The Color Master

The Fake Nazi

There was an old man in Germany who thought he was a Nazi. He turned himself in to a small court in a town near Nuremberg, and said, “Restart the trials; I should be punished for what I have done.” He seemed to be around the right age, and his name was a fairly common German name—Hoefler—and his first name even more common—Hans—but still, they had records and looked up as many Hans Hoeflers as they could and cross-referenced and found nothing. “Where were you?” they asked him repeatedly. He lowered his eyes. “I was in the room for all of it,” he told them. “What room?” they asked. “The ROOM,” he said. They raised their eyebrows. “Of which room are you speaking?” they said. “There were many.”

“I heard the planning,” he said. “I popped the Zyklon B. I shot rows and rows of people.”

The judge coughed into his fist. Hans broke down crying, begging for forgiveness, and the secretary found herself resisting the urge to pat him on the head, which seemed like the wrong idea altogether. They found a photo of him at the time, sitting with small children in the park as a babysitter for the neighbors; turned out he was then only a child himself, and would never have been allowed in any “room” anyway. He was an old man by the time he showed up at the court, and at his insistence, two clerks who had some extra time on their hands visited his apartment, where they found his jacket pockets stuffed with ticket stubs, and videos, all around his television, of every Nazi movie that one could ever rent or see. When they played one titled The Room, one of the actors delivered Hans’s exact same line about the room. His TV didn’t even work except to show these videos. He owned action flicks, the comic-book film versions, Holocaust epics, documentaries, stories of one regular man in times of horror, and stories of one extraordinary man in times of horror. He could’ve opened a specialized movie store.

They filed their report and sent him home. “You’re just a regular man,” they told him. “Congratulations.”

This Hoefler, he stayed away for a month or so, but then he brought himself back to the court again. And again. He became their regular monthly visitor. The judge enjoyed seeing him, but he was unsure what to do with him, so he telephoned his niece, who was studying psychology and had talked about needing someone to test, and she in turn set up a mock Milgram obedience test for Hans, for her Ethics and History class.

She put Hans in a room in the classic situation, in which he had to shock a victim, played by an actor, with a false electrical current, while a pretend supervisor claimed to assume responsibility for the victim’s screams of pain. She employed various friends from graduate school—the Psychology and Theatre Departments—and in truth, it was one of their most fun collaborations, and led to a very vital discussion the following week about grandparents. The test helped explain why cruelty was so easy to indulge if responsibility was claimed by someone else, but, caught off guard, on a regular workday, as his regular self, Hans Hoefler refused to use the shocking equipment, and he walked out, shaking his head, blinking as if he’d been stunned himself. When he returned to the court, pale as ever, the judge hailed his clerk, who called his niece, who drove over right away and ran in with the video to show Hans the recording of his own decency. Of his own interior strength. It was a slow afternoon, and everyone in the court office stood around the TV, watching him watch, hopeful. “You passed!” crowed the clerk.

Hans, as if deaf, made no sound.

“This is good, Hans,” the stout judge said kindly, the judge who, by then, had grown a strong affection for Hans Hoefler; after seeing criminal after criminal denying his crime, screwing up his or her face and saying, It is not me, I would never do such a thing, here was Hans, scooping up what was not his and cradling it like a child. Hans Hoefler, with his heavy sad eyes, who reminded the judge somewhat of his own father, dead the previous year of complications from a liver transplant.

From his viewing seat in the jury box, Hans gripped the wooden pew and said nothing as he watched himself with no expression on his face. They found him a week later, hanging from a rope in his dingy Munich apartment, with a short note propped on the dresser saying he had to die for what he had done to the Jews, to the Gypsies, to the Poles. He had piles of writing on his desk, next to the note, titled, in careful calligraphy: One Nazi’s Confessions. In cramped handwriting, rigid black ink, Hans had written pages upon pages; he had invented instances, written of places and times that did not exist and heinous acts that had never happened. He was a revisionist but backwards, adding horrors instead of denying them, inserting himself wrongly into true events. He used familiar names and terms—Kristallnacht, Dachau, the “sweet smell”—but the details he used otherwise were often shockingly wrong. He wrote of a hurricane at Dachau. He said in Auschwitz the guards were all named Hans, which seemed like a joke, except that all who knew Hans knew his sense of humor was limited. Was he making fun of us? asked the judge, scratching his head. Of history? It’s not funny, he said, and his secretary said no, she didn’t think so, though she could not explain it either. Hans said that he had rounded up Jews and Gypsies in a church and burned them inside and he could not forgive himself for shooting the ones that flew out the window in an attempt to escape. But someone noted that this was awfully close to the plot of the Wiesenthal classic on forgiveness, The Sunflower, and that that Nazi in question was already named. It took ten minutes to find The Sunflower on Hans’s bookshelf, dog-eared to a beige softness.

Hans’s notes were bound and filed in the judge’s paperwork, the finishing chapter of the Hoefler saga, which had been ongoing for more than four years by that point. “Case closed,” said the judge, with no small pang of regret for having asked his niece to do the Milgram study. He had known that Hans would walk out of the test. He’d been sure of it. But if he’d known that, he should have also known that that kind of empirical evidence on videotape might clash too intensely with Hans’s own image of himself as a murderer, which then might unsettle him enough to lead to something worse, but the judge was never a very good chess player and could not think nine steps ahead. It was tiring and difficult, this judge business.

Since Hans had no friends at that stage of his life, his funeral was attended only by the staff of the court. “If only the rest could be so responsible,” said the auburn-haired secretary to the judge’s clerk as they drank cups of stiff coffee afterward, standing in the coatroom, still in their coats. The world, they agreed, needed more Hans Hoeflers. “Better to commit suicide than kill someone else,” they suggested, but the words sat flat in their mouths as they worked that day. Like soda, unfizzed.

Even if it was true, there was something despicable about valuing Hans’s concave heart, and by the end of the day, the judge’s clerk found herself spurning Hans, and flicking him from her mind like a bug.

That auburn-haired secretary did not flick him from her mind; instead, she drew him closer inside it. She became obsessed with what had been wrong with Hans. Why hang himself? Why all the guards named his name? What would cause a person to distort so profoundly? She was about thirty years old, and her life had fallen into predictability, and so these thoughts of Hans would not leave her mind, which was as open as a bowl, ready to receive them.

She dreamed of him all the time, walking through the streets with a cane like her father’s, trailed by a tangle of scruffy dogs. Her father, a man so quiet and unobtrusive he often had been handed people’s plates and trash—even in public, even out dining. There was a generation of German men who, in response to what history had revealed, refused to tolerate any sign of internal aggression. Her father had never raised his voice. He would not even laugh loudly. He said, “I’m sorry,” when people bumped into him on the street, as if his presence on the sidewalk deserved apology, for had he not been there in the first place, he reasoned, the person would have had no one to bump into. “I am a mouse, a mouse,” he had whispered to her as he was dying. The problem was that being a mouse sometimes made people irritable, and many raised their voices in her father’s presence because he spoke so softly it was aggravating. “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” her mother said, often. “SPEAK LOUDER, MAN!” While he was dying, which took a few days, the nurse kept leaving her mystery novel on his stomach, along with her purse, and sometimes her snack, so when the secretary visited he was covered with objects, breathing thinly and carefully so as not to shake anything off.

Hans joined her father’s ghost-space easily. The two men walked through her dreams together, unable to speak, shoulders folding in, followed by dogs. She couldn’t stop thinking about them. Once, she had yelled at her mother about something small, like clothes, or the telephone, and her father had stumbled in, weeping and whispering, “Stop it!” His exclamation point came in the form of a loud hush, like a radiator expelling heat. She and her mother had looked over, startled. They both liked fighting. It felt like a good workout, somewhat aerobic. German women had a different legacy to manage.

Through leads on her computer and in the phone book, the secretary tried to find living Hoefler relatives, but no one returned her phone calls. Finally, through an advertisement she placed on the Internet, she was able to track down a former girlfriend of Hans’s, from their courtship in the 1950s, when Germany was split in half like a bread roll; when the Ottoman Empire could still occasionally be found on globes in thirdhand trinket shops.

The secretary walked up a dark stairway, curling around to the back of the stone building. The walls smelled of wine, and mold.

“The curious thing about Hans,” said the woman, after introductions had been made and she was now curled on her sofa with bubbly water in a green glass on a coaster of cork, “is that he would not let me perform what many men enjoyed. That is,” she said, petting the long-haired white cat who’d hopped onto her lap, “what men often request. I assume you know what I mean?”

The secretary thought of several things. Which was it? The older woman leaned in. “With the mouth,” she whispered, tapping her chin with a long red fingernail. “Just that.

“He never allowed it. He did let me once, and then he insisted on serving me repeatedly for days. It was very pleasant for me,” she said. “Were you similarly treated? You’re awfully young.”

The secretary frowned. “No,” she said. “He was only an acquaintance.”

“Is he dead?”

The secretary picked at the old chocolates in a silver dish between them, their corners whitened and chalky with time. She removed one and took a cautious bite. Crystallized maple sugar inside.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. I should’ve said so earlier.”

The cat closed its eyes, and no one took a sip of anything, and the sugar was sticky and too sweet in the secretary’s mouth.

The older woman reached out a hand and put it on the secretary’s elbow. It was a light touch, but there was something else in it. “Let me show you something,” she said. She lifted the cat onto her shoulder and led the younger woman into her bedroom, which smelled musty, windows shut forever, and even with the lamp lit, had an undefeatable dimness. No direct sunlight, only the reflection of it off the building’s bricks next door. It made the secretary instantly weary.

The older woman knelt, and from a drawer next to her bed removed a small gold locket. Inside was a lock of hair.

“It’s my hair,” she said. “Not Hans’s. I soaked it in a deadly poison. Hair is porous. Had I needed to, I would’ve eaten it and died. We all had to have a plan.”

“How old were you? Can a person eat hair?” asked the secretary, who stood awkwardly by the bed, and felt that she was being lied to.

“Of course,” said the woman, dangling the hair over her mouth. “You young people don’t understand. You think all poison is in a bottle. I was a very bright child.”

“I am trying,” said the secretary, “it’s just—”

“Look,” said the woman, waving the hair. “Look, yes?”

And because she knew she was supposed to, the secretary stepped up and pushed down the older woman’s hand, though she was tempted to let the woman eat the hair, to call the bluff, to shut down the opera. By her estimation, the woman had probably been five years old during the height of the war. Listening to panicked voices in the next room. The majority of the living memories now owned by then-children.

The older woman began laughing; her shirt had lost its top button, purposefully or not, and you could see her skin under the luminous blouse, the settled wrinkles, the breasts, which struck the secretary as almost intolerably lonely.

“Hans was lousy,” said the woman, slipping the hair back into the locket. “He was lousy and he was wonderful. He was lousy, he was wonderful, and he was a self-centered bastard.”

She clipped the locket shut and announced that the secretary was no fun. “You should be wearing more textures,” she suggested. “Your face is too plain for standard cotton.” She stood and rummaged in her closet and returned with a brightly colored silk-and-sheep’s-wool scarf, tasseled at the ends. “Wear it,” she said. The secretary waved her hand. “Wear it,” said the woman. The secretary opened her mouth to protest, and the woman said: “Put it on, or I will call the police and tell them that you broke into my apartment.”

So it was that the secretary left the building, her coppery hair wrapped in the burgundy, ochre, and forest-green scarf, which did become her small precise features, and which did protect against the cold creeping in from the north in a streamy wind. She knew nothing new about Hans except that he did not invite fellatio when he was a young man and he had loved a woman as flamboyant in her inventions as he. They both had been so young. It said very little to her. Now she had a new scarf and a strange feeling in her hands and thoughts, as if the poison had somehow crept from the woman’s lock of hair into her, and so, when she was suitably far away, she found the first person who looked cold, handed her the scarf, and said take it, and that person, whoever it was, took it, because it was gorgeous, and because it was warm.

The secretary’s own family had survived the war, but barely. All her men had slotted into different ages than were required. They did not have to fight; they were either too old or too young. Her grandfather, her father, her brother, her first love. This generational split freed them all from making any of the torturous decisions that Hans Hoefler had made for himself regardless. They formed their identities in the negative space instead.

The judge’s secretary was typing one day, details about a couple out walking who had been robbed at gunpoint, a fairly unusual crime for these quiet streets, when she received a call. “I hear you want information on Hoefler,” a man’s voice said.

She held her fingers above the keyboard, as if typing would scare off the voice. “Yes,” she said. “Please.”

“Meet me at the cemetery,” he told her. “Twenty minutes.”

“Which cemetery?” she asked, but she knew as soon as she said it, and the man had hung up. It was only a five-minute walk, and Hans was buried there.

She finished up the tail end of the report, swallowed herself inside her coat, and walked the ten blocks east, past the pawn shop and the bakery that specialized in crusty rolls soaked in chicken fat and sesame seeds. When she arrived at Hans’s grave, apprehensive, holding out her sharpest key just in case, she saw from a distance a man in a wheelchair with no hair on his head, wheeling past the headstones over the small green hills. She lowered the key. The air was chilly but clear, a good day to be outside. As the man drew closer, she saw he had no eyebrows, no eyelashes, and that he looked over seventy. She watched him navigate the bumps of grass. He did not look like the kind of man who would appreciate an offer of help.

Nearby stood other mourners, and even through the cold, she could smell the hints of the first dandelion tufts pushing their way to the surface. The man wheeled right up to Hans’s headstone and nodded at her. His face was geometrically compelling, with its triangular cheekbones and rectangular forehead. She waited for him to speak.

The man thanked her for meeting him. He said he was Hoefler’s brother. His older brother. He inquired after her interest and she explained that it was not professional. “I just think about him,” she said. “I’m not sure why.”

The man in the wheelchair sniffed in assent. “Good,” he said. “Then I would like you to know a few things.” He dusted his hands on the wheels of his chair, a gesture she could tell he did often. He kept his gaze on the headstone.

“When I was thirteen and Hans nine,” he began, in a voice louder than was necessary, “I told him my mind was stronger than his. We had been fighting often, or I had been fighting and he had been silent, and I was tired of it, so I sat him down and told him to try to hurt me with his thoughts. He was not a violent young man, and I could see he was uncomfortable, but he tended to do anything I asked, and he stared at me willingly. Even then, he had eyes very big and dark and more like a dog’s than a man’s. You recall?” He glanced up and the secretary nodded. She recalled very well, she said.

“You were his lover?” the man asked, lips harsh.

For the second time that month, the woman shook her head. “I was really only a distant acquaintance,” she said.

“To be stared at by Hans,” the man continued, “made you want to feed him soup, not harm him. Hans thought for a long period of time, and finally took a breath and said he wished I would not always have the first glass of juice. I told him that was an idiotic curse. Almost embarrassing. Just who was this brother of mine, so shiftless in his negativity? I’d been the clear favorite of both our parents and I’d gotten all the extra gifts and sweets. I’d never caught Hans looking at me with any kind of hatred or envy, something I found disconcerting. He tried again, and said that perhaps one day I might lose all the hot water while I was inside the shower, covered with soap. I believe then I reached out and hit him. ‘Come on, brother!’ I said. ‘Curse me! Curse me flat out!’ ”

The man shifted in his chair. His eyes flicked over to the woman, but not long enough to register an expression.

“Well,” he said, “something inside the combination of my contempt and that slap did alter Hans a bit, did snap him into a new place. He had always been obedient, and he continued to stare with that wet Hans gaze, but when he finally spoke, he said, in a quieter voice, that he might wish I had no legs. I was by then already a very fine and fast runner in school. He said Mother would not like me so well without legs, which, I must add as a side note, turned out, unfortunately, to be true. ‘Good one, Hans!’ I told him, encouragingly. ‘More!’ He leaned closer and in a whisper said that he wished that all my hair would fall out, as we’d just seen a horror film in which the vampire’s eldest child, the preferred child, loses all its hair and becomes a human snake and eats its father. Also, I had the better hair, the hair all the relatives commented upon. Such lustrous hair, too good for a boy, they all said, about my eyelashes too.”

The man in the wheelchair blinked, reptilian.

“I was—to be frank—delighted,” he said, leaning in. “Now, this was the sort of conversation I felt rivalrous brothers should have, and I suppose I felt guilty for all the preferential treatment I’d received, so it seemed better to get it all out in the open. I couldn’t tell if Hans had cursed me because he really felt it or just to please me, but I didn’t care. Of course, I was not to be outdone, and told him that he would turn scaly and dry up like a desert, that he would lose his hearing on the day of his piano recital, and forget how to speak at a crucial moment in his life, whenever that was. I said to him, ‘One day you will open your mouth when it is imperative that you use it, and nothing will come out.’ We were sitting in the room off of the kitchen; it was a small, dark hallway that was always warm from the heating vent, and smelled of nuts, though no one ate nuts in our home. We always loved sitting there. I was fidgety with pleasure. Hans nodded, digesting my curses. I asked for one more. His eyes began to glaze over, and he told me, as if in a trance, that Germany would collapse with me inside it, and I would be legless, dragging my body through the burning streets of a formerly beautiful city, and I would call and call and no one would come, and how I would find my darling wife dead in the flames.

“He and I sat silent then, until he shook himself alert.

“ ‘Will that do?’ Hans asked, smiling a little shyly at me.”

The man raised his forehead where his eyebrows would be.

“Well, he was quite a bit happier for a while after that,” the man said. “It was probably the longest I’d spoken with him in a number of months. It’s good for brothers to do a little cursing every now and then. Good to have some room to vent. All was well until, of course, the curses started to come true. The final ones didn’t. I was married for ten years, later, yes, but she left me because she fell in love with a younger man. I had no darling wife, dead. I was not present at any bombing.

“But the rest did,” he said. “We said so many curses that day, and the world was in such tumult that the odds were high that something would stick. None stuck to him; most did to me. Now, I knew an incident with a train took my legs, not Hans. I tended to put myself in dangerous situations. A fire took the hair off my head and eyebrows, a fire I could have avoided. But either way, though it was years later, Hans thought he had ordered it all, straight off a menu from the devil himself, and although I told him it was not his fault, he surely thought otherwise. That there was both greatness and a terrible danger in his mind.”

A light wind blew through the cemetery. The secretary kept her weight on both feet. She felt a bit too tall, taller than she liked to feel, but she did not want to sit on the grass, as it was wet.

“Never once did I think it was the power of his mind,” Hans’s brother said. “He had a fine human mind, sure, but he was no soothsayer. Please. I told him that, too—‘You’re just a regular kid, Hans!’—but I’m sure he thought I was trying to placate him. He read the news daily, every single word. It was a terrible time, a terrifying time. We could hardly understand any of it. And I felt terrible that I had encouraged him so. I was older; I should’ve known better. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, and I had made him, and then things came true, and imagination met reality. We all knew someone who had done something. News kept pouring in. Poor Hans. He listened to it all with terror. He stopped seeing his friends. It wasn’t just him; many young men I knew who had frightening thoughts or dreams were extremely vigilant in those days. One neighbor went on serious drugs to sleep so he’d stop having some kind of dream; he never said what it was. We did not know what we were capable of. The lid was off.

“I even once told him to curse me again, or to bless me—his choice—but by then he was a very different kind of man.”

He hummed lightly. The mourners on either side huddled back to their cars in the dimming light and drove away.

“And, you know,” he said, sighing, “it’s not true that nothing stuck to him. In a way, my curses came true too. In a metaphorical way. That moment of speechlessness happened to him over and over, where he could not talk when it was of tantamount importance. He rarely talked at all. He never married or truly fell in love. He never did anything with his life. Just wandered from country to country. We lost touch many years ago.”

The man closed his mouth, and the two looked at the headstone together, reading and rereading the few words there: Hans Hoefler, and the quote they had decided upon as a group at the court: We need more Hans Hoeflers in this world.

The words looked wrong, like a carving of incorrect dates. The secretary pulled her coat tighter around herself. She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. “Someone else should speak instead,” he said. “If I don’t speak, it means someone else will,” which did not always turn out to be true. She spent many, many hours with him in an expectant silence. “Tell me,” she whispered, softly, sometimes, but he would just look at her mildly, a flat blankness in his eyes. He did not even shake his head; it was like words had returned to abstraction to him, just interesting sounds exiting the mouth of the young woman whose nose and hands reminded him of something.

At the cemetery, she stepped closer and touched the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair, and he reached up to her hand with his own. He was much older, and hairless, but the bones in his face were still handsome. Compared with Hans—worried, dark-eyed Hans—this chair-bound brother still received more appreciative looks from women. There was something broad and fine in the way his cheekbones paralleled his jaw. The secretary walked next to him, and helped him home without seeming like she was helping, and stood with him in the elevator, and accompanied him into his apartment, into rooms that were clean and spare. Without words, as if they had been married for years, the two commenced cooking dinner together, chopping carrots and onions, warming the bread. He showed her a photo album of his childhood, and she could see the hair he had described and the strong legs of the former athlete. They ate facing the window, though it was night, and watched the lights in the building across the street switch on one by one. “Delicious,” he said once, and she nodded.

Before she left, after stacking the dishes and snapping off squares of dark chocolate from the cupboard, she pulled her chair in closer to him and, placing a hand on each of his shoulders, kissed his cheeks, his head, the heavy flat bones of his eyebrows where no hair grew. She kissed near his lips, but not on them. His eyelids closed, and she kissed their round, soft orbs. Each fingertip. Each palm. The corner where his jaw hinged, and the light lobe of his ear.

“I am too old—” he began, and she shushed him. She took his weathered, hairless hand, and placed it gently inside her shirt, on her breast, and she just let him hold her there, listening to her heart beat. In some quiet basic way, it was the opposite of the scarf given to her by the old woman the previous month. Here was a tasselless moment, without instruction or order or guilt or implication.

“Thank you for calling me,” she said, and she loosened the bowl of his palm, and said good night. His eyes were closed then. Not asleep, just cupping the tears that had gathered under the lids. She let herself out. The night was windy but clear, and since she had already eaten dinner, earlier than expected, the time felt unusually spacious. She stepped into a music club and listened to a violinist play Bach while a piano player waited his turn, and she sipped a glass of wine so acidic it seized her throat lightly, and she thought of the man who was sleeping now, and although she still dreamed of both of them often, she never investigated into Hans again.

The story would be over about Hans Hoefler except for one piece.

The week after the secretary’s visit, the brother decided to return to the grave; something about her visit made him want to go back.

It was a gray-skied October morning, and the brother wheeled over the knots of grass to the headstone, where he stared at Hans’s name for at least half an hour.

It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It’s so obvious at that point. And yet the brother wheeled as close as he could, and, leaning down from his chair, he grasped the cold sides of the headstone with his hands.

“You weren’t that powerful, kid,” he cried. “You died, didn’t you?”

And yet, even as he said it, he realized, with new clarity, that Hans had killed himself. And that it did not seem like an act of fear or great despair. It seemed almost like some sort of trick. The vampire’s child, from that horror film, had been a creature thousands of years old. Perhaps Hans had thought he would live forever, would curse and be cursed forever, would rule the world with his mind, forever. No one could ever prove to Hans now that he was as mortal and helpless as the rest. He had circumvented the question.

It altered the taste of the brother’s spit, thinking this. He took his hands off the headstone and wheeled away. It was beginning to rain anyway, and a heady mossy smell overtook the grassy hills of the cemetery. He wheeled as quickly as he could, past the chapel, through the iron gates, to the steadying relief of slick wheels on hard concrete. He popped open his umbrella and fixed it to the arm of his wheelchair. The rain was loud and pointed.

Had we left him here, the bitterness would be where we saw him last and maybe where he died, for wherever we see him last is where we assume he will stay forever. But we will not leave him there. Soon after the visit, his mouth relaxed, and within a week, there were tears, and the tears changed the muscles of his face, because they were not bitter tears but tears of sadness—sadness at the parents who had died long before, tears for Hans and his desperate delusions, tears for his country’s impossible recovery, tears for the fact that life happened once and choices were exactly what they were. Hans was still dead. The world went on perfectly fine without him, just as the war had started, happened, and ended without his playing a role as either hero or villain. One could not spend one’s life in the imaginings of another life; if the brother spent too much time with that, the wheelchair would crowd out all other thoughts. So he poured himself a glass of cold coffee from the coffee jug which he had put, unlidded, into the refrigerator, and the caffeine relaxed him, clarified his sight, as he looked out the window into the rainy afternoon. He would not call the auburn-haired woman who had been so kind, because what they had shared had been completed. But he could keep his eyes open now for the next point of meaning. He could watch the sky all day long. He could return to the restaurant with the fine herb omelettes where he had deliberately left his umbrella because he hadn’t wanted to leave. There was love to be felt, and discovered, still. There was a powerlessness that was kind.

Lemonade

I was at the Bev with Sylv and we were eating Chinese food takeout from Panda Express and I said about how the chicken chow mein would be a good street, like Chow Main? Like a Main Street in a food part of town? Get it? And then Sylv said she had to go to the bathroom and she left for a really long time. And I got nervous because she was gone too long and I thought maybe she’d even left the mall. Because maybe she is part Chinese and I just didn’t know? Her hair is black. And maybe I had totally offended her with my Chow Main Street idea; Mein and Main are not the same and here’s me, trying to make the Chinese into something American, and that is offensive, right, like I was that loud American taking over all the Chinese words, like saying it was Ciao Main or something, like Italian Chinese? And Chow is our word for eat—chow—but in China it’s probably something really different. So I was feeling really bad and really racist by accident and she came back and sat down and it had been I swear twenty minutes? and I said, Sylvia, I just wanted to say I’m really, really sorry about the Chow Main comment, and she looked at me through her new blue eyeliner which I noticed just then and said, What? And I said, Just I didn’t mean to offend you with the using of Mein as Main, I know that’s different, and she said, I don’t know what you’re talking about, Louanne. And she took a big sip of her Diet Coke. Behind her, by the movie theatre, two girls from school who are bitches strolled by; Sylv didn’t see, she was going on about how she’d checked her messages and Jack hadn’t called even though he said he would but maybe he was caught in traffic. Even though he has a phone? But I’d never say that out loud. Sylv’s the first friend I’ve had in a long time who really is way high on the friend pyramid, and the way she dances! She bops around really energetically but she’s also still. Like she’s moving her torso but her feet don’t move, and then sometimes she’ll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.

And then I couldn’t help it, I made another Chinese joke! Because I said that the popcorn shrimp would be good to take to the movies. And she was quiet and I thought: Oh my God, I did it again, didn’t I? Why do I do that? And I was about to say I was really sorry again when her cell rang and I could tell it was Jack because her whole face got all shimmery. It made me feel a little bad, actually, to see her face change like that. Because I think I’m pretty good company and I even have a few jokes I keep stored in my mind just in case there’s nothing to say but from the look on her face it was like she was released from jail. And she giggled to Jack, and I thought maybe the popcorn shrimp joke was okay because there were no Chinese words in it? And did she have a Chinese cousin somewhere or what? But it didn’t matter if she did or not because this is America so she should be offended anyway, on behalf of America. I should have offended myself. And I just thought maybe it was in bad taste, because movie popcorn is an old tradition but doesn’t take a whole lot of skill but popcorn shrimp, for all I know, could be passed down from many years of Chinese cooking classes and generations only to show up here at the Bev food court for all of us to enjoy. I really liked mine. I ate it all and it was kind of sparky in my mouth and then I ate two of hers, and I would’ve eaten more but she gave me that look with her eyebrow up and then she threw them out in the trash, which was hard for me just because they’re so delicious, but I wasn’t going to pick them out of the garbage or anything. Even though the garbage looked pretty clean.

Before we left the food court, I made a point of waving to the cute little Chinese food lady over at Panda Express who was wearing a chef’s hat, just in case she’d heard me, but she didn’t see me waving anyway because she was serving orange chicken in a rice bowl to some old guy who probably didn’t appreciate her good service at all.

When Sylv got off the phone she said Jack would meet us downstairs at the MAC store, so we took the escalators down, and I was feeling kind of gross from the popcorn shrimp but still I wanted to eat more so I had this weird balance of feeling like sleeping and also like eating for another hour, and then going up the escalator in the other direction were those two girls from school again, and Sylv saw them and hissed, Did you see? It’s Barb and Nature, and it was and is; I do not like Nature, she was a bitch to me in fifth grade when we were partners together on the make-the-book-diorama project and she said, Let’s make a mirror into a lake for Swan Lake, and I said, There’s no book Swan Lake but we can do another book with a swan, like The Trumpeter of the Swan? by the man who wrote Charlotte’s Web about the spider? SOME PIG? And she said great so I read it and I made a little swan out of Fimo clay which had even that red stripe on the beak that all swans all have but everyone forgets. And I was supposed to go to her house to finish it but when I did she opened the door like why was I there. And I held up the clay swan and made a trumpet sound and she said, Why are you here? And I said, For our book project? and she pulled twenty dollars out of her pocket like they were magic jeans that worked like an ATM machine, and she said, Can you just finish it for both of us, please, Louellen? Louanne, I said, and her eyes were all tired and droopy and slitty. Did you even read the book? I asked, and she said, Take the money and run, kid. And I took it, not because I wanted it but because she told me to take it and because she called me kid which was nice in a weird way even though we were and are the same age. Nature is like that; you just sort of do what she says because her hair is that shiny light swaying-field color that makes your brain get all puffy. Like it turns your brain into yeast. I didn’t look at her as she went up the up escalator and I don’t remember what I spent that twenty dollars on but we got an A on the project even though Mrs. Humfield took me aside and asked me directly if it had been uneven, the work sharing, and I said no, it was all exactly even, and Mrs. Humfield sipped out of her mug that had a hippo on it which I thought was a bad idea for a teacher who is not super skinny. Last month Nature sent a valentine to Sylvia saying Let’s Be Best Buds! with a drawing of a pot leaf on it, but Sylv didn’t answer which I thought was so cool. Except then Sylvia and her do sometimes stop to talk in the hall which means I wait behind and look at the sky. But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.

And then, because everything happens at the same time, Jack came bounding up as we hit the bottom of the escalator and he grabbed Sylv and kissed her right in front of me which is okay but I saw his tongue going into her mouth and that is just disgusting. And then they walked ahead arm in arm and I thought about the boyfriend that I am going to have; he’s going to go to a different school. I’ll meet him by accident in a crosswalk. And then I walked by a pretty black lady in pink high heels and I forgot to smile at her which means she might’ve thought that I didn’t smile at her because I am racist because, in case she happened to notice, I smile at everyone. I turned around to smile at her retroactively but she was walking ahead, fast, swinging her bag from Restoration Hardware. Maybe she bought herself a new faucet for her sink that makes the water really smooth. I think it’s good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It’s good for human pacifism. That’s why I even smile at people who give me mean looks, like just then there was a man with long mucky red hair without any bags walking by who looked really mad at the world, really fucked up, but we were heading over to Macy’s to try on makeup and I smiled at him, too. He looked surprised; probably no one ever smiles at him anymore. I might be the first person who smiled at him in like thirty years. Definitely the first girl. I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever going to psychology school.

In front of the Gap, Sylvia and Jack stopped at a bench and fell into it and they just made out right there. And we were right near Macy’s and right around then I started to remember deep down somewhere in my head that there are no windows here at the Beverly Center. I went over and made a little ahem sound but they couldn’t hear me and I sort of watched Jack’s hand go over Sylvia’s shoulder and he was almost on her boob. There are two pregnant girls in school but they are both still in classes and they said how they’re fat as an excuse but I can tell it’s not regular fat especially because one of them is spending all her class time knitting a blue bootee. I only have kissed two guys and even then it was short, not a long time. And Sylvia seemed pretty good at it and I couldn’t really stop watching and then Barb and Nature walked up swinging their shopping bags and they went over and stood right over the bench and Nature said “AHEM!” just like I did only a hundred times louder and Sylvia pulled her face away from Jack’s and her mouth was all smudged and soft-looking and she laughed and said “Hi!” And they hugged. Even though didn’t we all just not see each other deliberately on the escalator? And Barb was quiet but she made a naughty scoldy look at Jack and I went over and no one really looked at me but I stood there too because I was Sylvia’s ride. So, if people were cars, in a way, I was the one kissing Jack, if you were to think of it that way. And Nature was talking about some party and Jack pulled Sylvia into his lap so there was bench room and Nature sat down and crossed her legs and waggled her foot around and her toes were painted dark red like she was forty years old, and then it was just me and Barb standing there and Barb said she wanted to go look at the new Gap sweaters with the zipper front. Barb is independent like that. She’s taking an independent-study class in school to learn Portuguese which you’d think would make her ineligible for popularity. Did you know they speak Portuguese in Brazil? I don’t understand why that is. And I stood there and Nature was holding Sylvia’s hand and Jack kept grabbing it back, and then Nature took it again and they were like a sculpture: Bad Homework Partner plus My Friend plus Her Boyfriend on Mall Bench.

“We’ve been here for hours,” I said.

“What?”

“We’ve been here since three,” I said.

“I had to get some presents,” said Sylvia, leaning her head back onto Jack’s shoulder.

“How are you, Louanne?” Nature asked me.

“Me?” I said. “I’m fine. How are you?”

Nature laughed, and she brought Sylvia’s hand to her mouth and kissed its back. She was wearing light-pink lipstick from the MAC store and it left an imprint like on an old CD cover. Sylv laughed her little tinkling laugh. Jack made a whimpering sound.

“Now you can get into the bar,” said Nature to Sylvia, holding up her imprinted hand.

“What bar?” I said.

“The Nature Bar,” said Nature, and everyone but me laughed. Then she looked back up at me, with her snappy brown eyes.

“Will you leave us alone for half an hour, Louanne?”

“Alone at the Bev?” I said.

Sylvia laughed.

“The Bev?” said Nature.

I blushed. “The mall?”

“Just for a half hour,” Nature said. “I need to talk to Sylvia and Jack about something important. I’ll tell you another time, I just have to talk to them alone right now.”

I checked my watch. Four-thirty.

“Five?” I said.

“Great,” said Nature, and her hair fell into her face like a curtain saying, Go home, Louanne, the corn is growing, the show is done.

I went into a fancy dress store where I could stand at the window and watch because were they all going to make out? But Nature just sat there holding Sylvia’s hand and Jack at one point kissed Sylvia’s neck and it was all so great for Sylvia. At one point, Barb came back with a big Gap bag and pulled out a purple zipper sweater to show them, and then left. She left? And then they all laughed on the bench for a while and after about ten minutes they got up to go. I knew they were going before they even got up. I’m not stupid. Nature was walking off with her hand in Sylvia’s butt pocket and Jack was by himself but he had a car.

I was Sylvia’s ride but she had two more rides now except Nature doesn’t drive a car because she got her license revoked because the story goes that she was driving on Franklin and she hit a raccoon and that would be okay except she got so freaked out she ran to the nearest house crying and sobbing and said she’d hit a person and they ran out to look, all scared and calling 911, but then it was a much smaller shape on the road and one with circles around its eyes and fur and paws and a snout. And then everyone thought it meant she should take a break from driving because she was clearly high on something, to think a raccoon was a person. They are really different. The saleslady at the store asked me if I wanted to try on that jacket, the one I was next to that I’d been petting for almost twenty minutes. It was a mink maybe? But faux fur. It was sort of a golden color, like a golden retriever. I said okay. She had to undo the cord which meant it’s expensive but I tried it on like it was the animal I killed while driving high and now I couldn’t drive either. So how would I get home? I’d have to wear my road kill home through the sparkly streets of Los Angeles. But it didn’t look good on me because my face is splotchy sometimes and it made me extra splotchy to have fur around it. Nature said she’s happy not driving because it’s so nice to get driven, like she’s a movie star in a limo, but everyone in school talked about the raccoon story for at least a week, and for a while people held up animals in the hall for her and said, Nature, is this a person? and it’d be a stuffed Snoopy. Or: Nature, is this a person? and it’d be an address book.

I went back and sat at the bench for ten minutes. They weren’t coming back. I knew that. I wanted to do my part anyway. I smiled at people walking by. An old man with overalls walked by; I don’t think old people should wear overalls; it makes them look like shrivelly toddlers. But I smiled at him anyway. Most teenage girls don’t give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago. After a minute, he came and circled back and he was wearing overalls and that little Jewish disc hat, and sat down. He smelled like cashews.

“Are you here alone?” he asked.

“I’m a quarter Jewish,” I told him. “I attend Yom Kippur services.”

“Good for you,” he said.

“My dad’s mom,” I said.

I smiled at him again, but the truth is, the smile is best when you’re walking, not sitting. Sitting, I wasn’t sure how long I could hold it.

“I’m meeting friends,” I said.

“Are you lost?” he said.

“Oh no,” I said. “I am extremely found.”

“That’s good,” he said. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he kept folding it and unfolding it.

“Are you lost?” I asked, because maybe he had Alzheimer’s. “Sometimes,” he said.

“You’re on the first floor of the Beverly Center mall in Los Angeles, California,” I said.

“That part I do know,” he said. “But thank you.”

My ten minutes of waiting was up, so I said bye and walked away from the Gap and went to the MAC store. I found the pink lipstick that looked close to what Nature was wearing and I wiped it off with a tissue because people who have herpes or chapped lips try on lipstick too, there’s no ethical standard. It wasn’t any good on me. It made me look even splotchier because the lipstick matched my splotch tone so it highlighted the splotches. But the saleslady wanted my money so she kept quiet and when I told her I’d buy it, she said “Great!” She said it was one of the most popular colors. It was named Electric Seashell. Which I thought was a bad name because if you put together a seashell and electricity, you could get electrocuted, depending on the location. She put it in a little MAC bag, and when I stepped out of the store, there they all were. All three of them, boom. Sculpture upright.

“Hey, Louanne,” said Sylvia.

“Nice lipstick,” Nature said, and I sort of blushed a little, and looked in the bag, at the lipstick case and the name, like I forgot it was there.

“Electric Seashell,” I said, and I didn’t know why I felt like they had caught me somehow. They were the ones that left the bench.

Nature fiddled in her pocket and pulled out a lipstick and read hers. “Electric Seashell,” she said. “What do you know?” Behind her, Jack stuck his hand down Sylvia’s shirt.

“Hey,” said Nature, spinning hers up. It was almost flat. “I’m low on mine.”

“Your what?”

“My lipstick,” she said. She stepped up to me and I had this feeling like she was going to hit me, right here at the Beverly Center, with no windows, by the new café area with the indoor hedges. I never took Tae Kwon Do. But she stepped closer than a hitter would, and then she kissed me. Right in front of the MAC store. My third kiss in my life so far. She pushed her lips against mine, sort of hard, smearing them around. She smelled like tea, not cashews. Then she let go of my shoulders and stepped back, and Electric Seashell was all over her mouth and it’s so perfect on her, it’s raspberry jam on her stalky hair and her skin is all butter and I know cannibals are disgusting but still. Her face was a scone. “Thanks,” she said. And Sylvia was laughing and laughing behind her, saying, “Louanne, you should see your face!” but I can’t ever see my face, I’m in my face, and then Nature said, “Thanks, Louanne, now I’m all dressed and ready to go,” and they all turned around and walked off together and Jack started telling a story because he was making his arms out like an airplane. Her lips were gentle, Nature, even though she pushed them really hard. Way gentler than you would think her lips would be, being that she is Nature.

The old overalls man walked by, walking slow.

It got me thinking, for a second, about what would happen if Nature did hit a person in the road. She’d run to the neighbors and say she’d hit a telephone pole, or a rat. And no one would think it was a big deal and everyone would have a cup of tea and make the call to Triple A and stroll out to look at the damage to the car, and then there’d be a person, dead in the road, bloody, no pole at all, but a person who might’ve lived if only Nature had known it was a person ten minutes before.

I felt a little wave of downness then, for a second, like I might just fall on the floor of the Bev and not be able to do anything for a long time, so I walked as fast as I could and got a lemonade from the hot-dog/lemonade stand and I smiled at the balding Arab man who makes the lemonade and told him it was delicious, before I’d tasted it, actually, and he said thanks, bobbing his shiny head, and I could see him thinking what a nice thoughtful teenage girl, who takes the time to compliment lemonade and doesn’t assume he’s a terrorist when most teenage American girls are just busy thinking only of themselves.

“Enjoy,” he said, handing over the straw.

It was okay lemonade. Not delicious, but not bad. Still, meeting him and drinking it gave me enough of a lift that I could get myself to the elevator in front of Victoria’s Secret which was having a big sale on pink bras that said PRETTY over the boobs, PRE on one boob, TTY on the other.

When I was out of eyeshot, I tossed the lemonade.

I took the elevator to P3, which was the right level, and then my car was in G2, which was green, and which I had remembered by thinking GIRL, I am a GIRL, and the 2 was for TWO GIRLS: Louanne and Sylvia, going to the mall.

“G2,” I’d told Sylvia, pointing it out, explaining, as we got out of the car. “You and me,” I said.

She’d shaken her head and laughed. “You are so weird, Louanne,” she said, but she didn’t shake me off when I linked my arm with hers.

G1, going home.

At the bottom, I paid my parking dollar and said gracias to the Mexican lady who worked the booth and I told her I liked her red earrings. She sort of stared past me with eyes that said there are more cars waiting, so I moved on ahead and made a right turn, out of the mall.

The people were all busy in their cars, listening to the radio, so there was no one to smile at, so I just sent my love to the traffic lights. No one ever appreciates them, all day long, working so hard to turn red and yellow and green, right in time with us to make sure we don’t crash into each other. If there was any tiny chance, even the tiniest chance, that they happened to be alive, I bet I was the first person ever to tell them they were special. You are special, I said out loud in my car, but in case they couldn’t hear, I cracked my window open. “You are special,” I said, to the night air.

And just like that, a green light.

And then it’s me and La Cienega, all the way home.

Bad Return

I met Arlene in college, in the freshman dorm. We were not roommates but suite-mates in the corner section of a squat brick house at the center of a small college campus in the middle of Ohio. We both had moved from opposite coasts with the desire for a personalized liberal-arts college experience and had become friends due to proximity and availability more than compatibility. For example, we had nothing in common. She: Blue Ridge Mountain town. Me: central California suburbs. She: declared international-relations major with three eclectic minors. Me: not yet totally decided. The men she liked were brutish jocks; I had located within two weeks every single soulful gentleman on campus who wrote poetry. I found them by the length of their hair or the wear of their jeans. She liked big-budget romantic movies; I saw every documentary I could find at the library, and if I’d had any retention ability, I would’ve stored a great deal of knowledge about the world. She had a perpetual perm, because she felt it added volume to the thinness of her hair and gave her a look of energy; I was hard-pressed to use a brush because I preferred a ponytail, and part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half–girl Mowgli, half–woman Thoreau.

Unfortunately for me, she seemed to get a lot more sex than I did. The brutish jocks were hell-bent on getting her into bed, perm and all, and half of the poets—who were not really poets but just had volumes of very nice leather-bound, nearly blank poetry books given to them by parents who were trying to be supportive, books partially filled with the same poem, over and over, called “Life” and/or “Life II” and/or “Why Love Is an Illusion”—these men didn’t always want to touch a woman, or a man, but, rather, mostly themselves. It took me until senior year to find a poet who actually wrote poetry, and he took off my clothes very gently and spent nearly an hour on my neck and back, and when we were done and I felt all my waiting had been worth it, he explained that part of his education as a poet was to meet as many women as possible, and so this was now to be goodbye. He suggested I pretend he was going off to war on a boat. “What boat?” I said, clutching the blanket. “We live in Ohio.” He left a leaflet on my bed torn from a three-ring binder. Your breasts are fortune cookies, full of small wisdoms, he wrote. I read it multiple times. I almost notified the English Department. I was very tempted to show Arlene, but she was busily documenting her outings and weekends in a photo album labeled College, Senior Year, and although she had never been anything but sympathetic about my history with men, I couldn’t bear the thought that she might laugh at me and not him.

One afternoon in late March of our senior year, just about two months before graduation, I wandered into the apartment I then shared with Arlene and found her standing at the fridge looking upset. She was rummaging around in the vegetable drawer, and her mascara was smudged. Mascara, like the perm, was part of her daily wear.

“What is it?” I said. “Is it Fred?” Fred was her latest jock, a wide-eyed, hurdle-jumping track star whom I found very attractive and who stoked my envy. I always harbored a secret hope that they’d break up.

“No,” she said, into the shelves. “Fred’s fine.”

“And?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The usual.”

She held up several thin plastic bags holding vegetables we’d bought and forgotten to eat: floppy green onions, a browning head of broccoli, limp kale.

“We never ate any of this,” she said.

“So throw it out,” I said.

She dragged a hand across her eyes. “This happens every time,” she said, shutting the fridge door. “Why do we even bother to go shopping?” She pulled on a coat and went outside with a shovel, picking and digging at the ground until she was able to bury the old vegetables under a bedraggled marigold plant. I watched from the window. She was often upset in these days, usually about graduating. Every night, she cried a little about the end of this phase of her life. What the changes would be like. How much she would miss me, and her classes, and our apartment. I would watch her cry sometimes, on the sofa with her tissue, and I’d say comforting things I’d heard other people say about the opening and closing of windows and doors, but mostly I just admired how she did it; she had this way of crying like she didn’t realize she was crying.

When she came back inside, she was gripping a yogurt cup someone had thrown near our side strip of garden.

“Plastic doesn’t cycle.” She shrugged off her coat. “Right? We recycle it, but it can’t do anything on its own, and all it can ever do is be itself again. It is the worst kind of reincarnation. Lame! That is so lame! And it’s everywhere!” she cried, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face.

Arlene didn’t usually get so worked up about things like the veggies or the yogurt cup, but her moods had been heightened in the weeks since our friend Hank had hit the doctor on his drive to the recycling plant. Hank was a nice guy who lived two apartments over with a mutt named Blooper, and the two of them came by often. Hank, like Arlene, was conscientious to a fault. In fact, he was so thorough that he did not trust that the big blue trucks would actually take his recycling to the plant, so once a week he drove it over himself. He crushed his bottles and folded up his boxes, and he said he found it very comforting to see the plant itself, those manmade cycles in action. “It’s called a plant!” he’d say, goofily, delighted. Had he not been gay, I’m sure he and Arlene would have fallen very deeply in love for a long time.

One afternoon, while on his drive to the recycling plant, Hank glanced down at the radio during a song he didn’t like and hit a doctor. The doctor, a young surgeon just finishing his residency, was crossing the road on a sunny afternoon on his lunch break, and he stepped into the street right when Hank was spinning the tuning dial. Hank knocked him to the ground, and the tires rolled over his hands. The doctor who had specialized in surgery for children with cancer.

Arlene did not appreciate my line of thinking.

“You cannot make an equation!” she said, coming out of the bathroom. “The doctor’s hands did not break because Hank was recycling!”

She adjusted the ribbon on her dress that she was wearing as a gesture of support for Hank, who was meeting that day with a lawyer.

“True,” I said, flicking on the light that she always flicked off, even when we were studying. “And yet, if Hank did not feel the need to drive his bags to the plant, then the doctor would be fine. Correct?”

“That’s fudging the data!” Arlene protested.

The doorbell rang. Fred came in. He was looking particularly strong and flushed that evening, having just finished lifting weights at the gym.

“It’s just so sad,” I said. “He saved children.”

“It’s horribly sad,” Arlene said. “But it is not a lesson. Hey, baby.” She turned away from me and leaned in to give Fred a kiss.

“Or how about the Litmans?” I said.

The Litmans were the liberal parents of a mutual friend of ours who had adopted a homeless kid with no family and raised him with love and care and good limits and kind gifts and progressive schools, and the kid had grown up to be a staunch ultra-right neo-con who believed in torture and wiretapping civilians and aggressive, preemptive warfare. The parents did not know what to do.

Arlene began to rub Fred’s shoulders. “Did you go to the gym?” she said. “You look hot.”

“Nice dress,” he said.

“Anyway,” she said to me. “You can’t predict the outcome. You can’t raise a kid and then tell him what to think.”

“No,” I said. “I’m just saying.”

“You’re saying we should all stay at home and do nothing,” she said.

“Claire’s not a shut-in,” Fred said, smiling at me.

“See?” I said, smiling back, although Arlene’s statement did sound a little true.

“What happened with Hank and the lawyer?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Arlene said. “He’s still not back.” She held on to the sides of his T-shirt. Her eyes filled with real tears. Fred kissed the top of her head tenderly, and for the umpteenth time, I wondered how Arlene, of the questionably toxic perms and mascara drips and yogurt cup righteousness, always got the better guys.

“He has to live with that his whole life,” she said.

Fred ran a hand through her hair. They left, to go to dinner.

“I hate you people,” I muttered as I shoved my eggshells into our small kitchen compost pile, which smelled like rotten food, which is just exactly what it was.

The building quieted around me. Saturday night. I had nothing to do. The latest guy I’d liked, a documentary filmmaker, had to work late in the editing room. I loved documentaries, but he said I couldn’t see his for two more months, and, like a sports star, he said it was better that he work solo and think solo until he was done. Due to dating choices such as this, I seemed to have more time than most of my peers, so I had pursued an addiction to crossword puzzles. When not studying, I opened up the newspaper and did the daily one each afternoon. I was not particularly good, and often could not answer the questions. I grabbed a pencil and curled up on the sofa and opened the newspaper to the puzzle I’d started the night before. As I worked away, rereading the same clues, two thoughts commonly accompanied my work. One was my strong desire to finish as quickly as possible so I could do something else, who knew what. But finishing quickly was impossible, so I also found myself thinking that if someday I were taken by a dictatorship and shoved into a holding tank with only this crossword, and my only chance for survival was to finish this crossword, then and only then might I be able to figure out the answer to 12D: Lincoln’s controversial Cabinet member. Maybe it would take years, I considered, skipping that question, but as I continued to work the puzzle, I could feel that holding tank floating in the background, an Orwellian-style setup with a large crossword projected onto the wall as the world warred outside, and for some reason the future of humanity might even depend on whether or not I could plumb the depths of old history tests in my memory, and rustle up the answers.

Maybe then, I thought to myself, primly, I could finish.

I did the crossword for a while, made a tiny bit of progress by asserting that Plato was Greek, and then wandered out onto campus. I didn’t feel like seeing the new movie or going to the new specialty-beer bar that had just opened up across the street.

Instead, I found myself pulled to the main quad of campus, an area of green that, with spring, was only just starting to lighten and brighten from beneath the layers of cold, dark wetness. Some kind of vigil was going on. Rows and rows of students were sitting with candles, wearing gloves and hats. It was colder than I’d expected. I was shivering in my coat and scarf, and Julian, the documentary maker, was tucked warm in a dark room with technology, and Arlene and Fred were going to “dinner,” which often meant they were just waiting for me to leave so they could return to the apartment and have loud sex. Twice I’d come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one’s roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through the fog of her pleasure she’d heard the front door open and close.

So there I was, at this vigil. I knelt down. A man on a podium was talking.

“What’s it for?” I whispered to two women wrapped up together in a bright-blue sleeping bag.

“The war,” they said.

“Which one?”

“All of them,” they said.

“How many are there?” I said.

One shrugged. “At least three.”

I tried to count the wars in my head. I could count two.

“What’s the third?” I hissed.

“Sssh!” said the sleeping-bag pair, in unison.

“So,” said the man at the podium, a man with a beard and a knit cap, “as murderers, we too should be punished. Look around! Look harder! Look at what you’re not seeing!”

“Why are we murderers?” I whispered to the two.

“Duh,” said one.

“It’s a wake-up call,” said the other. “Most of us forget we’re even at war at all.”

I nodded. In fact, I could hardly hold the thought about forgetting in my head. It seemed destined to be forgotten.

“Brring!” said the man at the podium. “I am your inner alarm clock. Brrring!”

The group rose to its feet and began marching, with candles, down the main walkway of campus. The duo, bundled in their sleeping bag, moved in a lump ahead of me. I began walking too. I knew no one in the war/wars and hardly thought about them, and when I did, I wore the guilt and outrage like an accessory I could remove the same way as a nice pair of earrings. I would let the outrage adorn and better me and then slide the wires from my earlobes and tuck them away in my jewelry box. I felt ashamed of this even as I did it over and over, and one could reasonably argue that the fact that I felt ashamed about it and still did it made it worse. At least the Litman kid had beliefs.

We walked in clumps, heads leaning forward. Was there a group plan? Should I call my one journalism friend? But more than anything, I was pulled by the movement of something happening, something where I could join a flow and participate in some way without notice.

We walked for fifteen minutes, and at times the man from the podium, now with a megaphone, would call out “Murderers!” and the crowd would respond “Yes!” and then the feet would pick up. I hid my face in my scarf.

On campus a few weeks earlier, there had been a real protest, a sincere protest, one I had attended with Arlene, who did seem able to remember that we were at war and had adopted a soldier online to whom she sent electrolyte-enhanced water and peanut butter cups and moisturizer for the desert. She wrote him long letters in response to his letters and once even spoke to his wife on the phone to make it clear she was not flirting. “I have a great boyfriend,” I heard her say, as I was walking into the room to retrieve my latest attempt at the crossword. “Fred.” She was tugging at a curl, and her brow was furrowed with concentration and concern. “I truly mean no disrespect,” she said. At that sincere protest, with Arlene shouting next to me, our shouts visible in puffs of cold, I’d felt a momentary crush of panic, like for one second I got it, grasped the stakes, understood that people my age were living a completely different and precarious life on my watch, but then it was over and the crowd dispersed and we went to have potato skins at the food co-op. “But what’s a person to do?” I’d asked Arlene, scooping up fake bacon bits with a bit of crisped peel. “Give up everything?”

She dabbed her mouth with a napkin. It was just the two of us. Fred was away at a track meet in Akron.

“No-o,” she said, slowly. “Give up something?”

At this second rally, I continued to follow the sleeping-bag twins as they rustled along the sidewalk. This protest had a completely different feel than the last one, more like we were sleepwalking into a dream where death was only a Jungian symbol made into a colorful illustration on a tarot card. It was, by now, probably ten-thirty, and the regents were asleep in their white houses. We walked off campus, down a residential street to an empty dirt lot buttressed by two tract homes. Soon the lot would grow a house that exactly matched the ones on either side.

“Go!” said the man with the megaphone.

It was like watching a dance in slow motion. As if they’d all planned it in advance, which clearly most of them had, the marchers began shedding their clothes. The night was thirty or forty degrees, probably less, but off came the sleeping bags, the sweatshirts, the hats, the scarves, the shoes. I wasn’t sure what any of it had to do with dead soldiers, but it certainly was interesting. “Off!” yelled the man, and soon there were over a hundred naked coeds, their clothes in heaps. “Show your true selves!” he yelled, and they put their bodies on the lot, which I now realized was probably the largest plot of dirt around, since the campus was covered in concrete, brick, and grass, and all the students rolled in the dirt—“This is what we need!” he said—and they were rolling, and kissing, and kicking aside clothes, and warming up skin on skin, and shivering, trying to reclaim a decade long past. I was now standing in the veranda of the next-door neighbor’s house, which, as far as I could tell, had a still-up neighbor in it, due to the flickering light of the flat-screen TV I could see through sheer white curtains. Did the neighbor know that one hundred nubile twenty-year-olds were rolling in the dirt next door? I thought not. It seemed he was watching Law & Order.

The man with the megaphone backed off. He watched the bodies rolling and reaching. He watched piles of bodies start kissing. He saw me over in the veranda and glanced at me for a moment, I suppose to see if I was the type to tell. And it seemed he decided no, because then he began to pick his way through the bodies and clothing and with nimble, practiced fingers lifted over fifty wallets from the stack, tossing them into his backpack. Sighs and grunts erupted around him as he threaded through the piles and then tiptoed away. He’d read me right; I didn’t say a word. It seemed, in its way, a fair exchange.

When I woke up, the lot was clear. No naked bodies, no police, just one leftover sock in the dirt, lit by the white disc of moon. I’d fallen asleep sprawled out on the porch with my scarf wrapped tightly over my head. It was cold out, but tiredness had overtaken me, swallowed me, as it sometimes did, and so I hadn’t gotten to see the marchers finishing, or getting dressed, or yelling about their wallets.

I blew on my hands. Stretched. The whole elaborate thing—from protest to empty lot—had done nothing but make me irritable. There were real deaths happening, after all. Hard to imagine from our dorm apartments and fifty-minute course lectures. And on a pettier and slightly more distracting level, I also didn’t like having stood, as always, so everlastingly, to the side. I was certainly not doing my share to help out the world in any way, and neither was I doing my share by having fun as a naked college coed. I was basically sleeping through all of it. Was I really a nothing-doer, an apathetic blob? Was Arlene right? She planned most of our weekend activities. She adopted the soldier and called the wife. She had sex with Fred. When people danced at weddings, I would stand on the side grimacing, but not because I did not want to dance. I just couldn’t seem to. Cousins and happy types would cheerfully grab my hands and draw me into the center, but even with that encouragement, with smiles like fields of daisies surrounding, I could only make it through half a song. The magnet inside the wall was too strong. I liked Julian, tucked in his documentary office; he was the perfect boyfriend for me, similar to that magnet—someone I could not touch but who, with a pull from beneath a surface, still kept me from the activities at hand.

This all left me so cold and cranky that I decided right then and there to make something happen, because it is always possible to make something happen, and there was no reason that I had to go home right then with my hands jammed in my pockets and say hi to Arlene and Fred all cuddled up warm watching late-night comedy TV with their hair so mussed and gleaming and not have participated in anything myself. It was this reason, and perhaps others I did not understand, that led me to turn to the front door of the house attached to the porch upon which I was standing, square my shoulders, and knock.

By then it was well after midnight. The same flicker of TV light still broke against the windowpanes, but I didn’t even know if the watcher was awake until he quickly bounded up to the door.

“Yes?” said the voice, through the door. A male voice: reedy, elderly.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” I said. “Did you see what happened?”

“Something happened?” He pulled back the flimsy curtains that covered the window in the center of the door. He was an older man, probably close to sixty-five. Whitish hair. Bushy eyebrows that could’ve commanded authority but on his face brought to mind squirrels and hairbrushes. He could’ve been my grandfather, except my grandfathers were robust men, who strode through the world and stepped on people, including both of my parents.

“A hundred people were robbed right next to you,” I said, through the glass. “While having sex.”

“Robbed?” He looked startled. “Here? Sex?”

“While you were watching Law & Order,” I said.

He let go of the curtain and opened the door. He was shorter than I was. Although I was female and he male, I felt very clearly that I was the threat in this situation.

“Did someone call the police?” he said. “Are you a student?”

“No police,” I said, waving behind me, at the dark emptiness. “I’m a student.”

He stared. He was observing me as keenly as I was observing him. I could see the observations floating through his face, him observing, me observing him observing.

Finally he asked, “Would you like to come in?”

He didn’t seem scary, and the house looked warm. He led me through the living room. It was inviting, with the flat-screen TV nestled above the fireplace and lavish plants in metal holders marking the corners, everything tidy and clutterless, but not in an oppressive way. In the kitchen, he put on a kettle without asking, which I appreciated. It seemed we both understood that if I didn’t like tea I just wouldn’t drink it.

The kitchen had pale-green tile and light wooden cabinets. I made a note of the placement of the knife block, just in case.

He prepared a Japanese barley tea as my hands and cheeks thawed.

“I lived in Kyoto for many years,” he said when the water was ready, pouring the mugs full. “And I drank this every day. Not the same here. There, it’s fresh, roasted. Here, it was packed long ago. Whispers.”

He tilted his head to the sitting area, by the window overlooking the empty lot.

“They’re building a new house there, supposedly,” he said, handing over my mug. “It’s been three years.”

We sat down and looked out the window together, at the leftover sock.

“That’s where it happened,” I said, taking a sip.

“They all had sex?” he said.

“A hundred of them.”

“And then?”

“The guy stole their wallets.”

“What guy?”

“The guy who told them to have sex on Mother Earth as a war protest.”

“Ah,” he said, nodding.

“You didn’t hear anything?”

“Not a thing.”

“I fell asleep,” I admitted.

We sat and sipped, the warm tea spreading through my chest. Barley tea. It felt good to be doing something. Not that I was quite sure what I was doing. I tried to think up an interesting question to ask him, maybe about his childhood, or his first love, or if he’d fought in any war, when he turned to face me, his squirrel eyebrows up. By then most adults would’ve launched into their usual list of annoying questions—my major, my plans for the future, my hopes and dreams—but he just raised a hand and poked at the air between us, as if to poke those questions aside.

“Was it a good episode?” I asked.

“Of?”

“Law & Order,” I said.

He shrugged. “I’d seen it before.”

He poked again at the air between us. Raised his hand, dusted the air aside, put his hand down. Waited. Raised his hand again, pushed at the air, put his hand down again.

“What are you doing?” I asked, trying to laugh.

When he did it again, I raised my hand back. While he dusted the air on one side, I dusted the opposing side. I pushed some air at him. He smiled. Pushed it back.

“Could you do me a favor?” he asked.

“Depends,” I said.

He indicated upstairs with his chin. “I need a lightbulb changed in the guest room,” he said. “You’re taller than I am.”

It was true; I was. I looked at the flight of stairs past the kitchen, the dim light above. It was a small two-story house, probably two bedrooms upstairs, one his, one guest. No sign of a cat, dog, or any other resident. A lightbulb. It was, by all accounts, dumb to go upstairs in the house of someone I did not know, especially a male stranger’s house at one in the morning. With everyone nearby fast asleep. That said, I still felt that if anyone were at risk, it was actually him; I’d trusted what I’d read about following my own fear instinct, and instead of feeling fear, what I felt was a slight thrill or even a flicker of aggression, like I might harm him, like he should be cautious about inviting me up.

“It’s a dumb idea,” I said, sniffing. “Stranger’s house.”

“I’ll sit right here,” he said. “I won’t move, I promise.”

“Oldest trick in the book,” I said. “Lightbulb changing.”

“It is true, though,” he said.

I sipped my tea. “Nah.”

Still, I felt a strange and powerful pull to his second floor.

“I’ll come by in the daytime with a friend,” I said, “and we’ll change every lightbulb you need.”

“Sure, of course,” he said, shrugging. “Thank you.”

He refilled his cup with hot water. From our spot in the kitchen, I could make out the side frames of paintings lining the stairway walls, chosen carefully over time to represent whatever he wanted to observe while ascending. He stirred his tea.

“Okay, fine,” I said, standing. “Twist my arm.”

He raised his eyebrows, surprised.

“I might steal something, you know,” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said, warmly. “Take whatever you like. It’s the first room on your left. Thank you, thank you so much.”

I left my mug and climbed the stairs, past paintings of green hills dotted with trees and sheep, painted by a person named Hovick. The old man sat at the table downstairs, sipping his tea. I could hear him, sipping loudly, nearly slurping, and he had been a polite and quiet sipper earlier, so I figured he was doing it to let me know he was staying put.

“Where’s the bulb?” I asked, at the top of the stairs.

“On the dresser,” he called.

The room was cheerful enough—a small bedroom with a twin bed, a vase holding a graceful twig that required no water, and a lush, light-green carpet that matched the kitchen tiles. A desk lamp glowed through a sheer, paisley-patterned shade. On the dresser was the new fluorescent bulb with its squiggly spiral up, and I turned off the overhead light, stood on a wooden chair, and unscrewed the fixture. The bulb was warm. With a bit of balancing, I reached up with the new bulb and screwed it in, and on with the fixture again, and a twist and a turn, and his loud sipping below reminding me I had nothing to fear. I pushed the chair back to the desk and surveyed the room once again, my gaze settling on the bedside table, where a book about Ohio flora lay next to a fluted lamp. “Done,” I called.

“Thank you,” he said, from the kitchen.

But I did not feel done. I picked up the book on Ohio flora. Inside, between pictures of dogwood trees, I found pressed petals, wrinkled and overlapping and folded, page after page. He had saved a whole bouquet. I punched the bed’s pillow in the center, to make it look as if a person had slept on it at some point. It was a headless pillow, a pillow that had not made contact with a head, a sight that made me feel inexplicably angry. I moved the twig to the other side of the vase. I looked under the bed and saw two slippers lined up neatly, the kind with a band over the toes made of floral terrycloth. I shook and emptied the book of Ohio flora petals all over the bed, until it was covered in dry purple flowers, like a honeymoon bed for one.

Downstairs, the man was staring out the window.

I settled into my seat.

“Thank you,” he said again. “I’ve heard so much talk about these fluorescent bulbs.”

Some kind of mood had descended upon him while I was in the room. His voice drizzled into nowhere as he spoke.

“Whose room is that?” I asked, reaching for my tea.

“My daughter’s,” he said.

“Is she okay?” I asked.

He turned to me. His eyelids flickered lower. “She lives with her mother.”

“Where?”

“In Egypt.”

“Does she visit you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She is allergic to green,” he said.

He was looking out the window at his little side garden again, so I looked too, at the budding spring trees, half-lit by someone’s porch lamp, and at the hints of grass in the garden, peeking through winter. Soon enough, the whole town would be covered in green.

“All shades?”

“Every one,” he said.

“So why don’t you move to her?”

“I need it to live,” he said.

“Need what?”

“Green,” he said.

He turned back to the table and resumed what he had been doing before: pushing at the air with that faint, focused look on his face.

“Egypt has green,” I said, squinting.

“Not much,” he said. “In the southern part. Mostly browns and golds and blues.”

“A person isn’t allergic to a color,” I said.

He kept his eyes on the air between us. “Most people are not.”

I sipped my tea. I could not wait to tell all this to Arlene. “It’s not like cats,” I said.

He paused, his hand on the air. “I had this idea,” he said. “The other day. While drinking tea.”

“Or peanuts,” I said.

“While looking out this same window,” he said. “I thought that if a young woman ever happened to knock on my door, I would have a job for her. That the young woman could go into Nina’s room. And if she did, it would make the mark of young women and somehow it would bring her—my daughter—closer.”

He sorted some air to the right, some to the left.

“I would somehow summon your daughter?”

He nodded, briskly. “The way we put flowers in a room to bring joy,” he said. “The way we—” With a measured effort, he slowed his gestures and stopped messing with the air and folded his hands on the table.

I tipped back in my chair. I felt unusually comfortable in his house.

“By green, do you mean an environmental reference?” I asked.

He frowned. “No,” he said. “I mean actual green.”

“But, then, so what if I did summon her? She’d still be allergic, right?”

“Correct.”

“And you have green tile and green carpet and green hills on the wall.”

“Yes.”

“And you refuse to change your décor,” I said.

“I need it,” he said. “With less green, I get vertigo.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, balancing on the back chair legs. “Are you kidding? Did the lightbulb even need changing?”

“Of course,” he said, “those lightbulbs last twelve times longer.”

He pressed at his eyes with a napkin. I lifted my hands off the table for a second. Balanced. Swung the chair back down. “Oh,” I said, “speaking of flowers. I think I may’ve spilled some of yours on the bed.”

He finished his tea. Dabbed his mouth dry.

“There are no flowers in that room,” he said.

“The dried ones in the Ohio flora book?” I said, sipping my tea.

He peered at me.

“Purple?” I said. “Purple petals?”

He rose.

“Was that bad?” I said.

We headed up together, past Hovick’s pastures. As soon as he walked into the small bedroom, he knelt at the edge of the bed, his knees on the slippers, his hands clutching at the flower petals, clutching and letting go, like they were the most special thing in the world to him.

I watched for a minute. I could not tell what he was feeling. “I’m very sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

He rested his cheek against the petals for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said, heavily.

“They’re your daughter’s?”

He kept his eyes closed. Shook his head. “No.”

To give him some privacy, I stared at the floor. At the petals he had dropped. At the specks of gold in the green flat carpet weave. I did feel, against my will, creeping into my cheeks, a surge of what could only be called pleasure, which came from the fact that something interesting was starting to happen, something I myself had instigated, a feeling I found repellent in its selfishness but still unyielding.

“Are they from your wedding?” I asked, softly.

“No.” He held a handful of petals close to his face.

A funeral, I wondered. One of his beloved parents. What a rude thing for me to do, to take something precious and throw it all over the room like that.

“No funeral,” he said, as if he had read my mind. He closed his eyes. “They’re from nothing,” he said. “They came in the book.”

I nodded. “What do you mean?”

“The Ohio flora book,” he said. He rested his face on the bedspread again.

“It came with flowers?”

“I found the book and inside were these flowers.”

“You mean when you bought the book?”

“They were in the book when I bought it.” He smoothed the petals near his hair. “I bought it used,” he said, by way of explanation.

I took a step forward on the lush green carpet, careful not to crush the petals he’d dropped. “I don’t understand,” I said, slowly. “They’re not your flowers?”

“No,” he said.

“Then why are you upset?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me straight on. “Because they meant something,” he said.

“To someone else.”

“To someone.”

He kept gathering up the petals, smoothing them over the comforter, gathering and smoothing, and as I watched him I felt the very beginning, the very tiny initial curdles of irritation start to cluster and foment inside me. Something in the house was beginning to close in on me, and my softer feelings of sympathy at his old-man isolation were starting to harden and shrink into a kernel of annoyance that emitted a vaporous cloud of what could only be called entitlement. Like I owned this house. Like I lived in it, or could, or should. Like I was there to do whatever I wanted, me making the mark for all young women, and he would not, or could not, stop any of it.

“Maybe they did come from a wedding,” he said, bringing a cracked petal to his nose and sniffing it.

I walked over to the old oak dresser and pulled open the top drawer. Empty. Second drawer. Empty. Went to the nightstand drawer, by the bed. Empty.

“What is this place?” I said.

In the hallway, I opened two more doors, master bedroom, master bath, bed made, drawers closed. I turned on the lights. So neat, as if no one lived there, or wore anything, or sweated.

“What are you doing?” he called.

“Who lives here?” I called back.

I opened the linen closet, with its piles of fluffy towels in rows. Opened the dresser drawers in his bedroom, full of stacks of white undershirts. His nightstand drawer contained only a Bible and a comb. The Bible’s spine was unbroken, a firm brick of a book, and I was surprised to see it because he had not seemed like a religious man, but more than anything devout, it reminded me of the Bibles in drawers in American hotel rooms, and I imagined this man on a business trip opening a drawer and seeing one and interpreting it as something other people did in their bedrooms, something he then came home to imitate. I felt a wave of revulsion pass through me, thick and heavy, and something else, too, something I couldn’t pinpoint.

“Where’s Nina?” I called out.

“Egypt,” he mumbled, from the other room.

“I mean here,” I said. “Where are the photos? Drawings? Where is anything of her at all?”

I looked behind the headboard. Nothing. Under the bed. Nothing. Opened the drawer of the other nightstand. Hearing a rattle from the back, I pulled out the drawer and flipped it over, and onto the taut bedspread fell a silver nail clipper and a ring.

“She doesn’t like having her picture taken,” he called from the other room. “She is unusually unphotogenic.”

The nail clipper was of the same style I had in my own nightstand drawer back at the apartment. I picked it up and clipped a nail, out of habit.

“She has never enjoyed the drawing of pictures,” he said.

I put down the clipper and picked up the ring.

“Too much green,” he said.

I was about to say something about the drawing of pictures, how most kids would be forced to draw a picture in school at some point, even if they didn’t like to, and she could do it without using green, and how most parents would save the occasional picture, even if it sucked, and put it on the wall, or on the refrigerator, when my fingers reacted to the ring I was holding. It’s hard to explain. I had picked up something new, but it did not feel new.

“Hey,” I said. “I know this ring.”

I tried to say it in a friendly voice, but a prickle of fear traveled down the backs of my arms.

“She does send an occasional e-mail,” he said.

“Sir?”

“But I do not know how to save them on the computer.”

I bounced the ring around in my hand. I bounced it, to make it casual. It wasn’t the most unusual ring, just the kind teenagers buy at street fairs for twelve dollars, with a silver band and a yellow-orange stone. But I’d had a ring very similar to it, extremely similar. I’d had it until just that past summer, when I’d thrown it into the Kern River as a gesture of growth.

I turned the ring over. It was the exact same size as mine. The stone had the same dullness.

“What is this?” My voice came out a little too high. I walked over to the other bedroom. “Sir?”

He glanced up from his curled position by the bed. “Perhaps you can show me,” he said, “how to alter my mail settings.”

I held the ring up to the light. “Where did you get this?”

He sat taller, squinting. “Is that the ring?” He beamed at me. “Oh, good! I was wondering where that was! It’s not a photo, but there! There’s a piece of her, right there.”

“Where did this come from?”

“That’s Nina’s,” he said. “That is Nina’s ring.”

“But where did she get it?”

“She gave it to me on her last visit,” he said, face glowing. “She wanted me to have something of hers.”

“When was her last visit?”

“Four years ago,” he said.

I turned the ring over. It had a scratch on the underside, where mine had had a scratch, too. A very, very similar, if not exact, scratch.

“This is my ring,” I said.

“Oh no,” he said, straightening up. “That is my daughter, Nina’s. She gave it to me. She got it at a street fair.”

“I threw it in the river,” I said.

He frowned. “She said it was collateral, for our next meeting. She loves that ring. Reminds her of the sun.”

I stared at him. He had a petal stuck to his cheek, and he looked like a boy who’d been out playing in the meadows.

“Or maybe it was five years ago,” he said.

The ring slipped around in my hand, just as mine had. I’d watched it sink past the bright water, into the current.

“Have you ever been to the Kern River?” I said.

“The Corn River?” he said.

“In California. Kern.”

“I’ve never been to California,” he said. “What is that look on your face?”

I held the ring tightly. “I had a ring just like this,” I said. “And I threw it in the Kern River. Last summer.”

“I’m sure it was a different ring.”

I opened my hand. The yellow stone deepened to orange in the upper right hemisphere; I used to call it 80 percent yellow, 20 percent orange. The same slightly tweaked setting: a band of silver, not quite symmetrical.

“I threw it in the Kern River as my way into adulthood.”

He wiped the petal off his cheek, and it drifted to the carpet. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know what to tell you. Nina gave me that ring off her finger five years ago and told me to keep it for her until her next visit.”

“But she couldn’t have had it five years ago,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because I was wearing it.”

“But that’s just what she did,” he said.

I closed my fist around the ring. “Come on! Is any of this Nina stuff even true?”

“Of course it’s true!” he said, and his face washed out a little, panicked. “That’s her ring.”

“But this is my ring, too!” I waved it in the air. “Down to the scratch on the inside! Down to the shape of the stone!”

He shrank against the side of the bed. Meekly, he said something about how she’d taken it off her finger, and how she’d bought it at a street fair in Cairo, and how she didn’t like to use a calendar to make plans, and his words were trembling but insistent, and I had no idea if Nina was real, or never born, or if there could be two rings exactly the same, and he finished what he was saying and slumped down against the bedspread and closed his eyes.

“She told me to keep it for her for a while,” he said, in a low, hollow voice.

From outside came the distant sound of an owl. I slipped the ring onto my finger. It fit, just as it had fit before. Slightly loose, but held in place by the knuckle.

“I bought this ring at a sidewalk sale in Fresno,” I said. “In high school. Age fifteen. And I wore it for five years. And then last summer I was on a trip with my family, and I threw it in the Kern River because it was finally time to grow up. I kissed the stone, said goodbye to being a kid, and threw it in. Then I cried a little and went back to join everybody.”

I twisted it on my finger, as I had for years.

“Here it is again,” I said.

“Do you want to keep it for now?” he asked, in a tired voice.

“No.”

I slid down the door frame to sit on the carpet. I closed my eyes, too. “I’m not Nina.”

“No,” he said.

“I’m Claire,” I said.

“Howard.”

We let the names fill the room.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

I sat there for a while and maybe even fell asleep again for a few minutes. When I woke up, I went to his bathroom and splashed water on my face. Went to his bedroom and returned the ring to the drawer with the nail clipper. Went back to the doorway of the smaller bedroom. His head was resting on the bed of petals, and his eyes were open. He looked a little older now, heavier, quiet.

“Here.” I picked up the book of Ohio flora. “Here, Howard. Come on. Let’s put them back.”

We spent the next half hour placing six petals per page, alongside photos of Ohio marigolds and chestnuts and elms. Many of the petals had crunched into triangles on the floor; those we swept up and put into one of the empty drawers.

After we were done, he walked me downstairs, out onto the porch, and down the steps into the star-clear coldness of night. It must have been two or three in the morning.

“Thank you for the lightbulb change,” he said.

“Thanks for the tea.”

He nodded. We looked out past the dirt lot to a road beyond where the houses ended. It was a road that no one drove on unless they were very specifically going to either the recycling plant where Hank had been headed or to the Russian grocery complex. Another owl hoot came rolling at us from far away.

“One more thing,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. His voice was still low, but for some reason, now that we were out of the house, it sounded less wavery and broken than it had upstairs; its reediness reminded me of wind whistling, like its own sound now instead of a diminishment.

“Yes?”

“Drop the documentary filmmaker,” he said. “Go to Arlene. Stay friends with Arlene.”

I shrank under his hand. “What?”

“He’s in there rolling his film, cutting and rolling, and never thinks of you,” the old man said. “Not once. Not ever. She is thinking of everyone. She is a good friend. A good friend is rare. Go to her. Ed loves Arlene because she is a good person. He may have a friend, someone you’ll like. Go to Ed, ask him. Ask her. Eat dinner with them. Bury vegetables. Why not?”

He stood straighter. In the far distance, headlights rounded a corner, coming our way.

“What?” I said again, sharp.

“You don’t have to start with a hundred people having sex,” he said.

I watched the headlights come closer, the approach of big metal-music inside. I could have stepped into the street, flagged down the car, and asked for a ride home. The headlights illuminated the man, his elderly hunch. Then it was gone.

“Have you been stalking me?”

“No,” he said, smiling a little. “You found my door, remember?”

“Did you look in my purse?”

“You don’t have a purse,” he said, which was true.

“Did you hunt down my ring?”

“You threw it in the river,” he said. “How would I do that?”

I couldn’t think up an answer. “Is this what all the air pushing was for?”

He sniffed.

“Or the tea?” I asked.

“Is just good plain barley tea.” He slapped his arms from the cold, and we stared into the night together.

“By the way,” I said, “it’s Fred.”

“Fred?”

“Arlene’s guy. Is Fred, not Ed,” I said, smiling at the ground.

“Fred?” he said, nodding, frowning. Then he patted my shoulder goodbye and turned to let himself back in.

When I arrived back home, Arlene was up, making late-night waffles. She did this sometimes when she couldn’t sleep. Her face was scrubbed clean, and she looked smaller, and about ten times more vulnerable, without that blush on her cheeks and careful mascara.

“Hey,” she whispered when I came in.

She was whisking batter in a bowl and soon would be pouring it into the new waffle iron her father had sent from his kitchen supply store in Asheville. As on most evenings, she was wearing her oldest pink bathrobe, with embroidered suns on each lapel. Her mother had embroidered those suns there, as a gift to Arlene before college. Arlene, unlike most people our age, wore it with pride. She had moved past and through its symbolism, and now to her it was just a nice bathrobe.

I leaned on the cabinets, next to her. I could hear the steady, hunky breathing of Fred in the next room.

“How was your night?”

“Okay,” I said.

She looked up, whisk in hand, brow furrowed.

“I went to a war protest.”

“There was another one?” she said, disappointed.

“A bad one,” I said. “A fake. I saw a hundred people have sex and then get their wallets lifted.”

“No kidding?”

“And then I had tea with an old man who had dredged a river.”

She raised her eyebrows, curious. I told her a brief version, leaving out the part about his daughter. I also left out that I’d gone into his house, alone, and pretended instead that I met him at a late-night teahouse.

“He dredged the river to find your ring?”

“No,” I said. “I made that part up.”

“I bet it was a different ring,” she said.

“Looked exactly the same,” I said. “Same scratch. Same silver tweak.”

“Weird.” She wrinkled her nose. Only then did I see that her eyes were red, and that she kept dabbing them with a wet tissue, which in clump and formation looked a whole lot like the same tissue she’d been using earlier in the day.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“You can use a new tissue.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s only water.”

I didn’t ask why she’d been crying. I figured she probably had a good reason.

“Arlene,” I said.

“Yeah?”

I didn’t know what to ask her. How to be a person? On the first day of school, she had sought me out: saw me, made a beeline, and held out her hand for hello. “You have such great hands,” she had told me. My hands? She’d held one up and pointed out the shape of my fingers, the squareness, the good knuckles. “You were watching my hands?” I asked, and she said that during the orientation activity, when we had to wave at airplanes for some reason we could not recall, she had noticed my hands waving because they seemed like the hands of an interesting person. In the fall, she would be doing the Peace Corps or Teach For America, depending on which program took her first. Arlene, who made sure every used item went into the right bin because she wanted all things, everything, to find its way back into the world, new.

She was standing right next to me with her tissue. I put my head on her shoulder. Closed my eyes. “Will we stay friends?”

“Who? You and me?”

I nodded. The room smelled like waffle batter.

“What do you mean?” she said.

Those embroidered suns lit my eyelids, shining up from her bathrobe. “We have nothing in common,” I said.

“Oh, shush.” She started to laugh. “Human. You human. You silly human,” she said, leaning her head against mine.

Origin Lessons

We met the new teacher for origin class. He was tall, with a mustache. He was our last resort. The family-genealogy class had failed. The trip to the zoo to look at monkeys had failed. The investigation of sperm and egg in a dish had failed. All were interesting, but they were not enough. Where did the sperm come from? Where did the monkey come from? Where did Romania come from?

He sat in a chair at the front of the rug.

We began all at once, everywhere, he said.

We sat quietly, waiting.

Has he started? someone whispered.

Yes, he said. I have started. We began all at once, everywhere.

We thought about that.

But before that?

He shrugged. Goes beyond what we know, he said. All we can know is the universe.

I thought we started in a dot, someone said.

He shook his head. He brought out his lunch in a brown bag from his briefcase.

No dot, he said. A dot is at a point, and if at a point, things are also not at that point.

We watched as he chewed a baby carrot.

A very well-packed dot, someone else offered. From which all things hurled free. Not unlike a suitcase.

Nope, he said. Everywhere, all at once.

Then what? someone asked.

After that? he said. Well, at first, it was fast. Everything accelerating fast. Everything wanting to get out.

Get out of what?

Poor wording, he said. Just rapid acceleration. Then it slowed down. Now expansion is accelerating steadily.

What expansion?

Oh, the universe is expanding, he said, wiping his mouth. We found that out in 1929. From Hubble.

We nodded. This made sense. It had been in a suitcase and then—

No suitcase! he said, stomping his foot. All at once, everywhere!

Someone started to cry. Someone else pushed Martha into the rug.

How about this, he said. He put away his lunch bag and opened his briefcase again and brought out sock puppets to show us personified matter and radiation. So, he said, what happened was that, after around four hundred thousand years, everything slowed and cooled, and matter grew lumpy due to gravity, and radiation stayed smooth. Before that, the two lived evenly together.

He wound the two socks together and then moved them away from each other, and the lumpy sock got all lumpified, ready to form galaxies, and he stuffed a battery-operated lightbulb inside the smooth sock so that the light beneath the fabric radiated.

Nice, we said.

The origin of galaxies, he said, with a flourish.

Are those your socks?

No, he said. I bought the socks at a store.

Won’t the lightbulb burn the sock?

No, he said, coughing. It is a specially insulated sock.

Are we accelerating right now?

Yes, he said.

Edgar grabbed on to his seat. I feel it! he shouted. He fell off his chair.

The teacher removed the socks from his hands. We can’t feel it, he said. But everything is moving away from everything else, and it does mean that, in a few billion years, even our beautiful neighbors may be drifting out of reach.

He looked sad, saying that. We felt a sadness. In a billion years, our beautiful neighbors pulling away. But, surely, we will not be here in a billion years. Surely we will be something new, something that might not conceive of distance in the same way. We told him this, and he nodded, but it was wistful.

He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look.

This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We’re seeing back in time.

No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today.

No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you’re seeing is time.

Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart. What we’re seeing is space.

It’s space, yes, he said. It’s also time. You’re seeing what has already happened.

That’s absurd, we said, though we did not move.

We make bigger telescopes, radio telescopes, he said, to see back all the way. We can go back thirteen billion years now! Almost to the Big Bang.

No, we said.

Yes!

You can see all that way back?

Yes!

And? we said, sitting up. The suitcase?

We pictured it at the end of a telescope. The longest, biggest telescope ever made. A tiny suitcase, of a pleasing brown leather.

Well, he said, leaning on the side wall. We can see very close to the beginning, but at around 400,000 years, the universe goes opaque.

We almost tossed him off the roof then. We were right there at the edge.

It’s true, he said. We can see all the way to about year 400,000! Can you believe that? But before that, it’s veiled.

We stopped to consider this. The universe began in a veil.

Like a bride? we said.

He smiled for the first time that day.

Sure, he said, relenting. Like a bride.

And she takes off her veil at 400,000?

She does, he said. We see her quite well after that.

So who’d she marry? we ask, settling ourselves at his feet. When a bride removes her veil, it’s the moment of marriage.

I don’t know, he said, scratching his head. Everything? Us?

The Doctor and the Rabbi

The doctor went to see the rabbi. “Tell me, rabbi, please,” he said, “about God.”

The rabbi pulled out some books. She talked about Jacob, wrestling the angel. She talked about Heschel and the kernel of wonder as a seedling that could grow into awe. She tugged at her braid and told a Hassidic story about how it is said that at the end of your life you will need to apologize to God for the ways you have not lived.

“Not for the usual sins,” she said. “For the sin of living small.”

The doctor sat in his suit in his chair and fidgeted. Although he had initiated the conversation, he found the word “God” offensive, the same way he disliked it when people spoke about remodeling their kitchens.

“I’m sorry,” he said, standing. “I cannot seem to understand what you are saying. Are you speaking English?”

“English?” said the rabbi, closing a book. Dust motes floated off the pages into the room and caught the light as they glided upward. She wrinkled her forehead as if she was double-checking in there. “Yes,” she said.

A few months later, the rabbi became sick. She had a disease of the blood, a disease that needed weekly transfusions that she scheduled on Wednesdays so she would be at her best for Shabbat.

The doctor who had come to see her was a doctor of blood. A transfusionist. He had chosen this profession because blood was at the center of all of it. It was either blood, or the heart, or the brain. Or the lungs. He picked blood because it was everywhere. He was never even slightly interested in skin, or feet, joints, or even genitals. It was the most central core stuff of life and death that made him tolerate all those god-awful courses in anatomy and biochemistry.

She thought of him as she sat with her husband, staring at their enfolded hands, wondering what to do.

“That man,” she said, looking up. “That man who came by a few months ago.”

When the rabbi was in her paper gown she looked smaller, of the earth, and the doctor did not mind the role reversal.

“I’m so sorry you have to go through this,” he said.

The rabbi lay down on the cold table. She offered her arm. The blood drained from her; the blood of another person filled her. The doctor stood beside her and reset the instruments in a line.

The rabbi came for many transfusions, and she recovered at a brisk pace, filled with the blood of Hindus and Lutherans. The treatments went so well she didn’t have to visit as often anymore, and the doctor missed seeing her at the clinic. After a month had gone by, he went to her office again, where he found her talking to another rabbi, massaging the bottom of a stockinged foot. He stood outside the door as she sifted through her shelves, finding a book, opening it to a page, the two rabbis huddled shoulder to shoulder, commenting, gesturing. The age-old activity of Jews.

The doctor stayed near the door. He was not one to interrupt.

It was when the rabbi was locking up that she glanced over and saw him. Her color was back. Her eyes were clear. She was an attractive woman, with a kind, bearish husband, one raven-haired child, pink dots of warmth in the centers of her cheeks. She hugged him, and pressed his hand, and thanked him, and he said he would like to talk to her again.

“About God?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

They went to a coffee shop, because she could now go no longer than two hours without food.

She asked him why blood. He explained. The river of it. They picked at a croissant on wax paper between them. The radio expelled old pop songs. He felt something stir inside him when beside her, but it was not lust, and it was not religion. What was it? “I feel a stirring when I sit with you,” he said, rolling his coffee mug in his hands. “But it is not lustful.”

“I’m married,” she said, as an afterthought. She had bright-blue clay earrings on, formed into the shapes of stars.

“It’s like the coffee tastes more like coffee,” he said.

She sipped hers.

“There’s good coffee here,” she said.

“It’s not that.”

There was a pause. He found it awkward. She did not seem to mind. She dipped a croissant end into her coffee, and the buttery layers soaked up the warmth.

“I gave you the blood of other religions,” he blurted.

She laughed out loud, lifting out the croissant. “No problem,” she said. “I like what you gave me. It’s great. How’d you know?”

“There’s a box on the donation form,” he said. “An optional box.”

“Ah,” she nodded.

“I went with those who had checked the optional box.”

“How interesting that it’s a box on a form,” she said, chewing. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

He scratched his nose. “It’s new.”

“Hospital rules?”

“No.”

“Who made the form?”

“Me,” he said.

“You can do that?”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “No one thinks to question an extra form. Plus, it’s optional.”

“So—who’d I get?” she asked, now dipping the croissant torso.

His hands were shaking, slightly. He put them flat on the table, to calm them. He wasn’t sure why he was so nervous around her.

“Christians,” he said. “Of all sorts. Including a Jehovah’s Witness. Several Muslims. A few Jews.”

“Maybe it’s a new route to world peace,” she said. “Transfuse people.”

“And atheists?” he said, tentatively.

“What about them?”

“I gave you atheist blood, too,” he said. He cringed, visibly.

She laughed again. All that warmth in her laugh, like it could embrace someone across a room.

“I don’t hate the atheists,” she said.

“I’m an atheist,” he said, a little too loud, and he reached out for her hand.

For a second, she held his. His hand was much wider than hers, and her hands, not usually considered dainty, looked small and slender next to his.

“I’m not here to push anything on you,” she said. “Lots of Jews I know are atheist Jews.”

“Your eyes shine,” he said. “How do they do that?”

“Blood,” she said.

They slipped into the affair, even though it was not an affair. It was never anything to do with losing clothes. It was not the deep sharing of feelings. It was almost entirely one-sided. It was simple, like he’d slipped slightly into her blood, and she slipped strongly into his thinking. She had one or two dreams in which he played a part, as a kind of helpful direction-giver when lost on a highway, dreams she was only mildly aware of when she woke up and went to shower.

For the most part, she focused on the congregants who needed comfort, and her husband and young son with the amazing brown eyes. The doctor, however, cultivated thoughts of her like a fresh little garden. Sometimes he pulled out her chart just to reread her basic stats, because the numbers brought him something akin to joy. To joy, really—the numbers lifted his heart and step, buoyed his day. It was just knowing this person was alive, he thought. That he had helped her, maybe even saved her, and now she was out there talking about all this business he did not believe in.

God, he said, in his car, driving from hospital to home. What a word. Much had been made already of its similarity to “dog,” but as he wound through the streets, he particularly enjoyed conjuring up the image in his head of some kind of old and glowing man on a leash.

Not that he believed in such things, but he wondered if giving her atheist blood might in fact turn her into an atheist, and he felt guilty at the thought but also pleased—like she could come over to his house and they could browse his bookshelves, shoulder to shoulder, and read Sartre together, or a dash of Camus, and then stand on chairs in old-fashioned hats and drop apples from great heights to the floor.

He returned to the rabbi’s office. His mother was not well. She had cancer. She was in the hospital. Her illness had little to do with blood, or at least not his kind of blood, and so he’d stood around her hospital room, awkward, without a task. He watched the TV, attached to the ceiling with metal straps and hooks, the show pointing down upon them. He loved his mother, even though she seemed to be so private a person he had never understood much about her. She only ever told him on a daily basis about her day.

“I went to the grocery store,” she would say. “I got my hair done.”

“What else?” he asked once.

“I ate potato chips,” she said. “I talked to your Aunt Sophie.”

“About what?” he said.

She hummed, thinking. “About everything, I suppose,” she said. “And how are you?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I bought a radio. But what do you mean, everything?”

She paused on the phone. He could hear her unpacking groceries. “Sophie tells me about everything she is thinking and feeling,” his mother said. “It’s very interesting.”

“And you?”

“I so enjoy hearing what Sophie has to say,” she said.

“I have been unable to work very much this week,” he told the rabbi. “I took two days off.”

“Makes sense,” she said. She was wearing a navy-blue suit, maybe because she had attended a funeral, or a business meeting. The daily workings of a rabbi’s schedule were highly mysterious to him.

She was also surrounded by cardboard boxes of donations for a charity drive, and had just started sorting items into piles. A kid clothing pile, an adult clothing pile, a book pile, a toy pile.

“Want to help?” she asked.

“Sure.” He took the free seat. She had a pile of books in her lap, and was separating them into kid and adult levels.

“And my son is not doing well, either,” he said, settling in. “He lives with my ex-wife. He failed algebra.”

He opened a donation box. Sweaters. The rabbi was divvying up her book piles, but he could tell she was listening. She divvied quietly.

“I tried to tutor him,” he said, “but I didn’t know how. I forgot algebra.”

The rabbi shrugged. “Who remembers?”

“My ex-wife doesn’t like to talk about it,” he said. “My mother is doing a little better. They say she can go home tomorrow.”

He listed all the people on his fingers. Mother, son, ex. Looked at his hands. Ham-handed, he’d been called, as a boy. Big fingers. He had turned out to be very deft with needles, which had surprised everybody.

“And how are you holding up?” the rabbi asked.

“Fine,” he said.

He folded up the sweaters. Two had fairly large moth holes eating up the sleeves. “This okay?” he asked, showing her.

“Agh, no,” she said. She pointed under her desk. “Ungivables.”

He tossed over the sweaters, began folding others.

“What a stressful time,” said the rabbi.

“You say that to all the visitors,” he said, smiling a little.

She smiled back. “I still mean it.”

He folded the arms in carefully, then made the sweaters into tidy squares, smoothing down the fronts, so that each one looked new, like it had just been taken from a box at a department store and placed upon a table.

“Let me ask you a question,” said the rabbi, balancing the last book in the adult pile. “You’re here to see me. Why?”

“Because I like seeing you.”

“I like seeing you, too. But you could go to a friend. To a colleague.”

“You think doctors know how to talk about this stuff?”

She pulled a pile of animal toys into her lap, including an unusually large red plastic chicken.

“Bock-bock,” she said, moving the chicken up and down.

“I like seeing you,” the doctor said again.

“Well,” said the rabbi, steadying the chicken in her lap. “I ask because I have a rabbi kind of thing to say.”

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

“It’s not a secular comment, is what I’m saying,” said the rabbi. “It will probably piss off the atheist.”

“I get it, that’s okay,” said the doctor, pressing hands down on his pants. He placed his neat pile of sweaters in the adult pile. “I came here. Let’s hear it.”

She touched the plastic comb on the chicken’s head gently.

“You could pray,” she said. “Either on your own, or with us.”

“Oh, that?” said the doctor, shaking his head. “The ‘p’ word? No.”

“Not to an old-man-in-the-sky kind of God,” she said. “Not to solve all your problems. Just to ask for some help.”

“Oh,” said the doctor. “Nah. I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“Why not?” she said. There was no edge to her voice. Just interest.

The doctor put a small bottle of bubbles in the kid pile.

“Bubbles!” he said.

He looked back at her.

“Just because I think it’s useless,” he said. “And a little creepy.”

She laughed. “Okay,” she said. The red chicken bobbed in her lap. “Fair enough.” She glanced at the adult clothes pile.

“What beautiful folding,” she said.

He had opened another box and found a mushed pile of T-shirts, washed but unfolded, as if they had gone straight from the dryer into the donation box.

“And,” he said, after a minute, shaking out a T-shirt, “just to play along. You know. I wouldn’t want to use up the line space.”

“What line space?” she said. She placed the chicken in the kid pile. “You mean like margins?”

He swept his hand in the air. “No, a line,” he said. “A line-line. Like in the post office. Let’s say there’s a line. Of people praying. And I added my prayer to it. Well, I don’t want to take up someone else’s space in line with my half-assed, half-believing, baloney prayer.”

She laughed, again. Now she had a pile of very-loved stuffed animals in her lap. She was looking so well. He could not help but feel a little proud of how she was looking. He had made sure she had gotten very good blood.

“You atheists,” she said. “Scratch the surface and so many of you are so old school.”

He coughed. “What do you mean?”

“As if there’s a line!” she said. She released the herd of stuffed animals into the kid toy pile.

“But one prayer could edge out another prayer,” he said.

“I don’t see how,” she said.

“It’s just logic!” he said. He felt the sweat beading up, on his forehead. All those sweaters, all that wool. It was May. They were doing a clothing-and-toy drive for some holiday. Tu B’Shvat? Or was that January? Wasn’t that about trees? Who needed sweaters now?

“If I’m … praying,” he said, growing a little impatient, “and there are people across the world who pray five times a day, well, I think their prayers should be heard first, before my prayer, because they have, well, ‘earned’ their prayer spot in line, just as I would earn my place in line if I attended a museum opening and arrived at noon with a sack lunch for a three p.m. opening. There!” he said, sitting back, folding his arms.

The rabbi leaned in. She seemed to have forgotten about the piles for the moment. Her eyes were beams of light. “But there’s no line,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said. “But you’re using an example that doesn’t fit. An example that is of this daily world. You have to think differently.”

“All we know is of this world,” he said.

“True,” she said. “True.”

The doctor sniffed. “Or don’t you think the prayer lines get scrambled, with too many people praying?”

“I don’t think it’s like the phone system,” she said.

“Why not?” He held himself tight. “Six billion people on the planet, right? Some of them pray every day. Several times a day! All day!”

“But—” she said.

“I have no interest in cutting in the queue,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s a merit system,” she said. “Or a queue.”

“But it would have to be, right?” he said. “There has to be some linear order. A way for whoever is supposedly listening to decide what to listen to first?”

She pushed her hair off her face. “I’m not sure God even has ears like that,” she said.

He laughed. “Well, then, it’s even more pointless than I thought!”

She paused. She was looking in the middle distance, gathering. He could see she did not want to flood him. So much flooding, alone, pouring out of her eyes.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, slowly. A leftover giraffe fell on the floor. “Here,” he said, picking it up.

She furrowed her forehead, thinking. Took the giraffe, absently stroked its back.

“The best way I can think to describe it,” she said, “is the way, when you’re driving on the freeway at night, how everyone can see the moon in their window. Every car, on the road. Every car feels the moon is following that car. Even in the other direction, right? Everyone in that entire hemisphere can see the moon and think it is there for them, is following where they go.

“You’ve had that experience?”

“Many times,” he said. “I see the moon right out my window.”

She kept petting the giraffe, as if it were a cat. Petting the little giraffe ears.

“That,” she said, “is a little closer to how I imagine it works. Whether or not you pray has absolutely nothing to do with the person to your left. It’s like saying you shouldn’t get the moon in your window, or else the other cars wouldn’t get the moon in their windows. But everyone gets the moon. It’s not an option, to not have the moon in your window. You just see it. It’s there.”

She bit her lip. The window in the office grew golden with late afternoon.

“Half the world can’t see the moon,” said the doctor.

“It’s not the greatest example,” said the rabbi.

“Plus, the moon is far,” the doctor said, brushing dryer lint off a T-shirt. “That’s why everyone has access.”

“True,” said the rabbi.

“So is God far?”

“I don’t think those distance terms apply in the same way,” she said.

“Then I don’t understand the example.”

“It’s not—” she said, clasping her hands together around the giraffe. “It’s not so literal.”

“I am literal,” he said. “I think literally. The moon is also unresponsive.”

She shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s hard to find the right example. I’m not saying pray to the moon,” she said. “Truly. I’m just trying to think up a way to talk about why there’s no queue, you know?”

“You don’t think God has ears?”

She sat back in her chair. “Not like our ears.”

He laughed, short. “I’m a doctor,” he said, putting all the folded T-shirts into a neat stack.

She resettled herself. Her face was warm, flushed.

“And are these prayers to be answered?” he said.

She seemed to be resting now, the urgency quieting, and he could see her shifting modes, back to her regular rabbi self, her teacher self, returning to the statements she said maybe once a week, twice a week, to different audiences. “In Judaism we pray for a variety of reasons,” she said, gently tucking the giraffe next to a few worn teddy bears. She closed her eyes. “Out of gratitude. Out of despair, asking for comfort. Out of confusion. Out of anger, in defiance. To be with. To share oneself. Not for results, tangible material results, especially on Shabbat—isn’t that interesting? We’re not to ask for anything tangible on Shabbat, which is, I think, one of the nicest times to pray all together.”

He flashed on an image of a hamburger, at a drive-through near his home, in a tinfoil pocket.

“Right now it might be helpful,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

He wiped his hands clear on his pants. “I still think it’s hokum.”

“Okay,” she said. She opened her eyes. Her forehead relaxed. “That’s okay. I’ll stop. I just wanted to talk it through with you. I’m glad you stayed.”

He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. It was hot in her office.

“I apologize for being so stubborn.”

“You weren’t stubborn,” she said, leaning over and unpeeling the tape on a new box. “You were actually pretty open. In a way, in my book, we just did it.”

“Did what?”

“Prayed, in a way,” she said. “Wrestled with it.”

“Why do you say that?” He sat up taller. For some reason, the thought made him angry.

“Because you’re leaning in,” she said, unfolding the box flaps. “Because I am tired, in a way that I recognize. Because you seem to be fighting up from under some water. Into what, I don’t know. Into something. Because we were talking about it deeply,” she said. “I could feel it.”

“We were having an argument!” he said. He stood up, but her office was too small to pace, so he turned away, and stepped away, and found himself going through the door and going down the hall to use the bathroom. Down the long, dark, narrow hallway, with its closed office doors, and framed yarn art telling stories of the Old Testament. Once he was inside the bathroom, the motion sensor light clicked on; it was the end of the day, and no one had been in for over an hour. The space held the loneliness particular to an unused bathroom, the glare of fluorescent lights, the echo of sink and crumpling paper, the tired isolation of one person in an office building, alone, at night, working too late. He used up ten paper towels on his face and neck, until he was sufficiently dry. He washed his hands carefully in the sink. He took the back exit.

The rabbi sat in her office for forty-five minutes, unpacking the last donation boxes, to see if he would return, but he did not return, and so she shouldered her bag and walked the seven blocks home.

The doctor found his car in the parking lot, one of the last three there, and joined the flow on the street. He drove with his air-conditioner fan on full blast, into traffic as the sun set, into dusk, with the full moon rising in his rearview mirror, almost taunting him with her big presence in his car alone and every car around and none of it being how he liked to think or was interested in thinking. And yet. Why did he love the rabbi? He loved her. He got home and looked through the mail, and he had driven past the drive-through, so instead he sent out for a meatball sandwich, which he ate in pieces, because it was too unwieldy to eat all at once, and even the bread he cut into bite-sized parts. He could feel it, just feel it, the glimmer of something that he did not understand. He would never call it God. He would not call it prayer. But just beyond his sandwich, and the four TV shows he watched back to back, and his teeth brushing, and his face washing, and his nighttime reading of a magazine, and his light switching off, just the faint realization that there were many ways to live a life and that some people were living a life that was very different than his, and the way they lived was beyond him and also didn’t interest him and yet he could sense it. Comfort and fear rose together inside him. Like standing in the middle of a meadow, where no one had his back.