Three Nightmares

[note: this is the beginning of a story I really intend on coming back to soon, but Situation Normal sort of takes precedence.]

This morning, my landlady called to tell me that she found a new tenant for the empty second bedroom. Her voice was short and raspy on the phone, but I could hear her relief. She was a picky woman, and the last three candidates who asked after the room were rejected for reasons she would not mention. "She's a nice young lady," she said, "so you shouldn't have problems." When she hung up I then realized I'd never lived with a young lady who wasn't family. I wondered what kind of person she might be; if she was enrolled at Rutgers or if she was working in town. Whether she would dirty the bathroom with strewn cosmetics, or clean-freak her way through a full can of bleach in an attempt to battle the incorrigible bathtub. I hoped she wouldn't make things difficult. I became used to the shade of these gargantuan oaks and the pleasantness of the hilly ten-minute walk to the New Brunswick train station and from there a bus would take me to my laboratory on Busch campus. These houses in Highland Park were fossilized but still beautiful; I liked looking out my stuck window to watch the Orthodox kids playing jump rope in ankle-length skirts or chasing each other in the front yard while their parents watched them from lawn chairs, sipping lemonade. Here, it was cheap, my other roommate was friendly, and as a student I didn't need anything else.

When I came back from the lab the next day she was there, sitting in the mauve leather chair with its back to the door. Though she seemed to be looking at the television set, it wasn't on. I realized the house felt so still because she hadn't turned on the lights, even though there was very little sunlight outside. Since she heard me coming in I knew I had to say hello, so I slung my awkward backpack by the doorway and I sat down on the adjacent sofa, groaning as it sagged underneath me.

My new roommate said nothing. She was tinier than the chair itself, with rich skin that approached pitch black and eyeballs that were sallow and jaundiced by comparison. Her left arm ended in a stub where her elbow should've been like a defunct, once-sharp pencil. She wore short shorts that exposed her legs fully, but these were also smooth even though I expected scars. She untied her hair from an insubstantial bun and stared me down for a full two minutes, until she said,

"My name is Mary." She spoke with an American accent, tinted lightly by something else.
I told her mine.

"I lost my hand in a mine blast," she said, and pulled a bottle of Coke from the other side of her seat and drank it from the top, her thinnish lips underneath the spout, obliterating the fizzy liquid. She then went back to glaring at the television set, still off. I knew the conversation was over.




That night I dreamed of lobbed-off arms. Mostly focused on the spot where the skin grew back again neatly over the stub of the part that was wrenched from the body. The grotesque limbs attacked me on their own but it wasn't the force of the attacks that repelled me but the newness of the skin that covered stubs of the old vibrant joints. It encapsulated the death of a once-working limb. I saw these limbs when I lived in India, remembered legs removed at the knees and arms from botched amputations or terrible accidents. Some of them rolled around on mini neon-blue platforms, carting themselves around busy roads just waiting to be killed. For a moment I saw Mary rolling around on this platform, not only her arms but her legs and her torso casualties of the mine. The thing that woke me up was the fact that had this happened to her might be too dead to roll around on the street, waiting for the final blow from a massive water truck. Mary was somewhere in her room down the hall. I wondered if she, too, had these nightmares.

She kept the same perch the next day after I came home from class. I didn't see Mary when I woke early in the morning to walk to the bus stop but there she was again at seven, a bottle of Coke by her side, and the television off. I thought there was nothing awkward about going upstairs now that I had introduced myself but I felt guilty about the nightmare. It was all I thought about on the lab and it was so distracting that my Sir noticed and asked me what on Earth was wrong. I told him nothing, but the feeling stuck. I could not get rid of it even though I tried, so I did the unthinkable and left a half-hour early, and there I was, in the same room with Mary and her arm. Today I tried not to watch her limb but it fluttered every time she breathed or stretched out her hand as she relaxed in the seat.

So I sat on the sofa while Mary swilled her bottle of Coke, gargling and swishing it in her mouth like mouthwash before she swallowed. Didn't she know that the stuff was corrosive and ate at enamel? Somehow I couldn't reconcile the maniacal swallowing with her perfect teeth. White, and not at all crooked.

"Things go OK today?" she said. Her voice was as musical today as it was flat yesterday. It was as if she ripped these words from a song.

"No," I said.

"Where you work?"

"I don't," I told her, "I'm doing my PhD."

"That's not work?" she smirked. She offered me the bottle of Coke; I declined.

I didn't know what to say to that. Fortunately, she filled the silence as she hummed something.
"Commercial jingle," she said, again pre-empting a prompt from me. "for Cola. They played it back home non-stop."

The natural question to follow was where is "home"? but this woman had a habit of pre-empting my questions and I waited for her to say something. After a few minutes I felt silly watching her stare at the television and then, occasionally, at the bottom of her empty bottle of Coke and as I got up she said,

"I lied when I said that my hand was blasted in a mine," she said. I sat back down again.

"Someone had taken it out with machine gun." With her tiny hands she simulated a big gun. Pow! (In my world: Damal Dishoom.) Again, the gushing-blood images in my head would not go away. They came back even deadlier than they had been in the nightmares and my recollections of them at the lab. Mary watched me intently, not at all smiling.

"I am very sorry," she said. "You sick?"

"No," I lied, bravely.

She nodded. "Where you from?" she asked.

I told her about India, and she asked after my family and I gave her the story I gave everyone in this country and in the lab. One mother, one father, an assortment of siblings and a home in sweltering Madras. She did not ask me if I missed where I came from, though that question is always implied, so I thought about the second part of the question, wanting to give her an honest answer. But she hadn't responded honestly about her arm, had she?

"I miss it," I said, finally, "not sure I'd go back."

"Sounds like me and Freetown," she told me. Then she became silent again, staring at the television set.





Mary was from Sierra Leone. She left there when she was nineteen, and now she was twenty-three. Her parents were American; African expatriates who wanted to move back and live there. She had two and a half little sisters; as she said, only half of her made it into the world and she died shortly after childbirth. She did not know where her sisters were or -- she told me -- at this point, she didn't know who her sisters were. She told me very little about herself after that, though I continued to sit on the sofa and stare at her while she stared at the wall after I arrived home from the lab. Sometimes Mary brought infrequent guests to the home as well; one Jamaican kept turning up on the sofa in the spot where I used to sit, his hair nestled under a baseball cap and his wife-beater slightly off white from heavy sweating. These were the only pauses to these fantastic stories about her family. In order to reciprocate, sometimes I told her about my own treks along the Marina beach, the games of jacks I used to play with my siblings, the silly habits of my convent teachers and their obsession with male sexual propriety. When she heard this she looked at me and said, "how useless. I wonder how that worked out for them." Not knowing how to respond to that, I kept quiet and allowed her to carry the burden of conversation.

I came home one day to find her gripping a Corona instead of her usual Coke. The idea of someone as delicate as Mary drinking took me off guard and I tried to find a delicate way to ask after it (short of asking for a beer myself). She toasted me when she noticed I sat next to her and I smiled. I got used to a period of awkwardness before we spoke, which is why she began immediately:

"Stay any longer," she told me, "and you'll meet my mother."

This was the first time she mentioned any guests. I still didn't know whether she worked in town or went to school. I knew that she existed, but she was quiet past a certain time; by six o'clock, she left her living room perch. The sliver of light under her door was the only indication that I had that she was home. She hadn't even left a shampoo lying by the shower curtain or a stack of towels in the shelf above the sink.

After ten minutes I wondered if Mary lied to me the same way she lied about her arm. Nobody came through the front door. I made sure I was innocuous when I got up from the sofa, but as soon as I hit the bottom stair I heard the sound of rattling glass and a pair of heavy footsteps make it past the covered porch and into the house. A large woman in a slash-cut zebra print dress slammed herself through the door. This must be Mary's mother. The first thing I noticed was the severity of her lipstick and the tightness of the cloth that bound her head together. These clashed with her own brutal darkness. Then I realized she held something against herself. From here I noticed the curly crown of a sleeping baby drooling onto this woman's plump shoulder. Its nose fitted neatly into the ridges of cellulite. When I walked back to the sofa I saw Mary clutching her bottle so tightly I thought the glass would disintegrate into her hands and cause her palms to bleed.

"Mary!" her mother exclaimed, her accent potent and earthier than Mary's. She rubbed the back of the baby's head vigorously. "What happened?"

Mary did not reply.

I recognized the same troubled pause we shared daily times a thousand, but her mother kept talking through the silence. "Hi there, baby," she chanted into the baby's skull, "Say hello to your mother." It was supremely uncaring and burrowed deeper into the zebra print covered collarbone.

"Say hello to your baby," she commanded.

"What do I care what it says to me?" Mary said.

The woman thrust the baby into Mary's lap. It started to cry. Mary let it sit listlessly on her fragile lap. Then, a second later, she tipped over the bottle until its glass mouth touched the baby's forehead and then first trickled and then drenched the baby. I stood up in a second but Mary's mother got to the baby first before it even hit the ground, sodden with beer. It seemed relieved that it was back in her hands and out of Mary's lap. The amber liquid trickled onto the tired cracks in the wood floor. Mary's mother sniffed the baby's pudgy thighs for any scent of the alcohol and was so repulsed by it she ran to the porch door and slammed it behind her even more vehemently than she had when she came.

"It's not as bad the last time," Mary said, "Considering."

The smell and the noise from the door still lingered.

"What?" I asked.

I realized that I was screaming. I picked up my backpack and ran upstairs. The stairs protested against my quick escape and for a moment I thought I'd fall through them and into the basement. When I slammed my room door behind me I threw down my mammoth backpack, lay down on the bed and tried not to think of the baby soaked in beer.





But I dreamed about it anyway. It was a difficult image to get from my head. The woman and her cellulite and the baby (was it a boy or was it a girl?) and the trickle of beer onto its forehead, soaked into its curls and stomach like a primeval baptism gone wrong. The pull of the dream was so strong that I could not wake myself up in time to get up to finish the last of my thesis outline. Instead I was painfully conscious of the sun setting and too paralyzed to do anything about it. The smell of decades-old dust burrowed into my nose until my system revived itself enough for me to sneeze, but not much more than that until I heard the short knocks on the door. Without waiting for my consent, the door opened. It was Mary.

We had been living together for nearly two months now, and she did not once bother to speak to me after six o'clock in the evening. "I have a favor," she said.

I watched her.

"You would do that, too," she said, flatly. "Horrible creature." When I continued to be silent she said,

"Forget it."

She slammed the door behind her.




I called my landlady the next morning. Since I moved here I called her only twice and knew very little about her. She advertised the house on the Rutgers off-campus board as "QUIET ROOM LANDLORD NOT ON PROPERTY". To me, this was a big draw. My previous landlord entertained too much and the common areas were always trashed by the morning. I went to the lab smelling like others' hangovers. Eventually I knew I should move out. When I called Mrs. Waters, I felt relieved; the house was unoccupied until she could find me another roommate, she was a cheerful woman in her seventies, lived in upstate New York, and who detested conflict (or so she said). I mailed her her checks monthly, deducted from my scholarship money, and that was it.

I rehearsed what I would say.

("Mrs. Waters," I wanted to ask, "who is Mary?")

Though I got Mrs. Waters on the first try she asked me to hold. And when I held I could hear Mary pacing the hallways, making herself noticed as she had not been for the months she'd lived here. When the Mrs. Waters picked up the line again, she said, "Sorry, dear. That was the Children of Christ Network." I heard the roar of a vacuum in the background. She sighed and then said, "the mission work they do in Africa is startling."

So I took that chance. "Is this how you know Mary?" I asked.

Mrs. Waters tut-tutted on the phone. She shut the vacuum off and whispered something in her breakable voice.

"They found her in Sierra Leone," she said, "I had to do something. Have you ever looked at her?"

I certainly had.

"Can you imagine that something bad would happen to someone like her?"

"What happened?" I asked.

Mary stomped the floor into submissiveness. The wood practically wept.

"Her arm." Mrs. Waters said, still whispering, "It was hacked off with a machete by the men who raped her."



Would I ever really know what happened to that arm?



When I went to sleep I thought about her arm again except this time instead of the smooth stub I saw the open wounds and gashes and sputtering left behind by the unpracticed hacking of a machete. I almost died in my sleep from choking on the vomit.

Mary and I stayed away from controversial topics for some time. [tbc]

beginning of Joker's

note: not a new idea -- it's a year old, but the characters haunted me enough that I tried it all again. not very polished, but you get the drift.

JUNE THIRTIETH

1:01 AM

My mother gave it her best effort. She failed.

1:30 AM

She's been taken to St. Peter's. The Cadillac's stuck deep into a tree somewhere on Dean's Lane. I have to get to the hospital immediately. Nobody else knows. Ramesh is in bed and the others are out. Just as I'm about to slip into the garage I can still hear him snoring, so I'm sure he hasn't noticed.

When I get into the car there's silence in the hundred-degree heat. I'm grateful for this. One more stupid techno-mix CD and I might crash this car into something myself. Indu and Shalini both listen to garbage and I'm not in the mood for it right now.

I wish this was unexpected but it isn't. I know that Amma's been trying to harm herself for months now. She's been careless with vegetable knives. She takes scalding showers. I've seen her casually lift up a can of bleach and tip the can into her mouth only to let the liquid fall on the floor, instead. She's taken an academic interest in cutting herself up with keys. She knows that I can see her, and doesn't care. Ramesh never notices anything. And I think Shalini and Indu would celebrate on my mother's grave.

She started sabotaging herself a month ago. My mother is still beautiful at forty with hair grown calf-length, her face still smooth, and her figure unchanged even through a pregnancy and the death of my father. She knows exactly how to talk to others, something I've never managed. Though I can never tell what she believes about Ramesh, I didn't know she had it in for herself.

Last week Junie auntie told me she narrowly avoided skidding into a ditch. I tried everything I could to hide the keys from her since then, but she always managed to find a set. My mother is too smart for me. She knows this, too. "Sony," she's always said, "it'll take a lot for you to get a one-up on your mother."

It's only ten miles from here to St. Peter's but it's a thousand years of driving.

1:51 AM

The Nurse is Indian. When I tell her my name is Sony, she had to ask: "short for Sonia?" and when I said, "no, after the electronics company." she gave me a pretty dirty look. But it's true. I always carry around pair of grimy headphones I've had since I was a kid. It's one of the few things I have left of my father's.

My real name is Kamala, but no one calls me that.

When I'm finally taken to her room, I chomp down on the urge to vomit and look at her. She is at peace, a million needles into her translucent arm. I can see the machinery that brought me to life. It's a humbling feeling. I know that this isn't the most obvious thing to notice, but anything else is beyond me. Since my mother married Ramesh I've realized she is an enigma, and will likely stay that way for the rest of her life. Her blue shirt is stained with blood, though I know they will take that from her eventually and put her in a disgusting hospital gown with butt-flaps.

I am in too much pain to react, so I watch. There's nothing left to think about now.

4:00 AM

Indu drunk-dials me. I think she meant to dial her "secret" boyfriend, but when she realizes she's reached me, she demands a ride home. I tell her that I'm about to hang up the phone, when I hear her retch and the sound of free-falling vomit. "I'll tell Dad," she threatens. Ramesh is scary enough for this to work ninety-nine percent of the time. Except my mother is dying in a hospital, and I'm in no mood for her bullshit.

"Go ahead," I tell her. She barfs again, screaming gibberish into the phone. I hang up. I'm actually grateful for the sterility of the room.


After about a half-hour of staring into Amma's arm, I find that her wrist is attached to the strap of her handbag. Gently, I untangle the glossy red leather from her arm and kneel to open the bag. She's got a wallet, tons of quarters, a couple of bad action novels and the notepad in which she writes her shopping lists. There are endless reminders to bring milk, bread and butter.

Some nurse kicks me out of the room and I'm now resolved to sleep across all these chairs until someone brings me news of Amma.

7:00 AM

Three hours. I've managed to sleep for three hours. I want to go to Amma again, but my phone's buzzing. It's Junie Auntie.

I cut her off so that I can check the rest of my missed calls. As I expect, I have many. Sixteen from Ramesh. Eight from Indu. Two from Shalini. I don't want to return the calls, so I dial Junie Auntie's number.

Junie Auntie and Krishnamurthy Uncle are our closest family friends in the country. Krishnamurthy Uncle and my father went way back. Even my mother, who can't stand socializing, loves them. It's impossible to resist their company. Junie Auntie never has a bad word to say about anyone, is such a good cook that people show up at her house -- unannounced -- at very odd hours just to try her newest rice or curry or pasta concoctions, and she never loses her temper. Krishnamurthy Uncle is as tranquil as his wife is exuberant. He knows everything about anything -- from computer engineering, to the law, to literature and even puppetry. (Uncle took up puppetry to amuse his daughters, who are now both grown, married, and very, very boring women.) And Hari, their nephew and permanent guest, doesn't have much use for a puppet theatre.

My visits to their house are some of the only moments of real calm I feel in a day, a week, or even a month. Even the place itself is calm. It's along Dean's Lane, which is lined with trees that have branches so low they scrape the windows and with fields of corn and soybeans that stretch out in erratic patches of fluorescent green.

I expect Junie Auntie to be calm and cheerful. I'll have to deflect her enthusiasm. When I reach her -- on the second ring -- she's neither.

"Where is she?" Auntie demands. The television, usually blaring on her end, is silent. There's no disturbance.

"I -- how did you know?"

"Never mind that," she says, "where are you?"

I tell her where I am.

"Damn Hari," she swears. "Does he have to be in the city?"

Hari. I'm relieved he's in Manhattan. I don't know what to do around him anymore. Then, she cuts into my relief and says she will be here in fifteen minutes, sharp.

Auntie always knows what to do. In the meantime I can only hope that my mother won't die. Now it occurs to me that I've talked to her properly in almost four months, since she stayed home from work at the library and started manning the house full-time. As soon as she's lucid I will have to talk to her. I'll have to ask her why she's doing these things. Why she doesn't care about me. Why she's letting me sit in this chair to watch her die slowly of a mysterious self-hatred.

7:30 AM

I've never seen Junie Auntie this distressed. Her curly gray hair has a yen for the Blaxploitation seventies. A mulch-ified gardening glove sticks out of her khaki pants. She finds me in the waiting-room with drool caked to my lips and asks me how long I've been waiting here. I can barely reply with a glarrggh. I show her to Amma and together we watch her pincushion body smell more like Hospital by the second.

"Your stepfather called me at least a thousand times," Auntie says, after ten minutes of crying over Amma's comatose body. She cries loudly and bunches up her tears in her fist. "He was so worried about her."

"Worried about himself," I say. "he doesn't care."

I hear myself speak and don't know where the words come from. I'm shocked that I can. My entire nervous system wants to jump out of my body. My arteries and capillaries pump like subwoofers.

"Of course he cares," Junie Auntie says, and at first I'm afraid she's admonishing me, but even she doesn't look convinced. She watches me as I stand there and then holds my hand. "You were such a happy kid," she said, "but I know the past six years haven't been good for you."

Six years. I'm astonished that it's been that long.

Six years ago, my mother married Ramesh Reddy.

Six years ago, I lost my freedom.

Six years ago, I lost my mother.

9:00 AM

This time when Ramesh calls me, I have to pick up the phone. Junie Auntie won't let me ignore him. I stare down at his name at the screen, swallow my bile, and press the SEND.

My eardrums suffer from the moment he starts speaking. It's the usual: WHERE ARE YOU WHY HAVEN'T YOU CALLED ARE YOU CRAZY THERE'S SO MUCH WORK LEFT AT HOME AND INDU TELLS ME YOU WOULDN'T GIVE HER A RIDE HOME FROM THAT SHAH PARTY AND WHO'S GOING TO GET THE LUNCH READY BY THE TIME SHALINI COMES HOME

Junie Auntie snatches the phone from me and speaks to him calmly in her singsong Telugu. I don't know how someone can make the news sound halfway pleasant or slightly less than totally life-threateningly urgent, but somehow she manages it, and I can hear the screaming come to a halt. Now, he's going to feign concern, or something. After all, it wouldn't look acceptable otherwise.

Instead, he tells Junie Auntie to send me home because I've got a sink-full of dishes, the family laundry, and Indu's law school homework to edit. I've never hated Indu, Shalini and Ramesh more than I do at this moment. I know that I rue the day I caught seventeen grammatical errors on the first page of Indu's essay on the Reformation when she did her BA at TCNJ. She's four years older than me, and is now in her second year at NYU law. I'm sure no one ever told her how difficult law school was, or maybe she thought she'd sail through it on her princessy heels and supreme networking skills. It involves a great deal more writing than she thought, so she commutes from home on Ramesh's advice; that way, they can milk the most out of me. I don't resent it. Since I've dropped out of college, I have lots of time to review her stupid homework assignments.

Junie Auntie shakes her head (am I seeing her get impatient with him?) and insists that I will stay at the hospital. I hear Ramesh getting terse with her, insisting that he would come to see her straightaway and that I should expect all three of them in an hour. Auntie nods and hangs up the phone. She asks to borrow it to call Hari.

I nod, still watching my mother. I try not to listen to the conversation she's having with Hari. Hari and I keep our conversations to a minimum these days, though I always savor his every word, I know he doesn't find me interesting. Yet I take what I can get. My greatest hope is that when we're adults, we'll have a full-length conversation, if only about reminisces. So I watch the door. In a minute a plump nurse comes in to check her vitals. She smiles at me.

"You look so much alike," she says, nodding towards my mother's body, "are you sisters?"

It's such a nice thing to say that I have to smile at her. You'd think that that wouldn't be the case, but my mother's one of the most good-looking people I know. And people always say that I look like my father.

9:30 PM

Ramesh is in full form. He barges into the hotel room like some Telugu hero (he's a dead ringer for that corpulent mega-superstar actor Rajinikanth) complete with ridiculous mustache and disgusting, thick guttural spitting. First he curses at me for a full five minutes. It's mostly about Indu's homework, though I've learned to tune him out by now. I'm kind of thrilled, actually. Junie Auntie might begin to believe the kind of nonsense I face at home. I can see by her expression that at first she's shocked, and that her incredible sense of politeness prohibits her from acting on this shock, so she stands there awkwardly.

Indu follows him in mid-rant, her hair pulled back in an effortless, glossy ponytail and her feet squeezed into strappy sandals that show off her toned legs. Her face looks fresh. I wonder how she's concealed the effects of her nasty hangover.

Shalini is not here. I'm not surprised. The day after our parents' wedding I tore the skin off her face for calling my mother a whore. If my mother died, she would celebrate. Now I'm very happy she's not here, because if she said anything, a word, I'd rip the rest of her face off and some other skin besides.

Auntie is right. I've become too bitter.

Then I tell him I'm not going home.

Ramesh looks like he's going to collapse. I've never been this combative with him. The trillions of hairs on his dark arms are static-upright, porcupine quills on something decidedly less cute. I'm sure if my mother could speak to me while still comatose she'd tell me to go home. Listen to your father, she always told me. But we both know that this man is not my father. "If Indu wants help with her work, she can bring it here."

This gets her whining like crazy. I mean, whining is Indu's default voicebox setting, but she's raising it to a true art form now. She's stomping slightly in her uncomfortable heels. She's told her father that there is no way she's going to go home and get her things when I didn't give her a ride home from the Shah party yesterday. The Evil Crazy Stepsister in her claws its way out of her gut to flap its ugly leather wings in my face. I realize that from here I can still smell booze on her clothes. The sterility of the room carries her scent.

"I'll take her back with me," Junie Auntie says, "We'll bring food for you all while you wait here." I can tell from Indu's shock that she will open her mouth to refuse to wait here, especially for that woman (which is a step up from being that whore) when suddenly her face basks in the glow of an internal 100-watt bulb.

"Auntie," she says, very politely, "Is Hari home?"

Oh, Jesus Christ. But of course.

10:15 AM

My stepsisters knew Hari through us. And since they've met him, I've had a long time to get to un-know him.

The first time we took them to the Savidi's was the day after the engagement ceremony. Ramesh and the girls came with us to Junie Auntie's, and there they met Hari, latching onto him the instant they were introduced. Before this, Hari and I talked about dumb things like the news, or violin music, or the fish Auntie just bought to stock the fake lake at the back of their house. We were even almost friends. Now Shalini and Indu tripped over themselves to get his phone number. They were both irritatingly beautiful in their tight-fitting shalwars made from extravagant Park Lane cloth. Shalini, even at thirteen, was a creamy-skinned pale-eyed over-sexed knockout. Indu, though darker, was cool and mysterious in a way that made people instantly attracted to her, throwing themselves away in hopes of becoming her bestie. Though at that party she had had eyes only for Hari. I never felt more effectively sidelined in my own life as I felt then.

At every opportunity they got, the accompanied us to these parties. They even made an effort to be nice to my mother as long as it got them an invite to one of Junie Auntie's seasonal bashes. From start to finish (or, by Junie Auntie's party timings, from five in the evening until three or four in the morning) they monopolize Hari's attention. I watched them from a book-stacked corner of Junie Auntie's sunroom as they socialized on the lush carpet grass on the lawn. Mid-joke, the three of them -- or more -- would collapse together in happy laughter, the grass tickling their bare feet and arms. As I plowed through Bronte and Austen and Dickens and Dumas, I had a good view of Hari charmed by my stepsisters' company. Soon, they began seeing Hari (and his impressive circle of friends) independently of us. They were free to be as rude to Amma as they were before.

Not only has Indu taken any prospects of Hari's friendships away from me, she insisted on riding shotgun on the way to their place from the hospital. She slammed herself past me so that she won't be subjected to the backseat and is now talking up a storm with Junie Auntie, who's is her usual engaging, effusive self with her. I know what Auntie thinks of Indu; she's motivated. She's elegant. I should be lucky to have such wonderful sisters in her and Shalini. Auntie's the one who told me to embrace the idea of having extra people in the family. I might've, if I'd inherited different siblings. By the time her steady stream of self-promotion is through, we've crossed Easton Ave, two highways, a jughandle and a crawl up Dean's Lane. Each time Indu's shoes scrape against the gravelly driveway, I feel a twisting sensation in my gut. She's invading my sanctuary.


Junie Auntie's just painted her house bright red because she can. The sidings are sports-car red. According to Amma, it's a a flashy (mostly harmless) manifestation of her mid-life crisis. She is such a cheerful person that even her moodiness comes out in rich red. It's a split-level house that looks like it's been meandering because of the constant additions. First Auntie had to have a sunroom, and then, when the burden of guests became too great she built up the top floor. The thick black window shutters are shattered but still resilient; those've yet to be painted over.

(It's one cranky Frankenstein of a house, but I love it and its mad scientist creators.)

When I cross the threshold after Indu and Junie Auntie, I notice that it's dark and the curtains are drawn. It's instantly cooler and I begin to get goosebumps on my exposed arms after having just been fried by the unrelenting sun outside. Now I realize I've left the house in sweats and a tank top, but I don't care about the potential embarrassment or about the fact that I'm sweating from every orifice imaginable. In fact, I don't care about anything at all except basic human functions, like breathing. I never knew breathing could be so difficult, but there's a very elaborate process that involves 1) making sure your lungs expand and contract and 2) not choking on your own spit.

I thought Indu wouldn't come, but she always surprises me. Though Auntie told Indu that Hari was in Manhattan, Indu decided to join us anyway. "Doesn't matter," she'd said, "I wouldn't mind waiting for a while." No longer the Empress of Instant Gratification, she is all magnanimity.

Now, we sit beside each other on the battered mauve leather couch.

"Hari," Indu begins, "just broke up with his girlfriend."

"That's nice," I say.

The humongous standalone TV winks at me. The thousand remotes used to operate that, the cable box, and the four different players lay on the ancient coffee table across from us.

"Well, Tina Agarwal wasn't his girlfriend, really, but they were going out, sort of. Dating, I think, but not exclusively. She loved him, I think," she says. I can hear the motors churning in her head; she's wondering how to make a grab for Hari.

"I think we should invite him over," she continues, extracting a lipgloss from her bag, smearing it onto her full lips until they're saturated with berry liquid. She is so put-together. The contrast between us is so obvious I can't help but feel wretched. I hear Junie Auntie pottering around in the kitchen. The phone rings, and she goes over to pick it up. Satisfied that Auntie's distracted, she turns again to me. "What kind of food does he like? I mean, you've known him forever --"

I shrug.

"Nothing I know that you don't," I tell her. She pouts, but I think she's satisfied with this answer. I have gotten by unscathed (by comparison) because Indu doesn't find me threatening. If she ever suspected that I had something that she didn't, I'd be dead. I'd be food for a murder of scavenging crows.

Junie Auntie hangs up the phone and comes into the room with a humongous bowl of popcorn. I don't take any. I can't even eat. Auntie sits on an armchair by our loveseat and digs in. Indu refuses these verboten calories. How will she snag Hari if she puts on a half ounce extra weight?

In between fistfuls of popcorn, Junie Auntie tells us that Hari will come home soon, and that he'll take her and Indu to the hospital.

"I really want to go, too," I say, and before I can finish, Auntie interrupts:

"You'll see her in good time," she tells me, "but when Uncle comes back from work for lunch, you're going straight home. Your father is right, Sony. You should help around the house." She says this with such seriousness I don't know what to do. She can't really mean it.

This is my mother.

She's in a coma.

I don't care about Indu's education.

I won't help her with her awful essays.

I start to say something when I catch Auntie glaring at me, and this action is alone to stop me in my tracks. Auntie never glares. I swallow. Is it truly unreasonable to want to see my mother in the hospital? I can dismiss Ramesh Uncle, but Junie Auntie is a rational person. Why would she ...?

I can hear the dull sound of a garage door creaking itself upward and the accompanying thud of footsteps. Though I think I'm beyond it, I still feel my throat constrict even more than it has over the past few minutes. It's Hari.

He's even better looking than I remember him. Since he has gone to medical school I've seen him only at these parties. And over the past two years I've been avoiding the parties.

His face has become almost angular, though a lot of his face remains the same; according to Indu and Shalini, his friends called him Dollface in high school because of his very rounded nose. He's also thinner; the stubborn baby chubbiness that clung to his neck and arms vanished. As he clutches the handles of his bags I can see the clenched muscles of his forearms exposed by the rolled up sleeves of his black woolen sweater. Why he's wearing one in the ninety-five degree heat, I have no idea.

Indu's so excited she springs from the sofa and offers to take a bag for him.

"What happened?" he asks Junie Auntie. I notice he's speaking in Telugu; his voice is so low I almost can't catch it.

Junie Auntie shakes her head. Ignoring me, Hari gives Indu his arm. "Where am I going?"

"We can go to my place," Indu says, brightly. "my dad will meet us there when he comes home from the hospital."

Hari smiles at her. Without moving, he throws the bags at my feet. They land squarely on my toes and are quite heavy.

"I think we'd better go get Ramesh Uncle, then."

He still does not look at me. I wonder if I'm imagining this, because Junie Auntie nods her head, smiles, and asks him if there's enough gas in the car (which, of course, there isn't) so Junie Auntie wanders off into the kitchen to get a crisp twenty from the kitchen drawer. By the time Auntie presses the bill into Hari's hand, Indu is rubbing her toes together, somehow, in those constricted shoes. She's in a tearing hurry to leave.

Junie Auntie tells me to Wait There as she shoos Hari and Indu out the door. I'm reminded of a wooden-spoon toting Supermom, a benevolent matriarchal figure. Hari and Indu could be a married couple on their way to some event. Junie Auntie even looks a little like Kiron Kher, who's perennially cast as the long-suffering mother of dashing movie heroes in Hindi movies. I hear the garage door close behind them. According to the clock above the TV, the time is 10:30.

"Sony?" Junie Auntie calls from the end of the kitchen hallway, near the door leading into the garage. "Just wait there. I be right with you."

Nothing to do but sit in the dark and stare at the ceiling.

11:30 AM

Someone shakes me awake. At first I think it's Junie Auntie, but when I wake up, I'm looking into Hari's face.

I have to bite back from screaming.

"Mom's taking a shower," he says, "but I wanted to wake you up."

These are the first words he's said to me in years.

I wipe my eyes. "Haven't slept," I inform him, except it sounds more like, "pllrggggg". I can feel the drool flowing freely from the corner of my mouth.

He shakes his head. I notice that we're not even two inches from one another. I back away, and a second later, so does he. Hari ends up sitting in the armchair Junie Auntie left an hour ago. He watches the floor so I do the same, tracing the worn carpet fibers. Then he says,

"Your mother is getting better."

"Not out of the coma, though."

"No," he says, "but her situation is improving."

What does that mean? I want to ask. I don't.

Hari tells me that Indu's disappointed I won't go home with her. It bothered her the whole ride home from the hospital, and even Ramesh was very upset. I'm sure he complained to Hari the whole ride home. But Hari doesn't mention anything else.

"I hope they don't go too overboard," I say, "Uncle's taking me home in less than an hour."

"No, he's not."

Hari arises and takes his bags from their spot right by my feet. "I'll talk to you later," he whispered, slinking into the hallway. "Chithi will be out in a few."

12:30 PM

Help.

That's all I'm asking for. Please tell me what I'm doing here and why. Where is everyone? Why am I not going home? Why am I not with my mother?

It occurs to me that this might be some awful dream. I never thought there was something worse than the status quo, but I feel it now. Only one more thing has to happen before getting caught in a tree-twisted Cadillac becomes an attractive option.

more of chapter II (but very little more)

though it still hurt not to move, remaining fixed seemed the best possibility.

"You will have to contact your next of kin," Mrs Knowlton said, "we do not know your mother well enough to do it ourselves."

"Of course," Anna said, rubbing her tight sleeves together, "I'll send the letters out straight away. But I must thank you --"

"No," Mrs. Knowlton said, waving an imperious arm at her, "It is nothing for us to keep you here. Though your mother -- though we didn't know her well -- we knew you since you were a child and, of course, Edwin--"

At the mention of his name Anna felt a keen pressure in her head and had to rub it. Mrs. Knowlton chose to ignore her distress and continued to say that Edwin had enjoyed her company since she was younger and that he knew fewer other friends than she might have liked because of Anna's company. To this, Anna had to smile; though the accusation was harsh, it was not untrue.

"But you will write your next of kin," Mrs. Knowlton said, and the manner by which she twisted her dyed shawls led the color to bleed into her palms. "And these people can advise you (much better than I can) what you can do next. Chase may help you with a solicitor, if you wish, to accompany you to a reading of a will."

"No!" cried Anna, "I have no wish to -- I mean, no. My mother's estate will be settled upon, but I don't want a part of it."

Mrs. Knowlton put her needlepoint down on the sofa and her gaze felt like a thirty-minute full examination of her body. "Not want part of your mother's estate?" Mrs. Knowlton asked, "What kind of claim is that?"

those hills (chap 2)

CHAPTER II

Mother and the Doctor died on the way back home from the Park not one hour ago. Their carriage tipped into a deep gorge and if it had not been for the servant who had struggled and then escaped from the scene of the accident to alert the Knowltons, Anna knew she would have remained in the agony of ignorance for quite some time. Edwin's anguish, then, became her own. Together they sat in the dark for a half-hour. "You will have to plan," Edwin said, "there must be somewhere you can go, and quickly. It is foolishness to attempt to stay alone."

For any other casualty Anna might have resisted this, but she knew Edwin was right. There was no way that thought was possible in this instance, and if she sat here too much longer she and the chair would be one, a fixed instrument. Mother was not an affectionate woman but she loved her daughter, and Anna's three-and-twenty years of sensible youth was a testament to that love. The lack of that striking, irrepressible woman was too much for Anna to bear even thinking about it and she felt the coldness that was necessary for her to function. The fine cream muslin gown she wore for the party felt stilted and she ached for the ability to find something less constricting. Yes, that was what she would do, except changing would not be enough. She would have to find a thousand layers of hot water and fat soap and terry cloth to rub her skin off into infinitesimal pieces, until her in life and in death could no longer be distinguished, that she could ever reconcile herself to those damning two seconds.

And when she shed tears it was not a solitary or silent gesture. She pressed against Edwin, who had before not even acknowledged her existence but was there now to absorb her grief and she cried until she felt he was saturated with it.

"Anna," he said, grasping her hands with such force that she stood up, but he never completed the statement, instead leaving her name to hang between them. She stood up and went to pack her things into her trunk, taking care not to make it heavy. The servant then took her things to the carriage but she felt too weak to follow him; she remembered that Edwin dragged her back and that she was in the carriage to the Knowltons once more, a place she wanted wholeheartedly to avoid with such a passion she felt its distant echo through her grief.




The Knowltons were all sympathy. They offered her the best of their guest-rooms and had someone send up a solicitous tea. Edwin did not come to visit and Chase, Martin, and their mother prevailed upon her once each -- Chase even read from Bereaved, and his light voice was cast with such a dark tone Anna was properly chilled and captivated at the reading. She wanted to beg for more verses because the sound kept her tethered to the bed, but it was too late and grief was such a solitary exercise. The sadness was uniform and absolute. There was no immunity to this reaction nor was there respite to be found once acted upon. Her pillow remained wet throughout the night and the memories of a slightly neglectful Mother and Stepfather became suddenly beloved. She remembered the instance where Mother took her to Capital so that she might watch the traveling Slav Dance Company or that next day when she was showered with a hundred flavors of creamed ice in the parlour at the Doctor's insistence. Then there were the other innumerable luxuries her mother shared with her; a love of literature, of writing and even of landscape-sketching beyond the usual constraints on feminine virtuosity. When she woke up in the morning she made to write to her father, whose estate was not ten miles from Capital. Once fresh paper was sent up she sat at an ancient desk to begin writing.

Sir,

No doubt you must have heard the distressing news about Mama. I do not want to be the bearer of bad news but you have borne her first death, and now we both must endure her second.

But this was not a letter she could readily send. She tore it up to try again, but any coherent statement lay beyond her ability and her head ached too much to continue. She joined the rest of the Park for breakfast and found that Edwin was again missing; woefully she understood that her emotions were a contagion and he therefore made himself scarce.

Mrs. Knowlton, however, called her into the sitting room after the noon dinner and asked her to sit down across from her on the spare sofa. The curves of her neck and the black mourning dress she wore made her feel oppressively statuesque,

those hills (to the end of chap1)

Over there -- the next room was the antechamber to the study, where the rows of bookshelves began and went, almost interminably, into the rooms beyond. It was all in this same dark paneling, and Anna observed that the two eldest, standing against the heirloom piano and holding their liquor in very fragile glasses. She could not find Edwin anywhere.

"So you've joined us," said Chase, putting his glass down on the piano. Anna wanted to knock it off, because the wine was no good for the lacquer, but it was their house, and they could ruin a universe of Stein pianos if they wished as she stood there helpless. "Your mother did her best to make us forget about you," he said, "very charming."

Her mother had that effect on people, Anna knew.

Martin put the glass up to his lips and asked her if she was comfortable or wished for some drink.

Anna shook her head. "I do not drink," she said.

"Puritan?" Martin asked, toasting her with an obscene glug of the fermented fluid. "I'm so sorry."

"My father was." Anna colored. "Is. Mother and the Doctor believe that it is beneficial for one's health, but if I cannot keep track of my temperament if there's no control left to me."

"One's conduct in life is overrated," Martin said, "People are very forgive eccentrics, but they don't tolerate perfection."

"I agree," said Chase, "and a glass never made anybody ill; and with food the effects are nonexistent."

"Perhaps," Anna said. She did not want to upset them; she turned to ways to mitigate the effects of this awkward beginning. "Will anyone else join us?"

She looked at the tall window to her left, overlooking the tender sunset and the grass; the back of a wheeled-chair obscured much of the view.

Then she asked for Edwin.

"He's indisposed," Chase said, the smile stretching out his skin. He had done nothing but smile since Anna came into the room, and the feeling made her seek out a chair much more comfortable in appearance than in reality. He then turned to Martin and they discussed holdings they had in the West, where they had islands strung along the cost of A---. Anna found it difficult not to be transfixed by these conversations and descriptions; whatever Edwin told her about his two brothers, they were not stupid. The women were ripe and their wrappers innocently bared tanned, voluptuous bodies. Its beaches were white-salt and extended into the sea that cut the sky at a glorious unseen part of the horizon. To Anna this was being there itself, and aside from the creaking of the wheelchair, nothing distracted her from these island scents that somehow made their way pungent through a dry description of trade routes, plague and rotting shipments of lemon and bananas.

When they stopped talking they excused themselves to Anna after giving her a casual invitation to play billiards in the next room over (which she declined) and, solitary, she felt more comfortable but it was not enough to appease the loss of Edwin. So she, too went after them into the hall to search. The billiards room was further from the Hall so she followed them, and then went past that place. Ah! Now she heard voices from behind a concealed door:

"You cannot make me stay here. I will not," a man said, hotly, "After all you promised!"

Anna slammed her back against the wall. It was Edwin. And some conciliatory voice attempted to soothe Edwin, but he did not bear it. "It will not end well for you," it attempted, at last.

"How will it end?" Edwin asked. "With them dead? Bleeding? Flogged and bound to the ground until there is not one of them left? None of these people in this house know anything -- Samuel! It is true! They cannot be allowed!"

"The Good Book," the voice began, but it was piteous, and Edwin dismissed it within seconds.

"The Good Book would not tolerate genocide," he said. "nor does it condone slavery."

Anna heard the force of the man trying to get Edwin by the sleeves and Edwin wrenching his arm away. "I am sick of protecting these interests" he said, in a voice so scathing Anna felt its venom on her face. "nor do I care about my share. At least I know what I do not own!" Then, she could hear Edwin approach the door, so Anna ran back past the Billiards hall into the library so that she could appear as if she was waiting. But of course she was waiting. That was all she had been doing.

*

The dinner was so excellent that Anna struggled to remember what she'd heard behind the door. Edwin greeted her when he met up with her in the room but their conversation was perfunctory; they talked about nothing and their moment in the grass was long gone, the magic packed with it. Instead what was left was vats of buttery mashed potatoes, a rind of Whitehouse cheese, chicken tender and suffused with citrus and rosemary, wheat rolls, wine from Ibiza, and two or three more dishes of grilled vegetables and spices from the East and West Isles. This table served to prove that they sat at the eye of the edible hurricane; little was exciting or enjoyable to eat that could be found where they lived.

Mother sat, somehow, in her midnight gown that held together her untouched figure and leaned over to talk to the Doctor and Mrs. Knowlton simultaneously; the latter held her arms stiffly over her chicken and her utensils were not helpers but weapons. Chase and Martin asked Mother questions alternately and were rewarded with the brilliance of her stare and the Doctor and Mr. Knowlton kept the conversation on speculation in general, something Anna knew Edwin noticed. But he was silent, which Anna knew was unnatural. Edwin would not talk to her, instead keeping a focus on his mother, asking if she wanted her dishes replenished, checking with the servants to make sure that she was obliged and well-off.

There was no proper way for her to maintain the attention of anyone. For a moment she thought, at yet another periphery glance, she caught a carriage in the almost dark but that was impossible. No other guest was in attendance and surely the carriages had been dismissed for the evening. She felt agitated even without this sighting, twisting the cloth napkin in her fingers. Slavery. Genocide. These were such tough words to come out of his mouth, and Anna knew all to well of their source. Slavery was the last big disgrace of the empire, Edwin told Anna, but he mentioned it only once and years ago, before he went to Magdalen to study. She did not like to think on it much. The statement came at the beginning of nearly four years of separation, marked only by long letters and sporadic gifts between the two. It was something she thought about throughout, but even the relative anonymity did not afford her enough comfort to ask what exactly he did mean. She knew of slavery, but it was outlawed in this country for thirty years now. So it was not this, but something else. It made her ill enough thinking about it that even the chicken could not satisfy. Chase noticed her reticence.

"Miss Shrew," he said, "You will reduce to a bird."

Even at this acknowledgement of her, Edwin said nothing. It was to proceed like this for the whole evening, and an hour later, after they had all retired to the sitting room, Anna begged for permission to leave the Park for home. She gave up hope of attracting Edwin's solemn inattention (he sat on the windowsill bench, watching the hyacinths, his formerly happy face slashed with worry). He seemed poised to pick up and run at any moment. But she could not stand it if he should run from her, so she elected to leave first.

Mother told her she might leave a little later, and even offered to send for the carriage so that she could wait for that duration, but Anna insisted that she should leave at once as there was nothing better than a healthy walk. Chase offered to accompany her home, but she refused him and walked from the room to stem the protestations. The park's grounds were dark, and the path was not illuminated but her feet knew each square inch of the depressed dirt. The voice of Edwin's placater rang in her ears. It will not end well for you, it said ... it will not end well for you.

*

Sariah kept the gas lamps on at home, and there was some refreshment on the table in case the party food was inedible as it often was for parties other than the ones at the Knowltons. Spread out across the fresh cloths were fruit, rinds of Stilton, fresh bread and a jug of sweet lemonade. Anna knew there were a few cakes in the larder underneath their glass encasements and the knowledge delighted her slightly that she might indulge away from the watchful eye of Mother and the Doctor. She held out and collapsed into a chair. It was quiet here in the small nook facing the stalks of fragrant heather and in the night it sounded like an ocean of stalks.

She admitted now that Edwin's neglect troubled her deeply. That it was almost as if she could not breathe in that room without some recognition from him. Had they not just sat on the grass together, talking about Magdalen and those experiments and the goings-on at Parliament of which he had a sacred, intimate knowledge? When she heard those machinations explained in that gentle voice she felt she received this information as if from the eyes and ears of those walls themselves. What about their correspondence? Since that afternoon it had been two weeks since they last spoke and before that it had been a year; things could not have changed that much, but it would seem that they had. The space between the thumb and her hand were intimate with the tears she shed each time he boarded the train back to Magdalen and she ached to press her eyes against her hands again. But what was she to him?

She fell asleep against the table and awoke to the sound of others coming inside. It was even later than she suspected as the lamps were extinguished and the shuffling of servants ceased. Before she could push her chair to stand up, she felt someone holding her hands and saw that it was Edwin sitting on the chair next to her. Not an apparition, but wholly unexpected. His face was no less distressed, and his acute focus on her was even more devastating. She could not look; she had to look. She asked him, then, why he had come.

"There was an accident," Edwin began.

those hills (working title)

Anna's cotton dress bunched around her ankles and Edwin's rolled-up sleeves exposed him to the itchy grass as they sat on the lawn together. Their card game lay abandoned. The greenness beneath them was too rich to look at for long, the sky too sharp. The sun warmed them both through their thin cotton clothes and Anna felt her skin stretch in the heat. She welcomed it. This was bliss.

"I might have to go back to M---," Edwin said, "Mother wants me back."

"Your mother?" Anna asked. She pulled back the dark stringiness of her hair and tying it up loosely with the palm of her hand. When she turned around to look at Edwin he looked upward, his light eyes bleeding the rich blue. Anna wondered why he was determined not to look at her.

"You're eating with us tonight," he said. His face showed off very minor stubble, a slight shadow on his tanned skin.

Anna snorted. "I don't have a choice," she said. "Mother wouldn't like it if I refused. The honor of eating at N--!"

Edwin smiled but did not laugh. His trousers were muddy at the ankle. "If I go," he began, but Anna never found out what would happen if he went because the retrievers came in from the yard followed by the Forster children in their khakis and dungarees. Anna had to ensure that they did not trip themselves with the leashes. She felt Edwin looking at her, and he himself was too good in that sunlight. Anna felt her gut sink as she tumbled onto the ground with the two blond boys and the slobbering dogs.

When she went inside she felt heavy. She felt Edwin's immobility. Yes. She had to get ready for a very important dinner.



The Knowltons lived at N--, a very large house on a hectare of soft country. It was made of severe stone and straight lines, a bizarre house, but inside it was as delicate as Anna imagined the very wealthy to live. She'd seen plain rocks carry precious gems within them, their ordinary exteriors very quiet about the treasure they concealed. The paths ran for dozens of miles within the grounds, and the house itself was less a house than a massive compound with trees and sweet pink and purple and orange-flowered bushes that played host to a thousand birds a day. In the sunset these plants came alive for one last riotous exclamation before the night quieted them. Mother and the Doctor were already there with the Knowltons, no doubt sitting, starched, on ripely polished chairs while discussing the latest Rawlings play.

Anna thought she might see Edwin waiting outside, riding, but she was mistaken. The park -- the grounds -- were deserted. For a moment she wondered whether Edwin was there at all. She shivered. A party without Edwin would be no party. Edwin's two older brothers were into speculation and reaped vast sums of money without working. They lived in the ancestral house because they did not want to leave -- not because they could not. Neither of them had attachments, though one was almost twenty-eight and the other, twenty-seven. Mother was keenly aware of this, but Anna could not stand the sight of either. They weren't ill-looking but they talked too much and about nothing; she spent one hour talking to Chase, the eldest, just one month ago. The whole conversation revolved around dead birds. Martin, the younger, surrounded himself with so many scores of fine ladies Anna never found the opportunity to speak with him. But she heard enough about him from Edwin, enough to want to avoid him totally.

There was one brother younger than Edwin, but he was an invalid of nineteen just finished school, choosing to stay in his room and away from company, his head stuck into the folds of newspapers. "I think I like him the best," Edwin had told her, "though he doesn't like me much."

Samuel, their man, showed her inside. The gas lamps caused her to cough, but even she admitted they had a summery effect, making the hallway mahogany look dessert-rich. She heard the voices of Mother, the Doctor and the Knowltons in the living room, talking. Mrs. Knowlton never said anything except to disparage and Mr. Knowlton, though always civil, had his mind on his work and on his properties elsewhere. But Mother always tried so hard to please. And even Anna had to admit that Mother was a gifted conversationalist.

Their sitting room was very sparse for a family so wealthy. To silken couches, a fireplace, a couple of chairs, and a very red woven rug from the Near East. The rug was a peculiar conquest, a gift from a prolific Oriental business man. An Oriental rug, Mr. Knowlton said, to temper the Occidental furniture. Mrs and Mr Knowlton sat on one large sofa, and facing them, sat the Doctor and Mother.

When Anna came into the room Mother stood up and took her by the gloved hand, directing her to Mrs. Knowlton. The matriarch was handsome, with very little gray strands and an unconscionably slim figure. Her husband sat with his shoulder over the back of the sofa, his jacket strained at the belly and his hair mere wisps against his scalp.

"You've grown," Mrs. Knowlton said, "even in the last two weeks."

Anna nodded.

Mrs. Knowlton let go of her arm and gave her a critical look.

"My sons," she said, "are over there." And she continued whatever it was she'd been telling the Doctor, and Anna felt banished even in the room with them.



Over there -- the next room was the antechamber to the study, where the rows of bookshelves began and went, almost interminably, into the rooms beyond. It was all in this same dark paneling, and Anna observed that the two eldest, standing against the heirloom piano and holding their liquor in very fragile glasses.

consent

My brother and I have a nickname for our sister's fiance: Jerkface.

Not sure if it was because he smelled like ass or if it was the tattoos or the red-brown teeth. He stayed at the Khairatabad clubs drinking pig swill and standing in the smoky restroom queues chatting up those ladies-who-used-to-be-men until three in the morning. Jerkface got kicked out of college twice for getting into drunken fights. Even before getting thrown out he was no scholar; he averaged five on tens and six on tens, a straight-F student. Somehow in the few short months he stayed in college he managed to get into my sister's skirts. And now she wanted to marry him.

I kept my mouth shut whenever my sister talked to me about Jerkface. We couldn't talk often anyway. She worked at Infosys and those guys had their claws in her ten hours a day. Not sure what she really did, but she took a lot of trips, retreats and knew her boss intimately on the telephone. My sister had a real thing about lonely people. Maybe that's what drew her to Jerkface.

She called me last week to tell me they were going to be married. I sat in my rathole Rahway apartment looking out my window, staring at the brilliant convertibles and the long-legged miniskirted Black girls piling into them, when I got the phone call. I could tell that her "Hello?" was quiet and excited, even if we were separated by seven thousand miles. I waited a second, my ass on my bed and my feet against the wall. My room was tight.

Turned out she told the folks about Jerkface, and they weren't impressed. I knew why. (It's not like my aversion to Jerkface came out of nowhere.) Nobody wanted her to end up with this fool. When she told me about the part where Amma and Appa reacted to the announcement, she started to cry. She kept asking me why they wouldn't come around.

That was a rhetorical question and we both knew it.

I haven't talked to anna yet, she then said, sighing, But I know he's not happy. Nobody's supporting me.

It's so sudden, I said.

If my brothers don't help me, she said, who else can I ask?

She pulled her Brahmanastram on me; the ultimate Guilt Trip. I never figured how to handle it. She took advantage of my silence to tell me that Jerkface was coming to Jersey to find a job.

Then she said, tell me you're OK with it. Please.

It was time for me to strategically roll over my phone and cut the call.



I should have given my consent then. There's such a rich precedent for this kind of defiance in my family, especially in our women. Two of my aunts ran away from home. (My mother eloped with my father when they were both students at Andhra University but that was different. My father had brains, a half-dozen degrees, and an actual job.) I knew my sister would elope with Jerkface whether or not she had anyone's consent.

I got a lot of flak for this attitude from the Girl.

You still have to tell her, she said. You're lying to her if you tell her it's OK. She stood over me with her war chest hanging out, her unbound hair turned into frizzy rays by the Jersey humidity. I pulled her down to the bed by her bra strap.

Telling her everything was a bad idea. She went on to scare me shitless reciting one doomsday situation after another. What if he never got a job? What if he wouldn't let her go out? What if he beat their kids? What if she gets nightmare in-laws? It's funny how, when she rants, she waves her fists and spits a little. The questions soon became a steep price to pay for her shirtlessness.

Then when I tried telling her it was none of our business, Girl went apoplectic.

She said, If I had big brothers I'd tell them to beat you up. My very Central Jersey Girl had a much younger brother and impossibly strict parents. If they knew that we were together in my shoebox I'd be incarcerated. If Girl had an older brother, she'd be holding up my bloody carcass, so I told her that I was very happy she wanted me dead.

I think you should go see Jerkface, she said.

It took me about five extra seconds and creative bra hook maneuvering to get her to shut up. Half-an-hour later she was sleeping, nose into my pits, my leg twisted up in a Charlie Horse. I though through the pain, why not? My phone seemed light years away, sitting up on my dresser next to the weak fan.

Later.




My sister is a tenacious girl. She's asked me to meet Jerkface before. Set up a dinner date and everything for the two of us at the Hyderabad House the summer before I got accepted to Rutgers. I blame this on a supreme display of brotherly affection, I went. I knew he wouldn't show up before he didn't. I even made a good show of waiting for the guy, but half an hour later, I just went home. My sister called me later, sheepish.

I think he's scared, she said.

The problem was her prettiness. It's unfortunate she was born into our family. From the time she could talk the folks have been keeping her away from the guys who always scuttled around to get a second look up her skirt. You'd think that having two older brothers might scare these monkeys away but that never stopped them from coming around the place, sneaking a look up the balcony, waiting for my sister to drop a plait so that they could climb their stinky selves up the coconut-oiled Rapunzel ladder.

Before Jerkface she'd seen three serious boyfriends, two stalkers and a thousand wandering eyes following her every move. My brother and I were in college by the time she started getting serious with Jerkface, so we couldn't stop her or advise her. It was unfairness on a cosmic level that someone like him could get a girl.

It'd be stupid for me to say that no one knew. Of course we knew. Every time Jerkface snuck up the side stairs into the balcony, we knew what was going on. My brother and I came home on vacation and we'd see them talking. A lot more went on than just talking, we knew. Somewhere downstairs my folks would have fistfuls of yogurt rice in their palms, their eyes glued to the news. Masters of Self-Deception. Now that my sister had taken it to the illogical next step they were flustered. In their game plan they got to choose the groom. Now that the plan was almost collapsed I was its last hope.

So when I sent Girl home that night I called my sister and said I'd meet Jerkface. She pierced a hole through my right ear, that's how loud she shrieked.




I went to meet Jerkface on Thursday after five. I even started so early that, though my train managed to stop for close to fifteen minutes along the five minute stretch between Rahway and Metropark, I got there before time. Bastard didn't show. I waited at the Dakshin express for a hundred thousand years while I kept ordering mirchi bajji. I always manage to impress the Girl with the way I can eat these like candy, these supposedly spicy as fuck juicy peppers with fat seeds. The fan pulsated into the summer heat and the thousands of screaming kids and embarrassed parents threw each other at their food, scattering grease all over the floor.

To my credit I sat there so long even the owner became concerned. He offered me some free bajji, pawned off some of my vital statistics, and asked me if I was married.

When my sister called me I'd tell her that sorry, her loss, couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't give her my consent. Couldn't my indifference be enough?



Girl and I were on a very, very interesting trajectory when Jerkface called. Make that Fartface. Dickface. Fuckface.

"Sorry, ra" he said, "Can we do it again?"

afterdawn

Erin remembers the train & the tracks & the world though the thickets of trees as her last good memories before Bran's death. It seems a thousand years ago that the green veiny world was hers beyond the toxic steam from the train & Bran sat across the plush seat across from her, slightly hairy legs up on the plush seat so close she could almost smell his feet. She remembers the skirt she wore. Plump & taffeta. Red & obnoxious. Her hair brushed & blond-fluorescent against the white of her shirt. They played cards. Bran won because he cheated. She loved his cheating eyes. Dark cheating eyes & curly hair & a jaw so sturdy it survived bullets. They were seventeen then,

on the cusp of death. Because every year alive is always one year closer to death.

After playing cards forever they slept but Bran was not comfortable sleeping on a seat unoccupied by someone else, so he switched sides to borrow her shoulder.

Erin remembers the sweetness the most. The scent of his scalp, the gigantic right hand on her knee, the goosebumps they left behind around the small mole at the base of her skinny right knee. The glass compartment doors clanged together. If she screwed her eyes shut she could concentrate on the distracting breaths he blew into her ear.

Whenever the train jolted he'd kiss her neck. She did not pretend indifference. Instead her grins grew into perfect semicircles. Then lopsided. Unabashedly happy.

His arm wrapped around the small of her back. They remained like this, stitched together, for two whole hours.




They reached A---. The station was a lone platform in an ocean of overgrown trees, brambles & weeds that clung, needy, to the barbed wire fences. Two other ancient ladies left the train, their cloaks covering their dresses & the soft, pliant skins of their ankles visible in the heat. Erin could not bear to see in front of her. The air shook from the blue humidity. Bran had his arm around her & the handle of his suitcase. She could feel him already browning in the sun.

Bran offered to wait until the next train. Erin knew she had to endure the standard This is Not Forever speech. That was the worst part. So she told him to go. He would not go. They stood against the fence, waiting for the Express.

The easy thing was not so simple. She could not refuse to go. Worse, Bran stayed silent. Erin was at a loss to remember when he had ever been so quiet. He gave a subtle clutch to the chest, the only indication of this sickness of loss.

Just before the train came they heard the patter of gunfire. Quick, thick shots. Erin smashed her head against the sound of a man dying in the leaves. Head ringing, she vomited into the fence.

I can't leave you here, she sobbed, as the train finally pulled into the station. He didn't hear her.



One thousand more miles to C---.

She started that journey in tears.



Through those tears she saw that the train pounded dangerously through the coastline. The color of the trip: blue. Blinding blue in the water, softer in the sky. Eroded cliffs dipped into the turquoise shores. Though there was no one left to shoot guns, this was still the soundtrack of her imagination. Bizarrely, she was thankful. Bullets meant no Bran.

Dear Mam,

We have arrived safely at W--. No fire. Company all alive. I love you dearly. Will write again from Silver.

Tell Maria she may have whatever she wants from my drawers. Say hello to my dear Aunt. It's good you will be moving in with her. It's good that we're able to leave.

[Erin scratched out that last line. The last two lines.]

2

The world changed a day later. Erin slept through the metamorphosis. She stepped on the unfinished letter when she turned to look through the window. The land was silent, opening under the dawn.

When Erin looks back, she realizes that she never knew how to identify this rich bleakness. At first she thought it was emptiness. Too sedate to be hell. The train itself was quiet, an self-moving object that took her through space. Bran's distance became fresh grief.



Then, the train crashed


a thousand miles an hour it seemed, hurtling towards another fast-moving body of iron. It slipped off the track. Had Erin known about Bran then she would've welcomed death. Even now she knew no reluctance. The glass from the compartment door sliced her skin into pieces but she lay low, a habit of instinct, squatting through the cracks left in the injured door. She squeezed her cut-up body through the tipsy corridors, her cheek raw against the heat distortion of the walls. Her lungs were suffused with smoke. She crawled from the belly of the diseased metal animal & found herself in the softness of grass.

No one else left the wreckage. The other hulk of iron carried freight, an automated no-driver, no-human, no-soul train. The steaming accident & the smell of dying bodies stunk up the fresh heather of this meadow. She coughed into it.

As she walked through the grasses she heard the sounds of normal traffic on the road a half mile in front of her behind the moor & wondered why the roads were allowed to exist. Then

she fell into the grass. A poor-man's grave. A grave Bran might've shared.

She didn't notice the dried-blood covered ambulance hurtling through the wreckage at a million miles an hour, snorting gasoline into the grass. The weightless hands underneath her, strapping her onto a stretcher, did nothing to wake her up. Even the hardness of an industry-standard hospital bed could not cut her loose from dreaming. Not even the anesthesia could obliterate what she saw.

Somewhere she felt a deep sense of relief. Good. She had managed not to send that letter. It was not good that Mam was going to live with Aunt. She should not feel that way. Even when the world was being ripped apart by bombs that woman was more toxic than death. Even through the medicine & the attack of the scalpels and needles, Erin screamed a warning to her Mam. If she ever would listen.



You are awake, Erin heard.

Just like that, she was awake.

She sat in a box of white. The room had a door built into the wall. The light was blinding. The hardness of the mattress pinched her back. A nurse pinched at the needles stuck into her forearm. Another woman stood at the foot of her bed. Her skin was burnished and taut, a deliberately non-white thing in this sterile room. Her hair was clumped in thick parts around her shoulders, each equally susceptible to pulling the way Erin's old braids urged Bran to pull them when she sat in front of him in the elementary.

She nodded to the nurse to pull the needles out.

Register on your way out, the burnished woman said. She turned on her heels and walked out, tight skirt banging her on her calves. The nurse followed. When Erin felt her face the skin was almost healed. The pain in her arm was still significant. She found her clothes in a distended pile on a chair. She managed to leave the room, ignoring the pain in her intact face and arms. The corridors outside were too crowded, mostly with the carts of newborns the nurses pushed toward the industrial-strength metal doors. The sterility of the place bothered her. So did the linoleum. & the squeakiness of the wheels as they rubbed against the floor. Erin felt the outline of the damage to her face, even though it was still (after a second, third, fifth, hundredth exploration) fine.

At the end of the hallway the burnished woman stood there with the nurse & they both leaned against carts of these glass baby cages, filled with sleeping babies cocooned in their felt-stitched blankets. They seemed as inanimate objects. Erin watched as they stood close to the stairwell, in front of another glass-paneled door which led to the glass cribs for the newborn babies. Through the door Erin saw only empty cribs. They held them in their arms for moments before putting them back into the glass; the nurse wheeled them somewhere and the burnished woman took the stairs.

I'll get the last, the woman said, you bring its medicine.

Erin then crept closer to the glass door. Now she could see the last baby (burnished) left in its crib. She saw Bran's face in its copper one. A half-accidental-descendent of a fairer man who might never come home. Its fists crashed against its glass prison, and when she turned around to face the stairwell both women were gone, wheeling the glass cages toward the elevator.

She knew she would take that baby.

He waved to her.

His little fists jabbed into the air. He fought whatever sedative they'd given him to keep him cocooned in sleep. The others gave drugged breaths, but this one fought. Erin found his wrinkly face getting bigger and more beautiful to her the longer that she watched it.

The alarm went off as soon as she opened the door and grabbed the baby in one swoop.



She ran down the stairs. No sign of the burnished woman, though she heard the nurse roll the cart frantically toward the door from the elevator. The baby was warm in her hands & against her breast it made attempts to suckle as her heart thudded messages of caution. The baby seemed to understood, though it struggled silently on her chest thirsty for milk. Her milk. Milk that would undoubtedly, if it did flow, kill him.

Thud.

This was dangerous. She would get caught. The alarms were ringing. The cameras caught her back. She wished for her mother's thick Kashmiri cloak, a gift from her father's army friend. It would cover her. Make her into any peasant with a baby strapped around her chest for farmwork. Or a Vietnamese Straw Hat.

She heard the steps, though they were not many. It was a half-hearted chase.

When she pushed the (alarmed) door, the last door at the bottom of the interminable stairwell, the baby began to cry.

belfast killing

9/04 4:00 PM
Mrs Nicas is dead. And Brandon Nicas is missing.

Mom came back from the Nicas' a half-hour ago. Even in something as private as a diary, I don't even know how to start.

9/04 4:25 PM

In times like these I miss Rachel, my best friend. A lot. Since she's moved to Venezuela, this notebook might be the only friend I have. Maybe I can actually keep this going for some time. I've tried writing things down before, but it never worked because I always had someone to tell things to. And a notebook can't suggest where I should start.

Before she left Rachel swore she would send me emails daily. I've gotten three in the last two months. She did send me a letter just after she landed. She wrote that her new villa has a garden with a million different purple and blue and orange blooms. She's supposed attach the pictures as soon as she gets her camera to work. In the meanwhile, she said I should find myself a good Argentinean boyfriend like her mother's fiance, Marco. Then, I could visit her as often as I'd like.

(Rachel always knew how to make me laugh.)

I'm not the type to attract an Argentinian demigod. I'm tiny. I've got unfashionably long hair and crooked too-thin legs. I'm more than just pasty. I'm glow-in-the-dark white.

Even though I'm no psychic I get there isn't anyone in the tarot cards for me. Not an Argentinean. Or Brandon Nicas, who's lived down the street since I was born and whom I've been deeply in love with for as long as I can remember.

These are the facts of my life, and I'm fine with them.

Rachel isn't a bombshell either. I love the fact that we're equal in most t
things. Sure, she's slightly shorter and curvier than I am, but not by much. We both love classic rock. We bought the same pens and indulged our fetishes for stationary at the Papyrus as often as we could. Together (and with Dad's help) we built shelves to store our old LPs and books and whatever else we collected because we believed friendships are all about collecting things with hidden meanings. And now when I look at my bedroom shelf, at the broken parts of porcelain castles, the stacks of old Zeppelin records, I realize that I'm the only one on this side of the equator who knows about their origins.

It's not a fun feeling.

So there's no one else to tell about Brandon or what happened to the Nicas. Rachel's gone, and from her emails she's more than just a few thousand miles apart.

Back to the Nicas'.

They've been the only other family on our block we've talked to and my parents have known them since before I was born.

My parents are pretty aloof. They know it, too. They hate the Supermoms and Dads who manage to keep perfect lawns, who ferry their children to karate and to SATs and to swimming and to their cello lessons. My mother tells me (often) that she doesn't care what I do during the day as long as I keep out of prison, comb my hair, and take a bath occasionally. But they're very fond of the Nicas, and we have them over all the time, or as often as Mom feels like putting a huge dinner together.

The Nicas moved here from Belfast but they're originally from Romania. Their oldest, Brandon, was born in Belfast. for the longest time Brandon carried that accent with him. You can imagine that from the time that I was a baby I was subjected to that gorgeous voice.

What's a poor girl to do?

The Other Guy has a name, of course; it's Lucian, and he's my age, born in boring old Branville, New Jersey. It sounds like the ultimate preppy name, but it's wrong for him. He's almost as short as I am. He never changes out of his oppressive black sweaters and threadbare corduroys.

Often, we have dinner parties together. My mother babysat Brandon and Lucian when Elisaveta and Carlo went to Europe. Elisaveta was calm but not social. Just thinking about her now, I remember her black hair braided tightly behind her, the beautiful gray eyes, the flawless dusky complexion. She never went out unless it was to see us or relatives, and the times we have encountered her extended family she never looked comfortable among that colorful, boisterous group of men or the muttering of their silent wives. She felt the most comfortable at her flute, bent in front of the window, watching her sons in the yard. Carlo is more effusive but, again, though he is close with Dad (they play golf together) I feel like I don't know him much.

But I know Brandon and Lucian.

We always were a little group unto ourselves. Then, Lucian and I entered middle school, and then he broke away to hang out with his crowd of overachievers from high school. When I didn't see Rachel sometimes I played cards or Scrabble with Brandon over at his house. He commuted to college and sometimes had a few free hours in the afternoon. And after I got over the distraction of his gorgeousness, we played a few very competitive games of go-fish and rummy on his creaky porch. Our houses were each on the opposite sides of the street. Attached houses with twin roofs, bending to meet in the middle. In our similar houses we saw each other a million times a week, and Elisaveta said, in her serious way, that if she had any more children, she would make my parents its godparents.

It is tough for me to imagine Mrs. Nicas dead, but the news hasn't really settled in yet. Somehow, I'm not able to cry.

It's as tough to hear that Brandon is missing. For the longest time I won't be able to look at his knuckles while he conquers me royally in chess. I hope he is all right. Maybe he is not missing after all, and this whole thing is a total misunderstanding.

The time has come to talk to Mom.



9/04 8:34 PM

I've just come back from the Nicas'. When I found Mom in the kitchen, she put a hot casserole dish in my hands. Cheesy baked potatoes and spiced cauliflower. She told me to take it to Mr. Nicas quickly. "It's important that they eat," she said. I've never heard her so exhausted before. She had to hold onto the back wall in order to stand. "There's no use in people running around on empty."

My first thought was that Elisaveta's the best cook I know and the Nicas never ran around on empty. Then I remembered Elizaveta's dead. Quickly, so that Mom wouldn't see my watering eyes, I turned around with the dish and marched right out of the house. The weather outside is sultry. Not too hot, but I can still smell the accumulated heat of the season. Though it's cooling down and I've gotten used to the weather, I still don't feel comfortable, especially with this giant dish in my hand. So I made as good time as I could to the Nicas'.

The Nicas own one van and one Fiat. Neither were on the driveway.

I hit their doorbell so hard I was surprised by the noise it made. I almost dropped that boiling casserole on my foot. At first I was scared. Nobody opened the door. Then I heard footsteps approaching. They were too soft to be Carlo's. I was right. It was Lucian.

Clear-faced and, in this heat, still wearing his sweater.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

I held up the casserole dish. He moved to let me inside. "Where did your dad go?" I asked. I followed him into the hallway. Two suitcases lay against the wall. I squeezed myself against the bags to get into the kitchen. His kitchen -- even our kitchen -- is the biggest room in the house. No shortage of gleaming countertops and straight, polished cabinetry. Even now, with the chaos, their whole kitchen was immaculate. Just placing the dish next to the flat stove made me feel like I'd dirtied the place up.

Lucian shrugged.

"When will he be back?"

"Why do you care?" he snapped. "Thanks for the food."

He spun and left.



Lucian and I don't have a glorious history with one another. We were all right as kids. Now, we go to the same school and have an unspoken agreement to never interact. Outside, though, we're always pleasant. Sometimes we talk about what happens in the news, or about music. I like Brandon much more and save my Earth-shattering observations for him. When he's with his friends he literally does not acknowledge my existence. Which has also been fine, except (though I'll never admit it in public) I could use friends.

"Lucian took it?" Mom asked me, when I got home.

I told her yes.

She sat me down at the kitchen table and took her hands in mine. "I'm scared too, you know," she said. "Elizaveta was a wonderful woman. It's terrible what happened to her at Belfast." Her voice was shaking, like she was about to cry.


What happened to her was this:

She traveled to Belfast, with Brandon, to see her parents, who live in Ireland. When I have the time I imagine Brandon standing there on the super-green fields facing hills and tall hedgerows, just like in every researched stereotype I could find on Ireland. The whole world gets reflected in those eyes when I think about them, but if Elisaveta was killed there, I cannot imagine it anymore without wanting to throw up. Mom went on to tell me that some Irish nationals blew Elisaveta up in her parents' apartment. The authorities caught one of her killers, but there were others, and the police haven't found them yet. And, apparently, they couldn't find Brandon either.

"At least," Mom said, "she died immediately. She couldn't have survived the blast."

I'm wondering in what awful universe that's actually considered comfort.

It's only after I've gone upstairs do I realize that Mom didn't mention anything about Brandon.

Dynamo promo

MONDAY, JULY 4th
I was the one who burned down the Dynamo Diner.

This is how I did it:

I had the keys that Toni gave me to the delivery entrance in the back. I'm surprised that I got away with sneaking in, even though it was the first two hours after closing time and there must've been a million people across the street watching the July 4th fireworks though they weren't very flashy yet; they save the best for the last. It was a good thing. Arson was never legal and I was carrying enough matchsticks and kerosene on me to burn down the planet. I hoped that if someone caught me going in I could pass off as a bum though I don't know how I'd explain the can of kerosene under my jacket. I hadn't seen the inside of a bathroom for a couple of days and I'd been swigging enough mouthwash to smell drunk. My hair was so greasy it stuck to my hood. I smelled like I shoveled shit for a living.

The key took a little while to get into the lock but once the foreplay was over I stabbed it into the knob and the door opened into the kitchen, which still stunk of the old sauerkraut and the pickles Marie forgot to put away. I'm guessing that putting stuff back wasn't as important as some awful ten o'clock movie. Today it wouldn't matter. I'm sure Marie will enjoy these movies when she's unemployed.

The kitchen was larger than I was used to because there were always five hundred people in there, elbows bumping into each other cutting boxes and boxes of peppers and onions and the fat off of truckloads of steak. The smell was an echo of the afternoon down to Andrea's vomit from the first and last baby she should ever have. (My requirements aren't all that tough. The woman doesn't know her seven times tables.) Even the stench of puke wasn't so bad in the evening. I realized I felt bad for a place I didn't even know well. And hadn't burned down yet.

My feet killed me. My soles flapped around on the linoleum. I bumped into stacks of ketchup boxes, pots hanging like heads from the ceiling. The tray stacks rolled around on the floor because someone left the top window open. When I went to close it the pots clanged against the wall. It's one last satisfaction Javier will never have, telling Marie to close the door for the seventieth time that week.

There's another locked door between the kitchen and the rest of the place. I wondered if my key would work on that but it did, and the door sounded little less like old men getting up. It slammed into my face so I held it and came up behind the counter, crushing facial bones I didn't know I had. I was in front of the cash register and felt for the key taped under the second shelf from the bottom. After a few dust-bunnies settled in my nails I unstuck the thing and shoved it into the register.

It was a long time since I saw Ulysses, Lincoln, George and Andrew. (They didn't accept Benjamins, the Dynamo Diner was no Tavern on the Green.) I scooped them out and looked out the front windows. I could see the crowd jumping at the sight of fireworks. Wait until you see the Grand Finale, I wanted to say but that would have ruined everything and I'd have been drinking out of a coke can behind a two-way mirror, interrogated by the cops the same way it goes on TV.

Right in front of the counter was the broken stool Greg used while he ate his Grilled Cheeses with Ham toasted Just So with fries that he shoved into the melted cheese. The Dynamo isn't the only outfit in town that serves cheese fries. I was sure he'd eat somewhere else when the Diner was gone. Filthy pig.

The tables were made out of wood. Thick, sturdy, dry flammable wood. It gave the place a folksy look. Even the salt and pepper jars were made out of wood. So were the paneling and the frame for the picture schlepped from Cuba back when the fruit barons owned everything and carrying pictures of happy people stuffing their faces with sandwiches was more than just okay. Now you can't even bring a fart back from Cuba.

(I'm all for farts. They're flammable.)

The crowd still waited for the big blasts that were just about to start. It's quiet for awhile before that happens so they're checking watches, running after their stupid toddlers wandering in the streets, exploding when the fireworks burst. Almost everybody carried something in their free hands -- a hot dog, beefy bun, a carton of french fries. Their faces were covered in grease.

I wanted a burger, too.


I was back in the kitchen again, and because I couldn't see I was going to have spots all over my arms. I bruise like fruit. Pots and trays were my enemies. Boxes of knives sat ready to stab me by themselves. The jar of pickles wanted to kill me.

I turned on the gas and the grill flared up. I loved the smell but I turned it off anyway. That came last.

Somewhere in the corner was a can of old grease. Toni talked about keeping it a lock on the lid or something to discourage stealing. It's been done before, but not in this diner because nobody around here uses a car. There's nowhere to park on this street, not even illegally. Just to prove it my legs hurt from walking up the hill past Edgewood Place and then onto Laurel Avenue until it ended at a chain link fence. Beyond that there's weeds. Past the Dynamo Diner there's nothing. It's the end of the world. I didn't even have to watch a doomsday movie to see it either. There's nowhere to go, even if I did have a car.

So there's no lock on the grease cap. The barrel was made from tin and you could smell every rotten thing Maria and Andrea made with it this past week. There was bacon cooked with eggs and steak and six types of cheese. I tilted it onto the floor and let it go. I was afraid that it'd congeal and turn into a monster, something with a working brain and limbs and that was more than I could say for myself right now.

After a few seconds nothing happened. No grease monsters. I would've liked to meet one.

I took off my jacket and it stunk so much of myself that I gagged. My puke came up and went down my throat again until I coughed on it. All I could think was that my mother would kill me, my mother would kill me. Before burning a building, she'd always said, take a bath. Comb your hair. Be presentable and act like a lady.

I took the bottle of kerosene and a pair of gloves from the inside of my jeans. I poured the kerosene onto the jacket and took the million or so matchsticks, trying them out one at a time. Hiding them under my pits killed a fair few but finally I got one working. I've made a game of staring at matches until my nails feel like they're being melted off. I dropped the flame onto my jacket and soon it caught fire.

It was burning much more than I'd expected because within a few seconds the zippers were melting onto the floor, which was starting to turn black from white and orange.

When I turned around the fire was behind me and I was staring out the open door. Now was the time to make that last burger, before the kerosene met the grease.



Two seconds after I turned on the gas I jumped like the star athlete I never was and my face met the dirt. This was all right because I'd already managed to destroy my front teeth way before I knew I would burn down the diner or any other building. My left hand covered my bloody mouth, my right had one hell of a time trying to lock the back door by itself. I couldn't look. I couldn't smell because if I did I'd puke for real and I wasn't sure whether or not vomit was flammable.

When there was no way I could ever open that door again even if I wanted to I jumped the back fence just as the Chinese Dragon blasts ripped the atmosphere open (and when I closed my eyes on the other side I could still see them in my head). I had to run away into the weeds and away from civilization. I couldn't watch the Dynamo Diner burn down to hell, even if it had to.



(This is the why.)

MONDAY, JUNE 27
I was sitting outside with Toni while she got the call about her brother. He's dead? Toni asked but she couldn't get the sounds. I wanted to thump her back, to force the words out of her mouth so that the other person wouldn't go hello, hello on the other end like the Pathmark's tape deck sometimes does so that Britney repeats the word baby until my brain turns to ooze. The guy hung up and the dial tone brought us down to Earth. Toni's thighs touched mine as we sat on the steps and watched her knees which were nothing really to look at.