“The lake house has magic,” I say and let the fireflies go.

On their short, chubby legs the kids run to the edge of the water and wait for the bugs to transform.

The lake house held magic, grandpa said. He would capture the fireflies and then let them go, because when free the bugs turned to fairies. I always wondered if fairies turned to bugs because they didn’t want us to see them. The day grandpa died I went fairy hunting. I caught the fireflies and then put the jar away. Every so often I tried to surprise them.

Soon the bugs stopped shining. They twitched at the bottom of the jar, never turned to fairies.

How do you change the pictures in your mind

that won’t be quiet there

or go away, or go away?

From a song written by Dan Schuffman, who fought in WWII and remembered too much.

The old Marine wept.

He sat tilted to his left in the wheelchair, his eyes closed. There was no longer any reliable order to things present or past—faces, names, voices, noises, times, places, sometimes even the four walls of his tiny room—all of life muted in shape and sound, and now only the little one could order his mind, cause him to see and hear sharply, with a purpose. He opened his eyes, blinked into focus the food tray and the blue plastic plate, saw the uneaten chunk of meat, the pile of mashed potatoes, the dark puddle of pudding. He registered no hunger, ate only when the help came and urged him. Only the little one stirred life, and he was to visit this very evening, of that the old Marine was certain.

Voices in the corridor. One manly and vibrant, reminding him of a voice that once rumbled from his own chest. Another—the one he homed in on—small and delightfully squeaky. He raised his head, shifted his back straight, waited for a sliver of the bright world.

“Hey, Gramps, how you doing?”

“Fair, I reckon…fair.” He answered the man, but looked at the little boy. His hair was the color of straw, smoothed over his forehead but poking up in back where his cap had made it wild. Wide-set eyes, striking and blue and liquid. Nose still a button, cheeks round and ruddy from November’s night wind. A white-toothed smile, wide and innocent and true. The old Marine was alive now, lost in the blue eyes, and he felt the rigid muscles of his face work to curve the corners of his mouth upward.

The man leaned over the little boy and said, “Want to give it to Great Grampy now?”

The boy nodded eagerly, held up his hands, palms upward. His father reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a jack-o’-lantern not much larger than a softball, and then placed it in the boy’s hands. The boy turned, took two steps toward the old Marine, then said, “It’s for you, Great Grampy. Daddy helped me make the face.”

The dying Marine felt his smile slide, and then came screams echoing from a cave, foul and rocky, and visions that he could not blink away. In his chest he felt a wild fluttering, as if a bird caged within his ribs fought for freedom.

His grandson huffed a little laugh, said, “Not too fancy, for sure, but I wanted him to do most of it…and he insisted it had to have a tongue sticking out…so…that’s where the Tootsie Roll came in.” He made a sound, less than a laugh. “First jack-o’-lantern I ever saw with a tongue…I…uh…Gramps? Gramps? You all right?”

The wail of anguish filled the room, spilled into the corridor, and soon footfalls pounded over the tile, and then into the room. A black woman, fiftyish and sturdy as a man, commanded the close space. “Now, now, there, my old friend…what’s the matter now?” She knew there would be no answer, said, “Let’s get him laid on the bed, and I’ll calm him down…don’t worry.”

The little boy was crying, the jack-o’-lantern clutched to his middle like a teddy bear. The woman said, “Why don’t you take him on down to the lobby, I’ll manage now…just need a few minutes.”

Too soon, the door popped open behind them, and when the man turned around, a white-uniformed nurse locked eyes with him, her lips tightly pursed. She beckoned with two quick flips of her fingers. The man stood, took his son by one hand, and walked toward her, asked the question with his eyes. With a shake of her head that only the man could discern, the nurse leaned close, whispered, “I’m so sorry.” She looked down at the boy, said, “If that’s not the prettiest little jack-o’-lantern I ever laid eyes on, young sir, I don’t know what is. I have a lady inside that would just love to hear how you carved it…okay? Your daddy and I have some things to do.”

As they approached the door to the room, the nurse stopped, laid a hand on the man’s forearm. “We got him calmed down very quickly…and then…” she smiled firmly, patted his arm, “he just went to sleep. So peaceful…you should be thankful for that. Such a blessing.”

The Marine’s grandson tilted his head toward the ceiling, drew in a jagged breath, and nodded slowly. “He was quite a man in his day. World War II vet…survived Iwo Jima. I’ve read a lot about it.” He lowered his head, raised his eyebrows. “Had to…he would never say anything about it…even to my dad.”

“Hummm…I’m afraid I don’t know much about that.”

The man shook his head, shrugged his shoulders. “Not many do these days.”

The Marine rode toward the edge of town in a colorless 1929 Chevrolet pickup truck. The driver’s mouth was lost in the wilderness of a black beard that draped over the top of his coveralls and extended sideways to the straps. When he spoke—a frequent occurrence during the preceding half hour—it was as if a voice thundered from a brush thicket. He rendered pronouncements on subjects ranging from the habits of prime roosters to a surefire technique for eliminating a wasp nest without being stung. At first, the Marine had been pleasantly distracted from the duty he was soon to perform, the jabbering having reduced it to a flame burning low, like a pilot light at the edge of his brain. The bearded man paused, glanced at the Marine, waited a few seconds for a response. Stony silence, the silhouette a frozen visage. He tapped the dash gently with the fingertips of his right hand. “I know she ain’t much to look at now, but my oh my, in her day…” He shook his head. “Shiny and blue, 46 horsepower, 194 cubic inch cast iron overhead valve engine…first ever 6 cylinder, by the way…mercy, she was somethin’.”

The driver nodded to himself, and then pilfered another sidelong glance toward his rider. The only sounds were the whine of the engine and the crunch of gravel. The seconds collected, created a space in the driver’s brain, and he knew the Marine had already traveled forward to MOM’s house.

“You say she knows you’re comin’, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Knows it’s today?”

“No…I wrote her it’d be the first of November or so before I got home.”

The driver reached up and tilted back his hat. “Well…he was the only one we lost around Hilltop. You and him was the only Marines…one more Army…the Hadley boy, and he come back like you. Three left, two come back…thankful for that anyhow.”

The Marine nodded, said nothing.

“Want me to take you clear to the house?”

“No thanks.” He pointed through the dirty windshield. “This’ll be fine. Need to walk a little first.”

“Figured that, I did.” He paused, made a sound in his throat. “Me…I druther sandpaper a lion’s ass than go talk to her about over there…but I know you got to.”

“I do.”

“Least you say he died of a sudden. Least you got that…thank goodness.”

The Marine drew in a long breath, pushed it past his lips.

The Marine stood in a small copse of hickories at the edge of town, waiting as the twilight thickened into darkness. A few vehicles rumbled slowly by, and he was careful to stand as still as the trees that guarded him. The shapes of roofs and walls faded away and yellow rectangles of light flicked into view, formed a path to the only two houses that mattered. He picked up his sea bag and stepped into the street, and then began to walk toward a particular rectangle of light. He passed his own house from the opposite side of the street, though not without a long glance. The breeze stiffened, cool and misty, and he allowed the elements to penetrate him, sucked them into his lungs as an offering. He concentrated on the gravelly cadence of his footfalls as the rectangle grew larger, and then a shadow passed through it.

An object, squat and round, leaked into his peripheral vision as he climbed the four porch steps, and he willed his gaze straight ahead toward the door, waged for several seconds the little battle he knew he would lose. He turned his head to the jack-o’-lantern, saw the dark shapes of eye and nose holes, the wide, sagging mouth.

God…give me a break…I’m trying so hard…so hard!

He sat the sea bag on the floor, and then made a fist with his right hand and punched himself squarely in the chest. “Buck up, dammit!”

From behind him neighborhood sounds gathered—a child’s laughter, the excited yap of a small dog, a door closing—and then only the wind again, whooshing around the corner of the house. The fist at his chest loosened, and he rapped his knuckles three times on the door, then swiped his cap off.

The door opened quickly. She placed crossed hands over her bosom, bowed her head for a moment, then reached out and gathered him into her arms. The sobs spurted for only seconds, and then she steadied herself with two open-handed claps to his back. “Come sit…please.”

The Marine followed her to the couch and they sat with knees angled toward one another. He parted his lips to speak, but his tongue was locked to the floor of his mouth, and he could look only at the collection in her lap—worn hands, ringless fingers, a crumpled apron of faded green.

She said, “I treasure your coming…but I know it’s hard. That’s why it’s treasure.” She paused, reached out and patted his knee. “I got iced tea made…course I imagine your momma’s got you suppered up good.” She smiled.

His lips parted wider as he tested his tongue for movement, and then he stole his first glance at her eyes. Warm and soft, they beckoned but did not plead. “I…uh…well, truth is…uh…I came straight here.”

“Oh…my.” She fished a handkerchief from the apron pocket, kneaded it with her fingertips. “I’m ready then. I just want you to tell me how it ended for him over there. I’ve heard said that some don’t want to know about their sons…but I do…can’t have no peace till I know.” She opened her fingers like the petals of a flower seeking the morning sun. “However…whatever…I just have to know the truth.”

The Marine inched closer to her, placed both of his hands over hers. “We weren’t more than a few steps apart when it happened. Nobody even heard the shot. He just kinda whoofed, reached around with one hand to his back…kinda swiped, like he felt a horsefly bite on him…and he just looked surprised for a second. Then he buckled and I grabbed him, eased him down. Wasn’t even time to call a corpsman…he just closed his eyes…and that was it. Sarge said it was a sniper, no doubt.”

The woman eased her right hand free, raised the handkerchief to her eyes, then her nose. “Oh my…thank you…you can never know how much this means to me. I take it as gifts from God Almighty…him passin’ like that…and you being there with him, best friend and all. It was meant to be.”

He nodded, said, “Yes’um…reckon it was.”

She bowed her head again, her body rocking gently to and fro, a hum rising from her throat—faint, yet melodious and sweet—and the Marine recognized the tune as a hymn, though he could not find words to fit it. When she finished, she raised her head and said, “I just don’t want him forgot. That’s not too much to want, is it? Surely people won’t forget.”

“I can’t believe they ever would.”

She sighed, scooted forward to stand, and he helped her up. “Well, listen here now…you get across the street to your ma and pa. I feel half guilty you coming here first.”

“They’ll understand.”

“You staying around these parts?”

“Not long. Goin’ down to Lexington to find a job.”

She wrapped an arm around his waist, walked him to the door, and they stepped onto the porch. She pointed to the jack-o’-lantern, said, “I carved it special for you two…you boys and your pumpkin carvings. Those were good days.”

“Yes’um…the best.”

He picked up his bag, walked down the steps and into the street. Her voice chased after him, and he stopped, turned around. “It’s still in pretty good shape. You come look again in the daylight. It’ll be a nice remembrance for you.”

He nodded, raised his free hand in farewell, did not reply.

The Marine found the sprawl of tortured flesh in a Jap cave. Two days before, the body had been his strapping nineteen-year-old best friend. The fading sunlight, weak and colorless, was without energy, but it served in funereal fashion as it seeped into the cave. It bathed the corpse in a soft light nearly identical to that which would bathe the evening mourners three weeks later in a cracker box of a church house hovered over by an ancient green ash tree in Hilltop, Kentucky. It would be a memorial service, not a funeral, for a funeral required a body. Two years would pass before the body was disinterred from the 5th Marine Division Cemetery in Iwo Jima’s dark sand and returned to American soil.

The Marine knelt on one knee, his fingers white-knuckled around the barrel of his M1 Garand rifle. He had been staring from the jagged sliver of the cave opening for three minutes when the guilt finally overcame the hammer strokes in his chest—as if someone of authority had righteously demanded that he account for his time—and he was obliged to reckon that it had been at least a quarter of an hour even though he could not yet make himself study particulars, save for one: the crudely tattooed MOM high on the left shoulder. But now it was time. At first, the Marine’s gaze registered large things—arms wired to a stake pounded into a crack in the rock floor, stretched backward and upward, sharp bone ends peeking whitely through skin, a torso sliced in black-blooded furrows along and below the rib cage, legs splayed at impossible angles, toeless feet—but as his gaze ascended, the small things appeared. A little toe on the left foot had escaped the cuttings. The right kneecap bore pencil-sized puncture wounds, and protruding from one was the broken stub of a rifle cleaning rod. Both upper thighs were covered with burn marks from cigarettes, like tiny animal tracks leading to the penis stub.

”Oh, Mary, mother of God…oh, Jesus Christ…no, no, no…the lousy bastarrrrds!”

He dropped his rifle, turned away, and retched a jet of partially digested C-rations against the cave wall. He heaved until his ribs hurt, then fumbled for his canteen and swished out his mouth with water. He willed himself to suck air into his lungs, waited for the process to even out, for the whirl of his brain to slow. But with the slowing came the burden, and the Marine could feel the weight of it—a cold, heavy blanket suddenly draped over his shoulders—and he knew that one day in the months ahead he must face his buddy’s mother and steel himself in her tiny living room. But that was an ocean and thousands of miles away, and he would have to survive to tell the lie, live past whatever lurked for him in the taking of this God-forsaken, black, Jap-infested rock jutting out of the Pacific. Then. Far away. If I live.

Only the now of it all mattered, emptying his brain of everything, save for dealing with the body. He would fix what was left of his friend before anyone else saw it, puked at its sight. He dropped his rifle, a consuming urgency now in control of his every movement.

He pivoted on a knee toward the corpse. The twisted wire unwound easily, releasing the body, and the Marine caught the cold weight in both arms. He lowered it, careful to cradle the head in one hand as it touched the floor of the cave, but he did not look at the face. The limbs were stiff and unwieldy, and the Marine grunted under his breath as he struggled to straighten them. He unsnapped his first aid pouch, took out the Carlisle bandage, and then placed it squarely over the black patch of pubic hair before covering it with the pressure pad of the bandage. He lifted the buttocks, wound the tails of the bandage around them, and tied them tightly. The uniform was in a clump behind the stake, the boots at the base of the wall, and the Marine retrieved the items. First, the shirt, and it was a struggle—stiff arms and knife-sharp bone ends to avoid and back-handed swipes at the sweat stinging his eyes—and then the buttons, only two to work with, and that was easy. Except for tugging out the cleaning rod stub, so were the trousers; he just bunched them around the feet, lined them up, and worked them up into position. Three trouser buttons remained, and then he fastened the belt buckle. Boots last, over the toe stubs, a peek at the little one on the left foot as it disappeared. Laced up, neat, final. He reached for his rifle and disengaged the bayonet, jerked out his shirt tail and cut a long, wide strip for the final, dreaded chore.

The Marine picked up his rifle and swung it like a baseball bat at the base of the stake, snapping it clean. He reattached the bayonet, laid the rifle aside. From outside the cave, voices began to drift toward him, unintelligible at first, but American voices, and he thought he heard his name at the end of a shouted question.

He whispered, “We ain’t got but a minute or two now…I have to look at you.”

But he could not, and he sought another task. The fingers. He could do the fingers. The Japs hadn’t chopped off the fingers. He bent the elbows, lifted the hands to the chest, laced the fingers, covered the brittle hands with his own. The voices from outside the cave grew louder, now mingled with the sound of boots on rocks.

“Jesus help me!”

Slowly, an inch at a time, his gaze crept upward. Green cloth, buttons, tangled black chest hair, the lump of Adam’s apple, the outline of jaw, crusted blood on the chin. He placed a hand over the mouth, and then stared into the eyeless, black holes of a jack-o’-lantern carved in Hell. The palm of his hand cradled the severed penis. “Godaaaaaaaaaaaammmmm!!” He pulled it from the mouth, and with great care, placed it on the strip of cloth. He unbuttoned the trousers, loosened the bandage, and then tucked the flesh of his friend back in its place. After he re-buttoned the trousers, he tied the cloth strip over the face.

The young Marine wept.

Your hands
are sun-torched and callous.
They’re the climbing evergreen
keeping

me,
your dispirited bell-flower,
intertwined in those overbearing,
umbelliferous greens
and yellows.

I’d rather be with a lilac
or a lavender.
Someone pale blue
with traces of red
who will keep the moths away.

“I know my timing is bad…” He had to shout to be heard over the blaring alarms. “…but I really like you!” A stack of papers toppled over, whipped past them and flying down the hallway, toward the hull breach.

The woman, whose arm he had just caught as she was beginning to lose her footing, looked to her rescuer. She paused before yelling back, “What?”

Unhooking the clamp around his belt, he attached it to the rail, making sure it securely bound him to the wall before pulling her in closer. The airlocks must have been malfunctioning because the pull of the vacuum was starting to lift her off of her feet.

“I know it’s stupid, but I may not get another chance to tell you!” He smiled, his rosy cheeks lent his face a boyish quality. “You have to be the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen!” An engineer’s toolbox flipped open and its contents clattered down the hall. The breach was getting bigger.

“I think my supervisor just got sucked out of C-deck!” she yelled over the repeating klaxon. “We’re probably going to die! And I don’t even know your name! Your timing is fucking awful!”

“I’ve been watching you!”—Her eyes went wide—“No, I watch everyone! Security!” He nodded his chin toward the badge on his chest. “You always seemed so nice! I just liked to see you on the screens!”

They both felt the jerk as they were sharply pulled forward an inch. She saw that he wasn’t holding onto anything anymore. The tether attached to the rail was the only thing keeping them from tumbling down the hall. Tears rippled down her face and were lost among the debris. “You’re fucking crazy! You know that, right?”

He smiled weakly.

The airlocks, still malfunctioning, began to close slowly, in stiff spasms.

“If we survive, maybe we should talk sometime!” he yelled. “Coffee?”

She glanced down at the tether, watching as the only thing keeping them alive began to rip. He was trying to pull her closer, to fight the pull of the void, but he was losing his grip. He tried to flash her a reassuring look, struggling to smile.

She watched his lips quiver—the attempt to keep her calm, to hold on—and for a moment, everything subsided: the tension, the pull of gravity, the debris flying by. She saw herself sitting in a café with this man, someplace quiet. The conversation starting to flow, the awkwardness melting, coffee cups growing lighter, bodies leaning ever closer over the table.

She closed her eyes and took his hand.

The airlocks were a little over halfway closed when the tether snapped.

Darlene looked like a 1960’s film star in her high school graduation photograph. As tradition dictated, she wore the black velvet wrap and string of pearls, but on my mother’s sister they looked unique. Positioned at the front of Grandma’s side table, Darlene’s black and white portrait stood in a silver frame, dwarfing the family pictures behind it. I knew every shadow, every curve. Darlene drew me like nectar. I wasn’t allowed to touch, so I knelt in front of the table, hands folded and stared.

Darlene was a woman of prefaces: Darling Darlene, Ditzy Darlene, Decadent Darlene, and for the past 15 years, Dead Darlene, but no one ever said that one aloud. Three when she died, I grew up on a diet of Darlene tales. For Grandma she was the daughter kept in eternal soft focus. “She was so beautiful that men, complete strangers, ran after her on the street with bouquets of roses!” Grandma would turn toward the portrait, eyes moist, one hand kneading the top of her blouse.

My mother provided the Ditzy Darlene stories, beginning when I was about eight or nine. The crazy scrapes her sister got into, the number of times my mother covered her tracks. We laughed together over Darlene’s high jinks. “She had your grandparents in her pocket her whole life. All she had to do was flash that smile.” After I turned fifteen, I noticed that the same stories began to have a sinister edge, additional details that hinted at danger, humor ebbing away in my mother’s retelling.

In February, during my final year in High School, I received my own graduation picture appointment. One Saturday before the big day, Grandma pressed an oblong jeweller’s box into my hands. “Wear these for the portrait; you have the look of her.” Poised on the stool, I angled my shoulders, arched my neck, her pearls glimmering in the spotlights. “Very retro, very glam,” the photographer said.

A few months later, Grandma surprised me with a battered suitcase. “You’re nearly eighteen; she’d have wanted you to have these.” I rubbed the tarnished brass clips. Untouched for more than a decade, they resisted then slid back with a snap. Lifting the top, stale cigarettes and a strange perfume engulfed me. My mother frowned. “Darlene’s potion: Norell and nicotine.” I filled my lungs and explored the vintage treasures: beaded cashmere twinsets, satin party dresses, a Chanel suit. As I spun before the hall mirror, Grandma joined my laughter, each piece of clothing a perfect fit.

On graduation day, I wore the Chanel suit under my gown. Grandma nodded her approval.

“Now I have a surprise for you,” I said, handing her my graduation portrait in its own silver frame. “Look, the pearls, the pose…see the chignon—just like Darlene.”

Grandma grew still. “A bit like Darling Darlene, a bit.” Walking to the side table, she stretched her arm across the line of frames, placing me at the very back.

My head exploded, full of their talking, talking. They talked and talked and sold me. They laughed, happy. I was sad and crying, had no power over this. I played, the child I was. I played, but had to go toward the life that would be mine. My head exploded, full of new talking. They talked and talked. I was not a good bride. I was not a perfect woman, because I was thirteen. My head exploded, full of their talking. They talked and talked and beat me. Filled with pain, I was a mother, but had nothing. I had forgiven, all of my life, move now toward my future, happy. My head exploded. My head exploded. I love my infant, my family. I have forgiven all—parents, husband, the government. I am happy. My baby laughs and I laugh. Life laughs, and I am happy.

The above has been reprinted with permission from awwproject.org.

Having driven to work in the same car on the same roads every morning at the same time for the 4,456th weekday in a row, the universe had had quite enough. Like a gnat at the brunt of a fly swatter I was dismissed from the living drama with a perfunctory smack.

This was an offense I took personally. For a while I seethed with righteous indignation. But slowly, softly, these feelings dissipated. Time cultivated within me a modest amount of perspective. I no longer blame the universe for any pleasure it took from my demise.

I still wonder, though, how it all began. I ruminate on the details and cosmic connections. What else is there to do, floating in the ether with who knows how long, perhaps an infinite amount of time on one’s hands?

It was sometime in mid-January. A warm, humid southern winter. I step outside with my briefcase into a post-rain mist swirling through beams of sunlight. My nostrils swell with the rich smell of damp peat. I look at the bare trees, limbs overlapping in some complicated geometrical structure, lichen glowing like neon up and down the gray trunks. It is all telling me something, I am sure of it.

I get into the car and pull out of the driveway. The tires make a slushy sound over the blacktop. Mist rolls in the light like an exotic form of matter. As the road curves a sunray reflects in the rearview mirror, and for a moment I can see only a bright yellow spot, radiating insistently.

I put my fingers to the Bluetooth. There it is. Safe and secure.

The road pulls the world backwards.

In my hand I balance a cereal bowl which for now functions as a coffee cup. At some point all of my mugs disappeared. Somewhere someone is responsible.

At stops and turns the coffee sloshes precariously up the sides. I try to drink it quickly but it has the quality of watered-down sediment.

Inside the car it is cool and humid. A doe looks up from the roadside with a keen faraway look. I watch her in the side mirror. She sees me recede, lowers her head, and disappears.

To pass the time I go over last quarter’s data set. Recalling the figures and their serene indifference. The patterns, the outliers, the random numbers, the one- and two-dimensional collations. Through these figures I watch the hay bales and eastern cedars that dot fallow farmland. The scene passes through window frames like panels on a movie reel.

I push out onto Revolutionary Rd. There is something different about this morning, I can sense it. Shifts in the magnetic field. Sinister exchanges between subatomic particles.

The sun twirls through the mist, a million tiny pixelated refractions eddying around my car in a silent hum.

I turn the corner onto Democracy Ave., passing a jogger who does a fine job of augmenting my self-loathing while I sit buried in a light blue Honda Civic, drinking coffee that’s as weak and tepid as an argument from a New York Times liberal.

Suddenly a call comes for the first time in three years to the Bluetooth.

I knew it would happen someday. I had only to wear the Bluetooth faithfully through the dearth of connections. Ideally the event would have occurred when I was downtown, walking among the lunch hour din with ample opportunity to have my professional status observed by the passing glances of others. But well. This would have to do. Anyway, I was grateful.

On the other hand it is this very noise in my ear which causes me to whip the steering wheel and careen majestically over the side ditch through a mass of kudzu and adolescent sweetgums.

It is this very noise that spells the end of Harry Linkletter.

That this is the whole story I find hard to believe. “Harry Linkletter. Died at aprox. 9:04 a.m. on January Nth, 2013, in the state of: Georgia. Cause of death: Bluetooth.”

Call it egotism, call it a conspiratorial neurosis, but surely there is a more satisfactory explanation than this meager electronic happenstance.

I think carefully back on the morning.

There was the jamming of the electric razor. The sound of tiny machinery slowing down and grinding to a halt with a wince, leaving me more anxious than usual. As the razor jams, a person somewhere, or perhaps (more likely) an automated phone calling machine becomes destined to ring me later that morning.

Perhaps this is what caused the tear in the space-time continuum, snuffing out the world that was Linkletter.

Certainly it answers the question as to why they found me in the loamy Georgia clay with grizzle on one side and a superb lack thereof on the other.

A jammed razor, anxiety, death.

Already I can see the connections.

I sit in death’s spaceless expanse and watch the flotsam collect in the gyres. Grotesque developing fetuses of the ocean. Who says it is not a living, thinking, willful thing? Capable of executing vendettas and meting out justice? This time it happens to be my own extermination.

The razor’s gears squeeze shut. The gyres turn; the flotsam condenses. The vendetta is loosed.

This is conceivable.

On the other hand there is the brewing of the coffee, made in haste, terrible. The subsequent 8:00 a.m. bowel movement, or lack thereof, during which, in a nevertheless valiant effort to succeed at this endeavor, I read the entire Business section of The Week. ‘HSBC launders billions for drug cartels, is fined a small sum.’ ‘58 of the world’s countries have a lower GDP than the value of Twitter.’ ‘Hong Kong deploys five-story rubber duck into harbor.’

Somehow I feel I am complicit in this madness.

From afar I see the fumes of industrial capitalism’s excretions, like tiny wisps from the extinguished candles on a toddler’s birthday cake.

I boil the water. The coffee brews. The steam is released. A machine in Nigeria decides to call me about a secret inheritance.

There is something here, I can feel it.

I float languidly in galactic nether regions beyond the firmament. There is something to be said for death. Things do not press in around you, as in life, where there is so much stuff. Some of it orbits earth; junk committed to eternal centripetal motion around the rock from which it was flung. A languid dance that arrests my attention like a mobile above an infant.

Even in death I cannot entirely escape stuff. There’s just too much of it.

I watch shipments being exchanged at ports. Buttons on high alert. Tensions. Error. Soon some stuff will explode and the problem of stuff will be resolved.

So I read The Week in the john under the threat of nuclear holocaust. Meanwhile a telemarketer in Ohio becomes destined to call me in order to discuss the merits of purchasing an Abtronic. This sets in motion the following: one, the terrible coffee is made. Two: its steam disperses to infect the surrounding air. Three: an algorithm places my cell phone number into a queue. Events are irrevocably put into motion. There are toxic emissions. Orbiting junk. Complicity. The coffee cools to room temperature during the interim in which I sit failing at nature’s basic activity. Shortly thereafter I careen over a tract of Piedmont, a mere subject of physics.

This is plausible.

I watch the earth, the violent meeting point of an internal and external destruction, rushing towards the scarcity of species (not, of course, of the cockroaches—the true survivors) and the crisis of humanity. The knowledge, the final appreciation, of their mere specieshood. Weeks must have past now. Months. Millennia. At some moment long since passed, I ceased feeling like Linkletter, southern beau, Software Personnel Analyst Specialist Data Manager (SPASDM) III.

I lost the sense of corporeal attachment.

I suppose death will do this.

Between the galaxies and supernovae I watch humanity (what’s left of it) scavenging and being scavenged. Animals again. The Media (a hardy organism) scrambles across miles of cratered dust bins and sleet storms, sprinting like Olympians, microphones stretched out like pole vaults, shot putting vapidity. I try to imagine what it’s like back on earth, alive and embodied. Instead I achieve a serene indifference.

There is a precipitous demise burgeoning within me. It feels like the onset of a second death. It pulls me into stratums of memory toward a nexus so dense with content that experience has no choice but to be obliterated. Somehow I sense that I have only moments to try to understand the forces that led to my mortal ruin.

Yet, despite a careful consideration of the events, I remain at a loss.

I think hard. Perhaps I had things all wrong. Perhaps the extra anxiety over a jammed electric razor heightened my senses, leaving me more attuned to the road and my surroundings. It is therefore in spite of this heightened awareness that I plunge without witnesses to life’s final destination.

Yes, there are other factors at play here. I must find them.

I pull out onto Democracy Ave. There is the lack of enthusiasm for the coffee. There is a jogger on the road, utterly innocent. A paltry level of caffeine trickles through my veins. It is for this reason that my reaction to the Bluetooth is not more exaggerated and violent than it actually was. I careen over the side ditch but spare the runner, who in another world where Linkletter makes exquisite coffee is blitzed by a mountain of tires and metal.

Okay. But who is to say that it is in fact the way I combed my hair that morning? The shirt I wore? The cereal I ate, that instigated these last events? Who is to say that, for some lengthy and intricate explanation, it was not in fact the unmoved bowels which were in reality the only potential antidote to the force of fate and laws of physics that presented themselves to me that morning, in mortal opposition?

The scenarios are innumerable.

Hair is combed. Shoes are worn. A cereal is chosen. Humanity rushes towards the brink of destruction. There are shifts in the magnetic field. There are low levels of caffeine. Physiological ramifications. I swerve into a ditch and breach the windshield.

This is possible.

But I sense that I have reached the end, the real end, and that no time remains to discern the true course of events.

As I dissolve at last into an adjectiveless negation I see a familiar object in the corner of the Pacific, rectangular and burgundy, with two shards of metal glowing intermittently in the undulating waves. For a moment, while I am suspended over the threshold, I am there on the shoreline, feeling the breeze through my shirt. The ocean is a field of dazzling points shifting in the sunlight. As I fall over the precipice I get a peculiar, human-animal feeling. The feeling I had one balmy summer day, thick in a drug-like haze, watching the lake shimmer silently in the afternoon sun. A natural grandeur, bright and insistent.

I marvel at the power it still holds over a dead: synthetic, man-made thing, a city-dweller, a SPASDM III. For whom unprocessed fare in any form was a poison like no other.

A nostalgia wells up through the ancestral line. A visceral allure, vague and compelling.

I strain to look closer at the object. It is my briefcase, pieces of torn material flapping in the water, bobbing its way to shore.

So far, it had been nothing like what Brandon had expected. But then, as the gaunt man had already told him, folklore was really quite…ignorant about demons.

“It’s getting late, Brandon,” the dark man was saying patiently. His voice was calm, yet demanding. It was as though his tone was holding back some malicious stream of demands.

Like his voice, the man’s appearance seemed more layered than would a normal person’s. He was tall, at least to fourteen-year-old Brandon Lakes. His eyes were dark amber, his skin sallow and taut though it showed age. He stood erect, confident, commanding.

“The deal is really quite simple, and there are no hidden consequences, no other strings attached,” the man continued. As he spoke, he kept his skeletal fingers in a steeple at chest level. Occasionally, he would glide the tips of his fingers across each other. “Nothing to sign, simply a friendly handshake and the exchange is complete.”

“And then…they just stop?” Brandon asked, knowing the answer he expected, but still trying to build his courage.

“No, Brandon. I have told you; myth and reality have little in common. When you commit, I do not just snap my fingers and the boys keel over dead. Can you snap your fingers and kill me an angel?”

“No,” the boy replied.

“No. Neither can I snap a finger and kill the boys who torment you. I told you, I will not lie to you and I will not over-promise. BUT, when you agree, I belong to you. And you…belong to me. I protect what is mine and you are expected to protect what will be…yours. Rest assured, the idiotic bullying will quickly cease, but such things require a sort of …finesse.” As he stressed the last word, he closed his eyes, almost as if savoring a certain secret memory. As his eyes opened and regained their contact with Brandon’s, the smallest lift at one corner of his mouth accompanied the stare.

“But for how long? I mean, how long are we…together?” He had gone through his battery of questions, but the answers made no sense to him. They went with nothing he had heard or read, and there had been one hell of a lot of Internet reading on dealing with demons. Demons didn’t wear simple, black, collarless suits. They didn’t speak honestly either. But then, this man had once said that even Brandon’s name for him was ignorant; he was not a “demon.”

“Until someone or something else wants to buy you, Brandon. Or wishes to buy me. This is all very clear; everyone belongs to someone. We have all been bought. And…we have all been sold. The only change is who owns you…People are much like the lonely dollar in your pocket. Do you own it? Of course you do. And yet, does it not also own you? Are you not just as much a slave to it as it is to you?”

“But, still, this isn’t like, for my soul?” Brandon’s voice raised more than he wanted. He was young, obviously, but it seemed very important to try to keep a semblance of strength in front of this thing that was now going to “own” him.

“What the hell good is your soul to me? Can your ghost attain things I wish to possess?” The dark man was insistent that Brandon understand this point. “Other than moaning and pushing open an occasional door, your soul is worthless to any being in the flesh. You rely too much on old books written by old men who know nothing about the unclean. Often, they know nothing about their own God, but I digress.

“On the topic of your soul, keep the thing. What I desire are services rendered for services given. That is all,” the man replied opening his fingers as if showing that there was nothing further hidden in his remark.

“When…when does the deal end?” Brandon asked more quietly now.

“Again, when you or I decide. When one of us agrees to sell the other. Nothing is free, boy. Believe that. All things are bought. All things are sold. We are no different.”

The unembellished honesty that the dark man spoke with was nearly convincing enough on its own. He didn’t try to twist Brandon’s mind into logic pitfalls or tell him fanciful lies. True honesty was not something Brandon had experienced much in his life.

They had met for three nights now. Each time the demon listened to Brandon’s problems, his reasons for summoning him. Each night the man offered his hand and his services, but he knew negotiations took time. He had done these things countless times before and would continue to countless times hereafter.

For the boy, however, an offer of friendship was wholly unusual. Brandon had been bullied for months at his new high school and with an incompetent fool of an old woman as his Principal, nothing would ever be done about the problem. Nothing ever was any more in public education. This too had been seen in a thousand institutions throughout history, mostly a precursor to epic failure of that institution, and the signs never lied.

But history lessons weren’t something Brandon seemed interested in, so the dark man kept his memories private.

“And there was one other thing,” Brandon began. “There’s a girl.”

“There always is.”

“No, she’s really cool. Her name is Amanda. She’s in my fourth hour science class. Most kids think she’s kind of weird, but I really like her. She’s never even looked at me, but I want her to. But not be forced, ya know, not like that. I just want her to notice me and maybe…I mean, just see that maybe I’m someone she’s been looking for. I just think we might have a connection.”

“Absolutely. Again, Brandon, finesse. I wouldn’t force her into anything. We do not work that way. We simply…guide ideas that previously existed, even if the thinker has not recognized those thoughts themselves. I would simply….suggest,” the man concluded by offering Brandon his hand for the fourth time. As always, the boy studied it as if gauging the value of a potent drug, certainly destructive, but possibly divine.

The boy raised his own hand and took the man’s, giving a solid handshake and meeting the other’s eyes.

“Then the sale is complete and I will uphold my end of this bargain beginning immediately. Now, if you will pardon my abruptness, there is work to do. You know how to call to me, so please do not hesitate,” the man said as he released Brandon’s hand and began to step backward. The departure of the man had become something that Brandon was mesmerized by. No matter how many times he might see it, the novelty of the act could last forever.

“Wait,” Brandon called, halting the man’s movements.

“Yes?”

“I don’t even know your name.”

The man gave a light, humorless laugh, then smiled wryly at the boy before replying. “I have been called hundreds of names. But the one I prefer is Alba.”

At this, Alba stepped slowly backward into a corner shadow of the bedroom and melted into the blackness.

The suicide of two senior boys was a significant shock to the high school they had attended. Neither boy was exceptionally popular, but they were athletes, they were fairly well-liked, and no one had noticed any signs of depression. Nor had any one previously noticed anything other than friendship between the two. Nevertheless, here it was: a double suicide of two boys whose letters reflected their self-hatred at being gay.

Brandon did not respond like he had thought he might. Twenty-four hours ago he relished the thought of the pair of them being justly humiliated, or possibly harmed. Now, he just felt hollow. Maybe it was coincidence that on the night he had made his devilish deal his tormentors would decide to end their own sufferings. But maybe something had been…suggested to them. Brandon thought this might well be true and considered the personal cost of asking Alba for confirmation.

The day dragged along for Brandon. People, especially girls, seemed distraught. The guys had started making quiet jokes about the situation. Brandon would have thought they were funny too, had his stomach not been hollowed out the whole day. He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing to throw up, so he quietly suffered through his classes where teachers tried to address the issue while skirting the issue directly.

“You said you couldn’t just snap your fingers and kill them!” Brandon was furiously whispering to Alba that night in his room. For the first time, Alba had taken a seat in the boy’s desk chair. He was calm and appeared not at all interested in the topic of conversation, but humored the boy anyway.

“And I did not. I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t just snap my fingers. Really, boy, you act upset that you got exactly what you wanted. And rather quickly, I admit. Often I am still surprised by how simple teenagers are. So willing to kill. So willing to die. Full of life and potential, yet they toss it aside more carelessly than an octogenarian struggling with impending death. Odd, really, don’t you think?” Alba offered.

“I don’t even know what that word means,” Brandon answered both embarrassed and offended.

“Of course. This conversation bores me, Brandon. It really does. So if you have nothing better to discuss, I may as well be off. I have multiple engagements tonight,” Alba said as he rose from his seat.

“Wait,” Brandon started, but he was unsure how to continue. He wanted an answer or a solid rejection to his question, but battled with how to ask properly. “Can you see the future?” he finally questioned shamefully.

Alba closed his eyes, lifted his head up, and breathed deeply once before replying.

“Some times. Some things. But there is nothing you should ask about that. It is never beneficial.”

“What about me?” Brandon persisted. He had not suddenly become interested in his mortality; the concept of his life and death had always been on his mind. But now there was an urgency, having realized in the last twenty-four hours that he was immensely susceptible to suggestion.

“What about you?” Alba replied, obviously withholding some frustration at the demand.

“When do I have to die? How does it happen?” Brandon nearly whispered.

“Brandon…” Alba tried to dissuade the boy, but Brandon was insistent.

“I have to know! If you can see it, you have to tell me. You’re mine, remember?”

Again, Alba breathed in, held his breath and exhaled before speaking. Behind his closed eyelids, Brandon could see his eyes twitching back and forth rapidly as though gathering in a wealth of views.

“As you wish. I cannot tell you when it happens. That is beyond my scope. But as for how, let’s just say that you will have an experience that few have before they perish.”

“What…what experience?” Brandon asked feeling as though he were suffocating a bit.

“Brandon, you will momentarily know exactly what it feels like…to have an air-conditioned brain,” Alba finished without any humor at his statement. “Now, before I go and before you speak again, dress warmly tomorrow. I need your services after school.” And with that, Alba again shrank into the shadows of the room and simply dissolved into them.

Brandon could not find sleep until only a few hours before he had to wake up the next morning. When he finally did trudge across the room to turn off his alarm, his head ached horribly, he was cold, and his eyes were so puffy from fatigue that he had trouble keeping them open, much less focused.

Unlike the previous school day, the hours zipped by, due mostly to Brandon’s fears of whatever task he must perform that afternoon. If it was to be a fair exchange for what Alba had done for him, the inner consequences were gruesome.

Alba was nowhere to be seen after Brandon was done with school for the day. He expected the man to be waiting for him at home, but there was no visitor sitting in the desk chair as Brandon had been picturing and fearing on his walk home.

After forcing down two cheese enchiladas, Brandon excused himself from dinner with his mother. She had concluded that his new melancholy was due to the suicides at his school—despite the boys’ treatment of her own son—so she dismissed the depression she had noticed and let her son mourn alone. It was probably what boys did. She wasn’t completely sure because she had never understood men. Not her long-gone husband. Not her son.

Alba was waiting for Brandon this time when he retreated to his room. He stood in the shadows again as though he had also just entered the room. His image was the same as it had always been, but this time he held an elongated box wrapped in simple brown paper.

“You will want your jacket, Brandon,” he said flatly when the boy had closed the door.

“It’s not cold out,” he replied just as flatly.

Alba exhaled a single laugh and continued. “No, here it is a calm sixty degrees. Oklahoma has mild fall evenings. Still reeks, but the temperature is mild. Not everywhere else is as comfortable. Now, before we begin, allow me to give direction of what I require from you.”

Brandon was right about one thing: It was gruesome.

Hours later he sat on his bed cradling his throbbing head in his hands. Immediately after being told what he was to do, Alba had slammed his palm against Brandon’s face and as Brandon tried to take in a breath, he crumpled over in extreme pain. Breathing had become an agony and he fell to the ground gasping. Within seconds his insides were cramping, wanting to explode and, had he known what the experience was, he may have recognized the feeling of severe decompression.

Brandon had been moved instantly from small town Perry, Oklahoma to Summit County, Colorado. It was a jump in altitude of more than a thousand feet and the effect on his body was murderous.

For nearly an hour Brandon cringed, ached and hurt, writhing alone beneath the cold aluminum of the football stadium bleachers. When the symptoms subsided somewhat, he was able to gather the contents from the box, right himself, and begin searching.

It wasn’t long.

Almost as if on cue, a boy with long, dark hair was walking across the field towards the parking lot. Technically, he should not have crossed the field because students were always told to go around, but to him, rules had ceased to matter.

Michael Steimer had a charmed existence. He was loved by everyone in his school, and indeed in his entire community. He was a sports standout, recently granted admission to Dartmouth, enjoyed unexplainable wealth of late, and had grown into quite the heartthrob to many girls over the last year. Girls, most unfortunately, were the reason he had stayed late at Spring Play practice, which he was now leaving. Truly, he was living a perfect life.

Such thoughts were likely going through his mind milliseconds before the long, cylindrical blade of the pig-sticker was plunged through it as well.

Brandon had been told what to do, how to do it, and to act quickly. He hadn’t even been heard trotting up behind Michael since the iPod in his ears was rhythmically popping out Pitbull. Almost effortlessly, the knife found its mark at the base of Michael’s skull and plunged into his brain stem, then his brain. His body fell instantly, dead before it could even settle in the grass.

Brandon had a terrible moment to stare at what he had done before the pain of altitude change struck him again. He clenched the knife hard and luckily did not fall on it when he tumbled to the floor of his bedroom. He managed to hide the knife under his bed, flinging bits of blood and brain as it spun into the recesses beneath.

For hours after, Brandon wept and vomited.

After a few months, Brandon had begun to grow out of his strange stupor. He was starting to like school again and had not seen Alba since the night he had held up his side of the bargain. Certainly he had not summoned the demon either. The cost of asking for anything from that creature was far too great.

Of late, school had improved significantly for Brandon. He was doing better in his work, had gained a few friends, and, on a Thursday during Science, Amanda had looked his way, as if for the first time. She cocked her head the tiniest bit and smiled at him through a lopsided curtain of black hair. He smiled back and had even exchanged a few highly energetic words with her as they left the classroom. It had been a perfect few moments.

The following day Amanda spoke casually to him when she asked what he was doing after school.

“Just going home, I guess. My mom is out for the weekend at my grandparents’, so that’s about it,” Brandon had answered, trying to hold back the hopefulness he felt in his voice.

“So,” she crooned at him, “would you want to come over to my place for a while? My dad isn’t going to be back ‘til late. We could watch a movie or something.” Amanda was perfectly beautiful to Brandon at that moment. Amanda’s appearance and her occasional sharp comments didn’t earn her many friends, but that bit of almost arrogant wit was overpowering to Brandon. He accepted the offer instantly, beginning to fantasize about what they would talk about. About what they might do…

It was nearly six o’clock and the afternoon had gone nicely, if not as physically as Brandon had hoped. There had been some laughs, some near-touches, and some conversation.

The conversation had been the most interesting—and sometimes the most frightening—part of the day. They had discussed school, of course, other students, teachers, but shockingly, Amanda had briefly spoken about a subject that hit Brandon in the pit of his stomach, leaving him almost speechless.

“Sometimes I just want to kill somebody,” Amanda had said in a passing tone. Brandon had not answered. Instantly he saw gray, gelatinous bits of brain tissue on dry grass. He heard the wet spurt as a blade was pulled from a boy’s skull. He wanted to vomit again and felt immediate cold all over his body. Amanda had noticed his silence and thought that maybe she had said a bit too much. It wasn’t the first time a guy had thought she was weird, but it wouldn’t last for long, she had been previously assured of that.

“Don’t freak out on me. I’m not crazy or anything,” she explained more cautiously.

“No,” Brandon recovered, “I didn’t think that. I mean, I’ve thought about it lots of times before.” And that was true. He had thought about it constantly for months. That and the dark man that had been curiously absent since his request to kill another boy.

“Sometimes I just fantasize about it, ya know. Just killing someone and never getting caught. Did you ever think about doing that?” She asked interestedly.

“Yeah,” Brandon replied with flat emotion. “I don’t think it’s all you would think it would be.” As he spoke, the nights of the dark man flashed back in his mind. All he had done. All he had said. The damned concept of ownership.

“Maybe,” Amanda replied thoughtfully, “there would have to be certain arrangements made, though. Too easy to get caught otherwise. But anyway, let’s forget it. It’s morbid.”

“It is morbid,” Brandon said, glad for the respite. “So anyway, I should go soon.”

“Wait,” Amanda asked more desperately. “Do you…do you wanna see something I bought a little while ago?”

“Um…ok,” Brandon questioned more than answered.

“Just come this way. It’s in my dad’s room.” Amanda led Brandon down a long hall to a dark bedroom with a laminate floor. She walked to an elongated green steel box with “Remington” labeled on the front. A gun cabinet.

Amanda reached into the cabinet wordlessly and, even as she drew the weapon from the case, the meaning of her actions was becoming clear in Brandon’s mind through Alba’s voice:

We’ve all been bought.

We’ve all been sold.

“Oh my God…” Brandon choked out. He saw a slight cock of her head, a small grin. He felt an odd, cool breeze.

He shook hands a very loose way, folding himself in a chair to leave me standing, awkward in my own office, my hand raised as if in blessing. At the time, I took that merely for busy rudeness.

“I’ve seen your brochure.” He split open his plasticy document wallet. He meant the museum guide—the easy-read glossy in over-bright colors. Not the full catalogue, which nobody knows exists.

I moved my chair. He wasn’t a large man, but the fact of him took space. “May I ask, Mr…?” I asked.

Shuffling pages, he looked up, very directly, pushing his name ahead of him. “David Grace.”

“May I ask, Mr. Grace, what this is about?”

He folded the guidebook double, compressing its spine. “This.”

The Emperor: a solitary magnificence. Even today, our statue of Emperor Hadrian radiates majesty and awe. At least, so I think. “One of our proudest treasures,” I replied. I meant it in a wholly factual way. “Excavated near the site of the Roman fort at Reculver in Kent, by Roger Carstairs in 1931.”

“Roger Carstairs?” The young man sliced open a cheap-looking notepad with a pen that might have been picked up from a bank counter.

“The statue is unique,” I tried again, “Remarkably well-preserved, its head and torso intact. It is also, remarkably, a personal likeness.”

“Wouldn’t a statue be a likeness?”

“Not at all.” I stretched back, seeking expansion. Lately, I’d found my office— indeed, all space around me—increasingly cramped. “It was usual among Roman emperors for a template portrait bust to be distributed to the provinces, to be copied by local craftsmen for further distribution. That enabled a consistent likeness of the emperor’s image to be transmitted throughout the empire. We have a selection of these pattern pieces in the collection. But the statue is a study of Hadrian himself. The man, not the managerial image. You’ll notice, he’s posed in Greek-style dress…”

“Roger Carstairs.” His voice overrode me—harsh, almost metallic. “I don’t know the name. Was he someone?”

I’d grown too tired, too cramped for space, to bother with PR. “Roger Carstairs was treated appallingly. I don’t mind saying it. He’d been shell-shocked in the Great War—traumatized, or post-traumatized, whatever it is now. London in the 20s was increasingly frenetic, and Carstairs found noise and bustle very hard. He was really only at peace on excavations. One of the old school, a Victorian, when excavation was a business for gentlemen—”

“What happened to him?”

Not only did the young man not wait for me to stop speaking, he didn’t even look up from his notes when he interrupted. That fuelled my nagging annoyance of not knowing, really, who he was. “As I’m sure you know, there are plentiful Germanic clues to the decline of Roman power. After he found the statue, Carstairs became something of a celebrity—attention he hated. The Trustees posed him as their favored son, and as anyone who’s held that unfortunate position knows, it creates intense pressure.” I could sense him stir to interject, so I pitched up to a lecture-hall bellow. “At that time the museum was getting cozy with several German institutions, to agree acquisitions and broker exchanges. Museums trade pieces to bolster their prestige. With crass venality, the Trustees sent this poor, shell-shocked man to Germany. To do deals. Carstairs had no skill for that kind of thing, but was too fatigued and well-mannered to say so.”

“The trip wasn’t a success?” If any irony lay in his voice, only a spectrograph could find it.

“You don’t need me to tell you about Germany in the 1930s. Carstairs found that all the dull, donnish Meisters of the institutes had been supplanted by lively young men in uniform. It was their braying about Teutonic triumph that provoked his rebellion, though—like all rebellions—it did its instigator no good. Carstairs was educated, a historian—he could see through these odious people. He told them the museum would not transform itself into a temple of Wotan, simply for a sniff of Caesar’s cast-offs. Years later, the younger fellows used to joke that the Luftwaffe bombed the place every night because of Carstairs.” I paused, allowing him in.

He reviewed his pages a moment, flicking forward and back. When he looked up, his irritation was plain. “Yes. So, what happened to him?”

Mr. Grace wore suit and tie. Grey suit. Plain tie. I struggled for a second. When had students stopped wearing ties? The mid-60s? The late-50s? How hard in the present to spot the enduring changes. “Carstairs’ entirely correct and principled stand fell like lead with the Trustees. He retired—was retired—to the Sussex Downs, to potter in the chalk. Wrote a couple of small monographs, just local interest. Never married, of course. Left no memoirs. But we have the statue.”

When my secretary, bless her, brought Mr. Grace’s email to my attention, I thought he must be an amateur enthusiast, some crumbling history master with butter stains on his trousers. But not so. Young-middle-aged, his nylon suit and—I guessed—washable tie, put me in mind of a bankruptcy accountant. He took constant, rapid notes, the random flicks and jags of his pen suggestive of shorthand, the method of the efficient and secretive. He talked when it suited, and let silence drift, reviewing his papers with dyslexic intensity.

“Reculver?” he said suddenly. “The object was found at Reculver?”

“Regulbium. Important, in Hadrian’s day. Now mostly in the sea. The fleets would land at Rutupiae—Richborough, near Sandwich. Reculver was a look-out point and light, to guide them in.” Only afterwards, I noted the airy way he said the object, as though a half-ton of marble could be smoke.

“In what context did he find it, if this place was merely a lighthouse?”

A perceptive question that Carstairs never had leisure to answer. I gave the standard line. “It’s believed the statue was in transit, possibly to London. The fact that it’s not a pattern-piece which suggests it may have been a gift to some influential, some native notable, maybe, who fell from favor before it was delivered. Local politics was very fluid. Emperors shrug off alliances like old robes.”

He glanced from his scribbling—more industrious scribbling than one sees in lectures. “So why wasn’t it given to someone else?”

One dreads the simple questions. Indeed, if I’d commissioned an exquisite likeness of myself in solid rock, I’d want someone to be grateful of it. “Our best guess is that it was stored and forgotten.” I sounded unconvinced. “Remember, the Roman Empire was a huge operation—logistically, administratively; and the Romans had significant public order problems in Britain. One reason Hadrian himself paid a visit. In the context of armies and stores on the move all the time, it’s possible that a statue might be left off the inventory.”

“Possible,” he repeated, on his feet before I finished. “Of course, I must see the object.”

“The museum is open…”

“Yes. The website is comprehensive. But it’s important to achieve clarity. I’ll make an appointment for pictures.”

It wasn’t my business. The museum’s commercial arm employs a squad of unfriendly young women whose task is Brand Protection, which I understand as licensing our treasures for tea towels. “Can I ask your interest in the statue Mr…?” I floundered, forgetting his name.

“Necessary. My interest is necessary.”

There’s a bureaucracy to studying the collection. Online questionnaires, declarations of intent. In the nineteenth, a gentleman could walk in and borrow a piece if he wanted. Now we have forms, disclaimers and charges, to discourage focused study and penalize those who persist. Intrigued how the nylon-suited man would get his appointment for pictures, I was soon to find out.

Interrupting another attempt to write my valediction, my secretary told me she’d committed Friday afternoon to Copyright, most emphatic of Brand Protection’s many teams. I told her to find what Copyright wanted, and she returned with the news that I’d booked the meeting. As I avoid initiating anything these days, that seemed unlikely. Instructed to dig further, she discovered that someone had emailed Copyright, claiming my say-so. David Grace.

He was unapologetic; indeed, seemed to find it strange I should care for my time or privacy. Not argumentative, he simply elided discussion. He was accompanied by a morose young woman with a sketchpad and a box of pencils. Despite his expensive-looking camera, he asserted that drawings had inestimable value, enabling one to see as others saw. Copyright types hung about, perplexed at the exhibits, not impressed as, dutifully, I still am by the Emperor. Some of us get a blurry snap in a journal, a portrait on the odd, fading flyleaf. But it’s a challenge to imagine oneself life-size in marble, sent hundreds of miles on dubious seas as a gift, proudly cherished by the recipient as indicative of their own status. A politician as monumental as Caesar Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus himself. A strong, solid man; powerfully-built, purposeful: in many ways the pattern of an emperor. Unlike his contemporaries, the statue depicted him with a beard, a Hellenism that would be the required mark of strength for generations of kings to come. Indeed, in portrait busts, his soldierly appearance often seems more modern, for want of a better word, than his aquiline successors. He looks precisely what he was: an almighty man of action. In a space emptied of visitors, I felt ritually trivial at the Emperor’s feet. I hoped Mr. Grace did too.

He used every second of the two hours allowed him. When not scrutinizing pictures on his laptop, he fiddled with the kind of electronic measuring device estate agents use, pinging beams of laser light at the Emperor’s vast frame, entering myriad values in a spreadsheet. His companion never spoke, but with laborious diligence sketched the Emperor, again and again. Sometimes, Mr. Grace took an interest in her work. They shared what appeared to be a gross telepathy which—disgusted—enthralled me. It seemed natural, and not unexpected, when he said, “I will need to sample the object.”

We gawped, unsure of what he was saying.

His face betrayed a jaundiced annoyance that, on reflection, was never that hidden. “The object.” He pointed, as though we’d blocked it, elephantine, from sight. “I must undertake physical tests.”

I couldn’t expect the others to grasp this extraordinary violence. Samples had been taken, for the blunt, destructive chemical testing of Carstairs’ era. The few slivers left in the materials store were probably useless. I offered them anyway, suspecting he would know that.

“I need something clean. In situ.” No one had authority to give what he asked. But an imperium sat on Mr. Grace’s shoulder: for all his clerkish looks, his unconcern for consequence was Roman. I watched in bedazzled horror. The Emperor stood, passive, as the clerk snipped holes in his robe. Mr. Grace gave me a colonial look. “I shall make my report.”

David Grace is not an exotic name. The search found too many. I scrolled results with the vague, miasmic anger that’s a function of online research, till I happened on a post, on an art history forum, asking if anyone knew a David Grace interested in Renaissance paint components. The post was two years old and had no replies. A couple of days later, an email from a professor of conservatorship in Padua—sweetly apologetic for her English—told how a David Grace came to see her unannounced, very keen to examine paintings her institution had loaned from the Vatican. This Grace was especially diligent on the chemical composition of paint, given the presence of materials not used today. She agreed to let him view the works and—fretful of their delicate state—became alarmed at the “proximity of his attentions.” She wasn’t sure, but thought he might have loosened specks of pigment. “I could not,” she added plaintively, “be always watchful of him.” Further emails to the Paduan professor brought silence. As did messages to Mr. Grace.

Traces and their absence much in mind, I stayed late, my secretary thinking I had exam questions to work on. A self-conscious walk through the halls, carting her potted cactus, but there was no closer nor more defensible source of dirt. The galleries after hours aren’t a place to linger: lit just enough for the cameras, the clatter of visitors gone, the halls have an enmity of stillness insinuating, through the porous present, the hatreds of the past. Most things we collect have tragedy inherent: the grave goods of pharaohs from pyramids built on slaves; vast Assyrian lions tearing glory from desert tribes; delicate Chinese armor cleansed of tortured barbarian blood; African totems of bone magic, crated back by loud-voiced men in khaki. Without conquest and despoliation there’d be almost nothing at all and—in long retirement. The objects brood on unresolved history.

I switched off the Emperor’s trip wire; found the whited scalpel scar no one noticed in the folds of Hadrian’s robes, but it shouted through my fingers, stark as a quarried hill. Once known—and it would be known—the conservators would have no trouble to date the damage. I scraped dusty earth from the potted cactus, smeared it on the cut, trying to blend alien soil with millennial ageing. I worked along old, cold ridges and folds, until Mr. Grace’s excavation resembled more the carelessness of antiquity.

I worked an hour and more, till my hands, like the Emperor’s, were dulled, anonymous. Perhaps in his world of intrigue he might have seen the joke. Back in my office, exhausted, I remembered the cameras. Long past when I should’ve been home, I chanced the lock of the security room like a car thief. Through the glass, the bank of monitors glowed dark with bubbled views of walls and car parks; with split-screen bird’s-eye quadrants showing friezes, sarcophagi, cabinets of sterile things; a panopticon of days. A sign taped to the door gave the duty officer’s mobile number. He’d be patrolling the labyrinth: an intriguing job, if you’d shoulders for silence, a mind to endure the menace of history. I hadn’t the will to call him, to lie my way into the office; distract him, find and take the discs. Even to think how I might do all that was too much. Defeated, weary, I slumped to my room, telling myself they didn’t always check the discs before erasure. That if there’d been no visitor incidents I was safe.

The phone rang loud, echoing too late at night. I stumbled to my desk, fatigue conjuring thoughts of detectives, pointedly calling me “Sir.”

“Oh, I’m glad I caught you.” Mr. Grace made it sound as if it were ten o’clock on a Monday morning. “I thought you’d appreciate a heads-up.”

There were men in Rome like Mr. Grace: of driven, viral existence, their interest not the harmony of the polis, nor expansion of trade, nor glory in art or war. Not even in their own worth, or not directly. Men who would have made profound servants of the state, but with energy antithetic to servitude. Somewhere, in the texts of form and heresy, was the like of Mr. Grace. Caesars would order deserts to be made paradise, to occupy such men.

“I’ve had some interesting preliminaries from the lab.” He skated smoothly across my silence, expecting no better reaction. “You’ll want to know my emerging thinking.” His tone recognizable as the attrition of research, the wearing-away of cherished ideas with each glassy grain of discovery. “The object has much to commend it,” he said, generous to whatever lost master distilled an emperor from raw stone. “The workmanship is especially fine; the materials top class.” The insurance assessors—their insoluble brief: to value the collection—use much the same slang.

“It is the premier focus of that branch of our legacy,” I replied, my stuttering translation of the website’s shouty vulgate.

“Precisely. Of course. Which is why we should consider how it was mislaid in the first place. It has,” he eclipsed my silence again, “always been regarded as a remarkable survival. Tell me: have you visited Reculver?”

When I didn’t reply, he went on:

“Interesting place. Very little there: the sea has seen to that. Local sources confirm a light was kept through to the 1700s, if not later. But the cliffs have long collapsed, taking the settlement with them. And the archaeology, of course.”

My neck twitched.

“People I spoke to confirmed Richborough as far more strategically important. Fleets from the German coast would touch base there before proceeding to Southampton. What I was struggling with…”

My arm tingled.

“…is why so…material an object was off-loaded to Reculver. Rather than simply taken on from docking to destination.”

“Perhaps there was…” I tried.

“Some disturbance? Possibly. I agree conditions were volatile. But what were they doing, shifting the thing around? That’s the key to the matter.”

“And these matters will be addressed in your report?”

“Oh yes.”

I met him in a hotel lounge, in the stucco side streets symptomatic of Russell Square. I thought that heavy-coated doormen, piled carpet, and a room of buttoned armchairs, with fondant fancies and iced sombreros on silver service, would present an environment so doomily stolid as to inhibit his ardor. But men like Mr. Grace generate their own oxygen.

He accepted tea, which he didn’t drink, and refused all confections. Foolishly, I’d chosen glace fruit tart, which his bewilderingly puritan stare prevented me from eating. It hardened on its doily, a congealed decadence.

He handed me some neatly-bound papers. Flicking through it brought bleary suggestions of diagrams, maps, what looked like spectrographic analysis.

“You can study the detail later. You’ll want my recommendations.”

“Is there a summary…?”

“You can study the detail. I don’t intend to talk through the report.”

People might ask why training, why critical rigor, allowed it to happen. I’d say we act absent of certainty; the more we uncover, the less we know. All anyone needs of antiquity is four or five large ideas. But, approach the present and nothing is clear.

I listened, and he talked. “The object has much to commend it. Characteristics that, in context, are remarkable. The treatment of the subject combines gravity and fluidity, which—if one supposes aesthetics for a motive—is impressive. It has the benefit of proportion. What it does not have is the benefit of integrity.”

That twitch to my neck erupted in icy shivers of sweat. The discreetly attentive waiters; the clipped, county ladies taking tea with old girlfriends in Town; the tweedy gents with diaries blank till the sherry hour; the finery, fondants and faux-colonial niceties hung frozen, in the quiet terror Mr. Grace unleashed.

His gaze never wavered. “I do not mean to say that the statue isn’t genuine. It is. A genuine…something. But it is not the Emperor Hadrian. Or rather, it does not quite manage to be.”

“Are you saying it’s a forgery?” The word spread between us, obscene. “I’m sure our conservators…”

“Indeed. Quite. Your institution’s conservators would not miss anything so blatant. I have to say”—he gestured airily: a rare glimpse of affectation—“I’ve heard that said before. Many times. It’s often the case, people like the story they like. I have considered whether the object might be inauthentic: the test results do suggest discrepancies. But we are not dealing with one of those Victorian fabrications put around for someone’s amusement. Your statue is far more interesting.”

“What you need to remember…” I began with my preferred way in, said a little too loudly, “…is the statue has been subject to numerous tests; most recently, being x-rayed in the late 1990s.” Suddenly self-conscious, I dropped from lecture mode. “It isn’t feasible.”

Nothing in his tone suggested vindication. He had no need. “I understand,” he assured me, “that others have given opinions. Although, of course, techniques refine all the time. As to what is feasible, the key question for my method is what is tested for. Works considered integral for many hundreds of years—works which have been subject to scrutiny every bit as rigorous as that applied to your statue—reveal discrepancies through disaggregated testing of their critical factors. I am not talking about forgeries. These items are genuine, but to a different measure.”

“You said…”

“I said your object lacked integrity. Would you like to explore the meaning of that term? The test is the point at which you locate proof. A virgin female who loses her virginity loses integrity, on one measure. But on the measure of being female is still echt.”

My critical faculties bristled to take his unreason apart. But there were more pressing concerns. “In terms of provenance…”

“It may assist if I set out my conclusions in relation to Professor Carstairs.”

We were talking over each other, heedless of audience. “The Trustees will want…”

“I shall meet the Trustees if necessary.”

That ghastliness stopped me cold. The Trustees were placemen, sponsors, useless ex-professors. He’d terrify them. I reached for my cold tea but couldn’t lift the cup. “What about Carstairs?”

“You provided some interesting insights. His unsuitedness to public life, his privileging of narrow expertise above wider achievement. You mentioned his wartime trauma. That is a factor, plainly. I would also add his father’s indifference and eventual disappearance. He seems to have lived his life in pursuit of his father.”

“You’ve done your research.”

“Of course. How do you reach your conclusions?”

I closed my eyes, his voice the only sound.

“I would call Carstairs a nervous man, reaching for mastery. His choice of career, for instance: consider the extraordinary influence archaeologists deploy. The right find, at the right time, can change perceptions utterly. If I dug a bone, or found a coin, or unearthed a pattern of post holes, that instigated a chain of events, that led one day to general acceptance that Britain was colonized by Phoenicians not Romans, I’d not only rewrite the history books, I would change the past. There are many drivers to seeking to do this. Truth-and-knowledge-and-the-greater-good is possible, but unlikely. Professional and personal aggrandizement ranks very high. There are other drivers between these extremes, some venal, some with pathos. Perhaps as pathetic as a sickly boy’s wish for a father’s love.”

I rubbed my face, the skin waxy and inelastic. “What’s wrong with the Emperor?”

“Nothing.” His boyish look taunted me. “He sleeps where he was taken from the Gardens of Domitia. You should rid yourself of these thoughts that there’s anything wrong with Hadrian Augustus. It is your object that’s discrepant.”

“What is it? Tell me what’s wrong with the statue?”

Ladies chancing a second apricot parfait glanced across gold-rimmed Wedgwood, whispering, tilting their heads towards two men by the fire: one, young and poised; the other, old, collapsed, seemingly engaged in business not unlike blackmail.

“Based on evidence from other cases, I thought at first your difficulty was a cultural fraud—a lie told inadvertently, not for pecuniary gain. But the more I discovered of Carstairs, the firmer I felt that, for instance, to commission a simple forgery was more than he could stomach. Reculver’s a singular place, I can tell you. Any purpose it might once have had is long submerged in grey sea. So I considered: perhaps it was forgery. Not of artifact, but of place.”

“Talk sense for heaven’s sake.”

“Please: you’ll alarm these people. Who would go to Reculver? You said you’ve never been there. I’d stake my fee in this matter your Trustees never have. It’s nowhere near the railway. It’s nowhere near anywhere. You’ll see from my taxi receipts. And the locals seem not much moved on from your Emperor’s day. Carstairs found objects all right. Of course he did. But at Richborough. The only place he would find them. You were less than truthful when first we spoke.”

“Me?”

“Please: there’s no need. I mean by omission: the curse of academics. You quote a line you approve of, but omit the author’s sub-clause that negates the meaning you choose. Have you never done that?”

“Well, of course one is selective…”

“Selection: exactly. My notes show the clear impression, I could only have gained from you, that Carstairs was packed off direct from wearying Kent to the excitements of the Reich. But he wasn’t, was he? Itineraries for excavations are in your institution’s own archive. As are requests for leave of absence. Carstairs may be long dead, but his landlady’s daughter—though cruelly deprived of most of her functions—has a remarkably sprightly long-term memory. He was often at Reculver, after his finds. Finds. In the plural. At Richborough.”

I asked what Carstairs was doing at Reculver, as Mr. Grace wanted me to.

“Creating, then erasing, an ersatz excavation. Close enough to the cliff edge to succumb in a single winter.”

“But Carstairs found it, surely? Just got the site wrong.”

“Got the site wrong? He was a fucking archaeologist.”

A teaspoon clattered into the silence.

“I said, a moment ago: finds, objects. You really should pay attention. And sit straight. The torso is probably Greek. That your keepers think it Roman work says more about them than I ever might. I can only guess they have never properly interrogated the residual tool marks, nor sequenced the laterals in the robes, in relation to the grain of the marble. Of course your x-rays wouldn’t show this: x-rays understand less of the questions to ask than your keepers. And those sheep-dip tests for provenance you tried palming on me were plain wrong. Does your institution believe everything told to it in the 1930s?”

“I…”

“That wasn’t a question. Really, you’re too silly. When he returned from the wilds with this thing, everyone wanted to believe it. Look around the museums of Italy, Spain, Greece: full of the most uplifting reminders of golden ages past. We’d won the war and what did we have? Assorted luggage stolen from round the world, and from our own country: some sticks and stones and woad-stained bones. We’d won the war but we were eroding, collapsing into the sea. We had to assert our supremacy over history, just as Carstairs had to assert his expertise over bureaucracy, and his adult self over his pitiful childhood.”

He sat back, tapping his fingers lightly on the leather.

I looked up, some local downpour interfering with my eyes. “You said… the torso…?”

“The head might be Hadrian. I really don’t know. Emperors are gods. The Emperor says: ‘This is my face’, so that is his face. To think otherwise is both treason and blasphemy. Your object has a bearded head, of solid proportions reassuringly imperial, and with slight indentations to the earlobes. We believe that Hadrian had these lobal creases and your object has them. To me, that hardly seems basis to say the two are the same.”

“So the statue is a forgery?”

He slapped the arm of the chair. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not the issue. The head—which has been reworked, as a child of ten could tell your curators—is most likely Roman. It is a genuine something. The torso, from a different age and quarry, is likewise a genuine something. Together, they make an illusion of something else. A mirage that you want to make king. Then make the illusion your king. It doesn’t matter. But for goodness sake, give the man some credit: Carstairs took extraordinary care with his masterpiece. Cunningly managed crazing around the neck and jawline beautifully hides the restorer’s art. My associate’s drawings revealed that to me. X-rays would merely show an expected pattern of fracture. But drawings make the pattern of linkage clear. That dreary old man hasn’t made you all monkeys. You’ve done that yourselves.”

An extraordinary violence took hold in my body. I wanted to smash the tea plates; pull curtains from their rails; kick over the towering silver stands and trample pink and lemon icing in the spongy rug. I wanted to smack the waiters’ mouths and break the old women’s pearls. Most of all, I wanted to destroy this man who smiled through regicide. My legs twitched; my arms jerked on angry strings. But what could I do?

His look read me as inauthentic. “Now, now. Trepidation is not a medical condition these days. Your institution has a fine object. A fine portmanteau object. Savor it. Give it a polish.”

He’d calculated the price of our Emperor being a fiction. Income attributable to the statue was a factor, but more significant—he impressed on me—was the cost of doubt. What else in our galleries might be discrepant; what advice had we sold to others that might now look less than expert? “People don’t like doubt.” I still hear his voice. “Doubt is expensive. Far cheaper to make up a king to run your life for you. The Emperor’s price is fact.”

He wanted only his fee in the matter. I emptied my accounts, took a loan against my pension, sold books and other pieces, scraped the money together. What could I do? This man that I’m stuck believing is Hadrian Augustus knew that what matters is the appearance of Rome. From Turkic steppes to Atlantic shore, from burning desert to frozen hill, he travelled continually, sent his likeness everywhere; even to a drab little island in the North Sea.

I’ve seen a cottage in the Downs. I might manage the cost, if I sell up, if I work more years, if I’m careful. I’m tired, I need to rest from imperial surveillance. Find local interests, erode among the small things. Listen for storms blowing up from the Channel. Leave no memoirs.

From the pale-lit hallway, Jeff could hear his date bustling inside her apartment for half a minute before he knocked again and she opened the door. She was beautiful, small and slim, with dark hair and straight-across bangs, nicely modest-chested. Her brown eyes called out with long lashes against the deathly pallor of her ashen-white face and arms. Wounds gristly with rot desecrated her skin, a scar gaping the length of one cheek. Her blood-soaked clothes were grimy and ripped.

“Hey!” She flashed the concessionary smile of someone in the middle of important work, ushering him inside. He followed her, shutting the door behind them.

“Lookin’ good!” he said generously, admiring the remains of her nurse’s uniform. The dirty and frayed fabric. Distressed slit up one side of her miniskirt. The running tights that, where split open up and down her legs, showed the black-bloody holes of hot-iron torture.

Jenna glanced absently behind her—“Oh, it’s whatever”—as they passed from the entry hallway into the kitchen. It was a high-ceilinged space with yellow tile, new chrome refrigerator, decades-old olive paint on the cabinets. On the cracked green counter, a minor refinery of bottles with bright labels blared beside a double stack of red plastic cups, a mixer, bottle opener, tumbler with a mini-mountain of cubed ice.

What did he want?

“Anything.” Jeff laughed. He accepted a can of Miller Light, igniting the hiss-crack of the lid. Music pounded subtly in the next room, Ladytron or MNDR or somebody like that. He pointed to the spread of alcohol. “Think y’got enough?”

“I’m mixin’ stuff to take with us.” She leaned coolly against the counter, right hand clutching a red cup at a nonchalant dangle. “Mel’s coming. So’s Dave, maybe Cary.” Her eyes fell over his outfit, the old black work slacks he’d torn for this occasion and the blood-dappled white dress shirt, untucked. “Really s’posed to be a doctor?”

He surveyed his getup. “Medical technician. Fixin’ the x-ray when they broke through the barricade. Jesus!” he mock-pleaded to the ceiling, “The screams!”

She put her cup down and found a peeling knife on the counter.

A thought flashed through him. Maybe she heard about the deliberations he’d had with his friends about dumping her. She was going to carve him up. Why the hell not?

Her grin disarmed him as she stepped close, tugging his right sleeve taut and spearing the fabric with her knife. She jerked the blade down over his upper arm, tearing the sleeve cleanly with a whispered snicker of fabric. He watched her scrutinize this task.

Returning the knife to the counter, she took the sleeve in her hands, her ruby-red nails, yanking the shirt open with a decisive rip. He tingled. She stepped back to admire her work, a squint and shrug: “Probably could use more gore.”

“Y’got extra gore?”

“We got gore.”

“Who’s that playing—Metric?”

“Ladytron.”

“Cool.”

They were close, machinery of unexpected seduction whirring up, the two vodka cocktails he’d had at home and the drinking now and the music and her outfit, and he warmed with the need to kiss her, cup the back of her neck beneath her hair, pull her tight against him. Her sultry eyes and sardonic half-grin and the carnal liberation of destroyed clothing, bloody makeup, the minor thrill of being someone else.

“You’re gorgeous,” he hushed.

A rattling growl from somewhere in the kitchen stole her glance. She stepped back, looking around. There, her phone, nestled among the bottles of liquor.

She looked at the number and brightened. “It’s Mel!” And into the phone: “Hey!”

He nodded, meandered with his drink into the living room. In his benevolent banishment, set to music, something felt somehow wrong. Not quite that the place was haunted, but that a force was here, or out there across town with ways to get in. Something stalked Jeff, a spirit to entice his discomfort, or…

Or something worse.

The apartment was spare, old plaster walls, hardwood floor, cheap black futon-esque couch and matching easy chair. It was just Jenna and her roommate Mel in this 80-year-old place that bore the hallmarks of that post-collegiate transition into corporate jobs that still allowed for—maybe encouraged—drunken crusades with gaggles of friends at piano bars and Irish pubs, tiki huts and techno clubs. Some nights ended on the couch.

He gave the couch a wincing glance, the meaningless regret now of kissing, fondling her under her bra just a week and a half earlier as the TV beside the fireplace showed some Oscar-nominated cop drama they mostly ignored. He pressed on, hands probing, until she dryly told him to stop and the moment was over.

He’d picked her up that night at the glass office complex where she worked as an account assistant for a mutual fund. She stood chatting in the airy atrium with co-workers, almost too beautiful to behold in her tight white blouse, top three buttons undone, her short black skirt, strap-back heels and a slip of hair tucked behind one ear. Jeff just wanted to look at her in various states of undress, listen to her dreams, invade her bare softness, plan trips with male authority, act like he knew about money. See a future with her despite whatever peripheral messiness waited to bubble up.

He shook his beer can, felt the soft percussion of the liquid that was left. Back in the kitchen for another drink, he ignored Jenna’s animated cackling on her phone, no wink for Jeff or smile or index finger to say this is almost over. Here he was on hold, in the living room again with his drink. The music, from a small deco stereo on the black IKEA cabinet, swelled and surged, synthesizers and beats, a pop chorus Jeff found himself drunkenly humming. Distracting himself from the sense of foreboding.

It was how she looked at him, or didn’t, or didn’t get his jokes, or didn’t want sex after four dates—something. It was worse because he’d known her in high school, or known who she was, two years behind him. So conversations about him she would have with her friends had added cache; they’d ricochet around social settings like a fucking pinball, assumptions about who he really was, how he really felt about her, her brother.

Stuart Robinson.

Framed on the fireplace, he had an arm slung around Jenna, brilliant soap opera smile, tall and tan, muscled in a red Hawaiian shirt. Stuart and Jenna: a family with the perfect geometry of faces and bodies, like actors and actresses, it was genetic, when a lightning bolt of beauty and personality and popularity shivered down through siblings and shocked the school into reverence. Stuart had been in student government in high school, just a few short years ago, whooping up the crowd with a megaphone on the floor of the cacophonous gymnasium: “Let me hear youuuuu!” Back when Jeff was just an awestruck freshman, never imagining he’d date this senior’s sister. “You guys’re pathetic—come on! You can’t just sit there’n be lovable! Y’got that spirit! Y’got that spunk! Let’s hear the men! Now the ladies! Let’s hear the ladies!”

Jeff was still a little surprised to have dated Jenna. Stuart, of course, could end things between them in an instant.

Four pictures over, Jenna’s fireplace showed Stuart in his golden high-school superiority, his camp counselor days, maybe his upwardly mobile intern-who-golfed days, when he could’ve had any girlfriend in the world but dated only two. That warm, sun-dappled smile he shared with Jenna. There he was in his Army fatigues, the mottled gray camouflage, hands clasped behind his back, beaming broad and assured.

Jeff tipped the rest of his beer into his mouth as he heard Jenna tell Mel goodbye.

They went downstairs, fruity alcoholic drinks hidden in her purse, and they stepped conspicuously outside, a narrow corridor of four-story condos and cars parked along the street. The early fall afternoon was hazy, air with a pleasant breeziness that cut through the humidity, the distant sound of traffic and music.

“What’s the charity again?” Jeff asked. Jenna, already imprudently unpacking their flasks, knew the organizers and had donated the canned food required to participate.

“Lung cancer, fibrosis, some shit,” she handed Jeff his flask. “Homeless fetuses.”

Up the sidewalk, an elderly woman with groceries gave a start when she spotted

Jeff and Jenna. They offered friendly hellos as they passed with barely restrained giggles. Across the street, a middle-aged couple chuckled at them and a block down, a group of kids fucking around with a basketball paused to check the zombies out.

Jeff took a slug of drink from his flask, wincing, downing another. He leaned over to Jenna. “Do arrest reports actually mention zombies? Probably you’re just drunk’n disorderly, right? With attempted murder? I guess that dude in Miami was a zombie.”

“Shit, man.” Her sips were conservative. “Zombies need public defenders too.”

Occasionally, he saw a flash of something in her that made him sympathetic. He could see it in her posture, her metabolism, the stress that comes with needing to sync your life and career with a timeframe—mortgage, husband, kids—all the uncertain things in the future. Like having a fifteen-year layover to Paris in the Atlanta airport and there’s still a chance you’ll miss your flight.

After a moment of just walking, drinking, Jeff knew he needed to say it. The words perched on his tongue, waiting for space amid the cars and clatter and horns of the city. “So how’s Stuart?”

“Good,” she said evenly, tone tinged with resigned uplift. “He’s my bro.”

“Gettin’ by okay?”

“Yep. My mom’s probably over there right now. He might actually come out.”

A ripple of discomfort hit Jeff. As in out here? Shit. “That’s good to hear.” This made everything exponentially more complicated.

“It’d be cool for him,” Jenna went on. “Y’know, do regular stuff.”

“It’s tough.”

“I know,” the words came out slightly stronger than a sigh, almost recited. “Freedom, helping people, all that stuff.”

“Yeah, I can understand that.” He swallowed, took a drink.

“Look!” She pointed to the intersection up the street: the zombies bunched and waiting patiently for the crosswalk signal.

“Actual zombies would just barge through,” Jeff said, thinking of the absurdity of it all, the almost unseemliness of it, this whole horde of bubbly people dressed up as mutilated wrecks. How they would scream and sob and forget this moment ever existed when something horrific happened for real. Maybe it was just Jeff’s sense of being thrust onstage in an unscripted play and meeting his fellow actors for the first time. Maybe the best thespians here felt a deeper connection to their roles. A certain respect for death.

Maybe he needed more to drink. The corrosive liquid tickled his throat. He suddenly wondered if he’d lost his ability to enjoy himself. The crosswalk signal changed and the zombies advanced.

“C’mon!” Jenna tugged him by a torn sleeve and they hurried along. They merged with the slow-moving mass of undead, few paying much attention, some moaning, hands outstretched, most getting into the act. In the cluster of ironically shambling youth—there were a few here in their fifties or older, but even they seemed young—mutilation was a valid, if not great, leveler when it came to age and weight. Here, jowls were offset by mock-torn tissue, jiggly thighs and calves barely inside shredded stockings.

Jeff let out a drunken laugh as Jenna grinned, rolled her eyes and belted a comical moan. He played with his gait, turning his legs sideways to scrape his feet along, trying to lose himself in the moment. Before the procession began, most of the zombies had let makeup artists craft their look in the park a few blocks away. The whole train of them now stumbled down the street, past storefronts and slow-moving traffic with the occasional thumping stereo and heavy-bus grumble, past the curious and amused stares of people who were part of this in their own way too. A chatting, laughing legion of the crazed and mutilated was a joke that maybe went on too long but was over-the-top enough to appreciate. A lone nut was dangerous, even deadly; a pack of nuts was practically a snack.

Jeff laughed to himself—horror. What did it mean anymore? Horror was movies, something you showed your girlfriend on a weekend afternoon for fun. Sure, it crossed into other realms, a loved one murdered with no culprit or motive. Plague with no escape. There were always fears, irrational, but imaginable. Loved ones taken away. But where in the spectrum of horror would Jenna’s kidnapping be—maybe she’s clawed down a manhole by a hairy creature? Her horror, Jeff’s horror, a community in shock. But then she’s rescued, ravaged but alive, saved by a strike force of hunky guys who go in after her. The chiseled team leader winning her desire, earning some hot Seal team sex. Jeff could feel his own horror in the space between his neck and chest. Horror was a lover’s attention switching to another. It was a mirage, something intangible, but sitting there so innocently in the dictionary. A word tainted with laughter and fantasy. Zombies.

“—nomads, but they’re communal creatures,” a male voice was saying.

Another voice said, “Who’s Zombie Zero? The first one?”

“Your mother’s a communal creature.”

“Oh shit! Now it’s on.”

“—Amy H. or Amy J. again?” a girl’s voice overlapped, another conversation.

“She wants everybody to be just like her!”

“—driving around in an A4 one day’n you’ll be like, hey!”

Jeff and Jenna slipped away from the procession after collaborating on a glance, casually retreating behind a cluster of palm tree planters in a brick alley. The narrow space was stale with the pungent smell of moldy shoes and puke, a generation’s accumulation of decrepitude and humiliation. Jeff held his flask low for a refill of her citrus moonshine. He reminded himself—be cool, encouraging, optimistic.

He took a drink, gasping, “Damn”—eyes bulging watery—“Good shit.”

“Stu’s always all, ‘Give more than your best!’” She situated her flask back in her purse. “It’s a hundred-ten percent alcohol. Little goes a long way, huh?”

They rejoined the march toward the rear, behind a trio of college-aged kids, one jokingly getting stuck with a lamppost between outstretched arms until a friend pulled him free. Jeff could envision all this on YouTube, wondering how he must look, imagining the amateur fade-outs and spooky splashed fonts and the soundtrack, “Columbia” by Oasis or something like that, if anything was still legal to use.

From out of the crowd, a mutilated bride, half a cheek torn open to reveal a bloody mass of snaggled teeth, drifted over and hip-bumped Jenna. The zombies shared a shriek of recognition, Jenna with a hug for Mel, her roommate.

“Awesome!” Jenna bounced in delight.

“Omigod, I had the biggest hangover and I’m like waitaminute—it’s the zombie walk!” Mel laughed. She was with two guys. Cary, whom Jeff had met, was smeared gray in flip-flops and a T-shirt; his tall, rickety boniness was particularly suited to zombiehood. The other guy, Rusty, was stocky and muscled in a bloodstained white wifebeater, fake eyeball dangling by tendons from its socket. Jenna doled out more hugs.

Jeff’s mood sank a notch and he took a drink to try to lift it. That he’d expected the newcomers made no difference. The dynamic was changed. Anything he’d wanted to say to Jenna—or hint or confide or whatever—was now subject to scrutiny from people more popular than he was. He made a few lame remarks to the guys as they followed the girls—“I’d give her some rigor-mortis!”—words swept into the noise and distractions, a passing jeep thumping hip-hop as Jenna and Mel locked arms and skipped ahead. Jeff suddenly wanted all this to be over. What endgame were they heading toward?

Stuart.

“Stu’s coming!” Jenna clutched her phone, eyes wide with joyous surprise, telling Mel first and then Jeff as the procession shambled and laughed under a tree-lined canopy.

“Yeah?” Jeff’s back, neck, went clammy. “Be good to see him.” He grimaced, which Jenna, her attention already back on Mel, didn’t see. The walk ended in a park with a distant scatter of picnickers and dogs. The zombies laughed and mingled, posed for pictures, reveled in their bloody disarray. A plump woman in a tank top, one of the organizers, stood on a folding chair with a megaphone, getting a few laughs. The event was more or less over at this point, commotion ongoing, zombies drifting off. Mel and Jenna were coordinating where to go and decided on the Irish pub bordering the green where a number of zombies had trundled off to. Where Stuart would meet them. They crossed the street with a trail of bloody youth to the bar, a dim and bustling cave, a couple tables of zombies enjoying beer and fried appetizers on the sidewalk, more inside the dark confines. Linebacker zombies cavorted with a sorority snippet of cheerleader zombies. AC/DC blared its funky screech as Jeff fumbled through the crowd toward the back, asking zombies a table over if they needed their extra chair.

Crammed beside Mel, Jenna sat across the table from Jeff. Her distance said something; it was an acknowledgment of some kind. Welcome, at this point, to the jungle. He drank, nodded in absentminded agreement at whatever vapid thing someone offered up. A happily harried waitress brought pitchers of beer and talk circled the table, everybody naming the day’s best zombies.

“Kills me, the zombies half-assing it,” Mel said, “Like, flip-flops, weak makeup…” As her eyes found Cary, he ducked in pretend shame and the table laughed.

Jeff felt more like a zombie the further the walk receded. His group was good-hearted kids who seemed to like their jobs, maybe went to church, were largely apolitical except when the news pressed them, always up for a good time. How did people do what they were supposed to, to face life’s turmoil and show the proper strength? Jeff wasn’t so different, he felt. But here he was, gripped with tense irritation. It was Jenna and alcohol. It was Stuart.

At some point the table looked at Jeff with the apparent expectation that he say something.

“Somebody shows up with a gun to one of these things and it’s gonna confuse the shit outta the paramedics,” Jeff announced. Was he slurring?

The table paused collectively in the noise and music and Mel held up her beer.

“Cheers, to the conversation killer!” She let out a guffaw, clinking glasses with Jenna, who rolled her eyes, too far across the table to tap Jeff’s glass.

Jeff wanted an excuse to leave, chat up some sexy slut-zombie on the way out.

How did he make his move? He thought surely he was wrong for thinking this, feeling it. Maybe he was horrible, ruthless and worthless, cast out socially with good reason.

He was at how many drinks now? Too many to count.

Half-standing, Jenna craned her neck toward the front of the bar, waving someone over. The crowd seemed to part for them, Dave leading Stuart along. Jeff deliberately avoided looking. Dave was slim and curly-dark-haired, goofy grin and twinkling narrow eyes. He had one hand around Stuart’s right arm above the elbow, leading him forward. Stuart was mostly blind, slight sight left in one eye. On an artificial right leg, he proceeded tentatively, what remained of his gaze switching from the floor to the dark ahead. The group at the table greeted him warmly, glad he was there. Jenna stood to hug Dave, slip a quick kiss on his cheek, hug her bother heartily and kiss his cheek too. She and Dave helped Stuart ease into his seat.

Stuart said nothing, expression immobile, his mouth an ancillary slit where his face had melted in the furnace of the IED, dissolved his nose, his left ear gone, head a fleshy mass of skin grafts. One eye was mostly buried in the slump of his broken brow, the other pupil milky and blinking. Jeff was unsure if he could speak. There was still a firmness in his figure, a sturdy muscularity cloaked in a blue polo shirt, left arm cocked and tan and sinewy-strong.

The waitress brought over more pitchers, not noticing Stuart or knowing not to, as Dave made a toast.

“Here’s to at-risk teens! Wait, who’s the zombie walk benefit?”

“Alcoholics!” Mel blared and the table laughed. They all clinked glasses, all but Stuart—who wasn’t drinking but merely glancing around with what seemed like a passive smile—and Jeff, who gripped his mug but didn’t bother raising it.

Dave was the table’s go-to comedian, joking about the rock-climbing class he ran at the YMCA and the newbies who, bless their hearts, were simply too heavy to get higher than a couple rocks. He blamed Doritos-shell tacos.

Mel stood in the noise, asking around the table who needed anything while she was up: “Jeff?” Jeff stared at her, not entirely comprehending.

“Uh, hello—Jeff?”

“Huh?” mumbled Jeff.

“Want something?”

Jeff waved a sloppily dismissive hand. Want something? Helluva question!

Mel’s frown told Jeff he was being foul, unhelpful, unengaged, which he already knew. She shrugged, shook her head and vanished into the crowd.

In his expressionlessness, Stuart drew Jeff’s gaze like a drain pulls in a cyclone of water. What did the big brother think of the guy dating his sister? About being a soldier? Was he still a soldier? Was Jeff still dating his sister? Jeff’s churning stomach conspired with his spinning head on a plan to puke, erupt all over the place. Jeff and Stuart the only ones not talking as the loud moment’s deceptive misery slogged onward.

It was more than that. It was hints of compassion Jeff could’ve reached for, grasped in a more lucid state. It was here’s someone’s altered life he couldn’t comprehend. The confidence and struggle of training, the transport plane’s ominous swoop into some rocky, dusty otherworld. Boredom and nerves and joking about coming back to what he left behind, marching warily through a blown-out village and bam—the infinite flash and it’s over, stunned tingling where limbs and a face used to be.

Before and after, flipping between photos, the grinning kid in the pictures at Jenna’s—how she wanted to remember him—and here, now, this moment, the gruesome incongruity. The onslaught of life’s horror hit Jeff like an avalanche, a force in his chest. For a moment it was hard to breathe.

Look down. The blank darkness of the floor. Breathe.

At some point, Jenna eased around the table to Jeff as people got up to piss. “We’re all going to Cary’s,” she said with take-it-or-leave-it directness.

Jeff shook his head, words rubbery and refusing at first to come out.

“You fuckin’ trashed?” Jenna snapped indignantly.

“Nah, donwanna…” Beer swelling in him. “Whose place now? Fuck.”

“Fine, whatever. Go away if you’re gonna be a dick.”

“Seriously, this’s fuckin’ bullshit,” he mumbled.

“Huh?” she recoiled. Cary, returning from the restroom, seized on the tension and paused. He leaned down and whispered to Dave, both watching sharply.

Jeff was aware of looks from the rest of the table, Stuart’s included. They were all on Jenna’s side. Something was tumbling forward now, building in mass, the colossal weight of the gazes. It was a feeling Jeff couldn’t put into words, disallowed by tact, the stupid futility of having ventured this far from shore in a leaky boat named Jenna. And the other situation, shoved in his face—the pointlessness of Stuart’s ruin. Stuart, who in some tucked-away memory was still his mother’s tiny laughing son. Jeff swallowed, anger like a lead balloon in his larynx. Just about to pop.

“Why’re we here?” he blurted. “Seriously. What’s this stupid shit all about?” And now he did it, turned away from Jenna’s fuck-you scowl, eyes locking onto Stuart. He could barely look at him, but the moment was barreling onward, too late to stop. “Why’re you here?!” he demanded, the rest of the table trying to comprehend the ugly thing unfolding in the dirty throb of noise. Disbelief in the garbled stew of song and talk, an open secret of sour looks around the table at the drunk guy. Oh shit. “That’s right, that’s right!” Jeff went on, glaring at Mel’s impatient incredulity, her scabby-teeth makeup peeling away to normal healthy cheeks, and he took a breath, back to Stuart: “I appreciate what you did’n shit, but—but wait, no, ’cause why the fuck did it happen, you know? Where’s the fuckin’ victory celebration, the parade, you saved the world or some shit? And fuck, you had to come here? Where’s the fuckin’ parade the tourists get to watch, you know, with the fuckin’ zombies who can’t take off their goddamn costumes?”

Jenna’s mouth fell open and Dave started to stand when Mel grabbed his arm, holding his defensive thrust in place at the cruddy wooden table.

Jeff’s words were thick with would-be vomit. “Y’didn’t havta sign up! Fuck, it’s not like we got hit the week before! What’d fuckin’ bravery getcha?! Shit, you were sucha fuckin’ god’n now I can barely look at you—”

“Fuckin’—” Dave yanked his arm away from Mel, from Rusty’s firm grip now, when Stuart put up an arm, the one where his hand was supposed to be. A gesture of wait, hold on, strange calm in his blank demeanor.

Jenna sat hard-faced, a streak of tears sinking down her cheeks and Jeff knew they were done, no going back as the table watched him, glanced at Stuart, this conflict, the commotion, and Jeff wanted to stop but only managed a churned-up sigh.

“Okay, and I fuckin’ hate this shit, okay, an’I know you do too and I’d do serious shit to erase it but here we are, okay, an’ we gotta understand it was a lie, right, got us to this point, put a fuckin’ gun in your hand, turned you inta—”

Stuart’s jackhammer left fist suddenly launched across the table and found Jeff’s temple, pop of white in his eyes with a screech of chairs and spilled drinks, a flail of hands to steady Stuart’s frame back into his chair. Jeff tipped back, mouth ajar, back and collapsing onto the dark stickiness of beer and dust and grime on the floor.

Vision blurred, Jeff blinked. Swallowed, felt a swirl of moments pass, feet moving around him. People over him, looking down.

A balding, falsely scarred man laughed to a heavyset woman.

“Daaamn, dude fucked y’up!”

Jeff’s elbow, the dizzy static in his head—was he hurt? The floor’s slick softness felt like sweating clay under his palms.

Hands cradled Jeff’s armpits, pulling him up, reaffixing their grip, helping him into a sitting position. Setting him upright, with a slightly clumsy struggle, in the pose of someone normal. It was the laughing man, his huffing breath like a waft of salted meat.

The minutes spread out. At some point Jeff, seemingly ignored in the noise, thankfully, sighed and decided to leave, grapple his way back outside, vintage streetlamps already flickering to life. The zombies were gone now as he rambled down the sidewalk. But they weren’t, with their tidier apparel, shopping bags, children—they were all zombies now, courteous and some even kind, soldered to their purchases and plans for the night. Jeff veered too close to a group of teenage girls, who cringed, laughed, pulled away reflexively.

It was Jeff’s walk now, zombies and non-zombies invited, they could walk and not know they were part of it. Next time he’d dress up like a miracle doctor, a master of time, go back and slug Stuart before he could board that transport plane. Take Jenna in an innocently empathetic embrace and explain everything. It was infantile, hate mixed up with lust. What if Jenna was the one in the costume she couldn’t remove? The soldier who came back destroyed, still the girl Jeff had so needed to kiss?

His throat suddenly bulged and he darted into an alley, wracked with a gurgling spasm of vomit. It spattered over the torn black crumple of garbage bags and spilling contents, fast food wrappers, things decomposing brown and green.

Jeff took a stuttered breath. Horror always charged admission and never issued receipts. Hunched over, steadying a hand against the brick wall, he gasped. A line of spittle connected his open mouth with the ground and his dirty sneakers. He flashed with a thought of monsters, beautiful monsters, the invisible demons out there who would infiltrate his brain and occupy it, ensure he remembered this moment.

Another surge of puke swelled up and Jeff leaned forward again, spilling his guts to no one at all. He glanced back down the alley to see a few final zombies from the walk strolling past, a glimpse of laughter and blood. The last of the afternoon’s caretakers, these monsters of fantasy drifting away, no more dressing up simple reality inside something safe.

No ordinary tributary has a pulse—
maybe one pushed uphill by a pump
built like a house, my heart.
A stone ripples the river.

With skilled use of her middle
finger, one girl
braids another’s hair, hooks
my middle.
Each hook, one twist more.

Low tide, my father highsteps the trammel net, stoops
 half-submerged in Tanaga Bay and begins the work
 of disentangling another sockeye from the interlaced snares.

 He stands before me now, the same foot shorter
 he’s been the last ten years, my sister and I
 nothing back then but a notion
 when my father could hold his breath

              well over a minute,

 how or why I’ve learned not to ask, the familiar arc of his story
 cast out like he, the newest member of the crew,
 flung to the farthest edge of the intertidal.

               I could hear better then, he adds.

 Good thing, I always think. Otherwise,
 he’d not have heard that thin cry of alarum from the beach. Otherwise,
 he’d not have looked up from his work

 to see the bellowing cord of the continental shelf
 rise to obscure summer’s first dusk as if Britomartis herself—
 goddess of fishermen—has half-risen from the sea
 to encompass that final island of the Aleutians.

 Dumbstruck, my father watches the wave suck in the tide
 like a maw: his legs, Wranglers rolled to the knee,
 for the first time exposed, the net an organism in and of itself,
 a bare root system, salmon left clapping wet sand
 as far as the eye can see a wave
 the width of his vision charging the land.

 My father claims that in such moments,

               the body lightens.

 My father claims that there, he saw himself
 bird’s-eye view, that he watched himself look up at the sky
 and the sky had become a mirror.

 And he sees his body ascend the cumulus
 as if pulled by threads of light, each thrust of the sky’s wide wings
 lifting him ever closer to a rift in the clouds.

 But my father does not kneel genuflect to the gods,
 my father does not consider his sins or ask for forgiveness. Rather,
 he gives his marrow to those ropes,
 he weaves himself into those moorings.

 And the last thing he sees is the wave.
 And the last thing he hears is something like the clap of a thousand hands.
 And the sea took him.
 Language fails my father here, so he resorts to sound:

               Wham!

 slamming one open palm into the other as if to quash
 something living, his posture surging in our living room—
 the tumblings of his cliffhanger—
 body whipped by the imagined sea.

               How do I describe what seemed like hours beneath the waves?

 I am a poet retelling a telling.
 The sea did not care about my father,

               But

 the wave came and went and my father
 held his ground, the backdraft strong in the wave’s wake—
 Britomartis’ final tug for his spirit.

 And he lashed the flesh of his life from that ocean.
 And the water receded.
 Now, my father lights up when he tells how he returned to the beach

               as slowly as possible

 and how, when the men finally saw him emerge from the sea,
 they cheered his name, my father returned
 from what they believed to be the dead:

               Ghost gear, they call it:

 nets and riggings lost at sea to fish for no man.
 Blindly trolling seines illuminating the deep
 with their bioluminescent catch.
 Ruptured buoys and trammels coasting past coral reefs
 until they drift down,

               down into the dark.

 Only once have I asked my father
 why he chose out there to live. Only once
 has he told me that as the wave approached,
 he heard a voice.

 And that voice asked him,

               Are you a father?

 And my father said,

               Yes.