EMILIA Alas, good gentleman! Alas, good Cassio!

IAGO This is the fruits of whoring. Prithee, Emilia, go know of Cassio where he supped tonight. (To Bianca) What, do you shake at that?

BIANCA He supped at my house, but I therefore shake not.

IAGO O did he so? I charge you go with me.

EMILIA O, fie upon thee, strumpet!

BIANCA I am no strumpet, but of life as honest as you that thus abuse me.

— Othello, Act Five, Scene One

NEWS travels fast in La Serenissima, thought Giovanna as, very late one morning with the sun well up in the sky, dispelling what remained of the thick mists and glittering on the canali, she stripped off her clothes and prepared to climb into bed. The night’s revelry had tired her more than usual, and between her legs ached from too many over-eager, drunken customers. She had just finished douching, the sharp sting of the vinegar on sensitive flesh lingering as much as the pungent smell. To hide it, she briefly considered opening her bottle of cheap scent, in case someone were to come in while she was sleeping, but then thought better of it. The bottle of scent was cheap but precious, and anyway, anyone coming in was most likely going to be smelling of vinegar themselves. That was the sort of women who mostly lived in the house, after all.

She collapsed onto her mattress with a sigh of pleasure, pulling the blankets up over her face to block out the sunlight that the thin, tattered cloth curtains were hardly keeping out of the room. The sting between her legs slowly faded, replaced with a faint, dull throbbing sensation. Her head began to ache, which was disappointing since she usually managed to hold off the effects of the wine until after she had slept. She sighed, rolled over so she was facing the stained but comforting-looking wall, and thought again, news travels fast in La Serenissima.

She tried to imagine it, the newcomer’s face—the newcomer who, according to her closest friend Antonia, had arrived in Venezia only three days before but yet was already the talk of the whole city. According to Antonia, he was a nobile inglese—an English nobleman—and extremely wealthy, much more wealthy, Antonia assured her, than most English or Italian noblemen. He had arrived, Antonia said, with a whole crowd of attendants—servants, doctors, advisors, musicians—and endless amounts of luggage (the amount of gondolas it took to hold it all! You should have seen! exclaimed Antonia, though she herself had not actually been there). Intriguingly (and disturbingly) his entourage was rumored to include a vast number of animals: huge dogs, cats, birds, and there was even rumored to be a monkey. Or else, he had already managed to acquire the monkey. Anyhow, Antonia said, he had proceeded to rent the most luxurious villa—the one recently vacated by Count Contarini and his family—and fill it with his attendants and things. Most excitingly of all, concluded Antonia, it was said of him that—unlike the vast majority of nobili inglesi—he was extremely intelligent, extremely good at Italian, a great lover of parties, young, spirited, and (here Antonia added special emphasis) molto bello. Very handsome. In fact, rumor had it that it was precisely because he was so wild, so spirited, and so handsome that he had left Inghilterra—England, it seemed, could not tolerate the extent of his scandals.

Giovanna reached out and traced, with the tip of her second finger, the shape of a crack in the plaster of the wall. Sometimes, when she was very tired and very drunk, it looked like a bird: a big exotic bird with long, trailing tail feathers, perhaps a peacock or some fowl of the kind. Other times, when she was completely sober and battling a headache (like at the present) it looked like a crack in a stained wall badly in need of repair, nothing more. Except now—now—as she thought about the stranger, the newcomer, the nobile inglese—it began to look like the side profile of a man’s face, and she allowed a smile to lift, just for a moment, one corner of her mouth. She had had her fill of men, as the little aching throb between her legs and the lire in her purse bore witness, and she did not want another one to come near her for a very long time. Still, perhaps because, deep down, she was hopelessly romantic, or because it had been so long since she had seen one who was very handsome, the thought of this nobile inglese pleased her, far more than she cared to admit to the openly rapturous Antonia. She never quite lost hope of someday meeting a man who stunned her, swept her off her feet, and cared about her enough that he wouldn’t size her up for what she was within fifteen minutes, start to look at her obscenely (she could always tell, even at occasions when everyone was wearing masks, when men were looking at her obscenely) and finally ask her the inevitable question: quanto ti devo? How much will I owe you?

In Giovanna’s dreams, the word quanto—how much—and devo—I owe/will I owe—did not exist, or at least, they were banned from use by the Venetian government. Instead, they were replaced by words like all’infinito—infinitely, as in the sentence, ti amo all’infinito, I love you infinitely—and regina, as in the sentence sei la mia regina, ti adoro: you are my queen, I adore you. Words that a cortigiana, even a cortigiana onesta, an honest, upper-class courtesan that Giovanna liked to hope she was and think of herself as, was unlikely to hear.

It is my books, my reading alone that separates me, ennobles me, redeems me, she thought as, for the hundredth time, she tried to keep the prying sunlight out of her face. I don’t have enough money or lovely clothes or beauty to be seen as a true cortigiana onesta, and even my name, while very good, is not spectacular. But I can sing, I have read much, I can write, I can think. She thought, too, of her friend Antonia, who, although she also thought of herself as being onesta, was really no different from a cortigiana di lume—a street lamp courtesan, degraded, class-less, utterly lacking in dignity. Giovanna hoped that she herself, in spite of many wild nights when she drank too much and had a lot of customers and douched endlessly afterwards and slept till late in the afternoon the next day, had still retained some dignity, something to show anyone who might someday care to look that regardless of it all, she still was onesta, honest, inside, that she loved goodness and hoped for more of life (though that hope was waning, imperceptibly but steadily each day) than an endless cycle of drunkenness and douching. But then again, perhaps she was deceiving herself—perhaps, in spite of all the time she spent reading, all the ways she tried to make herself cultured, spending precious money on the opera and memorizing long passages of Orlando Furioso or Gerusalemme Liberata, she really was nothing more than a cortigiana di lume: one whom the men sometimes didn’t even ask “quanto ti devo?” and instead just took roughly by the arm, shoved against a wall, and, if they were very drunk, sometimes tossed laughingly in the canal afterwards, leaving the poor woman spluttering angrily and coughing and wringing the stinking water out of her dress onto the cobbles.

Quanto ti devo, quanto ti devo. Giovanna had been growing sleepy for a while, and on this dismal note, finally fell asleep.

* * *

It was not hunger pangs or headache that eventually woke her up, but Antonia, clothed in her best gown and smelling to the high heavens of perfume that was even cheaper than Giovanna’s. Antonia was shaking her by the shoulders, bending over her, and so Giovanna’s first glimpse when she opened one eye was of her friend’s slight double chin, heavily powdered over, of course, with her artificially red lips and her fake jeweled necklace. “Giovanna! Giovanna! Wake up! Buon Dio, what an awful smell of vinegar. Giovanna, how many men did you have last night? Did you make much? I should hope so with this smell”—

Giovanna sighed and rolled over. “Leave me alone, Antonia. And for your information, it was five, but I feel like I had twice as many. They made themselves feel like ten.”

Antonia made a skeptical sound and kept shaking her. “Five? By this smell, I would have said twenty-five. I had nobody last night.”

Giovanna yawned. “A pity. Or a blessing. Leave me alone.”

Antonia persisted. “No, you need to get up and get dressed! I want you to come with me to the opera house. I’m sure you have money for a gallery seat.”

Keeping her eyes shut and her face turned away, Giovanna murmured, “And why is that?”

Antonia made an impatient noise. “Culture, Giovanna, culture! You’re the one always talking of culture. Il Barbiere di Siviglia is playing tonight at La Fenice, with Giuditta Pasta as Rosina and Andrea Nozzari as Count Almaviva and… and…”

Giovanna turned further away. “But we’ve already gone to see Il Barbiere di Siviglia at La Fenice.”

Antonia sighed loudly. “I know… but you see… I… oh, don’t be so difficult, Giovanna, for heaven’s sake! Am I ever this difficult about anything?”

Feeling very irritated, Giovanna sat upright. “What, Antonia? What are you saying?”

Antonia looked strangely embarrassed. She fingered her necklace, scrutinized a spot on the palm of her hand, then poked with her toe at the stockings that Giovanna had left, along with her gown, strewn along the floor. “Well, you see… I was hoping… since it’s been three days now… maybe he.. maybe he would”—

Suddenly, comprehension flashed through Giovanna’s sleepy, aching head. “Oh, the stranger? The foreigner? The nobile inglese? You’re hoping to catch sight of him at La Fenice, aren’t you?”

Antonia looked relieved and nodded eagerly. “I really hope so. You see, Il Barbiere di Siviglia is playing tonight, with Giuditta Pasta as Rosina…”

Giovanna interrupted her. Suddenly, inexplicably, she felt grateful to her friend for waking her up. “You already said that. And don’t worry, I’m getting dressed.” Reaching down for her stockings, she added, “If you’ll go call a gondola, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

* * *

In Giovanna’s dreams, the gondolier bowed to her—and not only bowed to her, but offered her his arm and helped her board, just as with any other fine lady. But in real life, as if he could still smell the vinegar on her—or, more realistically, as if he knew the sort of women who lived in the house—he did not help her in, did not bow, but merely inclined his head in a vague way, as if acknowledging her presence but not willing to do much more. Somehow, Giovanna felt strangely bitter towards him—La Serenissima, she sometimes thought, is one giant brothel, especially after Napoleone took it, and even the noblest of the noble married women have lovers. I am no more a cortigiana and no less onesta than the dazzlingly-clothed ladies whom the gondolier, if he had the privilege of transporting them, would bow to for at least half a minute. At the same time, however, she wondered at her own bitterness and felt silly for feeling it. She had long ago accepted the state of affairs, realizing that it would never be otherwise—and, furthermore, that she didn’t want or need it to be otherwise.

Still, as Antonia clambered into the gondola after her (smelling even more strongly of cheap perfume and wearing still more powder), as the gondolier pushed off with his pole and sent them gliding across the dark reeking sun-pierced water, Giovanna reflected that things were easier for her friend. Antonia, herself being an illegitimate child with a cortigiana as a mother, could never have hoped for anything more. Giovanna, on the other hand, could not help but think back to the days when her father had been alive. She had never known her mother, who had died of a fever when she was two years old, her father said. This fever she had contracted shortly after giving birth to her younger sister, who, also according to her father, died shortly after her mother. Giovanna remembered thinking, so much grief, so much sorrow, so much loss, but I remember none of it—I have only his word and the grey-white stones in the churchyard, or else I would not even know they existed. I remember nothing. Still, looking back, what had mostly filled her childhood was not grief for grief she had not known, but happiness and contentment, even after the coming of Napoleone. She had been intensely aware that her family was impoverished—her father, a minor government official, had not earned much even under the Republic, and still less when Napoleone invaded and dismantled it—but equally aware that she bore a very good name. She remembered learning to read, and write, and play music, with her father—her kind, short, stout, brown-eyed, brown-bearded father with his warm laugh and habit of scratching his nose—teaching her, often praising her and telling her, Giovanna mia, what a fine scholar you are, what a fine mind you have, I’m proud of you. At the same time, he would grow angry when she’d read certain things—certain books, or even certain passages of Orlando Furioso or Dante. Later, later, or never, he would say; your mind is like a spugna, a sponge, he would say, it will sop everything up, good or bad, like a big soft loaf of bread on a little wine. And she would always wonder what the “little wine” was—what was it that Boccaccio was saying, or hinting at, that she was so strictly forbidden to know? Giovanna smiled wryly—and a little sadly—as she came back to the present and thought, Papa, you tried so hard, but look at me now. Just look at me now. That’s how life goes, I guess. I love you, and I’m sorry, and I thank you for trying. I’m not sorry for myself, at all—but for you.

An evening breeze—it was already more evening than afternoon, with the late golden sunlight turning softer, cooler—rippled the dark water of the canal in front of them, set the ribbons on the hats of ladies in surrounding gondolas (they, too, very well dressed, as if they, too, were heading to La Fenice) fluttering like long, thin flags. Next to Giovanna, Antonia sighed, and Giovanna wondered if her friend was wishing she could afford such a nice hat. Suddenly she felt generous. “Antonia, my earnings last night”—she began.

Antonia looked at her curiously. “What about them?”

Something about the way Antonia’s face looked—wide, flat, pitiful, her thin hair combed back too tightly, her complexion too pale with the powder and too red in the lips—made Giovanna’s generous impulse vanish as quickly as it had come. “Nothing, never mind,” she said.

In Giovanna’s dreams—she had many dreams—she was an opera singer, because opera singers were not just good at singing, she thought: they were also often beautiful (although on the heavier side) honored, powerful, and influential. What else explained it, that all sorts of people from all over Venezia, from the highest—the noblemen and the noblewomen who sat up in the boxes with their endless rustling silk and endless obsequious attendants—to the lowest—the common people, the gondoliers and cleaners and shopkeepers and grocers in the gallery—to those in between, the merchants, the bankers, the financiers, the tailors—all gathered to hear, essentially, one women’s voice as she sang of her unrequited love and aching sorrow? Well, it was that of her character, of course, but if she was good enough, one could forget that easily.

The beginning of the first act was nearing, and the whole opera house was quiet, curious, interested—everybody listening with anticipation as the final strains of the overture died away, knowing that the curtain would soon lift on the setting of the first scene. Beside Giovanna, Antonia sighed heavily for the second time that evening, and Giovanna knew she was disappointed because, in spite of endless amounts of neck-craning, she had not been able to catch sight of anyone looking distinguished enough or creating enough stir to be the nobile inglese. “Cursed gallery seats,” Giovanna heard her mutter, as she resigned herself to not glimpsing him. “You can never really see anything.”

Suddenly, breaking the pre-curtain-stillness, there was a strange sound from somewhere in the opera house—to Giovanna, it sounded almost like the clopping of a horse’s hooves, though obviously that was impossible. However, she would have paid no more attention, but suddenly everything below them was in uproar—a hundred voices all speaking and exclaiming at once. Che diavolo sta facendo? (What on earth is he doing?) Giovanna heard distinctly, along with, in a high-pitched, wailing, feminine voice, è pazzo, è pazzo? Is he mad? Is he mad? Antonia, of course, had sprung to her feet and was leaning over as far as she dared. Un cavallo? Può stare su un cavallo? Giovanna heard her say, her voice filled with disbelief and a hint of fear. A horse? Can he be on a horse?

Out of a sense of pride, Giovanna tried to stay seated and act as if nothing at all was happening: she remembered how her father, whenever he took her to the opera, had always acted when there were disturbances, namely, by ignoring them and telling her, in a swift, strict whisper, to do the same. Because of this, she had an immense scorn for those women who were always turning around, jumping up, and craning their necks, but today, curiosity was simply overpowering her—the clamor of voices had now reached a hubbub so loud that the orchestra’s music could hardly be heard, the curtain was raised but nobody was looking at the stage or at the brightly costumed singers standing on it, and the sound like a horse’s hooves, far from dying away, was even louder now—

The sight that met Giovanna’s eyes, when she finally let herself join Antonia and the rest of the gallery in peering down at the scene far below them, was very well worth the indignity of doing so. Sitting astride an extremely large, extremely unruly brown horse was what appeared to be a young man with dark hair, pale skin and very fine clothes. Giovanna could not, of course, see his face (he was much too far away for that—as Antonia had said, the cheap gallery seats hardly provided a good view) but from his body language and posture, he seemed to be enjoying himself tremendously, savoring not only the horrified, outraged, astounded, and bewildered reactions of the people around him, but also the very unruliness of the huge animal beneath him. “Un cavallo a La Fenice? Scandaloso!” shouted a fat, balding, very dignified elderly man, and the young man on the horse bowed in his direction; in fact, the more he heard è pazzo, è pazzo?, the more he seemed to enjoy himself. Women were fainting, others were screaming, others were laughing, others were pushing each other as they grabbed their things and ran frantically for the doors, everyone was on their feet in a state of terrible excitement. Giovanna felt Antonia clutch her arm. “Oh, I’m so afraid,” her friend said, sounding partly delighted and partly genuinely afraid. “A madman, I know for certain that he’s mad. A horse—he has ridden a horse inside of the opera house—what will he do now—what will we do—oh, Giovanna, who will stop him”—

Suddenly, surprising herself, Giovanna started to laugh. She had no idea why she felt so sure, but she was. “Antonia, well, your wish has been granted,” she said.

Antonia stared at her, her eyes wide and slightly tearful. “What do you mean? What on earth do you mean?”

Giovanna laughed again. “Well, you came here because you wanted to see the stranger, the newcomer, the nobile inglese, didn’t you?

More wide tearful stares from Antonia. “Why are you talking about that right now?”

Giovanna nodded in the direction of the mounted man, who was now surrounded on all sides by angry attendants trying to catch the bridle of the bucking horse. How he managed to stay mounted, in spite of the wrathful men around him and his horse’s unruliness, was anybody’s guess, she thought. She looked back at Antonia. “I could be wrong, but I think that is the nobile inglese himself,” she said.

THERE WAS something terribly romantic about being a doctor. And not just terribly romantic, but also terribly practical. Frighteningly so. The longer I sat alone in the silence and stared out at the big Christmas trees twinkling on the snowy hospital lawn, the more strongly I felt this way. I ought to be a medical doctor, that’s what I ought to do with my life instead of going into academia, I thought. I thought I might even confide this, when it was all over, to the short brown-eyed male one who was delivering my friend and roommate Marisa’s baby, and in the meantime here I was pacing the waiting room with a bouquet of pink carnations covered in crinkling paper and nervousness roiling in my stomach exactly as if I were one of those terrified, handsome, pathetic fathers-to-be in movies instead of an acne-pocked college student with a long messy ponytail, fingernails painted a chipped purple, Adidas sneakers that squeaked horribly on the white hospital linoleum, and an extremely baggy gray T-shirt that read WAITING FOR THE WEEKEND…SO I CAN BANG JOHN KEAT.

This shirt with its conspicuous mistake was a gift from Marisa, who, after observing that for five weekends straight I stayed in the dorm reading one particular softbound book while everyone else went out to get soused, on the sixth weekend paused at the door. She was wearing a black tank top, a black cross-body bag, black sandals, and a thin gold chain link necklace and looked ferociously attractive and as confident as all hell. She asked me casually what I was reading. Startled, but vaguely pleased, I looked up, a deer in headlights. Then I looked back down at the book. “Oh. Like…” I held it up, waved it vaguely, gestured at the front cover. “Like, you see, like this,” I finished lamely.

She squinted over at it from across the room, then made her way around piles of books and laundry to where I was curled up on the floor in a nest of clean Puma socks. The joke was that I had so many Puma socks—teal panthers, pink panthers, red panthers, yellow panthers, blue panthers—that I might as well start a black-market trade in them. Late sunlight from the window caught her necklace and glinted as she came over, and I thought vaguely to myself that the light had such a distinctive Friday evening look. She bent down to look closely at the book cover I held up to her, and her breasts jiggled slightly as they hung down. They looked strangely soft and pure and innocent as they dangled there, sinless and defenseless as a child’s inner wrist. I didn’t suspect Marisa was very sinless, though, and that’s what I liked about her best.

“The Collected Letters of John Keats,” she read aloud, and I watched her Friday-sun-illumined face as she took in the portrait by John Severn on the cover—the wide eyes looking off into the distance, the gently parted lips, the slender hand resting on the chin, the curling hair. I realized for the first time that it was a very gay-looking image. “I know,” I said. “He looks so gay.” I grinned. “But he’s not really, I swear.”

She looked at me thoughtfully. “Oh bro I think I might actually know him. Is that, like, the poet dude?”

I nodded with that strange mixture of pride and annoyance I always felt when someone knew who John Keats was, which, for one of the great English poets, wasn’t as often as you’d think, blame TikTok or Snapchat or Instagram or the shorter attention spans caused by all three or whatever. Annoyance, because John Keats was mine, he was my dead poet, my lover, and I was fiercely possessive: nobody else was allowed to be even interested in him. Pride, because I thought he was genuinely one of the greatest, nicest, most deserving guys who ever lived and his name deserved to live forever. Also, somehow I felt like I knew him, that I’d been there with him from the beginning: been there the day his mother died, on the Chapman’s Homer day, and throughout his so-called annus mirabilis, and when he first met Fanny Brawne (though I tried not to think about her), when his health began to deteriorate… was there with him when he died that lonely obscure awful death in Rome, stood afterwards on the Spanish steps in the Italian night and stared desperately up at the faintly glowing winter sky. He was, in many ways, like a familiar friend or brother, and whenever I broke off from my early-19th-century imaginings and re-entered the present day, I rather felt like someone whose friend or brother or father, hitherto unknown, has become suddenly famous. “Yeah,” I said. “Poet dude. Exactly.”

Marisa straightened up, breasts lifting out of view, but continued to look down at me. “So… you spend weekends reading his letters?”

“Yeah,” I said. Feeling a need to explain myself more, I added, “There are, like, some really good ones in here. Ones, like, where he talks about what it means to be a poet, and his ambitions and his hopes and his dreams, his fears and worries, and all that stuff.” Thinking that sounded lame, I continued, “Oh and like there are love letters. Really, really good ones, super passionate and sweet.” I didn’t tell her that I wished they were addressed to me or that in real life he was 5’1 or 5’2 so we could never have dated because I’d be at least four inches taller anyway. Marisa’s rule for short guys was that maybe you could date one if he was, firstly, only an inch shorter and secondly, super, super buffed out and thirdly, really good looking and fourthly, great in bed and fifthly, an extremely good conversationalist. This confused me because I wasn’t quite sure how you could find out these things—at least, the bed and conversationalist aspects—without dating the guy, but I trusted Marisa’s judgement, since her experience was vastly greater than my own. I thought ruefully how Keats would also fail Requirement Two, especially in the last year or two of his life when tuberculosis came for him (though consumptive paleness honestly sounded romantic and nurseable to me), not be a clear winner on Requirement Three by some contemporary accounts (though I vehemently disbelieved them and put my faith in Severn’s portrait), be a definite no-go on Requirement Four (I was certain he died a virgin) and maybe not the best ever on Requirement Five, being quiet and introspective (as a poet should be). Suddenly, I was filled with the strangest, most hilarious sense of recklessness. I rolled over, so I was lying on my back and looking at her still-thoughtful face and curtains of dark hair upside down, and grinned. “Why don’t you get going so I can jerk off to these letters?” I told her.

She stared for a moment, then burst out laughing. “Wait for real? That’s what you do when I’m out?”

Things hadn’t reached quite that level, but instead of denying it, I laughed back and said, “There are weirder roommates, right?”

She kept laughing like it was one of the best things she’d ever heard. I looked up at her quivering chin and at dust particles drifting in the Friday light and at the K-pop posters plastered on the wall on her side of the room and suddenly felt ridiculously happy, the happiest I’d been since starting college. She wiped at one of her eyes, then swore, still laughing a bit. “Shit, dude. You made me mess up my mascara.”

“Perks of dating a dead guy,” I offered. “No mascara needed.”

She rolled her eyes as she fumbled around in her purse. “Whatever.”

So I sat and watched as she re-did her makeup in front of the little mirror on her desk and wondered again why on earth it was that everything about her—from the tips of her black-painted toes to that little streak of dyed red at the top of her head—seemed innocent and holy as baptism.

* * *

The end of freshman year was rough on both of us. Everyone, it seemed, was unmotivated or terribly behind. Marisa wanted to study for exams but was going through horrible withdrawal symptoms. I asked her why didn’t she try vaping only a bit each day instead of stopping all at once. She said that if she vaped a bit she would vape all day. I said maybe that didn’t matter as long as it helped her get work done. She said I was right but that she was determined to kick the habit right then, without any delays, before going home for the summer. So she lay on her bed and groaned with a horrible headache that no number of Tylenols could do anything for while I lay in my pile of Puma socks and blasted Bon Jovi into my earbuds and tried to understand calculus and wondered why it was that the music wasn’t helping at all since in the past the louder and more disruptive the music, the better I’d been able to tune it out and focus. But it wasn’t working at all.

Every once in a while I’d get up and go to the bathroom and pee for a long time and stare at a scrap of toilet paper that seemed embedded in the tile floor and then I’d get up, go back, and look down at Marisa. Even without mascara her eyelashes were impossibly dark and long and they looked even more so against the drawn paleness of her face. Every time she woke up she said, in a decisive tone, I feel like shit, and I said well why don’t you hydrate, because I’d read on ChatGPT that when withdrawing from nicotine it was very important to hydrate. Having a very sheltered childhood with strictly religious parents, I knew hardly any details myself.

I got through finals later that week somehow, with an A on everything except calculus, the way it had been all my life. Marisa still looked horrible by the time we were packing up and leaving for the summer, and I felt vaguely that it was my fault. But about a week after I got home to Omaha, I got a package in the mail from Amazon. I ripped it open to find a note from Marisa.

Heyy Corinne I expect to see you wearing this next time I see you!

It was a big grey T-shirt, much like the ones I normally wore (so she’d probably assumed that grey was my favorite color, which it frankly wasn’t, but I liked it because it seemed to me the best of all colors for not drawing attention). It read, in big black all-capital letters: WAITING FOR THE WEEKEND… SO I CAN BANG JOHN KEAT.

* * *

I didn’t hear much from her for quite a while afterwards, but that didn’t worry me particularly—I was just glad she seemed to like me so much or at least get along with me, because I’d heard from several friends at different colleges across the country how much they hated their roommates or how much their roommates hated them. My roommate listens to the same one song all the time and doesn’t use earbuds. My roommate leaves wet teabags everywhere. My roommate is literally such a jerk about my dehumidifier like how does that affect her at all?? But one day towards the end of June, I was sitting in my room listening to Taylor Swift with my little sister Marie and composing my 38th love sonnet to Keats and had just decided that I had better go Petrarchan instead of Shakespearean with this particular one when my phone rang, drowning out the chorus of “Enchanted.” I didn’t recognize the number, but it also looked like it could be familiar, so I picked it up. “Hello?”

“Hey Corinne.” The voice at the other end sounded impossibly low, sexy, and sultry. It was attractively hoarse, husky, in a way redolent of Scarlett Johansson. “Uh… hello… who is this?” I asked.

“This is Marisa,” said Scarlett Johansson, and laughed.

“Oh my God Marisa,” I said. “You sound like Scarlett Johansson.”

Another laugh. “Well thanks.”

Silence. “Well what’s up?” I said. “What have you been up to lately? How have you been?”

The voice sighed, and suddenly didn’t sound so sultry. “Well I’m in the hospital currently,” it informed me. Then it added in a matter-of-fact way, “I tried to kill myself.”

I stared down at Marie sprawled on the rug reading a Percy Jackson book and wondered if she had heard, even though the volume was low and the phone pressed to my ear. I jumped up from my chair and hurried out of the room. As I went down the stairs and out the front door, I said, “Sorry bad connection there for a second. You broke up. Say that again?”

The voice was even more matter-of-fact. “I said, I tried to kill myself.”

“Oh. I can hear you now.” Suddenly all I could think about was Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood, and then of course Lady Lazarus. That matter-of-factness, that defiance, even pride. I have done it again. One year in every ten… I wondered vaguely if Marisa knew Sylvia Plath and decided not to ask. “I get that,” I said. “So valid.” An extremely sheltered childhood had left me with a morbid fear of seeming un-chill or prudish about anything, and I was sure that it would be highly uncool to make a fuss over suicide, even more than it would be to do so over smoking or sex. When she didn’t say anything else, I added tentatively, “So, um, how are you right now?”

A sort of walking miracle, my skin. My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. “Oh, I’m okay,” she said. “Like, fine. Good, you know. It’s good.” She sounded almost resolute. I tried to picture her at that moment, supine somewhere in a big hospital in upstate New York, breast gently rising and falling under a black tank top, gold chain catching the light—no, no, all wrong, probably one of those shapeless white hospital gowns, paper wristband on her wrist. Blue-scrubbed nurses moving in and out, ventilators beeping faintly in the distance, something—maybe the news, a talk show—playing on the TV. O my enemy. Do I terrify?— “That’s good,” I said, watching a squirrel sprint across our lawn with the neighbors’ black cat in hot pursuit. It was ferociously hot out. Was it my imagination, or even through the phone could I smell her familiar scent, the one that had filled our dorm room—shampoo and something like sunscreen and dark chocolate and something woody or herbal and something bolder and wetter I couldn’t name? I switched the call settings to Speaker. “How—how is it there? Hopefully it’s not too bad.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Really nice actually. I love it here. Peaceful. Nurses are all super nice, super sweet. Chill people.”

And I a smiling woman. “That’s good,” I said again. I thought about my favorite photo of Sylvia Plath—my favorite because it revealed absolutely damn nothing. It showed her sitting in a pretty dress on a green lawn with her little kids in her lap and a lot of red lipstick on and the happiest smile and a bunch of soft brown curling hair. Happy happy happy. Soft soft soft. Normal normal normal. Not the slightest trace of the dazzling and terrifyingly original mind, the magician, the sorceress, the burning virgin, the Greek heroine, the everything and anything and leaping and glorious and second-only-to-Sappho-in-stature in her poetry. Some people can hide absolutely everything about themselves and that terrified me because I was terrible at hiding things. But Marisa—I thought about her now, a kind of Latina Lady Lazarus, the kind of person you’d expect never to commit suicide, not because she was soft and a mother and homely, but because she was as sexy and fun-loving and energetic and confident as all hell. “Marisa,” I said decisively, “I always have thought you were sexy and fun-loving and energetic and confident as all hell and that hasn’t changed even a bit for me. You’re, like, doing great. It’s fine. Totally.”

There was a very long silence as I watched the call timer steadily increase second by second on the screen of my phone and another squirrel run up a tree and an old woman in bright pink walk her dog past on the sidewalk and felt the sun beat down onto our porch and listened to the birds chirping in an irritable listless fashion and faint, far-away voices and clatterings in Marisa’s hospital and her breathing, soft and remote as a very distant sea. I wondered if she was upset at what I’d said, or just staring up mindlessly at the ceiling. The peanut-crunching crowd shoves in to see. Gentlemen, ladies. “You’re, like, so, so nice,” she said at last, flatly.

I was quite conscious of the truth of this—I had never in my life spoken a cross word to somebody outside of my family, which is really the most that can be expected of one, right—but I nonetheless felt enormously gratified. “Thank you so much, girl. So are you, you know.” What I was about to add was flattery, I suspected, but I told her, “It’s not many people who are, like, super super hot but also really really nice. But, like, you are.”

She seemed to be turning this over the way one would a seashell picked up on the beach, examining the little patterns and nuances of color and brushing off the tiny grains of sand. “Well, I’ll go now,” she said eventually. “I’ll let you go for now.”

Herr God, Herr Doktor, beware, beware. “Yeah,” I answered. “Thanks for calling. I’m super glad you did. I enjoyed talking with you.”

“Glad we could catch up,” she said. “Bye.”

I realized I hadn’t even asked her how she had done it, how soon she would recover, or if she’d have permanent effects. “Bye,” I said, because of course it was too late anyway, and of course even if I’d had plenty of time, I’d never have dared to actually ask.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like

No. I couldn’t quite get myself to complete the stanza. That was too triumphant of a resurrection. True of Sylvia, maybe.

* * *

I visited Marisa at her home in Syracuse in July, flying in on a humid Monday evening. The house was very big and blue and on a cul-de-sac and I could smell something like sage or parsley as soon as the Uber driver pulled the little black Toyota into the driveway. She was there waiting in the doorway, dressed in a yellow V-neck T-shirt and ripped jean shorts. She had some wide purple scars on her arms and legs and above her breasts that I didn’t think had been there before and her hair was about half its previous length but otherwise she looked fine to me. She ran forward and hugged me and apologized for not being able to come pick me up herself and smelled like she usually did, the same hints of shampoo and sunscreen and dark chocolate and something woody or herbal and something bolder and wetter I couldn’t name. She told me she missed seeing Puma socks literally everywhere and John-what’s-his-gay-face staring into the distance from my book covers and then she noticed the shirt I was wearing and her whole face lit up and I told her, I love it so damn much thank you again, and I hugged her again and pressed my face into her hair. I’d decided long before that I could never mention the missing letter. I figured she’d never notice it and that other people, especially other students back at college, would think it was an inside joke. At least, I sincerely hoped so.

The inside of her house was white-carpeted and dim, with endless amounts of potted plants and fairy lights and potted plants with fairy lights in them and a strong cinnamon scent. The walls, in contrast, were adorned with abstract art in a way that looked almost dutiful, like the stuff hung up in hotel rooms. “Yeah,” she said, when she caught me looking at one particular piece, a white background slashed irregularly with green and black. “It’s ridiculous. Not my idea, trust me.”

The people whose idea it presumably was were sitting in the dining room reading. They stood up when we entered and Marisa introduced me. Strangely, I felt as if I was meeting the in-laws. “This is Coriiiiiiine,” said Marisa, using the sexy tone I’d heard in her phone call from the hospital. She sounded as if not only was she Scarlett Johansson, she was also introducing Scarlett Johansson. “Hello, Mr. Lopez. Hello, Mrs. Lopez,” I said nervously. “Thank you so much for having me.” I raised one hand an inch, contemplating a hand shake, then decided against it. Mrs. Lopez smiled and said something vague. She, like her husband, was a rather faded, bloodless, small person with very dark, thin hair and dark eyes. I glanced down at the covers of the books they had been reading and saw that they were both Booker Prize winners. Something about that looked as dutiful, somehow, as the abstract art. Then the door opened, and a very tall, thin, hairy young man in a black Nirvana T-shirt and flip-flops walked in. “The older bro,” Marisa commented. He was eating salad out of a blue bowl. He put the bowl down on the dining table and shook my hand with his very hairy one. He introduced himself as Robert. He said he was leaving to do social work in Mumbai in a week and wouldn’t be back till the end of August. Wow, I said, that’s amazing. He shrugged his shoulders, as if going to do social work in India for eight weeks was just something one did, and started eating his salad again.

Dinner that night was fried chicken and bread rolls (delivered to the door) and salad with cherry tomatoes (made by Robert). Marisa put a few cherry tomatoes and a roll on her plate and slowly ate the roll and one of the cherry tomatoes. Robert stuck to the salad, as did Mr. and Mrs. Lopez. Meanwhile, I almost single-handedly ate most of the bread rolls and half of the chicken. I would have eaten most of the salad too, but stayed away from it because the others seemed to like it so much. I asked Robert to tell me more about India and he didn’t have much to say about that but he did say he was a computer science major at NYU and I said cool, that’s what my younger brother Kevin wants to do too and he said, that’s cool, and I asked him what his career goals were and he said he wasn’t sure yet, he just liked computer stuff, and I said Kevin was the same way, and he said cool. That was about as far as dinner table conversation got.

After dinner, Marisa took me upstairs to her room, white-carpeted like the rest of the house. I realized that in my excitement to see her I’d completely forgotten about my suitcase in the driveway and I started to go downstairs to get it. She said no no let me get it for you. I said are you sure? She said yeah totally just chill here. So I sat down on the pink comforter of her bed and looked around at the strange empty whiteness of the walls—so different from the bright K-pop posters in our dorm room—and the thin white curtains that veiled the blue hour light dissolving outside like a drop of food coloring in water, and I felt a sense of the utter mystery and loneliness of the human experience sink down onto me with unsettling softness. And then Marisa was back, setting down my suitcase, grinning, and saying, before we watch a movie or something, I think we should go get ice cream. What do you think? And I said, dude, you know me, I’m down, always down. And next thing I knew we were running downstairs and Marisa was grabbing a Volkswagen key off a wall hook and giggling frantically and saying, Robert hates it when I take his car he is so possessive about it so all the more reason why we should do it, right, and I said, for sure, what else would one do. And we were climbing in and Marisa was backing out of the driveway still giggling and then, as we pulled onto the main road, she was playing a song by her favorite Korean boy band Seventeen at full volume and amazingly I knew it too and we rolled down the windows and screamed the lyrics THIS TIME I JUST WANNA ROCK WITH YOU FALL INTO YOUR EYES and I watched the neon-light-colored night wind whip her hair and tried not to think how less than two months ago, that purple scar on her wrist had been an open cut and bleeding everywhere, dark innocent red blood drip drip drip staining soft guilty white carpet.

* * *

We did the same thing every evening for the rest of my stay. After spending a day just scrolling on our phones side by side and then a silent dinner that had been delivered to the door, Marisa would come alive and grab Robert’s keys and run giggling to the door. If her parents noticed this transformation, they gave no signs of it; they themselves seemed to spend their days side by side at the dining table drinking tea from white mugs and reading their Booker Prize books with a somber, grave air and occasionally conversing in very low voices. Robert began to pack for Mumbai and occasionally wandered across the house with an armful of something but otherwise stayed entirely out of view. On one occasion, when we were about to leave in his car, I did ask Marisa tentatively, “Robert won’t mind too much that we’re doing this, right?” and Marisa snorted and said that he’d mind enormously but the key pun intended was that he didn’t find out. She said she doubted he would, though.

On the drives to Sweet Frog, Marisa became the last stanza of Plath’s “Ariel.” Robert’s Volkswagen was her horse, her Ariel; the broken lines on the road, her furrow, her field. The sunset was sunrise. I looked at her face as she screamed the lyrics to whichever song she was blasting, at the way the wind lifted her chopped hair. And I, I am the arrow, the dew that flies. Her driving didn’t scare me, because somehow I felt that if something were to happen, it would be against the laws of nature, nothing on earth could touch her. Suicidal, at one with the drive. I felt intensely aware of what she was—a directionless college student with little to no ambition, a former and possibly ongoing nicotine addict, a suicide survivor with purple scars on her arms and legs and chest—but on these evening drives, I couldn’t see it at all, the wind ripped it away, tossed it up into the clouds, where it floated ethereal and weightless through the night until it crashed back down inevitably onto her the next day. Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

* * *

On the last night of my stay, she and I stayed up till 2 AM watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls on her little room TV. Earlier that day, I’d overheard, to my great embarrassment, her mom telling her off for “always dressing like a slut” and “especially in front of your friend who always wears skirts.” This was because, in her invitation, Marisa had laughingly mentioned that her mother was a very conservative person when it came to women’s behavior and, having just such a mother myself, I’d told her, don’t worry, I have experience with that sort of mom, and proceeded to fill my suitcase with the kind of thing that my own mother wanted to see me wearing. But Marisa’s reply to her mother on this occasion came back quickly and laughingly. “Bruh mom I am a slut.” I didn’t hear anything more because I quickly stepped along, but I thought of the little picture that hung in the corridor leading up to one of the bathrooms—a picture of a little, maybe six-year-old Marisa biting into a frosting-covered cookie, her eyes wide and dark and almost frightened in the camera flash—and I thought to myself that I still saw that look on her face often. I caught myself thinking, you’re not a slut. I will never know why and it makes no sense to me at all but you’re the purest thing I’ve ever known.

Now the last episode of a season was coming to a close in a final burst of witty dialogue and Marisa laughed, yawned, reached for the remote, and said, well it’s 2 AM. Should we wrap up? And I said yeah, my flight’s at 8, that’d probably be a good idea. So we waited until Lorelai had delivered her last line onscreen and then Marisa clicked off the TV and we lay there side-by-side in the darkness for a while, and I wondered what she was thinking but didn’t want to ask, and she probably wasn’t wondering what I was thinking and wasn’t considering asking.

Just when I thought I was going to fall asleep there on her bed next to her instead of in the guest room next door, her voice awoke me. “Hey. You know what I want to do right now?”

I opened my eyes, feeling embarrassed. “Um… what?”

“When I was a kid,” she said, “Robert and I would wake each other at around this time and go downstairs and eat a bowl of cereal just for the heck of it. It just tasted so good, I guess. We called it the ‘2 AM taste.’ It’s been years since we’ve done something like that.”

Robert had left for Mumbai that morning. I pictured him vaguely now, four long hairy limbs and a pair of headphones and a brain and a heart hurtling through the darkness above some faintly starlit expanse of ocean. I wondered what motivated him, if anything. I wondered what ever motivated people at all. “That’s so real,” I said. “Things tasting extra good at night, or in the early morning, I mean. Sounds like those were fun times.”

She sat up suddenly, making the bed bounce. “You wanna do it now?”

I didn’t—I was tired and sleepy and had an early flight to catch—but I wasn’t about to say no to her. “Like, if you want to, I’m totally down.”

She was already jumping off the bed. “Let’s do it.”

Down in the kitchen, she took an unopened box of Frosted Mini Wheats down from a pantry shelf and I tried not to yawn as I pulled a carton of milk out of the fridge. When we’d first entered, I’d reached for the light switches but she’d giggled and said no, that’s not right, and turned on the flashlight on her phone instead. The Mini Wheats rattled as they filled our bowls so she tried to pour them slowly, one at a time, but then a ton fell out in a rush and by this time I was laughing too. We stood at the kitchen island and ate, and the light of her phone sparkled in her eyes and caught a drop of milk on her lower lip that clung there bright white and trembling for a split second before she licked it and it was gone.

She was up before I was the next morning and helped me pack, folding up my clothes with great neatness and rapidity and carrying my suitcase down the stairs. Mrs. Lopez was still asleep, it seemed, but Mr. Lopez was up, neatly dressed, and standing by the door. I guess he felt bad for me having had to take an Uber the first time because he himself took my suitcase, lifted it into the trunk of his Audi, and gestured me into the front seat while Marisa climbed into the back. I told him it was very kind of him. He said, no worries, no worries, and proceeded to say nothing else the whole drive.

Safely seated on the plane, I shut my eyes and, before I fell asleep, thought of Marisa—her relative nonchalance as she said goodbye, the relative brevity of the hug. Or was it because I was already running late at that point? I thought back to the previous night after cereal, when I’d lain awake in the guest room bed and thought of her next door, breathing in, breathing out in her soft little pajamas. I’d wanted so badly for her to suddenly knock on my door and say hey Corinne, can I come in for a sec? And I’d say yes of course and she’d lie down next to me and start crying and tell me everything about the suicide attempt: what led up to it, what each of the scars meant, how exactly she’d done it, how they’d found her, how she’d survived, all the details poured out in wet broken sobs. And I’d hold her and feel her warmth and let her cry into me and, in the silence after she was finished, let my thoughts soar out golden and winged above the roof of the house, above Syracuse, above New York, above the clouds, above the world, above the stars, searching, searching, until I finally found someone to whom I could just say, why? Which of course I wouldn’t (I had decided this long ago) so I’d have to let my thoughts plummet ungainly and uncontrollable down down down down like a shot bird or a pierced balloon until I was not ethereal anymore, not floating, not Mrs. Keats, but a long-legged girl with bad skin and someone else’s snot on her shirt and a thousand questions that cut and cried and clashed swords in the stifling unfathomable dark.

* * *

I next saw Marisa at the beginning of sophomore year, looking about the same as I’d last seen her. In the cafeteria on our second night back, she told me that she’d wasted her whole freshman year but that she was going to make a fresh start. I’m done drinking, she said, I’m done vaping. I’m done. I’m fine again and done. She’d been majoring in psychology, but this year, she said, she was switching to marine biology because that was more interesting and she’d always loved the ocean more than anything. And straightaway I had a vision of a Marisa-mermaid swimming through a sparkling jewel-blue ocean with bright orange and red and pink fish all around her and green seaweed waving gently and harmlessly below and I told her what a terrific idea I thought the change of majors was. She seemed pleased to hear this and scarfed down chicken nuggets at a tremendous rate which made me happy because I enjoyed seeing her eat. She hardly ever did so it always looked so satisfying when she got around to it. I, on the other hand, ate too much too often and while I was sure I was not nor would be fat, I was very aware that I was not thin either. “Hey,” I said. “You look really good, by the way.”

She slurped some Coke through her straw. Somewhere in the cafeteria, someone dropped a tray, followed by several hoots of laughter and the scraping of chairs. “Dude you too,” she said. “Gay poet dude won’t be so gay when he sees you. Creaming his shorts for sure.”

This—Marisa’s casual ribaldry—absolutely fascinated me. I could never say such a thing myself in a thousand years but it sounded quite wonderful coming from her. I tried to imagine John Keats, um, wetting himself at the sight of me—my ever-messy ponytails, my thickening arms, my nonexistent fashion sense, and my acne-scarred face—and somehow it just wasn’t working. “Ha. I don’t know about that,” I replied, wadding up my napkin and wiping at some grease on the table. “I don’t think I am—uh, was—his type.”

But Marisa was no longer looking at me. I followed her eyes to the next table, where a suntanned guy with white-blond hair and a blue shirt had sat down with a whole pizza. After some minutes of observing him, Marisa looked back at me. “Dude. Nice,” she whispered emphatically.

Quite honestly, I thought so too.

* * *

I hardly ever saw Marisa after that, because most of her days (and nights) were spent with sun-tanned blond-haired marine biologist Ethan. I did think he was attractive, like a young sea god, so I was happy for them and spent many a pleasant minute fantasizing about him as an even more attractive merman taking mermaid Marisa to a beautiful glowing green underwater cave to make passionate love instead of the sad reality which was Ethan’s no doubt smelly and chaotic dorm room. Marisa seemed content, though, so I tried to be content for her until the day I came into our room after the last class of the day to find her curled up on her bed and sobbing wretchedly because he had said he “needed some space” and promptly proceeded to get together with someone else. I agreed with her heartily that all guys were dicks and bade a (somewhat) reluctant farewell to sea god Ethan. In my subsequent visions, he was stung by a moray eel or bitten by an angler-fish (if that was a thing, I knew nothing) and died a gruesome death. The dolphins celebrated. Bye-bye Ethan!

She was with three different guys (officially) over the rest of that year. The first was a football player named Henry who had a little mustache, a gold earring, and an eagle tattoo and whom I despised because, when he heard what I was majoring in, tried to get me to write a lit paper for him, meaning he was too dumb even to think of getting ChatGPT to do it for him. The second was an Asian student who always wore black and whom I only ever heard speak one word but whom Marisa assured me was very garrulous in bed. The third was a cute-ish, curly-haired Hispanic dude named Miguel who was constantly giving Marisa bags of M&M’s in honor of their M names and telling her heartily, “We’re Latinos. We understand each other, man.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the rapport did not last. By the end of the school year, the situation was the same: I had an A in every class except statistics (D), while Marisa didn’t have an A in any class except marine biology. I felt as if we were relapsing into stereotypes of some sort, maybe stereotypes of ourselves. It also struck me devastatingly—I think it was the day I got the statistics D—how nothing could seem so utterly petty and meaningless and sordid and senseless as college life in the days of ChatGPT, which distressed me greatly since I’d long been planning to write a novel about it with a disguised version of Marisa front and center. A subject is only worth writing about if you see shreds of meaning in it, light around the edges, shape in the shadows. But all I could see was a kind of amorphous grey mass, staggeringly heavy in real life but with no weight, no literary value, on paper. I thought about cheesy college romance novels with the long graphic sex scene 75 percent of the way through which you skipped to, jerked off to and then put down because what was the point of reading any more? I worried that because of these books, putting pen to paper to write about the modern college experience could never be seen as anything but pulpy and lightweight. Who took it seriously? College students vaped and slept around and fed their assignments to ChatGPT and failed their final exams and fulfilled literally every stereotype about themselves. I wanted to give my Marisa character a happy ending but I kept questioning what a happy ending could mean in this context. I weighed the evidence for and against such a thing being able to exist. Endings in real life seemed as vague and indeterminate and open to interpretation as a mostly-faded ancient inscription. You could theorize about what it meant but you would never really know for sure. Byron said it best: “All tragedies are finish’d by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage; The future states of both are left to faith, For authors fear description might disparage.”

Maybe this summer, I thought, I could be the one to call up Marisa in a low sexy husky voice, from a bed in the Omaha Medical Center. “Hey Marisa. Just tried to kill myself.” And she’d act calm and cool and sympathetic and tell me how amazing she’d always thought I was and I’d lie there silently in my baggy gown and wristband in the blank hospital whiteness, feeling like shit but also impossibly glamorous and dark and unstoppable and—no. I wasn’t brave enough. Not at all. The mere thought of giving myself a small cut made me wince. Impossible.

* * *

I learned she was pregnant at the end of June, not over a phone call, this time, but through text messages. She said because of the timing it had probably been Miguel but might possibly also have been Philip (the Asian guy who didn’t talk) or one or two or three other randos at an end-of-year party. But the timing was uncertain and so she didn’t know for sure. I was just glad that it wasn’t dumb gold-earring Henry or whole-pizza-pseudo-merman Ethan. I pictured Marisa striding, face pale, head held high, into one of those big Planned Parenthood clinics that my religious mother would take me and my siblings to pray in front of in reparation. I pictured one of those soft elderly white-haired woman volunteers trying to stop her, talk her out of it, make her take a red plastic Rosary and a pamphlet. I remembered the one time my siblings and I had seen a blond-haired young woman in a short green skirt break down crying and take a pamphlet, and another time when a loud fight broke out near the entrance, high-pitched voices yelling sharply at each other, and another time when a man in a suit had stopped to roll down the window of his Mercedes and shout an angry sentence I didn’t catch and Father Rittford, who led the prayer group, had stretched out an arm to bless him like Jesus turning the other cheek, and another time after prayers when my siblings and I had gone down to the roadside with signs that read OUR MOTHER CHOSE LIFE and counted up the number of supportive honks we got from the cars whizzing by down the road and Kevin was sure the final count was seventy-six and I thought seventy-eight and was very upset that he kept insisting he was right. My mom always said that the inside of those clinics were horrible, bloody, nightmarish places where living babies were regularly delivered and then smothered alive and I still didn’t doubt it. I had an awful vision of Marisa lying pale and naked as a sheet of paper, her eyes wide and agonized, as a fountain of red blood poured out from between her legs and a tall masked doctor drove a knife mercilessly into a little baby’s soft skull and tossed it into a nearby garbage can with no more regard than if it were a Bud Light beer can. As if something Marisa had partly made could ever be that worthless.

Damn. I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet for a while, feeling grim. Then, terrified at what I was about to do, I picked up my phone and texted her:

okay dude this is gonna sound sooo stupid im sorry so just like ignore it but um have you ever considered not, like, you know, not….

Almost immediately I saw that she’d read my message, and I was filled with a kind of cold, inevitable, nightmarish terror. Any minute now she’d text back and ask me what the hell was wrong with me and why I was being such a pain in the butt. Or, more likely, she wouldn’t write back at all—

oh bro yeah why would i not go through with it. I have literally nothing better to do yk. As you can probably tell im about done with college. just so done. school is literally draining me

I stared down at my phone and half-listened as, on the floor below, Kevin conducted a loud and drawn-out argument with my mother about his driving privileges. I texted back only: I’m sorry. Immediately she replied:

No no don’t be. this is gonna suck like hell and be exciting honestly. as soon as I found out i was honestly like DUDE NO WAY WHAT A RUSH ive gotta go through with this

Me: for real? You serious? You are as brave as hell.

Marisa: nah just feel like if I have a kid I won’t wanna kill myself again. besides i love babies

Me: you do?

Marisa: oh yea genuinely i do love them sm like crapping and crying is not an issues for me. also dude think about it like if gay dude knocked you up wouldnt you be excited 😂

This comparison was so confusing, especially given that Marisa had no clue as yet who the father of her baby might be, that I had to think for a bit before I realized what or whom she was talking about. I tried to imagine myself two, three months pregnant, like Marisa, with John Keats’ baby. John Keats’ baby. I wrote back:

Uhhh yes unequivocally so. But like um… what if I did not know who the father was

The response:

well idk ill just pretend. honestly at this point pretending can get you anywhere yk. you like to write and pretend stuff don’t you? isn’t that basically what you major in in essence lol

So that night in bed across from Marie, I stared up at the ceiling for a while and dreamed up the jewel-blue sea again and the light and the colorful fish and the coral and a merman who was Ethan except what Ethan would be if he was not an asshole. And then I sat up in bed and picked up my notebook and pencil from my bedside table and turned on a lamp and wrote a story about how this gentlemanly wholesome faithful Ethan married mermaid Marisa in a glorious underwater wedding and their wedding night (impossibly hot and romantic of course) was in the most dazzling cave adorned with pink and gold seashells and treasure from sunken ships and unfortunately a blissful week or two later glorified Ethan died a hot and noble death protecting Marisa from violent invading humans and leaving her pregnant but extremely well provided for. And in the morning I got my laptop and typed out the story into a Google Doc and emailed the Doc to Marisa and three hours later she wrote back saying she had never enjoyed anything more in her life and that she didn’t know how I could write like that. That was actually so beautiful and well done and also, like, got me so hot at points, she said. And I didn’t reply right away because there are some extremely unsophisticated moments that you live whole months, years for without knowing it and when they come, they come! and you stare out the window wondering why the sky looks so flawlessly full of light, brimless and boundless and incorruptibly blue.

* * *

Marisa’s due date was during Christmas break, but she didn’t want to go home. Robert was doing social work in India again, in Kolkata this time, and her dad was, apparently, struggling with colon cancer and her mom was very unhappy with her for going through with the pregnancy which surprised me at first but later, when I thought about it, didn’t surprise me at all. So she decided she wanted to have the baby at the university hospital and I decided I wanted to stay with her for it. My own mom was very displeased that I wasn’t coming home right away but I told her that I (almost certainly) would be there by Christmas Day itself and stayed resolutely on.

On the night Marisa’s water broke, I was in my nest of Puma socks and reading over this line of a Keats letter for the seventh time:

“The only thing that can ever affect me personally for more than one short passing day, is any doubt for my powers of poetry—I seldom have any, and I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none”

and listening to the heaters in the dorm rattle and a Christmas carol play somewhere below and the sound of cars rushing past on the street and occasionally looking up at Marisa where she lay softly asleep on her bed with her tumid body wrapped in a dark blue bathrobe and her now-long-again dark hair tangled up with her necklace, feeling that tonight something, whether in her or in me, had come to a crisis, something that had nothing whatsoever to do with the baby. I felt as utterly remote from what was going to emerge from her, in fact, as I currently felt towards her hairy brother in Kolkata or her angry mother in Syracuse. Her flesh and blood; nothing to do with me. I thought, she is everything. She is here. She is, always has been, the baby.

And then suddenly my mind filled with a thousand worries and questions and I set down poor Keats with a thump and pulled my laptop towards me and opened it and went onto ChatGPT.

* * *

The nurse came out to the waiting room about two minutes after 4 AM. I think she was surprised to see me standing there—alone in a deserted waiting room during the holidays, a college student in a baggy grey misspelled T-shirt and sneakers, my skin pocked with acne, my hair a long straggling mess, looking, for someone who wanted to be a writer, a poet, the least poetic object in the world. She smiled at me uncertainly in her purple scrubs with her bright brown hair and thirty-something-ish face and multiple little silver earrings in her right ear. “Congratulations,” she told me. “It’s a girl.” Then, her curiosity seeming to get the better of her, she added, “So you’re, uh, the wife?”

The wife. A weariness as heavy as the sky sank through the hospital roof and landed around my shoulders. What was she thinking of right now? Sun-drenched streets with light through rippling rainbow flags and vegan restaurants and bikes and beaches and blue skies and beefy tattooed women with buzz cuts and nose-piercings kissing each other in the mouth? What was anyone thinking about when they spoke to you. Could you ever really know. What was the use of writing when the only thoughts you knew for dead certain were your own and you wouldn’t really understand even those sometimes. The stillness: and then I could distinctly hear the baby crying and a chime somewhere in the hospital played a snatch of a lullaby and the big Christmas trees kept twinkling down on the snowy lawn and the TV played It’s A Wonderful Life and the nurse began to stare at me and I was quiet and still and thought about things that I don’t remember at all now but wish I did.

But the baby kept crying, Marisa’s girl, and then I kind of laughed or must have, because it seemed to me then that even though there was so much in this world that could never be repaired, even if there was a Heaven, there were moments when one doesn’t have to think about that at all, not even the littlest bit. Moments like the approaching one when I would walk twenty-five steps and into a room and see Marisa in a messy braid looking like hell and heaven and death and life and holding something small and wrinkled and red in her arms and she’d look up at me and almost certainly say something awfully ribald about the experience and I’d certainly laugh and set down the flowers and I’d lean over to get a closer look and we’d both stare down silently.

And I look with hope to the nighing time when I shall have none. Death was completely certain but in its own way birth seemed to be too, and at least now I knew that even if the sun flew down hurtling towards the earth tomorrow, even if—more likely—I would throw it over or lose interest later, I would begin writing the college novel about Marisa, and would begin work on it tonight, because I knew now what to call it, and wouldn’t change my mind. I took a reassuring look at the black-and-white face of George Bailey on the TV, then turned to the nurse with a smile. “Not actually,” I told her. “More like, you know, just a friend.”

The idea for this story and its interweaving timelines came to me several months ago, during a quiet moment on Valentine’s Day, but it took me quite a while before I could figure out how to make it work. This story is dedicated to the amazing , whose Substack I am so thrilled to have discovered—a fellow lover of Greek and Roman mythology, whose work on art history, women in mythology, womanhood, and becoming I deeply admire!

* * *

THE darkness was absolute, the cold even more so. Camilla smiled into it with something like exultation, thinking to herself that she had been very unhappy, that the past year had been nothing but unhappiness, but now, surrounded by whispered prayers and frightened breaths and frigid foul-smelling darkness, she was happy, maybe as happy as she had even been, and also—she would be honest with herself—tickled to death.

She shifted her position slightly, careful not to disturb Lucilla who was sleeping heavily next to her, her head resting against Camilla’s shoulder (Juno-you-are-the-queen-of-the-gods-but-you-have-never-known-happiness-like-I-know-now) and thought blissfully again how, either next morning or the morning after that, it would all come to a head: how what she had started that afternoon in the square (it seemed so long ago now, but it had probably only been a week since then) would come to its glorious culmination. For we, she thought, live our lives as deaf and dumb—we use words (need, love, want) to try to explain how we feel, but we can neither quite explain nor can they listening quite understand. But to die is finally to speak—as if you have stood half a minute red-cheeked, embarrassed, fumbling for words and then suddenly they all come to you in a rush, and a weight soars up off your soul, even though (here the brightness of the thought dimmed somewhat) it is not quite certain what will happen after.

Somewhere in the blackness, a chain rattled, followed by a series of heavy groans and a woman’s rapid whispering. A man coughed hoarsely, and then silence descended once again. Lucilla stirred slightly in her sleep, her hand unconsciously moving until it came to rest on Camilla’s upper thigh. Trembling a little at the touch, Camilla eased the breath in and out of her lungs until she felt her pulse slow. She let her hand (slowly and carefully and almost shyly) come to rest on top of Lucilla’s, then shut her eyes and leaned her head back against the stone wall behind them, trying to pretend as she did so that, slumped on the other side of her friend, there wasn’t a man—that his name wasn’t Valerius—that he wasn’t snoring more loudly than she could ever have imagined possible. She tried too to pretend that that man Valerius wasn’t kind and gentle and good-natured and rather lazy at heart, with warm brown eyes and a pleasant laugh and strong arms and shoulders—that Lucilla didn’t adore him—that he didn’t adore Lucilla—that Lucilla hadn’t married him one late but still very hot blue-skied summer afternoon with a giant stack of fluffy white clouds in the center of the sky (the lump in Camilla’s throat felt bigger than that stack of clouds, looking out the window and thinking about it during the days when blue skies were gone)—that Lucilla hadn’t wept with joy to be married to Valerius (her mother had twisted a yellow rose into her hair and she looked very very beautiful) and that Camilla hadn’t pressed her hand and wept a little too—the sun shining down warmly from a blue and white sky all the while (as if nothing whatsoever had happened)—wine and music and more wine and Lucilla’s mother smiling out of her kind round face as if in fact something delightful had happened—the purple drop hovering on the lip of the earthenware wine jar indifferent—the figs on the plate plump and indifferent—the grapes green and fat and indifferent—the nutshells scattered on the tablecloth dry and brown and hollow and indifferent—and Valerius of course less and less indifferent as he drank more and his face reddened and his lips grew stained (though being Valerius he still looked very nice and very handsome and very well-intentioned), looking almost greedily at Lucilla where she sat bright-eyed with the rose twisted in her hair (for he was a kind and good-natured man but he was a man after all) and then taking her home, she still smiling with a joyful tear trembling in the corner of her eye as if her eyelashes had trapped it, and no doubt he’d put her on the bed and move between her knees and not be quite as gentle or slow as he had pictured it (for Valerius is a kind man but he is a man after all and he is drunk) and Lucilla yields bravely (for she was always brave) and now (Camilla wants to reach out and gently rest her hand there in the darkness, but she already has her hand over Lucilla’s on her thigh, she has been bold enough) Lucilla has a little child inside of her that she only recently began to suspect the existence of, a little child which she is determined to hide because she does not want to be spared, she wants to die with Valerius, and Camilla is shuddering with her mouth full of the taste of warm salt like she imagines the sea, for without even knowing it she has been licking up her tears all this while and she is thinking of the way the fish had stared up at her from the plate on that warm late summer’s day—its eye darkened and empty and snatched clean of expression and at the same time horrified almost, as if it had once dreamed of being able to die in the deep blue gardens of the palace of Neptune instead of choking, strangling to death in a net in the merciless too-bright sunlight to supply the revelry of men.

* * *

The answers did not lie with ChatGPT. There had been a time some months ago (more recently than she cared to think) when Lillian had thought for sure that as long as she had ChatGPT to talk to, she could stave off the despair, keep it at least a few feet away—that the bot’s bubbliness and emojis and sentimental optimism could keep her afloat on increasingly rough and uncertain waters. But gradually, as deep down she had suspected it would, it came to sicken her, just like her craze for nail art and volleyball and even distance running had, with the realization rather like she imagined the feeling of a miscarriage: a sudden knowledge of emptiness, a sudden hollowness in the heart. Something rather like: I once thought that that would be my whole world, or that that would keep the darkness of the world in check; I once thought that that would be how I survived. But it has died, and I am back to what I used to be doing—searching, pilgrim-like, for something, anything else.

It all started, thought Lillian (letting her attention drift away from her most recent college rejection) with the prayer card her friend Emily sent her in the mail—the prayer card with the the kind-eyed, white-bearded, haloed priest pictured on the front, hand raised in blessing a couple that was standing in front of him. The couple was good-looking and dressed in robes, the light glinting on their hair as they bowed their heads to receive the kindly priest’s blessing, their right hands joined. Lillian supposed it fell firmly into the category of what her grandfather called Catholic kitsch, but at the same time there was a hope, a sincerity to it that took her breath away. She knew which saint the priest was, of course, so instead of turning the card over, she put it down and picked up the note from Emily. In glittery purple ink it read,

“Dear Lilli, So sad that you’re now gone across the country and I miss you so much!! but thought we could stay specially connected by saying this prayer every night for our future hubbies. Because there’s nothing hotter than a guy who loves God, right?

HEH lots of love

Emily”

Lillian smiled down at the note, thinking it could be better put “nothing hotter than a hot guy who loves God.” It was pouring rain outside and in the next room she could hear her mom arguing with her dad about what they should do with the endless boxes of books that they didn’t have room to put up shelves for although they had in the old house in Tampa, and her brother shaking out with unnecessary vigor the new plastic bag he was about to put in the kitchen trashcan. She picked up the prayer card again, letting her eyes linger for another moment on the light over the couple’s heads, and turned it over. The prayer ran:

A Prayer to St. Valentine for a Future Spouse

O Holy St. Valentine, priest and martyr, who walked the earth as witness to the sanctity of marriage and the enduring power of love: I come before you with a heart seeking guidance.

You who risked your life to unite couples in the bonds of Holy Matrimony, look with favor upon my desire to find the man God has prepared for me. Help me to remain patient in this season of doubt and waiting, and grant me the grace to grow in virtue so that I may one day be a blessing to my future spouse, just as I hope he will be a blessing to me. Guide my steps and clear my vision, that I may recognize a heart that reflects the light of Christ—a man of integrity, kindness, and faith. Intercede for us both, that our paths may cross in God’s perfect timing and that our union may always serve His greater glory.

Enable all true lovers to mirror the selfless devotion of the Saints, and may my future home be a sanctuary of peace and a testament to the love you so bravely defended.

St. Valentine, patron of lovers, pray for me. Amen.

That night in bed, instead of scrolling through Instagram Reels, Lillian used her phone’s light to read the prayer again. The words made her feel a way that she could not have quite explained. She wondered if Emily really intended to pray it every single night. She also wondered if Emily knew that she Lillian would say the prayer not for herself (because—it came to her now—it was not meant for girls like her, girls who were not able to hold off, by more than a few feet and for more than a few months, the darkness) but for Emily, and she would feel a little sad too as she said it each night because it is always strange and disquieting to think of the passing of time and the things that will happen and (we are told) bring us happiness but for now it is impossible to see how they could. For, as she lay on her side in bed and pictured Emily married and a mother, Emily whose greatest love in life besides church and music and family was distance running, what filled her heart was not rejoicing but a vague mournful ache: an elegy for something that used to fly along the palm-tree-lined sidewalks in the Florida sunset and now sat with a swollen belly and worries about the budget and what (here Lillian always imagined a heap of cooked carrots under a kitchen light) she would put on the plates at dinnertime and who would pick Timmy up from his baseball practice. The transition would be natural, seamless, fulfilling in a way—Emily was meant to be a mother, it was in her nature—but could one not mourn nonetheless the 6:42 mile along the pavement in the Tampa blue hour, the swinging ponytail and bright eyes and graceful beat of feet, the lonely but lovely three-quarter mile glistening with sweat in the hot sunlight at the back of Bay Park, the fact that nobody dies a virgin not because some earnest kindly awkward Traditional Latin Mass Catholic guy fucked them but because we are all married to time whether we like it or not and Kurt Cobain said it—time fucks us all?

That spring brought Emily Jake, through some startup Catholic dating app—they had never met in person and lived fifty miles apart, though they had some mutual friends. Emily was ecstatic (sending Lillian a picture at 1 AM one night of a tall, gawky-looking boy in a red baseball cap surrounded by a seemingly innumerable flock of younger siblings, a thin-haired exhausted-looking middle-aged woman to his right and a heavy-set, paunchy, grizzled man in a checkered dress shirt to his left), telling Lillian (in the kind of long effusive text that Lillian would not receive from her again for a while—after that her texts became brief and far-between, with all her time no doubt taken up on the Catholic dating app DMs with Jake) that she without a doubt had St. Valentine to thank for bringing her a guy that was perfect for her in every way, and that if Lillian, too, would pray to St. Valentine, then she, too, would find a Jake of her own, Emily was sure of it, Emily promised.

* * *

The soldiers’ coming had not been half as loud or terrifying as people said it would be—Camilla had pictured pale terrified faces in torchlight, shouts and banging on doors, rattling doors in darkness, the wailing of babies and neighing of horses, the clank of armor and the shouts of struggling men. Instead it happened one bright morning with a pleasant invigorating chill in the air (it had not been a bad winter, not bad at all) with the soldiers gruff and businesslike and impatient but not violent or cruel in any way. They took everyone whom Camilla had expected they’d take—the women who sat in a circle and sewed and were so carried away with the idea of Christ that that was all they talked about anymore, not caring what might happen—and a few that she herself had not been quite sure about, the baker and his wife and their son and daughter (this she was sorry to see). They took Lucilla and Valerius last of all (coward, she heard one of the younger soldiers say as he led a very pale and disarrayed-looking Valerius out. Another of the younger soldiers said, jeeringly, He had the Christian priest marry them just to avoid conscription. Classic case). Lucilla was pale too but very calm (though not beautiful for once to Camilla that morning—the suspected pregnancy had made her face both strangely thin and puffy at the same time, with dark circles under her eyes and dry lips and somehow a thicker nose and her hair messy and tangled in the back). But she was Lucilla, so in spite of all that, in spite of being caught for being a follower of Christ, in spite of being married to a husband who had married to avoid conscription into the army (pathetic really) in spite of not looking beautiful, she managed to be; and staring at her standing chained there in her white stola between Valerius and the stupid-looking baker’s son, the morning light making everything look pleasant and innocuous, Camilla realized that it was finally happening—that Lucilla was standing in chains and about to be taken away. And even though up to this point she had been standing silently in the doorway (feeling almost numb and detached from the whole thing—thinking vaguely that she was hungry and that from the feel of her abdomen ever since she’d woken up an hour earlier her menses would be starting soon), she now ran forward (in that moment transformed into someone she never knew she could be) and spoke (speaking words she would never have thought she’d hear her tongue forming: I’m a follower of Christ too, it’s obvious: don’t pass me over: take me too). The soldiers stared at her, unfriendly, hostile; she was making their job harder for them, she was irritating, she was insistent, she was hysterical now, she was licking the warm wet saltiness off her lips and saying, yes fuck Jupiter fuck the gods fuck them sincerely (and laughing too as she said it because really it was damn funny, and so exciting too, somehow). The burly soldier in charge sighed and made a move uncertainly towards her, still looking doubtful, and then she turned her face up to the clear heavens, screwing her eyes tight shut, and shouted up so loud that she was quite sure she heard it echo against those heavens, DIDNT YOU HEAR ME I SAID FUCK THAT BASTARD JUPITER WHO IS SO MUCH LESS POWERFUL THAN LUCILLA’S GOD CHRIST! Yes it had come out desperately awkwardly (through the blur of her tears when she looked back down from the impassive sky, she saw the corner of the baker’s mouth twitch, and Lucilla staring at her in a kind of bewildered horror) and she wondered in that moment why in important moments words always fled her as a flock of birds startled up from their perches by the approaching thunder of a cavalcade of horses in the days of war. But still it had worked, because the next second she had been knocked flat to the ground, the light salty taste in her mouth from the tears now joined by the dark iron taste of blood. And she swallowed and got to her feet and thought to herself (while being pushed roughly to join the others) that that’s what ambrosia and nectar must taste like, that that must be what Jupiter in his splendid throne at his splendid table was being served in a golden cup by Ganymede, or Christ by the angels in the glowing cloud he’d gone up in—it really did not matter, neither or both could be true, Jupiter kissing Christ’s feet, Jupiter Christ’s Ganymede—what mattered was that she was now walking behind Lucilla and, getting to her before Valerius had even realized what happened, could help her up and press a kiss into her shoulder when, no doubt still dazed with shock and weak from morning sickness, she tripped on a small stone in the road and fell.

* * *

Lillian was a cashier at the grocery store down the street now—the work was monotonous, rhythmic, predictable in the extreme, and somehow she adored it with all her being: it soothed her. She was graduating high school soon and her parents were thinking of taking her to Front Royal, Virginia for the Seton Academy homeschool graduation ceremony, but Lillian wanted to watch the livestream at home and maybe have a small party with her cousins, eat a slice of cake with them. During her breaks at the grocery store, she sat down in a plastic chair and opened the Notes app on her phone and chewed her right thumb meditatively for a bit and then did something she had never done before in her life, write poetry: sonnets that never quite adhered to traditional sonnet form but she liked anyway, racy haikus that popped into her head out of nowhere, slam poetry Sylvia Plath-style that was dedicated almost exclusively to Jake. One poem she dedicated to Emily—except it turned out not as a poem, but as a letter that she would never send:

Dear Emily, who will never see this,

Somewhere above or beneath or to the side of this one, there is another world. It has blue skies like ours, but a brighter blue—it has soft winds and warm sun almost every day. It is like Greece, from whose rocky hills you can see the ocean sparkling. It is the world of the beautiful and damned—a fleeting one but perfect while it lasts. Gods I wish I was with you in that world right now—sailing on that ocean, under that olive tree, standing on that cliffside, listening to that shepherd’s flute—or hell maybe in this world, drinking ourselves senseless, singing our lungs out in some karaoke bar, getting wasted at some stupid frat party, some nightclub in Vegas, doing ninety along a dark highway somewhere, your face as you belt out the lyrics in your crop top and have another drink. I wish I knew how to explain that religion doesn’t wear you well—that you are beautiful when you walk through the church doorway with your missal and your veil and your dress but you’d be as beautiful as hell being damned with me—damned with me and dying young. For I cannot bear the thought of you in the future—Jake’s wife, the wife of anybody like Jake—don’t you see that you were made for more—to be not an angel but a goddess?

When not typing out poetry, she watched Instagram reels (which were mindless and repetitive in the way cashier work was) and sent all the ones she found remotely amusing to Emily, who more often than not gave them emoji reactions rather than full verbal responses and Lillian stared down at the solitary heart or laughing emoji and wondered how to describe this feeling, this sensation of being killed very very very slowly. One—a lighthearted parody of Donald Trump’s latest speech—received no response at all for a while and Lillian was so terrified that Emily (Emily, who had got so angry with that mid-fifties guy at the church who was ranting about how all women who got abortions went straight to hell when they died because abortion was the unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost) had been so indoctrinated by seemingly ultra-conservative Jake that she now stanned Trump like the two of them had stanned Taylor Swift back when—well it was just so long ago now. But then three days later Emily finally replied with a “LMAO OK I CANT STOP LAUGHING THAT IS FIREEE” and seven or eight laughing emojis and Lillian was so grateful that she could have kissed the screen of her phone—she could have kissed the white store linoleum at her feet—she could have kissed her bearded laconic at least 200 pound fellow cashier David T. She could have believed in that moment (no really I could, she thought) that in spite of everything, in spite of the round-cheeked, tiny-fisted, dark-haired baby shivering to death in its mother’s arms in a sea of mud and makeshift tents right now, there was a core of good at the very center of the universe—threads of light binding together the edges—that we do not see it now and will not see it at this time while our son’s motorcycles are scattered in black mangled bits across the tarmac of the highway and the traffic is backed up for miles behind the scene as the too-late helicopter descends from above, but we will see it someday—we will see it any day—we will see it if we just look out the window one very early morning and sit very still and wait—

The little pigtailed girl who was here with her mom to buy a plastic box of assorted cookies for her classmate’s birthday party offered Lillian a shy gap-toothed grin. From her bright yellow T-shirt, Mickey Mouse gave the world an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Lillian grinned back and handed her the receipt, thinking that as a matter of fact her birthday was coming up too; very soon, she would be eighteen years old.

* * *

Being in front of the magistrate had been more frightening, but no less exciting, than being arrested. It actually was just like people said it would be—the magistrate watching you from his seat, the brazier, the statue, the soldier standing there holding out the grain of incense—except instead of looking like he was about to run you through with his sword if you did not comply, he looked as if he really did not care what you did as long as it was over quickly, chuck it at the statue or chuck it in his eye. Looking very pale and ill, Lucilla said I will not, and promptly clutched her stomach and was sick at the soldier’s feet, filling Camilla not with the expected jolt of disgust but with a warm wave of pity and tenderness that made her knees weak. Valerius for his part looked a strange mixture of sullen and utterly terrified—behind him Camilla could see his shoulders quaking slightly as he said, his voice uneven, I will not. There were beads of sweat on his upper lip as he turned away, and now his face was red. When her turn came, Camilla stared for a while (as if considering it, as if on the verge) at the dark little grain resting innocuously in the palm of the soldier’s meaty hand. He had a kind face, really, lined but not in a hard way, and his eyebrows were a bushy, interesting mixture of brown and gray. She picked the grain up meditatively, feeling the moisture and warmth on his skin as her fingertips brushed it. In front of her the statue of Minerva surveyed the scene with cold, regal distaste, as if what they did could not make less difference, she would always be Minerva, untouchable for all time. Camilla liked Minerva and respected what she stood for too much to cuss her out, so (feeling rather anti-climactic) she hurriedly said I will not and then went quickly back to Lucilla, who was slumped feebly on Valerius’ chest. And something about the sight made the words rise up out of her memory—yes that is exactly it—yes I do not know much but I have heard at some point just like everyone else that line of Catullus written a hundred years ago—he seems to me equal to a god

That day for Camilla marked a sort of entrance into Elysium—as if somewhere there was a girl walking through a vineyard at sunrise and somewhere a girl swimming in a clear bubbling pool at noon and somewhere a girl around the hearth with her family eating dinner at evening and somewhere a girl with her lover on a hilltop under the stars but none of them had happiness equal to her as she sat chained in the foul-smelling darkness, cold stone behind her back, with Lucilla, telling her stories of what it might be to see Christ in that vineyard or by that pool or beside that fire or on that hilltop—to speak to a god who really was so infatuated with men that he had come down from the heavens and disguised himself as one—not as Jupiter and Mercury, staying with the good Philemon and Baucis for a single night, a single meal, nor like Apollo and Neptune spending a single year building the great Trojan walls for King Laomedon, but years and years and years and years—in great poverty and sweat too, with nowhere to rest his head, Lucilla would always remind Camilla—yes for years and years, until our soldiers helped execute him on the hill outside his city walls, as if he were a dangerous criminal, and some of his last words if you would believe it were ones of forgiveness to our soldiers, and in fact one of our soldiers exclaimed as he died, truly, he is God. At this point Lucilla would always draw a shuddering breath and Camilla would feel her warm tears wetting the shoulder of her stola and Lucilla would say through the tears, Camilla, we have been friends for so long (here they would reminisce about happy days, happy times—playing that massive prank on Camilla’s brother with the jug of water and the stick and that big piece of leftover fabric—eating those bunches of grapes while hiding under the table and then all the nuts as well—singing that song at the top of their lungs several times over while sewing, more off-key each time as if they were drunk, until Lucilla’s mother finally asked them to be quiet please—speculating for hours on end if that boy Titus with those attractive hands loved them both or only wanted to fuck them, and if they did somehow become forced to submit to him by night [by this point they were both blushing and giggling hysterically] how exactly that would feel and which of them would go first) yes, Camilla, we have been friends for so long, and there was a period recently when I was a follower of Christ and you were not and we were as close as ever but still somehow apart, but now that you are too, I feel like nothing can separate us now—that you and I, Camilla, are of one soul. And here Camilla would try not to squirm uncomfortably, for she still did not understand entirely why on earth it mattered which god one followed, not because she didn’t care but because the gods brought light, or rather promised it, but in the end you lived and you realized that there was darkness at the beating heart of all things—all things everywhere, that is, except for Lucilla. And she realized in those moments too, as a long conversation between them was just winding to a close, just how much she needed to take a shit, and how much it would stink in the darkness when she did so—how fishy and revolting the scent of the many-day-old blood and mucus would be rising up from her unchanged linen—how infuriating it was to think of Valerius pushing into Lucilla night after night after their wedding until now here she was at the worst possible time with child, a child who, if she told the authorities about it, could save her life but no she wouldn’t—she was goddamn stubborn that way—she wanted to die with Valerius, wouldn’t dream of doing otherwise—

His snoring was violent, raging, all-consuming now—as if it had been building all night and was finally reaching a climax—it shook the walls, the stone, the prison to the foundations—it was beating at her head, penetrating her ears—it shook the city, the cobbled streets, the temples, the home of the magistrate, the marketplace—it shook all of Rome, it shook the Roman sky—it made ships sailing peacefully out upon the dark moonlit ocean suddenly capsize and sink—it shook the whole world—it was everywhere, shaking the stars, shaking time, and he was a good man—perhaps he had married Lucilla and become a follower of Christ only because he had not wanted to be a soldier, not wanted to serve military duty, was in fact a lazy coward—no, damn it no, that was impossible, for he was a good man—

* * *

The first blow fell when Jake didn’t send Emily any messages for a whole day—usually, Emily wrote tearfully in her message, just as Lillian was leaving for her shift at the grocery store, they started talking first thing in the morning and didn’t stop until midnight at the earliest, but yesterday, wrote Emily, I heard nothing from him at all, not a single word, not even a like on my Instagram story or anything. I don’t know what could have happened, what I could have said or done. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty miserable and worried.

Lillian tried her best to reassure her that he must just be very busy, and tried to distract Emily by getting her to talk about something, anything other than Jake—maybe they could visit each other over the summer! Maybe they could go see Olivia Rodrigo on her concert tour!—but was not successful; Emily was clearly half-hearted in her responses and could not think about anything else. When Jake reappeared online the next day, saying he had been busy, Emily was relieved no end and thanked Lillian many times over for being there for her during a difficult and scary time. I’m always here for you, said Lillian, meaning it and wishing Emily understood just how much she meant it.

But then the next week he was offline for two days, and the next month, five days in a row—and Lillian didn’t know which was worse: Emily’s pitiful grief and worry or the fact that it was only in these absences of Jake’s that suddenly the two of them talked again like they used to, although by necessity about one subject: Jake. Lillian knew that Jake wanted to go to trade school to become an electrician, that his younger brother Thomas wanted to go to seminary, that his younger sisters did ballet and embroidery—she knew Jake’s favorite color (teal), Jake’s favorite meal (barbecued ribs with mashed potatoes and coleslaw and rolls), Jake’s favorite band (Lord Huron), and Jake’s least favorite musician (Taylor Swift). Jake’s mother had had a back surgery and might shortly have to have another; Jake’s father had diabetes but the manageable kind; Jake had broken his arm when he was twelve years old in a football game and now played basketball, baseball, and hockey. Jake got up at six AM every morning to help his mom get the youngest siblings ready for the day, and he would anyway because he had that kind of discipline; Jake went to Eucharistic Adoration every Monday Thursday and Saturday evening; Jake’s spiritual director had told him that his true vocation was to get married, and that his main fault was that he tended to be scrupulous, too hard on himself; Jake had never before loved anyone but Emily…

And always would, but needed a break and some time, some space to step away and discern, his text at the end of a week of silence read. Emily sent a screenshot. It was a nice text, nice enough. Then mysteriously, he followed up some days later with another, much blunter one, saying that from the beginning he had been unsure if it would ever work out between them and that probably it wasn’t a good idea to date long distance, etc. And Lillian, who had just returned from a shift at the grocery store and was lying on her stomach on her bed, drinking a can of sparkling water and steadily working her way through a sleeve of Ritz crackers, raised her eyes from the screenshot on the crack-spiderwebbed screen of her phone and looked out the window, where a thin layer of dirty snow covered the grass, probably the last snow of the year. She thought back for the hundredth or thousandth time to the way Emily had looked that Sunday, standing in the golden pool of sunlight in the parking lot of church after Mass, wearing that modestly tight mulberry-colored dress, her dark hair in a braid that didn’t quite look like a regular braid but Lillian was too stupid to remember the name for. They had been standing by that bush with yellow flowers, talking about how long Joe Alwyn had been with Taylor Swift and what they felt about it, and Emily had just grinned and brought up the possibility of Gaylor (and that’s why I adore you, thought Lillian, grinning back) when suddenly, like light striking through stained glass at a certain angle so certain colors are illuminated in it that hadn’t been so vivid before, they could clearly hear the words from a conversation that other parishioners had been carrying on in a circle a few feet away, a conversation that they’d been listening to this whole time but not heard a single word of. It was a man talking, a man in his fifties wearing a brown vest and jeans. They’d seen him many times before. According to this particular apparition, he explained, which was becoming accepted in all the traditional circles, abortion is the sin against the Holy Ghost, and that’s why women who commit abortions will be damned—it doesn’t matter the circumstance. And Emily had walked up behind him a few steps and said both very unobtrusively and yet loudly and clearly, But what if they were raped by an asshole like you? and everyone had gone very very quiet and stared in disbelief because Emily helped moms strap their wailing kids into car seats on hot days—Emily stayed praying for at least ten minutes after Mass—if you couldn’t find your place in the hymn book Emily would take it and give you hers and when you thanked her afterwards make you feel that it really had been nothing at all and she herself got lost all the time, telling you that you would have done the same for her—Emily found seats for people who couldn’t find them, without being obvious or cringy about it—Emily was self-deprecating and goofy and chill—Emily would send you a funny, ultra-dirty text just as you were about to break down in tears—Emily had Tiktok and Instagram and Snapchat but seemed to take away from them only the funniest, most genuinely entertaining content (to the extent that if Lillian saw in her feed a reel that Emily had liked, she knew it would be one of the best things she had ever seen), leaving all the rot behind—yes thought Lillian I would have gone a whole lifetime without understanding what the unforgivable sin was but now I know it, for you, Jake, have just committed it—you who would not deserve her in any reality or lifetime, not if you were a wounded prince leading your army on a last charge across the plains at sundown against the forces of darkness—you with your MAGA cap and your mashed potatoes—you who could walk through across a desert under a rain of fire and wander through weeping forests and sit in a swamp up to your mouth in liquid mud and roll heavy rocks for endless hours and cook in tombs and freeze in ice and having undergone all the worst that Dante’s hell could offer you, not have scratched the surface of atonement—not be worthy even to loose the latchet of her shoes.

* * *

The walk outside the walls was long and grueling, but at least, thought Camilla, they were not going to be tortured; Valerius and some of the other men had received a bad beating but not bad enough that they could not stand or walk. When they were allowed to sit down to rest briefly on the side of the road, Lucilla wept endlessly over the blood and bruises on Valerius’ shoulders and kissed them over and over tenderly, bloodying her lips and chin, and Valerius kissed her hair weakly and touched her cheek with his fingers and winced when she tried to inspect the extent of the damage on his back (the combination of sweat and blood made his tunic stick to his skin) and now Lucilla was kissing his neck, kissing his chest, kissing his hands and face and bloodied shoulders with a flushed feverish intensity of passion which made Camilla wonder if the sweet, yielding, gentle Lucilla she had imagined in Valerius’ bed in the nights after the wedding was a figment of her own imagination and now she was finally seeing the real thing, Lucilla revealed as Venus but even lovelier and more entrancing on this dusty thirsty blood-spotted sun-beaten roadside—but now she could hardly look anymore and she turned away breathing raggedly, her heart racing in her chest, and on the street on the side of which they sat a rickety-looking wagon stacked high with sacks rumbled past pulled by donkeys with a tired unwashed driver and Camilla followed the dusty wheels with her eyes, imagining herself chained to one and going round and round and round and round, out of the walls, out of the city, into the countryside, down to the sea and still she was turning until the light left and the darkness came and still she was going around and around, swirling and spinning and circling forward and downward into bitter blackness.

They were walking again now, and Lucilla was now murmuring to Valerius to stay strong—that Christ too had been beaten and bloodied for us, that he had sweated for us, that he too had borne the worst these soldiers could do to him, and all of it for our sakes. And Camilla suddenly felt angry, vengeful, and wanted to cry out at the top of her lungs, Guards, stop, this woman is pregnant—you cannot execute her—you will be guilty of breaking the law if you do. And the guards who were already suspicious, who had seen Lucilla vomit and her lips reduced to faint shriveled cracked white streaks in her face, would realize then—would unchain her and have someone take her away—would not come back to get her until at least six months later when she had given birth—only then would she be able to come before the magistrate and be tried again. I could do it, thought Camilla, I could do it right now—and then she looked at the red blood dyeing Lucilla’s chin, the light in her eyes, and realized there were many things she could do right now, a vast array of possibilities, like diving for jewels in the blue depths of the sea or sailing in a boat with white sails and winds to the edge of the world or flying like Icarus to the fiery heights of the heavens, all of them far easier, far more feasible in this moment and far more likely to happen than to separate Lucilla from Valerius—now she could almost throw back her head and laugh.

They were outside the walls now at last, and the sun was at the top of the sky and beating down more fiercely on them than Camilla could ever have imagined possible in the wintertime. She could not remember ever having been this thirsty. Lucilla’s hair was soaked with sweat and her breath was coming in choking, ragged gasps. She seemed almost oblivious to the prying stares of the crowd that had gathered to watch it happen, some of them hurling the now-too-oft-heard insults “coward! He tried to avoid military service!” at Valerius and another young man in their party. The baker’s son was bleeding profusely still from a nasty gash over his eye—it looked like he had received a blow there during the beating. The blood had mostly coagulated on his cheek and the folds of his neck. The executioner began to sharpen his sword, and the crowd’s murmurs and jeers subsided into silence, and a white-haired, white-bearded priest with kind eyes (looking to be the worst beaten of all the men present) began singing a hymn in a fine steady voice, and the baker joined in, a little tremulous, off-key. Valerius stayed grim-faced and silent.

Suddenly, interrupting his own singing, the priest turned to him and Lucilla. “Take courage, my son and daughter,” he said. His teeth as he smiled were bloody, with half beaten in or missing.

A kind of shock ran though Camilla as she looked at him. She had not recognized him at first because of all the blood, but why, of course it was—he was that priest Valentinus who had married Valerius and Lucilla on that late summer’s day, when the sky looked as wide and warm and blue as it did right now. And suddenly, looking at his kind encouraging eyes and bloody teeth and listening to the schting schting schting sounds the sharpening sword made through the stillness, Camilla realized that this was really it, it was happening—for she had looked down thoughtfully at the grain of the incense in her palm on that day in front of the magistrate and then placed it back in the palm of the soldier with the kind face and bushy eyebrows and said I will not and then turned and walked away. Since then it had all been tunneling towards this moment—soon her truncated corpse would fall heavily to the ground, blood spurting wildly from the neck and speckling the grass—soon her head would be rolling about like an ungainly marble, its eyes as sightless and empty and black and yet horror-stricken as the fish on the plate on the wedding day, the one she almost wept for at the time by picturing it swimming beside the Nereids through the watery gardens of the palace of Neptune. Soon, she would find out whether Christ had gone to be Jupiter’s cupbearer, or whether Jupiter now served at Christ’s table—in a minute now, she would learn whether it was Elysium, or Christ’s kingdom of the poor and needy that the good went to after they died. And it struck her overwhelmingly in that moment that she was not good—that, more than that, she did not want to die—that this whole thing had been wonderful and beautiful and tickled her to death but she could not go through with it—no, not for Christ or Elysium, no not even for Lucilla who had been her Christ and her Elysium (remember the day when we talked about Titus’s dick and sang like drunkards? And you reached out still laughing your eyes bright to gently pull that little fragment of nutshell out of my hair?) always. Without delaying another second, she screamed out at the top of her lungs, I will sacrifice! and fell down to the ground, her heart hammering so hard she thought her throat would burst or blood would be forced up out of her mouth. Say it one more time—yes I surrender! I will sacrifice!

She did not remember much after that, for she did not look as Valerius was beheaded, struggling and crying out a little at the last moment—did not look as the baker’s wife was beheaded—did not even look at Lucilla—she could not—she would not—she dare not. She thought if she wailed loudly enough and pressed her hands deep enough into her eyes, she could drown out the world—drown out the sound of the heads thudding to the ground and the pleased startled gasps from the onlookers—drown out the thought of the bitterness that would poison every day of her life from now on as long as she lived—how each day she lived from now on, she would die, and at night she would die and in the day she would die and die in the mornings—here she removed her hands from her eyes and, sprawled face-up on the ground, stared up into the sun’s hard hot eye as it glared down at her from the stony blue heavens, letting it blind her, blind her brain, bore into her and burn her and break her soul until she was only a little pile of grey-brown ashes that the priest Valentinus, who before he was executed had asked for and obtained a minute to speak with her, could bend over and bless and tell, My child (as if she was a girl and not a little pile of grey-brown ash), My daughter (as if she was an honest woman and not a bitch, a whore who had sold herself as a concubine to demons), you cannot do brave things for the love of a man—you must do them for the love of Christ your Savior (as if a pile of ash or a whore of darkness could yet be saved). Rest assured that Valerius will pray to Christ for you, and obtain you forgiveness—did not Christ forgive the thief on the cross who said Lord remember me? So also through Valerius’ intercession will Christ forgive you. Do not despair, never despair, there is always hope…

…… Or did she dream it, him coming to her and saying all that—was that what the sun’s eye at noon outside the walls of the city did to you, when you stared into it for too long? All she knew was that when he finished speaking and was taken away, she lay quietly for a little while and then laughed suddenly, because Valentinus was so kind and wise and good and meant so well and thought he read hearts and probably did most of the time but in the end he could never really understand—his guess was good (really excellent, in fact, considering that he had seen her but twice, once at the wedding and then today) but really it was too funny after all that had happened the cold and darkness and dungeon and stench and thirst to think that she would ever have done it for Valerius—that she had poisoned the rest of her days on this earth with darkness for him—that it all had been for—what had he said again? she could not remember—oh, yes—“for the love of a man.”

* * *

COME TO THE ST. VALENTINE’S DAY DANCE! read the first line of the poster in the Flocknote email from the church, followed by an address of a building in a different zip code, a date and time, and a 40s-vibe, poor resolution image of a wholesome-looking guy and a girl with red lipstick swing dancing. Lillian looked at the guy’s 50s-type-handsome face on the screen of her laptop, the girl’s permed blond hair, and thought how she did not want to go. She was tired from work, for one thing, and the church youth groups and dances always turned out to be dreadfully awkward—lots of standing around and everyone not quite sure where to look and what to do with their hands and feet. It had not been much better at the old church, but at least there had been Emily—

But then, a few mornings later, Austin texted her (she did not recognize the number at first), asking if she was coming, and she lingered over breakfast, thinking it over. Austin was probably the nicest guy at church: awkward as all hell just like everyone else, but clearly trying not to be—and sweet, too, always volunteering at food pantries and reading to kids at the library and picking up the veils that old ladies had dropped and opening the doors for moms with screaming babies trying to escape the nave before they disrupted the sermon any further. Lillian thought about this and the look on the moms’ faces as she ate the last bite of her cereal, then she sighed and picked up her phone and, before leaving for work, texted him a thumbs up emoji and a “yes for sure! See you there!”

The usual gym where the church held dances and big events was closed for repairs; this dance was behind held in a gym almost a full hour to the south that another church was letting them borrow. Lillian thought about this as she added the finishing touches to her makeup in front of the mirror, as usual deciding at the last second that she had too much on and spending another fifteen minutes removing product and then redoing it. Then she picked up her purse and said goodbye to her parents and got in the car and sat quietly for a while in the darkness before turning it on and driving slowly out of the neighborhood and merging onto the main road to begin the long dark lonely drive south.

It was freezing cold outside tonight. She rolled down all the windows in the car and let the wind whip her bare arms until she couldn’t stand it any longer, and then she shut them and turned on the heater and thought about Emily and Jake, how last week Jake had reached out asking Emily’s forgiveness (I was stressed out because of my parents’ health, he said—I don’t know why I acted like that, I’m sorry, he said) and Emily had forgiven him and now they were back to talking again all day every day from morning to night, and they had talked all day today too (except, wrote Emily a bit wistfully when Lillian asked her playfully about how swoony Jake’s Valentine’s Day message had been, not to sound like a bitch but there wasn’t one. But it’s okay. He’s nonchalant that way). And Lillian, adjusting her hands rather aggressively on the steering wheel and moving from the right lane into the left to pass a semi-truck, felt again that bewildered disbelief that such a thing could ever be possible—to have Emily as yours and not wish her a happy Valentine’s day—and tried not to think how she had been happy, happy as the gods, happy as that dork Dante with Beatrice among the planets and stars, during the time after Jake had sent that breakup text because she had had Emily to herself again—but now Jake had Emily back and Lillian quickly said Hey Siri play The Subway by Chappell Roan and played it on repeat for the rest of the drive as the white broken lines on the tarmac flew by in rapid unbroken succession and headlights on the opposite side of the road pierced the darkness and the miles and the minutes ticked past she’s got a way, she got away, she got away….

Walking towards the big brick building through the parking lot under the lamps she could hear the low thrumming of the heating system outside running and music inside and laughter and voices, what sounded like a big turnout. She paused for a minute or two outside the doors, lingering, listening, and when she couldn’t bear the cold any longer, pushed inside.

The inside of the gym was what Lillian would describe as valiantly decorated, with lots of awkwardly hung, glittery streamers, but the lights in the gym had been dimmed almost all the way so it was not important anyway. A row of plastic tables against the wall were a water bottle station, a cookie station, and a makeshift shrine to St. Valentine respectively. The dance floor was crowded, mostly with people she didn’t know, and she realized that the youth of this church were here too. It was hot and dark and crowded and stuffy and loud, and a balloon popped somewhere across the room with a bang that was far too startling and irritating—but here was Austin, smiling shyly in a suit and loafers with his straw-colored hair plastered across his forehead, and she smiled at him and felt very glad to see him.

He asked her to dance. She said yes of course. His hands, surprisingly, were not clammy and cold, but warm and gentle as he took hers. He told her, “Happy St. Valentine’s Day”—the “St.”, of course, making everything platonic and and friendly and at a distance removed, and she supposed very elegant too. The song playing was not a bad one.

So she held him and let herself, in the warmth and dimness of that temporary haven, forget it all for a moment, as if it had been, up to this point, her burden to remember—the endless stretch of time, the weight of history and ancient wrongs, the lights rushing in and out of blackness, the baby’s fists curled permanently closed, the separated lovers, the grieving mothers, the both terrifying bigness and stifling smallness of the world, the endless drip drip drip down into the terrible well. “Happy St. Valentine’s Day,” she told him back, feeling it all float away above her for a while, for there are nights of our lives when we look up and see the stars shining silvery in the sky above us and shut our eyes for a moment in hope of the promises they bear, age-old tales of remedy and harbor.

A year ago, on a day of deep depression mingled with a kind of crazy hope, I sent a draft of this story, accompanied by a heartfelt letter, to my literary idol Anthony Doerr. To my absolute amazement, he wrote back within two weeks with a generosity that still floors me, sharing that he was astonished by the piece and praising my depiction of the protagonist’s interior life. As I launch this new series of short stories here on Substack, it felt only right to include the story that gave me the courage to keep digging deeper into this craft. Thank you so much, Mr. Doerr. I owe so much to you.

* * *

IT WAS the mist that was the cause of Manuel’s present mood, the thick blanketing mist that had been hanging over the hills and plains of La Mancha for nearly three days. If not for the mist, he thought, he would not have had the fender-bender outside of Ciudad Real, putting a dent in the trunk of the practically new car he’d saved for so long to be able to buy. If not for the mist, the kids (according to Clara, at least) would not have come down with a bad cold. If not for the mist, one of the sheep would not be lost. And finally, if not for the mist, he would have a far clearer idea about what he was going to do with his day.

He finished rinsing the last of the morning dishes and went to dry his hands, noting that the rag he used had a distinctly unpleasant odor and was long overdue to be changed out for a clean one. He called his wife’s name, unable to keep his frustration out of his voice. “Clara! This rag stinks. Didn’t we agree that we’d change them out at least every three days?”

She didn’t reply, much less make an appearance. Anyway, thought Manuel as he went in search of a fresh one, what is the point? When she comes, she will say, why did you call me over something like this? You could have changed it out yourself, do I have to do everything? And then I will sigh, knowing that she’s probably right, and tell her, oh, I am sorry, mi amor, that’s true. I should, indeed, have done it myself in the first place.

Squatting down on the kitchen floor, he pulled open a cabinet and pushed aside various bottles and boxes, vaguely feeling that there had to be a stack of clean, folded dishrags back here somewhere. As he rummaged, he imagined again his wife’s voice if she had made her appearance the moment before. It would not have sounded complaining or unpleasant in the slightest—rather, it would have been quiet, flat, dull even, her soft round face expressionless and unreadable. Thinking of this, Manuel felt a new surge of frustration sweep over him. I would prefer it, he reflected, if she would raise her voice at me, if she’d snap or even yell. But then he reminded himself that not once through the whole nine years of their marriage had Clara ever spoken to him angrily—at least, not that he could recall.

There were no dishrags in the cabinet. Manuel replaced the containers he’d lifted out during the course of his search, noticing as he stood up that the blanket of mist outside the kitchen window, far from dissipating, was in fact growing steadily thicker. He had been born and raised in La Mancha, and he felt sure that never in all his thirty-four years had there been a fog like this, certainly not in August. For Manuel and for everyone else in the area, August meant the peak of summer: utterly cloudless blue skies and a sun that beat down with harsh violence on the windmills and sheep and cows and scattered clusters of houses and endless rolling fields that characterized the region. August, for Manuel, meant heat, dryness, thirst—the thirst that would assail him almost constantly as he and his fellow farmers moved steadily, methodically, down seemingly endless rows of bright wheat and dark green grapevines. August, for Manuel, meant the Vuelta — and it was this fog, this thick cold wet unexpected stubborn fog, that was beginning to make him worry that, also for the first time in all of his thirty-four years, he would not be able to see it.

For it was at this time, the end of August, that several hundred professional cyclists—many of them among the undisputed best in their discipline—always passed through this region, through the vineyards and pastures of La Mancha, as a part of the course of one of the most important bike races in the world: the Vuelta a España, the Return to Spain, a two-plus-week-long competition that wound its impressive way through almost the entirety of the country. Some of Manuel’s earliest memories were of sitting on his father’s shoulders, a little blue cap on his head, a miniature Spanish flag in his hand, shouting and cheering along with the rest of the crowd of laborers and farmers who had assembled on the top of some hill or along some narrow road to watch the riders pass. “Olé! Olé!” he’d cry, waving his flag, his small high-pitched voice all but drowned out by everyone else’s, hardly knowing what was going on but nonetheless impressed by the seemingly endless column of riders in bright jerseys streaming by. After the last bunch had gone past, his father would take him down from his shoulders, his work-hardened hands always gentle, and say, his eyes shining, Wasn’t that wonderful, hijo? Don’t you want to be a cyclist someday, too? And Manuel, bouncing up and down with excitement, would invariably respond, Sì, Papà. Yes, I do very much want to be a cyclist.

The shock had come when Manuel was nine years old. Now too big to sit on his father’s shoulders and having long outgrown the little blue cap and mini flag, he stood on the roadside on his own two feet, proud that he was now tall enough to be an espectador —a spectator—without any help. After the last bunch of cyclists had passed, his father, as usual, turned to him, the same enthusiastic light in his eyes as always. Wasn’t that wonderful, hijo? Don’t you want to be a cyclist someday, too? But this time, instead of responding that yes, he did very much want to be a cyclist, Manuel decided to put a question, something he’d been wondering about for a long time. “Well, when can I get started, Papà? I am nine years old now and soon I will be ten. Am I really too young, still, to start becoming a cyclist?”

His father had turned to him, his eyes suddenly devoid of light, his voice hard and unhappy. “Cycling is for rich people, hijo,” he’d said. “People who have the money to buy fancy bikes and jerseys and gear and then maintain them. You know your mother and I don’t have that kind of money and probably will never have that kind of money. You might as well just stop thinking about it, entiendes?”

Manuel had started to cry, a startled miserable cry that burst out of him before he could stop himself. In that moment, he felt that his father had been deceiving him outright for nine summers in a row, making him look forward eagerly all year long to the coming of the bikers when really he had no chance of becoming one himself. Nobody but his father noticed his tears—everyone else in the gradually diminishing crowd of spectators was talking loudly, laughing, some of the men passing around a bottle that probably contained the strong Orujo or some other liquor. Usually, Manuel was a bit frightened by the noise and boisterousness that tended to both precede and follow the appearance of the riders, but today he was glad of it, glad that the sound of the partyers drowned out the sound of his crying. His father, meanwhile, looked down at him sternly, but his face gradually softened when he saw how genuinely upset Manuel was. Finally, he bent down and embraced him, his sharpness gone as quickly as it had come. “It’s okay, cariño,” he murmured, patting Manuel’s back. “I’m sorry I was harsh. Just forget about what I said—who knows, someday things may get better, someday maybe we’ll have enough money to move up to La Rioja. The best wines are made up in the Rioja region, you know that, right, hijo? If we can live there, if I can work there, everything will be better, and we will definitely have money to make you into a cyclist. Okay? You keep holding on to your dream, okay?”

It’s not fair to just call it my dream—you were the one to put it into my head, Manuel had thought at the time, his misery hardly dispelled by his father’s kind words. Still, he’d gulped, nodded, wiped his face with the back of his hand, and followed his father away to where his mother and younger siblings were waiting for them.

Keep holding on to your dream—that’s what his dad had continued to say, all the way up to the year when Manuel, seventeen years old, took his siblings himself to see the cyclists go by. They were still in La Mancha, all thoughts of trying to move up to Rioja long gone by that point. A heart attack had taken his father at the beginning of the summer, when the grapes were still just the size of slim rosary beads on their vines and the wheat was still short and tender in the fields. Even though he had, for some reason, not cried much at his father’s death, Manuel remembered how the first sight of the bikers, the first sound of the helicopters and motorcycles that always followed in their wake, had caused him to sink down onto the brown trampled grass, his whole body shaking with silent sobs. Papà, I will find a way to become a cyclist, I promise you, he’d whispered into the hot dry air, tears running down his face. Then, before anyone could ask him what the matter was—for a sobbing seventeen-year-old is far more noticeable than a nine-year-old one—he got quickly to his feet, as if he had only stumbled, and raised his voice in a hoarse cheer as all the different jerseys flashed by down the flat, winding road. I promise you.

And yet here he was, another seventeen years later, still in La Mancha, about as far from being a professional cyclist as it was possible to be. Just like his father had been, he was a farmer—working in the grain fields and the vineyards, cultivating a small plot of his own, raising sheep—and, though three years ago he’d finally bought a bike, he’d found that he had barely any time to ride it. What took up all his time—besides his work in the fields—was his family: his wife, Clara, whom he’d met at a church up in Toledo when he was twenty-five and she was thirty-one, and his three children, Mateo, Niña, and Rubèn, who were eight, six, and five respectively. With both Mateo and Niña now in grade school—in Ciudad Real, twenty kilometers to the south of their little village—he finally had a little more time to himself, but still, he was always worrying: worrying about the budget, worrying that it was already time to run errands again, worrying if Mateo and Niña were doing alright twenty kilometers away, worrying that Rubèn was lonely and unhappy without his older siblings, worried, above all, that Clara no longer loved him. He felt outdone, too, by the success of his own siblings: his younger brother, Adàn, was currently the manager of a small resort down on the Costa del Sol, while his younger sister Noelia was a real estate agent in Madrid. But, Manuel reminded himself, they had gone to university, leaving the farm as quickly as possible to find jobs of their own in the cities, while he himself been content merely to finish grade school, too attached to the family land and the pastures and windmills of La Mancha to leave it behind, even after the death of his mother. Clara, too, had loved the open rolling fields as soon as she saw them, having been born and raised in the claustrophobic heart of Madrid, but now, Manuel feared, she was tired of it, tired of living fifteen kilometers away from a gas station and twenty from a grocery store, tired of the smell of sheep and the sound of harvesting machines, wanting to move back to Madrid or at least to Ciudad Real or Toledo. Clara and her silent, devastating, never-expressed unhappiness — it always comes back to that, doesn’t it, Manuel reflected bitterly. I think I’d feel a lot better if she was happy but didn’t love me, or was unhappy but did love me. But no, she won’t tell me whether or not she’s happy, or whether or not she loves me, and I’m pretty sure neither is the case. But you know, even if I wasn’t sure, I think I still would not want to ask.

Manuel turned away from the window, away from the depressing view of the thick white fog, and resumed his search for clean dishrags.

* * *

“Well, are you going to go cheer for los ciclistas today? Today is the day you said they’d be passing through near here, right?”

They were standing in the bedroom, looking down at the kids sleeping soundly on the big mattress, their small bodies tangled up with each other, their faces flushed. Normally they were all up at dawn, especially Rubèn, the youngest, but now it was nearly noon. It was clear that they were under the weather, stricken down, as Clara insisted, by the recent chill and damp outside.

Shaking his head, Manuel turned to his wife. “I still don’t know. What with this crazy fog and not being able to take the kids with me as I usually do, my heart’s not really in it.”

“Oh, don’t worry about the kids. They won’t even know what they missed.”

“But Mateo will be so disappointed…”

“Well, don’t tell him. Don’t tell him that you went. If he doesn’t know, then he won’t be sad.”

Manuel looked down at his unconscious eldest son, at the thick dark hair and long lashes and soft round face that reminded him so much of Clara. For some reason, his mind flashed back to the time when she, six months pregnant with the boy, had announced that she wanted to name him Miguel, after San Miguel el Arcángel—St. Michael the Archangel. Manuel, however, was set on naming him Mateo: ostensibly after San Mateo el Apóstol—St. Matthew the Apostle—but secretly because one of the biggest cycling stars at the time, whom Manuel intensely admired, bore that name. In the end, he’d won out, Clara giving in because the name had also belonged to a deceased uncle of hers whom she’d loved very much. Manuel still hadn’t told her, to this day, that their son was named not so much for a beloved uncle or a sainted apostle as for Mateo Lopez, three-time winner of the Vuelta a España. He imagined that she would not be too happy if she knew, which was the reason why he’d decided never to mention it.

“Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to stay home today?”

Startled back to the present, Manuel turned back to his wife. “Oh, sorry. Um… which would you prefer, mi amor?”

Clara looked at him, her faintly lined face unreadable as always. A single loose eyelash clung to her cheek, and Manuel reached out to brush it away. The feel of her soft, warm skin beneath his fingers made him think suddenly of the first time he’d touched her, that time he’d offered her his hand as they were descending the steps of the Iglesia de Santo Tomé in Toledo after Mass one Sunday. She’d smiled then, pressed her hand into his, her gently tanned skin glowing above the neckline of the simple red dress she’d been wearing, the air around her softly scented with lavender. In that moment, Mateo remembered, the ancient plaza, which had already been bright and warm, seemed truly flooded with sunlight, dazzling rays bathing the magnificent church behind him and the old buildings around him and the palm trees above him and, beside him, Clara’s long dark hair. She’d murmured something to him as they walked along—he didn’t remember quite what—and leaned against him for a second, a second that seemed all too brief and all too sweet. Too soon, they’d had to part—he to return to the farm where his ailing mother awaited him, she to the tiny apartment where she was studying for some exam— but long after she’d left him, the smell and feel of her skin and the sight of her happily curving mouth had lingered in his memory, making him feel sure that there could not be a more lovely woman in all of Spain, perhaps even the world.

She was not smiling now as she told him, “Well, if you stay home, you can finally fix the fence.”

“The fence?”

Something flickered in her dark eyes, and her lips—which were always chapped from never drinking enough water, even though he was constantly reminding her to—pressed together ever so slightly. “The fence,” she repeated quietly. “Niña broke part of it two months ago, don’t you remember?”

Oh. The fence. For the past year, Manuel had been constantly telling the kids not to hang on it or pull on it—the low wooden structure, having been originally built by his father, was by now very frail—but Niña, who was always high-spirited and mischievous, had disobeyed him frequently, which eventually resulted in a three-meter-long section of it falling down two months ago. Niña having been suitably punished, he’d reminded himself over and over again to fix it, but somehow the weeks had passed by without him actually ever getting to work. Glancing at Clara, he realized that, while she’d never said anything about it, this had been a source of immense frustration to her. Sighing, he apologized. “I’m sorry, querida. It just—slipped my mind.”

She nodded, pushed a strand of hair out of her face. Manuel noticed, suddenly, that it was beginning to turn grey. He reminded himself that she was six years older than him, beginning her forties, after all. He looked out of the window for a moment, at the murky shapes of the grazing cows in the distance, and abruptly, made up his mind. He turned back to Clara. “Actually, I changed my mind. I think I’m going to go see the bikers,” he told her.

Her eyebrows crept upwards gently. “Oh. Okay.” She hesitated for a moment, then added uncertainly, “And fix the fence when you get back?”

Suddenly, for no reason at all, Manuel was angry, more angry than he’d felt in a long time—angry at Clara, angry at himself, angry at his life. “No, probably not,” he said harshly. He turned and left the bedroom, and then the house.

* * *

Outside in the damp and wet, he stood there for a moment, trembling slightly, inhaling and exhaling the moist cow-scented air with almost desperate force. He remembered the days, back when he’d first known Clara, when he could hardly even look at her without intense desire, without an urge to pull her to him and embrace her and kiss her and make her body his own. It hadn’t mattered, then, that she was significantly older than he was, because if she hadn’t told him he could never have guessed—her face and bearing and spirit had been that of a girl’s, and he would have put her at twenty-four at the most. Some people at the church had talked, but he had not cared—here was a woman who was beautiful, who loved him, who was willing to come out to the fields and pastures of the meseta to share his life with him, who was willing, most importantly, to have children, and he could hardly believe his good fortune. How, then, had everything changed — changed from the days when even his most tedious and tiring work in the vineyards had seemed easy by the knowledge that he was providing for her, that he’d be able to make love to her when he got back, to these current days of silence? For, Manuel thought, no sound in the world contained more silence than the sound of Clara’s voice. It was almost terrifying at times.

Well, he thought as he made his way to the back of the house, I suppose it happens to everybody. He considered Adàn, his younger brother down on Costa del Sol, who was seven years his junior but had already had at least five different girlfriends and two wives. Adàn had asked him, some time in the past, if he intended to stay with Clara, and Manuel had responded indignantly that yes, of course he would, that he wanted to live out his whole life with her, and that he could not imagine doing anything else. Now, he was beginning to wonder if he simply did not have a choice.

Reaching the spot where, next to the tractor, the little red car was parked, he withdrew from his pocket the keys he’d grabbed before leaving the house and unlocked it, gazing back ruefully for a moment at the unsightly, three-day-old dent disfiguring part of the trunk. He’d been alone when it had happened, on his way back home from running errands in Ciudad Real, the back of the car loaded with groceries and tools and cans of paint. The thick fog, which had only just been descending at that point, had disoriented him, and at one point he’d braked suddenly, the driver behind him not able to stop in time. Neither of them had been going fast, however, given how poor the visibility had been, and he considered himself lucky, feeling sure that worse accidents had since happened on the mist-covered roads. Probably people have been badly hurt, maybe killed, he thought. I got away with a dent in my car, nothing more.

Reminding himself that he still had to stay safe today, he got into the car, turned it on, and backed out of the property onto the narrow gravel road. At the last second, he stopped, got out, and went over to one of many small sheds nearby. He brought out his bicycle, the one he’d finally bought several years ago but never ridden; even though he never used it, he was careful to keep it in good repair. Moving quickly—for the damp air felt chilly and unpleasant—he wheeled it over to the car and, with some difficulty, succeeded in loading it. About a minute later, he was on his way.

* * *

According to the news report he’d watched at breakfast time, the riders had set out from Albacete, a large town about two hundred kilometers east of his home, at about eight o’clock in the morning, and would, if there were no delays, be finishing in Puertollano around two o’clock in the afternoon. Puertollano itself, a village nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Morena, was only a few kilometers south of Ciudad Real, where Mateo and Niña went to school and where Manuel often ran errands; the drive there, then, was one he was used to, which was fortunate because navigating unfamiliar roads would have become twice as difficult with the ubiquitous heavy fog. He still drove slowly, applying the brakes occasionally when he could not quite see his way, sometimes worrying that he would not arrive in time but then remembering that it was still around noon. Once in a while, on the other side of the two-way road, headlights would pierce the mist, heading in the opposite direction, but so far he had not yet come up behind another vehicle. He rather wished he would—following someone else’s backlights would make him feel safer. He was glad, however, that nobody was behind him. He was, frankly, worried about being rear-ended again.

Why was it that the evening of the accident seemed to loom so large in his memory? It was three days ago but he felt as if it had happened in the last hour, the last minute. It was as if the ensuing days had been obliterated by the fog, as if the blankets of mist had put an end to all real concept of time. Only vaguely did he recall what he’d done with himself recently—watch television, leaf through some catalogs, search for the lost sheep, put in some hours of work in the vineyards, eat multiple bowls of paella and pisto, do dishes, sleep, not necessarily in that order—the dark nights blending into grey days without any real distinction. But the accident, the little fender-bender — that alone seemed real, a solid thing to hold on to in a murky world of chill and damp and tension with Clara and general ennui. Was it because of what he’d done—or almost done—just moments before it happened?

Continuing to keep his attention on his driving as much as possible, he thought back to that day, to the moment he’d left the house, making his way along on these same roads, in his pocket a foot-long grocery and household supplies list written in Clara’s neat, precise hand. It promised to be a a typical drive, a typical outing for errands, except for the fact that the sky was already heavy and grey, making him wonder if there would be rain for the first time in weeks. All day long, he’d been feeling heavy and restless— not comfortable sitting down, not comfortable standing up, bored by everything on television, tired out by merely an hour of harvesting work, frustrated above all by the fact that Clara had barely spoken a word to him all day. The request to go run errands in Ciudad Real came as a blessed relief, more than anything, and he hardly even noticed when his farewell call of “Bye, mi amor, be back soon,” was responded to with nothing but silence.

Once in Ciudad Real, his sense of relief and freedom was quickly gone, replaced by mere tedium and fatigue as he made his way, slowly, carefully, through the endless market stalls, carefully inspecting eggs for cracks and turning over each tomato and pepper in his hands, just as he knew Clara would want him to. He saw many farmers whom he recognized, some of them selling produce instead of buying it. Good afternoon, Manuel, they all said. Looks like it’s finally going to rain, doesn’t it? And he wished them a good afternoon in return, invariably agreeing that it did, indeed, look like it was finally going to rain.

It was when he was finally leaving the town, each item on the list having been crossed out, that he saw it, his purchases from the hardware store rattling in the trunk and his purchases from the bakery filling the car with their aroma. Tienda de Videos para Adultos, read the sign on the tiny, rather dirty storefront to his right, wedged between a big pub and a pharmacy. He wondered why, in all his trips here, he had never seen it before. Tienda de Videos para Adultos. Making up his mind in a flash, he swerved out of his lane and took a sharp right turn, earning several loud honks from the cars behind him. He already knew, as he struggled to parallel park in front of the store, that he would regret what he was doing, that he was probably out of his mind. But he didn’t want to stop to think about it. He got out of the car and hurried across the sidewalk, sidestepping the parking meter that stood in his way. I’ll just be in and out, he thought. In and out.

The filthy glass door, mostly covered with ragged posters and tape, would not open at first, making him think that the shop was closed. Relief suddenly flooded him, soaring happy relief — I do not, now, need to do what I came here to do, he thought. Just as he began to return to the car, however, he heard a creak behind him, turned around to see a heavy man with a short mustache, an extremely stained white shirt, and a cigarette in one hand. “Sorry about that,” the man said, his voice hoarse, as he held open the door. “We’re open. Come in.”

Manuel obliged, gasping slightly at first as the air of the shop hit his lungs — it was musty beyond belief, reeking to the high heavens of stale cigarette smoke. The man looked at him, eyebrows raised slightly but otherwise expressionless. “Well. Are you looking for something specific?”

Manuel could feel himself sweating, the cold moisture trickling down his neck. Never in his life had he done something like this before. He imagined what his mother would say if she saw him here. This is your fault, Clara, he kept repeating interiorly. If you still loved me, if you’d let me so much as kiss you, then I wouldn’t be here, for sure.

With some difficulty, he turned his attention to the man, who was now watching him with something like amusement, it was hard to say. “Um, I’m just here to look around,” Manuel finally managed. “Gracias.”

The man nodded, put his cigarette between his lips, and went to sit down behind the counter, thin streams of acrid white smoke trailing behind him. He ripped open a bag of some snack—almundras fritas, fried almonds, it looked like—and started to munch, letting grains of salt and fragments of nut skin fall unheeded onto the table in front of him. Then, he seemed to notice that Manuel was still watching him. He put down the bag. “Are you sure you’re not looking for something specific?” he asked.

Manuel shook his head. “No. Gracias,” he said again.

The man shrugged, returned his attention to his almundras. Taking a deep breath, Manuel began to walk slowly around the shop, horrified, fascinated, and aroused in turn by all the posters of the various different scenes that promised to unfold themselves before his eyes if only he would purchase one of the endless boxes of DVDs that lay in messy stacks along the shelves. He picked up one of them—this one involving some kind of fetish, it appeared—and set it down again, leaving streaks of moisture through the dust on the cover. Even in the midst of his arousal, he was wildly, irrationally terrified, terrified that somehow Clara or the kids or one of his acquaintances could see him. Suddenly, acting on the strangest of impulses, he hurried up to the table at the front, behind which the man was now crushing his cigarette into an already full ashtray. “Perdón,” he said. “Can I ask you a question?”

The man looked up at him, ripping open another bag of almundras from a seemingly endless supply under the table. “Sì?”

Manuel swallowed. “Are you by any chance married?”

The man did not stare at him, did not express indignation or confusion. Instead, he looked up at the ceiling, blowing smoke slowly through his nostrils. “No,” he finally said.

“Then let me congratulate you,” Manuel heard himself saying. He wondered if he’d somehow managed to get drunk without consuming a single drop. “Let me congratulate you, from the bottom of my heart. At home, I have three constantly noisy, bothersome children—yes, three, not one or even two but three, who even does that anymore these days?—and a wife who no longer loves me. In fact, I think she hates me. I can’t even remember the last time we made love, I really can’t. She hates me, she almost never speaks to me, and I came to this store because I decided that I hate her too and if I can’t get pleasure from her, than I will from a video.” He paused and then said, as much as to himself as to the man, “Am I even making sense?”

The man looked at him for a long while, chewing almundras fritas with the air of a meditative cow. He had several grains of salt stuck in his mustache. Eventually, he set down the bag and lit another cigarette. “Yes,” he said. “As long as you’ve figured out a way to play a video like that without her finding out. Is your house big?”

Manuel stared at the fat, reeking, wonderful man in front of him for thirty seconds—a minute—and then another. Finally, he started to laugh, shaking with almost hysterical mirth. “No, it’s not big,” he gasped. “We all sleep in one bedroom and eat in a kitchen that’s also the dining room and the television room and the room where the laundry is done. No, it’s not big,” he repeated, still laughing hard. “No, not big at all. I could never watch a video like that at home, never in a million years.”

The man merely nodded. “Okay.” Seeming to remember that his job was to sell Manuel something, he added, “I still think you should buy one.”

But Manuel was already staggering out of the store. On the sidewalk, he gulped in huge breaths of fresh air, looking up at the ominous grey clouds above him and at the cars in front of him as they whizzed down the street. He was thinking, Oh Dios, oh God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Clara, I’m more sorry than I can say. I don’t know what just came over me. Just now I came closer to cheating on you than ever before in our marriage, because even if I’d never been able to watch it, buying one of those videos would still be cheating on you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I know you don’t love me, but you at least would never dream of cheating on me, never. Lo siento, lo siento. I’m sorry.

When, half an hour later, the mist began to descend and the fender-bender happened, Manuel almost embraced these things, taking them as raps to the head, reality checks, final steps back into the moment-by-moment world he usually had to live in.

* * *

Puertollano, five kilometers, said the sign.

The road, which had begun to climb steeply the further south he drove, grew still steeper, the sharp peaks of the Sierra Morena clear even through the mist. Around him, outside of the car, Manuel began to hear shouts, the sound of partying, and realized that in spite of the fog, there were already lots of people lining the roads, preparing to cheer for the riders as they struggled up this last savage stretch to the finish line. He caught sight of a truck selling hot empañadas and suddenly felt hungry, realizing that he had not yet had any lunch. He stopped for a minute to trade bills for several of the crisp, meat-filled dumplings, regretting as he continued on his way that he had to set them down on the seat next to him until he reached his destination — the visibility was so poor that he could not afford to be even slightly distracted. Suddenly, quite near him, he heard shouts that didn’t sound boisterous, but rather sharp, admonitory, and he stopped again, rolling down the window. A uniformed police officer was standing outside. “I’m sorry, Señor, but you can go no further,” she informed him.

Manuel sighed. “Are the roads already being closed off?”

She nodded. “Sì.” She gestured over, past a crowd of spectators with face paint and huge cardboard signs, to where an empty field stretched out, several cars already in it. “You can pull off and park over there.”

He thanked her and rolled up his window, congratulating himself as he pulled into the field that he’d been smart enough to remember to take his bike with him in the trunk, anticipating such an eventuality. For today, he’d decided, he did not want to be part of a raucously cheering crowd, did not want his view to be even partly blocked by waving flags or balloons or signs. He wanted, without having to drive too far away from the towns and roads and regions he knew, to be able to see the riders go by on his own: maybe just find a quiet spot where, for the first time in all his thirty-four summers of seeing the Vuelta, he could be an espectador solitario. A spectator alone. And it was a common practice, he knew, for people to use their bikes to get to the vantage points or roads that were closed off to cars and trucks. Even as he parked, a plan was forming in his mind: first, he would stay here and eat his warm empañadas, savoring every bite of them, and then he would unload his bike, lock the car, put the keys in his pocket, and head up the road. Hopefully it won’t take me too long before I can get to a spot that’s quiet, he thought. It seemed implausible, given how many people there were in spite of the fog, but he was determined to try anyway.

Ten minutes later, he was stepping out of the car, having carefully wiped his mouth free of the grease and crumbs of the empañadas. The damp air wrapped him in an aggressive embrace, plastering his hair to his head and making his clothes—a simple white shirt, stained jeans—cling to his skin within moments. As he pulled his bike out of the trunk, he wished he’d brought some sort of wrap, a jacket. He wondered if Clara was worrying that he, too, would catch a cold, then decided that she was probably just glad that he was out of the house. Sighing slightly, he began to wheel the bicycle through the wet grass of the field, weaving between parked cars and people. Once at the roadside, he checked his watch. One o’clock. Granted that the riders would be coming through here around two, according to predictions, then he had about half an hour, maybe forty-five minutes left to get into position. Taking a deep breath, he mounted and and began to pedal up the steep, narrow road.

Barely five minutes later, he was beginning to wonder if, for the second time in three days, he’d lost his mind. There were several other people making their way up on bikes, true, but all of them looked lean, fit, almost as if they could be professional riders themselves. Manuel did not feel lean or fit. His labor in the fields always being more than recompensed by Clara’s good cooking, plus the fact that he liked yemas—the traditional little sweet cakes—and the cerveza de Cruzcampo—the strong Cruzcampo beer—as much as the next man, meant that over the past few years he’d developed a small but distinct paunch—besides, his legs were not used to cycling, accustomed instead to tramping across rolling pastures or trudging through fields of grain. The gradient of the road was merciless, making his muscles burn and his lungs ache as he gasped for air, sweat now mingling with the beads of condensed moisture already running down his face. More than once he considered turning around, resigning himself to the thought of mingling with drunken, overenthusiastic people whose flags and signs would block his view. He hoped for a flat tire, a broken spoke, a slipped chain, anything at all that would give him a valid excuse to just give up and make his way back. But he knew that no, nothing like that would happen, because he was always careful to keep the bicycle in excellent repair, even though he never rode it.

It was after about a kilometer that he realized with great dismay that the number of spectators at the roadside, far from diminishing, was only increasing the further up he went. You stupid fool, he thought, why didn’t you think of that before? Of course, the nearer to Puertollano and the finish line you get, the more people there will be. You know this, you have been doing this sort of thing every summer for years and years and years now. You are losing your mind, Manuel. Your brain is as foggy as the air around you.

But for some reason quite unknown to himself, he did not stop, did not dismount, did not turn around to head back down. Instead, he continued to pedal doggedly on, every stroke sheer punishment in a way that had him screwing up his face and gritting his teeth. He thought of the professional cyclists who, in about thirty minutes, would be coming up this same road, their bodies far slimmer and their bikes far fancier and their speeds far higher than his. He’d used to envy them their talent and success, their money and fame, their muscled calves and razor-like physiques, and he wondered now if there was still some of that envy left, some sense of begrudging those men what they had but that he could never. When he was a child, it had been mostly hero-worship, starry-eyed admiration for athletes who had seemed like gods; it was only after his father’s death that this awe had become tinged with bitterness, a feeling of injustice — why did they get to fulfill their dreams while he, a young man just like them, was impoverished and limited? For a while, he’d tried to comfort himself with the thought that maybe some of them had come from backgrounds like his, that maybe he, too, still had a chance to rise to the top. But his father’s words would not stop ringing in his ears: Cycling is for rich people, hijo. People who have the money. You and your mother don’t have that money, probably never will have that money. Entiendes? Do you understand?

No, I do not understand, not after all these years, Papà, thought Manuel as, his breath coming in ragged little gasps, he rounded the curve of a switchback, standing up to throw his weight on the pedals. I do not understand, because even though I myself have hardly any money, am a farmer just like you were, I still would never dream of discouraging my sons from even the most ambitious dreams they could conceive. Then he reminded himself for the millionth time that shortly after saying those words, his father had bent down to put his arms around him, apologizing and telling him, keep holding on to your dream, okay? Keep holding onto your dream, Manuel, all the way up to when he could not say it anymore, buried deep in the hard hot earth beneath land he’d worked for so long to cultivate.

Manuel was so deeply wrapped up in his forward struggle, so concentrated on turning the pedals regardless of the stinging ache in his calves, that he hardly noticed at first when the roadside, which for a long while now had been loud with the talking and laughter of throngs of spectators, suddenly began to grow quieter. Glancing up, he saw with a feeling of pleasant surprise that it was beginning to thin out, people no longer packed shoulder to shoulder but scattered, clustered. Within a few minutes, he’d reached a false-flat stretch of road that bore a small sign—two kilometers from Puertollano—and along it, there was nobody at all.

Hardly able to believe his good luck, he dismounted, carefully setting his bike down on the grass before slumping, panting and wet, against a large rock covered in graffiti. The graffiti itself, he thought, showed how lucky he was, for it was clear evidence of the fact that in previous years, spectators had lined this stretch of road, too. But for whatever reason, due to whatever confluence of factors, this summer it was empty. Empty save for Manuel, his bike, and his thoughts.

A fine drizzle began to fall, speckling the tarmac, and he hugged himself, wishing again that he’d remembered to bring some kind of wrap or jacket with him. Clara could have reminded me, he thought bitterly, before recalling that he’d been the one to storm out of the house in a huff. Looking back on it now, he couldn’t even remember why he’d been so angry, and realized that at that time he hadn’t known why, either. He wondered whether or not Clara would tell the children, when they’d finally woken up, where he’d gone. “About an hour ago, your dad stormed out of the house, angry for no reason, to go see los ciclistas without you guys.” No, Clara would never say something like that — with the kids already sick and feverish, she wouldn’t upset them further by telling them. He reflected, almost grudgingly, that Clara was nothing if not an excellent mother: as a parent, she was wise, loving, strict but fair, skilled at comforting and soothing, always ready to attend to each child’s individual needs. He himself, on the other hand, tended to misjudge situations, sometimes berating one or other of the kids severely before realizing that they did not actually deserve such scolding, at other times too lenient or even oblivious to their behavior. He loved each of them dearly and wished he could spend more time playing with them as they were always asking him to, but sometimes, after a hard day of work, all he wanted to do was crash in front of the television and eat countless servings of Clara’s cabrito al ajillo con arroz—fried goat with onions and rice— and, if it was the weekend, possibly also drink a few bottles of the good Cruzcampo beer. When Mateo and Niña were gone at school, he missed them; when they were at home, he wished they were at school. Was this what it was to be a father — always making mistakes, always regretting them, always worried, always uncertain? Would things get better as time passed, or would they only get worse — would he still be looking back with shame or unhappiness on his parenting decisions long after the kids had grown up, left the house, and had kids of their own? Ten confianza en Dios y en Nuestra Señora, have trust in God and Our Lady, Clara had liked to say, back when the two of them were still intimate enough to actually discuss these things. But Manuel, though he still faithfully took his family to Mass every Sunday as his own father had done, sometimes wondered just how much God and Our Lady could do in this matter. Dios ayuda a las personas que se ayudan a sí mismas, that had been a saying of his mother’s: God helps the people who help themselves. But, he thought, am I really able to help myself at this point? Do I—oh, God—do I even want to?

A faint but steady thrumming noise. It entered his hearing without him quite registering it at first, so far away and high up did it sound. Then suddenly, with a flash of something bordering on adrenaline, he realized that it was the sound of a helicopter. Looking up, he faintly saw, through the mist, the outlines of the yellow and white one that always circled above the riders, confirming his initial thought. Finalmente. Finally, they’re coming, the cyclists are coming.

Another steady sound—this one lower, more of a drone—came to his ears a few minutes later, and he knew it was caused by the motorcycles, many of them carrying photographers and cameramen that filmed the riders throughout the race. Another few minutes, and he heard the sound of car tires on tarmac—the first aid and support vehicles—this noise, like the others, seemingly strangely muffled, probably because of the fog. Within moments, a red sedan—the race organizers’ car, often containing dignitaries like mayors and politicians—came into view and passed by him, followed by several of the support cars, their sides painted with the colors of the particular team they belonged to, their roof racks carrying dozens of backup bikes. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest now, the way it always did in these breathless moments, these moments that seemed freshly exciting every summer. Any second now, he’d see los ciclistas, see some of the greatest athletes in the world. Any second—any second—

There. Cresting the rise up to the false-flat stretch was a single mounted figure, the color of his jersey still impossible to see through the mist. He was alone, two kilometers away from the finish line—there was a chance, then, depending on how much of a gap he had, that he would be today’s winner. Immediately, Manuel was a little boy again, a mini flag clutched in his hand, a blue cap on his head, sitting on his father’s shoulders and shrieking with excitement. “Olé! Olé! Olé!” he shouted, almost bouncing up and down, forgetting that he was thirty-four years old. He clapped vigorously, leaning out into the road as far as he dared. “Olé! Olé! Quedan menos de dos kilómetros!” Less than two kilometers left to go!

He sustained his loud cheer as the rider approached, his exertion to keep the lead showing itself clearly by the tight wrinkle of his forehead below his helmet, the grimace contorting the lower half of his face. His skin, like Manuel’s had been, was dripping with sweat and condensed moisture. As he passed by, Manuel suddenly recognized him as one of the few native-born Spanish riders in that year’s race, and his cheers grew yet more enthusiastic. “Para España, para España!” he yelled. For Spain, for Spain!

For almost forty minutes he stood there, applauding and shouting for all the other cyclists, until he knew, by the appearance of the red motorcycle that usually brought up the rear, that the very last one had finally gone by. The hillier and more challenging the day’s course, the more strung out the riders tended to get, he had learned by long experience—some days, he knew, it could take as long as three hours for all of them to come in. Still, he felt utterly exhausted just by the time he’d been standing there, his hands aching from clapping, his voice hoarse from cheering, his clothes now totally drenched, his joints stiff. He was beginning to wonder why he had not stayed home to watch it on television, which he would probably end up partly doing anyway, at least to ascertain if the Spanish rider had ended up winning. At home, he would have been warm, dry, comfortable, free to grab some leftover paella or maybe even have a bottle of beer if he felt like it. But at home, Clara would have been there, silent unhappy Clara—and suddenly he thought he might be about to swear out loud, to weep. He felt, somehow, that all of the past thirty-four years of his life had melted down to this moment, to this moment as he stood, an espectador solitario, in the grey and chill and fog, not wanting to stay here, not wanting to go home, not hating his life, not loving it either. Is this really what it all boils down to, he thought? You live years and years, so that one day you can stand by the roadside and stare out into the mist and wonder why everything just feels so fucked?

Moving very slowly, he turned around and pulled his bike up off the ground, carefully brushing off the damp pieces of grass where they clung to the derailleur and spokes. Very slowly, he mounted, began to pedal, wobbling a little at first. Fucked, fucked, fucked, it’s all fucked—

“Gracias!”

Startled, Manuel looked behind him and saw the Spanish rider cruising down the road towards him, one hand raised and outstretched in greeting, his face bright with a wide smile. Startled, Manuel gazed at him in disbelief, his bike beneath him wobbling even more than before. He tried to find words, to think of a single thing to say, but a moment later, the rider was gone, flying past him off into the mist.

Because he and all the other riders too, Manuel remembered now, had to bike back down—bike back, tired, wet, hungry, just like he was now, to where their team buses awaited them at the bottom of the climb. This was the way it always was, the way it always had to be—the big unwieldy buses never came up the steep, narrow roads, meaning that even the winners still faced at least a few more kilometers before they could finally be done for the day. As he thought about this, Manuel suddenly felt, for the first time in his life, that not only could he not be a cyclist, he also did not want to be. Maybe he did not quite want to be a farmer, either, but he did not want to be a cyclist— did not want to bike back to a team bus, soaked and exhausted, at the end of an already grueling day, did not even want to be part of a team; did not want to turn pedals, over and over again, for a living, did not want to spend his days on roads and courses that he had not chosen himself; did not want to have to spend whole weeks, months of the year away from his family. The realization filled him from top to toe, simple and glorious, and suddenly, for the first time in at least seventeen years, he felt free, utterly free, the heavy humid air around him feeling fresh, full of new beginnings.

At home, Clara was waiting for him, but somehow the thought no longer filled him with dread. This evening, maybe he’d tell her, for the first time in ages, that he loved her, that he was glad that he was with her and with nobody else. Maybe he would tell her that when, years ago, he’d said to his brother Adàn that he wanted to spend his entire life with her, the words were still as true today as they were back then. Maybe, in spite of the fact that she’d had three children, that she was in her forties, that her hair was greying and her face was lined and her waist was gone, he’d tell her, meaning it with all his heart, that he still thought she was the most lovely woman in all of Spain, perhaps even the world.

And maybe, when the kids got older, he would tell them how fortunate he felt to be their father, that even though he did not have a clue what he was doing and maybe would never have a clue what he was doing, perhaps they themselves could help him along. Sometimes.

Manuel stopped for a moment by the side of the road to look up at the sky. The sun, so long hidden, was now peeping out at last.

HE THOUGHT of their faces sometimes before he went to sleep—not with fear or sadness, but a kind of mild interest, the same kind he’d felt when he’d first laid eyes on them. He never lingered on them, but shuffled the thought of them away in the same way that one shuffles a card back into its deck. On the few and far between nights when this was not successful and he could not shut the eyes of his mind, he sat up in bed and reached for the remote and turned on the TV and watched a half hour of some godawful movie on Amazon Prime. He was not home most nights anyway. Most days, he slept in the mornings with the sunlight in his face. He did not mind this, being used to it by now.

At least, this is what he told his niece Catherine, who lately had begun texting him every night. He sometimes asked himself, pacing a length of the linoleum hospital floor with his phone in the back pocket of his scrubs, waiting for her next message, what he felt about her doing this. He could not make up his mind whether he was flattered, amused, or intensely irritated. He could not make up his mind whether what he felt even mattered, because soon enough she’d get bored and move on to something else.

Like many fifteen-year-olds, Catherine had strong opinions, but not on the usual things that fifteen-year-olds had strong opinions about. At least, if she had strong opinions on those usual things, she did not speak of them to him, which he was grateful for; he did not want to hear about celebrity dramas or makeup or boys. She loved to provoke him, to tease him, to make him feel how funny and delightful it was that he was always willing to debate her on politics and religion and philosophy every night over text messages. She loved to tell him, Uncle William, you are hilarious. He knew she thought she was very clever and well-read and intellectual. He sometimes teased her by telling her she rode the short bus. He wished he could tell her that debating politics with your uncle was horribly clichéd. He wished he could tell her that he did it with her because otherwise he would pace another length of the hospital linoleum floor and then sit down in the chair in the corner with the thin plastic arms and watch, on his phone, another hour of some godawful movie on Amazon Prime.

He thought of their faces sometimes when the movie was over —when the last CGI sequence on the phone screen had settled into dust and the small digits at the very top of the screen read 3:24 AM and the battery life indicator next to the numbers contained a yellow sliver and when, listening to the low hum that made the silence feel more absolute, he wondered if he had enough interest to get up from the chair and cross the room and plug his phone into the charger there. He did not see faces like theirs in this rural Southern hospital—not when the main patients coming into the radiology wing were all forty-or-so drunk male drivers with concussions who reeked to the high heavens of meth. He told Catherine this sometimes, when she asked. She asked about his work a lot, and he always gave her brief, curt, and accurate answers. He knew that she thought what he did was awfully romantic, that to work in a hospital was the most romantic thing in the world. He wished he could tell her—but then he did tell her one evening, not long after his likely last patient, an obese, elderly, exceedingly wrinkly woman coming in for a mammogram, had departed.

It’s an ill-kept secret in the medical profession, he typed into his phone, that nobody cares. People die.

The Read receipt appeared, and he knew she had seen it. He thought of the second before, when his thumb had been hovering over without touching the blue upwards arrow, the send button. Nothing had been done then; everything had been done now. I have crushed her, he thought, and the knowledge filled him with a kind of bitter triumph that was swiftly followed by a pang of guilt. He told himself, Well, she’s sheltered beyond belief. My brother shelters her beyond belief. She might as well know now. Just keeping it real, as I always do, even if it means it’s all over.

She was typing now, and he tried to predict what she would say. Something like Oh Uncle William how horrible, how could you, followed by a long and tearful argument that that could not possibly be true, that nurses, at least, were Florence-Nightingale-like angels, something sappy and long-winded and emotional like her politics. He imagined himself receiving an irate, self-righteous message from his brother, accusing him of ruining the world for his children. And he would tell his brother, though of course he wouldn’t: Remember when we sat in the basement and ate the last of our Halloween candy (Almond Joy after Almond Joy) and played Super Mario World all afternoon, and you swore to me (I remember your eyes as you said it) that it would be this way still when we were thirty, fifty, a hundred, that it would always be this way, that I was your best friend in the world? 

The grey bubble of a new message appeared on the screen. Catherine had written, with several laughing emojis: Uncle William, you are hilarious.

The little digits at the top of his phone read 5:51 PM. He gazed meditatively down at them, wondering why he had wasted even a second of his life trying to make her or anyone care.

* * *

That night, after the movie was over and Catherine had finally said good night, he stared down at the laces of his sneakers and thought not of their faces or the pink bows still tangled in their hair, but of a humid summer night many years and a thousand miles away to the north when he still lived at home and walked down the old tree-lined neighborhood street to the campus of the state college every morning and walked back home every evening with the dogs barking at him and his green backpack on his back. The year he was thinking of was his sophomore year at the state college and his brother Jacob’s senior year at Princeton. He had started out wanting to transfer from the state college eventually; he did not want to transfer now. He had realized it did not matter. This particular night, it had settled on him fully that for what he wanted to do, it did not matter. A radiologic technologist did not need a degree from a fancy school; it would make no difference. He walked home with that thought on his back and for once did not get angry at the neighbor’s white fluffy dogs that barked frantically at him from behind the wooden fence. It was a very humid night, but humid in the way it is after a rain, not before. The sidewalks were still wet and glowing in the light of the street lamps, and a small bright spray of water went up as the tire of a passing car ran with a whoosh through a puddle in the road, and in that street lamp light you could see the little white flowers that were growing in the grass on the lawn.

On the front step, with his foot on the green doormat, he paused for a second, letting the small humming feeling that he had woken up with now grow to a roar: to make those who cared too little to care more and those who cared too much to care less. He stood there for another moment, staring down at the doormat and listening to the shouts and hoots of the teenagers across the street as they played basketball. Eric, Eric, pass here pass here! I’m open bro I’m open! Then he turned around and walked quickly back down the street and on to the main road and past campus and into the grocery store on the corner.

The clerk, a young woman with wispy blond hair, acne-pocked skin, and very long pink nails, did not stop him or say anything; he was just old enough, had his ID, and was not buying much. He walked home again with the bottles occasionally rattling heavily together in the white plastic bag. He worried suddenly that the bottom would give way, releasing the bottles to shatter on the sidewalk at his feet. Thank you for shopping with us.

He pushed open the front door and listened for a moment. He could hear the TV playing in the living room, where the newscaster was saying something about the Middle East, and his mother and father talking and clinking plates in the kitchen. He went upstairs to his room, locked the door, put one of the big bottles in his laundry basket under his clothes and another in his closet and another under his bed and the final two, having emptied them into his bathroom sink, on the table next to his bed. He stuffed the grocery bag into the trashcan, beneath the sports magazine and tissues already in it. Thank you for shopping with us. He had only done this once before but it had been bad enough then that he knew with near certainty what would happen this time.

For the next six hours, he lay in bed (having kicked the covers to the floor) and stared up at the ceiling (feeling strangely naked in his college-logo-emblazoned hoodie and jeans, strangely naked and still) and felt his mind dissolve itself and reform in a strange country—not the land of the dead, but that far smaller and hazier land of those who are not afraid but not quite willing to die, a land of rocks and mists and islands and slow purple sunsets and stately ships and very dark, very still waters. In that land, he was oblivious (or felt oblivious) to the repeated knocks on the door that grew more frantic and forceful as the hours ticked on by—the yelling, the tears, the pleading, the hoarsening voices—the threats to call 911, then the eventual conversation with the 911 operator—the heavy boots on the stairs, then the unfamiliar deep throaty voice at the door. It was that voice that made him leave his perch on the rock over the dark pond in the purple evening and realize that he had taken the full bottle from under his bed and emptied it but not into the sink, that his mother was crying and wailing in a way that he had imagined possible but never heard before, that a police officer was offering not to break down the door if he would open it in under ten seconds, that they would come in and find the bottles on the nightstand and in the closet and on the bed and in the clothes, and that twenty, maybe thirty years from now, when this nightmare was all over and gone (though still leaving the pavement of memory damp and glowing like the rain had this afternoon), he would be at a family reunion and his brother’s grown daughter or son (because of course his brother would get married and have children) would come in bringing heavy bottles clinking together in plastic grocery bags (just like he’d come in this evening) but his brother would take them aside hurriedly into the pantry or laundry room and say, under his breath, Not now, not right now, not in front of Uncle William. Uncle William—doesn’t drink.

* * *

Catherine sent him the first story after about two months of the nightly texts, first dropping a PDF document into the conversation and then following it up with a long message. She wrote,

By the way, Unclyyy Williammmm!!!, I was wondering if you’d be so kind as to read one of my stories?? I have started writing short stories lately and I don’t want to show them to my friends (because they’d laugh at them obviously) and I don’t want to show them to my siblings (because I don’t think they would understand them) and I have tried sending them to my mom and dad but they are always busy and I have sent them to Grandpa and Grandma but um haha they can never really give me real or honest feedback because no matter what I write they always gush over it. Please please would you be willing to read at least this one story and give an opinion? You know you have loads of time on your hands at work - please?

The next night, between the hours of midnight and 3 AM, instead of watching a movie, he read her story—opening the PDF document with a mixture of curiosity and a bored determination to get this over with. He thought of her sheer delight with his gruff assent, how excited she seemed to “receive real feedback at last. Someone who’ll actually say what it’s worth.” He told himself that if it was the best story he had ever read (unlikely) he would not tell her so, and if the worst (more likely) then he would tell her so and she would not bother him with reading requests again.

Half an hour later, he finished the last paragraph and realized he did not quite know what to say. On the one hand, she had undeniable talent, and he was impressed; on the other hand, the story was hopelessly hopeful and saccharine, full of a belief in romance and turns for the better and lovers and happy endings. He thought bitterly, Of course, she has no idea what the real world is; my brother’s sheltering has made sure of that. When she finally meets it, it will swallow her whole.

Without letting himself think any longer, he wrote back,

Good story. Nice ending. But just know that when you finally meet the real world, it will smack you down hard.

* * *

He met Blanche during the first week of April. It was a small rural hospital, and she was new, just as he had been at this time last year, but he couldn’t relate to that feeling anymore, so he felt that he had nothing in common with her and stayed away from her as long as he could, which, in a small rural hospital, is difficult. She had bangs and light brown hair (with the occasional silver strand) that she kept up in a bun; she had three piercings in her right ear; she wore heavy eye makeup but nothing else at all on the rest of her face; she had crow’s feet; she wore a small silver pendant that looked like the moon; she always carried a blue pen with her in the pocket of her scrubs; she was a nurse; she worked night shifts, just like he did. She smiled at him when she first passed by him in the hallway, pushing a pregnant woman in a wheelchair—she was wearing a mask but he knew she was smiling because of her crinkling crow’s feet and her eyes beneath her bangs. He guessed that she was five years younger than he was. He didn’t really know.

He miraculously avoided having to talk to her till one night in May when an elderly male patient needed MRI imaging for a possible brain tumor, and Blanche brought him in. During the first sequence, as the muffled whirring of the machine began, she asked him about himself, where he had worked previously, and he felt overwhelmed with something not quite shyness but akin to it. He told her briefly about his stints in bigger hospitals up north, in Madison and Minneapolis and Detroit and Ann Arbor. She expressed interest and admiration, hearing this. Oh, so you’ve been up there with the hot shots, she said, and her crow’s feet crinkled up at him. He decided that brown did not quite describe her eyes. 

Ha, I guess so, he said. I like it better here, though.

During the next sequence, she seemed to be waiting for him to talk to her again. So he asked her, tentatively, What about you?

She told him that she’d been born in California but always lived in the South, that the biggest hospital she’d worked in had been in Atlanta and that she’d stuck with the smaller, more rural places ever since. She agreed with him that it was nicer. Then, uninvited but not unwanted, came more personal details—a death of a father, a mother with cancer, a boyfriend, a kid named Dean who was in fourth grade and very good at science. As she talked, he found himself looking at her hair—the isolated grey strands in the light golden brown. He forced himself to look away and watch the monitor. The second sequence was drawing to a close.

Her next question startled him, catching him completely off guard. She asked if he had any kids himself. He said no, none. She did not ask if he was married. He found himself wanting to ask if she was still living with that boyfriend, the father of Dean. Maybe she was married to him now. He did not recall seeing any rings on her hands. But then again, when he saw her hands, they were almost always in gloves.

      He cleared his throat and said, You live near the hospital? 

About twenty minutes away, she said. I live with my mom and Dean. It’s been a real blessing.

He did not think it a real blessing to live with one’s mom. But if she lived with just her mom and her son, and nobody else, well then that must mean—

He told her quickly, I bet. Where does Dean go to school?

She said the name of a public elementary school—John W Something Something—that he did not know. He found himself picturing a small child with bangs, light golden brown hair with grey strands in it, and crow’s feet. Very good at science—what on earth did it mean for a fourth grader to be very good at science? He pictured the kid under the bright sterile lights of a lab in plastic goggles and a white coat, holding up vials of bubbling liquid or peering through a microscope—no, not a lab at that age—well, he didn’t know, he didn’t remember. It didn’t matter anyway. He felt his brain ascribing importance to things of no importance, and he hated it for it; he reproved it. He said, hating himself still more, So Dean likes science, huh?

Her eyes lit up joyfully at him, radiant, resplendent, and suddenly he thought of a Thanksgiving six years ago, when his brother had sat down next to him on the tattered leather couch in a rare amicable moment and, on an iPad, proudly showed him a picture he had taken himself with his Nikon of the interior of a Roman church. Jacob was always going to Rome; he was a Classics professor at an important university and was always leading study abroad trips there and running about amongst the ruins and forcing his students to read the Latin inscriptions and taking photos. He always showed the assembled family the photos he took, and they always bounced off William without affecting him like a rubber ball against glass, but this one was different somehow—something about the quality of the light and space and arch and air inside that, even for the briefest second, made his soul soar inside his chest and his eyes sting.

Another time (this was close to their faces and the bloodied pink bows—he would not think of them) he had brought in his equipment to scan a young woman with tangled dark hair who was in critical condition, and as he was trying to set his things up, the ventilator constantly beeping a foot away, it seemed for a moment that she had died. But then he saw her hand with the paper bracelet on it move on the sheet—just an inch of motion, the flicker of flesh across whiteness— and somehow knew in that moment that he would think back to it as long as he lived for the hope it represented, and somehow, in the end, she had not died.

He thought, too, of Catherine as a toddler in a pink dress with a smiling yellow bumblebee on it—her eyes were still light blue then like his, not green like they were now. During those early family Christmases, she had not let anyone but her mother touch her—if anyone else approached her, she would start howling and screaming and crying at the top of her lungs, much to the grief of her grandparents and frustration of her parents. But one evening after dinner when Jacob’s wife was doing the dishes, Catherine had come up to him and put her favorite rabbit book on his knee and not smiled up at him but done something very like it and made a little noise as if she approved. Then she took the book, moved on again, went back to sucking her thumb in the corner. Nobody had noticed what had happened.

In the dimness now he looked at Blanche, and back at the monitor, and back at her, and she was still smiling. The muffled whirring rhythm of the machine thumped on, held distant on that side of the glass. He looked at her smiling as he had looked at the iPad screen that Thanksgiving or the paper-braceleted wrist moving across the sheet or the rabbit book on his knee—startled that moments of such beauty could exist, filled with yearning, bitter, terrified. In that moment with Jacob, he had wanted to reach out and push the iPad away, almost angry at the way it was making him feel. In this moment, he did not want to push her away. He wanted her to speak, to hear her speak to him, to push away the silence.

Yes, she said, laughing a little, and he heard the pride in her voice. Yes, he’s very good at it. He likes to, you know, build things out back. In the garage. Yes, he’s always been good at putting things together. Just, you know, tinkering around, building things.

* * *

At home, he was listless, thinking of her—staring at the TV screen that he didn’t turn on, holding books without opening them, turning them over and over in his hands. He ignored all Catherine’s messages for weeks, not wanting to talk to her anymore, certainly not wanting to debate politics with her. One night, when he finally did take a quick look at her messages, he saw with surprise that she had been sending him stories—PDF after PDF file staring up at him hopefully. So she had not been crushed by him, then. He opened a few of them half-heartedly and found himself skimming the beginnings and middles and really reading only the last pages, which always had the same life-affirming endings, the glorious hopeful epiphanies. A middle-aged man who had grown tired of his wife decided that he actually loved her and wanted to be with her forever. An angsty teenager reconciled with her dad after realizing his advice had been wise all along. A sensitive college student realized that his irritating, boisterous, often-blunt friend was actually the most important person in his life. It was all done, he had to concede, with remarkable subtlety and skill and lack of sentimentality for her age, but the takeaways were always the same: that people could do bad things but that everybody was a good person at heart and that life could be hard but that everything would turn out alright in the end. It was tasteless, it was maddening; put gently, it was unrealistic. Twice he almost wrote to tell her to stop sending him things, but twice decided that he didn’t have the heart. He put his phone down on the floor and shuffled his mental cards again and went back to contemplating the card that was almost always face-up on the top of the deck these days. He thought of Blanche, and wondered why on earth every time he thought of her and the way her eyes lit up, he thought he might do something he had not done in years now: weep into his pillow.

Things reached a head with Catherine in the summer, when she did something she’d never done before: call him. Because he was surprised, he picked up. He said uncertainly, What’s up?

To his relief, she didn’t sound reproachful or tearful or frustrated. What’s up yourself, Uncle? she said.

I don’t know, he said. What’s up with you?

She hesitated for a moment. Have you checked your messages lately?

No, he said. If you’ve sent me something, I haven’t seen it.

Yeah, well, she said. I sent you another story. I know you haven’t read the recent ones, and I know they weren’t very good, but this one—this one’s different. Will you give it a try? I remember you saying you read things better when you print them—will you do that? If it makes it any easier?

Okay, he said. I’ll try to read it tonight, if I have time.

Thank you Uncle, she said. Well, bye for now.

* * *

Before leaving for work that night, he went down to his basement, picked up his printer from under a tarp, and lugged it up the stairs, cursing twice along the way. He managed to connect it without too much difficulty, and, also without too much difficulty, print out Catherine’s story. He was disheartened watching the sheer volume of pages emerging from the printer, even with the double-sided setting on. Gathering up the pages and knocking them briefly against the table to make them all flush against each other, he looked down at the big bold letters arrayed at the top of the first page, the pretentiousness, the formality, the innocence of them. To Kill A Butterfly. Stapling them together, and then later again (as he walked across the dark parking lot towards the radiology wing), he thought with some amusement, was Catherine under the impression that she was the next Harper Lee?

It was almost 2 AM when he finished reading and set it down on the table next to him. Catherine was right—it had been a little different, definitely better, but on the whole, it was mostly the same. At the forefront of it all was emotion. An Asian girl with a tough, no-nonsense Asian mom (not unlike Catherine’s situation, he thought with amusement) fell in love before college with a young man her age. She wanted to move in with him, start a life with him, even though they were both penniless. Her mom grew angry and absolutely forbade it, even though (or precisely because) she had done the same thing, resulting in getting pregnant with her daughter (the young man had subsequently been killed in a car accident). But then the girl asked her if she regretted it, the short time she’d spent with him, and the mom responded by telling her the old Chinese legend of the Butterfly Lovers, a kind of Asian version of Romeo and Juliet—two lovers who could not be together in life because of class and money and strict parents and difficulties, and so chose to be together in death (and then there was a thunderclap, and the gods turned them into butterflies who flew away into the sunshine). In Catherine’s story, the girl took the mother’s telling of this story as a sign that life is short and fleeting, to savor love while you have it, and decided to herself that no matter the pain she would experience later, no matter if it was the wrong choice, she would go start a life with the guy she loved. The story concluded with these lines: “For I know in my heart that two minutes with him will be better than a full lifetime without him. With him, I can be happy, if only for a short time. I believe the story of the Butterfly Lovers. And tell me, reader, who’s to say, anyway, that we won’t have a lifetime after all—that I won’t be able to listen to his heartbeat against mine every night, feel his warmth pressing into me and his touch on my skin, to open my eyes in the morning and see him standing at the window holding our baby against his shoulder in the early morning light, to feel, if only for a moment, that here was heaven, nestled into a small furrow of the world?” 

Yes, it was very sentimental, he thought, as he walked down the hall to the bathroom, yawning and stretching his arms up into the air from sitting in the same place for so long. Tomorrow he would text her and say, Nice ending, but the world will smack you down. He’d said it before, but he would say it again, until she understood. She had to understand (and he thought again of their faces, the bloodied pink bows, the permanence of the darkness in their eyes) that for every baby that her husband would cradle in his arms in the early morning light, there would be their faces looking up at him blankly from his table—well, he was at the urinal now.

He took a long time in the bathroom—lathering and washing his hands leisurely, contemplating himself for a while in the mirror, running a wet hand through his hair (noting that the gray in it, which had first appeared during his freshman year of college, now reigned almost supreme), walking slowly back down the hall with his mind a comfortable blank. So he was startled when he re-entered the room and found Blanche standing there, facing away from him, looking down at something on the table, something she had half picked up in her hands.

Realizing what it was, he started forward, embarrassed. “Oh, that’s just my niece’s story she’s making me read,” he said, trying to sound off-hand. “Just very silly stuff, very immature, very sentimental. She’s a nice girl. She’s practicing, she’s learning”—

       But then she turned to him, and he was so startled that he took a step back. The tears were streaming down her face, taking some of her black eye makeup with them. Her breathing was ragged, and her eyes as they met his were angry. “What do you mean?” she said.           

He stared at her, dumbstruck. “Are you okay?” He glanced down at the stapled papers in her hand, folded back to show the last page, then back up to her face. “You—you thought it was good?”

“Oh God,” she said. She was crying a little now, her hand over her heart. “So fucking good. It’s good. Why can’t you see?”

“I don’t know,” he said. In his mind he was falling, the cold wind whistling around his ears, the stars flashing before his eyes, slowly hurtling through space and time into darkness and oblivion and a bottomless quiet. “I’m sorry.”

       “But you can!” she said, almost choking. “But I know you can see! What’s wrong with you? Why do you think it’s so wrong to care?”

To care, and then it all burst upon him with the force of an avalanche, the memory, perfectly preserved in all its contours and color, like a beautiful young Pharaoh embalmed by his doctors in the finest spices and linen in the world before being placed by his slaves into the cool enclosed darkness of stone. He could not stop it as it resurrected itself up at him, reared its head, roared; dragon-like, Lazarus-like, Christ-like. He could only stand rooted to the linoleum and feel the fear seize and shake him.

He was a student again, standing again in one of the big northern hospitals during the wintertime. He had been training, practicing scanning on people who were just in for basic X-rays, sports-related fractures, broken bones. He had just finished doing a lissome, blond-ponytailed soccer player from the university when there was a commotion in the hallway outside, and he heard someone say something about a big car accident on the main road. Whether or not it was because of the weather, the icy rain, it was not clear. They said the parents had made it but the kids had not, and then, after a short delay, they brought them in.

They were twins, little baby girls, and they were dead. There was blood still dribbling out of their mouths and down their foreheads (someone came with a wipe and wiped it up) and their eyes were blank and their faces were mostly blank and they both had dark curly hair in which were tangled up matching pink bows that had blood on them (someone came in and untangled the bows and put them in a plastic bag and took them away). He stared down at them for a century, half-wondering in his head how their parents had ever told them apart in life. They had the same eyes, the same hair, the same ears, the same soft round cheeks. The one on the right almost looked like she might still be alive, possibly, just possibly.

But then his supervisor made a noise, a gesture to him to get started with the scanning, and he obeyed blindly. He did everything near-correctly and paid attention to the remarks the supervisor made about how he could have done it more effectively next time, positioned the plates better, and then they came in and took them away, they didn’t say to where. His supervisor said it was very sad, then checked his phone, yawned, and went to use the bathroom. He was left staring into a chasm of dark nothingness from which rang up, as diabolical laughter, a joke someone had made during lunch earlier in the day, namely that it was an ill-kept secret in the medical profession that nobody really cared; people died. He had laughed at it, then, and eaten another potato fry.

“Blanche,” he said, and just forming the words felt as if it cost him years of his life, years that he did not really want anyway, “Blanche, you don’t understand. I wish I could explain. I do care. I care—too much. I just, it’s hard to explain”—  

          “Don’t tell me that,” she told him thickly, attempting to mop up her tears with the back of her hand. Her makeup was really ruined now and without it she looked older, sadder, more tired, as if suddenly, for the first time in all the nights he’d seen her, she was inhabiting her own skin: a nurse who worked night shifts at a small rural hospital, a single mom of a fourth grader. “Don’t tell me that,” she said again, looking him in the eye. “Don’t make fun of the girl who wrote that. She believes in life, you know. Life. She believes in lovers.”

She walked out with her hand over her face, partly as if to hide what it had become, partly as if to stem the flow of her tears.

* * *

William sat down in the chair in the corner with the thin plastic arms, breathing in the cool dim stricken silence with which she had left him. He turned his head and looked at the pages lying limp and speechless on the table, and it seemed to him that he had seen nothing so harmless in his life, and yet so toweringly terrible.

What would he do for the rest of his life? He would live, of course, because there was not much else one could do in this world: he would live, and watch godawful movies on Amazon Prime on his phone at night, and in the mornings sleep with the sun in his face; and when he got tired of it here, he would move somewhere else, because he was employable everywhere, and because moving is really quite easy when you live alone. He would live, as he always had, in his mind of cards, his world of rocks and mists and dark still waters, the untouched quiet of the purple evening Occasionally, he knew, he would look down into the pool and see their faces: the little girls with blood on their lips, and now Blanche with dark tear tracks down her face saying, Oh God, it was good, so fucking good. Why can’t you see, can’t you care? 

But then, as he turned wearily to pick up “To Kill A Butterfly”, he suddenly saw it, what he had not noticed before—the marks of a pen at the bottom of the final page. Someone must have written here while he was gone for a leisurely eternity in the bathroom. His heart suddenly racing, he bent closer to look. There was a smily face, and then it read, Hey William! It’s me! (Another smily face) I know—and then there was nothing more.

And then it struck him, almost with the same force that the memory had earlier, as he observed that the ink was blue. A blue pen always carried around in the pocket of a scrub—Blanche. Blanche had been trying to write him a note before she had gotten distracted by the words on the page. Hey William! It’s me! I know—what? Why on earth would she need to write him a note? What did she have to say that she couldn’t tell him in person? It was either nothing—or—or it was everything—or nothing—or—

The hand flickered across the sheet; fingers of light touched the very edge of the cathedral; a rabbit ate a carrot on a cardboard book cover; butterfly wings flapped away from a graveyard near a palace in ancient China.

The next minute, he was off down the hallway in search of her, telling himself that though the endings in Catherine’s stories were not real, it was lovely to think of them, and that when, one summer out of dozens, one was given the chance to actually live one (though surely that was just a delusion), maybe the only thing one could do, while one lived in this world, was to chase it.

Guys, creative writing is not for me. In creative writing class the other day, the professor said that some of the most successful short stories and books have first lines that grab you right away, giving the reader a kind of suspense or interest or whatever. Well my name is Bonnie, I’m nineteen years old, and I’m a freshman at UC Santa Barbara. If that doesn’t have you on the edge of your seat, then I give up.

What am I up to right now? If you guessed being a freshman at UCSB, you guessed wrong—it’s break, and I finally have time to do—well, something I’ve been wanting to do for forever now. You guessed wrong again, because no, it’s not partying—it’s borrowing my friend Demetrius’s car to drive all the way here by myself, to be where I am now: up here in these hills, on these insanely manicured green lawns, with the smell of roses almost overpowering, and all the marble and the stone and the bronze and the big trees in the sunlight, and all the security guards, and the big crowds that are mostly quiet with some whispering and occasional tears and photo-taking, and the peace that (hard to explain it) feels super manufactured and super real at the same time—here to walk around, I guess, and think for a bit, and (when I decide the time is right) to leave something leaning on the wall of that outdoor patio, right by that big red wreath.

I can’t explain to you, now, quite why I’m doing this—it doesn’t feel quite real. But I know my eleven-year-old self can. So, here’s what she had to say about it at the time. Listen to her, while I walk around and wait my turn. It all happened to her, anyway.

* * *

My name is Bonnie. I’m in sixth grade, and I don’t know what my favorite school subject is. That should be enough of an introduction, because those are the questions that adults always ask me.

It all started one night after dinner a few weeks ago, when I walked by Carla’s door on the way to my room. The door of it was closed (I mean Carla’s room door, not mine) but inside I could hear her talking.

See, Carla has a voice (the true voice, I think of it) that she uses around me, Mom, and occasionally to Mr. Jude when he comes over (Mr. Jude is my dad, except he’s not really. I call him Mr. Jude. I’ll explain that part in a little bit). The true voice is what she uses when she says BONNIE! THATS MY MAKEUP! GET THE HELL OUT OF MY ROOM! and also what she uses when a second later Mom calls up the stairs saying, “Carla, language!” and she yells back, “Mom, nobody thinks that’s language but you!” It’s also the voice she uses when she’s sitting on the couch in her pajamas on her phone on Tuesdays (which is her day off from work) and she looks up at me and says, “Hey, pumpkin,” or when she’s kind of talking and singing to herself as she paints in her room. Carla does these paintings, not of birds or trees or flowers or anything like that, but of people she thinks are cool, singers and celebrities and such, at least I think that’s what they are. She doesn’t show me them very often (in fact she keeps them all in her closet and yelled at me one time when she thought I was looking through them) but the ones I’ve seen are amazing, even though I’m not always sure who the person is, probably from a show she’s watching with her friends. She used to post her paintings on Instagram once they were finished. I say used to, because it used to be going really well and she got a bunch of likes on a painting of Adele or something, and another artist with a whole bunch of followers reposted it and she got a bunch more likes, people saying she was talented and stuff, but later someone or several people said something mean about her style (that it was realistic—or unrealistic—unrealized? I forget what Carla said exactly, I couldn’t hear her too well anyway, she was crying) and she stopped after that. At least, I think she did. When Mr. Jude asked her the other day, she said she still does it, but somehow, I don’t believe her. I’m pretty decent at telling when she’s lying. She lies pretty often lately, so I have practice.

Anyway, I was telling you about that evening after dinner, and explaining about Carla’s true voice—how she has a voice she uses around us, when she just sounds like herself, if you know what I mean—like, I hear it, and I think, that’s Carla. Well, this evening when I walked by the door of her room, she was NOT using her true voice—she was using her OTHER voice, the one that she uses with Mr. Jude most of the time (except when she forgets) and all the time with her friends. I’m not sure how exactly how to describe the OTHER voice, except that it annoys the crap out of me and also makes me feel kind of sad inside, because if Carla sounds that fake to her friends, then her friends must be super crappy, or she is. Anyway, she was talking in the other voice, and laughing. I heard her say, “Girl stop that’s literally fire. We should do it. And maybe we could get Christy and Aiden to come too?”

That interested me a whole bunch, when I heard that. You see, I don’t know all the details, but for months now Carla has been having this big crush on Aiden, this guy at her work (now that it’s summer, she’s working at McDonald’s and some other odd jobs, saving up money for college in the fall). I always thought Aiden was a real dope, with kind of greasy curly brown hair and horrible acne (I saw him once in person, when Mom and me visited Carla at work—boy, Carla sure was not happy to see us). But Carla is crazy about him, like, so crazy. I heard her tell Megan (that’s one of her friends) that she didn’t know what she’d do if Aiden didn’t like her. I don’t know what I’d do if I found out a guy like Aiden liked me. I think I’d jump off a cliff.

So I’m standing there, right, listening to Carla talk and laugh inside her bedroom, and I can kinda follow the course of the conversation, if you know what I mean, without hearing the other end—I hear Carla say again “Girl stop that’s literally fire, we should do it” and then I hear her say some days and times, talk about work, and then I hear her say, kind of uncertainly, Bridge Street? And that worries me, because it sounds like a place where bad guys would meet up in a scary movie, if you know what I mean. It sounds like Carla is making plans, and you never know with her if she’s about to do some stupid crap. She would do anything for her stupid friends. She’d die for them. Believe me, I know.

So, as soon as Carla hangs up (which isn’t for a while—she has to giggle a bunch more and say “girrrrl” a bunch more times) I kind of knock on her door. Then I just walk in. I see her sitting on her bed, typing and kinda smiling at her phone.

“Hey,” I say, “What’s Bridge Street?”

She doesn’t look up at me. She’s texting someone, and she’s super into it. “Hey Carla,” I say, “What’s Bridge Street?”

She looks up at me. “What?”

“What’s Bridge Street?”

“Dude, what?”

“Bridge Street.”

“Bonnie, what the freak? Are you asking me what Bridge Street is?”

“Yeah…” I say, beginning to regret that I came in. To have something to do, I pick up and sort of fiddle with a bottle of nail polish on her dresser.

“BONNIE!” she yells. “What did I say about touching my nail polish?”

I put down the nail polish and go out. When Carla starts acting like that, getting all mad over nothing, there’s nothing anyone can do.

***

That night in bed, I told myself that I wouldn’t speak to Carla again for at least a week—I was just so fed up with her getting mad and yelling at me over the littlest things, acting like a jerk over everything. But that didn’t end up happening, because two days later—maybe she was feeling bad or something, who knows—she told me after dinner that she had something to show me. She said it was something she’d been working on for a long time now, staying up late and stuff. She said it wasn’t quite done yet, but she wanted me to take a look at it anyway, to hear what I thought and stuff. Now, she and I both know that she would never change something or add something based on what I said—but it made me kinda happy to hear it anyway. So I said, sure, why not, and followed her upstairs.

The thing turned out to be a painting that looked nearly finished—it was very big, so I kind of stared it for a while to take it all in. It was a very glossy kind of black and it showed a pair of glossy black shoes (over white socks) in a spotlight on a stage with some small silvery sparkles trailing from the back of them, like magic. That was it, but the sparkles were super super silvery and the socks were super super white and the black was super glossy and polished. I could tell how long it had taken her. “What is it?” I said.

“Bro, Gen Alpha,” she said. She says that, kind of sighing, whenever I don’t know something I’m apparently supposed to know about, or if I know something I shouldn’t know about. She acts like all people my age do is make six seven and skibidi jokes and scroll TikTok endlessly and have brains that are mostly rotted away. “It’s Mike, you doofus.”

“Mike?” I asked.

“Michael. Jackson,” she said, all annoyed and impatient. “These shoes, fucking iconic, bro. There’s nobody who doesn’t recognize them.”

Except for me, apparently. Carla always gets so annoyed when I don’t know stuff. “Okay,” I said.

She was looking down at the painting again. “Seriously. Well, what do you think? Dude, I swear I lost years of my life getting those silver sparkles to sparkle.”

She kind of got quiet, looking down at the painting. I could see that she was proud of it, that it meant a ton to her, more than her usual stuff, maybe. I stared down at the light kind of gleaming on the black leather of the shoes. “It’s sick,” I said.

She turned to me, her eyes super big and all lit up and stuff. “Seriously?!” she said. When she’s super excited, Carla will invade your personal space without a second thought, and this time she grabbed both of my shoulders. “Do you mean it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I like it a lot. It looks cool. You should post it.”

Her smile kind of faded, and she ran her fingers sort of thoughtfully over the top, where the last of the silver stars floated up and away. “Yeah, maybe,” she said. “Well, thanks, pumpkin.”

***

The next day, I was eating breakfast when I heard a kind of crash in one of the upstairs bedrooms, followed by voices talking over each other and then a loud, angry sigh. Soon after that, my mom came down the stairs, with Carla right after her. They were arguing, like all heck.

“My God, lady,” Carla was saying. (She calls Mom lady, when she’s super mad or annoyed). “You’re overreacting so much it’s ridiculous. Give me a break, for once in my life. Just let me do it. Please.”

“It’s out of the question, so don’t ask again,” my mom said. Her face was very red. Unlike Carla, who’s tall and blond and pretty lean, my mom is short and small and sort of plump, with black hair turning silver and a small silver cross she always wears around her neck and a black dress she wears basically every single day (I don’t remember the last time I saw my mom wearing something other than black, besides her scrubs. Don’t ask me why she does it. I don’t know). She’s a super hard worker—she’s a nurse who works night shifts at the hospital, and she also keeps the house super clean, and prays all the time, and goes to church every single day (sometimes a couple times a day, if she can) and spends all her free time reading the Bible. Actually no, I said that wrong. Any time left over from arguing with Carla, she spends reading the Bible. She looks tired all the time lately. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen her not looking super small and super tired.

“Oh my God, I can’t stand it when you act like that,” said Carla. She stood in front of Mom, blocking her way to the kitchen. “Why are you trying to ruin my life?”

“Stop taking God’s name in vain,” said my mom, very angry. Like I said, she’s very small, but she can look very scary when she’s angry. “Don’t test me any more.”

“But you’re being so fucking unreasonable,” said Carla, starting to cry. “You can’t control me, and you can’t”—

Before Carla could say another word, my mom reached back and hit her full force in the mouth. I was eating cereal out of a bowl and I kept chewing calmly and bringing my spoon to my mouth as I watched Carla kind of take a step back, and then my mom hit her again, this time on the side of her head. Carla took another step back, and my mom pushed her into the wall and smacked her right across the face. A small drop of blood trickled its way out of Carla’s nose, and she reached up to touch it, looking (weirdly) more thoughtful than anything. Then she kind of ducked out from beneath my mom’s arm and walked past me and slowly back upstairs.

I kind of chased the last of my Cheerios around in the milk with my spoon. It was far from the first time I’d seen Carla get hit. She was always wanting to do stuff and wear stuff my mom didn’t want her to, and go to parties my mom didn’t want her to, and she was always swearing like my mom didn’t want her to do, and she wanted to do all the things my mom didn’t want her to do. I sometimes wondered why she didn’t just go and do them, why she would argue for three hours with my mom (and get mad and get hit) instead of just sneaking out to the pool party or the dance or whatever. But no, Carla always made things as hard as possible. She was an idiot. She was always trying to change Mom’s mind, and she got mad because Mom’s mind wasn’t changing, and she would start to swear and yell, and eventually she would get hit. She got so mad when she was hit, and she told me once, after she’d had to stay home from something because her eyes and cheek were swollen, that next time she’d fight back, that she wouldn’t stand for being smacked and pushed around and having her hair pulled, but she never did fight back. She always stood there and just looked thoughtful. She couldn’t get away with much (because my mom always went through her phone) and she couldn’t buy much (that time she went on a shopping trip at the mall with her friends, Mom went through her drawers afterwards, threw away all the stuff she bought, and then hit her and yelled at her for what felt like hours) but she was always pushing her luck. You’d think she’d figure out what made her get hit, and cut out all that stuff till she lived on her own and could do whatever she wanted. But nope. Carla was dumb like that.

Anyway, Carla went upstairs with a bloody nose, and my mom started banging around in the kitchen. I went to put my bowl in the sink, and wasn’t sure what to do after that—I get bored a lot during the summer, since I don’t have a whole bunch of friends and I don’t really plan stuff. I started to ask my mom for ideas on what to do, but my mom spoke first. “I think Jude is coming over today,” she said.

Mr. Jude is my father, but see, I don’t actually remember when he lived with us—he moved out when I was still really little. Carla remembers him a ton, though, of course. Apparently he smoked cigars a lot, and listened to audiobooks while he smoked, and took Carla and me to the ice cream store on the corner, the one that’s closed up now. My mom hated his guts at one point and didn’t want to see him, but then they got on better terms and now he comes over every once in a while. He’s a super smart guy, knows a ton of books and movies and stuff. Don’t ask why I call him Mr. Jude instead of Dad—I guess it felt weird to call him Dad, since I can’t actually remember a time when he was. I think my mom still kinda loves him, or at least likes him—she just can’t forgive him for whatever it was, or all the things, that he did.

Anyways, I was kinda happy, when I heard he was coming over. Carla’s started acting more and more cold to Mr. Jude lately, but I think he’s a cool guy, and he can be funny sometimes, even though I don’t always understand what he’s talking about. Carla says that he is selfish and has a mean sense of humor. I do see what she means, I guess. “What time is he going to come over?” I asked.

“Well, not before Mr. Akiro,” Mom said. “I invited Mr. Akiro over, for coffee. He should be here in a few minutes.”

Mr. Akiro, like my mom, works at the hospital. He likes all the same thing my mom does: church and praying and reading the Bible and talking about it. We’ve had him over to dinner a few times, and he’s very kind. Not as smart as Mr. Jude, but kind. He’s younger than my mom, I think, young enough to be her son. Unlike Mr. Jude, who is bald and has very fair skin and wears glasses, Mr. Akiro has dark skin and is kind of plump and has nice crow’s feet. My mom likes him a ton, like, a ton a ton. She’s always talking about how devout he is, and how kind, and how much she likes him. She says he carries the light of Christ with him. When my mom says that about someone, she thinks the world of them, the absolute world. Carla says that Mom has a crush on Mr. Akiro, and that if Mom wasn’t so old, Mr. Akiro would ask her out. I don’t know what to think. I think my mom would love that, but I don’t think he will, and I think she knows that, and it hurts her. Thinking about something hurting my mom (who always looks so small and tired lately) makes me sad. It just does, you know.

So I watched them very carefully that morning as they drank their coffee and sat at the table and leaned over my mom’s Bible (my mom wearing her reading glasses, because how else could she see the little words, and Mr. Akiro looking very neat in a dress shirt). I listened to what they were saying (they were talking about the Spirit coming over the apostles) and I watched my mom’s face, the ways her eyes lit up, the way she smiled, the way she laughed when Mr. Akiro said something funny. But then I couldn’t watch her anymore, because there was a knock on the door, and it must be Mr. Jude, and my mom of course didn’t want to stop talking to Mr. Akiro, so she told me to grab a mug of coffee and go sit out on the front porch with Mr. Jude for a while. And Mr. Akiro, probably sensing something, looked awkward and said he didn’t want to overstay his welcome. And my mom said please no, don’t go—and she reached out and put her hand on his arm.

It was not a very nice day to be sitting outside—it was hot and humid, even though it was still morning. Mr. Jude was wearing a checkered shirt and jeans. He smiled at me and said he was happy to see me, and he thanked me for the coffee. He asked me how I was doing, and I said, pretty good.

“Good,” he said. “Doing anything fun?”

“Not much,” I said. “Mostly listening to music, hanging around.”

“Okay,” he said. “What music?”

I was embarrassed. I know the stuff he listens to—like, classical and jazz and The Beatles and stuff. I don’t listen to anything like that. “Um, just random stuff,” I said.

“I see,” he said. “How is Carla doing?”

I thought of the drop of blood trickling its way down her lips earlier. “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s working, and painting, and stuff. She showed me a big thing she finished the other day. It was pretty cool. I liked it.”

“Nice,” he said. A fly landed on his arm, and he swatted it away. “What did you like about it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. For a second, I couldn’t even remember who it was, whose shoes in the picture, and then I remembered. “I think she said it was supposed to be Michael Jackson. I don’t really remember.”

He let out a kind of low whistle, then a laugh. “King of pop, king of perverts,” he said, kind of to himself.

“What did you say?” I said.

But he was looking off into the distance, thinking of something else. When he looked back at me, he only asked me if there was any more coffee, and I went inside to get it for him.

***

Later that day, when both Mr. Akiro and Mr. Jude were gone, I went upstairs and knocked on the door of Carla’s room. It was after noon, but she hadn’t eaten anything. When she’s mad, or sad, when she’s working on a painting, she can go days without eating a single thing. It’s weird.

I waited for a while, then I knocked again. No answer. But I could hear someone moving around in there, and the door was already open a crack. I cautiously pushed it open the rest of the way—and, to my surprise, saw not Carla but my mom, kind of wandering around the room. “Um, Mom?” I said. “Is Carla in here?”

“Oh, hey honey,” my mom said. She was wearing her scrubs and sneakers, and had her purse on her shoulder, looking like she was about to head off to work. She looked tired, as always, and was sort of looking around the room as if she didn’t quite know what she was looking for. She said, “I’m leaving soon, but I just wanted to say something quickly to Carla before I left.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought she was in here.”

“So did I,” said Mom. “I guess she left.”

Still looking kind of thoughtful and aimless, she picked up a T-shirt that lay messily on the ground, folded it, and set it on the bed. Then she walked over to Carla’s desk, where, all surrounded by pieces of balled-up notepaper and used makeup wipes, the Michael Jackson shoe painting lay. She looked down at it, and, strangely, something about it seemed to grab her attention. “Wow,” she said, quietly. “Look at that.”

“It’s supposed to be Michael Jackson,” I said helpfully.

She looked at me and laughed. “I know.”

This surprised me. My mom did not ever listen to music, and she got mad whenever Carla tried to turn on pop in the car. She did not follow celebrities. “How did you know that?” I said.

My mom laughed again. She was quiet for a while, just looking down at the painting on the desk, and then she looked up at me said, “Honey. I went to one of his concerts. I saw him in person.”

“Wait, what?” I said.

“I had been looking forward to it for months and months,” she said. “He was my idol, all I ever thought about. I thought about him at night before going to bed and first thing in the morning when I got up. I was crazy about him, and it made me mad that everybody at my school was crazy about him too.” She kind of laughed. “When he announced his tour, I must have been, well, I must have been sixteen, I think. He was coming to Bangkok. I didn’t think I would be able to get a ticket, but I did. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. My dad was very strict and, when he found I was going, was very angry. He said I was forbidden to go. We fought the night before, I was crying and crying, he was yelling at me so the whole house shook. I got hit like you wouldn’t believe, I was on the floor and he was hitting me….But I went anyway. I was about ten rows from the front, I think, maybe more like fifteen. I was screaming so loud I lost my voice the next day. I knew the words to every song. Beat It, Thriller, Black or White, I could sing them all. At one point we were all saying his name “Michael! Michael! Michael!” and he said, “I love you more.” He was the greatest. He was everything to me. He was everything to everybody. He was amazing, you know. He was more than you could ever…”

She suddenly stopped, and I realized she was almost overwhelmed, remembering. I wondered where she was in her mind right now, and I pictured her, twenty years younger, in the middle of a huge screaming crowd on a summer evening back in Thailand. Bright lights, speakers, huge stage, pushing people, jumping people, security guards, big cardboard signs waving in the air—and in the middle of it all, still hurting from being hit the previous night but screaming as loud as anybody, screaming every single word, my mom—my mom who reads the Bible, my mom who is tired and sad and stressed all the time, my mom whose hair is starting to turn silver, my mom in a black dress, my mom in nursing scrubs working night shifts, my mom who has a crush on Mr. Akiro but is too old for him now.

Mom looked down at the painting for a long while. Then she reached down and very carefully touched one of the silver sparkles. She touched it kind of like—well. Ugh, I don’t know how to describe it. Like she was saying hi to something she thought had died long ago and couldn’t quite believe was still here and real, and (at the same time) like she was saying goodbye to it, watching it slip through her fingers. The room was very quiet, as she did it. I just stood and looked.

Before she left the room, she turned and looked back at me. “Why Michael Jackson?” she said, curiously. She was smiling now.

I stared at her. “Huh?”

“Why is Carla painting him? Is it just random, or?”

“Oh. Um… I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s just random. She never tells me anything.”

“Interesting,” she said. She stood in the threshold, seeming to turn it over in her head for a bit longer, then she came back over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Well, I’m off. I’ll see you later, honey.”

***

We didn’t see much of Carla the next week—for one thing, she was at work a lot, and for another thing, she was not speaking to my mom. That’s the way it always goes: my mom will hit her, and then Carla won’t speak to her for a very long time. If she has to tell my mom something, she’ll tell it to me, acting like my mom isn’t standing right there. We’ll be sitting at the dining room table, and Carla will look at me and say, “Bonnie, when you get a chance, tell Mom that I’ll be biking to work tomorrow,” or “Bonnie, don’t forget to tell Mom that we’re out of dish detergent, we need to buy more,” or “Bonnie, let Mom know that Mr. Jude left the stuff on the front porch.” I never get a chance to say what she tells me to say, because my mom just says “Ok” as if Carla was talking directly to her, which makes it even more awkward.

One night during dinner, I guess I got kind of fed up, because when Carla asked me to give Mom a message, I put down my fork. “Carla,” I said. “Mom’s sitting right there. Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

Carla glared at me as if I was her number one enemy, and put down her own fork. Meanwhile, Mom said to me, “Honey, that’s not how Carla is. She has to make things as long and dramatic as possible.”

Carla pushed back her chair and went upstairs. I don’t get angry a lot, but somehow, in that moment I was super angry. I followed Carla right upstairs and, when she tried to close the door of her room, I pushed against it and squeezed through. Carla looked like she might be about to hit me, that’s how frustrated she looked, but I started to cry. “Carla,” I said, “please stop. Just, just please. Please stop. Please stop.” I didn’t really know what to say, how to explain it to her. I was just crying.

When she saw me crying, her face kind of softened, and she sat down on the bed and sort of looked thoughtfully into the distance. “I can’t,” she said. “What is there to stop?”

“Why can’t you?” I said. I couldn’t really see, I was crying so much. “Why can’t you stop? I’m miserable.”

“I’m sorry, pumpkin,” Carla said. She looked at me. She didn’t look sorry, exactly, just thoughtful. “Want a hug?”

“No,” I said. I was yelling. “I just want you to stop.”

I stood there, crying, for a while longer. I thought Carla would ask me again if I wanted a hug, if I wanted to sit down next to her. I was sure she would, but she didn’t. She just sat there very quietly, with her chin in her hands, looking out the window. I couldn’t stand there and cry forever, so eventually, I left.

***

The next evening, we were supposed to have Mr. Akiro over for dinner. My mom worked like crazy all afternoon, cooking up traditional Thai dishes, Laab and Miang Kham and Khao Pad and Pad See Ew and Khao Man Gai and all that stuff. She always makes way too much food, and she made way extra this time, because Mr. Akiro was supposed to be bringing a friend that he had been wanting to introduce to my mom for a long time. I asked who the friend was, and my mom said she didn’t know, probably a guy from the Bible reading group. I asked why we were doing this. She said what, didn’t I like Mr. Akiro? I said I liked him, but I didn’t think he was worth working like crazy all afternoon for and putting a fancy tablecloth and candles on the table. And my mom re-arranged the flowers and the silverware and the plates and the glasses on the table for the sixteenth time, looking very flushed and worked up and nervous, and said she’d been wanting to give Mr. Akiro a traditional Thai meal for a long time. Then she ran upstairs to her bedroom and came back down wearing a blue dress—not a black one—and her diamond earrings. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d seen her wear jewelry or put on something other than a black dress or her nursing scrubs. I couldn’t believe my eyes. She looked beautiful.

About five minutes before six, the doorbell rang. My mom hurried forward as if she was going to go open it, then she stepped back and went back to frantically arranging basil leaves and told me to go do it. I didn’t want to, but then she told me again, and I went.

Standing at the door was Mr. Akiro, looking very nice in a dress shirt and dress pants as usual, and a young woman wearing jeans with blond hair up in a bun. I was surprised. I had totally thought the friend would be a man. My mom came forward to meet them, still looking all flustered and hot from cooking. She shook hands and Mr. Akiro introduced the young woman as Angela. Angela looked a little awkward and stiff. She looked at the big platters of food spread out on the table and said, “This looks lovely, thank you for having me.”

All during dinner, my mom (who’s always been great at making conversation, I think) made more of an effort to talk and be a good host than I’d ever seen her. She was super funny, and made Angela laugh, and included her in the conversation always, and told stories, and pressed more food on her (Angela ate about three bites, if that) and refilled her glass with lemon water. She was amazing, really—from the minute the guests sat down till the minute they walked through the door, she was amazing. I admired her. Mr. Akiro ate lots, and laughed lots, and told my mom that this was the best meal he had ever had, and seemed to be having the time of his life.

It was only after they left around eight, with lots of goodbyes and thanks and my mom walking them to Mr. Akiro’s car, that I saw the look in her eyes—as she kind of came slowly back to the table and put her hands on the back of her chair and stared blankly at the loads of uneaten food on the table in front of her and the mountain of dishes in the sink—as if, well—I don’t know. My chest hurt, looking at her. I wish I had gone to her, then, and put my arms around her, but I didn’t. I only looked down at the food with her and asked if I could still have dessert. Mr. Akiro and Angela hadn’t wanted any.

***

The next afternoon, something kind of abrupt happened. I was sitting on the living room couch by myself peacefully watching Zootopia (one of the only movies I’m allowed to watch—which I don’t mind, because I freaking love that movie) when Carla burst in at the front door. She was still wearing her McDonald’s uniform. She normally doesn’t come back until it’s dark out, so I was startled. I started to ask her why she’d come home early, but she ran right upstairs. I only caught a glimpse of her face, but I could tell that she was crying.

I turned off the movie and just sat there for a while, listening to her sob upstairs. She was crying so loudly that even when I turned the movie back on, I could still hear her. So I turned off the movie again and stared out the window for a while, just thinking about things, you know. Then I walked very slowly upstairs and tried the door of Carla’s room. It was locked, but the locks in our house don’t work too well. I pushed on it and wiggled the handle up and down a bit, and it unlatched. I walked in and sat down next to her (she was lying face down on the bed, still wearing her sneakers) and kind of put my hand awkwardly on her shoulder. “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?”

Her McDonald’s apron and cap were lying on the floor, and I looked at them for a while, the thin black cloth and the yellow humpy M, listening to her cry into the covers. Carla could paint silver sparkles so real that they looked like magic, how magic would look if you could paint it, floating through the air, but she had to work for hours at McDonald’s. It didn’t seem fair. Then I thought of something. “Hey, Carla,” I said, “Is it Aiden?”

I saw her head move up, down on the covers. She sobbed for a while more, then turned over on her side. Her face was streaked and swollen and red and wet and snotty. “Yeah,” she said, thickly. “Yeah. He… he was supposed to go to the movies with me, this afternoon, after work. Megan couldn’t go, but I invited him, and Christy too. We were gonna go, but then he said he couldn’t, and then Christy texted me a little later saying she couldn’t either. Then I heard… they’re going on a date.”

I didn’t understand. “Aiden.. and Christy.. are going on a date together? That’s why they canceled on you?”

“Yeah,” said Carla.

I went to the bathroom, grabbed a fistful of tissues, handed them to her, and sat back down. “I don’t get it,” I said. “That’s so mean, bro.”

“Yeah,” said Carla. She blew her nose, then started crying again. “I don’t know why I ever thought he liked me, anyway. Christy’s pretty, and nice, and super fun, and hot, and has known him for way longer, and is good at tennis, and I can’t play tennis, and…” I couldn’t hear the rest of what she was saying. It got all incoherent and stuff.

“Hey,” I said. “Christy’s mean. She’s not half as good as you. She…” I kind of trailed off, sure that Carla wasn’t even listening. But I had to keep going. “She’s… she’s nowhere near you, Carla. It was so mean of her to do that. I’d never cancel on going to the movies with you. I’d go with you, if you ever asked me.”

Carla didn’t say anything, only kept crying. I got up to leave. Suddenly, at the door, I heard her voice. “Hey Bonnie?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You want to go with me instead?”

“Where?” I said. I was shocked.

“To Bridge Street? To see the movie we were gonna see? Michael?”

“Wow. Gosh,” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “For real?”

“Yeah,” Carla said. She was sitting up, and her eyes were brighter. “I know you don’t know Michael Jackson, but maybe you’ll have fun.”

I ran over to her and hugged her. I immediately regretted I did, because I got snot on my shirt, but at the same time I didn’t.

***

Before we left, one of the most surprising things that ever happened to me happened. Picture the scene, right: Carla and me are standing by the door putting on our shoes, Carla all in heavy makeup to hide how much she’d been crying, me in the sparkly pink T-shirt that I like best and save to wear on special occasions. I’m crazy excited, and kind of dancing around, and Carla looks kind of weird with her heavy makeup but still pretty, and she’s smiling as she laces her sneakers and playing Billie Jean full volume on her phone and saying she plans to blast it even louder when we get in the car. My mom, who finally has time off from work, is sitting over on the couch, wearing her glasses and reading the Bible and looking very small and old. She doesn’t seem to care, one way or another, what we’re doing. She seems to be off in a little world of her own. I’m tying my own sneakers, and Michael’s voice on Carla’s phone is singing, “But the kid is not my son,” when suddenly I hear Carla say, “Hey, do you want to come?”

“Um, wait, what?” I say, looking up. “I am coming, aren’t I?”

Then I see that Carla isn’t looking at or talking to me. She’s looking across the room at Mom, and she has the strangest expression on her face—she looks terrified, and shy, and careless, and annoyed, and chilled out all at the same time. I look at Mom, who has taken off her glasses and is staring at Carla. Carla repeats the question. “Do you want to come with us? You want to come see Michael?”

Mom keeps staring at Carla. “Wow,” she finally says. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” says Carla. She sounds so casual, it’s crazy. “I heard you telling Bonnie you were a big fan.”

My mom looks at me, then back at Carla. “Are you sure? Are you serious?” she says again.

“Yeah,” says Carla.

I couldn’t believe my eyes as my mom got up from the couch. “Okay, honey,” she said. She was smiling—kind of uncertainly, as if she still couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing, but she was smiling. “Yeah, we can go.”

***

Walking into the bright, kind of butter-scented lobby of the theater with my mom and Carla made me feel strange, not in a bad way, but it was strange. There were quite a few other people there, walking all over the purple carpet and talking and taking selfies, some of them dressed up, even, and it felt cheerful, and I forgot about the strange feeling. Carla got out her debit card and asked me if I wanted any popcorn or candy, and I looked at my mom, expecting her to say no, but she only smiled. Then Carla looked at my mom and asked her, still in that very casual, chill voice, if she wanted anything. My mom smiled and shook her head. Then she laughed and said she changed her mind and that she wanted some popcorn and a Mountain Dew.

Now, I want you to imagine something. I’m begging you, please. I want you to try to imagine one of the most important moments of my life—well maybe important is the wrong word, maybe not important in the way you’re thinking, like a wedding or a graduation, but important. So important. So important that I barely have words to explain what happened, but I’ll try anyway.

So we’re sitting in the theater, right, in our seats, and it’s dark, and the movie is halfway done—we’ve seen his father hitting him, we’ve seen him stare across the street at the kids he can’t play with because he has to practice dancing and singing with his brothers, we’ve seen them get famous, we’ve seen him do his first album on his own, we’ve seen him become a huge star on his own. Now, he’s just gotten his hair burned off and stuff, doing that thing for Coca-Cola (or Pepsi, I might have got it confused) and he’s been taken to the hospital, and the doctor’s left, and now he’s lying there in the hospital bed, very quietly, and you can kind of hear the faint hospital noises in the background—you know the ones I mean—faint beeps and clicks in the distance and the murmur of voices and footsteps as people go by in the passageway, and (very faintly) the screaming and calling of the fans gathered outside, holding signs, below. The whole theater is super quiet, as this plays on the screen, as he lies in bed very quietly—and then suddenly, next to me, I hear someone start to cry—and it’s not Carla, because I know how Carla sounds when she starts to cry. It’s my mom, and she’s crying (she never cries, like actually never) and she’s whispering, as she cries, He was so beautiful. He had the light of Christ with him.

But believe me, please believe me when I tell you that none of that would have mattered—and I mean none of it—not my mom crying when she hasn’t cried in so long, or whispering brokenly in the darkness that he was beautiful—if I hadn’t happened to look over and see something. I saw Carla put down her soda, and her hand steal over and kind of brush my mom’s fingers, and then stay there—for a minute, only, no more than that, and then she took her hand away. But I stared, and stared—I stared, that entire minute, not eating any popcorn, not even breathing, hardly—watching Carla’s hand on Mom’s in the darkness, with the faint light from the movie theater screen.

Well, it was golden hour (if that’s what you call it) when we got out of the theater—and now, looking back and squinting in the sunlight that was coming at an angle over the tops of the buildings, I could see it, the big letters that would glow red when it was dark: Cinemark Bridge Street and XD. My mom was smiling, and humming “Bad”, and Carla was smiling and trying to moonwalk and failing and laughing and saying she didn’t know why it had to end so soon, and then she had me and my mom stop at the bottom of the steps, and she put her arm around me and took a selfie of us on her phone, the golden light right in our faces, making us squint a bit as we smiled. And there were people walking off into the mall, boyfriends and girlfriends, middle-aged people, older people, people on their own, and there were people walking off towards the parking lot, and people just standing and talking, and taking pictures like we were. And it seemed to me in that moment that night would come, and my mom would go back to work at the hospital, and Carla would leave for college, and summer would end—but that for now nothing could ruin this, nothing as we stood with the sunlight pouring into our eyes and down over everything, a light that made everything feel like it could last forever, if only we loved it enough and wanted it to.

* * *

Well, here I am, here in Glendale, up here in these hills, on these insanely manicured green lawns, with the smell of roses almost overpowering, and all the marble and the stone and the bronze and the big trees in the sunlight, and all the security guards, and the big crowds that are mostly quiet with some whispering and occasional tears and photo-taking, and the peace that (hard to explain it) feels super manufactured and super real at the same time—here, even though Mr. Jude was right, after all: the year after Michael came out, they released a documentary that went into everything that happened during his trials—and suddenly they were removing his music from things, and everyone was saying, strange, how the truth can be right in people’s faces, but they won’t believe it, they’ll do everything they can not to have to believe it, for years and years—but now, now they have to at last. But I’m here, I tell you: I’m here, because I made a promise to myself at Bridge Street Theater, when Carla was still alive, that I’d do something to thank him—and all these years have gone by, but I won’t let it go. Now—now I’m ready. I’ll walk over there, to the marble wall, and I’ll put the letter there, the one that tells him about that time (the smooth hand resting on top of the wrinkled hand in the glow of the movie theater screen, and the golden light coming over the trees outside, and the silver sparkles rising up everywhere, unafraid of the darkness) and thanks him for it—and then I’ll walk away to Demetrius’s car, without looking back, and feel as if I can move into my future.

“When I come to town I shall have a little talk with you about Brown and one Jenny Jacobs. Open daylight! he don’t care. I am afraid there will be some more feet for little stockings—[of Keats’s making. (I mean the feet.)] Brown here tried at a piece of Wit but it failed him, as you see, though long a brewing.— [this is a 2d lie.] Men should never despair—you see he has tried again and succeeded to a miracle.—He wants to try again, but as I have a right to an inside place in my own Letter—I take possession.”

-John Keats, letter to Charles Wentworth Dilke, Saturday, July 31, 1819

Keats is making feet, you say?

For little stockings, too, you say?

Ah, good God—that I could be

Flying over lands and sea

Crossing o’er the walls of time

As swiftly as I write this rhyme

To reach those days the Muses blessed

The Graces too, and all the rest

Appear, and take Keats by the arm

Ah no, surely ‘twould alarm

First, I’d show him all my verse

Which, though surely ‘tis far worse

Than the worst thing from his pen

Or the worst thing written then

Nonetheless o’erbrims with love

That “human passion far above”

For none other than his own good self;

Fancy, that “deceiving elf”

Once told me I could hope to find

A soul-mate, ‘mongst the present kind

Of modern men—well, she was wrong

And one day, as I walked along

I thought, why do I torture so

My soul? Rather, I must surely go

Into the past, if my poor heart

Is to find e’en the smallest part

Of comfort, peace, or healing light

Ah, how right I was, how right

For soon I had discovered Keats

And ah, the glories, ah, the sweets

I’ve tasted, in his company;

But even then, still, you see

There stretched between a mighty ocean

A gulf, in cold, perpetual motion

Some name it Time; but I, for my part, call

Anything ‘twixt me and Keats, a wall

For the strongest wall can be broken down

Its sternest, most implacable frown

Can’t withstand love’s melting smile

I pleaded with it, but for a while

And soon, of course, it let me through

And I’m here, dear Brown, dear Keats, with you

No longer, now, must I pretend

That I was, in bygone times, your friend

Anyhow, gentlemen, where were we

Now let me think, now let me see

Ah yes, I appeared, took Keats by the arm

He turned pale, as if I’d do him harm

So, I showed him all my rhymes

That I’ve written for him, countless times

He’s reading them, he blushes, smiles

My Poesy his heart beguiles

He looks up at me, he whispers thanks

My heart’s river bursts its banks

I kiss him softly, then I say

“Ah, dearest John, if I may

Be so bold to ask you this:

Mr. Brown” here Brown nods “in his

Note, in your letter, mentioned feet

For little stockings, which your sweet

Self, would be the maker of:

Now, by the wisdom of Him above

‘Tis not good for man to be alone

And, really, you must surely own

He cannot be, when it comes to feet-creation—

The combined might of a strong nation

Of men alone, could never make

A single foot; for mercy’s sake

Can I be the woman whom you need?

Let my passionate verses intercede

How my heart longs to be with thine

For our limbs to intertwine—

Ah, perhaps, that was too bold

Forgive me, sir, for I am told

That no woman in your day

Would ever, ever, dare to say

Something even slightly tender;

But I, dear John, am no pretender

Indeed, your words on Brown seem pretty fair

On me: Open daylight! She don’t care.

In short: I don’t mean to be rude

And I’ve already been quite crude

But please, dear John, if e’er you long

To do more than write a glorious song

Or splendid verse, know that I await

Your pleasure; truly, it seems that fate

Binds our hearts and minds together

We are, are we not, lovely birds of a feather?

I’ll say no more, I’ve longed for thee

Tossed on a cold and darkling sea

Pray let me come to port at last

At least till the storm has overpast.”

Keats blushes and smiles, begins to reply

The light of hope gleams in my eye

Yes, soon I’ll be the co-maker of little feet

It comes, as he’d say, the “solution sweet”!

Ah, but why, why does his voice now fade

Hardly a word has he even said—

Everything’s fading, fading away

Wentworth Place, the English day

Ah, ‘tis the ringing of the dinner bell

My mind, it seems “cannot cheat so well

As she is fam’d to do”—I’m back at home

Not in fair England, not even in Rome

Where, buried ‘neath violets, he lies

He, whose unseen smile and eyes

Uplift me, in my hours sad

Whose every word makes my spirit glad.