Highwater High

Take it like this:

like a two-step, the downbeat coming quickly and relentless. Take it home with you, and put it in your inside pocket, out of the cold. Take it to your safe imaginary and lock it away, away from the world of asphalt and nuclear fission and sun shine.
Glorious, beautiful sunshine.
For this is love, and it’s fragile in the rays. It needs a long night and quiet.
**
Janet was in the middle of something - of an ice-cream pop to be specific - and it all seemed too damn much for her at a time like that. She had molten chocolate cream gushing down her face, floes drying before she could wipe them away with her withering napkin, increasingly futile in its work. They couldn’t be hid, or played off. She’d have to embrace them. So, five year-old from nose to chin, Janet went out to strut.
He was coming up the hall, still chewing his pencil from his math exam. The way he snorted when he laughed was one of the things she liked about him. When he stopped, she giggled.
He gave a chortle back, a half-snort, almost there. She forgave him this time, for there was conversation to begin – the first since he had dropped her off.
“So how ya doin’?”
She'd play it safe. Keep it honest, sure, but ease him in slow.
“Hi,” he snickered back. “I mean, well, well, it’s just…”
“Yeah. I couldn’t clean it off.”
“No, not the ice cream. It’s just, you see…”
This wasn’t right at all. She had initiated the conversation. It should have been her serve for at least one set.
“Just what?” Oooh. The words popped right out from her throat; she yearned to reel them back, even curling her tongue like they wouldn’t fall off. Now she had to dive in. “I mean, I want to lay this on the line. I really like you. It’s absurd. It didn’t really start last night, and I don’t think it did for you either. I don’t need you to put a ring on me or whatever. I just need to be sure I wasn’t a one-off., that there’s potential for this to go somewhere, you know, if that’s what seems right.”
“Right. No. Totally. I agree totally – I” (Now he snorted for real. Her heart jumped, knocking her mind into a swoon). “It’s just, well…”
“That phrase makes me kinda nervous, Johnny”
“I’m a marsh demon.”
“What?”
Janet liked laughs, especially accompanied by snorts. Janet did not like jokes. Or stupid grins like they could appease her.
“You’re being facetious.”
“No.”
“Ironic.”
“You don’t even know what that word means.”
“Well I’m pretty damn sure I’m using it right now.”
“It’s a good shot, but I’m just telling you the truth. I think you had to know.”
“Why, but, why couldn’t you tell me before? Maybe last night, before you held me so close and…” She was nearly transported by bliss, but matters were pressing here. Unfortunately, he’d already taken control of the discussion.
“It didn’t matter before, and besides, really, how easy do you think it is to get a girl to kiss you if she knows you're a marsh demon?”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Especially a hip, sexy, and totally landbound girl like you?”
“Aww, you.” But he had a point, and it would explain the B.O. “Shouldn’t you be, like, shooting noxious fumes and cavorting with banshees.”
“I mean...I should be.”
“But instead…”
“How could I give up this face?”
“Same time tonight? No. Tonight I’ve got bingo with Mom-mom at the Union Hall. Maybe tomorrow, Johnny?"
“That sounds great. I’ll pick you up again.”
“Right after sundown.”
“So this is why you only go out on cloudy days.”
He snorted in response, so big it seemed to echo off the lockers. No one else noticed – in high school everybody’s so focused on themselves. Except Janet.
“Oh, this is really for the best. I feel like I know so much more about you. I can’t believe I never noticed. “
In response, he lifted one slime-coated tentacle to her tender dimpled cheek, and sucked her face into his cavernous maw.
God, he was such a better kisser than Tommy.

It was there in the window

Hold it together, he thought. Just a few more minutes and he'll be here.

His back was pressed up against the window of what might have been a store—maybe it was a cafe—but he was nervous, and he hadn't paid enough attention to notice. He stared down each end of the street in turns; for five or six seconds he would watch the people and cars coming at him from one side, then slide his smooth-heeled shoe across the pavement and stare intently to the other. It was February and he was sweating, and he couldn't stop. His handkerchief was cold and damp, and it gave him shivers every time he ran it over his forehead.

Maybe him? A rather well-dressed older man, the type you could call a gentleman and really mean it, was coming towards him from the left. The gentleman wasn't paying any particular attention to anyone or thing around him. It was nothing overt like that that caught his eye. It was the man's glasses that made him seem like the type to be a spook. But no, he walked right on past, just like everyone else who, over the past fifty minutes, had seemed suspicious because of an oddly-colored scarf, unflatteringly curved nose or indelicate walk.

He squeezed the handkerchief for lack of anything else to do. Moisture came out of it as if from a sponge, and he was disgusted to find his hands moistly greased in a way only sweat could do.

If he'd had a watch he would've been checking it obsessively, but he was pretty sure that it had finally been an hour since he'd arrived here. And then, at his wits end, dismayed that a woman across the street whose pink-rhinestone veil he had thought was a dead giveaway, when he had finally persuaded himself to blow the meeting off and find a glass of scotch and a dry napkin, he was shocked by a finger pointedly jabbing his lower back and the unmistakable uneasiness one feels when the animal brain is aware that it is no longer alone.

A voice from over his shoulder said, “You have ten minutes to make it to Clary's. Take even two seconds more and the whole thing's on ice.”

He wanted to run, right then and there, but he needed to know who the finger belonged to and whether he'd been looking for the right signs. Unable to stop his diaphragm from quavering like a sail in a storm, he decided to turn around, and did. Each of the one-hundred eighty degrees between him and his informant was a torture more hideous than the last.

There was nobody there. It would have been a cliché if he had had time to think about it. No, what he was met with instead was that most awful of feelings, one of revelation and powerlessness, because he saw immediately that there was a man—two men, three men, four—walking towards him, and he knew they were coming for him because they were dressed in uncomplicated, neutral-colored suits and their pedestrian anonymity bled a grinning, thuggish malice.

Run, he told himself.

He did. He ran as if he was being chased—and he knew, though he never stopped to look back, that he was. Everything was so unbelievably fast as he ran; he could make out no faces nor details of anyone he passed, the street becoming a layer-cake of grays and metal-paint greens.

His feet were so heavy, so unbearably heavy, that he couldn't stop himself from crashing into everything nearby; and yet he felt as far from the ground as if he was watching his own panicked dash from the clouds.

He might have turned a corner when he found Clary's, but his mind had accelerated with him and had long since lunged beyond the past. Still wild and unfocused, he was ignorant of his surroundings, and would have overshot completely if not for the flicker of a feeling at the periphery of his awareness, a bell-tinkling that made his roaring mind itch.

There it is, his intuition informed him. And, looking to his left, the newspaper was, through a window, indeed there.

He felt profoundly good, and pressed his face to the glass. The reflection of an old man with a lazy stoop filled the edge of the window, and then the street was mercifully empty.

Without him asking it to, his hand had found the envelope that he had tucked into the inside pocket of his overcoat. Looking at it, he realized that his fingertips had left long, damp marks across its face.

Good, he thought, before dropping it onto the street, at least they'll know it was me.

We are new men

"But of course," he said, in the kind of drawing room lit only by lamps with green-glazed shades, "you can't expect moral discipline, not anymore. The foundations of past times were as concrete as a sidewalk or a Soviet apartment building. Today we do not simply forget to believe. We can't possibly begin to imagine what belief really is! And so you see the absurdity of any appeal to the old staples of that handsome, well-ordered time. The human mind was in chains then, of course, but as the Negro chain gang on the road it was disciplined by the hardness of its circumstance and nourished by the sureness of hierarchy, until its body grew too large and strong for those chains and broke free. And now we stand upon our ruined shackles in an age of muscularity. Not with the wiry strength of the yeoman that hurls the pick and axe over day upon day, but with the dumbell-and-calisthentic physique which the scientists of strength test and refine with their own flesh, must we understand our future to lie."

His son listened to this and nodded, for his father declaimed often on this subject and it brought him a warm sense of reassurance to hear it repeated. It was perhaps also that this room made him almost giddy, so strong was his the feeling it gave him in what he was not embarrassed to call his soul. The desk and the bookcases were older than he. Their constancy reminded him of what he believed he would enjoy in siblings, had he had any who had not died before his birth. He had sat often on a little wooden chair the maid would bring in especially for him, sat and regarded his father while he drew like a winter's wool coat around himself the mystery of his affairs. They rarely spoke, the old man an orthodox adherent of the silence-of-children school, but that did not bother his son overly much; he took pleasure in his other senses, delighting even now in the scribbling of a pen or the vaguely racy sound of a seal pushed into hot wax.

He loved his father as he thought one ought to, which is to say in the fashion of an Israelite to his dangerously equivocal, but nonetheless paternal, God. And so he was only too glad, now as a young man, to sit in the study in the chair reserved for his father's associates and nod agreeably at the old man's lecture. Nor was it merely affectation, his compliance, for in this house he knew the blessings of certitude and consistency, blessings for which he prostrated himself before his progenitor with absolute faith that they had been bestowed by him.

His father was looking into the fireplace although it was unlit.

"Yes, my son, yours will not be a life grounded in religion, but do not curse this fact. Naturally you will never be a man of greatness such as once pierced as the dawn the night of the soul that shrouded ages past. What man now sees within himself with such clarity as Buddha or Christ? This nearsightedness is no fault of physical infirmity. The laws of evolution have made ironclad the proposition that the body is no less motivated by progress than is the force of history itself! No, it is simply that that into which they gazed was made luminous by a thing, at once magnificent and primitive, that burned hotter than the purest manganese. That was the soul, my son. For if it is that ours is an age of great bodily hypertrophy, yesterday it was within a man that one found the same mightiness of sinew. You cannot be so strong within, so embrace it without."

He had been taking a cigar out of the humidor in the desk's top drawer while he spoke, and now stopped speaking in order to snip and then light one for himself. He did not extend the same courtesy to his son, and, from the settling of his brow and the way his eyes lost their focus, it was probably the case that to do so had not occurred to him. There was quiet, and it stretched on without showing any signs of stopping as the clock added each second. Eventually it became clear that the old man was finished and his son was to recognize that their company was meant to be parted.

He hardly noticed the telegram in government off-beige on the edge of his father's desk as he was walking out of the office, for he thought he heard the sound of a woman crying in the hallway, and was sure it was his mother. The old man, too, no longer seemed happy, his cheeks having crept up even as his brow had slumped down.

In the doorway, he glanced down at the newspaper he had brought with him into the study.

"Oh, but the Prussians have gone to Belgium," he remarked to his father before stepping out. The old man remained silent. His son frowned, took in the scent of the office as he left, and, smiling, died in the Ardennes two weeks later.

Beit Sahour

On Christmas day in Bethlehem, the shepherds watched their flocks, attentively as always. They worried about the rainfall that season, and the quality of the grass their lambs were eating. They concerned themselves with those sheep that looked worn, and argued over the ones who had gone astray, wandered from the flock. There were some certain sheep, who would in quiet hours list quite slowly towards the other shepherds, other flocks. They found in the crook of the far off staff an invitation familiar, and known, and warm. They stretched their necks and baa-ed, coyly. In the hearts of the shepherds, those left and those new-joined, there lived a fire. In the hearts of the sheep – who could know?
At night the sun was setting and the stars would rise as always, so they did. There were some who saw the sky and knew it, like as there were some who saw the sky but as a ceiling full of stars, never remarkable. From this first group came the paltry few, memorialized forever in the crèche, who attended to the Lord Jesus at his birth. No one could know, and even the Gospels extrapolate, whether the starfire burned bright in the hearts of the shepherds, or of the sheep. Who was led, and who followed – who could know?

Violence, 1

The taking of another’s life is an act that can be learned to transparency much as a particular algebraic trick or sequence of dance steps. Children in Sierra Leone can learn this skill, and do. Killing is merely learning by rote. A fight is different—not because of it is romantic, or anything else so adolescent. No, a fight is different because it is irreducible. It is a plurality of acts but it is contingent on no single one of them—each equilibrium is incidental and all its own.

The first thing that happens is fear. Total and overwhelming, it courses over and through you, lighting your synapses ablaze. When you look the man who you are going to fight, your fear magnifies him to grotesque proportions. His nerves appear steely while yours are gelatin. How does he stand so coolly, when your knees wobble and your legs feel unable to hold the ground? He must feel nothing but a brutal readiness. When he punches you the blow will be precise and it will be with maximum force, whereas your swings will be glancing and amateurish.

You could just sink into your own gut, then.

These few seconds before you jump into the fray are timeless, as is often said about them. They are also torturous--they force a fireworks show of potentiality through your mind, possibilities that burn with manic intensity into existence, fade rapidly, and are replaced almost immediately by others more shocking and terrible.

**

Fear? He felt it for a few moments, but then an explosion of force sent him, shoes squeaking on wet concrete, to the ground. The feeling was something like magnesium burning at the tips of his nerves. There is something peculiar about being hit in the face for the first time, if the hit is a good one. You feel less terrible than you’d imagine. The explanation is part chemical, part intangible: a mix of adrenaline and dopamine, and uncertainty dispelled by total directness. His jaw ached somewhere far away.

**

The first blow confirms your worst fears and thereby liberates you from them. You know that the fight has started. You know the substance of it: knuckles digging into muscle or glancing off bone; nervous stumbling and the skinning of knees on pavement; a kind of deafness that spares only your heartbeat, your heartbeat which fills your chest, throat and ears, and which, with the amphetamines and opiates painting your psychic palate with Pollackian imprecision, is its own special madness.

**

His mind felt blurred, but he was clear and had purpose. Pushing himself up from his knees, he charged forward. Though he paid no attention to it, he had unconsciously put his hands in front of his face and bent his back. His body was struggling to remember boxing matches, movie combat-- playground self-defense, even. The first punch he threw was no good, a bad straight that would have been glancing even if it’d been aimed right. It cost him another wack to the face. This time, though, he did not stumble. Relaxation swept through the muscles of his lumbar spine and abdomen, then down into his quadriceps, so that he was squatting, and then pushing against the ground, driving a curled fist at the other man’s throat and jaw. It connected; the hands that had in the meantime taken hold of his lapels loosened, the other man slackened and his eyes went hazy.

**

A fight goes on like this: sometimes you feel elation and you move with smooth athleticism, only to be cut off by a misstep or mere chance and returned to anxious caution. Then there is the exhaustion. You put your whole self behind each strike in the hope that it will be the last one needed, and you do this repeatedly, endlessly. Your chest begins to scream. Fatigue is the worst pain of them all, far worse than physical injury. Fatigue is an oracle: it can tell you long in advance whether you’ll come out the better or not. When your lungs cannot keep up with your body a grim satisfaction overtakes you. It is the kind of satisfaction that a man going to his execution might feel, knowing contentedly, if not happily, that he no longer need suffer any lingering ambiguity about his fate.

**

This man’s lungs were about at this point. He was lucky, though--he had always been lucky. His opponent seemed to be if anything in worse shape, despite having boxed a better round. A small cut over the other man’s cheek was filling his mouth with blood so that if he didn’t spit constantly he was seized by spasmodic coughing. Had the man been a more experienced fighter—had he done no more than run a few miles in the morning over the past few months—he would have recognized this as a time to clinch the set. At least he could take his breath, which he did with large, clumsy, liberal gasps.

**

The end of a fight is instantly recognizable because it feels just like that. It is the literal end of the body. In each person the end is timed differently, a function of physique and willpower. Nevertheless it is inevitable and ubiquitous. The muscles no longer function: a punch or a kick thrown then is habitual, not strategic. The contestants come closer, unable now to deliver power and so hoping that strength, if not pure mass, will decide the struggle. With hands soaked in sweat, sometimes in blood, they take limbs and torsos in their grasp, pulling and pushing, wrapping around each other’s legs. In truth what both need is the support of the other. Their bones feel brittle. Their muscles cannot deliver. So they come close, putting their heads on each other’s shoulders even while wrenching this way and that with their whole bodies. That this scene is a facsimile of romance—that the whole exchange is unmistakably sexual—is oft remarked upon.

**

He kicked at the other man’s shins and had his kicked in turn. He did not do what he did because of volition. The dopamine had left him, and the adrenaline was following fast behind. A badly aimed but exceptionally forceful stab of the knee sent him reeling back onto his feet. He saw the eyes of the other man not for the first time but for the first that stuck in his memory, and was momentarily stilled. And then came the magnesium fire again and he was suddenly facing the wall, the trash cans, a seam in the concrete and what he thought of as a lake of blood. Oh, he thought. Oh, I’m the one who’s bleeding. And then he might have been kicked, he couldn’t tell. It had already become too dark to notice.

**

Sometimes we lose—more often, one suspects, than we admit. The loser is lucky; he goes to sleep. It’s the winner for whom complications loom. The body on the ground that moments before was a threat, an enemy, ceases to be foreign and, in its helplessness, becomes human. It is a strange metamorphosis, and sympathy an uncomfortable reward. Few men find it too much of an immediate bother, though. They leave the body, leave the street, congratulate themselves on their strength, take pride in their wounds (no longer embarrassments but trophies), and find others to celebrate and exaggerate them. A fight has that strange propensity to generate exponential dishonesty, a cascade of lies and half-truths that help fashion mystique from what is really nothing more opaque than pain and terror. The winner will savor his victory only until he is called upon to defend this new myth. He will fight again.

The loser will awake eventually to his own dilemma. He will confront it with cuts, bruises—maybe even a sprain or broken knuckle—that have had time to set into his body and become horrid. His luck is that he will be an object of sympathy, if he can lie soon and well enough. Inside he will feel inadequate and angry. He will look for any slight against him with eagle eyes; alcohol will help both his courage and to shorten his fuse. He, too, will fight again.

On some street somewhere these opposite strains will coalesce. The sequence of blows will not matter, and the winner may change. Violence, like matter, is conservative and chaotic; ignorant of circumstance and unchanging it is a moral-less force. But for the man who awakes on the ground at its worse end, or the one who sleeps guiltily in his bed at its best, that same panoply of emotions, chemicals, tension and desiccation, will appear unrelentingly anew.

Because if she still loves you on a Tuesday in the rain

This is a first draft, and more an experiment (for me) with a narrative perspective than an effective piece. If you've got a minute, I'd love to hear what you think. If you're pressed for time, treat yourself a bit - scroll down and read about Zev.

Bill didn't know what had made him so irritable that afternoon. He hadn't meant to say all those things to the bus driver, because he was sure the poor craggy man's mother was a perfectly nice woman, and quite chaste, and quite dead. In fact, he doubted, unless she was quite an athlete, that she could even execute the acrobatic feats he had attributed to her.

A honking car jolted him out of a crosswalk. His wandering mind had carried him all the way down the Oak Street hill, far past Jenny's Consignment Shop and its pruning merchandise and its almost anachronistically curvaceous cashier. He couldn't really go back unless he had a mind to buy something, and even rummaging through the mothball-drenched store made his stomach turn. The cashier was 60, he was sure, and it was just the reek of preservatives that kept her looking collegiate and taut. Still, he got goosebumps whenever she smiled at him. He tried to make a point of peeking in each day, and giving a shout of hello in fair weather when the door was propped open. Except some days he blundered past and he was ruined for a whole 24.

“Hello, Bill.”

Bill's mind had a habit of going a different way than his feet, and while he nurtured the image of the cashier's red lips, his feet had carried him into the doughnut shop. Where Debbie worked.

“What can I get for you today, Bill?” Debbie the doughnut girl asked.

Bill thought of the horrible coincidence that to get at something so sweet, he had to penetrate something so sour. He recoiled at the word, “penetrate,” fearing something Freudian, and it must have shown in his face, because Debbie inquired,

“Is everything alright today, Bill?”

And she didn't use the insipid tone that Customer Service Training manuals advocate. She was asking after his health and state of mind. Like she could somehow comprehend, or even assuage the problems that afflicted him. Bill found it repulsive, but then he had been irritable all day, and again, it wasn't like the time she asked him whether he wanted a little extra sugar, and seemed to put a wink on it. It wasn't nearly like the time she asked if he would share his table during her coffee break, with the sly innuendo of a burgeoning advance. That had required a full vocal response – almost a sentence. This could be taken care of with a grunt.

“Un-hunh”

“So what kind of doughnut today, Bill?”

It was a trap. He wanted the manager's special. He always wanted the special, because he always appreciated variety, but this was her way of getting him to say it to her. To say special. To open his mouth and say,

“If I cared as much about my choice of doughnut as you care about your face, I'd probably be eating the puss-filled crater-to-be on your nose, but because I have a powdered-sugar's granule of self-respect, I think I'll go for the goddamn manager's choice. And when you give me the medium coffee, I'd appreciate if you could just give me the sweetener packets to handle myself – I don't want any sweet things slipping accidentally into my coffee.”

When he added it up, he was probably irritable because of the persistent cough from the two-week cold, the two cars that splashed him while he went trudging towards the bus (one ruining his white shirt) and the fact that after a month and a half without a date, the only woman that gave him the time of day was a pimple-faced, lard-loaded doughnut girl he dumped in the 10^th grade. John was happy that his hands could work independently of his mind, for they had already laid four dollar bills on the counter and waved a “keep the change” in the kind of man-in-charge way he wished his squeaky speaking voice could meet. Those confident hands reached up and pulled his flat-brimmed Yankees cap over his eyebrows while his feet plodded over to skulk arrogantly by the pick up counter. He appreciated the shelter from the stares of the other customers and the strident stern gaze of doughnut Debbie as she placed a napkin, and two Equals into his bag beside the chocolate glaze on his special pastry. He tried to fight off the creeping thought that his disgust may have been misplaced; he cocked his own shoulders to ward off the sting to his pride, but then, she said it.

“Have a good evening, Billy.”

The bitch was crazy for him. It didn't matter what he did - this was inviolable ga-ga. And in front of the droop-jawed clientele, he orchestrated all his limbs in a cool, smooth strut.

***

When the Pennsauken Police Department arrived at the dock, the anxious water taxi driver was already attesting his innocence, shouting in broken English about how the body had just washed up against his boat as he was getting ready for the first morning cross to Philadelphia, and nobody wanted to deal with the Camden police about a body. The surly detective was far more interested in the perfectly penned note pinned in the bull’s-eye center of the forehead, the old-fashioned ink uncannily preserved.

The art of drowning

The analogy with captivation makes it seem

voluntary, as if while the lungs are

bursting with emptiness, the mind considers a bit of coral

or a rock formation

to be more persuasive than life

But life is long you say

the analogy works the other way - we

cannot help our drowning

of course, many people think like you

and their bloated bodies surface daily.

I don't have a title; it is kind of long and maybe unfinished

Sitting under the protection of the smeared Plexiglas and moisture warped timetables of the bus-stop shelter, Zev Fellman munched on a soggy rice cracker and dabbed at his nose with a hankie. From the curb, I watched him, far enough to pretend otherwise, my sneakers filling with rainwater. My mother had told me repeatedly and as recently as that morning that I ought to be nice to Zev. He really is such a sweet boy, she had said. And I was such a sweet boy. She had smiled too, patting my shoulders and shaking her head as if she still couldn’t believe her good luck. And Zev wasn’t really so bad, was he?

But Zev was that bad. To my mother, who didn’t have to attend Mission Hill Elementary except for the occasional parent-teacher conference or school play, we were all such sweet boys. She didn’t realize that Zev smelled like steamed vegetables and that he carried around his inhaler with a tube of cortisone cream in a velvet bag with a drawstring. She didn’t have to watch him at recess ruin game after game of kickball and she didn’t have to listen to him cry afterward, conspicuously stomping his L.A. Gear, a trickle of salty snot in every instance left to dry upon his upper lip. She didn’t understand just how frequently he corrected Ms. Morgan during homeroom grammar exercises or how he always ate his lunches in the bathroom.

My mother didn’t see this because she was an adult but she also didn’t see it, I suspected, because she had found a new friend in Sophie Fellman, Zev’s prematurely aged, rice-cracker and hanky-plying mother. Zev had enrolled at Mission Hill while we were both in the second grade and up until the present moment I had been perfectly happy to dispassionately ignore him. To the extent that he was aware of it, this arrangement seemed to suit Zev too. We rarely spoke at school. For what it may have been worth to him, I generally allowed him without too much comment or critique his poorly timed histrionics and flamboyantly zealous literacy and unabashed respect for our teachers, despite the popular consensus among all of the other boys that these qualities were all unquestionably gay. I was, after all, a sweet boy.

But things had begun to change that previous June when the major city newspaper and eight-year employer of my mother’s consumed and absorbed, like a bloated, debt-ridden bacterium, the even further indebted employer of Sophie Fellman, the City Observer, spewing in its wake, among a few million dollars in unsatisfactory severance packages and the region’s remaining journalistic standards, my mother and Mrs. Fellman, bound by fate and unemployment.

And so by early September, when the news of such things could prove to be a social liability for me at school, the two women, one the last editor of the Herald’s once and former metro section, the other, a food and culture critic for the defunct Observer, found themselves working and wincing with defeated resignation for the same thinly distributed neighborhood news-journal, the Twin Valley Lookout.

I cannot say how or when the predictable process that drew my mother closer with each workday to Sophie Fellman began. I cannot say when the cool civility of their working acquaintanceship blossomed into the dependant friendship of the newly and inadequately re-employed. What I can say is that one day I came home to find Sophie Fellman sitting and drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Mrs. Fellman, who I knew by sight as a frequent volunteer at our school and by smell as vigorously reminiscent of a dentist’s office, had introduced herself as Zev’s mom, which was unnecessary, and then proceeded to tell me about all the great things she knew about me. She knew all of these things, she was eager to remind me, because her son had told her these things. This, along with her habit of braying loudly when nothing at all was funny and sitting with her legs too far apart, made my stomach hurt.

That was the first visit. After that, she was back at least once a week for coffee. And then it was for dinner. My mother picked me up from my father’s house after their first outing. She let me choose the radio station on the ride home, which made me nervous. I looked out the window and pressed my knees against the inside of the car door. And then as we waited at a red light, the back window fogging up with our breathing so far mercifully uninterrupted with speech, she turned the volume down and told me how nice it was to have a friend, how things could be difficult sometimes and that sometimes just having someone to talk to can make a big difference.

“You understand that, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Green light,” I said.

But she smiled anyway, accelerating and giving the back of my neck a quick pinch. I understood, I’m sure is what she was thinking. Divorces can be so hard on a kid.

The night that followed was worse. I was watching T.V. after dinner and my mother came out of the bathroom and excused herself for just one moment.

I sat up and looked at her.

“I said, excuse me for just one moment,” she said again.

She fidgeted and looked away. I didn’t understand. I was watching T.V. and she was my mom and there was nothing to excuse. “Excuse me” is something she said to people on the bus or at the supermarket or to the mailman whenever she had to squeeze around him in the hallway. “Excuse me” is something she said to strangers.

“I just need to run out for a quick second.” She paused at the door. “Everything is okay.”

Out the bay windows I watched my mother cross the street to the Fellman family’s small white car. The engine was off, ticking and clicking as it cooled, and Sophie Fellman was sitting in the driver’s seat. I watched my mother get in, and then I watched, in the copper-colored streetlight that filtered in through the car windows, as she started to cry. I watched Mrs. Fellman reach her thick, wrinkled arms across the center divide of the car interior, letting them drape around my mother’s neck, looking like bags of wet oatmeal. The two sat like that in the car for over a half-hour and I sat too, watching out the window and watching one show and then the next flicker on the glass in front of my face and realizing that this small white car was the same one that I saw every day at school. Every day it would arrive promptly at the bell and every day Zev would tuck his backpack in the trunk and climb in the backseat, always in the backseat, even when nobody else was riding up front. And I thought about how my mother had said “excuse me” to go sit in that car, a car that probably reeked of steamed vegetables and rattled with half-empty inhalers, and she had gone there to cry.

Soon after that, the two were discussing the possibility of Zev and I getting together. Mrs. Fellman began referring to us as “you boys.”

And so, flicking my big toes back and forth inside my wet socks and watching the wrong bus go by for the second time, I stayed outside the shelter of the bus-stop and away from Zev. I looked at my watch. My father had given it to me for my birthday a month before. Across its face, a ninja threatened me unenthusiastically with a katana. The hands of the clock weren’t even swords, which seemed to me like an obvious oversight on the part of the manufacturer. It read three-thirty, but it was much too dark out for that.

“My mom had a chiropractors appointment today,” Zev said, rice-cracker crumbs falling from his mouth. Or at least not looking up, this much I assumed. I pushed the mode button on my watch. The screen display on the right began flashing the month, 11, and there was the sound of tearing fabric that was probably supposed to be the swinging of a sword. I pressed mode again; another sheet was ripped in half somewhere behind the ninja, who did not seem particularly concerned. I pressed it again and again. Maybe with the distance between us and the cars and wrong busses splashing by through the puddles and my understandable fascination with this spectacular new watch, a watch that my father had purchased for me even though it had violent imagery which Zev was probably forbidden to see, maybe I couldn’t hear Zev talk about his mom and her chiropractor. Maybe he would give up.

“She has a bad lower back,” Zev explained. I imagined him wiping his nose unsuccessfully with a hankie. I imagined that day’s lunch still stuck in his teeth, slowing decomposing against his swollen pink gum-line, tainting his every word with an unspeakable odor. I didn’t turn around; I kept pushing the button. Rip Rip Rip.

“Sometimes it will act up when she’s exercising or moving her plants, but sometimes it just flares up for no reason at all! Like she’ll lean down to pick up her keys and…”

And then from around the corner five blocks away, the bus finally emerged, its window wipers batting furiously across its flat face.

“My dad says its because she doesn’t stretch,” I stared at the street and waited. When Zev spoke again his voice was clear and soft. I could almost feel his rancid breath on the back of my neck.

“But she says it’s because of stress. Like your mom and her eczema problem.”

I turned around. Zev was standing directly behind me. There was no food in his mouth or stuck in his teeth. His hankie was folded and tucked neatly into his pocket. The dark sky and pouring rain made the skin on his face look clean and ghostly pale and the fat crowded around his face, beset around such a calm expression, made him look almost dignified.

Behind me, a pair of slowing tires hissed against the water on the street and cautiously cozied up against the curb. I imagined the bus idling behind me, its doors sighing open. Quickly I would turn, hopping the three steps in a single jump to where the driver sits with no expression, not knowing me or anything about me. I would brandish my bus-pass at him like a katana before turning to Zev and letting him know: “My mom doesn’t have a problem.” Then I would wedge myself past the sad and similar looking people standing at the front of the bus, disappearing behind a jungle thick with damp coats and hanging purses. And into that brightly lit silence I would leave Zev behind forever, waiting at the curb.

But turning, it was not the bus, but a small white car I found waiting. Rolling down the passenger-side window, a narrow faced man was leaning over the emergency break and smiling at me. He wore glasses and a beard and a single eyebrow.

“You better hop in, the bus is coming,” he called out over the noise of rain and traffic.

Zev walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I remained at the curb.

“Your mother mentioned that I would be picking you up today, didn’t she?” The man was still looking at me and I looked back. “I’m Zev’s father,” he said. “Didn’t your mother tell you about this?”

My mother had not told me about this. Zev was still standing behind the car with the trunk open waiting for me. His mouth was open to. He looked like an idiot.

“My mom doesn’t have a problem,” I said. Or maybe I screamed. The rain was coming down hard and loud now, it was stinging my cheeks and bringing tears to my eyes and suddenly, rumbling behind the Fellman family’s car, the bus honked. Inside I could see the bright white lights of the cabin full of people, soaked and with no room to sit.

“We really need to get out of the bus lane now,” Zev’s father said. His voice was calm and deliberate, like the slow, rhythmic tapping of a hammer on a nail. It was the tone of voice that let me know that I had become the problematic center of attention. Because now Zev and Zev’s father and the honking and expressionless driver and the thousands and thousands of adults standing in the bright white lights of the bus aisle were staring at me. And so with the back of my throat aching, I walked around to the back of the small white car, put my bag in the trunk, and climbed into the backseat.