhale managed (like the beat of his heart) by a failing brain where a few operations still continue. The man who spent his working life in the accounting department of the Midwest Trust is now doing his final tallies: small income, large disbursements. “Banks are supposed to be heartless, but they really loved him there,” Brian says. “They sent a ton of flowers. The nurses put them in that solarium thing because he’s not supposed to have flowers. What did they think? That it was going to kick off an allergy attack or something?” “He loved working there,” Doug says. “It wasn’t a big deal in the grand scheme of things, I suppose—he was never going to win a Nobel Prize or get a Medal of Freedom from the president—but he did love it.” “Dancing, too,” Brian says. “He loved dancing. He was good. So was Mom—they could really cut a rug, she used to say. But she also said he was better.” Doug laughs. “Used to call himself the poor man’s Fred Astaire. And model trains when he was a boy. His zaydee had a set. You know, his granddad?” “Yeah,” Brian says. “I know about his zaydee.” “He had a good life, Bri.” “Not enough of it,” Brian says. “He’ll never get to take the train across Canada like he wanted to. Or visit Australia—he wanted that, too. He’s never going to see me graduate high school. He’s never going to have a retirement party where people make funny speeches and give him a gold . . .” He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “A gold watch.” Doug squeezes his nephew’s shoulders. Brian speaks looking down at his clasped hands. “I want to believe in God, Unc, and I sort of do, but I don’t understand why it has to be this way. Why God would let it be this way. It’s a mystery? You’re the hotshot philosophy guy and that’s the best you can do?” Yes, because death brings philosophy to ruin, Doug thinks. “You know what they say, Brian—death takes the best of us and death takes the rest of us.” Brian tries to smile. “If that’s supposed to be comforting, you need to try harder.” Doug seems not to have heard. He’s looking at his brother-in-law, who is—in Doug’s mind—an actual brother. Who has given his sister a good life. Who helped him get his start in business, and that’s really the least of it. They had some fine times together. Not enough, but it looks like they’ll have to do. “The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.” “And now my dad’s world is dying.” “But not ours,” Doug says, and gives his nephew another squeeze. “Ours will go on a little while longer. And your mother’s. We need to be strong for her, Brian. As strong as we can.” They fall silent, looking at the dying man in the hospital bed, listening to the bip . . . bip . . . bip of the monitor and the slow breaths Chuck Krantz inhales and exhales. Once it stops. His chest remains flat. Brian tenses. Then it rises again with another of those agonal rasps. “Text Mom,” Brian says. “Right now.” Doug already has his phone out. “Way ahead of you.” And types: Better come, sis. Brian is here. I think Chuck is near the end. 3 Marty and Felicia went out on the back lawn. They sat in chairs they carried down from the patio. The power was out all over the city now, and the stars were very bright. Brighter than Marty had ever seen them since he was a boy growing up in Nebraska. Back then he’d had a small telescope and conned the universe from his attic window. “There’s Aquila,” he said. “The Eagle. There’s Cygnus, the Swan. See it?” “Yes. And there’s the North Sta—” She stopped. “Marty? Did you see . . .” “Yes,” he said. “It just went out. And there goes Mars. Goodbye, Red Planet.” “Marty, I’m scared.” Was Gus Wilfong looking up at the sky tonight? Andrea, the woman who’d been on the Neighborhood Watch Committee with Felicia? Samuel Yarbrough, the undertaker? What about the little girl in the red shorts? Star light, star bright, last stars I see tonight. Marty took her hand. “I am, too.” 4 Ginny, Brian, and Doug stand beside Chuck Krantz’s bed, their hands joined. They wait as Chuck—husband, father, accountant, dancer, fan of TV crime shows—takes his last two or three breaths. “Thirty-nine years,” Doug says. “Thirty-nine great years. Thanks, Chuck.” 5 Marty and Felicia sat with their faces turned up to the sky, watching the stars go out. First in ones and twos, then by the dozens, then by the hundreds. As the Milky Way rolled away into darkness, Marty turned to his ex-wife. “I love—” Black. Act II: Buskers With the help of his friend Mac, who has an old van, Jared Franck sets up his drumkit in his favored spot on Boylston Street between Walgreens and the Apple Store. He has a good feeling about today. It’s Thursday afternoon, the weather is fucking gorgeous, and the streets are thronged with people looking forward to the weekend, which is always better than the weekend itself. For Thursday afternoon people, that anticipation is pure. Friday afternoon people have to put anticipation aside and get to work having fun. “All good?” Mac asks him. “Yes. Thanks.” “My ten per cent is all the thanks I want, bro.” Mac heads out, probably to the comics store, maybe to Barnes and Noble, then to the Common to read whatever he’s bought. A big reader is Mac. Jared will call him when it’s time to pack up. Mac will bring his van. Jared puts down a battered tophat (scuffed velvet, tattered silk grosgrain band) he bought for seventy-five cents in a secondhand shop in Cambridge, then places the sign in front of it that reads THIS IS A MAGIC HAT! GIVE FREELY AND YOUR CONTRIBUTION WILL DOUBLE! He drops in a couple of dollar bills to give people the right idea. The weather is warm for early October, which allows him to dress as he likes for his Boylston gigs—sleeveless tee with FRANCKLY DRUMS on the front, khaki shorts, ratty Converse hightops without socks—but even on chilly days, he usually shucks his coat if he’s wearing one, because when you find the beat, you feel the heat. Jared unfolds his stool and gives a preparatory paradiddle across the drumheads. A few people glance at him, but most simply sweep on by, lost in their talk of friends, dinner plans, where to get a drink, and the day gone by to the mystery-dump where spent days go. Meanwhile it’s a long time until eight o’clock, which is when a BPD car usually slides over to the curb with a cop leaning out the passenger window to tell him it’s time to pack it up. Then he’ll call Mac. For now there’s money to be made. He sets up his hi-hat and crash cymbal, then adds the cowbell, because it feels like a cowbell kind of day. Jared and Mac work part-time at Doctor Records on Newbury Street, but on a good day Jared can make almost as much busking. And busk-drumming on sunny Boylston Street is certainly better than the patchouli atmosphere of the Doc’s, and long conversations with the record nerds looking for Dave Van Ronk on Folkways or Dead rarities on paisley vinyl. Jared always wants to ask them where they were when Tower Records was going under. He’s a dropout from Juilliard, which he calls—with apologies to Kay Kyser—the Kollege of Musical Knowledge. He lasted three semesters, but in the end it wasn’t for him. They wanted you to think about what you were doing, and as far as Jared is concerned, the beat is your friend and thinking is the enemy. He sits in on the occasional gig, but bands don’t interest him much. Although he never says it (okay, maybe once or twice, while drunk), he thinks maybe music itself is the enemy. He rarely thinks about these issues once he’s in the groove. Once he’s in the groove, music is a ghost. Only the drums matter then. The beat. He starts warming up, going easy at first, slow tempo, no cowbell, no tom and no rimshots, not minding that Magic Hat stays empty except for his two crumpled dollars and a quarter flipped in (contemptuously) by a kid on a skateboard. There is time. There is a way in. Like anticipating the joys of an autumn weekend in Boston, finding the in is half the fun. Maybe even most of it. Janice Halliday is on her way home from seven hours at Paper and Page, trudging down Boylston with her head lowered and her purse clasped close. She may walk all the way to Fenway before she starts looking for the nearest T station, because right now walking is what she wants. Her boyfriend of sixteen months just broke up with her. Dumped her, not to put too fine a point on it. Kicked her to the curb. He did it the modern way, by text. We r just not right for each other. Then: U will always be in my heart! Then: Friends 4ever OK? Not right for each other probably means he met someone and will spend the weekend with her picking apples in New Hampshire and later on fucking in some BandB. He won’t see Janice tonight, or ever, in the smart pink blouse and red wrap skirt she’s wearing unless she texts him a photo with a message reading This is what U R missing, you pile of . It was totally unexpected, that’s what set her back on her heels, like having a door slammed in your face just as you were getting ready to walk through it. The weekend, which seemed full of possibility this morning, now looks to her like the entrance to a hollow, slowly turning barrel into which she must crawl. She’s not down to work at PandP on Saturday, but maybe she’ll call Maybelline and see if she can pick up Saturday morning, at least. Sunday the store is closed. Sunday best not considered, at least for now. “Friends forever my ass.” She says this to her purse, because she’s looking down. She isn’t in love with him, never even kidded herself that she was, but it’s a dismaying shock, just the same. He was a nice guy (at least she thought so), a pretty good lover, and fun to be with, as they say. Now she’s twenty-two and dumped and it sucks. She supposes she’ll have some wine when she gets home, and cry. Crying might be good. Therapeutic. Maybe she’ll cue up one of her big-band playlists and dance around the room. Dancing with myself, as the Billy Idol song says. She loved to dance in high school, and those Friday night dances were happy times. Maybe she can recapture a little of that happiness. No, she thinks, those tunes—and those memories—will just make you cry more. High school was a long time ago. This is the real world, where guys break up with you without warning. Up ahead a couple of blocks, she hears drumming. Charles Krantz—Chuck, to his friends—makes his way along Boylston Street dressed in the armor of accountancy: gray suit, white shirt, blue tie. His black Samuel Windsor shoes are inexpensive but sturdy. His briefcase swings by his side. He takes no notice of the chattering after-work throngs eddying around him. He’s in Boston attending a week-long conference titled Banking in the Twenty-First Century. He has been sent by his bank, Midwest Trust, all expenses paid. Very nice, not least because he’s never visited Beantown before. The conference is being held at a hotel that is perfect for accountants, clean and fairly cheap. Chuck has enjoyed the speakers and the panels (he was on one panel and is scheduled to be on another before the conference ends at noon tomorrow), but had no wish to spend his off-duty hours in the company of seventy other accountants. He speaks their language, but likes to think he speaks others, as well. At least he did, although some of the vocabulary is now lost. Now his sensible Samuel Windsor Oxfords are taking him for an afternoon walk. Not very exciting, but quite pleasant. Quite pleasant is enough these days. His life is narrower than the one he once hoped for, but he’s made his peace with that. He understands that narrowing is the natural order of things. There comes a time when you realize you’re never going to be the President of the United States and settle for being president of the Jaycees instead. And there’s a bright side. He has a wife to whom he is scrupulously faithful, and an intelligent, good-humored son in middle school. He also has only nine months to live, although he doesn’t know it yet. The seeds of his end—the place where life narrows to a final point—are planted deep, where no surgeon’s knife will ever go, and they have lately begun to awaken. Soon they will bear black fruit. To those passing him—the college girls in their colorful skirts, the college boys with their Red Sox caps turned around, the impeccably dressed Asian Americans from Chinatown, the matrons with their shopping bags, the Vietnam vet holding out a huge ceramic cup with an American flag and the motto THESE COLORS DON’T RUN on its side—Chuck Krantz must surely look like white America personified, buttoned up and tucked in and all about chasing the dollar. He is those things, yes, the industrious ant trundling its preordained path through flocks of pleasure-seeking grasshoppers, but he’s other things as well. Or was. He’s thinking about the little sister. Was her name Rachel or Regina? Reba? Renee? He can’t remember for sure, only that she was the lead guitarist’s little sister. During his junior year in high school, long before he became an industrious ant working in that hill known as Midwest Trust, Chuck was the lead singer in a band called the Retros. They called themselves that because they played a lot of stuff from the sixties and seventies, heavy on British groups like the Stones and the Searchers and the Clash, because most of those tunes were simple. They steered clear of the Beatles, where the songs were full of weird chords like modified sevenths. Chuck got to be the lead singer for two reasons: although he couldn’t play an instrument he could carry a tune, and his grandpa had an old SUV which he allowed Chuck to drive to gigs, as long as they weren’t too far. The Retros were bad to start with, and only mediocre when they broke up at the end of junior year, but they had, as the rhythm guitarist’s father once put it, “made that quantum leap to palatability.” And really, it was hard to do too much damage when you were playing stuff like “Bits and Pieces” (Dave Clark Five) and “Rockaway Beach” (Ramones). Chuck’s tenor voice was pleasing enough in an unremarkable way, and he wasn’t afraid to scream or go falsetto when the occasion called for it, but what he really liked were the instrumental breaks, because then he could dance and strut his way across the stage like Jagger, sometimes wagging the mike stand between his legs in a way he considered suggestive. He could also moonwalk, which always drew applause. The Retros were a garage band that sometimes practiced in an actual garage and sometimes in the lead guitarist’s downstairs rec room. On those latter occasions, the lead’s little sister (Ruth? Reagan?) usually came ditty-bopping down the stairs in her Bermuda shorts. She’d station herself between their two Fender amps, waggle her hips and butt in exaggerated fashion, put her fingers in her ears, and stick out her tongue. Once, when they were taking a break, she sidled up to Chuck and whispered, “Just between you and me, you sing like old people fuck.” Charles Krantz, the future accountant, had whispered back, “Like you’d know, monkeybutt.” Little sister ignored this. “I like to watch you dance, though. You do it like a white guy, but still.” Little sister, also white, also liked to dance. Sometimes after practice she would put on one of her homemade cassettes and he’d dance with her while the other guys in the band hooted and made semi-smart remarks, the two of them doing their Michael Jackson moves and laughing like loons. Chuck’s thinking about teaching little sister (Ramona?) how to moonwalk when he first hears the drums. Some guy is banging a basic rock beat that the Retros might have played back in the days of “Hang On Sloopy” and “Brand New Cadillac.” At first he thinks it’s all in his head, maybe even the start of one of the migraines that have plagued him lately, but then the crowd of pedestrians on the next block clears long enough for him to see a kid in a sleeveless tee, sitting on his little stool and beating out that tasty old-time rhythm. Chuck thinks, Where’s a little sister to dance with when you need one? Jared has been on the job for ten minutes now and has nothing to show for it but that one sarcastic quarter flipped into Magic Hat by the skateboard kid. It makes no sense to him, on a pleasant Thursday afternoon like this with the weekend just around the bend, he should have at least five dollars in the hat by now. He doesn’t need the money to keep from starving, but man doesn’t live by food and rent alone. A man has to keep his self-image in order, and drumming here on Boylston is a big part of his. He is onstage. He is performing. Soloing, in fact. What’s in the hat is how he judges who is digging the performance and who is not. He twirls his sticks between his fingertips, sets himself, and plays the intro to “My Sharona,” but it’s not right. Sounds canned. He sees a Mr. Businessman type coming toward him, briefcase swinging like a short pendulum, and something about him—God knows what—makes Jared want to announce his approach. He slips first into a reggae beat, then something slinkier, like a cross between “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and “Susie Q.” For the first time since running that quick paradiddle to gauge the sound of his kit, Jared feels a spark and understands why he wanted the cowbell today. He begins to whack it on the offbeat, and what he’s drumming morphs into something like that old joint by the Champs, “Tequila.” It’s pretty cool. The groove has arrived, and the groove is like a road you want to follow. He could speed the beat up, get some tom in there, but he’s watching Mr. Businessman, and that seems wrong for this dude. Jared has no idea why Mr. Businessman has become the groove’s focal point, and doesn’t care. Sometimes it just happens that way. The groove turns into a story. He imagines Mr. Businessman on vacation in one of those places where you get a little pink umbrella in your drink. Maybe he’s with his wife, or maybe it’s his personal assistant, an ash blond in a turquoise bikini. And this is what they’re hearing. This is the drummer warming up for the night’s gig, before the tiki torches are lit. He believes Mr. Businessman will just go past on his way to his Mr. Businessman hotel, the chances that he’ll feed Magic Hat hovering somewhere between slim and none. When he’s gone, Jared will switch to something else, give the cowbell a rest, but for now this beat is the right one. But instead of floating on by, Mr. Businessman stops. He’s smiling. Jared gives him a grin and nods to the tophat on the pavement, never missing a beat. Mr. Businessman doesn’t seem to notice him, and he doesn’t feed the hat. He drops his briefcase between his black Mr. Businessman shoes instead and begins moving his hips side to side with the beat. Just hips: everything else stays still. His face is poker. He seems to be looking at a spot directly over Jared’s head. “Go, man,” a young man remarks, and chinks some coins into the hat. For the gently jiving Mr. Businessman, not the beat, but that’s okay. Jared begins working the hi-hat in quick tender strokes, teasing it, almost caressing it. With his other hand he begins knocking the cowbell on the offbeat, using the kick-pedal to add a little bottom. It’s nice. The guy in the gray suit looks like a banker, but that hip-sway is something else. He raises a hand and begins ticking his forefinger to the beat. On the back of the hand is a small crescent-shaped scar. Chuck hears the beat change, becoming a little more exotic, and for a moment he almost comes back to himself and walks away. Then he thinks, Fuck it, no law against dancing a little on the sidewalk. He steps back from his briefcase so he won’t trip, then puts his hands on his moving hips and does a jivey clockwise turn like an about-face. It’s how he used to do it back in the day, when the band was playing “Satisfaction” or “Walking the Dog.” Someone laughs, someone else applauds, and he goes back the other way with the tail of his coat flying. He’s thinking about dancing with little sister. Little sister was a booger with a dirty mouth, but she could sure get down on it. Chuck himself hasn’t got down on it—that mystical, satisfying it—in years, but every move feels perfect. He lifts one leg and spins on the other heel. Then he clasps his hands behind his back like a schoolboy called on to recite and moonwalks in place on the pavement in front of his briefcase. The drummer goes “Yow, daddy!” in surprise and delight. He picks up the pace, now going from the cowbell to the floor tom with his left hand, working the kick-pedal, never losing the metallic sighing from the hi-hat. People are gathering. Money is pouring into Magic Hat: paper as well as metal. Something is happening here. Two young men in matching berets and Rainbow Coalition tees are at the front of the little crowd. One of them tosses what looks like a five into the hat and yells “Go, man, go!” Chuck doesn’t need the encouragement. He’s into it now. Banking in the twenty-first century has slipped his mind. He frees the button on his suit coat, brushes the coat behind him with the backs of his hands, hooks his thumbs into his belt like a gunslinger, and does a modified split, out and back. He follows with a quick-step and turn. The drummer is laughing and nodding. “You the cheese,” he says. “You the cheese, daddy!” The crowd is growing, the hat is filling, Chuck’s heart isn’t just beating in his chest but thrumming. Good way to have a heart attack, but he doesn’t care. If his wife saw him doing this she’d shit a brick, and he doesn’t care. His son would be embarrassed, but his son isn’t here. He puts his right shoe on his left calf, spins again, and when he comes back front and center, he sees a pretty young woman standing next to the beret guys. She’s wearing a filmy pink blouse and a red wrap skirt. She’s staring at him with wide, fascinated eyes. Chuck holds his hands out to her, smiling, snapping his fingers. “Come on,” he says. “Come on, little sister, dance.” Jared doesn’t think she will—she looks like the shy type—but she walks slowly toward the man in the gray suit. Maybe Magic Hat really is magic. “Dance!” one of the beret guys says, and others pick it up, clapping along with the beat Jared is laying down: “Dance, dance, dance!” Janice breaks into a what-the-hell smile, tosses her purse down beside Chuck’s briefcase, and takes his hands. Jared drops what he’s been doing and turns into Charlie Watts, hammering like a soldier. Mr. Businessman twirls the girl, puts a hand on her trim waist, draws her to him, and quick-steps her past the drumkit, almost to the corner of the Walgreens building. Janice pulls away, waving her finger in a “naughty-naughty” gesture, then comes back and grasps both of Chuck’s hands. As if they had practiced this a hundred times, he does another modified split and she shoots between his legs, a daring move that opens the wrap skirt to the top of one pretty thigh. There are a few gasps as she props herself on one tented hand and then springs back up. She’s laughing. “No more,” Chuck says, patting his chest. “I can’t—” She springs to him and puts her hands on his shoulders and he can after all. He catches her by the waist, turning her on his hip and then setting her neatly on the pavement. He lifts her left hand and she spins beneath it like a hopped-up ballerina. There must be over a hundred people watching now, they crowd the sidewalk and spill into the street. They burst into fresh applause. Jared runs the drums one time, hits the cymbals, then holds up his sticks triumphantly. There’s another round of applause. Chuck and Janice are looking at each other, both out of breath. Chuck’s hair, just starting to gray, is stuck to his sweaty forehead. “What are we doing?” Janice asks. Now that the drums have stopped, she looks dazed. “I don’t know,” Chuck says, “but that’s the best thing that’s happened to me in I don’t know how long.” Magic Hat is full to overflowing. “More!” someone shouts, and the crowd picks it up. There are many phones being held up, ready to catch the next dance, and the girl looks like she would, but she’s young. Chuck is danced out. He looks at the drummer and shakes his head. The drummer gives him a nod to show he understands. Chuck is wondering how many people were quick enough to video that first dance, and what his wife will think if she sees it. Or his son. And suppose it goes viral? Unlikely, but if it does, if it gets back to the bank, what will they think when they see the man they sent to a conference in Boston shaking his booty on Boylston Street with a woman young enough to be his daughter? Or somebody’s little sister. Just what did he think he was doing? “No more, folks,” the drummer calls. “We gotta quit while we’re ahead.” “And I need to get home,” the girl says. “Not yet,” says the drummer. “Please.” Twenty minutes later they’re sitting on a bench facing the duck pond in Boston Common. Jared called Mac. Chuck and Janice helped Jared pack up his kit and load it in the back of the van. A few people hung out, congratulating them, offering high fives, adding a few more bucks to the overflowing hat. When they’re rolling—Chuck and Janice sitting side by side in the back seat, their feet planted among stacks of comic books—Mac says they’ll never find parking next to the Common. “We will today,” Jared says. “Today is magic.” And they do, right across from the Four Seasons. Jared counts out the cash. Somebody has actually tossed in a fifty, maybe the beret guy mistaking it for a five. There’s over four hundred dollars in all. Jared has never had such a day. Never expected to. He sets aside Mac’s ten per cent (Mac is currently standing at the edge of the pond, feeding the ducks from a package of peanut butter crackers he happened to have in his pocket), then begins to divvy up the rest. “Oh, no,” Janice says when she understands what he’s doing. “That’s yours.” Jared shakes his head. “Nope, we split even. By myself I wouldn’t have made half this much even if I drummed until midnight.” Not that the cops would ever allow such a thing. “Sometimes I clear thirty bucks, and that’s on a good day.” Chuck has the beginnings of one of his headaches and knows it’s apt to be bad by nine o’clock, but the young man’s earnestness makes him laugh just the same. “All right. I don’t need it, but I guess I earned it.” He reaches out and pats Janice’s cheek, just as he sometimes used to pat the cheek of the lead singer’s potty-mouthed little sister. “So did you, young lady.” “Where did you learn to dance like that?” Jared asks Chuck. “Well, there was an extracurricular called Twirlers and Spinners back in middle school, but it was my grandma who showed me the best moves.” “You?” he asks Janice. “Pretty much the same,” she says, and blushes. “High school dances. Where did you learn to drum?” “Self-taught. Like you,” he says to Chuck. “You were great by yourself, man, but the chick added a whole extra dimension. We could do this for a living, you know it? I really think we could busk our way to fame and fortune.” For a mad moment Chuck actually considers it, and sees the girl is, too. Not in a serious way, but in the way you daydream of an alternate life. One where you play pro baseball or climb Mount Everest or duet with Bruce Springsteen at a stadium concert. Then Chuck laughs some more and shakes his head. As the girl tucks her third of the take into her purse, she is also laughing. “It was really all you,” Jared says to Chuck. “What made you stop in front of me? And what made you start moving?” Chuck thinks that over, then shrugs. He could say it was because he was thinking about that old half-assed band, the Retros, and how he liked to dance across the stage during the instrumental breaks, showing off, swinging that mike stand between his legs, but that’s not it. And really, had he ever danced with such elan and freedom even back then, when he had been a teenager, young and limber, with no headaches and nothing to lose? “It was magic,” Janice says. She giggles. She didn’t expect to hear that sound coming from her today. Crying, yes. Giggling, no. “Like your hat.” Mac comes back. “Jere, we gotta roll or you’re gonna end up spending your take paying for my parking ticket.” Jared stands up. “Sure you don’t want to change career streams, you two? We could busk this town from Beacon Hill to Roxbury. Make a name for ourselves.” “I’ve got a conference to attend tomorrow,” Chuck says. “On Saturday I’m flying home. I’ve got a wife and son waiting for me.” “And I can’t do it by myself,” Janice says, smiling. “It would be like Ginger without Fred.” “I hear that,” Jared says, and holds out his arms. “But you have to get in here before you go. Group hug.” They join him. Chuck knows they can smell his sweat—this suit will have to be dry-cleaned before he wears it again, and strenuously—and he can smell theirs. It’s all right. He thinks the girl nailed it when she used the word magic. Sometimes there is such a thing. Not much, but a little. Like finding a forgotten twenty in the pocket of an old coat. “Buskers forever,” Jared says. Chuck Krantz and Janice Halliday repeat it. “Buskers forever,” Mac says, “great. Now let’s get out of here before a meter maid shows up, Jere.” Chuck tells Janice he’s headed to the Boston Hotel, past the Prudential Center, if she’s going that way. Janice was, the plan had been to walk all the way to Fenway, brooding about her ex-boyfriend and muttering doleful shit to her purse, but she’s changed her mind. She says she’ll take the T from Arlington Street. He walks her there, the two of them cutting across the park. At the head of the stairs, she turns to him and says, “Thank you for the dance.” He gives her a bow. “It was my pleasure.” He watches her until she’s out of sight, then heads back down Boylston. He walks slowly because his back hurts, his legs hurt, and his head is throbbing. He can’t remember having bad headaches like this in his whole life. Not until a couple of months ago, that is. He supposes if they keep up, he’ll have to see a doctor. He supposes he knows what this might be. All that’s for later, though. If at all. Tonight he thinks he’ll treat himself to a good dinner—why not, he’s earned it—and a glass of wine. On second thought, make it Evian. Wine might intensify his headache. When he’s finished his meal—dessert definitely included—he’ll call Ginny and tell her that her husband might be the next one-day Internet sensation. That probably won’t happen, somewhere right now someone is undoubtedly filming a dog juggling empty soda bottles and someone else is memorializing a goat smoking a cigar, but it’s better to get out front with it, just in case. As he passes the place where Jared set up his drums, those two questions recur: why did you stop to listen, and why did you start to dance? He doesn’t know, and would answers make a good thing better? Later he will lose the ability to walk, never mind dancing with little sister on Boylston Street. Later he will lose the ability to chew food, and his meals will come from a blender. Later he will lose his grip on the difference between waking and sleeping and enter a land of pain so great that he will wonder why God made the world. Later he will forget his wife’s name. What he will remember—occasionally—is how he stopped, and dropped his briefcase, and began to move his hips to the beat of the drums, and he will think that is why God made the world. Just that. Act I: I Contain Multitudes 1 Chuck was looking forward to having a baby sister. His mother promised he could hold her if he was very careful. Of course he was also looking forward to having parents, but none of that worked out thanks to an icy patch on an I-95 overpass. Much later, in college, he would tell a girlfriend that there were all sorts of novels, movies, and TV shows where a main character’s parents died in a car crash, but he was the only person he knew who’d had that happen in real life. The girlfriend thought this over, then rendered her verdict. “I’m sure it happens all the time, although partners can also be taken in housefires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and avalanches while on ski vacations. To name only a few of the possibilities. And what makes you think you’re a main character in anything but your own mind?” She was a poet and sort of a nihilist. The relationship only lasted a semester. Chuck wasn’t in the car when it went flying upside-down from the turnpike overpass because his parents were having a dinner date and he was being babysat by his grandparents, who at that time he was still calling Zaydee and Bubbie (this mostly ended in the third grade, when kids made fun of him and he reverted to the more all-American Grandma and Grandpa). Albie and Sarah Krantz lived just a mile down the road, and it was natural enough for them to raise him after the accident when he became what he first believed to be an orphant. He was seven. For a year—maybe a year and a half—that was a house of unadulterated sadness. The Krantzes had not only lost their son and daughter-in-law, they had lost the granddaughter who would have been born just three months later. The name had already been picked out: Alyssa. When Chuck said that sounded to him like rain, his mother had laughed and cried at the same time. He never forgot that. He knew his other grandparents of course, there were visits every summer, but they were basically strangers to him. They called a lot after he became an orphant, your basic how-are-you-doing-how’s-school calls, and the summer visits continued; Sarah (aka Bubbie, aka Grandma) took him on the plane. But his mother’s parents remained strangers, living in the foreign land of Omaha. They sent him presents on his birthday and at Christmas—the latter especially nice since Grandma and Grandpa didn’t “do” Christmas—but otherwise he continued to think of them as outliers, like the teachers who were left behind as he moved up through the grades. Chuck began to slip his metaphorical mourning garments first, necessarily pulling his grandparents (old, yeah, but not ancient) out of their own grief. There came a time, when Chuck was ten, that they took the boy to Disney World. They had adjoining rooms at the Swan Resort, the door between the rooms kept open at night, and Chuck only heard his grandma crying once. Mostly, they had fun. Some of that good feeling came back home with them. Chuck sometimes heard Grandma humming in the kitchen, or singing along with the radio. There had been lots of take-out meals after the accident (and whole recyclable bins full of Grandpa’s Budweiser bottles), but in the year after Disney World, Grandma began cooking again. Good meals that put weight on a formerly skinny boy. She liked rock and roll while she was cooking, music Chuck would have thought much too young for her, but which she clearly enjoyed. If Chuck wandered into the kitchen looking for a cookie or maybe hoping to make a brown-sugar roll-up with a slice of Wonder Bread, Grandma was apt to hold out her hands to him and start snapping her fingers. “Dance with me, Henry,” she’d say. His name was Chuck, not Henry, but he usually took her up on it. She taught him jitterbug steps and a couple of crossover moves. She told him there were more, but her back was too creaky to attempt them. “I can show you, though,” she said, and one Saturday brought back a stack of videotapes from the Blockbuster store. There was Swing Time, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, West Side Story, and Chuck’s favorite, Singin’ in the Rain, where Gene Kelly danced with a lamppost. “You could learn those moves,” she said. “You’re a natural, kiddo.” He asked her once, when they were drinking iced tea after an especially strenuous go to Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher,” what she had been like in high school. “I was a kusit,” she said. “But don’t tell your zaydee I said that. He’s old-school, that one.” Chuck never told. And he never went in the cupola. Not then. He asked about it, of course, and more than once. What was up there, what you could see from the high window, why the room was locked. Grandma said it was because the floor wasn’t safe and he might go right through it. Grandpa said the same thing, that there was nothing up there because of the rotten floor, and the only thing you could see from those windows was a shopping center, big deal. He said that until one night, just before Chuck’s eleventh birthday, when he told at least part of the truth. 2 Drinking is not good for secrets, everybody knows that, and after the death of his son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-to-be (Alyssa, sounds like rain), Albie Krantz drank a great deal. He should have bought stock in Anheuser-Busch, that was how much he drank. He could do it because he was retired, and comfortably off, and very depressed. After the trip to Disney World the drinking tapered off to a glass of wine with dinner or a beer in front of a baseball game. Mostly. Once in awhile—every month at first, every couple of months later on—Chuck’s grandpa tied one on. Always at home, and never making any fuss about it. The next day he would move slowly and eat little until afternoon, then he was back to normal. One night while watching the Red Sox get thumped by the Yankees, when Albie was well into his second sixpack of Bud, Chuck once more raised the subject of the cupola. Mostly just to have something to talk about. With the Sox down by nine, the game wasn’t exactly holding his attention. “I bet you can see way past the Westford Mall,” Chuck said. Grandpa considered this, then pushed the mute button on the TV controller, silencing an ad for Ford Truck Month. (Grandpa said Ford stood for Fix Or Repair Daily.) “If you went up there you might see a lot more than you wanted,” he said. “That’s why it’s locked, boychick.” Chuck felt a small and not entirely unpleasurable chill go through him, and his mind immediately flashed to Scooby-Doo and his friends, chasing down spooks in the Mystery Machine. He wanted to ask what Grandpa meant, but the adult part of him—not there in person, no, not at ten, but something that had begun to speak on rare occasions—told him to be quiet. Be quiet and wait. “Do you know what style this house is, Chucky?” “Victorian,” Chuck said. “That’s right, and not pretend Victorian, either. It was built in 1885, been remodeled half a dozen times since, but the cupola was there from the start. Your bubbie and I bought it when the shoe business really took off, and we got it for a song. Been here since 1971, and in all those years I haven’t been up to that damn cupola half a dozen times.” “Because the floor’s rotted?” Chuck asked, with what he hoped was appealing innocence. “Because it’s full of ghosts,” Grandpa said, and Chuck felt that chill again. Not so pleasurable this time. Although Grandpa might be joking. He did joke from time to time these days. Jokes were to Grandpa what dancing was to Grandma. He tipped his beer. Belched. His eyes were red. “Christmas Yet to Come. Do you remember that one, Chucky?” Chuck did, they watched A Christmas Carol every year on Christmas Eve even though they didn’t “do” Christmas otherwise, but that didn’t mean he knew what his grandpa was talking about. “The Jefferies boy was only a short time later,” Grandpa said. He was looking at the TV, but Chuck didn’t think he was actually seeing it. “What happened to Henry Peterson… that took longer. It was four, maybe five years on. By then I’d almost forgotten what I saw up there.” He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “I said I’d never go up there again after that, and I wish I hadn’t. Because of Sarah—your bubbie—and the bread. It’s the waiting, Chucky, that’s the hard part. You’ll find that out when you’re—” The kitchen door opened. It was Grandma, back from Mrs. Stanley’s across the street. Grandma had taken her chicken soup because Mrs. Stanley was feeling poorly. So Grandma said anyway, but even at not quite eleven, Chuck had a good idea there was another reason. Mrs. Stanley knew all the neighborhood gossip (“She’s a yente, that one,” Grandpa said), and was always willing to share. Grandma poured all the news out to Grandpa, usually after inviting Chuck out of the room. But out of the room didn’t mean out of earshot. “Who was Henry Peterson, Grandpa?” Chuck asked. But Grandpa had heard his wife come in. He straightened up in his chair and put his can of Bud aside. “Look at that!” he cried in a passable imitation of sobriety (not that Grandma would be fooled). “The Sox have got the bases loaded!” 3 In the top of the eighth, Grandma sent Grandpa down to the Zoney’s Go-Mart at the bottom of the block to get milk for Chuck’s Apple Jacks in the morning. “And don’t even think of driving. The walk will sober you up.” Grandpa didn’t argue. With Grandma he rarely did, and when he gave it a try, the results weren’t good. When he was gone, Grandma—Bubbie—sat down next to Chuck on the couch and put an arm around him. Chuck put his head on her comfortably padded shoulder. “Was he blabbing to you about his ghosts? The ones that live in the cupola?” “Um, yeah.” There was no point in telling a lie; Grandma saw right through those. “Are there? Have you seen them?” Grandma snorted. “What do you think, hantel?” Later it would occur to Chuck that this wasn’t an answer. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention to Zaydee. He’s a good man, but sometimes he drinks a little too much. Then he rides his hobby horses. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.” Chuck did. Nixon should have gone to jail; the faygelehs were taking over American culture and turning it pink; the Miss America pageant (which Grandma loved) was your basic meat-show. But he had never said anything about ghosts in the cupola before that night. At least to Chuck. “Bubbie, who was the Jefferies boy?” She sighed. “That was a very sad thing, boychuck.” (This was her little joke.) “He lived on the next block over and got hit by a drunk driver when he chased a ball into the street. It happened a long time ago. If your grandpa told you he saw it before it happened, he was mistaken. Or making it up for one of his jokes.” Grandma knew when Chuck was lying; on that night Chuck discovered that was a talent that could go both ways. It was all in the way she stopped looking at him and shifted her eyes to the television, as if what was going on there was interesting, when Chuck knew Grandma didn’t give a hang for baseball, not even the World Series. “He just drinks too much,” Grandma said, and that was the end of it. Maybe true. Probably true. But after that, Chuck was frightened of the cupola, with its locked door at the top of a short (six steps) flight of narrow stairs lit by a single bare bulb hanging on a black cord. But fascination is fear’s twin brother, and sometimes after that night, if both of his grandparents were out, he dared himself to climb them. He would touch the Yale padlock, wincing if it rattled (a sound that might disturb the ghosts pent up inside), then hurry back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder as he went. It was easy to imagine the lock popping open and dropping to the floor. The door creaking open on its unused hinges. If that happened, he guessed he might die of fright. 4 The cellar, on the other hand, wasn’t a bit scary. It was brightly lighted by fluorescents. After selling his shoe stores and retiring, Grandpa spent a lot of time down there doing woodwork. It always smelled sweetly of sawdust. In one corner, far from the planers and sanders and the bandsaw he was forbidden to touch, Chuck found a box of Grandpa’s old Hardy Boys books. They were old-timey but pretty good. He was reading The Sinister Signpost one day in the kitchen, waiting for Grandma to remove a batch of cookies from the oven, when she grabbed the book out of his hands. “You can do better than that,” she said. “Time to step up your game, boychuck. Wait right there.” “I was just getting to the good part,” Chuck said. She snorted, a sound to which only Jewish bubbies do true justice. “There are no good parts in these,” she said, and took the book away. What she came back with was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Now this is a good mystery story,” she said. “No dummocks teenagers running around in jalopies. Consider this your introduction to actual writing.” She considered. “Okay, so not Saul Bellow, but not bad.” Chuck started the book just to please Grandma, and was soon lost. In his eleventh year he read almost two dozen Agatha Christies. He tried a couple about Miss Marple, but he was much fonder of Hercule Poirot with his fussy mustache and little gray cells. Poirot was one thinking cat. One day, during his summer vacation, Chuck was reading Murder on the Orient Express in the backyard hammock and happened to glance up at the window of the cupola far above. He wondered how Monsieur Poirot would go about investigating it. Aha, he thought. And then Voil?, which was better. The next time Grandma made blueberry muffins, Chuck asked if he could take some to Mrs. Stanley. “That’s very thoughtful of you,” Grandma said. “Why don’t you do that? Just remember to look both ways when you cross the street.” She always told him that when he was going somewhere. Now, with his little gray cells engaged, he wondered if she was thinking of the Jefferies boy. Grandma was plump (and getting plumper), but Mrs. Stanley was twice her size, a widow who wheezed like a leaky tire when she walked and always seemed to be dressed in the same pink silk wrapper. Chuck felt vaguely guilty about bringing her treats that would add to her girth, but he needed information. She thanked him for the muffins and asked—as he’d been pretty sure she would—if he would like to have one with her in the kitchen. “I could make tea!” “Thank you,” Chuck said. “I don’t drink tea, but I wouldn’t mind a glass of milk.” When they were seated at the little kitchen table in a flood of June sunshine, Mrs. Stanley asked how things were going with Albie and Sarah. Chuck, mindful that anything he said in this kitchen would be on the street before the day was out, said they were doing fine. But because Poirot said you had to give a little if you wanted to get a little, he added that Grandma was collecting clothes for the Lutheran homeless shelter. “Your gramma’s a saint,” Mrs. Stanley said, obviously disappointed there wasn’t more. “What about your granddad? Did he get that thing on his back looked at?” “Yeah,” Chuck said. He took a sip of milk. “The doctor took it off and had it tested. It wasn’t one of the bad ones.” “Thank God for that!” “Yes,” Chuck agreed. Having given, he now felt entitled to get. “He was talking with Grandma about someone named Henry Peterson. I guess he’s dead.” He was prepared for disappointment; she might have never heard of Henry Peterson. But Mrs. Stanley widened her eyes until Chuck was actually afraid they might fall out, and grasped her neck like she had a piece of blueberry muffin stuck in there. “Oh, that was so sad! So awful! He was the bookkeeper who did your father’s accounts, you know. Other companies, too.” She leaned forward, her wrapper giving Chuck a view of a bosom so large it seemed hallucinatory. She was still clutching her neck. “He killed himself,” she whispered. “Hung himself!” “Was he embezzling?” Chuck asked. There was a lot of embezzling in Agatha Christie books. Also blackmail. “What? God, no!” She pressed her lips together, as if to keep in something not fit for the ears of such a beardless youth as the one sitting across from her. If that was the case, her natural proclivity to tell everything (and to anyone) prevailed. “His wife ran away with a younger man! Hardly old enough to vote, and she was in her forties! What do you think of that?” The only reply Chuck could think of right off the bat was “Wow!” and that seemed to suffice. Back at home he pulled his notebook off the shelf and jotted, G. saw ghost of Jefferies boy not long before he died. Saw ghost of H. Peterson 4 or 5 YEARS before he died. Chuck stopped, chewing the end of his Bic, troubled. He didn’t want to write what was in his mind, but felt that as a good detective he had to. Sarah and the bread. DID HE SEE GRANDMA’S GHOST IN THE CUPOLA??? The answer seemed obvious to him. Why else would Grandpa have talked about how hard the waiting was? Now I’m waiting, too, Chuck thought. And hoping that it’s all just a bunch of bullshit. 5 On the last day of sixth grade, Miss Richards—a sweet, hippy-dippyish young woman who had no command of discipline and would probably not last long in the public education system—tried to read Chuck’s class some verses of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It didn’t go well. The kids were rowdy and didn’t want poetry, only to escape into the months of summer stretching ahead. Chuck was the same, happy to throw spitballs or give Mike Enderby the finger when Miss Richards was looking down at her book, but one line clanged in his head and made him sit up straight. When the class was finally over and the kids set free, he lingered. Miss Richards sat at her desk and blew a strand of hair back from her forehead. When she saw Chuck still standing there, she gave him a weary smile. “That went well, don’t you think?” Chuck knew sarcasm when he heard it, even when the sarcasm was gentle and self-directed. He was Jewish, after all. Well, half. “What does that mean when he says ‘I am large, I contain multitudes’?” That made her smile perk up. She propped one small fist on her chin and looked at him with her pretty gray eyes. “What do you think it means?” “All the people he knows?” Chuck ventured. “Yes,” she agreed, “but maybe he means even more. Lean forward.” He leaned over her desk, where American Verse lay on top of her grade book. Very gently, she put her palms to his temples. They were cool. They felt so wonderful he had to suppress a shiver. “What’s in there between my hands? Just the people you know?” “More,” Chuck said. He was thinking of his mother and father and the baby he never got a chance to hold. Alyssa, sounds like rain. “Memories.” “Yes,” she said. “Everything you see. Everything you know. The world, Chucky. Planes in the sky, manhole covers in the street. Every year you live, that world inside your head will get bigger and brighter, more detailed and complex. Do you understand?” “I think so,” Chuck said. He was overwhelmed with the thought of a whole world inside the fragile bowl of his skull. He thought of the Jefferies boy, hit in the street. He thought of Henry Peterson, his father’s bookkeeper, dead at the end of a rope (he’d had nightmares about that). Their worlds going dark. Like a room when you turned out the light. Miss Richards took her hands away. She looked concerned. “Are you all right, Chucky?” “Yes,” he said. “Then go on. You’re a good boy. I’ve enjoyed having you in class.” He went to the door, then turned back. “Miss Richards, do you believe in ghosts?” She considered this. “I believe memories are ghosts. But spooks flapping along the halls of musty castles? I think those only exist in books and movies.” And maybe in the cupola of Grandpa’s house, Chuck thought. “Enjoy your summer, Chucky.” 6 Chuck did enjoy his summer until August, when Grandma died. It happened down the street, in public, which was a little undignified, but at least it was the kind of death where people can safely say “Thank God she didn’t suffer” at the funeral. That other standby, “She had a long, full life” was in more of a gray area; Sarah Krantz had yet to reach her mid-sixties, although she was getting close. Once more the house on Pilchard Street was one of unadulterated sadness, only this time there was no trip to Disney World to mark the beginning of recovery. Chuck reverted to calling Grandma his bubbie, at least in his own head, and cried himself to sleep on many nights. He did it with his face in his pillow so he wouldn’t make Grandpa feel even worse. Sometimes he whispered, “Bubbie I miss you, Bubbie I love you,” until sleep finally took him. Grandpa wore his mourning band, and lost weight, and stopped telling his jokes, and began to look older than his seventy years, but Chuck also sensed (or thought he did) some relief in his grandpa. If so, Chuck could understand. When you lived with dread day in and day out, there had to be relief when the dreaded thing finally happened and was over. Didn’t there? He didn’t go up the steps to the cupola after she died, daring himself to touch the padlock, but he did go down to Zoney’s one day just before starting seventh grade at Acker Park Middle School. He bought a soda and a Kit Kat bar, then asked the clerk where the woman was when she had her stroke and died. The clerk, an over-tatted twentysomething with a lot of greased-back blond hair, gave an unpleasant laugh. “Kid, that’s a little creepy. Are you, I don’t know, brushing up on your serial-killer skills early?” “She was my grandma,” Chuck said. “My bubbie. I was at the community pool when it happened. I came back in the house calling for her and Grandpa told me she was dead.” That wiped the smile off the clerk’s face. “Oh, man. I’m sorry. It was over there. Third aisle.” Chuck went to the third aisle and looked, already knowing what he would see. “She was getting a loaf of bread,” the clerk said. “Pulled down almost everything on the shelf when she collapsed. Sorry if that’s too much information.” “No,” Chuck said, and thought, That’s information I already knew. 7 On his second day at Acker Park Middle, Chuck walked past the bulletin board by the main office, then doubled back. Among the posters for Pep Club, Band, and tryouts for the fall sports teams, there was one showing a boy and girl caught in mid-dance step, he holding his hand up so she could spin beneath. LEARN TO DANCE! it said above the smiling children, in rainbow letters. Below it: JOIN TWIRLERS AND SPINNERS! FALL FLING IS COMING! GET OUT ON THE FLOOR! An image of painful clarity came to Chuck as he looked at this: Grandma in the kitchen, holding her hands out. Snapping her fingers and saying, “Dance with me, Henry.” That afternoon he went down to the gymnasium, where he and nine hesitant others were greeted enthusiastically by Miss Rohrbacher, the girls’ phys ed teacher. Chuck was one of three boys. There were seven girls. All the girls were taller. One of the boys, Paul Mulford, tried to creep out as soon as he realized he was the smallest kid there, coming in at five-feet-nothing. Miss Rohrbacher chased him down and hauled him back, laughing cheerfully. “No-no-no,” said she, “you’re mine now.” So he was. So they all were. Miss Rohrbacher was the dance-monster, and none could stand in her way. She fired up her boombox and showed them the waltz (Chuck knew it), the cha-cha (Chuck knew it), the ball change (Chuck knew it), then the samba. Chuck didn’t know that one, but when Miss Rohrbacher put on “Tequila,” by the Champs, and showed them the basic moves, he got it at once and fell in love with it. He was by far the best dancer in the little club, so Miss Rohrbacher mostly put him with the girls who were clumsy. He understood she did it to make them better, and he was a good sport about it, but it was sort of boring. Near the end of their forty-five minutes, however, the dance-monster would show mercy and pair him with Cat McCoy, who was an eighth-grader and the best dancer of the girls. Chuck didn’t expect romance—Cat was not only gorgeous, she was four inches taller than he was—but he loved to dance with her, and the feeling was mutual. When they got together, they caught the rhythm and let it fill them. They looked into each other’s eyes (she had to look down, which was a bummer, but hey—it was what it was) and laughed for the joy of it. Before letting the kids go, Miss Rohrbacher paired them up (four of the girls had to dance with each other) and told them to freestyle. As they lost their inhibitions and awkwardness, they all got pretty good at it, although most of them were never going to dance at the Copacabana. One day—this was in October, only a week or so before the Fall Fling—Miss Rohrbacher put on “Billie Jean.” “Watch this,” Chuck said, and did a very passable moonwalk. The kids oohed. Miss Rohrbacher’s mouth dropped open. “Oh my God,” Cat said. “Show me how you did that!” He did it again. Cat tried, but the illusion of walking backward just wasn’t there. “Kick off your shoes,” Chuck said. “Do it in your socks. Slide into it.” Cat did. It was much better, and they all applauded. Miss Rohrbacher had a go, then all of the others were moonwalking like crazy. Even Dylan Masterson, the clumsiest of them, got into it. Twirlers and Spinners let out half an hour later than usual that day. Chuck and Cat walked out together. “We should do it at the Fling,” she said. Chuck, who hadn’t been planning on going, stopped and looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “Not as a date or anything,” Cat hastened on, “I’m going out with Dougie Wentworth—” This Chuck knew. “—but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t show them some cool moves. I want to, don’t you?” “I don’t know,” Chuck said. “I’m a lot shorter. I think people would laugh.” “Got you covered,” Cat said. “My brother’s got a pair of Cuban heels, and I think they’d fit you. You’ve got big feet for a little kid.” “Thanks a bunch,” Chuck said. She laughed and gave him a sisterly hug. At the next meeting of Twirlers and Spinners, Cat McCoy brought her brother’s Cubans. Chuck, who had already endured slights to his manhood for being in the dance club, was prepared to hate them, but it was love at first sight. The heels were high, the toes were pointed, and they were as black as midnight in Moscow. They looked a lot like the ones Bo Diddley wore back in the day. So okay, they were a little big, but toilet paper stuffed into those pointy toes took care of that. Best of all… man, they were slick. During freestyle, when Miss Rohrbacher put on “Caribbean Queen,” the gym floor felt like ice. “You put scratches on that floor, the janitors will beat your butt,” Tammy Underwood said. She was probably right, but there were no scratches. He was too light on his feet to leave any. 8 Chuck went stag to the Fall Fling, which turned out just fine, because all the girls from Twirlers and Spinners wanted to dance with him. Especially Cat, because her boyfriend, Dougie Wentworth, had two left feet and spent most of the evening slouched against the wall with his buddies, all of them sucking up punch and watching the dancers with lordly sneers. Cat kept asking him when they were going to do their stuff, and Chuck kept putting her off. He said he’d know the right tune when he heard it. It was his bubbie he was thinking of. Around nine o’clock, half an hour or so before the dance was scheduled to end, the right tune came up. It was Jackie Wilson, singing “Higher and Higher.” Chuck strutted to Cat with his hands out. She kicked off her shoes, and with Chuck in her brother’s Cubans, they were at least close to the same height. They went out on the floor, and when they did a double moonwalk, they cleared it. The kids made a circle around them and began clapping. Miss Rohrbacher, one of the chaperones, was among them, clapping along with the rest and shouting “Go, go, go!” They did. As Jackie Wilson shouted that happy, gospel-tinged tune, they danced like Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly, and Jennifer Beals all rolled up into one. They finished with Cat spinning first one way, then the other, then collapsing backward into Chuck’s arms with her own held out in a dying swan. He went down in a split that miraculously didn’t rip the crotch out of his pants. Two hundred kids cheered when Cat turned her head and put a kiss on the corner of Chuck’s mouth. “One more time!” some kid shouted, but Chuck and Cat shook their heads. They were young, but smart enough to know when to quit. The best cannot be topped. 9 Six months before he died of a brain tumor (at the unfair age of thirty-nine), and while his mind was still working (mostly), Chuck told his wife the truth about the scar on the back of his hand. It wasn’t a big deal and hadn’t been a big lie, but he’d reached a time in his rapidly diminishing life when it seemed important to clear the books. The only time she’d asked about it (it really was a very small scar), he told her that he had gotten it from a boy named Doug Wentworth, who was pissed about him cavorting with his girlfriend at a middle school dance and pushed him into a chainlink fence outside the gymnasium. “What actually happened?” Ginny asked, not because it was important to her but because it seemed to be important to him. She didn’t care much about whatever had happened to him in middle school. The doctors said he would probably be dead before Christmas. That was what mattered to her. When their fabulous dance was over and the DJ put on another, more recent tune, Cat McCoy had run to her girlfriends, who giggled and shrieked and hugged her with a fervency of which only thirteen-year-old girls may be capable. Chuck was sweaty and so hot his cheeks felt on the verge of catching fire. He was also euphoric. All he wanted in that moment was darkness, cool air, and to be by himself. He walked past Dougie and his friends (who paid absolutely no attention to him) like a boy in a dream, pushed through the door at the back of the gym, and walked out into the paved half-court. The cool fall air doused the fire in his cheeks, but not the euphoria. He looked up, saw a million stars, and understood that for each one of those million, there was another million behind it. The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful. He moonwalked under the basketball hoop, moving to the music inside (when he made his little confession to Ginny he could no longer remember what that music had been, but for the record it was the Steve Miller Band, “Jet Airliner”), and then twirled, his arms outstretched. As if to embrace everything. There was pain in his right hand. Not big pain, just your basic ouch, but it was enough to bring him out of his joyous elevation of spirit and back to earth. He saw that the back of his hand was bleeding. While he was doing his whirling dervish bit under the stars, his outflung hand had struck the chainlink fence and a protruding jut of wire had cut him. It was a superficial wound, hardly enough to merit a Band-Aid. It left a scar, though. A tiny white crescent scar. “Why would you lie about that?” Ginny asked. She was smiling as she picked up his hand and kissed the scar. “I could understand it if you’d gone on to tell me how you beat the big bully to a pulp, but you never said that.” No, he’d never said that, and he’d never had a bit of trouble with Dougie Wentworth. For one thing, he was a cheerful enough galoot. For another, Chuck Krantz was a seventh-grade midget unworthy of notice. Why had he told the lie, then, if not to cast himself as the hero of a fictional story? Because the scar was important for another reason. Because it was part of a story he couldn’t tell, even though there was now an apartment building standing on the site of the Victorian house where he had done most of his growing up. The haunted Victorian house. The scar meant more, so he had made it more. He just couldn’t make it as much more as it really was. That made little sense, but as the glioblastoma continued its blitzkrieg, it was the best his disintegrating mind could manage. He had finally told her the truth of how the scar actually happened, and that would have to do. 10 Chuck’s grandpa, his zaydee, died of a heart attack four years after the Fall Fling dance. It happened while Albie was climbing the steps of the public library to return a copy of The Grapes of Wrath—which, he said, was every bit as good as he remembered. Chuck was a junior in high school, singing in a band and dancing like Jagger during the instrumental breaks. Grandpa left him everything. The estate, once quite large, had shrunk considerably over the years since Grandpa’s early retirement, but there was still enough to pay for Chuck’s college education. Later on, the sale of the Victorian paid for the house (small but in a good neighborhood, with a lovely back room for a nursery) he and Virginia moved into after their honeymoon in the Catskills. As a new hire at Midwest Trust—a humble teller—he never could have bought the place without Grandpa’s inheritance. Chuck flatly refused to move to Omaha to live with his mother’s parents. “I love you guys,” he said, “but this is where I grew up and where I want to stay until I go to college. I’m seventeen, not a baby.” So they, both long retired, came to him and stayed in the Victorian with him for the twenty months or so before Chuck went off to the University of Illinois. They weren’t able to be there for the funeral and burial, however. It happened fast, as Grandpa had wanted, and his mom’s folks had loose ends to tie up in Omaha. Chuck didn’t really miss them. He was surrounded by friends and neighbors he knew much better than his mother’s goy parents. A day before they were scheduled to arrive, Chuck finally opened a manila envelope that had been sitting on the table in the front hall. It was from the Ebert-Holloway Funeral Parlor. Inside were Albie Krantz’s personal effects—at least those that had been in his pockets when he collapsed on the library steps. Chuck dumped the envelope out on the table. There was a rattle of coins, a few Halls cough drops, a pocket knife, the new cell phone Grandpa had barely had a chance to use, and his wallet. Chuck picked up the wallet, smelled its old limp leather, kissed it, and cried a little. He was an orphant now for sure. There was also Grandpa’s keyring. Chuck slipped this over the index finger of his right hand (the one with the crescent-shaped scar) and climbed the short and shadowy flight of stairs to the cupola. This last time he did more than rattle the Yale padlock. After some searching, he found the right key and unlocked it. He left the lock hanging from the hasp and pushed the door open, wincing at the squeal of the old unoiled hinges, ready for anything. 11 But there was nothing. The room was empty. It was small, circular, no more than fourteen feet in diameter, maybe less. On the far side was a single wide window, caked with the dirt of years. Although the day was sunny, the light it let in was bleary and diffuse. Standing on the threshold, Chuck put out a foot and toed the boards like a boy testing the water of a pond to see if it was cold. There was no creak, no give. He stepped in, ready to leap back the moment he felt the floor start to sag, but it was solid. He walked across to the window, leaving footprints in the thick fall of dust. Grandpa had been lying about the rotted floor, but about the view he had been dead-on. It really wasn’t much. Chuck could see the shopping center beyond the greenbelt, and beyond that, an Amtrak train moving toward the city, pulling a stumptail of five passenger cars. At this time of day, with the morning commuter rush over, there would be few riders. Chuck stood at the window until the train was gone, then followed his footprints back to the door. As he turned to close it, he saw a bed in the middle of the circular room. It was a hospital bed. There was a man in it. He appeared to be unconscious. There were no machines, but Chuck could hear one just the same, going bip… bip… bip. A heart monitor, maybe. There was a table beside the bed. On it were various lotions and a pair of black-framed glasses. The man’s eyes were closed. One hand lay outside the coverlet, and Chuck observed the crescent-shaped scar on the back of it with no surprise. In this room, Chuck’s grandpa—his zaydee—had seen his wife lying dead, the loaves of bread she would pull off the shelves when she went down scattered all around her. It’s the waiting, Chucky, he’d said. That’s the hard part. Now his own waiting would begin. How long would that wait be? How old was the man in the hospital bed? Chuck started back into the cupola for a closer look, but the vision was gone. No man, no hospital bed, no table. There was one final faint bip from the unseen monitor, then that was gone, too. The man did not fade, as ghostly apparitions did in movies; he was just gone, insisting he had never been there in the first place. He wasn’t, Chuck thought. I will insist that he wasn’t, and I will live my life until my life runs out. I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes. He closed the door and snapped the lock shut. IF IT BLEEDS In January of 2021, a small padded envelope addressed to Detective Ralph Anderson is delivered to the Conrads, the Andersons’ next-door neighbors. The Anderson family is on an extended vacation in the Bahamas, thanks to an endless teachers’ strike in the Andersons’ home county. (Ralph insisted that his son Derek bring his books, which Derek termed “a grotesque bummer.”) The Conrads have agreed to forward their mail until the Andersons return to Flint City, but printed on this envelope, in large letters, is DO NOT FORWARD HOLD FOR ARRIVAL. When Ralph opens the package, he finds a flash drive titled If It Bleeds, presumably referring to the old news trope which proclaims “If it bleeds, it leads.” The drive holds two items. One is a folder containing photographs and audio spectrograms. The other is a kind of report, or spoken-word diary, from Holly Gibney, with whom the detective shared a case that began in Oklahoma and ended in a Texas cave. It was a case that changed Ralph Anderson’s perception of reality forever. The final words of Holly’s audio report are from an entry dated December 19th, 2020. She sounds out of breath. I have done the best I can, Ralph, but it may not be enough. In spite of all my planning there’s a chance I won’t come out of this alive. If that’s the case, I need you to know how much your friendship has meant to me. If I do die, and you choose to continue what I’ve started, please be careful. You have a wife and son. [This is where the report ends.] December 8–9, 2020 1 Pineborough Township is a community not far from Pittsburgh. Although much of western Pennsylvania is farm country, Pineborough boasts a thriving downtown and just shy of 40,000 residents. As you enter the municipal city limits, you pass a gigantic bronze creation of dubious cultural merit (although the residents seem to like it). This is, according to the sign, THE WORLD’S LARGEST PINE CONE! There is a turnout for people who want to picnic and take pictures. Many do, some posing their younger children on the cone’s scales. (A small sign reads “No children over 50 lbs on the Pine Cone, please.”) On this day it’s too cold for picnics, the Porta John has been taken away for the season, and the bronze creation of dubious cultural merit is decked out in blinking Christmas lights. Not far beyond the giant cone, close to where the first traffic light marks the beginning of downtown Pineborough, is Albert Macready Middle School, where almost five hundred students attend grades seven, eight, and nine—no teachers’ strike here. At quarter to ten on the 8th, a Pennsy Speed Delivery truck pulls into the school’s circular drive. The delivery guy gets out and stands in front of his truck for a minute or two, consulting his clipboard. Then he pushes his glasses up on the bridge of his narrow nose, gives his little mustache a stroke, and goes around to the back. He rummages and retrieves a square package about three feet on all sides. He carries it easily enough, so it can’t be too heavy. At the door is an admonishment reading ALL SCHOOL VISITORS MUST BE ANNOUNCED AND APPROVED. The driver pushes the button on the intercom below the sign and Mrs. Keller, the school secretary, asks him how she can help. “Got a package here for something called . . .” He bends to look at the label. “Boy-howdy. Looks like Latin. It’s for the Nemo . . . Nemo Impune . . . or maybe you say Impuny . . .” Mrs. Keller helps him out. “The Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society, right?” On her video monitor, the delivery guy looks relieved. “If you say so. The last word is Society, for sure. What does it mean?” “Tell you inside.” Mrs. Keller is smiling as the delivery guy walks through the metal detector, enters the main office, and puts the package on the counter. It’s plastered with stickers, a few of Christmas trees and holly and Santas, many more of Scottish guys in kilts and Black Watch caps honking on bagpipes. “So,” he says, taking his reader off his belt and aiming it at the address label. “What’s Nemo Me Impuny when it’s home with its shoes off?” “The Scottish national motto,” she says. “It means No one provokes me with impunity. Mr. Griswold’s Current Affairs class has a partner school in Scotland, near Edinburgh. They email and Facebook and send pictures to each other and things like that. The Scottish kids root for the Pittsburgh Pirates, our kids for the Buckie Thistle Football Club. The Current Affairs kids watch the games on YouTube. Calling themselves the Nemo Me Impune Lacessit Society was probably Griswold’s idea.” She peers at the return address on the label. “Yup, Renhill Secondary School, that’s the one. Customs stamp and everything.” “Christmas presents, I bet,” the delivery guy says. “Gotta be. Because look here.” He tips the box up, showing her DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 18 DECEMBER, carefully printed and bookended by two more bagpipe-blowing Scots. Mrs. Keller nods. “That’s the last day of school before the Christmas break. God, I hope Griswold’s kids sent them something.” “What kind of presents do Scottish kids send American kids, do you think?” She laughs. “I just hope it’s not haggis.” “What’s that? More Latin?” “Sheep’s heart,” Mrs. Keller says. “Also liver and lungs. I know because my husband took me to Scotland for our tenth wedding anniversary.” The delivery guy pulls a face that makes her laugh some more, then asks her to sign the window in his reader gadget. Which she does. He wishes her a good day and a merry Christmas. She wishes him the same. When he’s gone, Mrs. Keller grabs a loitering kid (no hall pass, but Mrs. Keller lets it go this once) to take the box to the storage closet between the school library and the first-floor teachers’ room. She tells Mr. Griswold about the package during the lunch break. He says he’ll take it down to his classroom at three-thirty, after the last bell. Had he taken it at lunch, the carnage might have been even worse. The American Club at Renhill Secondary did not send the kids at Albert Macready a Christmas box. There is no such company as Pennsy Speed Delivery. The truck, later discovered abandoned, was stolen from a mall parking lot shortly after Thanksgiving. Mrs. Keller will excoriate herself for not noticing that the delivery guy wasn’t wearing a name tag, and when he aimed his reader at the package’s address label, it didn’t beep the way the ones used by the UPS and FedEx drivers did, because it was a fake. So was the customs stamp. The police will tell her anyone might have missed these things, and she has no reason to feel responsible. She does, nevertheless. The school’s security protocols—the cameras, the main door that’s locked when school is in session, the metal detector—are good, but they’re only machinery. She is (or was) the human part of the equation, the guardian at the gate, and she let the school down. She let the kids down. Mrs. Keller feels that the arm she lost will only be the beginning of her atonement. 2 It’s 2:45, and Holly Gibney is getting ready for an hour that always makes her happy. That may suggest certain low tastes, but she still enjoys her sixty minutes of weekday television viewing, and tries to insure that Finders Keepers (nice new digs for the detective agency, fifth floor of the Frederick Building downtown) is empty from three to four. Since she’s the boss—a thing she still finds hard to believe—that isn’t difficult. Today Pete Huntley, her partner in the business since Bill Hodges died, is out trying to track down a runaway at the city’s various homeless shelters. Jerome Robinson, taking a year off from Harvard while he tries to turn a forty-page sociology paper into what he hopes will be a book, is also working for Finders Keepers, although only part-time. This afternoon he’s south of the city, looking for a dognapped golden retriever named Lucky who may have been dumped at a Youngstown, Akron, or Canton dog impound when Lucky’s owners refused to pay the demanded ransom of ten thousand dollars. Of course the dog may just have been turned loose in the Ohio countryside—or killed—but maybe not. The dog’s name is a good omen, she told Jerome. She said she was hopeful. “You have Holly hope,” Jerome said, grinning. “That’s right,” she replied. “Now go on, Jerome. Fetch.” She’s got a good chance of being alone until it’s time to close the place up, but it’s only the hour between three and four that she really cares about. With one eye on the clock, she writes a starchy email to Andrew Edwards, a client who was worried that his partner was trying to hide business assets. Turns out the partner wasn’t, but Finders did the work and needs to be paid. This is our third billing, Holly writes. Please clear your account so we don’t have to turn this matter over to a collection agency. Holly finds she can be much more forceful when she can write “our” and “we” rather than “my” and “I.” She’s working on that, but as her grandfather was wont to say, “Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Philadelphia.” She sends off the email—whoosh—and shuts down her computer. She glances at the clock. Seven to three. She goes to the little fridge and takes out a can of Diet Pepsi. She puts it on one of the coasters the firm gives out (YOU LOSE, WE FIND, YOU WIN), then opens the top left drawer of her desk. In here, concealed by a pile of junk paperwork, is a bag of Snickers Bites. She takes out six, one for each commercial break during her show, unwraps them, and lines them up. Five to three. She turns on the television but mutes it. Maury Povich is currently strutting around and inciting his studio audience. She may have low tastes, but not that low. She considers eating one of her Snickers and tells herself to wait. Just as she is congratulating herself on her forbearance, she hears the elevator and rolls her eyes. It must be Pete. Jerome is way down south. It’s Pete, all right, and smiling. “Oh, happy day,” he says. “Somebody finally got Al to send a repairman—” “Al did nothing,” Holly said. “Jerome and I took care of it. It was just a glitch.” “How—” “There was a small hack involved.” She’s still got one eye on the clock: three minutes to three. “Jerome did that, but I could have.” Once more, honesty compels her. “At least I think so. Did you find the girl?” Pete gives her two thumbs up. “At Sunrise House. My first stop. Good news, she wants to go home. She called her mom, who’s coming to get her.” “Are you sure? Or is that what she told you?” “I was there when she made the call. I saw the tears. This is a good resolution, Holly. I just hope Mom’s not a deadbeat like that guy Edwards.” “Edwards will pay,” she says. “My heart is set on it.” On the TV, Maury has been replaced by a dancing bottle of diarrhea medicine. Which in Holly’s opinion is actually an improvement. “Now be quiet, Pete, my show is coming on in one minute.” “Oh my God, are you still watching that guy?” Holly gives him a forbidding look. “You are welcome to watch, Pete, but if you intend to make sarcastic remarks and spoil my enjoyment, I wish you would leave.” Be assertive, Allie Winters likes to tell her. Allie is her therapist. Holly saw another therapist briefly, a man who has written three books and many scholarly articles. This was for reasons apart from the demons that have chased her out of her teens. She needed to talk about more recent demons with Dr. Carl Morton. “No sarcastic remarks, roger that,” Pete says. “Man, I can’t believe you and Jerome bypassed Al. Took the bull by the horns, so to speak. You rock, Holly.” “I am trying to be more assertive.” “And you’re succeeding. Is there a Coke in the fridge?” “Only diet.” “Uck. That stuff tastes like—” “Hush.” It’s three o’clock. She unmutes the TV just as her show’s theme song starts up. It’s the Bobby Fuller Four singing “I Fought the Law.” A courtroom comes on the screen. The spectators—actually a studio audience, like Maury’s but less feral—are clapping along with the music, and the announcer intones, “Steer clear if you’re a louse, because John Law is in the house!” “All rise!” George the bailiff cries. The spectators get up, still clapping and swaying, as Judge John Law comes out of his chambers. He’s six-six (Holly knows this from People magazine, which she hides even better than her Snickers Bites) and bald as an eight-ball . . . although he’s more dark chocolate than black. He’s wearing voluminous robes that sway back and forth as he boogies his way to the bench. He grabs the gavel and tick-tocks it back and forth like a metronome, flashing a full deck of white teeth. “Oh my dear Jesus in a motorized wheelchair,” Pete says. Holly gives him her most forbidding look. Pete claps one hand over his mouth and waves the other one in surrender. “Siddown, siddown,” says Judge Law—actual name Gerald Lawson, Holly also knows this from People, but it’s close enough—and the spectators all sit down. Holly likes John Law because he’s straight from the shoulder, not all snarky and poopy like that Judge Judy. He gets to the point, just as Bill Hodges used to . . . although Judge John Law is no substitute, and not just because he’s a fictional character on a TV show. It’s been years since Bill passed away, but Holly still misses him. Everything she is, everything she has, she owes to Bill. There’s no one like him, although Ralph Anderson, her police detective friend from Oklahoma, comes close. “What have we got today, Georgie, my brother from another mother?” The spectators chortle at this. “Civil or criminal?” Holly knows it’s unlikely the same judge would handle both kinds of cases—and a new one every afternoon—but she doesn’t mind; the cases are always interesting. “Civil, Judge,” Georgie the bailiff says. “The plaintiff is Mrs. Rhoda Daniels. The defendant is her ex-husband, Richard Daniels. At issue is custody of the family dog, Bad Boy.” “A dog case,” Pete says. “Right up our alley.” Judge Law leans on his gavel, which is extra-long. “And is Bad Boy in the house, Georgie my man?” “He’s in a holding room, Judge.” “Very good, very good, and does Bad Boy bite, as his name might indicate?” “According to security, he seems to have a very sweet nature, Judge Law.” “Excellent. Let’s hear what the plaintiff has to say about Bad Boy.” At this point, the actor playing Rhoda Daniels enters the courtroom. In real life, Holly knows, the plaintiff and defendant would already be seated, but this is more dramatic. As Ms. Daniels sways down the center aisle in a dress that’s too tight and heels that are too high, the announcer says, “We’ll return to Judge Law’s courtroom in just a minute.” An ad for death insurance comes on, and Holly pops her first Snickers Bite into her mouth. “Don’t suppose I could have one of those, could I?” Pete asks. “Aren’t you supposed to be on a diet?” “I get low sugar at this time of day.” Holly opens her desk drawer—reluctantly—but before she can get to the candy bag, the old lady worrying about how she can pay her husband’s funeral expenses is replaced by a graphic that says BREAKING NEWS. This is followed by Lester Holt, and Holly knows right away it’s going to be serious. Lester Holt is the network’s big gun. Not another 9/11, she thinks every time something like this happens. Please God, not another 9/11 and not nuclear. Lester says, “We’re interrupting your regularly scheduled programming to bring you news of a large explosion at a middle school in Pineborough, Pennsylvania, a town about forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. There are reports of numerous casualties, many of them children.” “Oh my God,” Holly says. She puts the hand that was in the drawer over her mouth. “These reports are so far unconfirmed, I want to emphasize that. I think . . .” Lester puts a hand to his ear, listens. “Yes, okay. Chet Ondowsky, from our Pittsburgh affiliate, is on the scene. Chet, can you hear me?” “Yes,” a voice says. “Yes, I can, Lester.” “What can you tell us, Chet?” The picture switches away from Lester Holt to a middle-aged guy with what Holly thinks of as a local news face: not handsome enough to be a major market anchor, but presentable. Except the knot of his tie is crooked, there’s no makeup to cover the mole beside his mouth, and his hair is mussy, as if he didn’t have time to comb it. “What’s that he’s standing beside?” Pete asks. “I don’t know,” Holly says. “Hush.” “Looks sort of like a giant pine co—” “Hush!” Holly could care less about the giant pine cone, or Chet Ondowsky’s mole and mussed-up hair; her attention is fixed on the two ambulances that go screaming past behind him, nose to tail with their lights flashing. Casualties, she thinks. Numerous casualties, many of them children. “Lester, what I can tell you is that there are almost certainly at least seventeen dead here at Albert Macready Middle School, and many more injured. This comes from a county sheriff’s deputy who asked not to be identified by name. The explosive device may have been in the main office, or a nearby storage room. If you look over there . . .” He points, and the camera obediently follows his finger. At first the picture is blurry, but when the cameraman steadies and zooms, Holly can see a large hole has been blown in the side of the building. Bricks scatter across the lawn in a corona. And as she’s taking this in—with millions of others, probably—a man in a yellow vest emerges from the hole with something in his arms. A small something wearing sneakers. No, one sneaker. The other has apparently been torn off in the blast. The camera returns to the correspondent and catches him straightening his tie. “The Sheriff’s Department will undoubtedly be holding a press conference at some point, but right now informing the public is the least of their concerns. Parents have already started to gather . . . ma’am? Ma’am, can I speak to you for just a moment? Chet Ondowsky, WPEN, Channel 11.” The woman who comes into the shot is vastly overweight. She has arrived at the school without a coat, and her flower print housedress billows around her like a caftan. Her face is dead pale except for bright spots of red on her cheeks, her hair is disarrayed enough to make Ondowsky’s mussy ’do look neat, her plump cheeks glisten with tears. They shouldn’t be showing this, Holly thinks, and I shouldn’t be watching it. But they are, and I am. “Ma’am, do you have a child who attends Albert Macready?” “My son and daughter both do,” she says, and grabs Ondowsky’s arm. “Are they okay? Do you know that, sir? Irene and David Vernon. David’s in the seventh grade. Irene’s in the ninth. We call Irene Deenie. Do you know if they are okay?” “I don’t, Mrs. Vernon,” Ondowsky says. “I think you should talk to one of the deputies, over where they’re setting up those sawhorses.” “Thank you, sir, thank you. Pray for my kids!” “I will,” Ondowsky says as she rushes off, a woman who will be very lucky to survive the day without having some sort of cardiac episode . . . although Holly guesses that right now her heart is the least of her concerns. Right now her heart is with David and Irene, also known as Deenie. Ondowsky turns back to the camera. “Everyone in America will be praying for the Vernon children, and all the children who were attending Albert Macready Middle School today. According to the information I have now—it’s sketchy, and this could change—the explosion occurred at about two-fifteen, an hour ago, and was strong enough to shatter windows a mile away. The glass . . . Fred, can you get a shot of this pine cone?” “There, I knew it was a pine cone,” Pete says. He’s leaning forward, eyes glued to the television. Fred the camera guy moves in, and on the pine cone’s petals, or leaves, or whatever you called them, Holly can see shards of broken glass. One actually appears to have blood on it, although she can hope it’s just a passing reflection cast by the lights on one of the ambulances. Lester Holt: “Chet, that’s horrible. Just awful.” The camera pulls back and returns to Ondowsky. “Yes, it is. This is a horrible scene. Lester, I want to see if . . .” A helicopter with a red cross and MERCY HOSPITAL stenciled on the side is landing in the street. Chet Ondowsky’s hair swirls in the wash of the rotors, and he raises his voice to be heard. “I want to see if I can do anything to help! This is terrible, just a terrible tragedy! Back to you in New York!” Lester Holt returns, looking upset. “Be safe, Chet. Folks, we’re going to return you to your regularly scheduled programming, but we’ll continue to update you on this developing situation at NBC Breaking News on your—” Holly uses the remote and kills the TV. She has lost her taste for make-believe justice, at least for today. She keeps thinking of that limp form in the arms of the man wearing the yellow vest. One shoe off, one shoe on, she thinks. Deedle-deedle-dumpling, my son John. Will she watch the news tonight? She supposes she will. Won’t want to, but won’t be able to help herself. She’ll have to know how many casualties. And how many are children. Pete surprises her by taking her hand. Usually she still doesn’t like to be touched, but right now his hand feels good holding hers. “I want you to remember something,” he says. She turns to him. Pete is grave. “You and Bill stopped something much worse than this from happening,” he says. “That crackpot fuck Brady Hartsfield could have killed hundreds at the rock concert he tried to blow up. Maybe thousands.” “And Jerome,” she says in a low voice. “Jerome was there, too.” “Yep. You, Bill, and Jerome. The Three Musketeers. That you could stop. And did. But stopping this one—” Pete nods to the TV. “That was someone else’s responsibility.” 3 At seven o’clock Holly is still in the office, going over invoices that don’t really need her attention. She managed to resist turning on the office TV and watching Lester Holt at six-thirty, but she doesn’t want to go home just yet. That morning she had been looking forward to a nice veggie dinner from Mr. Chow, which she would eat while watching Pretty Poison, a vastly overlooked thriller from 1968 starring Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld, but tonight she doesn’t want poison, pretty or otherwise. She has been poisoned by the news from Pennsylvania, and still might not be able to resist turning on CNN. That would gift her with hours of tossing and turning until two or even three in the morning. Like most people in the media-soaked twenty-first century, Holly has become inured to the violence men (it’s still mostly men) do to each other in the name of religion or politics—those ghosts—but what happened at that suburban middle school is too much like what almost happened at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex, where Brady Hartsfield tried to blow up a few thousand kids, and what did happen at City Center, where he plowed a Mercedes sedan into a crowd of job-seekers, killing . . . she doesn’t remember how many. She doesn’t want to remember. She is putting away the files—she has to go home sometime, after all—when she hears the elevator again. She waits to see if it will go past the fifth floor, but it stops. Probably Jerome, but she still opens the second drawer of her desk and loosely grips the can there. It has two buttons. One blares an earsplitting horn. The other dispenses pepper spray. It’s him. She lets go of the IntruderGuard and closes the drawer. She marvels (and not for the first time since he came back from Harvard) at how tall and handsome he’s become. She dislikes that fur around his mouth, what he calls “the goat,” but would never tell him so. Tonight his usual energetic walk is slow and a little slumped. He gives her a perfunctory “Yo, Hollyberry,” and drops into the chair that in business hours is reserved for clients. Usually she would admonish him about how much she dislikes that childish nickname—it’s their form of call-and-response—but not tonight. They are friends, and because she’s a person who has never had many, Holly tries her best to deserve the ones she has. “You look very tired.” “Long drive. Heard the news about the school? It’s all over the sat radio.” “I was watching John Law when they broke in. Since then I’ve been avoiding it. How bad?” “They’re saying twenty-seven dead so far, twenty-three of them kids between twelve and fourteen. But it’ll go higher. There are still a few kids and two teachers they haven’t been able to account for, and a dozen or so in critical condition. It’s worse than Parkland. Make you think of Brady Hartsfield?” “Of course.” “Yeah, me too. The ones he got at City Center and the ones he could have gotten if we’d been just a few minutes slower that night at the ’Round Here concert. I try not to think about that, tell myself we won that one, because when my mind goes to it I get the willies.” Holly knows all about the willies. She has them often. Jerome rubs a hand slowly down one cheek and in the quiet she can hear the scritch-scritch of his fingers on the day’s new bristles. “Sophomore year at Harvard I took a philosophy course. Did I ever mention that to you?” Holly shakes her head. “It was called—” Jerome makes finger-quotes. “—‘The Problem of Evil.’ In it, we talked a lot about concepts called inside evil and outside evil. We . . . Holly, you okay?” “Yes,” she says, and she is . . . but at the mention of outside evil, her mind immediately turns to the monster she and Ralph tracked to his final lair. The monster had gone under many names and worn many faces, but she had always thought of him simply as the outsider, and the outsider had been as evil as they come. She’s never told Jerome about what happened in the cave known as the Marysville Hole, although she supposes he knows something pretty dire went on there—a lot more than made it into the newspapers. He’s looking at her uncertainly. “Go on,” she tells him. “This is very interesting to me.” It’s the truth. “Well . . . the class consensus was there’s outside evil if you believe in outside good—” “God,” Holly says. “Yes. Then you can believe there really are demons, and exorcism is a valid response to them, there really are malevolent spirits—” “Ghosts,” Holly says. “Right. Not to mention curses that really work, and witches, and dybbuks, and who knows what else. But in college, all that stuff pretty much gets laughed out of court. God Himself mostly gets laughed out of court.” “Or Herself,” Holly says primly. “Yeah, whatever, if God doesn’t exist, I guess the pronouns don’t matter. So that leaves inside evil. Moron stuff. Guys who beat their children to death, serial killers like Brady fucking Hartsfield, ethnic cleansing, genocide, 9/11, mass shootings, terrorist attacks like the one today.” “Is that what they’re saying?” Holly asks. “A terrorist attack, maybe ISIS?” “That’s what they’re assuming, but no one’s claimed responsibility yet.” Now his other hand on his other cheek, scritch-scritch, and are those tears in Jerome’s eyes? She thinks they are, and if he cries, she will, too, she won’t be able to help it. Sadness is catching, and how poopy is that? “But see, here’s the deal about inside and outside evil, Holly—I don’t think there’s any difference. Do you?” She considers everything she knows, and everything she’s been through with this young man, and Bill, and Ralph Anderson. “No,” she says. “I don’t.” “I think it’s a bird,” Jerome says. “A big bird, all frowsy and frosty gray. It flies here, there, and everywhere. It flew into Brady Hartsfield’s head. It flew into the head of the guy who shot all those people in Las Vegas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, they got the bird. Hitler. Pol Pot. It flies into their heads, and when the wetwork’s done, it flies away again. I’d like to catch that bird.” He clenches his hands and looks at her and yes, those are tears. “Catch it and wring its fucking neck.” Holly comes around the desk, kneels beside him, and puts her arms around him. It’s a clumsy hug with him sitting in the chair, but it does the job. The dam breaks. When he speaks against her cheek, she feels the scratch of his stubble. “The dog’s dead.” “What?” She can barely make out what he’s saying through his sobs. “Lucky. The golden. When whoever stole him didn’t get the ransom, the bastard cut him open and threw him in a ditch. Somebody spotted him—still alive, barely—and took him to the Ebert Animal Hospital in Youngstown. Where he lived for maybe half an hour. Nothing they could do. Not so lucky after all, huh?” “All right,” Holly says, patting his back. Her own tears are flowing, and there’s snot, too. She can feel it running out of her nose. Oough. “All right, Jerome. It’s okay.” “It’s not. You know it’s not.” He pulls back and looks at her, cheeks wet and shining, goatee damp. “Cut that nice dog’s belly open, and threw him in the ditch with his intestines hanging out, and you know what happened then?” Holly knows but shakes her head. “The bird flew away.” He wipes his sleeve across his eyes. “Now it’s in someone else’s head, it’s better than ever, and on we fucking go.” 4 Just before ten o’clock, Holly gives up the book she’s trying to read and turns on the TV. She takes a look at the talking heads on CNN, but can’t bear their chatter. Hard news is what she wants. She switches to NBC, where a graphic, complete with grim music, reads SPECIAL REPORT: TRAGEDY IN PENNSYLVANIA. Andrea Mitchell is now anchoring in New York. She begins by telling America that the president has tweeted his “thoughts and prayers,” as he does after each of these horror shows: Pulse, Las Vegas, Parkland. This meaningless twaddle is followed by the updated score: thirty-one dead, seventy-three (oh God, so many) wounded, nine in critical condition. If Jerome was right, that means at least three of the criticals have died. “Two terrorist organizations, Houthi Jihad and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, have claimed responsibility for the bombing,” Mitchell says, “but sources in the State Department say neither claim is credible. They are leaning toward the idea that the bombing may have been a lone-wolf attack, similar to that perpetrated by Timothy McVeigh, who set off a huge blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. That explosion took a hundred and sixty-eight lives.” Many of those also children, Holly thinks. Killing children for God, or ideology, or both—no hell could be hot enough for those who’d do such things. She thinks of Jerome’s frosty gray bird. “The man who delivered the bomb was photographed by a security camera when he buzzed for entry,” Mitchell continues. “We are going to put his picture up for the next thirty seconds. Look closely, and if you recognize him, call the number on your screen. There is a reward of two hundred thousand dollars for his arrest and subsequent conviction.” The picture comes up. It’s color, and clear as a bell. It’s not perfect because the camera is positioned above the door and the man is looking straight ahead, but it’s pretty good. Holly leans forward, all her formidable job skills—some that were always innate, some honed during her work with Bill Hodges—kicking in. The guy is either Caucasian with a tan (not likely at this time of year but not impossible), a light-skinned Latino, a Middle Easterner, or possibly wearing makeup. Holly opts for Caucasian and makeup. She puts his age as mid-forties. He’s wearing specs with gold frames. His black mustache is small and neatly trimmed. His hair, also black, is short. She can see this because he’s not wearing a cap, which would have obscured more of his face. Bold son of a gun, Holly thinks. He knew there would be cameras, he knew there would be pictures, and he didn’t care. “Not a son of a gun,” she says, still staring. Recording every feature. Not because this is her case, but because it’s her nature. “He’s a son of a bitch, is what he is.” Back to Andrea Mitchell. “If you know him, call the number on the screen, and do it right away. Now we’re going to take you to the Macready Middle School and our man on the scene. Chet, are you still there?” He is, standing in a pool of bright light thrown by the camera. More bright lights are shining on the middle school’s wounded side; each tumbled brick casts its own sharp shadow. Generators are roaring. People in uniform rush here and there, shouting and talking into mikes. Holly sees FBI on some of the jackets, ATF on others. There’s a crew in white Tyvek body suits. Yellow crime scene tape flutters. There is a sense of controlled chaos. At least Holly hopes it’s controlled. Someone must be in charge, maybe in the Winnebago she can see at the far left of the shot. Lester Holt is presumably at home, watching this in his pj’s and slippers, but Chet Ondowsky is still going. A regular Energizer Bunny is Mr. Ondowsky, and Holly can understand that. This is probably the biggest story he’ll ever cover, he was in on it almost from the start, and he’s chasing it for all he’s worth. He’s still wearing his suit jacket, which was probably okay when he got to the site, but now the temperature has dropped. She can see his breath, and she’s pretty sure he’s shivering. Someone give him something warmer, for heaven’s sake, Holly thinks. A parka, or even a sweatshirt. The suit jacket will have to be thrown out. It’s smeared with brick dust and torn in a couple of places, sleeve and pocket. The hand holding the mike is also smeared with brick dust, and something else. Blood? Holly thinks it is. And the streak on his cheek, that’s blood, too. “Chet?” Andrea Mitchell’s disembodied voice. “Are you there?” The hand not holding the mike goes to his earpiece, and Holly sees there are Band-Aids on two of the fingers. “Yes, I’m here.” He faces the camera. “This is Chet Ondowsky, reporting from the bombing site at Albert Macready Middle School in Pineborough, Pennsylvania. This ordinarily peaceful school was rocked by an explosion of enormous strength sometime not long after two o’clock this afternoon—” Andrea Mitchell appears on a split screen. “Chet, we understand from a source at Homeland Security that the explosion happened at two-nineteen P.M. I don’t know how the authorities can pinpoint the time that exactly, but apparently they can.” “Yes,” Chet says, sounding a little distracted, and Holly thinks how tired he must be. And will he be able to sleep tonight? She guesses not. “Yes, that sounds just about right. As you can see, Andrea, the search for victims is winding down, but the forensic work is just beginning. There will be more personnel on the scene by daybreak, and—” “Excuse me, Chet, but you took part in the search yourself, is that right?” “Yes, Andrea, we all pitched in. Townspeople, some of them parents. Also Alison Greer and Tim Witchick from KDKA, Donna Forbes from WPCW, and Bill Larson from—” “Yes, but I’m hearing you pulled two children from the ruins yourself, Chet.” He doesn’t bother looking falsely modest and aw-shucks; Holly awards him points for that. He keeps it on a reporting level. “That’s correct, Andrea. I heard one of them moaning and saw the other. A girl and a boy. I know the boy’s name, Norman Fredericks. The girl . . .” He wets his lips. The mike in his hand trembles, and Holly thinks not just from the cold. “The girl was in bad shape. She was . . . calling for her mother.” Andrea Mitchell looks stricken. “Chet, that’s awful.” It is. Too awful for Holly. She picks up the remote to kill the feed—she has the salient facts, more than she has any use for—and then hesitates. It’s the torn pocket she’s looking at. Maybe torn while Ondowsky was searching for victims, but if he’s Jewish, it might have been done on purpose. It might have been keriah, the rending of garments after a death and the symbolic exposure of a wounded heart. She guesses that is the truth of that torn pocket. It is what she wants to believe. 5 The sleeplessness she expected doesn’t happen; Holly drops off within a matter of minutes. Perhaps crying with Jerome let out some of the poison the news from Pennsylvania had injected in her. Giving comfort and receiving it. As she slips away, she thinks she should talk about that with Allie Winters at their next session. She wakes sometime deep in the early hours of December 9th, thinking about the correspondent, Ondowsky. Something about him—what? How tired he looked? The scratches and brick dust on his hands? The torn pocket? That, she thinks. It must have been. Maybe I was dreaming about it. She mutters briefly into the dark, a kind of prayer. “I miss you, Bill. I’m taking my Lexapro and I’m not smoking.” Then she’s out and doesn’t wake up until the alarm goes at 6 A.M.