Meanwhile. Stars scattered in a shotgun spray above and the sound of snakes in the low grass below. All the children but one are asleep and the adults meander in their weariness: on couches and highways and atop the bodies of lovers. Squirrels conspire for winter, bushes a-chirp. A breeze through the valley picks up the scent of earth and the manifold stench of life–petroleum and cooking oil, cardamom and ryegrass, ruptured septic tanks, malt liquor on concrete, pine and conifer and rose and elm and the sweet salt of a town’s value in sweat–the breeze carries it all out toward the city limits where Joan sits and watches the corn.

She’d gone out the doggy door after her parents had gone to sleep and ridden her training-wheeled bike until the asphalt gave way to dirt, then stowed it in Mrs. Gladkov’s garden and walked out to her lookout, which was really just a boulder at the edge of the Gladkov lot from which one could look out over the state-owned cornfields.

She’d seen what she’d seen. No one believes children in these matters. But she was so certain of what she’d seen that she’d almost used a curse word against her father when he brushed her off with a change of subject. Her mother entertained the notion–played ball, as it were–but didn’t care to take Joan back out the edge of town to look again and finally put her foot down, literally and proverbially, when the little girl’s insistence ran through dinner and bath time.

Joan had gone to bed when told to, but could not sleep. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Him darting from corner to corner, then rushing forth and ducking beneath her inner vision’s horizon. His eyes had the quality of Christmas coals. It was less that he wore red than that red followed him like a swarm of bees. His mouth was always out of sight–open or closed, she could not say. For the first time in her young life, she understood what it meant to be tasked with something: this was the first of many: the beginning of her life’s great heap.

She’d seen Him on the drive back into town from the pumpkin patch. They rode in silence because her parents had gotten into a whispering argument about which in-laws had the rightful claim to this year’s Thanksgiving, and decided that they needed to reserve their words so that they could really lay into each other after Joan’s bedtime. Even the radio would’ve ruined it. So Joan sat in the back of the car and clutched a gourd that looked like a witch’s nose and watched the corn go by. Each stalk looked like a limb reaching up in prayer and she pictured a congregation of lanky subterranean giants reaching out of the soil in blind praise of the sun they could not see but that fed them nonetheless. She wondered what their babies looked like.

When she first saw Him, He was moving at the speed of the car–as if she were holding Him in her hands. He looked like a skeleton with a pestilence attached, the way each of the angles of his body betrayed itself through his robe, and the red cloud followed him like a cape. Joan didn’t get the impression that He was aware of her, yet she watched Him go along and He never once slowed–He was there for her, somehow.

A group of geese had crossed the road, making Joan’s father–distracted by his petty rage–slam on the brakes and pull the girl’s attention forward. When she looked back, He was gone. All that remained were the penitent corn, swaying in their praise.

That which bothered her, ultimately, as she laid in bed and watched him approach and recede from her mind’s eye was purer and simpler than one might think. She couldn’t shake it: did He, too, remember her?

So now she sits, her chin on her knees, and watches the corn from above. All of the town’s crows have taken to the trees and cast the silhouettes of turrets girding a king’s field. She listens to the sound of two distant raccoons fighting: their yowls high and feline and hair-raising. Somewhere out there, wild dogs are settling in tight little spirals the same shape as the universe above them. The night air smells like dust off the top of a cupboard.

Joan would never say that He was the devil. It could never even occur to her. It isn’t exactly that she doesn’t have the language for it: she’d seen the scary-house movies and the gold-toothed TV preachers and the candy bar billboards with  “GO AHEAD–YOU CAN REPENT TOMORROW” stamped next to a smiling Satan with full cheeks and an ashen cross on his forehead. It is much more that an identification of the devil would require the capacity to imagine a figure as emerging out of its own morality. He is not an allegory or a symbol. Joan doesn’t know what He is, but she’d like to ask Him and maybe have Him ask her the same.

The night is not still or quiet, but it will be long. That doesn’t bother her.

On the other hand, Mrs. Gladkov has long been certain of the presence of the devil. Yes, she’d seen that Red Death out in the corn and, yes, she knew it to be the devil but there’s nothing really remarkable about it. The devil came to Ollsville just as he came to Poland and the Soviet Union and Judea and the Garden and the Lake of Fire and the lap of the Lord. She doesn’t have Joan’s sweet blankness. She puts her cigarette out in her teacup and turns off the television. She considers calling Joan’s parents to rat her out, as it were, but decides against it.

Mr. Gladkov had been a collector of militaria and his wife now survived to witness the remains of his collection. The walk from the den to her bedroom involves the stepping-over of a bear-skin rug ostensibly having belonged to Tsar Alexander (fake) and the passage by three wall-mounted Henry rifles actually fired at the Battle of Boonville (real and, unknown to Mrs. Gladkov, still loaded). None of it matters to her. For their twentieth anniversary, her husband had given her a pistol the name of which she’d long forgotten and she still keeps it in her nightstand. She hates it, but she will not be rid of it. It’s like an old dog that stinks but still barks.

She refuses to doze off on the couch. She has self-respect in that way. Mr. Gladkov had dozed off permanently in his recliner–a shredded pleather monstrosity that he called his “retirement property” and that his wife had long dreamed of setting ablaze–with him in it, if necessary–and her having found him the next morning in that way came with its own terrible complications. She hadn’t merely lost her husband: she’d lost her respect for him. Sometimes, before bed, she tries to picture his semi-recumbent corpse seated next to the throne of Christ but, most nights, she cannot square the Lord’s grace with her husband’s final silent snore and his cheap shredded deathbed.

It might be easier to let it go if she had any family left. But there never were children and her mother died in the Revolution and her father had never been there in the first place.

Tonight, as she steps out of her houseshoes and slips beneath her duvet, she thinks of Joan–the little dreamer is only a few hundred feet from Mrs. Gladkov’s head. The old woman hopes that she finds the devil she seeks and that he eats her whole. That is how the world is. That is what is right.

She lays in the quiet for a while. Her thoughts turn dark and inarticulate and sour. She pulls the pistol from her nightstand and slips it under her nightgown so she can feel the cold metal at her breast. It pulls all the old sick warmth from her heart and, before she knows it, she is asleep.

Outside, at the grass’s edge, a rabbit ponders the road. It had seen the flattening of its cousin only hours before and was both thrilled and terrified by this immense field of warm black and sudden death. It figures that one must be able to outsmart this road–to get across it before the arrival of the flattener. It stands and thinks a while, but doesn’t get anywhere. It thinks more and the moon crawls across the sky like a spotlight on a wall. Then there’s the sudden uprush of beating wings and the snap of a nearby neck and the rabbit looks up and finds itself having already crossed the road. It took no thought at all. The road is now just the memory of flesh on dead dirt. It’s pleased as punch. There’s so much night left and so little to think about.

The kill-fall of the bird had stirred more than the rabbit out of the dumb midnight stupor: prey animals of all kinds scattered out through the grass like a synapse firing. A field mouse pressed itself through a gap in the basement window, not knowing that it had just made itself a permanent roommate to the Juarez family, whose pater familias is pacing in the livingroom with an old paperback pressed to his forehead. He mumbles: “poor Turlygod, poor Tom, that’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am,” then “I nothing am,” again and again.

Edgar Juarez had run the local pawn shop–Ollsvile Silver–after his father’s premature death from methylmercury poisoning. Edgar was only weeks away from starting his degree in Classics at the state college and his head was still full of schoolboy Latin when he wrote in to his advisor requesting to withdraw his registration on account of a personal family matter. Though his sorrow was great, he did not share it. When his mother–sweet Linda–had asked how he felt about taking over the family business, he’d responded “cum tacent, clamant,” which she did not understand and he did not translate. So he donned the tie and the nametag, commissioned a storefront sign that read “CAVEAT EMPTOR” in flashing neon red, and stepped into his life.

He’d soon convinced himself that he could keep the daemon of Commerce at an arm’s length by cradling Art in the other. So, yes, he earned his pound of flesh from the interest against heirlooms and relics, but he did so with the righteous aloofness peculiar to young tenderhearted intellectuals.

He showed up, as it were. He kept the store in the black. He paid his people on time. He met his wife–Cece–at a book club. On their first date, he recited Homer’s invocation in the Greek (“ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν…”) and though she listened sweetly, Edgar felt empty inside when she praised the quality of his voice and fell silent into her drink.

That emptiness fueled his love for her: it was an ever-receding horizon toward which he could pursue her as she fled from him. Even after they’d married and raised four children and grew fat together, he spent most nights watching the rise and fall of her body in sleep, entirely incapable of grasping her finally and totally.

Now, in retirement, he continues to cradle Art with one arm, but cannot yet name that beast which the other keeps at bay.

In four weeks time, “LEAR, LIVE” will debut at the Ollsville Community Center: a one-man version of King Lear adapted, directed, produced, and starring Edgar Juarez. The flyers went up today, making it real, as it were, which has sent Edgar into a quiet tizzy. Doubts that have piled up silently now leap and yip at him like terriers: how is he supposed to distinguish between Kent and Caius? how to do the shift between Edgar and Tom? dear god, how was he supposed to blind himself as both Cornwall and Gloucester?

A million wrinkles to iron out. But he is stuck on that “I nothing am.” He can’t pull himself out of it. But Cece is asleep and the children have all moved out and they threw out all the alarm clocks the day after his retirement, so there is time and space to ponder and dillydally and feel the weight of words roll over dumb in his mouth.

Outside, a storm rolls in, drops a quarter-inch of rain into the gutters, then is quickly blown south. So it goes. As the clouds go, one of them–belly full of mist–permits a hawk and its payload to pass through it and, for a moment, comes to understand flight, which sends it into a crisis of identity: does it fly as the hawk does? But then the bird moves on, disoriented by the mist, and the cloud goes back to its life entirely unaware of itself.

In its disorientation, the hawk finds itself circling low over Lake Bundren as its rabbit slips from its grip and plummets fifty feet, spinning like a leaf from a tree. The hawk cranes itself into a turn and tries to gauge if the rabbit will land on Dobbs’ Isle: a little zit of earth and stone at the center of the lake’s placid water. It does–nestling with a thud in the switchgrass–and the hawk tucks itself into a little bullet, tilts forward, and enters into a dive. Ninety-five miles an hour: all of the earth a moving target.

But Dobbs is faster. He leaps upon the shattered rabbit–creates a little womb for it in the kneeling nestle of his body. The hawk is quick to slow. It drags a talon through Dobbs’ back on its exit, but only to prove a point. Dobbs tears into the rabbit with his teeth, feeling the strain of hard young flesh against his aging canines.

Taste ceased to matter to him a lifetime ago: he lives for the wide-eyed surge of pure calories and cares not for anything else. His beard is matted and almost knee-length–the blood of the rabbit casts its white even whiter, like surgery theatre tile. One eye, lazy in its fall, rests in a permanent westward tilt. Language has long left him: his tongue is only for the movement of food. The chambers of his soul have grown crooked and scrambled so that the little that remains of him–that which has been loved, that has known the feeling of bare feet raised to winter fire, that has known the feeling of being known–wanders wailing from wall to wall like a barque down an endless channel. Now there is only the beat of his heart and the low lapping of the waves in the night breeze and the lithograph shadows of the pines at sunset. And the taste of rabbit, which brings him to tears though he does not even think to know why.

Ollsville has forgotten him. With the rising of each moon he is swallowed and with the rising of each sun he is belched forth again, but each occurs in the realm of oblivion. None care to hear his wails across the water. None dare venture out to old haunted Dobbs’ Isle. And yet.

So there is time to chew on the cartilage and watch the empty-bellied hawk fly westward pride-struck and feel the young dew bubble up around his ears.

From the tops of its nameless attendant hills, Lake Bundren looks rolled out like an old carpet–its depth having disappeared into a flat mute reflection of stars. A mole, having ventured unprecedentedly far from its burrow, has emerged–head and hands–from the earth and looks out into the night in still contemplation. It is far from home. Its family is terribly worried. The firmament above is beautiful and the earth–common and terrible–seems far enough beneath him to become irrelevant. It traces new constellations in the imagining of digging routes from star to star, wondering at the taste and smell of the space between, and tries to find a natural burrow but cannot. A mole could thrive up there.

A van putters up the hill, shaking the mole from its reverie. It ducks back into the earth; pisses there to mark his way back to the lookout.

The van is new but filthy: mud is caked in cardiogram lines around the wheel-wells and the bumper is beginning to betray salt-rot and the windshield bears a Vatican arch of water spots. “THE GOD PURSE” has been painted on the side in big slanted yellow lines. A fiddle-leaf fig reaches out from the rear window like Juliet from her balcony. A labrador–Charley, his tongue dumb and lank in the wind–sits with head and paws out the passenger-side window.

Nancy Lee is the driver. She and Charley are not of Ollsville but, in their journey of thousand-acre reckoning, have found themselves in its foothills with the moon chasing them into camp for the night. Nancy pulls off into the grass. Charley leaps out from his window in olfactory pursuit of the mole, now long gone.

Nancy rests her head on the steering wheel and listens to the little-tin clinks of the van’s motor in its slow descent into stillness. She imagines the chittering of mechanical birds in a subterranean cave who, upon her peeking-in, fall silent. Her hair has grown white with years–she no longer thinks or cares about such things.

She’d once believed the world to be a fundamentally fearful place–a threshing floor upon which the feet of the gods grind little-orb souls into shattered soil bodies: a place of becoming in which those who undergo said becoming have no means of actually experiencing it. Knowledge is impossible in such a place. The only peace is in the laying-off of hands: it is all chaos, anyway. Pressure, breaking, withering.

This model of the cosmos had proved to be the kelson of much of her life. It had justified the cool distance that carried her through decades of labor: cleaning grease-traps, waiting tables, mopping linoleum, repairing copiers, serving subpoenas, fielding lovers, raising children, painting, sculpting, woodcarving, the building of gardens and the planting of seeds, the lilt of mourning doves and the yawp of the squirrels in late autumn, the creak of her knees as she rises from bed each morning before even the sun has risen from her own underground slumber. Each of these seemed to occur, for Nancy, at movie-theatre distance: bright and hot and moving, but having little to do with herself.

But, eventually, the monotony began to betray the presumptions that had seemed to permit it in the first place. With each day’s repetition, chaos seemed less and less to be a reality. How to justify each summer’s batch of grapes? How to square the blind step of the gods with the fact that each generation of neighborhood cat bore its mother’s birthmark? How is it that age had not withered her but, in fact, strengthened her? Surely, this had nothing to do with the falling apart of things. Surely, she had been wrong.

This needling doubt was with her on that fateful Labor Day morning. Yesterday’s heat had never quite broken, so her stepping out into the morning twilight had the quality of awaking in the night to the tender coals of a campfire. The desert’s low horizon was obscured by the tops of houses and the occasional eruption of a palm tree, but the yowl of coyotes–sad and hungry and choral–betrayed this facade of low civilization. A cat slept in a window across the way, backlit in red. Nancy’s coffee was more cream than anything and smelled like hazelnut. Old reliable quiet. Necessary quiet.

Then: an argument aloft–the shallow beating of many wings growing closer, muffled by squawks. A company of parrots, their paintshop beauty cast into chiaroscuro by the low sideways sun. They alight into the palm trees and disappear, kept real only by the occasional bray and shiver that makes the tree look alive with high wind.

They’d been freed from the house of a rich old man who, having seen his Reaper standing in the doorway, could not bear the thought of his birds languishing indoors. He’d opened his high hillside windows and kissed each of them goodbye, and named them, and watched as each immediately shed their name and joined their panoply.

Each morning, they returned. Each morning, Nancy went out and watched them. Her watching took up more and more of each day until the late afternoon sun, harsh and personal, would force her back inside.

Patterns emerged. Negative space took on new registers of meaning. Days and nights and notebooks were filled with the pondering of the distance between the birds. It was always the same, yet immeasurable to her.

Then summer ebbed into autumn and the parrots stopped coming. Silence fell on the trees, but Nancy’s mind would not quiet. Each night, her dreams brought storms of wings out of which voices would emerge speaking,  in tongues too old and low for living ears, of dust and ashes and the rushing-river foundation upon which our world is built. These dreams were insufficient. They heaped Nancy with sick treacly desire: if only she could know the nature of the birds–so inherent to their interior distance–then these storms would level out into the steady voice of reason itself. Then she would know. Desire would go.

So she sold her car and her books and her jewelry and remortgaged the trailer and put it all down cash on The God Purse. The first time she crested the ridge and saw the country spread out before her–brown and white and green in the trees, dancing in the heat, humming with the movement of millions of little souls–it grew nearer and realer and even her tears could not obscure the world of which she knew herself to be a part. As she moved through it, she marked the distance of the lonely cardinals and hawks and the brash-boy gangs of crows and the lipsticked starlings. Charley had found her as she marked the wanderings of geese in a park. He decided to stay.

Now–many miles and notebooks behind them–they’ve come to Ollsville. Their camp is alight with halogen: their own little sun set beneath pinpricks of starlight. There is necessary quiet here, too, as elsewhere. Just Charley’s b-flat snore and the slow debate of the owls.

But, then–a laugh–high and hardy and wild–spreads itself over the foothills like the ring of a bell. Nancy looks around but there is nothing to see. Just the dark and all beneath: the adults fading into dreams and the beasts burrowing into the earth and the child–changed in the night–running back home with a red pestilence at her heels.

Sweet bullet-ridden Night lies comatose in the low firmament. Her curves ride the horizons and her breath–sweet and simple–moves the intercourse of clouds in a spiral too grand for earth-bound eyes. Once, it was only dark. Night was alone at the center of creation. So she took a lover, Light, who, in his greed for the earth she concealed, gunned her down. Now, though she comes and goes–her eternity always promised–Light always makes himself known to her and her cradled creation.

Dreams do not come to the comatose. But, as canary-proud Light creeps over the eastern hills like an outland lord, Night shivers: startled in her shift. But the stars are now too far gone for those on earth to watch them fold.

Alarm bells. Cigarettes. The urine-dribble of coffee makers. Ollsville alight in a widening ripple like that from a stone at a pond and the free clean smell of night gives way to those bigger and bolder odors of labor. Daytime is for cars and they belch their king-pride upward with the choral intwining of thousands of ignitions.

Leonard Green sits in his car at a red light and watches a homeless man dance on the corner. The man is quick and lithe and shines with the kind of energy unique to the chemically-induced insomniac. Leonard–who, for better or worse,  goes by Len–is both fascinated and harrowed by vagrants. They pull him in the way eddies do ships. He’d once told a high school counselor that his great dream in life was to be a homeless man and to ride the rails, as it were, and count the stucco stars in the big roof of the sky and feel all his old filth wash away in the rare arrivals of summer rain: not in so many words, of course. But that was the gist. Filth and freedom: the freedom to dance and to taunt the morning commute.

Len used to smoke but quit at thirty-three. He keeps a pack of Copper Blondes in his glove compartment and the psychic pull of the dancing vagrant seems to make the compartment glow. He resists the desire; turns up the radio. It’s the morning show–Low and Slow with Morning Joe–and Joe reads a letter to someone named Denise as the opening trill of In a Sentimental Mood walks forth like a dancer from behind a curtain. The light turns green. The vagrant, still dancing, disappears behind the low-sun shine of a red sedan.

The interior of Len’s car is remarkably clean. Not even a penny in a cup holder. It’s how he keeps himself together–sometimes he feels like a very fat man who has pinned his heft behind him with only so many clothespins and it is only a matter of time before the truth of himself (ugly and immense and undeniable) will burst forth for all to see–and such a togetherness is absolutely necessary–especially today.

His agency has a new boss: a young cub named Bernstein who reminded Len of Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter: sinister, self-assured, likely homosexual. At his welcome party, Bernstein had mused to Len and others about all the spiritual benefits of fatherhood. He talked about having something to wake up for everyday, a reason to live… not to mention the sweet smell of an infant’s head or their always-beatific glee with which they meet the world. He’d then talked about the greatest of it all: having a real and tangible sense of one’s own future: a legacy in the flesh.

Len did not even think whether or not this was offensive to him. But he responded:

“But that’s just an illusion, really, right? Legacy, all of that? Beautiful and sweet, sure–he’s a gorgeous baby, thank you, thank you–but but isn’t it really just an illusion with which we cope with an absence of the future? Or the future-as-absence, maybe? No, Bob, please–please, Bob I’m trying to–I’m not saying that you and your boy aren’t connected, I’m not an ape, you see. What I mean is that–don’t touch me no this is just tonic water–what I really mean is that what connects us, and connects you and your boy more than anything, is that we share a common void. We are always already tumbling down into nothingness. Tumbling like–tumbling you see–tumbling like children down a hill. Ha! Ha! You see? See, Bernstein—”

Then Bob had ushered Len away and bowed low to the agency’s now boy-king in a gesture of a vicarious apology.

That had been Friday. Now it is Monday and Len must go in and make things right. He has mortgage payments, after all, and Ollsville has not gotten any cheaper since he was a boy. It is entirely possible that he’s already been fired. He pulls into his assigned parking spot. He is childless and has never really gotten beyond a first date.

When he emerges from the elevator with head slung low in a faux-casual sway, he finds all of the other agents–Bob and Sanj and Mary and Karl–gathered in the doorway of Bernstein’s office at the space’s far end. All of the office lights are out so the only light is oblique and thin from the eastward blinded windows. Then, from within Bernstein’s office, there’s a mechanical shush and the mass of agents are cast into shadow by what appears to be campfire light. Then a click and it’s gone. Another shush and it’s back. Click, gone. Sanj laughs and taps his fingertips at his shoulders.

Len creeps up and peers over Mary’s shoulder. There, in his office, Bernstein sits on a low sofa before an ankle-height coffee table, so that he appears in the squat of a hunter in the reeds. He holds one hand up toward the crowd–his index finger raised–and the other rests upon an ornate box the gold inlays of which glint coyly in the blind-light. Bernstein’s face–bearded and marsupial–is fixed in an expression of childish knowing. The greater effect is like that of stumbling across a prayer circle in a language one does not speak around a guru whose eminence is obvious if foreign and nervous. Bernstein has not seen Len–perhaps he doesn’t care to.

He strikes the lighter again and his office is thrown into a wash of cave-painting shadows, then releases it and brings it all back to flat dark sideways reality.

“I don’t smoke but, hell, it’s cool,” says Bernstein. Freed from his trance, he looks out across his audience and encounters Len. His eyes change.

There’s a thump as a sparrow slams into Bernstein’s office window. Its neck snaps on impact so it does not feel the four-story spin-fall to the concrete below, but it does ponder where that other bird could have come from and if it, too, was suddenly stopped in its flight? It watches the clouds move across the morning sky and a plane–high, insectoid, unnatural–leave a trail of mist in its wake. This is not so bad, it thinks, as an alley-cat, blind in one eye, moseys up for breakfast.

The cat–whose real name is not easily pronounced with human equipment though he had once been called Amos–had lost its eye in a fight with a coyote pup, the ultimate victory over which still serves as a point of pride. The cat has gallstones and the cartilage in its knees is wearing away and it has developed a stench so profound that most prey flee well before seeing it. The bird is delicious, if slight. Not-Amos struts out into the street and pauses for the passage of a car, whose driver–former Officer Huber, now just Huber–is distracted by his phone, on the screen of which a computer-generated woman, nude and absurd, writhes incorrectly.

Huber’s eyes are distant in the wild way of suburban animals. Aluminum cans tumble-kept knee-high shiver maraca-like with the car’s ride over a speed bump, but the only smell in the car is that of marijuana. Huber lost his job on the force some time ago, but he still gets up and out every dawn to cruise, as it were, in his car which is now teetering over the cliff of jalopy. Neighbors have submitted a dozen noise complaints about his dragging bumper, but there is some anonymous Sergeant whose heart still goes out to poor Huber and thus makes these reports disappear.

This morning, he’s heading to Em’s house. Her husband will be gone to work and their daughter, Joan (toward whom Huber feels a strange repulsion), would be at school. If he’s lucky, he’ll catch Em working in the back garden–the top of her ponytail moving in a slow bob over the fence like a skiff in a canal.

Huber and Em married two weeks before their high school graduation and divorced the week Em moved away for college. Neither knows now how it really happened–perhaps they were just young and wanted to give their hearts over to something: why not each other? Perhaps distance had made their hearts grow inward, and Huber really wanted to sow his wild oats, he’d thought, and Em wanted to leave her options open, she’d thought, and so the young divorcees grew upward and outward like two stalks from the same root. Em, flourishing skyward with new love and infant life, felt little need to think on the ground from whence she came. Huber, made to bend low as if beneath storm clouds, could think on nothing else. So he visits her from time to time. More precise: he watches her from time to time.

He parks down the street from Em’s house and limps the rest of the way–a persistent result of his accident, though many years have passed. He sneaks into Papa Cho’s rose garden and settles into a void in the greater wall of thorns. From Cho’s house, he is obscured by a birdbath made to look like a martini glass (big concrete olive and all). From Em’s house, one can only see a shiver in the bushes like that of a raccoon. There’s a narrow gap in the vines where one might avoid the thorns and it’s through there that Huber–his fingers parting the vines–watches, his eyes flat and inapparent to any passersby.

As a boy at the Passover seder, he’d watch from between his fingers as the wine in the fifth cup–at the empty seat left for Eliahu–slowly diminished. He knows it could not have been a miracle. He saw it, after all.

Some had said–Em, more than others–that Huber’s accident had changed him. After the fall of the car’s chassis and the caving in of his skull and the weeks of sleep and the honorable discharge, those who loved him had felt such desperate grief that his image ossified in them like a saint on a medallion. When he awoke, he could not but be different.

But then there was the incident. Huber stills calls it one of many spiritual experiences. It happened at a Wellness Event at the Ollsville Bazaar–a friends-and-family meditation meeting, more than anything–after he’d been out of the hospital for a few weeks and still wore the glassy stillness of the recently infirm. He’d taken to spending his afternoons sitting at the Food Court, at a plastic booth wedged between Siam Palace and something called “Wham Bam Thank You Clams,” watching shoppers meander like ducks on the surface of a pond. He saw the whole scene as if underwater and beneath: odd and beautiful and silent: just the wake-lines of bodies in a movement too distant to be apprehended. He saw everything after it had already happened. For a while after the accident, this had been his way of being.

But on the afternoon of the incident, the Food Court’s stage had been cleared and ropes had been drawn in an enormous velvet circle within which people–children and the elderly and all between–sat cross-legged on raised pillows with their crowns high and their gazes cast downward and inward. No movement but the occasional shiver.

For a moment, it was as if Huber had gone blind. All the pond-skip echoes that had brought forth that little which had been left of people, for him, disappeared into a deep soundless well. He was alone at the center of creation.

Pluto has a sunless ocean–warm and blind–beneath fifty miles of terrestrial ice. Who can really say what it is like at the center of all things?

Then there was a pinging: a tapping on his aquarium. From somewhere out in the dark, a little life was reaching out to Huber. Acting without thought or sense, he lunged toward it–taking the velvet ropes down in his fall–and snatched the child out of her impatient little dance; took her to the ground and clung to her as if she would keep him afloat. When the wide bright world clicked into light and the mother pulled him from her daughter–fingertips at his eyelids–he awoke like the Man of Bethany with no expression but sleepy confusion. He’d go on to feel that he’d become the object of some greater miracle which he was only tenuously allowed to apprehend. The arrest didn’t matter. None of it mattered. He’d touched the hem of a divine garment and still–on this day in the bushes–he could feel its touch and smell the air that it had moved: like soil after rain.

Em is not in the garden. But there is the shiver of life from within the house that fills Huber with a gall-rising satisfaction. The windows, like the panels of a comic, tell a story in captured moments: a figure–maybe Em–passing in the shadow fragments of shoulders and hips from corner to corner in the day-sway of chores, perhaps; the dull shine of bathroom tile; then, through from the livingroom, the little feet of Joan propped up on the couch’s back, the soles facing out at Huber like palm fronds at the sun. She was home, then. Sick, maybe.

Then another shiver: new and striking: a rising of red like a sandstorm over the sky’s western wall, out from behind the couch. Then the disappearance of the little feet and, up and out through the pestilence, the little girl’s face–a nocked arrow, drawn and dead and distant–gazing through the red at Huber in his hideaway. He feels the hide on the back of his neck grow tight as if curling in the sun. Here it is again: something–the thing–peeking through the veil from the other side of things.

Huber bursts from the rosebush. His palms and scalp are marred by the roses in a mess of catscratch lines and his right calf is torn open by a branch. He runs, tumbles, bleeding and mewling, shoulders stooped and legs giving out, and falls flank-first into Em’s front door.

“Lord, thank you,” he says, “it’s her, I know, it’s her.”

Inside, Em is making a grilled cheese sandwich for Joan that she knows the girl won’t eat so she just decides to end the facade and eat the sandwich herself and let her daughter go about her inevitable business. She doesn’t hear the thump.

Back across the street, Papa Cho is in a deep state of meditation in which he experiences a psychic dominion so total that it’s become lonely, there, inside, above it all.

At the nearby Neal Park, a coyote has set up shop atop the high slide at the playground local families have come to call the Blue Lot. Last night, curiosity got the better of her so she let herself tumble down the spiral slide and feel the warm dark disappearance before the head-over-tail fall into the sand. It was thrilling. She’d done it–again and again–until the sand gave way to concrete and her fur stood up in scared-cat static bunches. Now she casts her gaze out over the park. Her domain. Parents yank their little children away from the Blue Lot upon spotting her. Some throw trash in her direction, trying to startle her away. A father–bearded and newly gym-fit in a somewhat manic way–forms a big X with his body and hollers, thinking without actual thought of anecdotes about bears. An elderly woman dials the police. The coyote is unbothered. None can touch her here. When night comes, these hollering earthlings will return to their dens and she will slide again. For now, she has her own inside silence and the shiver-skin-shimmer of birds and sunlight atop the pond.

Turtles gather at the lake’s edges, sunbathing on black rocks. Gracie May is lakeside, reclined in her stroller, with the soles of her not-yet three month old feet aimed upward at the sideways morning sun. Her parents sit on a bench to her right eating brie-buerre sandwiches. They do this all the time. Before Gracie’s world had even taken shape–when it was still a buttery melange of light and shadow–her parents brought her to the park just to get out, as it were.

Now, with some weeks under her belt, her world is beginning to be populated by objects: discrete touchable loveable things. Take the turtles, for instance. Gracie May is just now noticing them. She watches as one of them–an old drunken grandmother of a thing–cranes its long neck skyward and parts its beak for the passage of cool morning air. How incredible. How magnificent that such a thing could be at all. Gracie May is moved to silence. All of this beautiful skyward world for herself! How to commemorate this occasion? From her silence, suddenly and perfectly, she sings a Song of Turtles:

“Yes, baby, of course,” her mother coos in return. She takes a bite from her sandwich, then runs a finger through its middle and presents Gracie with a taste of butter. The babe–rich and quick with the joy of life lit anew–gladly accepts that which glistens on her mother’s finger. Delicious and different and welcome, this lovely stranger at the door of her life: butter, by God. She sings a Song of Butter:

Over all and all, now and ever, spreads this new immense urge of urges: the always-next and -forward procreant urge of the world. Gracie May’s attention–the vehicle of her love–sprouts out from her in slow but inevitable tendrils: a thousand thousand arms of love. A thousand thousand songs. This tree of life. And with this new growth, she becomes a person: Gracie Mae Plurabelle.

Father Plurabelle slips his hand into Mother’s backpocket, trying on a new slick confidence that he feels ought to come naturally to a pater familias but, for better or worse, doesn’t yet fit. A not insignificant part of him still quivers at the impossibility of this new life: this family, this peace, the taste of butter and the shiver of wind over the lake. He remembers kneeling at the side of Gracie May’s crib as she slept and wanting more than anything to confess–to tell her all that he’s done and all that he deserves and, with this confession, somehow keep the taxman at bay: to keep running with this joy with which, somehow and somewhere along this merry way, he had absconded. Each night, in that open-room booth with the priest sleeping swaddled and skyward and the humidifier’s hiss and the hum of mute sin in his chest, Father Plurabelle could only raise “Thank you… thank you…”: all of this as the sweet little priest dreamt in black-and-white.

So now he spends his days sitting and waiting for the joy of his life to become real to him. For now, there is the warmth of his hand in his wife’s pocket, his daughter’s gentle song, and even the black smoke rising over the treeline betrays something beautiful.

In the low atmosphere, carbon atoms gather like cousins at a wake, all a-clashing in their upward swirl. Some bond–bringing new life to their swirls of sulfur, hip-locked dancing with hydrogen and chlorine–while others ping off of each other and careen outward, painting the sky’s blue in the grey of evenings and firearms. Tracing this wake downward, mist gives way to smoke gives way to high invisible licks of fire, then to the burning building about and around which people huddle and fret and send great jets of water up and into the blaze. There are sobs and heaves and nervous chuckles and the lull and thrum of low voices hard at work. Then, shooting through its center as if from an open artery, Len Green sprints soot-soaked and barefoot out from the burning building–releasing a shriek that is neither laugh nor lament–and disappears into the trees with Bernstein’s lighter held aloft.

He sheds his clothing as he goes. Nothing runs through his head but a red-alert buzz. He stops and leans against a tree and removes his underwear, revealing his naked rump to the open air though no one is around to see it and the thrill of his own exposure is his alone to miss. Not knowing to where he runs, he carries his newly splintered soul–the gilded cube of consciousness still firm in-hand–off toward Lake Bundren whose chilly glare abides no flame.

Len’s trousers find themselves atop a squirrel who, in his full-bellied and dreamless sleep, feels nothing but a kind of unconscious gratitude for the blanket. Its tail shivers and tickles the trunk end of a system of lichen whose many-chorded voice–mute to simian ears–rises in a hymn that climbs their attendant maple and translates into shaken air with the coda of the jays in the overstory. From this point overhead, a network of squirrel kits, unknown to each other but united in their dreamy selfsame smudge sight, ping like radar with Len’s flight through the forest: they sing out a map of his passage in chirps. Seconds or less. Perhaps it is their relative blindness or some real unverifiable miracle but, as Len’s bare feet leave the embrace of the grass and land in the waters of Lake Bundren, he seems not to sink but to run right across it–too fast for gravity–and disappear only with the coming of a fog that obscures even the pines of Dobbs’ Isle.

The fish beneath care not to play witness here. None pay attention. One trout, now rudderless with age, nestles between two rocks to die. A school of tetra shiver in fright with the passage of a gar who only moments ago had pondered if he’d ever be able to smile, or if this frown of his is permanent in an anatomically if not spiritually determined way.

Down in the lake’s bed, mitten crabs rise from beneath the sand like workingmen from their sheets–all a-tilt in a kind of determination that comes only with sleepiness. They skitter-march forth. They dodge shafts of light and climb over one another with total calm. There is no offense here. No desperation. No starvation. Just quiet brotherhood; each as unique as a snowflake; their movement as steady as a storm. Steady, now, up the phalanges, the talus, the tibia, the patella and femur, some up over the humerus (one nestles in the sacrum), many up and down and over again the ribs, then a veritable superhighway up through the cervical vertebrae and the mandible overflows with the hungry emergence of furry-mittened life. Some even begin to build new homes (new views–the promise of children!) along the chains that drape down over the thoracic vertebrae. One particularly daring crab dives down to plumb the sands by the anvil.

The skeleton is that of E. B. Mifune, otherwise variably known as Johnny Jacaranda, Nick Hornsby, The Man, The Fat Man, and the Other One, but his mother had always called him E. B. (Eeby, he always felt), so now his restless soul has long forgotten all those other names.

The Ollsville papers had not reported his disappearance. He’s not in or of its history. But if one were to proverbially corner any of its elderly–say, over tea–they’d tell you that they learned as children not to answer the door for strangers. Eeby was one of those figures who’d fled history for the silent comforts that lie at the ragged edges of memory.

He’d been enormous by virtue of both heredity and volition. Born at twelve pounds, his body was always ahead of his mind at a not insignificant clip, so that, by the time he was in middle school, he was often mistaken for the kind of morbidly obese middle-aged clerks that populated the city’s diners and tram-lines at dawn and dusk. Men asked him for cigarettes. Others of particularly voracious and outre sexual tastes propositioned him gently before realizing, having seen themselves in the nymphwater of his eyes, that they’d made a horrible mistake. He ate his poor mother out of house and home and though, at the uppermost branches of her soul–distant and windswept–she felt the personal cost of her toil (the overnight shifts at the grocery store, the multiple daily trips to the soda jerk [“Mightn’t you just sell me a vat of the syrup?”], the late nights making half-a-dozen grilled cheese sandwiches that he carried in not so much a lunchsack as a duffel bag), she loved the boy dearly. Ever since the doctor first hefted the blood-smeared infant to her breast, she had felt his weight there–a heavy and serious weight–like a stone from the River Jordan–and she felt it every moment of her life. It was a comfort. And she just, despite it at all–despite his father leaving and despite her diagnoses and despite the lack of money and despite the lack of sleep and despite despite despite–despite it all, she just wanted to pay the boy back for having heaped her with such warmth: for having forced her, rooted her, back down to her very own earth.

There were whispers at her funeral that the boy had smothered her to death and, in a sense, it was true. The teenage Eeby stood by the coffin for the entirety of the service not out of grief-stricken filial duty but, rather, because he’d broken three of the mortician’s chairs during the rehearsal and the sweaty old git was balancing ballerinic on his very last straw.

Many blamed his simplicity on his size. There’s a peculiarly long half-life to the greater belief that, as one’s physical stature grows, the sister-soul of intellectual stature diminishes in equal, if not exponential, quantity. But Eeby’s simplicity was not an intellectual diminishment: it was the cumulative effect of having lived a life as a fundamentally strange being. Reminders of his strangeness, all around and at every moment, smoothed him out like water does a stone, so by adulthood he skipped across the surface of his life with a peculiar lack of resistance and, as is only logically right and decidedly terrible, he hit the far end of the river quicker than most.

Eeby was seventeen when he met Oliver Baynes Mienko, otherwise variably known as Alister Alovera, Charlie Incidentally, The Man, The Thin Man, and That One, but Eeby came to call him Obee. Eeby was just about the grandest fairground pig Obee had ever seen. From every pore scattered across that All-American pulchritude came the low smell of money which always made Obee aware of the palms of his hands and the space between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. Though he’d already gotten a pretty good thing going racing horses (he could all but guarantee the weekly victory of one particular quarterhorse, Darlin’ I Tell Ya I Ain’t Dreamt Since You Left, through the strategic and surreptitious injection of a cocktail of B Vitamins and cocaine), his conman’s intuition told him that said bubble was well on its way to bursting. A horse’s heart can only take so much. A man needs a living. Lodging. Tobacco. Food. And here was Eeby, fat and smooth like an old king; as solid as a boulder before a cavemouth; as sweet and simple as buttercream.

The game was simple. Door-to-door sales was still the style of the time, and, though Obee, at a glance, would be considered fundamentally untrustworthy by the gentler set (with his grease and scars and golden teeth), Eeby’s rotundity and silence brought with them an air of calm authority that might lull your average homebound soul into a placid passive consumer bliss. Obee took Eeby to the tailor and the old, typically steely, Italian man all but shooed them out with a broom. “No inventory! No inventory!” he’d hollered. But Ollsville Silver had just seen new inventory from a travelling circus that just happened to lay down and die in Ollsville that summer, and the Gentleman Walrus no longer had any need for costuming (they had a recurring skit in which said Gentleman Walrus would don a suit and tie and attempt to get a bank loan), so Eeby was soon church- and business-ready in wool and cotton.

“It’s all a matter of wanting,” Obee had said. “These people, they get old and they get married and they have children and the children grow up and leave them and they find themselves alone again and they think–they think–that it is their age and their aloneness that makes them want but, boy Jesus, they’re just too stupid to know they’ve been wanting the whole goddamn time and that the marriage and the kids and the jobs and the houses have all been insufficient–so insufficient as to only make them want more. I mean, listen, if you give a starving man nothing, then he just goes right on without a peep–just silent suffering swallowed freely. But say you give him a single oyster cracker and that’s all there is. Drives him fucking nuts. Banging his head on the concrete about it. So he wants another, then more banging, more screaming, then another and another. And somewhere inside he’s convinced that the next cracker is finally gonna fix it. This one will fill me full, it will ful-fill me. But no. Simply isn’t the case. So they go on skipping through life, tip-toeing on mania, from cracker to cracker, and the want never really goes away. Too stupid or proud to know that the wanting is their life. And if they’d just accepted that in the fucking first place they wouldn’t be so fucking sad about it. And we wouldn’t be knocking on their door. But you wouldn’t know about starving, would you, kid?,” at which point Obee had crumbled into a fit of vague staccato laughter–a habit that, despite seeming somewhat staged, he was often wont to do.

Obee couldn’t have understood that Eeby did, in fact, understand the plight of the starving man: it was, for all intents and purposes, his chronic ontological condition. Though it was easy to mistake his silence for satisfaction. Few know that real desire–like that of castrated monks in their heel-grooves, half-sleeping–is silent and dreamy and forever.

So, believe it or not, Eeby was not a mere silent rube to Obee’s swashbucking conman.

They sold all manner of things. Obee’s existing connections meant that a great many commodities were always proverbially falling off of trucks and landing right in his garage. Their inventory just depended on the day and the neighborhood: papal and presidential portraits, commemorative stoneware, jewelry, cutlery, women’s one-piece bathing suits. personal radios, hunting kits with knife and strop and flint in water-proof keyring, prints of the fine art greatest hits, LPs, EPs, cleaning fluids named in the manner of quotidian sorcery (Wish-Away, Gunk-B-Gone, SWISH!), foldable mops and brooms, dry air cooling apparatuses, ironing boards that we can install today right into the wall by your dryer, trifle jars of potpourri, paperback romances, paperback westerns, paperback legal thrillers, all manner of shoes and shoe-cleaning accessories.

The product didn’t matter. It was just a catalyst for the real consumer reward: the transubstantiative drama of the purchase.

And this went on for some time. Neither Obee nor Eeby grew particularly rich, but they did all right for themselves and even Eeby, caught at the right moment, began to take on the easy gait of an alley cat. They dined in restaurants and smoked cigars right there at the table. Obee’s wardrobe grew larger and more and more ostentatious until the tailor had to tell him that he just couldn’t order sheets of blue paisley in such amounts and he was fairly certain that he couldn’t get them from Persia because he was, again, fairly certain that no such place existed anymore. Hadn’t some Spartan Penelope run them out of town way back when?

It may be a kind of love, Obee sometimes thought. Did he love this strange immensity? Eeby, a brother? No: a thing. A chap, perhaps. But a thing. And in his dreams, more often all the time, he was visited by a monolith the breadth of which he could encompass with both arms but, in height, disappeared into a velvet sky.

This ease ended with a visit to the home of a woman named Martha Horseman (her father had been Antoine Chevalier but, on his leaving-home papers, became Tony Horseman), which sat at the very bottom of a cul-de-sac’s bag, with high windows draped in purple and a widow’s walk from which an immense ivy leaned outward in its slow dying. It was the only house left on the street. Some builder had bought up the lots around it and planned to build low-rise apartment complexes but the curtain of bureaucracy had fallen upon him some time ago, so, as Eeby and Obee pulled up to Martha’s house, the lots were nothing but ragged weeds and hobo camps and feral dogs all atwirl in lovemaking.

Martha’s vision was beginning to go, so her lipstick–cherry black–ran well over her lips and set her face into a kind of clownish smirk, as if she grew tired of actually expressing her I’m-Still-Here pride and just decided to paint that sucker on. She was tiny and stout and looked like she’d be difficult to knock over. Obee imagined her going at some poor fella’s kneecaps over a minor dispute. He chose to find the image cartoonish rather than foreboding.

Martha’s inveterate pride and self-satisfaction made her peculiar prey to filth-peddlers like Eeby and Obee. She felt herself unassailable. She’d gotten through much of her life as an enormously rich woman, so she could withstand a great number of dings to her estate without any real sense of loss. But the decades had come and gone and a lifetime of proverbial pebbles at her window had finally and inauspiciously let the winter in. She didn’t know that she was broke. Though, perhaps, somewhere inside, she did–hence the pride. She’d never married or had children, but her sense of family was ironclad. Her last living relative was her older brother, Marty: a figure with whom Obee was unfortunately familiar and, even more unfortunately, was soon to appear on his sister’s doorstep.

Marty Horseman, at the time of this affair, was ninety-seven years old. Time had not stooped him by an inch. He was six-foot-four and, as any at the Ollsville Sports Club could then attest, averaged 350 pounds on the bench press. He’d found enormous commercial success with his geriatric wellness program, STILL HERE, which offered brochures detailing strength training regiments tailored to the elderly, as well as an extensive product line of pre-packaged meals, nutritional supplements, and at-home exercise equipment. He’d even recently been taken up as a sponsor for the tremendously popular radio show, The Ruby Dee and Golly Gee Power Hour, at the middle point of which Marty would, live for the audience, conduct a five-minute aerobics course to be followed by listeners at home. He still had all of his teeth. His hairline, while no longer intact, never crossed anyone’s mind.

Before he was a mogul, Marty was a gangster. None of his geriatric wealth had come from any Horseman family fortune: whatever of that which was his had long ago been lost at craps tables, in arms deals, and in legal fees. He took his first stint in prison at fifteen for robbing a fruit seller and beaning the poor old bastard in the head with a stanchion while doing so. He managed fifteen cents out of the deal. The old man languished in a fevered coma for some weeks before waking up with no memory of the affair, but, nevertheless, a decidedly new lease on life.

It was during Marty’s last stint in prison, beginning at the age of eighty, that he met Obee. They shared a cell: Marty was in for puncturing car tires outside a movie theatre then trying to charge the car’s owners for a tow as they left the show; Obee was in for exposing himself to a woman at a bar (he would claim, until his dying day, that he meant absolutely nothing by it). The third cellmate was the teenage Lou Dobbs–clear-eyed and shiny-cheeked–who was in for setting fire to a live sheep.