(Last time, Charlie made it back home.)

“I’m back,” I called as I swung open the screen door.

Two weeks can change so much. The second-hand red sofa no longer seemed like a prisoner’s pallet. Leaning against the mantle over the chipped fireplace, the photo of my vovo no longer seemed to stare down at me in scorn. Instead, she was smiling at me again.

My parents greeted me with hugs. “Great to have you back, kid,” my father said. It’s weird to find out that you’ve missed a bristly mustache.

My mom squeezed me so tight. I had missed her perfume, too—the kind I went looking for at Filene’s Basement every Christmas. Then she stepped back and held onto my arms as she inspected me. “Oh, Carly. There’s a light in your face again.”

“It’s been a wild trip, Mom.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and started to tell them about our adventures when the phone rang.

My dad picked up the phone. “Pat? You want to talk to Charlie?” He held out the phone to me. “He says it’s urgent.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

“He’s here.”

With the frenzy of a boiling-over pot, Pat explained. Mickey Kent was there. At Kentstock East. Somehow, he had heard about it and was making a surprise appearance. Like it had been doused in gasoline, the Mickster phone tree was burning with the news.

“So you gotta come. It’s at the Playhouse, like usual. You know how to get here?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

I could almost hear his waiting smile on the other side of the line. “And one more thing. I think she’s here, too.”

The breath pounced in my chest like a panther. “What?”

“It’s the red minivan, with the bumper-sticker and everything.”

“Are you serious—are you serious?”

“Dude, it doesn’t have to be serious to be true. She’s here.”

The kitchen suddenly seemed to open around me. “Mom, Dad—I think I have to go.”

I grabbed my keys and jumped over the front step. As I drove my old gray hatchback, I felt like a boy chasing after a butterfly—running, daring to leap, trying.

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Travel Journal Entry #11

Is it weird to hope again?

Talk about middle school!!!! Maybe there’s something about the journal format that makes everything so melodramatic. Like when I was accused of talking during a “silent lunch” how I filled pages with anger at the injustice and the barbaric (was it Soviet, 1989 Bonnie?) unfairness of silent lunch as some kind of collective punishment in the first place. You spend all this time on words words words and me me me that every little hiccup becomes some grand and wild drama.

But—if I can be a DRAMA QUEEN—I think I do feel hope again. The lovely, open-ended kind of hope. You don’t know what today will bring. But it could be something wonderful.

Last night, I practiced Janacek. The sonata is like rubbing steel wool on my brain. G-sharp, E—every note just grinding away every spot of anxiety or worry. You can’t doubt. You can’t second-guess. You can’t recriminate. You can just race race race race. You’re skiing the notes—that’s what you’re doing.

So I put down the bow, sign onto AOL, and then I see that e-mail…

Lana thinks I’m crazy. Worse, naïve. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

Oh, thanks, mom. But you know what I said to her?

“I have not yet begun to be naïve.”

Here I was. Getting out of the car, I felt the air upon my face—sparkling, like wet diamonds, like I hadn’t felt it in so long.

The letters on front of the theater’s sign were jumbled: Kentstock East all askew. The t dangled upside down.

I jogged toward the doors. The gravel parking lot was full of empty cars. I followed the path to the rickety steps, with their grain warped and twisted like the topology of a canyon network. Two pineapple-shaped lights attached to the double doors cast a pale yellow glow upon the cracked and peeling gray-painted wood.

My hand slipped around one of the brass door knobs, the metal washed with the night’s dew. I opened the door and stepped inside. In the box-office area, the tables cluttered with Mickey Kent collectibles were unmanned. The hallway was cramped, wooden, and dimly lit. The years had scuffed and scraped the boards beneath my feet and trod through their finish. I had last been here as a boy, on a school field trip to see some retelling of Snow White.

No one was around. My steps fell with hollow plunks as I walked down the hall. A hum of song called me.

Hardened drops of blue clung to the wood of the door to the stage. In the upper corners, chipped mermaids frolicked on the rocks and in the sea. A silvered echo of song came through the paint-encrusted wood, through the distance of dried, heavy colors.

I pressed my hand against the painted door. I pressed my ear against it, to make clear that jaunty melody. I held my face flush against it, my cheekbone driving against the wood.

Even muffled through the wood, I could tell—it was still his voice. It had thinned with age, but it still carried that half-smiling-eye-winking coolness that was only Mickey Kent’s. It coasted along with the strumming bass and made merry with the tapping drums and splashing cymbals. The horn blared.

Take my hand, love—hold it tightly.
Take my hand, love—hold it tightly.
Come with me and let’s go lightly...

Say, say, say the words....
...come dance with me...
...if only...
Then I could hold you.

And you’re the one with that razzamatazz,
That whatchamacallit and all of that jazz,
You’re the one who makes my heart pitter-pat,
You’re the one and I like it like that.
I like it like that—
My heart pitter-pat—
You’re the one and I like it like that.

I drank in the words. They swirled syllable by syllable through my skull. The drums raced like an exercise bike straining at its limits. The hammers of the piano danced from string to string. The voice, drawing out the long final note, reaching on it, savoring it with infinitesimal reverberations. The voice, through the trembles of noise, holding onto breath, keeping true in time, reaching up into the harmonies that move the spheres. Crescendo.

Lapping applause and then silence. The patter before the next song. I heard a shake of laughter. A few drum-taps—the convulsive starts of a heart. And then, the voice again. And the music. And the swell of applause as the audience recognized the song. And the voice.

And I thought I was falling in love...
....but it was only a trip...

My fingers felt the globbed dots of paint, the texture of the woodgrain where the paint had flecked away, the minute cracks running through the solid frame. My hand drifted down to the heavy brass doorknob. Its curve reminded me of a seahorse. The door seemed heavier, the fullness of sound thicker.

...in the sunlight...
As the stars die.

With a swallow, I leaned into the door.

Oh, but...oh...
But...

I stepped back. Should I wait? Try another door?

I took a breath.

The painted door swung open.

Opening

Sometimes, we wake from a dream of death with a gush of wind. Our eyes spring open, and the sweet air—breath—greets us.

All our words perch curled and happy on our lips. We swallow—is this really my throat?—tracing our muscles’ contraction and extension.

Sometimes, what seems surprise is the deepest recognition, and we do not flinch at the dazzling days.

It was her. She was alone, her lips bent. It was her.

I swallowed as our eyes met.

She was here. And I was here. Here, where I could see her. Here, at that very instant. Here, after all those miles.

She stood so still. I stood still, dancing with fire.

“Charlie.”

I did not now blink but met the wind rushing to my eye. “Bonnie.” That was all I could say. It reached all the way down my throat to deep within my ribs. And then, the air was at my lips, which stretched back into a smile. All my face seemed wonderfully alive.

She walked. I walked. Foot followed foot. It was like a spring had renewed, and every metallic wind allowed for a happy leap, as steel pressed against roll of steel.

“I saw your friends in the audience,” she said, “and I knew.”

I fumbled her handkerchief with its white swirls out of my pocket.

“You have that on you?” Joy colored her voice.

“Of course. After all that time. I couldn’t forget.” I swallowed and held the handkerchief out to her. “Well, do you want it back?”

She took the square of fabric, reached forward, and put it in the breast pocket of the worn sport coat. The corners hung out like the curling tips of a star. “You keep it.” She patted the pocket. “It looks good on you.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Not giving up. Hoping.” She laughed. “My dad had heard through the phone tree that Mickey Kent would actually be here—that Kentstock had been cancelled. So I figured I’d come, because you never know what can happen.”

“So did you get what you were hoping for?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

My heart swung forward, and I brought my lips to hers.

Sometimes, two notes stumble together, and they realize a harmony in their crash—deep as the heart of the waves. The instant unfolds and reveals a celestial harmony, joining the course of years and the span of stars. The heart pounds forward as though each beat is a discovery. The dead weight quickens, and your flesh tingles. And the surge—the jubilant wash and rush—rises. The rivers merge in their flow. The ocean roars.

“Do you hear it?” she asked, and smiled.

The sun and the moon and the far-ranging stars weave the ocean, whose waves echo the pulse of your blood, that heavy thunder of your heart. The waves are filled with joy.

I knew just what she meant. “Let the music play.”

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ancient theater. We walked down the stairs as the mists of night, reminding of the mists of morn, rose up to greet us. The shadows parted, and light swept in. The wind etched the road opening around us with a glinting white stream. Moonbeam and starlight shone there, and the moonbeams bore the reflected glory of the sun. And I believed, as we took those first few steps together into the silver-tinctured mist, that we would not walk alone.

THE END

Thank you for reading Mixtape Summer! This is the end of the line for the serialized version, but stay tuned for some news!

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(Last time, Charlie went for a walk—and came to a decision.)

Everyone was still asleep when I returned.

I padded over to Ralph’s laptop. The sign-on information for the Internet was on an index card next to the desk, so I entered the password.

The modem began to warble its vacuum-soprano song. It sounded like a distorted alarm—like the convulsions of the heart.

I signed into my Yahoo account. Then I started to type.

Gina,

I spent months and months missing you. It’s amazing how much missing there can be in a heart.

I got your letter. And I have to be honest. I didn’t at first know what to make of it. It’s funny. You wanted to write me a letter to get the words right, and I’m writing to you to try to figure out what to say.

We grew up together. And I owe you so much for that. And I’m sorry for, well, everything. I’m sorry for the fights and the tears. I’m sorry for the mean things I said. I’m sorry that this wasn’t a happily-ever-after ending.

But I understand now why you had to move out to Seattle. You knew that it wasn’t working. You knew that we both had to change.

And now we’ve changed.

I thought about coming out to see you. I really did.

But I can’t now. We’ve changed. And we both need to start anew.

I don’t say this with bitterness or anger or anything like that. I say this because I care about you. I think we both deserve a new start.

I was so angry at you for so long, Gina. (Anger, self-pity, depression—I had it all.) But I’m not angry anymore.

We had a lot of great times. And I still care so much about you.

Your friend,

Charlie

It was all true, I realized as I sat back in the chair. It was like I had gained a new perspective. I still did care for her, but that care no longer stabbed my heart like a white-hot poker. And the anger was gone and so was the regret that I had both fed and fed upon for so many months.

We did have to start anew.

So I unfolded the small piece of paper next to me and typed in another e-mail address. For some reason, my fingers didn’t quiver too much.

Bonnie,

It’s me, Charlie. Remember me—I’m that guy you met on the road and danced with at a wedding in Kentucky? The guy who then burned everything down? Who earned a place in the Biggest Jerk Hall of Fame? Who flinched when he saw the first ray of light in a really long time?

First of all, I’m sorry. I’m getting used to saying that these days. But I really am.

This is to explain—not to excuse: You know how sometimes you fantasize about something for so long and then it becomes true and then you realize you don’t want it anymore? Well, for a year, I had cast my whole self into this wish that somehow my ex and I could get back together. So when I heard that she did maybe want to—it was like a stab in the dark.

But now I see I never could go back.

This is the real first of all—first in what I feel inside. I really like you. I sometimes feel like you and I have found some secret door in the universe—the one that makes a dead end into a wide-open horizon.

You have such a light inside. It comes out when you’re on the violin—or when you’re tucking a strand of hair behind your left ear. You know how to improvise with life. That’s one of the reasons why your smile is so great—it lets some of that light shine through.

I want to see you again. I want to hear you play the violin again. And I’d love to hear your laughter.

So maybe we can begin again?

In hope,

Charlie

And that was all true, too, I saw. The happiness deserved a chance. It was time to take it.

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Happy Days II

My mother’s cool hand reached up to touch my cheek. “Disappointment? No. Never. Charlie, I want you to be happy. I want you to be free.”

Ralph wanted to drive back with us. “Maybe I’ll come back for a week or so. Take a break from the cabin.”

“Driving to Montana doesn’t count as a break from the cabin?” Pat asked.

Ralph shrugged. “It’s lonely out here, but not in a good way. I can catch a bus back here later. It might be inspirational to go to the beach. I’ve been meaning to write some poems about piping plovers.”

So the wheels went around again. The odometer went around, mile by mile. We rode on the serpentine, solid road. It touched ocean to ocean. It cut through mountain and lake and prairie and city.

As we crossed the border of Western Massachusetts, we drove through the silhouettes of the Berkshire Mountains—not like the mountains of the West, slicing the sky with ragged reach, but great green undulating waves. The sights grew familiar. The billboards advertised companies and chains that were no longer strangers to us.

Pat craved “one last adventure,” so we drove to a beach near my house. The waves hissed against the amber sand. Most of the tourists were gone, but a few tried to squeeze a little more out of the dusk’s waning hour: scattered figures bobbed in the ocean or slouched in beach chairs. Two children ran through the surf, splashing amidst the white foam at the water’s edge. Down by a jetty, someone was fishing, the long rod suspended like a broken mast in the air.

Heavy with salt and the scent of seaweed, the air clung to my nostrils and tongue. Pat kicked off his sneakers and waded into the ocean until the water licked the hem of his shorts. He was smiling. Even Danny took off his shoes as he went inspecting shells on the shore. With a grin, Pat splashed him. Danny kicked back, and then they went chasing after each other. Their footprints swept in and out of the water’s edge, the waves tossing over them. Ralph stretched out in the sand and ran his fingers through it.

As I walked toward the water, I rubbed my arms through the wrinkled wool of the old coat from Kentucky. The sand ate my steps; my feet sunk into hills. The waves crashed. The saudade echoed with the wind and the waves.

I had spent so many hours at this beach. I had stood there in the winter, amidst the lone and level sands. I had watched the relentless, restless waves devour inch by inch. With an arctic edge, the wind had flailed my face and left scabs of numbness.

Now, the heat from the long day seemed to radiate from the sand. The breeze blew with the promise of further shores—the vastness of the ocean—the hope of new horizons.

I wandered over to Pat and Danny. Grains of sand had piled up in a lump beneath the arch of my foot. Pat had perched himself atop an empty lifeguard’s chair, watching the sea. I sat down at the base of the chair and emptied my sneaker. The sand fell like rain.

His hair tousled by the wind, Pat laughed. “It’s at a time like this that I almost feel like howling at the moon. Look, there it is!”

The moon bobbed amidst the dueling pinks.

Ralph had risen from the sand. He said, “Despite all the tourists, the beach can be rather beautiful.”

“We have returned,” Pat said.

We had returned. And I had a date with those wrinkled pages in my desk drawer—to finish that thesis and move on. And grow up.

“It was worth it,” Pat said, “totally. For all the craziness—for something different.”

“The rave,” Ralph said.

“The Northern Lights,” Danny added.

“The wedding,” I breathed. “It’s good to be back.”

Pat grinned. “Glad to hear you say that, Charlie.”

“You come back to yourself, but you’re not what you used to be. And maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Hey!” Like lighting had struck him, Pat bolted upright in the chair. “We can still do Kentstock. Kentstock East. It must be on right now.”

“Why not?” Ralph said with a smile.

Danny shrugged. “I’ve never gone.”

“What do you say, Charlie?”

“You guys go. Just drop me off. I want to go home.”

Moving On

“We’re a long way from the Gardens.” She suddenly remembered that as she stepped away from the email window open on the computer. She had said those words to Charlie the night they had broken up, the night she had told them she would go to Seattle alone. He always had that way of provoking her, of making her so melodramatic. It was because he was so serious. Charlie could be a lot of fun, but he lived his whole life like he was looking for an epiphany around every corner.

One night a couple years ago, when they were getting ready to meet some of her friends from high school in Providence, she had been braiding her hair, and he had been lying on her bed. All of a sudden, he sat up and started talking about how this was such a perfect moment—with the rain and the smell of the fresh-cut grass or something. He seemed like such a child, and she had dismissed it. She knew that he had held it against her. And she held it against him for holding it against her.

“Maybe I could act like a child, too,” she said to Cleocatra, as she swept the rag-doll cat up off the floor and scratched her head. She walked over to the sliding door that opened onto her apartment’s tiny balcony. For some strange reason, Cleocatra didn’t mind being taken out to the open air that high up. Maybe her nine lives made her indifferent to danger.

She looked at the supermarket and coffee shop below her building. She looked across—to the skyscrapers rising against a gray backdrop. Cleocatra rubbed her soft white head against her shoulder. The cat’s claws kneaded her flesh through her t-shirt.

Maybe she had done something childish, too, by writing that letter.

“Boys are so weird,” she said to Cleocatra. She put her lips close to the cat’s ears and whispered (so softly she could hardly hear it herself), “But girls are weird, too.”

Thank you for reading Mixtape Summer! Tune in next week for the finale…

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(Last time, the guys spent all day driving homeward and then slept in the car.)

A mustachioed policeman knocked on our window a little after five in the sun-tinged morning. “This isn’t a hotel, folks, so let’s move it along.”

When we pulled into a fast-food place down the road and got out, my body protested at being wrenched from its contorted mold. Jerkily, like a zombie, I followed my three friends into the building. My head throbbed as I sipped thawed orange juice and chewed deep-fried Styrofoam branded as hash browns.

Danny took the wheel after we left the restaurant. I should have been able to slip into sleep, but I was numbed past the point of exhaustion.

The eye-scouring sun rose, and so did the temperature.

“Even this shirt’s wasted,” Ralph mumbled.

“What?” Pat asked.

I twisted my neck to see Ralph point at the Verse for Wear t-shirt he had bought from the Electric Cafe. “This used to be a bright red. Now, it’s, ah, plum. Pale, faded plum. And the writing’s chipped, too. I can’t believe one wash could do this.”

“Oh,” Pat countered, “one good wash is sometimes all you need. All the color—gone.” He snapped his fingers at that quick erasure. Yet even if bright colors could fade, some stains could endure. Some went too deep, perhaps, and could not be dissolved, for all the shocks and spins and sudden elations of the washing machine.

Ralph sighed. “Well, maybe it wasn’t that bright to begin with.”

“Maybe it wasn’t very well made,” Danny added.

“It’s hard to remember those things after the fact,” I said. “Maybe it was. Maybe it’s all gone. But maybe it never was—you just thought wrong.”

What, barely a week ago, had been bright new verse was now revealed to be a tired ditty—slept-in and mussed.

It had seemed, then, like so much. The winds had been touched with glory, like dancing bright streamers. Yet those happy gusts wilted, and the streamers fell apart like spiderweb tendrils. The thrill passes, and even—especially—the brightest colors fade.

Ring ring ring—reality called again. Even Pat’s work bravado seemed brittle. “Oh hey, Frank….I’ll call the boss about it….How’s the trip been? Well, it’s been unexpected, let’s just say that…”

We drove past cities jammed with cars and noise. We drove past towns, shells of factories, and vacant lots. The car trolled through the waving cornstalks that hinted at the fruition to come—the sudden surprise of joy, of gold pouring out from the green stalk. And the great spinning machines would come by and rip them up, and the gold might be corroded with bugs or disease or over-ripe or too-soon plucked. The wheels of the car rolled through the flat miles. Everything passed through the windows of the car in a succession of flat images. They fled, frame by frame.

I slumped in my seat. My shoulder pressed against the door’s hard plastic. The heat fell like a thick blanket. My face ground against the hot glass. I slipped my hand in my pocket and rubbed her bandana’s fabric with my fingers. At a corner, a seam had come loose.

“What is it?” Danny asked.

I shrugged, my finger still feeling the edge of the handkerchief. “I don’t know. I’m just thinking.”

What could I even say to her? How could I begin? How could I step across the gulf of time and hurt?

It was sunny. The wheels turned. We hit a patch of rain clouds, streaks of lightning tearing down the horizon. The wheels turned. The sky was blue and clear, the sun like some golden pendant. The wheels turned. The clouds frothed, a yellow bubble peeking through. The wheels turned. The clouds rolled like the plains around us. The wheels turned. They poured like black smoke in the air. The wheels turned.

We drove. The road endured. It reached behind us, spanning the hours, the days, the night, the thousands of miles.

“I’m tired,” Ralph said.

“What a surprise,” Pat said.

“Well, I am.”

The hours of that Kentucky summer had been edged with excitement. And I had been able to dive into the suddenness. And maybe, as my lips ran along that shimmering, wet surface, I had gotten some taste of air.

Night fell. We got provisions at a gas station’s convenience store. In the car, Pat guzzled soda from a giant bottle. Ralph had purchased some packaged cotton candy. As I sat next to him in the back, he ripped it open. A sugary smell, light like faint pink carnation petals, rode on the air. It lingered for a moment as Ralph gobbled a cloud. And then it was gone.

We at last made it back to Ralph’s luxury cabin in the Adirondacks. It was the same as when we had left. Two half-drunk beer cans still stood sentry next to the sink.

“Home stagnant home,” Ralph said as he went to turn on the air conditioning. There was some organic pizza in the freezer.

“Organic—what does that even mean?” Pat asked.

“It means it’s healthy, I think,” Ralph said. “Non-processed.”

Pat looked at the orange price tag. “It means it’s for suckers.”

“There are worse things to be a fool for,” I said.

After dinner, Ralph and Pat went out to the front porch to savor the Mello Mello, just like they had done when we were setting out on this errand. Danny found a Star Trek: The Next Generation rerun on cable TV. I called my parents, got their answering machine, and left a message saying that I’d be coming home—that Kentstock was a bust.

As the sound of laughter and far-off space explorations played off in the distance, I rolled out my sleeping bag like a cloth coffin in the loft. I gazed at the bedroom ceiling. The grand canopy of the sky had been replaced by the foam of a popcorn ceiling. The stars were lost in that swirl.

The darkness fell heavier. The sounds faded. The eye gets so tired of twilight. It’s tired of being tired.

I knew I couldn’t keep living this way.

The Shadows of Heroes

My brothers excelled.

Both were tall and strong, and they both had chosen the martial life: Hank in the Marines, and Jimmy in the Navy by way of the Academy.

In high school, I sometimes stayed late to watch my brother Hank at practice. He pushed and pushed and pushed his teammates—fusing challenge and encouragement. It seemed to me that duty was to him not an impediment but an incitement. He liked the satisfaction that rules gave. He didn’t understand, he sometimes said, games without rules.

Jimmy preferred the lonely sport of solo running. He liked “running along the crack of dawn,” as he put it, so he rose every morning before everyone else to chase across the gray pavement. A master of time and subduing it with purpose, he once told me that a runner needed to know how to wait—how to wait for the finish line, how to wait from one step to the next, how to wait through the burn. The waiting gave him a severe strength—my mother’s resilience edged in steel. Jimmy, however, in his unguarded moments, could break that stern facade with a radiant smile. He was in love, and I sometimes wondered if those same people who saw his face so hard on the track or in formation would recognize him getting out of the car with Claire.

I once did a road race with Jimmy. He was in the top three and did a few dozen jumping jacks afterwards. I fought through every mile. The sweat, which should have evaporated since my flesh felt so hot, ran down my face, arms, chest, and legs. I could barely see or hear anything as I stumbled over the finish line, but I did, stumbling, finish. I then collapsed into bed and could barely get out of it the next day.

I endured.

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I had to face the morning.

It was dawn’s twilight, when darkness had begun to dissolve. I had to change.

I pulled on my pants and stepped outside. The heat had broken, and the morning air had the crispness I associated with early fall.

So I began to walk. Each step ran zig-zags up my neck. I felt the bend of my knee, the knot of ligaments like corroded elastic bands. I felt the spiky song of my birthright in my blood. Every step was hard.

Light squiggled upon the firmament, a pane of smoldering red and orange. I kept following the weaving course of the road. I staggered up the crest of hills and down into the troughs. The road was broken and cracked. Green and brown weeds reached up through the scratches.

Clouds foamed above me. Bobbing in a sea of purple, the cratered white mask of the moon cast a few glints of silver like spiderthreads downward.

So I sank lower and lower into that deepening dawn. I walked, and the memories rose—of kisses and tears, of midnight yearnings and daybreak disappointments, of sudden cuts and leaps.

There, in Kentucky, there had been something. The notes had risen, scoring the sky as the wind blew through her hair. Maybe not an air-brushed facade of paradise, nor a glib utopia of endless pizza—but something? Something human and flawed and maybe wonderful?

I marched over the splintered road. My shoes crunched on sand and crushed the splinters of broken glass lining the way. I walked amid shattered bottles and crushed cans, depleted reminders of drunken joy. I stepped on cardboard husks, faded and scorched by the cycle of rain and sun. The dimness made the frozen waves of the road even more turgid. Every stumble was another step, every step a stumble.

A car raced up behind me, and it sent my shadow ahead—shade piled on stretched shade. The chasing particles of the car’s wake tugged at my fingers, my arm, my toes, my legs. Yet my foot pressed on.

I walked. I followed every step down to its base—down to the soles of my shoes, down to the dark scales of the pavement.

A burning haze whirled out from my brain. It collected in drops and slid down the sides of my skull.

I don’t know how long I walked. I don’t know how many times my foot fell flat on the pavement.

It was just the road. It was just my feet. My lips burned with the kisses of shadows; my fingers raked through the settling darkness. It was just myself.

A fog licked my heels. The white mist swept like teasing fetters at my ankles, and every step was only a taunting renewal of the shackle’s click. It seemed spun of air, yet water trembled on its threads. The water—the thousand atomic tears—clung to my pant legs. The tiny drops quivered at the tips of my eyelashes.

I walked.

I walked.

I walked.

A crack of gold opened in the sky. A hundred million miles away, the spitting sphere of the sun cast its glaze on our sky through the vacuum of vast space. Its fire splashed the air and seared my face and lip and eye. The gold returned. And the sky erupted in a riot of colors.

In the rising dawn, I heard a clarion call, like a bird’s song through the gale, like the arching notes of a violin. I stood still. It could be borne. After all this, there was still life. There was still the air upon my face. I could not stay in the crypt anymore. A faith had returned, like a creed that had gained anew the heart’s conviction. There were true mountain tops. There were peaks within, real spires of spirit. And the true adventure was to strive for them. Love was more than blind spurts in the darkness. Love could haul us through our moments of agony, want, and joy into something further and truer. Love could fulfill the thirst of our yearnings if we had the courage to yearn truly.

A resolution grew within me, a golden rocket shooting to the sky. I could meet the world, for all its sufferings, all its losses, all its pains. I could—I would meet life with an open hand. Let worldly wounds accumulate like barnacles, let scornful time whip my body bloody, let the knives cut—as they would cut!—through the thousand disappointments! I would still meet life.

I would meet it with its sweet and sour. I would meet it with its hurt and horror. I would meet it with its grace and gladness. I would face life, even in the broken road. I would try again.

“I’m Back”

From Mickey Kent, 61^st Street Sessions (1977)

So they say I’ve been gone for too long.
And they say I don’t know my way around.

Things have changed—people, too.
What now is gray used to be blue.
And it’s long and it’s gone and right is now wrong,
And where I used to live now I don’t belong,
And it’s gone and it’s gone and a song can’t be found
To untie the knots that have everything bound.
And it’s gone and it’s gone and it’s gone.
And they say I don’t know my way around.

But now the dreamer’s back and he’s on his way
The dreamer’s back and he’s here to say—
Stomping down the street—
Oh, the sun is fine!
Everything I greet
Seems like fruit on the vine.
With the streetlights and the car horns
And the streetfights and the popcorn
I’m back! and the sky is blue again!

So sun light up the world,
And wind tousle and swirl,

I’ll take the world for all in all,
Midnight and high noon,
Now and then, later and soon—
I’ll get up when I fall.

Let the music play,
And reclaim the day,
Let the music play,
And I’ll go my way.

Stomping down the street—
Oh, my life is mine!
Everything I greet
Seems like fruit on the vine.

With the streetlights and the car horns
And the gumdrops and the popcorn
With the happy and the careworn—
I’m back! I’m back!
I’m back! I’m back! I’m back! I’m back!

So world, here I am!
So world, this is the song!
So world, here I am!

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(Last time, the guys found Allegria ruined. They decided to head home.)

We drove. The hours—long, flat, blank—uncoiled around us. We had grasped the fine glass globe of hope and desire too firmly. Shattering at the touch, it brought forth blossoms of blood as it sliced open the hand with surgical precision. A sting remained as the reminder of promised joy.

Time or care or use or whatever had exhausted the air conditioner, so no more soothing breezes poured from the vents—just warm sighs. The heat weighed like an anvil on every pore. When the windows came down, air thundered in and rendered any attempt to talk a nuisance; when they were up, the stagnant swamp-heat made talking an impossible exertion. No more mixtapes, now. That music was exhausted. The radio spun through various stations, from rock to rap to oldies to pop to country to talk to static. Sometimes, we just rode completely quiet, sweltering in our seats.

As the heat bored into my brain, I gazed again out the window. This time, no smiling face appeared. Nothing alleviated the tedium of the rolling road. It was a chain of signs and rest stops, cars and clouds.

And we drove.

No wonders hid on the roadside. No surprises or wrong turns greeted us with seeming delights. Songless, the road wound on—a black band of gray across the nation.

The wind raised the dust. Having the appearance of life, it whisked down the road in cataracts. But the wind moved on, and the dust died again. It was always dust, no matter how much it danced.

Passing

Days stretch into days, the sun rising, the sun falling, the numbing exchange of sameness. Hours pass—sometimes slipping through the fingers, sometimes with the tedious sadism of geological progress. And we sit, and our minds drift within vacant shells, our spirits soured by the siren song of the almost. Everything passes. Even our better moments. Maybe even our hopes. Maybe we’re only left with that image of a passing girl in a car, a smile we can’t quite see, as we suck on dust’s grainy sustenance.

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We descended from the cut heights. My ears burst with a swallow at the changing pressure. A cotton-tipped vise tightened on my jaw and ears.

We drove the highway teeming with cars and sixteen-wheelers and motorcycles. The rush of traffic crashed like waves of static. The Road Warrior’s motor hummed like a swarm of drones. The heat rose through the engine. Ralph squirmed. Danny had closed his eyes and leaned his neck over the back of his seat. When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple seemed to struggle with the weight of the heavy air.

A few times, for something to do, we’d pull over somewhere. My friends would get out and walk numbly around the wagon—a few rotations of the glum-go-round. I’d sit slumped in my seat.

Once, I did leave the car. The manacles of my stiff muscles caused me to hobble. Ralph pointed at me and said, “Look, a scarecrow.” My chest stuffed with brittle shreds, I smirked at him.

When we started driving again, the scarecrow was behind the wheel. The sun fell. The blue darkness swept down, and the car lights grew blaring. The night brought a teasing hint of respite from the day’s heat, a few degrees of relief—like licking the bottom of a rock for some Saran-wrap skim of water.

I drove as the darkness deepened. There was no thrill in the miles, which were mere ticks of the odometer. The numbers rolled around in the dim neon light of the dashboard’s instruments, the zero sweeping around at every mile.

I drove past cities. The lit windows looked like faded stars. A few black towers rose, bound with ropes of yellowed novas. I drove, and the novas tumbled down like jacks on the ground.

That string of ticks drained the car. I pulled into a gas station. I slouched over to the attendant’s hutch, slapped down some cash, and went to fill the car. Bugs swarmed over the lights above the gas pump. I watched their frantic circulations, their vain endeavors against the indifferent plastic. I swallowed. The pump clicked in my hand—dead. My fingers closed with a lurch.

The traffic thinned with the thickening night. Every mile seemed one closer to loneliness. Soon, we drove alone for miles, two headlights against the black road, with the occasional big rig or other lonely rider gliding by in the night. The great trucks’ rumbles could be felt in the still air, and the lights grew blinding in the dark solitude. They filled the rear-view mirror and drowned my eye in a flood of photons. Against the warped glass of the windshield, the white lights blurred and splintered; the lines of light stretched out like fractures in the eye.

I drove alone and heard the slumber-soaked breaths of the three around me. Pat’s crumpled snores sounded like choking gurgles. A funnel of tension pressed down from the sides of my skull to my eyes. Weariness yanked at the optic nerve behind my eye.

Perching my foot on the pedal, my ankle tingled. The tendons by my knee stood out in a dull ache in the darkness. I felt the steering wheel in my hands. Its curves were hard; they were something to hold. The wheels spun black through the black miles. The top of my skull clamped down on my brain, which, sluggish, seemed to rise.

By two in the morning, I decided to get some rest for the next day. I pulled off at an exit and drove down the dark road to the empty parking lot of a strip mall, finding a space near some bushes and away from the few streetlights.

It was a hot, sticky night. I didn’t want to choke on a swarm of bugs, so I kept the windows closed. Every breath made the already close air a little tighter. I couldn’t lean my seat back. Danny’s legs were already jumbled up behind me, and leaning back even a few degrees would have bumped into his knees. I couldn’t move my legs much without banging the unyielding edge of the steering wheel. The heavy air pushed my face, my whole body, back into the seat.

I drifted in and out of sleep. My dreams were like a boat skimming the water; impressions of the waking world and those of dreams mixed together with little cognitive bounces. A shadowy hand seemed to push the back of my head down—deeper into the darkness, kneading at the back of my neck—but the flesh, the sinews, the wasted joints, resisted. I couldn’t keep straight where I was sitting or where in my dreams I waited to fall asleep. I didn’t know what box I was locked in or why, when I turned, something kept me back and bound me across the chest. My face drifted forward and landed against the rim of the steering wheel. I leaned against the locked door and waited for the dawn.

Travel Journal Entry #8

Things never work out quite the way you expect. It’s our last night on the road before L, S, and I have to get back to MA. (You like that—on the road, like I’m a real pro…) We played in Kristy’s hometown. There must be NOTHING to do out here, because we got a good turnout. Who would have ever thought that we’d need to set up more metal folding chairs in a rec center in upstate New York?

Even though we’re going to play a lot more together, it was kinda sad for this tour to end. No, I’m not going to get all weepy and sentimental—leave that to Lana!

But so much has happened on this trip. And all the ups and downs made it something important.

“It’s about moving on.” That’s what Clara told me when I was struggling with a movement from this Bartok sonata. The “Melodia” was just killing my fingers. She said I needed to move on to other parts of the sonata—to not let myself be stuck in one place.

And here’s the weirdest thing: I did move on, but, when I got back to that movement, suddenly it all made sense. I could keep up with it now.

Like I said, things never work out how you expect. Just like I never expected that journaling could become a habit again.

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(Last time, the guys arrived at Allegria. But it wasn’t quite what they expected.)

The museum door was carved with figures of saddled dolphins and shining stars. Mickey Kent had had it made in India, it was said, and he had picked out the signs himself. The brass of the stars flashed in the sunlight as we ascended the steps. Pat was ahead of the rest of us as he reached for the handle.

And then, nothing. The door didn’t open. He pulled again. Again, nothing.

“Is it stuck?” I asked.

Pat grunted. “It feels locked.”

“Locked?” Ralph tried the door. His lips curdled into a frown.

Danny and I tried. With a hand on each handle, I could not budge the steel and brass for even a fraction of a hope.

“Excuse me?” a voice said behind me.

I turned to see a woman in an orange vest. She had shoulder-length blond hair and lines like girders around her mouth. She scrutinized us through square glasses and carried a walkie-talkie like a weapon.

“We’re here for Kentstock,” Pat said.

“Kentstock?” She drew her head back. “That’s cancelled.”

We stood in silence.

The woman leaned forward. “Because of the tornado?” At the sight of our obvious confusion, she explained that, earlier this week, a tornado had touched down near the ranch. “You didn’t see it in the news? Thank heavens it didn’t kill anyone. But it did hit us hard. So it was just not possible to host Kentstock this weekend. Mr. Kent didn’t even come back.”

“He’s not even here?” Ralph asked, like leaky punching bag.

“No no. He’s in Nantucket, visiting friends.”

“Look,” Pat said, “we came all the way from Massachusetts...”

“Well, isn’t that funny,” she said.

None of us felt like laughing.

“So the museum’s closed, too,” Danny said.

She nodded. “It is. It suffered significant damage during the tornado. We’ve taken some steps to ensure structural integrity and keep it from collapsing, but it will be months and months before it’s restored.”

“Maybe we could go inside? Wear hardhats or whatever? We’re very responsible.” Pat smiled his broadest smile, the kind that usually bent reality with its charm.

Her smile seemed almost mechanical. “That’s very nice, but, no, you can’t. Liability concerns. I’m sure you understand.”

“Can’t we just take a look inside?” Pat asked—pleaded (and his voice was unused to crawling on its knees).

“I’m sorry, but that’s just not possible. Only authorized personnel are allowed on the property.”

“But we’ve come so far—and we’re such big fans.”

“I’m sure you are, but Mr. Kent has many fans across the world. Policy is policy.”

Here, at last, was some slice of the universe completely indifferent to Pat’s will.

There was nothing left to say. The woman smiled perfunctorily, offered another rote apology for our having come so far for “nothing,” and told us to move along. Before her walkie-talkie called her away, she did say we could take a few pictures in front of the museum.

Pat said, “I can’t believe it.”

“Well, that’s our situation, whether you believe it or not,” Danny mumbled.

Pat looked around us. “I’m not giving up yet. Look, I bet no workers are out there right now. I don’t hear anything back there.” Neither did I.

Danny said, “Pat, we can’t go there.”

“Why not?”

“Because that would be trespassing,” Danny said as though that settled it. “You could get arrested.”

“Get arrested?”

“Pat—”

“Try and stop me,” Pat scoffed and ran, his gangly legs scrambling like they did in high school when was launching off of home plate.

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Falling

The footage of the 1991 Kentstock wavered like the surface of a stream. The singers seemed to be warbling under water.

“I can’t believe we got this,” Pat cried and took another swig of his third—or was it fourth?—gin rickey. The tape was a copy of a copy, assembled via the national network of the Mickey Kent Fan Club. “Can you imagine what it would actually be like to be there? Not Kentstock East. But the real thing.”

Maybe that was the appeal of the tape to Pat—why he had insisted I come right by his parents’ house after it had been delivered through the Mickster channels. It wasn’t the clarity of sound—a CD would be better for that, even a cassette. It was that this grainy VHS footage was one step closer to the immediate experience of Kentstock. It was the yearning for origins that drew him on.

I stretched. “It happens every year.”

Pat launched up from the sofa and began to pace around. “Hold on hold on hold on…” He held both hands to his head, like he could barely contain his brain.

Then, his foot caught on the edge of a throw rug and he landed belly-first on the floor. His laughter echoed through the room. “Why don’t we do it?”

“Do what?”

“You. Me. The whole crew. Summer 1999. Kentstock.”

“Pat—”

“Why not? Let’s live. Seriously—what’s going to stop us? Ourselves?”

“Pat!” Danny cried and lunged after him.

I looked at Ralph, who shrugged. “I’m going to have a smoke on the steps here.”

So I took off after both of them.

Soon, mud and dirt took the place of the astroturf-green grass. The white walls disappeared in a giant hole. Warning tape wrapped around the hastily-erected fencing.

With muscles honed by baseball and years of Tuesday-night-basketball games, Pat far outpaced Danny and me. He pounced at the fence and grabbed the top of it, vaulting over with panther-like ease.

“Pat!” Danny called out in frustration. He leaped and caught himself on the fence like a stork stuck in a giant steel honeycomb. He struggled and surrendered, tumbling to the ground. “He always takes a joke too far!”

“Is that what this is—a joke?” I asked. “I thought this was Allegria.”

Danny replied, “Well, it’s a joke now. Or a ruin.”

“I’ll get him,” I said. Or at least I’d try.

The holes were wide enough that I could easily fit the tip of my sneaker in them, though my fingers burned with the effort. At the crest of the fence, I lingered for an instant. Pat had been right. The workers were gone. I saw him wandering through mud and packed dirt and piled scraps.

“Pat!”

He waved and turned away from me.

“Pat,” I muttered as I swung over the top. As I tried to descend the fence, my toe slipped out of one of the steel squares, and I crashed down.

“You okay, Charlie?” Danny asked.

The muscles of my back felt like a clenched fist, and my palms ached like a rolling pin had been dragged across them. “Yeah. Fine.”

I limped over to Pat.

“So you alone were willing to join the party,” he said.

“This isn’t much of a party, Pat, and we really shouldn’t be here.”

He looked around at the wasteland with a smirk. “No kidding.” He walked onward.

I waited a moment and then crossed the threshold into the ruined darkness. The building’s broken skeleton of steel arched above us. Furrows scarred the ground. Along parts of the wall, girders still stood like the ribs of a carcass. Boards replaced the smashed wounds of windows. Nails, strips of wood, bits of plaster, shards of glass, plastic wrapping, broken cardboard boxes, cigarette butts, and all the other refuse of a work site lay at our feet.

I stepped deeper into the darkness and brushed my hand against part of a wall that still had some of its plaster. Apparently, a display used to be there; my fingers gingerly touched its off-blue broken writing: “and so he flew.” A jagged tear in the wall cut off the rest. I turned and saw by the dim light the swarm of dust particles surrounding me. The dust invaded my mouth, too.

The hallway meandered into the glum almost-darkness. Perhaps the storm had not destroyed as much there. As I took a giant step over the crowbar by my feet, my foot fell hollow on a piece of plywood, and the dust whirled. I coughed. The echo was splintered amongst the girders and gaps.

I stood there for a few crumbling minutes. Farther in the darkness—down the littered way of refuse and fragments—more dust swirled in flecked pirouettes.

All of this was the monument to Mickey Kent. The songs that had set hearts pulsing, the voice that had conjured desire, the melody that had inspired yearning—all had collaborated to build this: this ruined museum, like the navel of the earth, the Delphi of celebrity. This monument, in the boundless and bare dusty darkness.

Pat held out his arms like a ringmaster. “Welcome to Allegria.”

“It’s different than I had imagined.” I tried to smile.

Pat laughed, his ha-ha-ha’s sounding like a machine gun’s tat-tat-tat. “Yep.” He kicked a nail in anger. It skittered into the darkness. “Do you know how much I would have loved to talk about this? I mean, not talk about going—but about being there. About being here.”

“I know.”

He swallowed and said, “Did we really come for this?”

“We came for a hope, a dream, desperation—something.”

“Something. Something stupid.” He sighed.

I said, “There’s nothing here. There’s nothing be found. It’s gone. It’s ruined.”

And we stood silent amidst the ruins.

Dust. Dust. Dust everywhere. Dust had brought me here—my fantasies of renewal, of escape, of fun. And dust was the only thing awaiting me in Seattle. I saw that now. I had made Seattle into a great, distant citadel for myself, caring about it because I had once cared. As the dust churned around me, I saw that that citadel could never be the palace of my memory—or what I thought it could have been in those earlier days, when youth had polished every yearning. We could never be what we had been, or what I hoped we could have been.

“Where to next?” Pat asked when we got back to the car.

“Home,” I said. “Home.”

Drained and dimmed, no one disagreed.

Waiting

You can waste yourself in waiting.

The forty draft pages of my thesis sat on a disk in my bedroom desk. In the top drawer of that desk, I kept a marked-up printout, a legal pad scarred with black scribbling, and a cluster of index cards. Thinking about trying to work on it was a great drama for my days—but, when I sat down, a cold steel plate dropped in front of my brain. I turned the pages. Tried to read a paragraph of Xenophon. Shuffled in the index cards. Sometimes, I would make a note in the pad—only to realize that I had made a similar note on another page. It was only a little more to write. But that little more opened up broad venues. It was too much.

A line from the beginning of Xenophon’s Symposium haunted me. I wrote it out and taped it above my desk: “It seemed to me that the things worth mentioning were not only the deeds of fine and good men done seriously, but also what was done playfully.” The playful—the Greek word paidiais—came from the Greek word for child. The playful, the kid-like, the light could have its own insights.

In my sarcophagus of lead, I saw a great, distant charm in the hope of that light learning.

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(Last time, Charlie made a decision, and Danny got some unexpected news.)

“Nothing lasts,” Ralph declared when we left Marnie’s house early the next morning, “not even hangovers or tiredness.”

So change swept on and carried us in its wake. We drove amid the open miles, passing from Iowa to Minnesota. The cars all around us rolled their thousand ways. We all drove together alone. The lakes and ponds around the Minnesota highway seemed like speckled gardens of sunlight.

Outside Minneapolis, we stopped to get some drinks and snacks, and Pat and Ralph bought another disposable camera.

“We’re definitely going to need some—some evidence of seeing the great man,” Ralph said.

As we walked out of the store, Pat ripped open the packaging and held the camera up to his eye. “So, how will the distinguished poet look as he stands with Mickey Kent?”

“What should I do?” Ralph asked.

Pat waved his hand. “Pick a pose—any pose. It can’t be that hard for you.”

Ralph posed behind a bicycle rack, like he was a tiger about to leap over it. He leaned his head on his hand and gazed into the distance.

Ralph took a picture, too. It was of me, standing in the nearly empty parking lot. I was alone, looking at the road before us. “How evocative,” he said. “You could have been so much… a yearning explorer...someone looking back at the vast waste of a civilization...”

“Come on, Ralph,” Danny called. “We’re not even in North Dakota yet. We’ve got to keep moving.”

Keep moving, keep moving—the theme for that day. Kentstock started tomorrow, and we had hundreds of miles still to go. Now, we could afford not a single a detour or unexpected stop. Now, we had to focus on the goal.

We passed into wide plains of North Dakota. They stretched out like spreading hands. Our road ran like an arrow through the state.

We drove for hours.

“It’s still so sunny,” Ralph said.

“That’s because of how north we are,” Danny replied. “The days are longer here.”

We came to the edge of the state and decided to camp in a prairie of rolling brown-green fields. That night, Pat and Ralph joined in a pick-up game of frisbee with some of the other campers. Danny and I sat and watched them play in the buggy twilight. Pat charged with a roar as he went to grab the frisbee and whooped whenever one of his teammates caught it. Ralph mostly walked at the edges. When the frisbee came near, he would make a wild grab for it—and the whirling disk usually slipped through his frantic fingers.

“Pat’s always so competitive,” Danny said.

“He loves to win,” I said. When we had been kids on the playground, he had tried to make everything a competition, whether it was who could bounce a ball the farthest or who had the longest fingers or who could cross the monkey bars the fastest. Anything for struggle—for victory.

Danny swung his arms out behind him and arched his back. “I’m really glad we did this. I know there have been a few obstacles—and maybe disappointments.”

“Maybe.”

“But we’ve still done something.”

Pat came running back from the game, his chest heaving. “What a night!” He gulped a few breaths. “You know, this night feels like the night before the election, when you carried me to victory, Charlie.”

I laughed. “I was just along for the ride.”

“We were a team, buddy—a team. And we will be again.”

“Not this again—not this again.” For some reason, a grin overwhelmed my face. I laughed again, and it did indeed seem like that night before Pat’s victory that Friday in May.

As the heat pummeled me while I tried to fall asleep, a sudden cry jolted me upright. Then I heard another cry. And another. Then a rumble of claps and cheers.

“Danny,” I muttered.

“I’m awake.” He sat up next to me.

A few more cheers punctured the silence.

“Should we see what it is?”

“Yeah.”

I stepped outside the tent. Other shadowy figures—including Pat and Ralph—stood watching the sky.

“What—” I began and then saw it.

A blue-green luminescence like smoke washed the sky. High above us and seeming to mix with the stars, it rolled and danced and rippled.

“What is that?” Pat asked.

“Aurora borealis,” Danny breathed. Wonder glinted on his words. “The Northern Lights. I didn’t know they came this far south. But here they are. I never thought I’d see this.”

The atmosphere had distilled some wild gift from the sun, and now the green light rolled in the night sky like the wake of a ballerina’s arms. A strand coiled, then straightened, then slipped sideways—infinities of aquamarine horizon. Like some beautiful, illegible writing, the light etched the sky.

“That’s pretty cool,” Pat said.

My chest rode a racing rollercoaster as I followed the sudden peaks and drops of the roving beams.

After a few minutes, the light retreated, but the night sky above still held some trace of its thrill, some memory of the florescent pirouettes. The colors swirled in my dreams.

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On MK

—Ralph Cudmore

the bard—in golden tone!
the bard in gray toupee!
to sing—to sting—to always stay

awake old song—
the one I knew in antient days!
awake—and become new!

and make me new

let all the chrysalises burst
and flashing rainbows fly forth!

[In pencil in the margin:] Greve would laugh in my face if I showed him this!

All was ready when we left the campsite that morning. The key turned. The engine of the car had sprung to life, and we were off.

Mickey Kent! A few hours away!

Jagged and raw, the mountains of the West cut into the sky. The far-reaching plains around them gave an even sharper point to their piercing height. And now we were going to reach the sharp summit of joy. Every rotation of the wheels breathed more into the swelling balloon of expectation.

“Bliss it is in this dawn to be alive,” Ralph murmured. A dreamy smile slid upon his face as he hung his hand out the window, his fingers trailing through the flowing air.

“What?” Danny asked.

Ralph looked over. “Oh, Wordsworth.”

“This is going to be awesome!” Pat cried as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Everything glittered like a brand-new toy on Christmas morning—the cast of the sun, that car over there, the funny name of a chain store. Danny had pulled out a print-out of the schedule for Kentstock.

I breathed deep of the anticipation hanging heavy as incense in the car. After everything, there was this. And perhaps, after this, there could be more. We would eventually make it to the edge of Allegria.

Now was the hour for a mixtape that Pat had kept safe in its plastic box: a collection of Mickey Kent’s songs that he had made in our senior year of high school: “The Golden Mix,” as he called it. The smooth voice of Mickey Kent poured out of the speakers.

Young hearts burn with desire;
Young blood boils at a look.
Young touch sets the skin afire;
Young love—a kiss is all it took.

It poured, it poured, it poured—fluttering like streamers out of the speakers, past our burning ears, through the open windows, on the rushing air, past the sign marking the exit that we would turn down on the path to see Mickey Kent.

We met a rock engraved with an invitation in cursive script: Welcome to Allegria. Outstretched like the fingers of eager hands, the golden beams of the sun caused our eyes to squint. Cattle grazed behind fenced-in pastures. The scents of hay and fresh-cut grass spun through the air—and something else, thick and dark and mysterious.

At the end of our long road, in the apogee of noon, it stood: a great white building, carvings running along its top. The edge of shadows—in the lines of the letters, the furrows of the columns, in the shade of the doorway—made the marble even more lustrous, the stones more palpable. The steps ran up to it like a marble waterfall, the water foaming white.

The sound and color of a waterfall projected on a screen can at first be overwhelming. But then the brain begins to take stock—of the flatness and the distortion of the speakers. Then you realize that the waterfall was no heart of nature but an illusion.

Suddenly we noticed that the vista around us was vast and empty.

“Where is everybody?” Pat asked.

“Where are the signs?”

“Where’s the music?”

A few cows stood as solemn witnesses to our arrival—but that was all. No crowds or soundstage or scent of carnival food. No Mickey Kent gushing out of loudspeakers. We had turned the corner into that drive expecting glory and wonder. And, instead, we found nothing.

Well, not quite nothing. I then saw that various bits of refuse littered the grass: pieces of plaster, chunks of stone (no sparkle there!), steel curled like a pig’s tail, tree branches, glass shards, coiled veins of wire, and dust like clumps of gray snow. Like scars, ruts of dirt scored the grass. The fencing at the far edge of the front of the museum reminded me of the barbed-wire barricades guarding trenches in a warzone. Some thick gauze stretched in front of the fencing, blocking my view of what was beyond. Trees like toppled chess pieces lay around us.

“What happened here?” I wondered.

“I don’t know,” Pat said as he parked the car near the front of the museum and next to two pick-up trucks.

“Is Kentstock over?” Ralph asked. “Have we come too late?”

I took a long draw of air, and the heaviness of the inside of a factory, accented with animal excrement, punched up my nose. “It’s like a warzone here.”

“Maybe we can ask at the museum,” Pat said. “See what’s going on.”

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(Last time, Charlie and the rest of the gang were picking up the pieces of memory at Marnie’s house.)

Marnie had said I should call my parents. It was long distance, but she was right that I should check in. So I called early the next morning. They always woke with the sun.

“Charlie”—my mother like a burst of sunlight when she recognized my voice—“how have you been?”

“Fine, mom, fine.” I could hear the clamor in the background as my dad realized who was on the phone. I explained that I was at Marnie’s.

“Great, tiger.” My dad must have gotten on the phone in my parents’ bedroom. “How was the Appalachian Trail?”

“Have you been eating? I was telling Pops the other day how thin you looked.”

“Yes, Mom, I have been eating.”

She pressed, “And you had a good time hiking? How far did you get?”

I swallowed. “We didn’t get that far at all. We—we didn’t really go.”

“Oh?”

“Really?”

I swallowed again. “Yeah, we, um, actually ended up going to Kentucky for this, ah, wedding.”

My parents both started to talk so quickly that I couldn’t make out their words.

“It’s—it’s a long story.”

“Is this about some girl?” my mother asked.

Suddenly, my mouth felt very dry. “What?”

“Is this about some girl?”

“Mom, why would you ask that?”

She chuckled, like when my brothers or I feigned confusion about why a lamp was broken or why mud ran in tracks around our house. “When you go that far out of your way, a girl is almost always involved.”

Now it was my dad’s turn to laugh. “And the fact that you didn’t want to answer it—well, son, that’s like a bright red arrow that there’s some hanky panky going on in with you and, well, uh, this girl here.”

“Dad—I wouldn’t say it’s hanky panky. We’re uh…it’s just ah…”

“You go and do it. Live. You’re young. It’s good to see you getting out there, mixing it up with the honeys.”

“Frank…”

“I’m just trying to give the boy some encouragement, Luce. It’s not like when you and me were kids.”

“Mom—Dad—I’m running up Marnie’s bill here. I gotta go.”

“I wanna hear more about this,” my mother said as I pulled the phone away from my ear.

“Me, too.”

I hung up the phone, ripples of fire spreading through my cheeks.

Pat chortled about the whole conversation on our way to the mall to get his disposable camera developed. “Hanky panky,” he hooted. Of course, he had heard me say that.

“I felt like I was twelve or thirteen again,” I said.

“Well, that’s not the worst thing in the world.”

I wondered why my parents would have said if I had told them about going out to Seattle to see Gina. You have to move on had been my mother’s mantra over the past year. Would she see that as a retreat to the past?

I don’t know what we did to each other back then, Gina had written. She was right. We had done so much to each other that it was hard to sort out: We had crashed the edges of our lives together, and sparks had erupted. It’s hard to have the light of sparks without the heat. We had helped remake each other.

As we drove past the crumbling façade of an abandoned factory, I thought that, yes, it would be nice to see Gina again. Even just to try to sort it out: to have some reckoning of where we had been and maybe even where we were now. Maybe we had grown up enough. Maybe I had grown up enough. That nagging hesitation in my brain—wasn’t that my infatuation with paralysis? Wasn’t it me losing myself in the coiling labyrinth of the saudade? I had mourned my relationship with Gina for over a year, and now—when it seemed like the coffin could rumble and rattle in front of me with some new life—why was I so reluctant?

We walked through the white halls of the mall as we waited for the film to be processed. Because it was early in the afternoon, the milling shoppers mostly had white or dyed hair. We each got a pretzel from a chain that had not yet spread to Massachusetts, but the pretzel tasted about the same as the ones from the chain at the mall back home.

“What do you think about Seattle?” I said as we walked away from the food court. Just like at almost every other mall I had ever visited, the Chinese food place had a guy out front holding a tray full of scraps of chicken, each pierced by a toothpick like a barren flagpole.

Pat chewed his pretzel for a few moments. “If that’s something you’re thinking about…”

“You don’t sound super-enthusiastic.”

“Charlie, it’s your life, and I back you no matter what. But are you ready to become her project again?”

“Pat—”

“I’m just saying—I’m just saying, are you ready?”

At last, the packet of memories was returned to us. Pat ripped the tape off the envelope of the pictures and began speeding through them. “It came out!” he cried. “Look, you can just see her face!”

Yes, Amelie Darfani’s face was at the edge of the picture, as she waved open-handed to the MTV crowd.

The past week was distilled into twenty-seven images. There were the tree-covered heights of the Adirondacks. The frozen ripples of metamorphic rocks. Ralph, Danny, and I hunched around the fire in Pennsylvania. A pickup truck with a Confederate flag fluttering from a pole on its bed. Danny asleep, with drool stretching down his cheek. The front of Mr. Smee’s TV and VCR Repair shop (“Don’t know why I took that one,” Pat said with a squint). An Iowa corn field drenched in rain.

Later that afternoon, I returned to the pictures spread out like playing cards on the table. My hand dropped down. The wedding. Here we all were. My smile was almost as wide as Bonnie’s. She looked so good in that dress. There were our faces stained with barbecue. Pat or someone had taken a picture of us dancing. A slight blur covered our limbs as we copied the dance scene from Pulp Fiction. I pulled my fingers in arrows over my eyes; she gripped her nose like she dropping under the water. And then I had copied that move. We had both seemed so playful and free there. The serious set of my lips was actually a joke. I could even see the arching corners of a smile. And she was grinning outright.

“You look happy,” Danny said from behind me.

“Yeah, I guess we were.” I picked up that picture and looked closer at it. “Pat said that same thing—that I looked happy then.”

“It still could be true, you know.”

I smiled. “Maybe. So how was lunch with Marnie?”

“They have a strange idea about what makes a ruben out here. No sauerkraut.”

“Positively barbaric.”

“Then Marnie said she had to go run some errands. Alone. I thought we were supposed to hang out today.”

“Must be a secret mission.”

Danny was right—I did look happy there. But was that the artifice of the camera, like the glowing eyes and the transfigured colors of the flash?

Pat insisted on making dinner that night. “A little token of thanks, Marnie.” He tightened the strings of the frilly gingham apron around his waist. “Time for the grillmeister.”

“Is that thanks—or a threat?” I asked. The minigrill that Pat had stowed on his porch in college had birthed more hockey pucks than edible hamburgers.

The spatula flew to his chest in a pose of mock offense. “Charlie, I’ve improved my technique, you’ll see.”

And the hamburgers were, well, hamburgers. The corn was delicious. “If it’s one thing we know how to grow in Iowa,” Jason said, “it’s corn.”

After dinner, Marnie brought out a small package wrapped in green paper. “I have a surprise.”

Instinctively, we looked at Jason, who shrugged.

“It’s a surprise,” she repeated. She dropped the package in front of Jason. “For you.” Her voice seemed brittle, for some reason.

Jason’s eyes swung between her and the box. “You want me to open this now?”

“Uh huh.”

Warily—like he was trying to defuse a bomb—Jason detached the tape from the sides and unfolded the paper. He carefully pulled off the top of the white box inside. He picked up a small bib with a squint.

“Babe, what is this?”

“It’s not babe,” she said, with tears trembling sapphires in her eyes. “It’s baby.”

“Baby?” He blinked. “Baby!” He sprung up to hug her. They kissed. And hugged. And kissed again. And hugged again.

It took a moment before the blastwave hit the rest of us. Wait—they’re having a baby! Someone I actually knew—a peer, not an adult or old person—was going to have a baby!? We started to applaud—to hoot—to holler.

“A baby!” Jason’s tongue still seemed to be wrestling with alien syllables. “How—how did this happen?”

“I think you know,” she replied to another explosion of laughter.

We congratulated and hugged them both.

And I went to hug Danny, too. “Congratulations, Uncle Danny.”

He answered with a blush.

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Mello Drama

“Are you smoking pot in my sister’s backyard?”

He had found Ralph in a lawnchair. He had arranged three citronella candles in an equilateral triangle around his body. A crumpled white cylinder was pressed to his lips. He stank. He also looked a little guilty.

“I didn’t know you were back,” Ralph murmured.

“Ralph—in her yard?”

Ralph’s lids sunk closed. “I didn’t want to smoke in the house.”

“But I don’t know why you had to smoke at all.”

“You’ve ah—you’ve ah never gotten high, have you?”

“No.” The idea of it was repulsive. He shouldn’t have been so annoyed. But he was.

“It’s weird—they talk about getting high. But really it’s like getting low. You just slip into the grass and let the whole world go by. Life. Life is just so crushing.”

“That sounds depressing.” He didn’t add that it also didn’t sound true. He had to hold himself back.

“Everyone’s looking for an escape,” Ralph exhaled. “Some people are just more honest about it. What do you think nostalgia is about, anyway?”

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(Last time, the guys stopped by Danny’s sister’s house in Iowa, and Charlie read a letter from the past.)

Ralph still wasn’t feeling totally better. “My constitution is, ah, not as robust as it used to be. Remember, Pat, when I could drink all night and bounce back the next day?”

“I remember a lot of Sundays with you passed out in bed the whole day, PL.”

Stretched out on the couch, Ralph gazed at half a glass of soda and tapped the bubbles out or let them waste away with time.

To his malingering delight, a cable channel was playing two Mickey Kent movies back to back that afternoon: two Albert Dasher films—film noir shot in technicolor. Three things made a standard Albert Dasher pic: The 70s swimsuit model Paula Brogett as Liddy Lanx, Dasher’s feisty and sultry secretary. Tumbleweed, Dasher’s orange tabby, who spent an inordinate number of scenes being stroked on Dasher’s desk or lap. And the eventual triumph of good over evil.

Ralph dreamily laid vigil at the television screen; he thought Dasher was one of Mickey Kent’s best incarnations. I caught part of The Jade Midnight with him. (I had never made it through an Albert Dasher film from start to finish.)

Dasher (his eyebrow raised): I’m just going out for a smoke.

Liddy Lanx: Last time you said that, you almost had your head blown off.

Dasher: I guess I must have lit the wrong end.

Ralph watched the scene on the tip of a sigh.

Mickey Kent had lost the boyish smoothness of youth. Instead of the lean and elastic cheek of his 1950s glamour shots, narrow webs of wrinkles formed around his lips and eyes when he spoke or squinted. The flesh by his jaw sagged. No adolescent shepherd piping songs on halcyon hills, this was a man worn by time and trial.

Dasher entered a bar, and there were four minutes of slow, steady shots: the smoke curling in the light, a woman in a blonde wig with burning eyes, the clatter of ice in drinks as the lounge singer warbled in the background. “That’s nice, isn’t it? It’s like…perfect,” Ralph said and then fell back into silence.

Staying at the house of someone you barely know can sometimes make you feel like a phantom interloper. While they’re gone, you circulate through the empty house. There’s a way things are supposed to be—how the cups should be stacked in a cabinet, where the remote control should be stowed, whether the toilet seat should be up or down. All your actions disturb that conspiracy of habits, and you try to set it right but that’s like trying to remake a collage of fall leaves after a wind has passed: it can’t be quite what it was.

Danny had happily set up his books and laptop at the kitchen table, which had also been his parents’ kitchen table. As he must have in high school, he hunched once again over that table and a giant textbook and a notebook covered with his indecipherable scrawl.

“You know, Danny, this trip is supposed to be about fun,” Pat remarked once.

Danny looked up from his laptop. “And who’s to say this isn’t fun?”

“Like the human race. I mean, you know biology. There must be some sign in the genes that studying tiny molecules is inherently boring.”

Danny just laughed.

Then, Pat’s work cellular phone rang. Like the insistent tapping of reality, it had called him throughout the day. Some scheme was afoot somewhere in the third floor of the statehouse, where Mistah Speakah ruled. “Yes, sir. I was speaking to someone in Walsh’s office, and he’s willing to play ball….Yes, about that—we could have them fax it over, sure.” Just after he hung up, the phone rang again. “Hey, Georgie, good to hear from you….What? Hey, buddy, glad you’re thinking of me, but we’re in Iowa right now—not Montana. So we’re all safe from that tornado here…”

After that call, Danny said to Pat, “I thought you said this trip was supposed to be about fun.”

“Danny-boy,” Pat said, “this is the ultimate kind of fun. Keep that in mind, Charlie. We could use you up there—but doing something real.”

“Sure, Pat.” He liked to suggest the prospect of a job somewhere on Beacon Hill—in the education department or some legislative committee or the state ethics commission (“don’t laugh”).

In the afternoon, Marnie drove up in a car pulsing with music; she said she sang along with Top 40 radio on her ride back from work as a way of “washing out” her brain. She entered the house with the antiseptic aura of the hospital as well as a distracted smile. “Jason hasn’t come back yet, has he?”

No sign, we said.

“Well, what do you guys feel like—pizza? There’s a place he loves. I’ll order some and pick them up as a surprise.”

And Jason was surprised. “Whoah, thanks, babe. It’s the little things, you know, that can turn a day around.”

Later, we played poker, like we had a decade ago. We bet with coins from a bowl they used to store loose change. Jason played with us. Refusing the offer of a beer and a seat at the table, Marnie went into the living room with a fantasy novel and some warm water with lemon. The peachy smell of the giant pink candle she lit after dinner suffused the house.

“Doesn’t this bring you back?” Pat said with a satisfied laugh. “We played on this very table, you know.”

Ralph pointed to a knot in the grain. “I remember staring at that sometimes, and it seemed to stare back like a wooden eye. It was almost intimidating.”

“Was that after his first or second pot brownie?” Pat muttered to me.

“What?” Ralph asked.

“Nothing.”

During one hand, Ralph sighed as he tossed a couple more pennies into the pot. “In a few days, Kentstock.”

“I told you, I want a t-shirt,” Marnie called from the living room.

“Oh, you’ll get a t-shirt,” Danny said.

It was my turn. I ran my fingers over my face-down cards. A king and two of clubs. There were plenty of combinations. I felt the smoothed texture of the penny’s rim on my finger.

“And it has to have his face on it,” Marnie said.

Pat laughed. “No promises!”

I tossed in one penny. Then another. Those days of before had been full of gossamer promises.

Sitting on the porch after my interest had waned in the game, I thought of those promises and those disappointments.

The screen door creaked behind me. I turned. “Oh, hi, Marnie.”

“Hey, Charlie. Tired of the game?”

I shrugged. “Just wanted to get some air. It’s nice out tonight.” The bobbing lightning bugs reminded me of other nights.

She stretched and smiled. “Isn’t it?” She sat down in the wicker chair next to me.

“You have a nice place here, Marnie.”

We talked for a while. “Remember when we were kids in high school?” I asked at one point.

She laughed. “Yeah. Of course.”

“And you’d invite me and Danny to sit with you at lunch sometimes. With your boyfriend...”

“Tyler!”

“Yeah, Tyler. And my brother would be there?” Tyler had been on the football team with Hank.

“Oh, I know. And Tyler had two lunches every day.”

“Oh yeah—that’s right! I don’t know how he could eat that. Everything they served tasted either like cardboard or a greasebomb.”

“Or both!” Marnie added.

“Or both.”

“Like the fries,” she said. “Remember those?”

Laughter spread from her to me like a contagion. “They were like soggy toothpicks!”

Marnie brought her hands together as her body rocked in its chair. “Yes!”

“You know, when he became class president, Pat tried to get them to change vendors and get fries from someone else or get a different type of fries from the same vendor or something like that.”

“What happened?”

“As I’m sure you can imagine, Pat could do almost anything he wanted as president. But, whenever he tried to bring the fries up for discussion, he was completely shot down. It was the weirdest thing. He convinced them to give him his own parking space, to let him manage all dances—he even got them to rearrange the final-exam schedule. But the fries—no way. We joked that there must have been some international conspiracy to keep the fries like that at the high school.”

“It had to be the New World Order,” she said with a smile.

“Of course.” The night seemed to grow thick with the pulsing life of the countless tiny insects. “I miss those days sometimes. Before all this happened. And life got so complicated.”

Marnie leaned forward so that her elbows were on her knees. She suddenly seemed to have the oracular-like confidence of when we first met—the insights of a fifteen-year-old that baffled my twelve-year-old brain. “You’ve always been so serious, Charlie. Just like Danny. That’s one thing you two always had in common.”

“Really?”

“Really. Look, it was great being a teenager. There were a lot of good times. But it’s so easy, looking back, to make the past seem so much better or so much worse than it really was. The past can be a trap like that. A memory’s just a memory.”

“Danny said something like that the other day—that you’ve got to recognize a fantasy for a fantasy.”

She grinned. “My brother’s a smart guy.”

I nodded. “He is.”

“And, you know, Charlie,” she said, looking into the distance, “sometimes the future has things so wonderful and sorta scary—but really wonderful—that you can’t even imagine.”

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Medals

In the drawer of an old cabinet, behind receipts and pictures and newspaper clippings, my father kept his military medals. When I was six, I opened that drawer and saw their dull glint. I didn’t know if I should have seen them or not, so I turned the medals over and over again in my mind. I wondered whose they were and what they were for. After a few days of bouncing those mysterious bits of metal around the walls of my skull, I asked my parents at dinner. That night, my father sat down with me and went over each medal. Not a single syllable wavered. I could tell even then that my father had no great joy in telling me about these medals. It was a duty to tell me, and so he spoke.

The National Defense Service Medal. The Vietnam Service Medal. The Purple Heart for when a bullet ripped through his shoulder. The Bronze Star for when he had provided cover to help his platoon escape from a Viet Kong ambush.

He had been twenty years old.

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(Last time, the guys hit the road to Iowa after a tumultuous wedding.)

We arrived at Marnie’s house after the rain had dulled into the evening’s diffuse grayness, when molecule-sized droplets hung invisible in the air. Its peeling yellow paint made the ranch look like a wilted sunflower. Weeds snuck through the snaking canal-cracks of the driveway. Parked in front of the house were a black SUV and a rust-spotted blue sedan, which was one of Danny’s parents’ old cars. I remembered riding in its backseat when Mrs. Goldenfarb would drive us around. Then, the air had swirled with the textured odor of a new car and the scent of Mrs. Goldenfarb’s anti-dandruff shampoo, which was the same kind my grandfather used.

Marnie rushed down the cement stairs with a cry of delight. She looked different—bobbing just below her ears, her hair was shorter. And her cheeks seemed a little bit leaner, like the collagen had deflated just a little. By the time Danny had made it halfway out of the car, she had thrown her arms around him, crying, “Oh Danny, it’s so good to see you!” She even kissed him on the cheek, and my friend’s face flushed. Danny was the kind of guy who would shake his grandmother’s hand if he could get away with it.

Then she hugged me. “Look who it is! I still remember when you were pimply teenagers playing cards at the kitchen table.”

I smiled and remembered those long, lazy nights of poker games for pennies. Looking back gave a glow to the ridged, uneven details: the guzzled soda or lemonade or whatever Mrs. Goldenfarb had for us, the crunch of the pretzels or chips that were always a little stale, the fingerprints of grease on the cards. We’d usually play at the kitchen table. The point of the game wasn’t pennies or cards. It was to pretend and entertain hopes. What could I do if I had a two of diamonds or an eight of clubs—then I’d have a straight flush—then I’d have three of a kind! Feasting on what could be brought its own pleasure, even if you ended up losing.

“I guess we’re back again, Marnie,” I said. “How are you?”

She laughed. “Wonderful, Charlie. Wonderful.” She tilted her head to measure me anew. “You look good. But tired, maybe?”

“It’s been a long few days.”

“It looks like you’ve been dragged over a broken-up highway,” Jason said as he shook my hand. His grip felt like a wrench’s squeeze. He had filled out since I had last seen him. His Motley Crue t-shirt stretched across his great barrel chest, and his arms strained like pistons at its short sleeves. His thick brown stubble seemed a mesh of wires.

“It feels that way,” I said. “Good to see you, Jason.”

“You, too, Charlie.” He then turned to look at Pat and Ralph, who were just now trying to rise from the car. “And these guys look like the highway was lined with glass.”

I said, “Oh, them. They had too much fun.” Grabbing my backpack, I went up the steps to their house. Long story, I heard Danny say behind me.

Marnie insisted that we stay a few days. “You need to recover, especially if you want to have any fun at that music festival.” We were so late that she had to take out of the fridge the dinner she had made for our arrival: roasted chicken and green bean casserole, along with homemade oatnut bread. “I was off work today so I could try the bread machine that Jason’s aunt got us for the wedding. The recipes are kind of crunchy-granola, but what do you think?” Especially after all the rich food yesterday, I thought it tasted pretty good.

As sometimes happens when friends get together who haven’t seen each other for a while, we did spend some time talking about our lives now. Marnie’s job nursing—the rows of hospital beds filled with the injured and dying, the daily confrontations with doctors, the red tape of HMOs. Pat gossiped about Beacon Hill. Jason compared elections to selling a car.

But we were always drawn into the whirlpool of talking about our lives then. We laughed about a senior talent show, when Marnie had lip-synched and danced to a New Kids on the Block song with four of her friends.

That reminded Pat of the skit that he, Melissa Panni, and I had done for the talent show when we were in eighth grade: a farcical and abbreviated version of Romeo & Juliet. “We had just read it in school,” I explained. “Pat thought it was completely ridiculous.” Pat and Melissa had come up with the idea.

“It was.” Pat slipped into a bad Italian accent. “Juliet—I’m a-gonna love you forever! If I can’t a havee you, I’m a-gonna die! Yawn. I mean, come on. He barely knows her. And she barely knows him!”

Jason laughed. “Ouch.”

“It’s true!”

“I always thought the play was beautiful,” Marnie said. “All the passion. I loved it.”

“So did Charlie here.”

Most of our classmates probably saw ridiculousness rather than beauty in it. Their feet had pounded with delight in the rolled-out bleachers, and rubbery laughter had bounced through the gym like a barrage of tennis balls. Melissa’s Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?—like she had a helium balloon wedged up her nose—caused the audience to crack up. Pat, of course, was Romeo, and I played Paris. We dueled with yardsticks, and Pat and I wore wigs like we were from some bad 80s hair band. Cradling the comatose Juliet in his arms, Pat beat his breast with soaring agony and let out a despairing burp after he chugged down the poison. The excess of grief was a comedic triumph.

Of course, they asked about the trip.

“So Mom told me you were on MTV? I wish I had known. I could have programmed the VCR to record it.”

Danny shrugged. “It was kind of an impulse thing.”

“And what about this wedding?” Jason asked. “How did that even happen?”

Pat leaned forward. “It started when we met these cute girls at a fair.”

“Started—how did it end?”

Pat shot a glance at me and then smiled wide for the whole table. “That remains to be seen.” Part of a politician’s job is being an actor.

May

We had taken the train and then a bus to Nahant. The sunlight filled the small island town. The heat of the warm May afternoon seeped into our bare feet through the sand.

“It’s been such a beautiful day,” she said. The wind blew her hair straight out.

“It is. Beautiful.” My lips could taste the ocean—along with the tartar sauce from the clam strips we had for lunch.

With a couple steps, she somehow melted into me. She had that way of just slipping right around my chest. “Everything changes when you’re in love.”

It was like my whole life suddenly diffused in a breath throughout my body. Beams of light shook free their haze. Cotton balls fell from my ears. The shadow of old frozen casts at last dissolved.

“We’re lucky to share this,” I breathed.

Her arms tightened. “I know.”

Charlie—

I’m writing this because I wanted to get the words right. I don’t know if I’m going to but there’s more of a chance this way. There’s kinda a minefield between us, you know?

But there are a lot good memories too. I’ve been thinking about them. I miss your laughter. I miss your seriousness. I always knew that you were trying to be straight with me. And I’ve gotten so sick of the head-games guys out here play. It probably hurt when I said I wanted to go out West by myself, but I needed space. I needed to work on some things for me.

I don’t know what we did to each other back then. Last March all I could think of was the bad things…this giant black hole that sucked up everything else. Now it’s like I see things in perspective and I see that there were a lot of sunny days after all.

You probably don’t remember this. It was just a random night. But do you remember one time in our junior year this really warm day in February—we were at a party and stayed really late and left and were probably kinda drunk. We were walking down the street—you had that puffy blue jacket open, the one that looked so good on you—and someone was just blasting 70s music out their apartment window. So you and I did some silly disco moves to this cheesy disco music.

That’s how it felt like then. Like there was music everywhere. We just had to pick it up.

Maybe we could have that again? Maybe we’ve grown up enough that we can do it better this time. Maybe

Maybe we could make a new start?

Alyssa told me you might be coming out here. My AOL address is still the same. Send me a message.

I’m willing to try again. And anyways I’d love to see you.

Gina

I had found that letter on the floor next to me in the morning. Marnie and Jason had left for work so quietly that I hadn’t heard them. I had turned in my sleeping bag and seen an envelope with Charlie written in purple ink across the front. She always loved that color. Even though Pat was still stretched out on the couch, I had assumed that he had left it, as a kind of apology.

And I did remember that night. I remembered that I had thought that Gina must have been really drunk to want to dance with me in the street like that. Normally, cheesy was the ultimate negation for her, and dancing in the streets to disco was the grand fromage. So doing the Hustle with me that night was a confession that she had become spontaneous and free and completely overcome by alcohol.

Maybe we could make a new start. But could I make a new start with her? Hadn’t there been a new start—a real new start—in Kentucky, at least in those moments before I had flinched? The letter weighed like a plate of lead on my chest. I sighed.

Like a cat that seems to sleep while it lies in wait, Pat rolled over on the couch. “So now you’ve read it.”

“Yes.”

He pivoted up and swung his legs over the couch. “What’d you think of it?”

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

“Look, about before—I’m…I’m…Charlie, you’re my best friend and I worry about you, okay? I can’t stand to see you waste your whole life feeling bad all the time.”

“I know.”

“Do you know how great it was to see you happy out there? And I don’t mean half-smile happy. I mean full-on beaming. I sometimes feel like I haven’t seen you like that in years. And I’m gonna say this one time and then it disappears into the old lockbox and never comes back: Frankly, even when you were happy with Gina, it seemed like the light was dimmed, like you were trying to squeeze yourself into being something you weren’t.” He stood up, stretched, and scratched his bare leg. “I’ve gotta find something to eat. I’m finally hungry again.”

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Dead End

Her eyes widened, like she was taking in a brave new vista, as she marveled at the menu. “This all looks so good, and I’m so hungry. Are you?”

My eyes slid along the columns of dim sum. “I’m supposed to be hungry.”

She laughed. “Pat said you were so funny.”

No mirror—however distorted—could spit back at me the illusionary “Charlie” that Pat had conjured. “One date, Charlie, that’s all I’m asking,” he had insisted, and I had finally agreed.

She was smiling and eager and almost impulsively unguarded. The collar of the soft pink cardigan hung open around her neck.

I remembered the taste of salt on her sweaty neck. My face pressed into her tangled hair. My tongue running along the groove behind her ear.

No. I wasn’t hungry. At all.

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By the way, was this the New Kids on the Block song that Marnie sang at the talent show back in the day?

(Last time, Charlie found out about a letter—and disappointed Bonnie.)

The rain traced narrow bars down the motel window the next morning. Last night, when we had returned, I had taken off my sopping clothes and wordlessly rolled my sleeping bag around myself like a winding sheet. Yesterday morning, everything had seemed touched with butterfly wonder, and now drops of lead fell into an endless, blank horizon. A bony hand squeezed my ankles, neck, and shoulders. The dancing shoes kicked off, my feet throbbed. My back felt like a broken spring.

The flatness and emptiness reminded me of so many other days I had endured. Flaccid with exhaustion, I savored the aches, the oiliness, and the old rigidities the way a wine connoisseur sifts through a favorite merlot. I rolled around in my mouth the taste of day-old barbecue and cheap beer. No hint of the sweet polish of a girl’s lipstick lingered on my lips. No, not even the tiniest shred. The emptiness—the absence—coated my lips instead.

Standing underneath the running water of the shower, I remembered how I had walked back to the car like a sopping scarecrow. The rain had blotted out the moon’s golden glow. As the fog of the mirror receded after the shower, I could see the fine red cracks running through my eyes. So this was reality.

Everyone else woke up. As Danny spoke to Marnie on the motel phone, Pat grumbled from underneath his pillow, “Could you dampen the sound just a little? Some of us have a headache.”

Danny cupped his hand over the receiver. “How many beers was it, Pat?”

A growl. “It wasn’t the beer. It was the bourbon.”

“Maybe it was the bourbon.” Ralph’s voice limped along. “My eyes aren’t exactly parallel.”

“OK, Marnie, well, gotta go. See you soon!” Danny hung up the phone and turned to us. “OK. Time to get going. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

And so we did. Hours and hours of rain. The cars ahead ground the water up and threw it at us in a spinning rebuke. The buildings along the highway passed like shadows.

Rain. It fell in jackhammers and hatchet-chops and sledgehammers. Rain. Always rain. Rain. Relentless. Untiring. Unending. Every sweep of the wiper gained only a thin angle of vision, before new drops devoured it. The rain fell over everything. It ran down the sides of festival tents and against the stained windows of churches. It washed away the make-up of carnival masks and turned to mud the green fields. Rain. Rain. Rain.

I slumped next to Danny in the front of the car. I folded up the coat from yesterday and tried to use it as a pillow against the window. Last night’s storm had renewed its mustiness. Behind us, Pat and Ralph snored.

“Pat almost sounds like he’s choking,” Danny said. “Are you supposed to wheeze like that?”

“We’ll find out,” I said. We drove over a bump in the highway—a jab at my temple in the darkness.

We drove in silence. Danny didn’t really like the radio on—“too distracting,” he would say. More jabs in the darkness.

Then, Danny spoke again. “I want to tell you something.”

“What?” I opened my eyes.

“I didn’t know. About the letter. Or going to Seattle.”

“I know, Danny.” I smiled. It was hard to not talk to anyone.

“I just wanted you to know I would never keep that a secret from you.”

“I do.” And I did. The same kind of care that Danny showed in middle-school science experiments was reflected elsewhere in his life.

“And…” And then he hesitated.

“And?” I asked.

He took a breath. “And I get that you’re angry. I would be, too. But Pat and Ralph—”

“Should have been honest with me from the beginning. Maybe if they had been honest with me before, yesterday would have turned out differently.” Of course, if I dared to be honest with myself, the sudden souring of that magical night had been about my choices—what I had said, how I had flinched.

“Sometimes,” Danny said, “the way forward isn’t the direct one. You know, sometimes, when a bone sets bad, it needs to be rebroken to be fixed or an infected scab need to be cut open so that you can clean the wound.”

“Oh yeah, oh yeah.”

“It’s true.” True. Danny’s voice kneaded that word, as though that truth were a kind of balm, a bandage for—no, an eraser of—a jagged wound.

So I pivoted. “Do you think Marnie will be ready for the onslaught?” I hadn’t seen her in a long time, not since she had moved out to Iowa a few years ago. She was a vague but slightly sparkling presence in my youth. When I first met her, I was in middle school, and she was what seemed an exquisitely sophisticated high school sophomore, an elevated initiate in the rites of adolescence. Nowhere near as tall as Danny, she had a lithe figure and framed her face in hoop earrings and a high ponytail. Like all the Goldenfarbs, she needed glasses, though she usually wore contacts (unlike all the other Goldenfarbs).

Danny laughed. “Onslaught? She’s always liked you guys.” Danny was the baby of the family, and, though he towered over her, her sense of sisterly responsibility hovered over him—and, by extension, his friends. “Besides, she needs someone to watch over.”

“You mean Jason is self-sufficient?”

“Yes. I think she liked that about him.” Marnie and Jason had met in college. They had eventually moved out to Iowa because of Jason’s family’s car dealership. “But out here in Iowa, what else is she going to care for? She loved the dog and cats at home, but he has allergies. And they don’t have kids yet.”

“So it’s us.” A fissure of a smile spread across my lips.

Danny smiled, too. “Yes. I have this theory that that’s why she became a nurse: her addiction to caring. She just didn’t want to be stuck in a lab running tests or on the phone negotiating with an insurance company. Now, I couldn’t be a nurse. I don’t have that capacity for caring. It would exhaust me.”

“You said don’t have kids yet—wait till she has some ankle-biters,” I said. “Uncle Danny won’t be able to resist them.”

“Can you imagine me as an uncle?” He shook his head. “Can you imagine us having kids?”

“We’re still kids ourselves.”

We continued to drive through the tumbling rain.

Somewhere in Indiana, Ralph let out a ferocious belch. He lurched forward in the seat. “Oh, oh, pull over—pull over!”

“What? Now?” Danny asked.

 “Pull over!” He frantically cranked down the window as Danny shifted into the breakdown lane.

But not fast enough.

Ralph stuck his head out the window and vomit sprayed in technicolor streamers through the air. A passing car swerved out of the throw-up’s trajectory.

The rumbling and retching shook Pat awake. “Wha—” he asked.

Ralph’s head hung limply over the edge of the window, as he gave little whimpering coughs.

“PL, you could never hold your—” Then a gag strangled his words.

More spurted out of Ralph’s mouth, and Pat heaved himself out of the car. He collapsed on his knees just underneath the guardrail. The rain splattered on his crumpled figure as he emptied himself with cries that fused a bark and a howl.

Ralph pushed his head away from the window. “It’s it, uh, weird that you can feel cleaner after throwing up? Like you’ve gotten some poison out of you.”

“I don’t think the side of the car is any cleaner,” Danny said.

“The rain will wash it all away,” Ralph said with a shrug.

Pat stumbled back to the car. “Synchronized barfing—now that brings me back. Something about hearing you hurl, PL…” He grimaced like he was gagging on his own mouth. “You got any gum or anything?”

“You know what I think about gum,” Danny said. He thought it was disgusting.

“Charlie?”

I closed my eyes.

“Charlie?”

I stretched.

“What is this? The silent treatment? Are we eight years old again?”

That was a shot to my ribs—and it only hurt because I knew he was right. But that recognition only added an edge to my irritation. I opened my eyes and turned around. “What do you want me to say? No. I don’t have any gum. But do you know what I think is really childish…”

Danny held up his hand. “Let’s—let’s not get into this now.”

“I think,” Ralph mumbled. “I think I’m going to be sick again.”

And so more streams of bile ran down the side of the car, mixing with the rain.

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Travel Journal Entry #6

The rain keeps falling. It’s like hammers on the roof. On my brain. What makes disappointment even worse is when you think you’re getting what you want. Two steps down the yellow brick road and the Emerald City in the horizon.…but you end up at the witch’s castle.

Jess was so happy at the wedding. You know when they say a person glows? I get it now. It was like a light filled her and almost lifted her up. The click of her heels was the only thing that told you she wasn’t floating. I’ve never been to a wedding before as an adult. It’s different than as a kid or in some magazine photo shoot. The air is electric and two people waltz off to happily ever after. Or at least that’s how they feel, when a symphony fills the night.

But now it’s raining.

Maybe I need to grow up.

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(Last time, Charlie and Bonnie were having a great time at the wedding—until Ralph mentioned something about a letter.)

“Letter? What letter?”

Recognition shot through the glaze coating his eyes. “Nothing, ah, nothing. For-forget about it.” His arm slid over my neck as he tried to drift away.

I grabbed his wrist. “Ralph.”

“Charlie. You don’t—” He swallowed. “You don’t want to know.”

 “Ralph, you gotta tell me what’s going on.”

He sighed and slumped down on a bench. “You know Alyssa?”

“Alyssa—Gina’s friend?”

“Yeah, yeah. You know we had that thing, right?”

“Ah, sure.” Ralph’s many sexual adventures hid beyond the furthest horizon of my mind.

“So she was, ah, going to come visit, and, ah…”

“And hook up.”

“And we were talking—and this was before—but she said Gina wanted to see you again.”

The music and the crowd disappeared. There were only the words of this scrawny and strung-out perfect pattern of a poet. “What?”

“And, ah—and, ah, when she came out, she brought a letter from Gina.”

Electric hands were squeezing my lungs like bellows. “What are you—what are you telling me?”

“Did you think Pat really wanted to see the Golden Gate Bridge that much? We were going out to the West Coast to go to Seattle—for Gina.”

I choked on the golfball-sized sparks in my throat.

“We weren’t supposed to read the letter, but we did, just to be sure it wouldn’t hurt you. And we shouldn’t have done it, but she wanted to see you again. She wanted to make a new start. And we were going to show you—we were—but then Bonnie—and Pat said—”

“Pat!”

“He said it was better for you not to know. Not right now. Not—not yet.”

My head swirled. A flurry of lightning shot through my body. Everything blurred together. My friends had deceived me. My friends had taken me on a trip with a secret purpose. Secrets coiled within secrets. I had invested so much pain, disappointment, and anger in that dead relationship with Gina. But the fantasy of joy was a whetstone for the edge of pain. I had lost forever those hours on the quilted coverlet, the quick kisses in the movie theater, and the taste of spice that had at once burned my tongue. And now—they could return? She—we—could be back?

Thunder rumbled. In my head? Outside?

I stormed through the brass echoes—crashed through the busy dance floor—tripped over the edge of a plastic chair—and found him at the edge of the tent. With a beer in one hand, Pat sat on top of a table pointing two fingers at Lana, in one of the stupid, demonstrative arguments he used as a flirting technique. He stank of booze.

Ralph was somewhere behind.

I yanked Pat’s elbow and pulled him off the table and dragged him outside.

“Charlie, what is it?” he asked.

“Do you see strings on my wrist?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Or maybe they’re around my ankles somewhere? Are they there? Are they there? Can you see them?”

“You sound crazy.”

I was so crazy, I pushed him. “Do you think I’m your puppet?”

He stumbled backward. Beer flew in the air.

But he didn’t get angry. Instead, it was like a key had turned in his head—an awareness that something had happened. His words were level. “Charlie, what’s this about?”

“Pat,” Ralph said behind me, “I told him about the letter.”

Now, anger flashed in his eyes. “You what?”

“You think you could hide that from me?” I said. “You think you can lay out this whole scheme for my life and not tell me about it? This is my life.”

“This is your life, Charlie? Yeah, sure. And it’s circling the toilet bowl. You sit on the couch all day long watching TV and feeling self-pity twenty-four seven.”

A drop of water hit my forehead, which felt so hot that it should have sizzled. I had nothing to say.

“So, yeah, maybe I wanted to help get you out of this rut. And maybe we had this one plan, but then there’s Bonnie and the wedding, and I would not do anything to help you screw this one up.”

In the distance, a single streak of lightning flashed like a glowing scar in the sky.

Bonnie and her friends had heard our shouting. I saw Danny standing next to Sarah, both frowning.

Bonnie touched my arm. “What is it?” The sunshine of before had concentrated into care, even worry.

A sharper blow of thunder.

“I just found out that Pat had this giant plan for this road trip, how we were supposed to finish it by going out to Seattle to see my ex-girlfriend. My friends even have a letter from her to me. And they’ve kept it all a secret.”

“Well, you’re not going to go, right?”

Her question was a karate-chop.

I thought I had escaped in this adventure of fun. Yet a thin line—supple as silk, firm as steel—still threaded from me to the citadel where I had piled my idols of longing. In the fury after Ralph had mentioned this letter, hadn’t there been some flash of something, even hope? When your first love says she wants to see you again, can you really say no?

“I don’t know.” Then, my throat tightened, like the closing of a lock.

I immediately knew I shouldn’t have said that, as a brick of regret hit me full in the chest the instant those words left my mouth. I had been weighed in the scales of the moment and been found wanting. I had flinched.

Now, the sunlight was all gone, and there was only a frozen mask on her face. “Well, you need to figure that out then, I guess.” And then she turned and left.

“Bonnie…Bonnie…”

With a great rolling crack, the rain blasted down in pricks of ice against the boiling of my brain.

“You blew it!” Lana cried as they ran into the dark storm. “You blew it!”

“Bonnie!”

From the heart of the tempest: “Good-bye.”

The water drowns. It all slips away. You slip and tumble down the thousand stairs of memory and despair and hope and desire. The lungs—burning hollow—echo in the emptiness of breath.

 “Good-bye.” The rain tumbling down my face. “Good-bye.” The rain all over. “Good-bye.” Washing down my cheek.

“Good-bye.”

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The Thoughts of Many Nights by the Sea

The sea bears away all our tribulations and triumphs, and it drowns all our tears. What is it to fight the sea? What is it to grab a fistful of water? What is it to drown so deep, that you are forgotten in the night of that embrace, bones your only testament, bones which transmute into coral? Even death can be forgotten in that faint, expiring, relentless doom. What cup is that which no man can drink to the dregs—that poison, that annihilation of surfeit?

Our eyes look to some paradise across the sea. There, no one shall grow old or sick, and brotherhood will unite us. No song shall ever wither and no dance shall ever tire. At night, we will withdraw to fires and palm-leaf cabins. We will eat warm pizza from an always-full box and grab beers from an ever-stocked cooler. And we shall want no love in the night.

We hold out even when we should know better. We hold out for ourselves, our dreams, and our fantasies of love. Some hope of renewal comes before us like a far-off vision—so far, so grand, like an aged matinee idol. Hopes are cunning, but the heart always betrays us.

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Speech came after speech. The father of the bride. Barney’s brother (his best man). Jess’s sister (her maid of honor). Jess’s mother. A tune came on I thought I recognized. The melody bobbed through my mind, and I remembered it in flashes, though with different lyrics.

Cut that cake and let them free

Cut that cake and let them go

Forty blackbirds away can fly

If you just cut the cake

“Donna!” the quartet cried out. Then I remembered, it was supposed to be “Cut that pie.”

“Wait a minute,” Pat said, his words dipped in disbelief, “you guys are Donna Taylor fans?”

“Of course,” Kristy said.

Ralph muttered, “How unfortunate.” He nursed a special enmity for Donna Taylor, lamenting her as “among the crunchy-granola horde that ended the golden age of American popular music.” That is, the days when the likes of Mickey Kent had reigned atop the pop charts.

“What? You’re not a fan?”

“I’m not a fan of decadence in any of its forms,” Ralph said.

Pat started to cough into his beer.

Not wanting her disdain to be dimmed in any way, Kristy looked over the edge of her glasses at Ralph. “What, you can’t take anything other than Wonder Bread pop?”

“I’ll take all kinds of music, but it has to have a melody.”

“That’s just what all the critics said back in the 70s. They just could not handle a woman’s perspective.”

Ralph sneered. “They just could not handle musical junk.”

“They’re about to cut the cake,” Bonnie said, her voice slicing through the contentions.

The Donna Taylor song played as an instrumental backdrop as bride and groom cut into the narrowing tower of layers, adorned with green vines and blue roses. As Jess and Barney began to feed each other, the ritual of cake-eating became a food fight. Jess started it, etching a blue-and-white streak across Barney’s cheek. Soon, frosting scarred both their faces. But those wounds were wiped away by a wet napkin.

As people stood in line for cake, Pat pulled me off to the side.  “So, having a good time?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Of course.” He swallowed. “She wants you, you know.” Those words gushed forth in suds of beer.

“Okay, Pat.”

He leaned closer. “I can see it in the eyes.”

“Okay.”

“The eyes always tell.”

“Thanks, Pat, thanks.”

A thin line of raspberry ran through the center of the white wedding cake. With the edge of my fork, I cut off a sliver. First, the solidity of the cake, with an edge of buttercream and sugar—then, the rush of raspberry, red and barbed in its sweetness.

On the dance floor, the festival of youth returned. No longer manacles of pain and stiffness and frustration, our bodies became wonderful, responsive instruments of expression. The notes exploded like fireworks along my spine.

We danced in improvisational allusions to order. With a twist, the Running Man transformed into an imitation of tap dancing (Step ball change, step ball change, as Kristy hoarsely called over the music).

It’s all a wonder and a wild desire.

Being with you lifts me so much higher...

 We pantomimed reconciliation and loss and midnight yearning.

Swing your partner round and round...

I had last square danced in middle school gym class. Then, it felt forced and hokey. Now, my nerves vibrated like iron strings. My arms slipped through those of mothers and sons and brothers and sisters and grandfathers and aunts and friends. Pat elbowed me, Ralph almost tripped me in going left when he should have gone right, and Lana teased me with a furrowed brow. Hand slipped after hand. But always—always through the multitude—I came back to Bonnie.

The air’s alive

And I can breathe again with you.

My heart will strive

’Cause I can breathe again with you.

The air thickened as the night rose around us. As Bonnie bounced to the beats of those songs, her steps seemed incredibly light, like they would not make the tiniest divot in a trampoline. It was like the music had woven into her flesh and it carried her along.

So forgive me if my heart is quakin’

So forgive me`f I trip o’er my feet,

And forgive me if my hand is shakin’

`Cause I’ve got jumpin’ beans all in my veins—

I danced until my chest strained with the fury of my coursing blood. The weight of my arms and legs seemed to dissolve into the coursing music. There was only the pounding and the harmony and the gulping air.

In a gasping moment, I said to Bonnie, “It’s like I’m a kid again.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, growing up, I sometimes had trouble breathing. When I’d run and play, I sometimes felt like I was running on the edge of suddenly collapsing, like my lungs couldn’t take it all. And I remember running and thinking that, maybe, if I ran hard enough, I’d break through and then I’d breathe so easily. So I’d run, and, sometimes, just as my lungs were about to burst into flame, I’d feel like maybe, maybe, I was almost getting there.”

“Getting where?”

“To my breath.” I laughed again and added—because I couldn’t resist, because the flow of words pulled me onwards, “It’s like I’m a bassoon, and I’m straining for all the high notes.”

“Yes!” Bonnie cried, punctuating each affirmation with another punch in the air. “Yes yes yes yes yes!”

Spontaneously assembling link by link, a Conga line formed out of the foaming chaos. Bonnie grabbed the waist of Sarah, and I grabbed Bonnie’s. The fabric of her dress suddenly seemed such a thin border between her bare flesh and mine.

As it finished a circuit around the tent, the Conga line scattered and left Bonnie and me near the kegs and large tubs of ice water. A haze of sweat rose from my open collar, slipping through the loosened knot of my tie. “Water?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, happy maybe that my thoughts and my thirst were hers.

I grabbed a paper cup with one hand and with the other pulled the spigot. Icy water splashed over my hands as the cup ran over. “Here,” I said, handing it to her.

As I went to get a second cup, she said, “You’re all sweaty.” She reached forward and wiped my forehead with her bandana. The music disappeared for an instant as there were only her fingers against my forehead. Then they were on my cheeks. “Well, here,” she said and placed the handkerchief in the front pocket of my shirt. Her hand slipped like a lodestone across my chest, and my heart stirred.

“Thanks,” I said. “This is good water.” It shocked my throat to a new life, and I could feel it working outward through my pores. It was like the air was really on my face for the first time in a long time, as though some mask of dried tears had been washed away.

 I poured more ice-water into my cup, and, through the swirl, the bride was at our side—almost knocking into the table. “Hey y’all! Bonnie!” she hugged her. “So you having a good time?” Her syllables had a tremor in their knees.

“Of course,” I said. “This is a wonderful wedding.”

Jess looked at me, like she was seeing me in a new light. “Bonnie, I do declare, is this him?”

Bonnie’s face suddenly flushed. “What do you mean, Jess?”

“Is this Jasper the cutie you’ve been talking about? Look those shoulders.” Jess began to rub those shoulders. Her hand darted down to my bicep. “Oh, he’s a real studmuffin. Such a man.” She swung her head to look right at my eyes. “You should have heard all the giggles that went around about you last night. Bons was like a schoolgirl talking about you making it all the way here. Now, you treat her right, you hear?”

“Jess…” Bonnie stretched out the name through a rictus smile as she pulled me away.

“Oh, Bons, you’re so silly sometimes,” Jess said before drowning in some more giggles herself.

“Real studmuffin, huh?” I said to her.

Bonnie shrugged. “Her words. But we figured we should let Jess know.” She pressed her lips together. “And it should be pretty obvious by now that I’m glad you’re here.”

I hope you find another heart

I hope you find another heart

I hope you find another—find another

Find another heart...

Young men ran sweating through the tent in their t-shirts and unbuttoned dress shirts, holding aloft a sloshing amber diamond.

“Oh, they’ve dug up the bourbon,” said a middle-aged woman.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s a tradition. If you want good weather on your wedding day, you’re supposed to bury a bottle of bourbon. Barney—I’m sure it was Barney—must have told them where it was.”

“Isn’t it bad luck, then, to dig it up?”

The woman smiled at Bonnie’s question. “Oh, child, we’ve made it this long. Nothing to worry about.”

The flashing bottle went around. “Charlie!” Pat cried through the maelstrom. “Charlie!” His tie was wrapped like a commando’s sweatband around his head. “You gotta have some!”

I held the bottle to my lips, and the bourbon poured pale and honey-golden. It bit the back of my throat with smoky fangs. It was as though my mouth were virgin again—like I had never tasted alcohol before. The fumes swirled through my mouth. A burning pillar streaked through the center of my chest.

Bonnie took a tiny sip. “That’s strong.”

“The night is strong,” I said.

Other hands came to take the bottle, and a riot of laughter filled the air.

I could see the moon outside the edge of the tent—swollen with the sun’s light and floating like some silver buoy of yearning. Clouds like curtains hung in the air, swaying with the wind. Lighting bugs had settled in the field like dancing stars. A gust of wind blew through the tent.

A sudden flood rose—foam like flashing diamonds—and gushed over the tangle of briars and thorns. I said, “You make me feel that life is not so far away.”

“I didn’t know there was such a distance.”

“Before, there was.”

“But that was before.” She reached out and took my hand. “I never knew the night could be so alive—so alive with music—with you and me and everything. Can’t you feel it? It’s like a silvery symphony.”

“Okay everyone,” one of the band members called. “I’ve got an old-school request here.” A single voice began.

So they say I’ve been gone for too long.

And they say I don’t know my way around.

A few wandering notes on the keyboard as the voice continued.

Things have changed—people, too.

What now is gray used to be blue.

And it’s long and it’s gone and right is now wrong,

And where I used to live now I don’t belong,

And it’s gone and it’s gone and a song can’t be found

To untie the knots that have everything bound.

And it’s gone and it’s gone and it’s gone.

And they say I don’t know my way around.

Then, the music began to swell.

But now the dreamer’s back and he’s on his way

The dreamer’s back and he’s here to say—

“Wait—I know this!” Lana cried.

At her recognition of one of Mickey Kent’s biggest mid-career hits, Pat smiled.

“This is from a ShoePlanet commercial, right?”

That smile dropped into an open-mouthed gape of utter disappointment.

So sun light up the world,

And wind tousle and swirl…

She and I danced. This was different—slower, hand in hand, faces inches from each other. Perhaps the violin had nurtured that touch, so her slightly leathered fingertips could rest listening on my veins.

“I can still taste the bourbon,” I said.

“So can I.” She put her head on my shoulder. “Just hold me.”

And so I did. Her heartbeat echoed against my ribcage as we turned slow circles. I could feel the heat rising from her cheeks. I closed my eyes so I could just focus on her arm around my back. We were alive.

In that final drawn-out note of the song, I heard an echo of Mickey Kent—of the recording I was familiar with, from his 1977 61st Street Sessions performance, when the sun of youth had long ago set but a weathered yearning endured in his voice.

Kristy and Ralph wavered up to us. They both looked a little high; maybe Ralph had rolled up some of his Mello Mello for the wedding. Kristy gave us both hugs. “You guys are such a cute couple,” she said. Yeah, she definitely had smoked up.

“To-ta-lly,” Ralph said.

“Come on, Bonnie, let’s check out those cupcakes. I’m hungry.” Bonnie followed after her with a wink.

“So you’re having fun,” I said to Ralph.

“This is so much fun,” Ralph threw his arm around me. “Best—best wedding I’ve ever been to. It’s like kaleidoscopes and moonbeams.”

“Sure, Ralph.”

“I mean it. It’s transfixing. It’s transfiguring. And we almost didn’t go—can you believe it? I’m so glad we never showed you the letter.”

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Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Love’s Labour’s Lost is a love-letter to classic Hollywood movies.

(Last time, Charlie and the guys snuck into a wedding ceremony before heading over to the reception.)

The Road Warrior smelled like old plastic and years of body odor, but a chemically pristine pine scent filled the minivan. The floormats had recently been vacuumed, and the maps stood in an overlapping row in a door-pocket. “Everything’s so neat in here,” I said.

Bonnie laughed. “My car isn’t usually like this, but…”

“But I run a tight ship,” Lana finished.

Lana drove like she was testing the limits of the car: how responsive the gas or brakes or steering wheel would be to her whims. She raced toward a stop sign like the car was about to leap over a chasm and then slammed on the brakes with such force that my guts crashed against the skin of my stomach. She accelerated when taking turns. She was testing me as she drove.

“So it’s Charlie—what?”

“Tavares. Charlie Tavares.”

“So, Charlie Tavares, what do you do?”

“Excuse me?” Obtuseness like a shield to deflect a trident in the gladiatorial arena.

“What do you do—like a career or an ambition?”

I wasn’t sure that failed janitor was the answer to give here—or semi-comatose zombie or guy with a Xenophon block. “I’m in between things right now.”

“Lana, you’re being rude,” Bonnie said from the back.

“I’m just making conversation. No harm in that, right, Charlie?”

“Oh, it’s fine,” I said quickly, hoping to encourage her to turn her eyes back to the road.

The questions whizzed through the air like stilettos.

“So I heard you went to some MTV taping. Do you like that—MTV?”

“Well, we more went to see this model.” And then I almost grit my teeth at the opening I had just given her.

“Who?”

“Amelie Darfani.”

“Oooo. She’s pretty hot. Don’t you think so, Charlie?”

“Well, she’s, ah, she’s attractive.”

“No kidding.”

“But it was Pat who really wanted to go.”

“Oh yeah, I’m sure it was all Pat’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“Lana,” Bonnie interjected.

“Bonnie, we’re just having a conversation. So, Charlie, what does your girlfriend think about you taking this road trip?”

“Girlfriend? I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Sure, maybe you don’t want to put a label on it.”

“Label? Nobody. Nothing. That’s what it is. I’m all alone. I don’t have anybody.” And she had just provoked me into confessing my absolute singularity.

Lana smiled.

When Bonnie began to talk about how Jess and Barney had met, Lana turned to the topic of love. “They said that it was love at first sight. Can you believe that, Charlie? I mean, really.”

“Why not?” I replied.

“Love at first sight. It kind of sounds like an excuse to me. Though love as a whole is kind of an excuse. Love is for movies and confused teenagers. As adults, we should be honest—it’s just about sex. Everything else is sentimentality.”

I said, “You make even Pat sound naive.”

“I’m trying to be realistic.”

“What’s unrealistic about love? About something better and higher, something that makes you better?”

“How romantic,” Kristy drawled.

“Or even sentimental,” Lana added as a teasing poke.

I said, “Truth doesn’t care about whether it’s sentimental or not.”

Bonnie’s laughter sailed through the air like the bubbles at the wedding.

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That Feeling

—Ralph Cudmore

it begins
a whirligig
a ferris wheel
a kaleidoscope of feeling
I don’t know
where this will go
but somehow I’m inside reeling

love starts again

By the end of the fifteen-minute drive, I felt like I had barely survived a tap-dancing marathon.

The reception was at Jess’s father’s farm. A giant tent stretched alongside a sprawling whitewashed farmhouse—a white canvas sky tied down by flowery garlands. Aside from a few plastic walls, the tent was open to the wind and farm air. In front of a makeshift stage, a portable dancing floor had been set up on one end like a rectangular tortoise shell. On the side nearest to us, barbecue’s charred sweetness rose from two giant black barrel-like contraptions. That hint of barbecue painted the sky with accents of rouge. A barn and other outbuildings stood at another side, and beyond them stretched rows of green plants.

As I walked away from the car, I felt a gust of wind like the sudden press of the heart. I turned to face Bonnie. The wind chased through her hair, lifting as it ran. How did it feel for those zephyrous fingers to run through those strands and brush her cheek?

“What?” Bonnie asked.

A smile burned on my cheeks. “It’s the wind. And everything else.”

“Isn’t this a beautiful place?” She stretched out her arms, her hands wide open to the world around us.

“If you’re into carcinogen-producing farms in the middle of nowhere,” Kristy said.

I squinted a query at Bonnie. “Oh,” she said, “Jess’s dad grows tobacco.”

“It’s amazing how casually you say that,” Kristy retorted as she went to talk to one of the bridesmaids, who was getting out of a car driven by a young bearded man in a cream-colored suit.

“Kristy takes some things very seriously,” Bonnie explained. While her friends chatted with others, she leaned closer to me. “I’m sorry about the whole interrogation in the car.”

“Oh, it’s part of the adventure.”

“Lana can just be a little overprotective. She has this big-sister complex with the whole world.”

“And what would she protect them from?”

“Oh, from stalkers who seem suspiciously charming.”

“I’m certainly not charming, so I don’t think she has to worry about me.”

“I just don’t want you to think she’s totally crazy—that’s all.” She paused. “Maybe sort of, but not totally.”

As she said those words, the Road Warrior careened into view. Gravel sprayed as it drove, and the frame almost groaned as the car came to a sudden stop. Pat slammed the driver’s door behind him with a flourish. “Now this is the heartland! My feet cry out for cowboy boots.” Sarah emerged from the passenger side looking even paler than usual.

As sparks explode when two rocks collide, laughter burst out when our gazes met. “Maybe sort of, but not totally,” I said.

Pat swaggered toward us. “You know, Sarah’s very nice but she could use more of a sense of fun.”

Danny said, “Wanting to survive a car ride does not mean that you lack a sense of fun.”

Uncle Billy staggered past our group, hugging the girls and kissing them on their cheeks. “Don’t I know you folks from somewhere?” he asked Danny.

“We met at the wedding.”

We met Pappy George and Granny Mae and Auntie Jean and Cousin Randoph and Jess’s high-school English teacher and Barney’s pop’s business partner. They all just had to meet the quartet. Most people assumed that we were the dates of the quartet, if they said anything about that at all. We never corrected them.

We all applauded when the bride and groom entered. The band—a collection of cousins and uncles—began to play. The players switched on and off during the night. For this song, the singer had long gray hair and a grizzled goatee.

I don’t want no stadium act
Or a million-dollar contract
Baby, if I can’t have you.
Don’t give me no beer or pin-up;
Don’t care much ’bout movin’ it up
Baby, if I can’t have you...

Jess clung to Barney as they clung to each other in small, uneven circles. Against her frailness, Barney looked bigger and thicker, his broad shoulders straining against his coat.

The buffet dinner was a gamut of tastes and textures. There were three different kinds of salad, five different kinds of rolls, collard greens with onions and pepper, hominy stew, and green-and-orange pasta. And, of course, there was barbecue. Ribs and chicken had been smoking for hours and hours. The slightest press of my plastic fork caused the meat to drop off the bones. Each bite unlocked the sweet, tangy flavor of the sauce. When I ate the smoked corn, the crystals of red pepper ignited in my mouth.

The eight of us ate together at one of the picnic tables scattered around the tent. Danny praised the chicken, Kristy sniffed at the scarcity of vegetarian options, and Ralph dared to try a slice of Granny Mae’s chicken potpie (which I thought resembled a swamp with crust). Sitting on the edge, Bonnie and I talked.

About her siblings and my brothers. About her aversion to broccoli and her insatiable love of candy corn. About what we both liked about Pulp Fiction. About our favorite books and music.

“Mickey Kent, right?” she asked.

“That’s more Ralph and Pat than me. But he’s pretty good.”

We talked about what I did. “You told Lana you’re between things. What are you between?”

“Between being a boy and a man,” I laughed. “I work part-time at night as a janitor. My dad’s a barber, and I help clean up around the shop and a few other places. But that’s only part-time, and it’s more like a holding pattern, you know?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I mean, it’s nice in its own way. You know what to expect. It’s quiet. There’s plenty of time to think.”

“So you like to think, then?” she said—like a shared in-joke, and not a spear of barbed sarcasm.

I laughed. “Or at least trying to. In college, I worked in the library—that was one of my favorite things about the job—the time to do that. I still have one thing left for college: this senior thesis.”

“On what?”

“You know Xenophon?”

“He’s a philosopher or something, right?”

“Yeah. It’s on Xenophon and—and love.”

“That sounds interesting,” she replied, without a hint of irony or disdain.

“It is. If I can get my head clear on it. And after that—well, then I need to figure things out.”

She smiled. “This is the time in our lives to do that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

When she searched for a word, her lips stood poised apart like two cherries on the bough. The late-noon sun ran up her throat, tracing it with blooms of gold and rose. I realized how much I liked her smile—the way she would tilt its corners, how it would reveal her teeth in an impulsive burst.

An elderly couple and some kids danced to the trickling notes of an acoustic guitar.

Wake me up with a kiss.
Wake me up with summer in your voice.
Shake me up with some bliss.
Shake me up with starbeams on your lips.

I rose from the table and went to one of the coolers to grab a soda. Bonnie accompanied me, and we looked at the vast fields around the tent. The clouds seemed to thicken in the red-gold air.

“So no girlfriend?” she asked.

“No. Oh, I was with my girlfriend from college for a while. I guess we’ve been broken up for a while, too.”

“So you’re like me, then.”

“What?”

“Why do you think Lana invited you guys to this so suddenly? She’s impulsive, but not a complete maniac.” She laughed—not out of nervousness but more out of what I took to be rueful appreciation. “This guy and I had been together for a couple years. Well, almost a couple. And it got kinda bad.”

“I’m sorry.” And I was, because a sedimentary layer of pain ran underneath that kinda bad.

“That was a while ago, now. It wasn’t like a tragedy or something, even if it sometimes felt that way at the time.”

“Really?”

“Really. If it doesn’t work out, it’s not meant to be. I was so sad for a while.”

“And then?”

“And then I just accepted it. And I thought that I’d be better off growing, even if that meant some kind of unhappiness. I don’t know—I guess pain’s part of being human.”

Her words had the poise of a dancer’s steps in an improvisational ballet—toeing from thought to thought, from one emotional shade to the next. “And maybe,” I said, “if you keep going, there’s some truer happiness to be found. Maybe.”

“Maybe.” She grinned at me. “That’s what’s interesting about you, Charlie. You know how I saw you on the road?”

“Yeah?”

“You were looking out the window like you were trying to see something far, far away. And I thought to myself, who is that guy and what is he looking for?”

Using my laughter as camouflage, I launched an answer: “You.”

Bonnie laughed in response. Then, she paused and looked at me hard—the way you do when you’re trying to see through a veil. “What are you doing here, Charlie Tavares?”

I smiled. “Crashing a wedding on my way to Allegria.”

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This video is like the 1990s distilled: Outback Steakhouse, the Goo Goo Dolls, a 1-800-Collect ad, and VH1 playing music.

(Last time, Charlie and his friends arrived in Kentucky to crash a wedding.)

The rosy-fingered sun rekindled the light of morning. The air washed over my face from the open motel window above me. I wondered at how long it had been since the day had promised so much to me. I stretched out in my sleeping bag and listened to the languid strumming of my blood. I had been sleeping on the floor, but my muscles had the smoothness of water. I reached out my hands to the edge of the paint-covered old radiator. I yawned, and tasted the golden mist of the air.

As the others slept, a cloud of wonder unfolded around me. I didn’t want to think too concretely about anything. I just wanted to let the little glinting buds of possibility flower. I would see her again. Maybe we could dance. What would she be wearing? What would I be today, on this holiday from everything—from soot and ash and blackened wasteland? Today, I could live. Was this like what Cinderella felt like as the carriage left to take her to the ball?

Though my sneakers were not exactly glass slippers. I smiled, throat too full with sunlight to laugh.

Taking a shower (the first time in days), I felt like an old skin was peeling off. I put on my new old clothes. I made three attempts at tying the blue-and-gold-striped tie from the church shop. At last, I drew the crumpled knot up to my neck.

Standing outside, I watched the heat bake the packed earth of the parking lot and the air around me, making it harder, grittier, and thicker.

“So who are we going to be?” Ralph asked as he buttoned up the pink shirt. That question seemed both wonderful and scary.

Pat peered at his reflection in the mirror. “We’re dates of the quartet. And it’s true, we are. Even if it’s a little complicated, right Charlie?” His laughter sprayed in bursts.

“Well, we should be going,” I said.

From the instant he stepped out of the car in the First Baptist’s parking lot, Pat seemed to belong. He didn’t seem to be sneaking or watching or trying to hide. Instead, he just looked like some guy happy to go to a wedding. Danny slouched a bit, as though his head were a strange beacon, and looked around suspiciously. I tried to avoid eye contact with anyone. Ralph went forward in his usual haze.

The girls were waiting for us at the church steps. A short black dress clutched Lana’s narrow frame, ornamented by her lilac eye shadow and gold necklace. Her short locks curled like snakes. Sarah’s brown hair still fell across her back like a ponytail, but, this time, the ponytail was braided. Instead of a t-shirt and jeans, she wore a teal-and-green-tiled shirt, dark blue pants, and black orthopedic shoes. Kristy’s outfit seemed a tornado of colors: shades of blue, yellow, and purple fluttered around her in tendrils of diaphanous silk.

The sight of Bonnie caused the nub of my throat to tighten and then swing up, like a high striker when Goliath hits. Her hair had always seemed so straight before, held back by that bandana, but now it unrolled in soft curls around her face. For make-up, I could only see the faint pink of lipstick’s accent. Light pink with etchings of swirling chrysanthemum leaves, her dress was soft and sleek, like a starlet’s nightgown from the 1930s. Though the dress itself was sleeveless, she also wore a meshy white cardigan over it, unbuttoned and running to her mid-forearm. She had tied the blue-teared bandana around her wrist like a bracelet.

“Covert ops, reporting for duty,” Pat said with a mock salute.

“Hi,” I said to Bonnie as everyone began to exchange introductions and (sometimes mocking) compliments. “You look great.”

The lipstick added to the brightness of her teeth when she smiled. “So do you, Charlie.”

“I’m not used to this.” I gestured at the tie around my neck.

“You look very dashing.” She laughed. “It is a little different, though. Usually, when we play in a formal setting, I’m just in black pants and a shirt. And Lana insisted that she had to do my hair.” She batted the curls. “I didn’t even have that done when I went to prom.”

“Well, it’s very nice,” I said. “Not that your hair isn’t...”

She laughed again. “I know what you mean. Hey, let me adjust the knot just a little.” She reached up and massaged the tie knot by my neck. I could suddenly hear the blood in my ears. “There.”

I felt the knot. “Thanks.”

“Hey,” Pat said, “let’s take a picture of all of us—to commemorate the day!”

I had done those cheesy arms-over-shoulders group photos so many times in high school and college, but my heartbeat nevertheless started to pick up as she pressed her body next to me and her hand reached along my back. It was like the rush I got from a girl’s touch at a school dance when I was thirteen.

“Okay, you dears, say cheese,” the pink-clad matron we had hooked into taking our photo said. Click. “And just one more time again. You’ll want to be sure this comes out.” Click.

Sarah looked at her thin steel watch. “It’s quarter of. We should get ready.”

“Good luck,” I said to Bonnie. “Or is it break a string?” She waved with a wry smile as she went with her friends.

“Geez, Charlie,” Pat murmured, “you guys looked like you were in your own world back there.”

The bustle of the wedding party filled the front of the church. A bent elderly woman in a purple dress fumbled at the lapels of young men in tan cotton suits. I assumed one of them was the groom but couldn’t tell which. Groom, best man, groomsman—friend, brother, cousin, father—it was as though a play program were a jumble of titles without a single name. I figured that old woman with the gnarled fingers was somebody’s grandmother. I guessed that Jess’s mother was the skeletally thin woman who hugged many of the entering guests.

An expectant chatter hung like a cloud in the air of the church. Our feet creaking on the old wooden floorboards, we walked to the bride’s side and sat at back pew. Bonnie and the rest of the quartet waited at the front of the church. They talked, looked over the music, and scrutinized their instruments as though they were at perfect ease, as though this were simply an everyday performance. Bonnie looked at me a few times—like the beam of a lighthouse through the fog.

“And how are you folks doing here?” a man said behind us as his hands landed on Danny’s and Ralph’s shoulders. The pace of his voice had the uneven stroll of a drunk trying to cross the street, alternating between drawn-out and clipped syllables. I looked back and saw a man with a mustache like a sandy scrub-brush slouching over us.

“Oh, um,” Danny began.

“Cat got your tongue?” The man laughed. “What you folks doing back here by yourselves?”

“Oh, we’re Jess’s friends,” Ralph ventured.

Before Ralph could continue, the man pounded with both his hands again. “Friends! Well, that’s just dandy. I’m Uncle Billy.”

“Uncle Billy!” Pat swiveled in his seat and stuck out his hand. “So good to meet you!”

“Well, how do you do?”

Uncle Billy tried to persuade us to sit farther up, but Pat demurred. “We don’t want to block out family.”

“That’s decent of you.” Uncle Billy drew his fingers along his mustache, as though he were trying to smooth it out. “Well, nice meeting you gentleman, and we gotta talk later.” He wandered down the aisle, talking to guests as he went.

As Uncle Billy left, Danny exhaled as though he had been holding his breath the whole time. “I don’t know why this makes me so nervous.”

“Because you have no sense of fun,” Pat replied.

A few scattered notes of the quartet’s instruments flashed through the din. A man whose stomach strained against the dark blue wool of his double-breasted suit stood in front of the assembled group. He must have been the minister. One of the men in the tan cotton suits—tall, wide-shouldered, and crowned with a mop of red hair—walked toward the front of the church to join the man. I wondered how he must feel, minutes before he would pledge his life.

Sarah’s cello came slow and heavy and steady at first. Then, Bonnie’s violin joined in, with its reaching clarion notes, like a bird rejoicing at the morning. Then, Lana’s violin added an affirming echo of the fluttering notes, and Kristy enriched the medley with the wine-tinctured register of her viola. The musical canon started like a budding flower, slowly filling with the sun. The petals began to stretch outward like opening hands. And, then, with a flair of the violin, a radiating exuberance crowned the far-reaching petals. The violin danced up and down the scale with sure, daring leaps. Bonnie’s playing ran like a golden braid through the fabric of the song.

I had heard Pachelbel before. I remembered, dimly, the pattern of notes from pasta commercials and mall bookstores. But now, for the first time, it was alive.

Seeing her play deepened the wonder of the music. Her fingers danced like spiders up the strings. From those thin, metallic, lifeless strings, the bow—guided by her butterfly-fluttering wrist—wove a ribboned tune. Spontaneity suffused her playing. Soft and supple and responsive, her hands moved, and notes sprung up at her fingers’ happy press. Every note seemed an enterprise of anticipation and listening. They arced free and wild and incandescent in the air. The violin’s part climbed in pitch, and diminishing volume suggested the preciousness of that auditory cynosure, and then it grew louder, as the polestar rejoices at its parabolic peak in the sky.

The violin’s ecstasy redounded through her whole body. Her right foot stretched out in apparent ease, and her neck curved with the luxuriance of a stretching ballerina. Her whole pose was one of infinite listening and expression. Everything about her playing aspired to the fluidity of water and of the free air, which register every slight perturbation of force. She took the tiniest details and filled them with life.

The golden braid was not a lonely dancing strand. Its fibers spun and wove with those of the other instruments. Every shift in violin, cello, or viola became a new responsive opportunity for her. A wonderful fabric wove itself in front of me: she played, the others responded, she responded to their responses—and the cycle continued on. The quartet suggested that nothing was alone. Everything responded to everything else—note to note, sea to sky, heart to heart.

The music clung to the church like a heavy perfume, lingering on pews and shoulders and ears. The groom stood like a knight with a helmet of mussed red hair. The bride stepped down the aisle with the grace of a fairy princess.

In watching the wedding, I was also watching Bonnie. Maybe I even watched the wedding through her. If I tilted my head just a little, I could see her face through the rows of shoulders and heads in front of me. I heard her laughter ring full-throated through the crowd. I saw her eyes widen and then blink, as though her eyelids would fan away an incipient tear. Our gazes met a few times. Once, she suddenly smiled—an impulsive burst of white teeth—which ignited a smile on my own lips.

I wondered what allowed her to conjure music from the violin, to listen so intently and respond so carefully, and to smile with such an outpouring of joy. I wondered what she thought of me sitting there in an old ashen coat.

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“Now love, my friends,” the minister was saying, “is one of the great gifts from God. That love of man and woman, husband and wife, answers to a yearning so deep that it goes all the way back to Genesis. That love that brings Jess and Barney here is that kind of love. Now, just because love is what we want doesn’t mean that love is always easy. Some of the best things in life can be hard at times, right folks? It ain’t easy to be a heart surgeon. It ain’t easy to dream big and realize that dream. But it’s worth it, right? Raising kids is no walk in the park. And being married—don’t get me started. Sorry, Charlene.” He winked at a middle-aged woman sitting in the front. “You want to hear about some tales of difficulty—some days in the desert—ask her what it’s like being married to me.” Chuckles.

“But the point of this, folks, the point of this is that, in love, you share in the sweet and the sour with that other person. When they hurt, you hurt. When they smile, you smile, too. You join your hearts together for worse and for better, and ultimately it is for your better. It shows you something beyond yourself. It gives you something to lean on when life goes all sigogglin. My friends, there’s a mystery to love—to the love of God, the love of marriage, the love of friendship, the love of family, and all the other loves out there.

“When love comes and touches you, as it has touched Jess and Barney, it rewrites the book of our expectations. When love comes, love shakes the heart. When love comes, it turns the whole world topsy-turvy. Love gives the world mountains and canyons, oceans and rolling plains. It shakes us up, and the stars start to spin, and the sun dances in the sky.”

Lightning Tells

Like dewdrops, mystery hangs on my parents’ youth. They were heedless and bold—no, they were courageous, and willing to grab the thorns of life.

I think of them—both twenty. They met at the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament in New Bedford. She had seen him a few times in the crowd. “Your pops was so cute. He wasn’t one of these big puffed-up bodybuilders. But he had this short-sleeved gingham shirt on—and you could just see these toned muscles. I knew that was a man.”

“I was a boy then,” my father would say.

And my mother would lean forward. “You were the man of my heart.”

Somehow, she contrived to spill a soda on his shoes. And then they talked all day long. They watched the parade. They ate pao de queijo and pasteis de nata. By the time the sun set, my father knew he wanted to marry her. By the time he left for Vietnam, they were engaged.

“Lightning tells, Charlie. Lightning tells. The first time your mother held my hand, it was like a firefly had burst into my veins. I couldn’t say no to that.”

So they had run headlong into life—with marriage and children and a home. Death took loved ones. Recessions took jobs. Fate gave them a sickly son. But still they raced and laughed.

In his fifties, my father still had a backbone of steel. My mother’s eyes were as sharp as when she was a teenager. They still carried that spark of lightning between them.

The bride and groom kissed to great acclaim. Pat stood and cheered with his hands above his head. It was almost like he actually knew Barney and Jess.

 An avalanche of applause accompanied the couple as they marched out of the church, but over it all, like the flashing sun, came the music of the quartet. The notes of Handel did handsprings and summersaults. Bonnie’s violin wove in and out of the tune like a flashing needle, and every sequence of notes was a new twist.

At the end, when the wedding party had left, the people still in the church applauded in thanks. I clapped, too, as I walked up to see them. The applause echoed the tremoring in my chest, which I tried to smooth out of my voice when I spoke. “You guys are amazing.” Closer, I could see the nimbus of exhilaration around her, a glow intensified both by her smile and by sweat thickening the air.

“We messed up a couple times,” Sarah said, “but I don’t think it went too badly.”

“So you liked it?” Bonnie asked.

“It was magical,” I said.

A woman with a face like a wrinkled apricot handed us each a little plastic bottle as we went outside to the receiving line. When the bride and groom drove away in the limo, we were to blow bubbles after them instead of throwing rice.

Bonnie opened the pink plastic bottle with a smile. “When I was a little girl, I always thought blowing bubbles was so much fun.” She swirled the wand around the bottle and pulled it out. The ring atop that dripping scepter caught the sunlight in a circular, glimmering rainbow. She blew through the ring, and bubbles stumbled out in a short, broken train.

Her laughter coursed with the bubbles. “Oh, I haven’t done that in so long!” A few bubbles popped in the sunshine or landed on the ground. She dipped the wand and blew again, this time with her head tilted upwards. The prismatic spheres rose up in a fountain’s blast. “Here, you try,” she said, holding out the wand.

I bent down and put my lips close to that glistening ring. I blew, and the rainbow harnessed my breath, and the bubbles poured out. It was so smooth, as smooth as I felt the air rising from my lungs. I watched the parade of bubbles float on the air. So fragile—more fragile than any glass—those transparent shells of breath flew for a beautiful moment. Some drifted higher, some lower. They distilled the sun’s light and glinting rode the wind.

Smiling, she turned toward me and put the wand to her lips again. The bubbles poured toward my face. One exploded near my brow, and, in an instant, all the colors of the rainbow streaked past my eye like comets.

Pat slithered from person to person in the receiving line, with a hungry-eyed attention to every social cue. His face a smiling mask of presumed intimacy, he laughed and shook hands and hugged and kissed bridesmaids on cheeks.

Pat’s cheer worried Danny. “I wish he would be a little more forgettable,” he muttered to me after Pat posed for a candid with a couple bridesmaids. “I thought one of the techniques of successful wedding crashing is not being noticed.”

“But Pat hates not being noticed.”

The bride and groom departed in a tempest of bubbles.

By the time we had packed the instruments in the minivan, Lana turned to plotting out the trip to the reception. “The reception is kinda far out in a farm. You’ll need directions.” She spun on the spiky spires of her heels. “And Sarah’s got an excellent sense of direction. She should go along with you guys.” Lana looped her arm around mine and pulled me along. “And you, Charlie, should come with us. You get the shotgun.”

“What?”

She laughed, and its practiced sheen had an eerie resemblance to Pat’s. “I mean, you get to ride shotgun. Right next to me.”

“Lana…” Bonnie began.

“Come along, Bonnie, come along. We can’t be late.”

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To follow up this wedding theme, here’s some vintage footage from one of the big “weddings” of 1999, via the WWF.

(Last time, Charlie had a strange night.)

“So how about Kentucky?” I had said. Pat had clapped and hollered like he was back at the MTV Beach House. Danny pulled out his road atlases to show me the path that he—quite coincidentally—had laid out for getting there.

And here we were, travelling to a little dot on the map named Vauville, a place none of us had ever heard of. I had no clue what it would look like. I assumed it was small. Vauville appeared in my brain like some model township composed of stacked plastic boxes.

“I haven’t been to a wedding since I was a kid—like a toddler,” I said. It had been my mother’s youngest sister, Maryellen. Only a few flashes of memory rose through the mists. Most of all, I remembered leaning against the wooden pillars in the Fall River veterans club that had hosted the reception, as the men in her new husband’s family sang some song in Portuguese. The song had pounded the air with the feet of a marching army.

“I think Marnie’s wedding was the last one I went to,” Danny said. “I even got a blister from dancing. I hadn’t worn those shoes since high school. They were just too tight.”

Pat turned in mock surprise. “You actually danced, Danny?”

“A little.”

“Stunning. Absolutely stunning. You dancing.”

Danny replied, “I danced at my bar mitzvah. You were there. You saw that.” Her skin piling in wrinkles at the tightly buttoned collar of her white shirt, Great Aunt Hannah had pulled him in circles on the dance floor. As they danced, Danny’s thirteen-year-old head had bobbed like a balloon over the diminutive woman with the lilting Polish accent. Pat had found the sight very funny, so funny that Great Aunt Hannah then asked him to dance.

Pat rolled his eyes. “I thought you had grown out of that.”

“And at prom,” Danny added.

“You actually danced with Heather Quaid?”

“Yes. I think.”

“I don’t know if I’ve ever, ah, crashed a wedding,” Ralph said from behind the wheel.

“I’ve crashed a few parties in my time,” Pat said. “And the key thing to remember is to act as though you belong. If you can fit in, if you’re confident, if you’re part of the crowd—you become almost de facto invited.”

“What if there’s a seating chart?” Danny asked.

“No big deal. You just have to show a little ingenuity.”

“You make it sound so easy,” I said.

“We’re just putting on a mask,” Pat said with a shrug. “And we’re always wearing one mask or another.”

We passed billboards featuring the Ten Commandments, the Louisville Cardinals, a giant bottle of bourbon, the Kentucky Wildcats, another giant bottle of bourbon, and the smiling face of an insurance agent. The greenery lining the highway seemed to quiver with the laughter of nymphs and the music of the wind.

We took the exit to Vauville, and stopped at a gas station near the highway. “It’s a left onto Hamilton, but he wasn’t sure if there was still a sign on it or not,” Pat said as he returned to the car. “It’s right past this big old red barn.”

The roads off the highway reminded me of the rural parts of Western Massachusetts: we drove past a staggered parade of rundown buildings and wide fields, with sprawling houses in the distance. Generations had worked across time to build those uneven structures.

“Look at that,” Ralph said, pointing to a yellow sign that read Militia Xing, the letters beneath a silhouette of a man holding a rifle across his chest. “That’s a joke, right?”

Pat replied, “For the record, I’d say that you should be cooperative if we hit a paramilitary checkpoint.”

Ralph blanched. “What?”

“If the militia gets rowdy, don’t worry—the black helicopters will come and save us.”

“What?”

“Dude, you gotta lay off the weed.”

And then we arrived at the old red barn—well, really by now a gray barn, with scraps of red clinging like dried blood to the rotted wood. A forest of weeds and brush had grown around it, so it looked almost like it had sunken into a marsh. The window at the top was broken, and one of the doors hung by its hinges.

“I think we found our road,” Pat said.

Time had jumbled the buildings along Hamilton. Old farmhouses stood between one-story ranches from the 1950s and larger colonial-style houses from the 80s and early 90s. A faded yellow sign welcomed us to Downtown Vauville.

A two-lane strip of road bordered on either side by trees and a cluster of buildings, Downtown Vauville had sidewalks. “Let’s get out here and explore,” Pat said as we passed a parking lot in front of a closed-down movie theater. “Maybe we can get directions to the church.”

An old man in a straw fedora waved at us as we passed the local bank, the Boyle Trust Company. “How you folks doing?”

Pat waved back. “We’re doing fine, thank you kindly. And yourself—you enjoying this fine day?”

“Oh yes.” He kept on walking.

One of Ralph’s eyebrows lifted like a haughty apostrophe. “Thank you kindly? Are we in the, um, Wild West now?”

“I don’t think Kentucky was really part of the Wild West,” Danny ventured.

“I’m trying to fit in here,” Pat said. “When in Rome. Or Vauville”

In addition to sidewalks, downtown had four churches, two restaurants, one historic hotel, and about a dozen storefronts, most of which were vacant or closed. The four of us felt like a crowd to me.

“Do you feel that people are looking at you, almost like they can tell we don’t belong?” I asked quietly.

“You’re starting to sound like PL here, Charlie. It’s called being friendly. And besides, how can they tell if we do or don’t fit in? Is there a badge or something? Don’t worry.”

The First Baptist Church of Vauville reached over us, and its white steeple pierced the sky like an alabaster spear. “Well, this is it,” I said. “At two o’clock tomorrow...” Icy fingers drummed up my sternum, and I fell silent.

Across the street, the New Light Methodist Church advertised that its “Thrift Mission” was open on Fridays from 1:00-4:30. Pat said, “Maybe we can find some duds in there that might fit in more at a wedding.”

We followed a gravel path around the brick facade of the church to a one-story outbuilding that looked like it once might have been a house. The faint hum of bluegrass swelled as we neared the screen door. Opening that door, I felt like a child entering a theater’s costume room for the first time. Metal clothing racks filled the room, with shirts and pants piled on tables. To the side, it looked like there was another small room stocked with old plates, discarded toys, and faded needlepoints. Despite the screen door, the air was thick with the musk of old clothes and history. An old woman with nearly translucent skin sat behind a sheet-covered table reading a book. To her side, near a closed window, the radio blasted.

She looked up at us. “Well, hello. How’re y’all today?” Before we could articulate a response, she was standing up and yelling, “Marilyn, we’ve got some handsome gentlemen here!”

With gray curly hair and a 50s-style housecoat, Marilyn walked through the doorway of the smaller room. “Well, well, well. We do indeed, Dorothy.”

While the blitzkrieg of solicitude dazzled Danny and me, it seemed to energize Pat.

Marilyn asked, “So what brings you folks here?”

“A wedding,” Pat said. He explained that we had come all this way from Massachusetts for a wedding at the First Baptist. He obviously preferred the thrill of making a scene to the benefits of discretion.

“The First Baptist,” Dorothy repeated. “So you’re going to the Nunn wedding, then?”

Pat held open his mouth just for a moment and then nodded. “Oh, yes, that’s it.”

“Sue and I are members of the garden club here. And she’s been so busy preparing for this wedding that she’s even pulled out of helping out with the county fair—not that I blame her.” She laughed and turned to Marilyn. “I declare, she looks like she’s lost ten pounds with all the stress.”

Dorothy said, “And she was a sapling to begin with.”

“Well, she’s a twig now.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Dorothy said to us, “to come all this way for their wedding.”

“What should I get?” I murmured to Pat as we began to dig through the assembled clothing.

“What do you want to get? Who do you want to be?”

I drew my fingers along the layers of fabric. What would I become? Or what would I pretend to be? I found a white shirt with a yellowed sweat ring burned into the collar. It was my size.

Pat posed in a seersucker jacket that pooled at his wrists. “Can you believe that Danny wants to pass this thing up?”

“It’s way too tight,” Danny said as he held up a dark blue shirt. “I looked like I had monkey-arms in it.”

One jacket flapped like a giant flag at my waist. Another one devoured my hands in a cascade of yellow-red plaid. I found one that had no size marked on it. Heavily-worn and soft, this jacket had seen many mothballed years.

“Maybe this will work,” I said. It slipped on, like an ash-colored fog.

“Now that fits you perfectly,” Marilyn exclaimed with an Archimedean fervor.

I looked at myself in the mirror. I wasn’t used to wearing sport coats, but somehow I could tell that it fit. I smiled. It was a curious mask, being happy, and I marveled at how convincing it looked. It really did fit.

Pat ended up buying the seersucker jacket (“it’s only five dollars!”), and Danny bought a vest he couldn’t button and a stained striped shirt. And Ralph walked away with two different pairs of pants, a pink shirt, and a linen coat. “How could I decide?” he asked.

At Danny’s insistence (“We really should get them something.”), my friends went over to a local general store in order to find some gift for the couple. I crossed the street to look again at the First Baptist. Responsive to any twitch of the wind, my heart seemed to balance on the tip of its steeple.

The church’s wooden door opened.

She still wore the bandana, this time with a blue t-shirt and yellow shorts. I stood for a moment simply appreciating the everydayness of her walk down the stairs. Each step seemed like a little hop.

Then, she noticed me. “Charlie,” she said, sun in her voice. “Charlie!” The hops down the stairs quickened.

Like a bow, my smile stretched taut across my face. I didn’t know my muscles could stretch so far without snapping. My hand shot up in a wave, and I called back, “Bonnie!” Whether because of the sun or the heat or whatever, a slight flush washed her cheeks. “What are you doing here?” She pounced in a quick hug—sudden, instantaneous, head-spinning.

“I heard there’s a wedding going on,” I said, and then my lips bowed again. “And I’ve never been to Kentucky before.”

“I knew you’d come. I knew you’d come.”

I shrugged, trying to be casual. “Why not, we figured.”

“So how’s the road been?”

I tried to explain—with the mountains and the woods and MTV.

“Wait, you were on MTV?”

“In the background somewhere, lost in the crowd.”

“That must have been exciting.”

“It’s more exciting to be here,” I said.

She smiled. “It’s going to be so awesome. Jess—she’s our friend, the one getting married—is like on another planet right now.”

That makes two of us, I wanted to say but didn’t.

Bonnie continued, “It’s just going to be so much fun. I haven’t been to a wedding since I was a little kid.”

“Me, too.”

“Then we can be kids together—or we can be adults together for the first time.”

The quartet had stopped by the church to prepare for the wedding: to practice a little and to get a sense for the acoustics of the space. But they were still waiting for Kristy, the violaist. “She just had some quick shopping to do,” Bonnie said, “And that was two hours ago. Sarah had to lug her cello half a mile to the church here because the van wasn’t around.”

“It’ll be nice to hear you play tomorrow,” I said.

The minor flush again. “Thanks, but I’m nervous enough playing at this wedding.”

“You were so great at the fair.”

She dragged her hands down her face like it was melting. “Don’t even mention that—it was ridiculous. I think you were like the only person who was listening.”

“In that case, trust me: every single audience member loved it.” Was this flirting? I was never good at it—never adept at the weird, hieroglyphic balancing act of humor and seriousness, satire and honesty.

“Well at least that’s a relief.” Smiling. Then a finger popped up, “Oh, before I forget, can we exchange e-mail addresses or something? Tomorrow might be pretty crazy, and…”

“And,” I said, “it would be good if we could stay in touch.”

She pulled a small pencil out of her pocket and ripped a piece of paper out of a small notebook (titled Music Notes) in her back pocket.

The church door swung open again. “Well, look what the cat dragged in,” a voice—Lana’s voice—cried. “Sarah, Sarah, you gotta see this!” With one leg stretched forward and her head angled to the side, Lana looked like she was inspecting some prey. Her frizzy brown hair in a ponytail, a girl of medium height stood next to her.

I tried to make my voice as nonchalant, average, and ordinary as possible as I said, “Oh, hi!”

Lana said, “Bonnie, I thought you were supposed to be watching for Kristy—not talking with some disreputable stranger.”

“That’s not as funny as you think it is, Lana,” Bonnie replied.

They came down the stairs, Lana like a general at the head of an army. “You actually made it,” she said softly to me.

“I’m Sarah, by the way,” the brown-haired girl said and shook my hand. Her eyes blinked behind her large round glasses. “And you must be Charlie.”

“I am. Nice to meet you,” I said.

“Where are your friends—Paul or whatever his name was and the others?” Lana asked.

I replied, “They’re across the street, trying to get a wedding gift. And it’s Pat.”

“Whatever.”

Sarah asked, “So you’re really going to the wedding?”

“Well, I thought so...”

As Sarah’s brow furrowed, Lana marshaled forth perfectly confident words. “Oh, we’ll fit you in.” She then outlined exactly how. We’d meet at the church a little before two. Then, they would lead us to the reception. “Just act like you belong. Besides, we’re entitled to dates.” Bonnie blushed.

The red minivan rounded the corner. At the wheel was a slight figure with tanned skin. Her cat-eyed glasses combined with her narrow chin and broad cheeks to give her an even more feline appearance. “Hello, ladies!” she called.

“So you found your way out of the mall?” Lana said with a smile.

“They had these lovely bags there—I need a clutch…” Kristy’s bubbly voice trailed off as she noticed me. “And who is this young man?”

“This,” Bonnie said, “is Charlie.” Her words felt like a hand on my shoulder.

Kristy had a way of stretching out her words like a cat arching its back. “I thought so. I’ve heard a lot about you, Charlie.”

“Well, we should probably get practicing,” Sarah said. “We’re behind schedule as it is.”

“Sarah loves schedules,” Kristy said.

Lana added, “But she’s right. And no audiences allowed for rehearsals.” She turned to me. “So we’ll synchronize our watches, and see you at the church before two. Try to stay out of trouble.”

“I’m already here, aren’t I?” I said. Bonnie laughed.

I crossed the street to join my friends, who had been observing the scene from the store’s striped awning.

“You were outnumbered there, Charlie,” Pat said with a smirk. “But you survived.”

“Of course he did,” Danny said.

“So did you guys settle on a present?”

Pat held up a bag. “I think so. Ralph and Danny duked it out, and we decided—”

But as Pat spoke, I saw Bonnie crossing the street to walk toward us.

“Hold on,” I said, and jogged forward to meet Bonnie. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah. I just wanted to say that I’m glad you decided to come. I’m glad you’re here.”

“I’m glad I’m here, too,” I replied.

The late afternoon sun coated those instants—her face, the street, the dry air, my face, my brain—in gold. And suddenly I realized that I had paddled past the buoys of my little prison and crossed into where my feet could no longer touch the bottom. I hadn’t been there in so long, but somehow I was swimming.

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah, tomorrow.”

And the gold did not fade as she left to rejoin her friends.

Travel Journal Entry #5

Wedding tomorrow! Jess looks so excited. She giggles whenever anyone even mentions Barney’s name.

I think that excitement is contagious. That’s one of the reasons why, even though it’s after one in the morning, I still can’t sleep, so I’m sitting here in the bathroom writing to you. I know I’m not the only one up. Jess’s aunt’s house is full of creaks.

Maybe it was the excitement that caused my fingers to keep shaking during rehearsal this afternoon. I’ve been playing Pachelbel since I was a teenager, but I felt like I was racing racing racing to try to keep up with the notes. Kristy (of course) found it wicked funny, but I think Sarah (of course!) got a little worried. It sounds great in the church, though, and it’s going to be so incredible to see Jess walk down the aisle.

It’s weird how, sometimes, when it gets late at night, it actually gets lighter. I look out the window and the moon’s dyed everything an otherworldly blue. It seems removed and more beautiful and totally bizarre.

I saw C today. It was the weirdest thing...I was coming out of the church, and there he was. I kind of couldn’t believe that he was there. But then I also kind of couldn’t believe that he wouldn’t be there. Not there at the church. But there—here in Kentucky—at all. When he saw me, he got the biggest smile on his face (he’s got a great smile, btw). I almost broke down in these silly (like, totally juvenile) giggles when those pearly whites broke out. I don’t know if he could tell that I had like a million springs inside me about to pop in every direction the whole time I was talking to him.

Even though she’s just met him, Kristy teased me about him all night. “I love the curly hair...the dark eyes...give me a sip of that iced coffee.” She’s totally ridiculous.

Somehow, I’m sitting in an old house in Kentucky, perched on a bathtub, thinking about some guy I only met a few days ago. And he’s so serious. And he’s so cute. And maybe he’s got some shadows there—at the corner of his eye. And maybe I’ll understand that someday.

OK, I’ve just gone a little RIDICULOUS there.

So—me in five years: what happened? Do you look back at this and even remember what C even stands for? Do you laugh reading this? Do you cry? Is he sitting right next to you, now, as you look through the journal chronicling the week when you first met?   

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(Last time, the guys met an old man in the woods, who began to tell them a story.)

“It’s an old story. It goes all the way back to the first days, back when the Dutch were just coming, and the Shawnee walked the land. The Shawnee had tales of these spirit creatures that lived in the woods. It was said that these spirits guarded something. What? Nobody knew. Maybe it was a treasure or the fountain of youth or maybe a sacred something or other. But everyone knew this: Say. Out. Of. The. Forest.

“Now the Dutch came, and heard about these things. But do you think they listened to the Shawnee? They thought it was just a superstition—like the world being flat. But they saw real fear in the eyes of the Shawnee. When some doubters went out to explore this forest, well, they ran back to the settlement with their tails tucked between their legs. Dark shapes running all around—weird howls filling the night.

“So the settlers left the forest alone, at first. But more men came. More houses were built. And so one day, one man—we call him Farmer Jon, the third son of a third son—wanted more land for himself. And he decided he was going to take it from these woods.

“Farmer Jon was gonna show them all. Day and night he chopped wood. His two farmhands feared. His wife and children feared. But he kept working. He built his farm deeper in the forest—in the turf of the boskrijgers, as they came called. Folks said they saw odd shadows in the night. Farmer Jon—he laughed at their fears. He would not give in. His farm grew bigger and bigger. And folks said that shadows deepened around his house.

“Farmer Jon’s crops failed. His livestock got sick. And one night, disaster struck. His youngest daughter had disappeared. The boskrijgers has stolen her, he believed, and he went out into the forest to save his beloved child. He took both the farmhands with him that night. Now, no one knows what happened. But only one farmhand returned—pale and scared. And he never spoke about what he saw. The forest—the boskrijgers—had taken revenge. And that was that. His widow and surviving children left the forest. No one wanted to settle in that homestead, and, eventually, the house and the fields disappeared as the forest took the land back. So the boskrijgers watch. Round these parts, sometimes, a farmer would go too deep hunting in the woods and never come back, or a little girl would go picking flowers and not return. Back when I was a child, I always heard, never go deep in the woods after sundown. And if you should hear the eee-eee-eee, the sound of their war cry, you better run, run, and never look back.”

“What happens if you look back?” Ralph asked, taking the stem of his pipe away from his mouth.

Chester shrugged. “No one ever told me for sure. But I heard some things. That their eyes will catch you. That they would take you back to their forbidden home.”

“That’s a good story,” Danny said.

Chester shook his head. “There are a chunk of stories out here, and some of them are more true than you might think at first. I’ve heard things—I’ve seen things—I can’t explain, and things I won’t pretend to understand. But they’ve happened. And there, in the dark forest, you face a lot that makes you wonder.” He then stood up and stretched. “Well, I got a puzzle to get to. You boys have a good night. I got a shovel by the camper if you gotta use the bathroom. Be careful out there.”

As the gray fell to black, the mound of flame grew before us. I watched it, sometimes pushing sticks into the heart of the flames. I soon lost them in the red torrents. We ate chicken noodle soup heated by the fire. Time passed within the wavering shadows cast by the crackling flames. Ralph had rested his head on his bookbag, and his eyes had drifted closed. Stretched out on a blanket, Danny had cracked open another space opera, which he read by a small flashlight clamped to the back cover. Pat flipped through the remainder of the newspaper that Danny had used to start the fire.

I watched the licking dance of flames. I thought of the road, of the miles that reached behind and ahead—somewhere—in the shadows. I stood up and walked away from the fire. Chester was right. You could see the stars so much clearer out there. I wonder what she would say to her friends about me. If she talked about me—if they remembered me—at all.

A cry tore through the night. A gust of wind roiled the campsite, and the leaves whirled with that song. And then silence.

“What was that?” Ralph asked, poking up his wide-eyed head and brushing a leaf away from his face.

“I don’t know,” Danny said. “It could be a wolf or a coyote.”

“Or a boskrijger,” Pat said.

Danny shook his head. “I’m pretty sure it’s not a boskrijger, seeing as boskrijgers don’t exist.”

“That’s what Farmer Jon thought, and...”

“He probably didn’t exist, either.”

Ralph slumped a little higher. “Go and investigate it, then, if you’re so sure it’s not a boskrijger.”

“I’m not going out there.”

“If they’re just so fictionally impossible, why are you so afraid?”

Danny replied, “Wolves and coyotes and bears are dangerous enough. They can hurt you more than a made-up story.”

“You should have said that to Chester,” Pat said with a nod at the camper. Soft golden light and oldies music poured out of one of the windows.

“I was trying to be polite. It’s possible that there’s something there in the woods, but we need evidence for it. Real evidence. Like a picture or something.”

That’s the problem with scientists!” Pat proclaimed. “Just because they can’t get a fairy on film, they think they don’t exist!”

“Well, yes.”

Ralph sighed. “Ah, no. You can’t cage all the facts with a—with a periodic table or statistics or anything else. What’s wrong with a little fantasy, to show us what’s beyond ourselves?”

There was so much out there, in the shadows beyond. Incidents of surprise and wonder. Festivals and oceans and weddings. It would be like some fantasy to swagger into Kentucky for a rendezvous with some girl I had met on the highway—to dance with a smiling mask.

“There’s nothing wrong with fantasy,” Danny said and picked up his novel for emphasis, “as long as you recognize it as fantasy.”

I had learned that fantasies all too often flee before the cool clarity of experience’s gimlet beam. Fairy baubles would turn out to be the metallic wrappers of chewing gum littered in the underbrush, and will-o-the-wisps would be revealed to be just marsh gas. The smile would be practiced politeness and not a sudden effusion of joy or affection or empathy. And maybe nothing would have been meant at all.

Danny continued, “Fantasies can hurt you, if you believe in them too much.”

The waning fire stretched the shadows. The darkness and light fell into a sinuous curve, which leaped and sputtered and crashed. The languorous, thick-pulsed dance pulled at the limits of my eye. The flame glowed with a black light, and the night seemed to distill into an irradiating glow.

I watched—wanting, fearing, doubting, hoping.

Happy Days

The flashing technicolor twilight rolled over my face. Some nights, I couldn’t bear to put the lights back on—anything more than the TV’s glow was too bright.

“Charlie,” my mother said from behind me.

I pivoted to see her concerned face. “Oh, hi, Mom.”

“It’s—it’s four in the morning. Aren’t you tired?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” I was almost too weary to sleep. “I should go to bed soon.”

She sat down on the couch next to me. “Oh my boy—oh my dreamy, dreamy Carly.” My grandfather—her father—had called me that. She only used “Carly” when she was feeling very sentimental.

“Mom…”

“What are you watching?”

It was a “Happy Days” rerun. “I’m sorry, Mom. This must be a disappointment—to have son like this.”

I awoke with an urgent throbbing between my legs—the revenge of cheap beer. I fumbled my sneakers onto my bare feet and quietly unzipped the front of the tent. A few hours in a sleeping bag on the hard ground usually stiffened my back, but not that night, when the warm air ran like palm fronds over my sweaty face and bare legs. I left the path to go deeper into the woods.

As I emptied my bladder, I heard a splash in the distance, just at the edge of my awareness. Its ripples reached in tenuous, glittering rings through the air. Another splash. A woman’s laughter wove through the air like a sliver of gossamer silk. Its notes set my pulse drumming in the back of my head. Who—

The laughter again. Or was it a call? I hadn’t remembered seeing a river or a pond in the daylight. But now the wind carried watery tumults to my ear. I turned around and scanned the forest around me.

I heard it again. I knew I could follow it. So, in my boxer shorts and sneakers, I went forward in pursuit. I would have to make my own path. I walked like hunters of old did: quiet, deliberate, with supreme concentration. The vast forest—underbrush, dead leaves, giant oaks, and all—seemed almost too alive in the stillness. I slipped as I tried to step over a fallen tree branch coiled with briars. The leaves gave way, my ankle turned, and only a dancing step forward kept me from falling.

The night had its dangers. The canopy of leaves allowed only lunar hints, glints, and portents through. I stalked through a curling landscape of silver-etched shadows. Plants brushed against my legs like reaching hands. Vines and tree roots writhed around me. Sounds—crunching, fluttering, loping, running, thrashing, knocking—gave flashes of evidence of life around me. A jagged cry ripped through the night. What else walked around me? Perhaps witches were gathering for some festival, with their infernal servants wrangling victims for the latest sacrifice. Perhaps the shades of warriors from ancient tribes glided through the woods. Maybe a farmer’s daughter, searching for a home long ago ransacked by time. Maybe another sleepwalker staggering through the woods.

As I went deeper into the woods, the whispers of glamour grew louder. The laughter and splashes struck with more force.

I stalked toward a row of trees that stood like columns before a clearing. I edged near one of the trees, and peeked around its scaled trunk. A pool glittered in the cloud-strained moonlight. Silvery speckles danced over the body of the woman swimming in the pool.

I watched her, and lost myself in the gazing.

The water flowed around her body as sinuously as smoke. Her laughter seemed as unfathomable as the pool in which she so easily swam. It seemed as glossy as her shoulder-length brown hair.

Even as I recognized her, she seemed to recognize me and waved her arm, soft and smooth, in invitation.

She laughed again and turned, paddling in the water. I felt like I had been splashed in the face. What swam beneath that dark water!? My chest inflamed and my face flushed, I kicked off my sneakers. Stripping off my striped boxers, I ran as fast as I could toward the water.

I thundered into the dark wet, and the water was cool in the night. The shock stole my breath. A sudden gasp, a momentary, thrilling grasping—water slipping over my chest, my face, my thighs.

At the first touch of water, my limbs struggled with an alien force. But eagerness, the night’s insinuative promise, all the songs of wand’ring minstrels set to the clear-toned lyre—these helped me leap through my vain incompetence. Desire made a wonder of inexperience, and mystery squeezed vigor out of uncertainty. And thrashing through the water to the beckoning of a lady’s silver hands, I drew close—close—closer still.

My body swollen with new-born delight, my sharp breaths dancing, my blood all afire, mind swimming in the glamour of the night, I reached far out to dare for my desire.

And—she flew! Her flesh flashed away from my hand. My chest’s innards curled like a corkscrew. I wondered where she was, water ripples the only trace of flesh so fair. And the laughter returned. She returned, a little away from me. She blew a kiss. What fancy-frenzy captured me? What invitation in those teasing fingers, which drew me close, which I could not resist! She slipped beneath the water. I dove underneath.

Nothing could be seen in the watery darkness. A few desperate surges, and then I gaspingly returned to the moonlight. She was there, a few paces from me. Was she naked? The dark told little, and the water hid all below her shoulders, as her brown locks skimmed the water’s lim. She laughed and dropped deep once more.

I dove after her, and again she eluded my grasp. Again and again, as I seemed on the cusp of touching her hand or meeting her face, she slipped away somehow. And her laughter never seemed any closer than it had by the water’s edge. I swam under the water to touch her foot—though I hadn’t seen her feet, really—and my hands grasped at dark water. Again and again, I stretched and followed; again and again, nothing. I didn’t know how long we danced in this ballet of chase and escape, but my arms grew tired and my heart was pounding so hard that it might have created ripples in the water. At last, she stopped her circling, turned to me, and beckoned before slipping under the water.

Concentrating all my might for one final dash, I drew deeper of the air than I had before and then charged into the water. The darkness only met me there. As deep as I could dive—my limbs were so weary, my muscles nearly flaccid from the hard labor of water—it was not deep enough. My will was nearly spent, but I gambled a few moments more. And then it was over. I was done, beaten by that silent, slippery blackness. I waited for a single beat of balance, when the water held me in perfect suspension. Then that, too, ended, and I came surging up.

I had been too long. Even above the surface, I still struggled for breath. Spasms racked my body as I wretched up coughs of water. I was so tired—so worn out on the wheel of vain endeavor. Instead of laughter, the woods now echoed with the barking and spewing of a reckless swimmer.

“Hello?” I called. “Are you there? Is anyone there?”

Wherever she was, it wasn’t here anymore.

Later, the light gray felt of the early dawn wiped away any shadows as I reclined in the tent. Fingering the hem of my plaid boxers, I stared up at the trees and sky through the mesh window above me. Scattered bird-calls wheeled like yo-yos through the air, and I couldn’t tell if the birds sang in desire or warning.

I would go to Kentucky.

“To Kiss and to Catch (Is a Commonplace Thing)”

from Mickey Kent, Say Hi Again, Mickey! (1963)

To kiss and to catch

Is a commonplace thing

To mix and to match

Is to make my heart sing,

But kissin’ and catchin’

Don’t add up to matchin’

With—oh!—it’s just a little too much!

You set me all a-burning,

And you set me in a spin,

And how the hour’s yearning-burning-yearning-burning,

And you—well where can I begin?

So give me a touch, a touch of a touch,

And give me a kiss, a kiss of a touch,

And oh how I need you—I need you so much!

And—oh!—it’s just a little too much!

And—oh!—it’s just a little—

Oh!—it’s just a little—

Just a little little—

And—oh!—it’s just a little too much!

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(Last time, the guys got caught in a fiery rave.)

“You know, I think we’re lost,” Danny said as we stood outside the car on the edge of some access road.

“We’re on an adventure.” Ralph declared and added, “Can you be lost on an adventure?”

After leaving the rave, we had crashed at the first motel we could find. At 11:02 AM, the motel manager had woken us by banging on the door and yelling that he would call the police if we didn’t leave immediately—or agree to pay for another night. Check-out was, after all, at 10:30. So we left without even unpacking our bags. Last night’s alcohol and lipstick clung to my mouth like a scum.

We had been trying to get to Western Pennsylvania so that we could at least start to consider whether we wanted to do the Appalachian Trail or not. But Ralph had been driving, and we had missed a turn—or turns. And somehow we had ended up getting further and further from the highway or any signs of civilization. Not one car had passed us.

“All that matters,” Pat said, as he stretched, “is that we have enough time to make it to Kentucky.”

“Oh, you’ve decided we’re going?” My back ached from the hours in the car, so I was rubbing my spine.

Pat grinned, the ridges of his lips like the serrations of a knife. “Come on, Charlie, you know you want to go.”

I wanted happiness—joy—a phoenix’s burst. But how to get from the woods of Pennsylvania to there—well, that was the great mystery. “I don’t know if they were serious.” How could they have been?

“Affairs of the heart,” Ralph said, “are always of the, uh, utmost seriousness.”

“And foolishness,” I said. But, even if it was foolish, I couldn’t deny the throb in my chest thinking about going there. I could listen to Bonnie play again. I could see her smile. I could dance with her, maybe. “What do you think, Danny?”

He looked up from the pile of maps and gazettes on the hood of the car. “About what?”

“About Kentucky?”

“Well, if we want to skip the AT or cut corners somewhere else, we can do it.”

Pat laughed. “Cut corners—I knew I was finally corrupting you, Danny-boy. Besides, Charlie, you wouldn’t want to disappoint Bonnie, would you?”

“I don’t even know where we are,” Danny lamented.

“You boys looking for something?” a reedy voice called out from behind me.

I spun to see a man in faded overalls walking toward us with one hand in his pocket. His frayed blue shirt whipped behind him like a tattered flag.

“Oh, we’re fine,” Pat said loudly.

“We’re lost,” Danny said, instead.

We explained where we were hoping to go, and the man listened, his jaw quivering like he was chewing invisible bubble gum. A yellowed stubble coated his thin cheeks, and the heavy wrinkles around his eyes made him look like he was used to squinting. At last, the man smiled. “You are lost.” He flashed his crooked teeth in a laugh. “So where you’uns heading?”

“Iowa—or maybe Kentucky.”

Pat rushed in on the heels of Ralph’s words. “We like to keep our options open.”

The man shook his head. “Those are some options.” He considered. “You’re deep here in the woods. Most people don’t come out this far. I don’t see folks out here that often.” Danny got out a pad of paper, and the man described the route back. Then he added, “You’uns got a tent back there? You’re welcome to stay at my camp tonight, a little down the way.”

“Sure,” Pat said before anyone else could say anything.

The man—Chester—waved us down a leaf-covered path just wider than a car.

“Pat,” Danny whispered, “are you sure this is a good idea?”

Pat shrugged. “There’s four of us and one of him. If he really wanted to hurt us, he could have picked us off from the woods. We’re here for an adventure, remember?”

A little down the road, the trees parted in a small clearing. A small camper was on one side, with a firepit and a couple folding chairs nearby. At the edge was parked a rusty red pickup truck.

“This is…interesting,” Ralph said.

“This is how life used to be,” Pat replied. “People going into virgin wilderness—becoming pioneers. This is the life.”

“Welcome to my home away from it all,” Chester called as he made his way up from the path. “I’ve been here for a couple years now. It’s nice in the summer.”

“I bet,” Pat said.

We began to set up our tents on the far edge of the clearing. The day had reached a threshold hour, when the light tumbles into darker hues. Humming to himself, Chester started a fire in the pit. “I split the wood myself,” he said. “Good exercise these days.”

“So what do you do around here?” I asked.

“Mostly this. The day has a nice rhythm. Go to town once or twice a week. Get some books from the library. I do a lot of puzzles. And there’s nothing better than sitting under the stars. You can see ‘em so much clearer out here.”

Mostly this included drinking. He pulled a giant cooler out of the trailer. Beer cans bobbed in an ocean of melting ice. “Take a load off,” he said once we were done with the tents. He had also pulled out a few tired beach chairs.

The beer was cold and cheap. I stretched in the chair and felt like I could fall through the frail weave at the back.

“Thanks for the beer,” Danny said, taking a wary sip.

“Ah, I like to drink with company. It gets lonely out here. So what you’uns doing here?”

“We’re on our way to Kentstock,” Ralph said. When Chester squinted, he added, “It’s, ah, a music festival at Allegria, the estate of Mickey Kent.”

“Mickey Kent! I didn’t know kids listened to Mickey Kent anymore.”

“Some of us have more discriminating tastes,” Ralph said.

Chester smiled. “I remember back when I was a kid, younger than you’uns, that we’d play his songs at dances, at diners...What was that song of his—Maybe I’d be better off with you?”

“‘Out of the Blue,’” Pat answered. It was one of his favorites.

“Yeah, ‘Out of the Blue.’ They don’t make music like that anymore.”

“Tell me about it,” Ralph said.

 “Back then, songs had a melody. They’d be nice to listen to—not like that rap stuff today. You kids listen to that?” He didn’t wait for us to answer. “I remember that song. I was just getting out of the Army then.”

“You served?” I asked.

“Yeah, yeah. I was called, and I served.”

“My father served—my brothers, too,” I said, “Well, they’re serving.”

He lifted his can in a toast. “Good men. Now, I didn’t fight. This was before Nam took off. Was your pop there?”

“Yes.”

“Better man than me. I just went to North Carolina for a while. Then, Germany. Tell you, getting back here—hearing your man, Mickey Kent—was like I was back in the promised land.”

After the army, Chester had worked at a steel mill for many years. The mill had closed in the early 90s, and he had bounced around for a few years before he went on disability. “I guess you can say I’ve gone back to nature!” he said with a laugh.

“It’s nice here,” Ralph said. “Uh, nice and peaceful.”

“Best thing I ever bought. Scraped together everything I could for the trailer but never regretted it for a minute. I always wanted to get away, even if it can sometimes get a little strange out here.”

“Strange, how?” I asked.

“Strange like strange things happen,” he said, “like I can’t explain. Sounds in the woods. Sounds like someone’s tapping on the door. Shadows at the edge of the fire late at night. You’uns ever hear about the boskrijgers?”

We all shook our heads.

He took a sip of his beer. “Well, I got a story to tell you, then.”

Undone

Silence was one of H.R. Stanley’s greatest weapons.

An affectation he had picked up during graduate school in Chicago, the cigarette holder was wedged like a smoking scepter between his fingers. He irritably dismissed university policy against smoking inside—“philistine health-nuttery”—so his window was always wedged open with a small fan running next to it.

“I haven’t seen you for a while,” he had said when we first entered his office. “I even had the departmental secretary send you an e-mail.” And then he waited.

He had seen me on the street, put his arm around mine, and said “let’s have a chat”—then started talking about how the wild eruptions of spring always reminded him of Nietzsche.

At last, I broke. “I don’t have the thesis done.”

He barked a nicotine-stained laugh. “I assumed as much. The real question is when will it be done?”

I turned my eyes to the stained white tips of my Converse sneakers. “I don’t know.” Like much else, Xenophon’s writing turned to curlicues whenever I tried to concentrate on it.

“You need to have the thesis to graduate, you know.”

“I do.” The deadline for submitting it had come and gone.

“This isn’t like you,” he said.

In the two classes I had taken with him, Stanley had never shown such a combination of frustration and disappointment.

He continued, “The first part was very good. Xenophon’s Symposium is underdiscussed, so that close reading—especially on the theme of love—is needed. But you need to finish it.”

“I’ve just hit a block, I think.” Even in the fog, I could write a dozen pages for term papers for other classes or march bewildered through a final exam—enough for B’s and C’s. But the thesis was like climbing a sheer steel plate.

“You’re on the cusp of going out into the world and doing things. Things that matter.”

Now, it was my turn to be silent.

Stanley took a long drag and inspected me. Combined with his bushy eyebrows and gray-streaked beard, his new round glasses made him look especially owl-like. “What’s this about—this block?”

I figured honesty would embarrass me less than a lie he could pierce. “My girlfriend and I broke up.” Not honest enough. “Well, she broke up with me.”

“Oh,” he coughed and brightened. “That’s almost noble. The heart has its costs and all that. Part of being intellectually serious is to feel seriously.”

By the end of our discussion that afternoon, we had agreed: After this semester, I would go on leave. “Just finish it. Whenever. Send it to me, we can have the defense and file for graduation.”

So my college degree had fluttered in the air like a half-severed appendage, waiting along with everything else.

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(Last time, the guys snuck into the MTV Beach House.)

“It’s so dark out here,” I said a few hours later. We had pulled away from the highway and were following a service road before Ralph instructed us to take a turn. A train shrieked in the distance.

“You’re sure—down here?” Danny asked. “I don’t see a sign.”

“That’s what Fernando said—that’s the point.”

We were somewhere in the industrial shadows of New Jersey. The moon hadn’t fully risen, so I couldn’t quite tell what was around us. We drove past a shroud of trees.

The station wagon went over a large bump in the road and bucked like a bull. I jumped.

“Hey, be careful,” Pat yelped. “I’m trying to recuperate here from a terrible case of private-security brutality.”

“They didn’t yank your arm that hard,” Danny said.

“They didn’t want to unleash the fury of the McCanns,” he conceded.

“I see something,” Ralph said, with the sodden hope of a sailor thinking he sees land.

A distant glamour dyed the horizon like a fluorescent fog. A guy in a neon yellow vest approached the car. “You can park over there.”

We drove past anonymous rows to park the car. Against a red-tinged sky, vast shadows towered over us. The beams of more cars advanced in the distance like the vanguard of an alien army.

“It feels like we’re on the surface of the moon,” I said.

As we walked closer to that pleasure dome of fantasy, a hum suffused my blood. It grew louder and louder as I walked closer to the entrance. A guy with dreadlocks charged us admission and put neon green paper bracelets around our wrists.

We walked into a cataclysm of sound and light. Techno foamed as fluorescent flashes swung through the darkness. The beams raked like claws across my eyes. The tiny shards of whirling disco balls reflected the thousand pulses of light.

The dance floor was a crawling mass of bodies writhing together in one great erotic organism. So many bodies pressed together—grinding, groping, grasping—a crush like a honey-bee hive. Neon-tipped hands waved in the air to the frenetic thunder of the bass. This was youth, mad in a summer frenzy. The thronged bodies jumped like the floor was a trampoline. Creatures of fantasy sported before us. Tigers and mermaids and winged sultry fairies and rabbits and tie-dyed bears danced. Bare skin glittered with sweat and tiny sparkling dust.

Ralph had his cellular phone out. “Hello....I’m here....I can’t quite hear you....where? where?” He wandered off into the noise.

“Let’s get a drink,” Pat said, “to start the night off.”

“No thanks,” Danny said, waving us on.

The rave’s heat massaged my body like countless fingers. Cloying, clutching, clinging everywhere. I staggered through the grinding crowd and somehow made it to the bar. A wild smile on his lips, Pat’s teeth flashed blue and green and red. A thousand scents—perfumes and colognes and pheromones—tangled around me. His eyebrows bent in perpetual irony and his arm slung around a woman with flowing dark hair, a late-night comic with a new cable show walked by.

I felt a flutter of eyes upon me as we sat at the makeshift bar.

“Now this is the place to be, Charlie,” Pat declared, as he shot me an elbow-nudge.

“I guess so,” I said. All those eyes were like the instantaneous flash of a predator—weighing, measuring, calculating. Was I famous? Was I cute? Was I rich? Was I worth knowing, or an insignificant distraction?

Pat seemed oblivious to the stares. He waved two fingers at the bartender. “Two shots of tequila—for me and my friend.” He slapped me on the back as the skinny guy with barbed-wire tattooed around his left bicep poured the drinks. “Just go with the flow.”

We raised our glasses in a neon salute and downed them. Like a comet, the tequila etched a burning trail down my throat.

Through the crowd, two nymphs approached us. The taller one’s wavy blonde hair fell across her shoulders like a golden train, and the shorter one had smoldering dark eyes and a rhinestone headband that held back her raven hair. Both wore spandex bikinis—the blonde in bronze and the brunette in pink. A sheen washed over their toned stomachs, all the way down to the waistbands of their bikini bottoms. Fabric fairy wings peeked over the blonde’s back. They both had elaborate, glittering facepaint, adorned by beads of sweat. Lilac streaks reached out from the brunette’s eyes, and a silvery band reached like a blindfold across the blonde’s face.

“That is so intense out there,” the shorter one said.

“I know. I just get so exhausted,” the taller one replied.

“Don’t you need just like a recharge?” the brunette said.

Pat pounced at their invitation. “What would you ladies like?”

“How about some powershots?” the blonde asked.

“Ah...” Pat looked at me. I had no idea.

The brunette said, “They’re really good. They’re like an instant refill of energy. They might even be an aphrodisiac or whatever.”

Pat ordered the shots.

They leaned on either side of us—the blonde near Pat and the brunette near me. “I don’t know if I’ve seen you guys here before,” the blonde said.

“First time,” Pat replied.

“You’re lucky guys, then,” the girl next to me said. Her perfume, from whatever its scent had been extracted, had a sultry, tempestuous flair. Her face was smooth—not a hint of freckles. “It’s like anything can happen here.”

“Really?” That word almost sounded like a purr in Pat’s mouth.

“Yeah, you know Johnny Depp was here last week?”

The four gleaming shots came forward, filling with the music’s momentary pulses, like blinking lights—a warning, an announcement, some emblem of indecipherable meaning.

“To new opportunities,” Pat said as he hoisted his glass.

The pounding noise absorbed any echo of glass upon glass before I felt that swift, sweet fire pour down my throat. By the time that drink had bolted down to my belly, I so longed to breathe.

“What is this?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the blonde said. “I know it has some fruit juice and a lot of Vitamin C and some amino acids or something.”

“It makes me feel all bubbly inside,” the girl with the headband confided to me. Maybe it was those bubbles that made her seem on the verge of giggling. “So you from around here?”

“No.” I swallowed and tried to be bold—just like Pat would be. “We’re adventurers. From the Northeast. Massachusetts.”

“Oh really—wow. That’s so far.” She made that distance sound like an accomplishment. “We’re, like, real Jersey girls.”

“Oh, cool.”

“So what brought you here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “A car.”

I immediately wanted to pucker after I said those words. A car. Was that bold? No, it was awkward.

But she just smiled. “You know, there are people who come from all over to go here. This is bigger than some raves in the city, and, because it’s out there, not just anyone can come.”

 “Why do you think we all came here?”

She shrugged. “It’s a rave. We’re all looking to escape. We’re all looking for a good time.”

I kneaded my forehead with my fingertips. My face tingled. “We’re all looking for something good,” I said, and I could not tell if it sounded like resignation. “And what are you looking for?”

“Something. Anything,” she said and laughed.

“We should dance,” the blonde suddenly declared.

“Let’s!” Pat sprung to his feet.

The girl with the headband pulled my hand and dragged me like a limp fish toward the dancing mob. “Come on, let’s dance,” she said, her voice a sultry invitation in the noise.

Na ah ah ah ah ah
Ain’t gonna stop it
Na ah ah ah ah ah
Just gotta hold on to it
Na ah ah ah ah ah
Just keep on stepping
Na ah ah ah ah ah

The brunette pulled me into the thicket of cavorting zombies. Around me, shimmering bodies jumped with wheeling arms. Pacifiers swung around necks and pumped in mouths. Some suckled at empty air, and jaws writhed in a frantic search for satisfaction. Next to me, one shirtless guy shook as though pierced by an onslaught of lightning bolts. His neck whirled his head around like a tornado, and an inarticulate wail of desire poured out of his trembling lips.

She danced with protean ease. She shook her hips like she was riding an invisible bull. The string-ties of her bikini bottom swung through the air in a tantalizing suggestion—how easy to pull—just a liquid twist. She drew close. Then ground herself against me. Then leapt in time to the music, her raven hair tempest-tossed.

The thudding synthesizer rammed me like a jackhammer. It sent my organs spinning and caused the blood to slosh and crash against the narrow walls of my veins. Soon, my feet were jumping, too. My arms reached and reached. Neon sweat bloomed on my skin. I tried to ride the throbbing cascade.

“Isn’t this fun?” she called through the maelstrom.

You know I want you.
Cut to the chase—
I just gotta hold you.
And on and on and on and on
Let’s get it on and on and on and on....

The swap-fever heat tightened its grasp. One rainbow flash after another punched my eye. White bulbs—ecstasies of polished light—turned cartwheels in my field of vision.

Her mouth pounced upon mine. Her lips were sure and practiced, her tongue subtle and skilled. She tasted of alcohol and sparkling lipstick. Her hands roved—behind, between, above, below. Out of instinct, my body stirred.

The notes fell on, unending—wave after wave after wave. The numberless notes threw themselves against my stubborn, yearning flesh and crashed—evaporating into the open air. They poured in my brain like frenzied bees, swarming along the myelin sheaths. The records whirled blurs on turn tables. The hand—fickle, opportune, indifferent—broke the course of needle, running from groove to groove. As a hand pumps a trombone, it ran up and down a zipper, letting loose a warped helium-charged buzz. Up and down, up and down, scratch scratch scratch.

But the instant turned, and that climbing balloon suddenly seemed a swelling monument of hollowness. I glimpsed myself. All my nerves clenched into a cold fist.

“What?” she asked.

Inside, I staggered. “I’m sorry. I’m, ah...”

“What? Do you have a girlfriend or something?”

“No, not really.”

“Whatever. Let’s just have some fun. Whoever she is, whoever you are, it doesn’t matter.” Her perfume slipped through the air like an undertow. Her voice floated on the electronic spasms. “There are lots of opportunities.” She leaned closer.

“For?” I asked.

“For anything,” she said. Anything—a hand running up my arm, drawing fingertip after polished fingertip across my flesh. Anything—the whine of a saxophone, brassy-bodied and long and slow. Anything—the amber of champagne, glittering with bubbles that rise in a cyclone.

I looked at her face. Two promising eyes. Lips burnished to a kissable strawberry red. Tresses that tumbled across the bare glittering skin of her arms and chest and back. The rhinestones of her headband flashing with reds, greens, and purples.

Anything—a heaviness fell upon me. I felt my arms again and the worn sinews of my legs and each individual strand of the spiderweb of muscles across my face. My voice gurgled out of the clog of my throat. “You’re you, and I’m me.”

Her head tilted in confusion.

And then, myself weighing on myself down to the soles of my sneakers, I walked away. I wandered through the weight of dark bodies—through the black shoves and bumps and stumbles. The lights hit my face like candied flares. Arms pushed me...hips shook into me...the blaring music rose. As the sweat of the dance floor frothed into a haze, oxygen drowned in the eddies of carbon dioxide.

I struggled past the crowd and leaned against a cool, dark wall. The lights whirled in my stomach. A train seemed to rush out of the black mesh speakers and pierce my stomach . The drums pounded as though they were beaten by rows of go-go girls dancing atop spiraling platforms.

Everything faded from me. I closed my eyes, and the flashes battered my eyelids. Everything was pouring out of me. Everything was sucking into that great big hollow in my guts. For a moment, I felt like water, touching and taking from all around me, drawn by lunar aspirations, drifting, fluid. Anything—anything—so hollow.

“Dude,” I heard a voice say, “you don’t look too good, dude. You need to like chillax.”

“I…I…I…” And I didn’t know how to make my tongue shape the words.

Shadows walked around me—throbbing in the distance. My brain rotated in my skull. My chest mumbled.

“Charlie?” I knew that voice.

“D—Danny?” I squinted up at him.

He squatted down and put his hand on my forehead, which I suddenly realized was coated with sweat. “You look—you look—”

Suddenly, like a flaming knife, a high whine cut off his words.

I lurched upward. “Whatsthat?”

Danny looked around quickly. “It sounds like a fire alarm.”

The shrieking echoed in my jaw. The sweet, heavy saliva at the back of my throat drained away.

The music had stopped. Instead, a thronging darkness, as the crowd of shadows searched for the exit. The mist of sprinklers filled the air. The pinpricks of water fell cool upon my face. A hint of smoke slithered through the hallway. The thrilling dance and the flush of music were gone. The nymphs had departed—or were departing. No fairy face-paint could be seen now. Over all, the sirens blared, killing all words of flirtation or invitation or anything else.

The floodtide of people surged through the doors, carrying me with them. The shadows poured out around me. I wandered through the crowd of strangers. The dark night and the vast barren plain of dust carried away all scent of perfume or cologne or body paint or sweat. Some people groped catatonic through the darkness. Others had run to their cars, and the groans and rumbles of starting motors hummed underneath the fragments of speech around me. A few people—young bravos and gossamer sylphs alike—were throwing up. Away from the throbbing music and crowded dance floor, everyone around me seemed lost, displaced, and utterly uncharmed.

In a spurt of headlights, I saw Pat staggering amidst the crowd. He seemed to be looking for something. “Pat!” I called.

 “Charlie! Have you seen Danny and Ralph?”

I shook my head. “Danny earlier, but I lost him in the crowd.”

“You’re not the only one who lost something. Or someone.”

We walked toward the periphery of the cloud of shadows. “Oh, that girl you were dancing with?”

“Her?” He emitted a burp of a laugh. “I saw Amelie Darfani. Hair was different—maybe she had a wig on or something—and a lot of make-up, but I could tell. I could tell. I was grinding with this girl, and then Amelie Darfani just slips through the crowd. Now my head’s spinning, and I’m racing through the dance floor looking for her. It was like a labyrinth there, Charlie, a labyrinth. And I don’t know what it is, but my head is popping, and I’m looking for her, and I’m looking and I’m looking. But I never actually find her. I knew she was there—I know she was there—but I could never find her.”

Danny was waiting outside the car when we got there. “Did you see Ralph?” he asked.

“No,” I said. I leaned against the station wagon and looked at the giant building, which no longer quivered with pounding notes. “I wonder what happened.”

“I don’t know if this is true,” Danny said. “But I heard some people were smoking near some curtains by one of the doorways and they just went up. Or maybe it was a trash can.”

“Lucky us,” Pat said. He slumped down in the backseat and massaged his forehead with his hand.

And there came Ralph, sauntering through the night. “Found you at last.”

“And what put such a smile on your fuzzy face, PL?”

The smile almost seemed smug. “Music. Dancing. Kissing. And, ah….”

“You’re as high as a kite.” Pat waved his hand in dismissal.

“So you found someone?” I asked.

Ralph squinted and nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Her name was, ah, Amy. Or was it Alexa? Alice? It was kinda hard to hear.” He shrugged. “Well, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

It mattered, I wanted to answer. Names mattered. Faces mattered. There had to be a deeper joy out there beyond the carnival of appetite. Or that’s what I told myself, as we drove away from the graveyard of neon lights.

Travel Journal Entry #2

The past few days have been a blur—you know, the way the first days of school can be? It’s like it takes time for your brain to adjust. So I’m spinning and trying to catch my breath.

Right now, it’s a sunny afternoon in Uncle Neil’s backyard. Lana and Kristy are by the pool, Sarah’s tutoring my cousins in geometry (in the summer—come on!?), and I’m just breathing in the warm air. Breath caught, I think?

True confession: I miss journaling. Yes I’m a total nerd but that was one of the things I looked forward to every night back in middle school: me and my fuzzy pen and my sticker-covered journal. It was a chance to get my thoughts out. A chance to organize my thoughts. Even a chance to see who I was, who I was becoming? And then I got so busy with the becoming that I didn’t have time anymore.

The performance last night was…uhhh…weird. Picture playing Beethoven (oh Ludwig, you heartthrob) in an elementary school cafeteria with everyone sitting in tiny chairs (because, you know, it’s an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL). Like Kristy said, “It sounds pretty exciting to be part of a cross-country string quartet.” But that’s what summer’s for—trying something different…doing weird things…eating Ben and Jerrys and dancing to Spice Girls at 11:30 at night.

Lana this morning: “Is it a sign that I’m getting old if I think that two in the morning is too late to go to bed?” (We got sucked into watching a “Laverne and Shirley” marathon.)

Sarah: “It’s a sign that you’re growing up.”

There’s a difference between growing old and growing up. You can grow old without growing up. (Tell that to Uncle Neil, who’s still dating like twenty-five-year-olds.) Can you grow up without growing old? Maybe sometimes you need to be a little childish. To leave common sense behind. (Yeah, sure, Bonnie, you’re going to graduate school to study the violin—you’re rolling and rolling in common sense.) But being able to slip into kid mode seems important somehow…maybe even to keep yourself sane.

Take what we all now call the “C situation.” Yeah, just invite this cute guy (who definitely is not—no way—a stalker) to meet you at a wedding in Kentucky like 2000 miles away. It was fun to say that. How many times do you get to invite a definitely not a stalker to crash someone’s wedding? But here’s the thing I can tell you and no one else (flip to the next page so that Future Me can tear it out): I’m nervous either way. I want him to come. I didn’t think of that when Lana tossed out that invite but now I know I’ll be disappointed if I don’t see his face there. It’s weird, isn’t it, how something can make you more hopeful and more vulnerable? And if he actually does come—him and his goofy friends (Lana thinks that Pat is pretty hot, TBH)—what then?

It’s fun to be a kid sometimes.

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(Last time, the guys tried to climb a mountain.)

Our plans changed again the next day. Instead of heading toward the Appalachian Trail, we instead aimed at Seaside Heights on the Jersey Shore. While watching late-night Loveline, Pat had seen an ad about how Amelie Darfani—underwear model and conjurer of teenage male erotic manias—would be featured on the next day’s MTV Beach House. The cable channel had set up a giant backyard BBQ party, where celebrities performed and pitched products in front of a crowd of teens and college students.

“Who?” Danny had asked that morning.

“Who? Who?” Pat’s questions stabbed the air with incredulity. “Seriously, Danny, you gotta get out of the lab more. Her body is incredible from every angle. If I were still a teenager, I’d have her pictures up on my bedroom wall.”

Descending from the mountains to the Garden State Parkway, we drove through the sprawl of American commerce: fast food, video rentals, and the shadowy behemoths of malls. Golden arches, giant blue ticket stubs, cartoon giraffes—we saw them all. We scrounged for change at one toll booth after another.

Someone Ralph knew from college had snagged a PA gig with MTV, and Ralph had called him on his cellular phone. “Fernando says he can get us on the set.”

Off the parkway, we turned onto the road leading to Seaside Heights. We passed more strip malls and glimpses of neighborhoods with small homes. The water under the bridge leading to Seaside Heights itself sparkled in the sun. The moments streamed. The many shades of light ran over the windshield so that it seemed to ripple like the surface of the water. We coursed amid the grains of pollen carried on the air as bee thighs blended flower into flower.

The island of Seaside Heights was thick with traffic and people and the ferocious pursuit of leisure. We paid at an all-day parking lot and got out of the car. “Fernando says that we should just keep walking until we get to beach. They’re right on it. We should see the trucks.”

We did indeed see the trucks—and the security cordon around the filming location. A magical land of spectacle glimmered just over the shoulders of the men in yellow “Security” shirts. “We’re looking for Fernando,” Ralph said to one of the hulking guards, with a neck that rippled like a pack of hot dogs.

“Who?”

“Fernando,” Ralph repeated.

A skinny guy walking by in a black “Offspring” t-shirt suddenly stopped. “Hold on, I’ll get him.” He lifted the walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Nando, there are some guys here for you.”

Constantly licking his lips and darting his eyes back and forth, Fernando looked like a tanned iguana. “Ralphie, good to see you,” he said as he gave him a big hug. His shaved head glistened in the sun. He leaned close. “Bro, you came at just the right time. We’re going to be checking out a rave tonight, deep in Jersey. You and me there together, Ralphie—we’ll knock ‘em dead.”

Ralph and Pat grinned. Danny looked queasy—or at least concerned.

Fernando led us through a labyrinth of cords and cameras to the backyard of the beach house. PAs, technicians, and security swarmed around us. On screen, the beach house looked fun and spontaneous, but it took an army to conjure that illusion of ease. “Just be cool and act natural,” Fernando said. “We can just fit you in right here.”

Being in the crowd was like returning to a polished version of college: surrounded by youthful, eager, and attractive people. Immersion in such a performance of glee caused my head to spin. During commercial breaks, the PAs had us bounce around giant beach balls. They encouraged girls in bikinis and tanned shirtless boys to dunk themselves in the pool. A skier from the last Olympics stood next to a mini-grill cooking hotdogs while a producer leaned over her like a grinning alligator. Everything gleamed with fun fun fun.

And everywhere the cameras—filming, watching, absorbing. The camera cords wove like snakes through the scene. Twenty-somethings in baseball hats moved through the crowd, searching for any detail. Nothing could be missed. Every drop of fun, quirkiness, and enticement had to be wrung out of the assembled youths. I couldn’t see anyone over forty. The aged were in the corporate offices and sales meetings and citadels of accountants. We were there to sell something, after all: acne products and CDs and Victoria’s Secret underwear—but mostly the sense of coolness.

“Hey, welcome back to the Beach House,” the host said after yet another commercial break. We had been told to cheer, so we did. He paused theatrically. “Hey, it sounds like someone’s at the door.”

The sliding door behind him opened, and Amelie Darfani walked into the sunlight and the cameras’ hungry gaze.

Burnished-copper hair poured over her shoulders and down her back. The wind pulled back the bottom of her partly-buttoned plaid shirt, revealing a bellybutton like a winking eye. Boot-cut jeans clung like eager hands to her legs. Her skin seemed like it was stretched between bones. She waved, and a single golden bracelet on her wrist flashed. The air around her shimmered with sex and celebrity. The crowd watched. The crew watched. The cameras watched. The millions watched.

“Woooo!” Pat roared with the rest of the throng. His elbow shot out in a spasm of excitement.

Over Pat’s shoulder, Ralph rolled his eyes.

She was there to promote a movie. “Yeah, well, it’s a little naughty.”

Woohoo, the crowd bayed.

“So is it true,” the host asked, “that you didn’t want your mother to see it?”

Laughter.

“Well, there’s this one scene with a striptease…”

More ejaculations from the crowd.

Then she smiled with such practiced poise. “…but it’s with Jason, not me.”

The PAs started to clap over their heads. Our applause and laughter dutifully followed.

“That’s all the endorsement I need,” the host said. “A striptease with a dude. Amelie Darfani, thanks for joining us at the beach house. Stick around, because we’re going to put some of our audience here to the test. And there might be a little musical surprise. We’ll be right back…”

I suddenly noticed that Pat had somehow pushed to the far edge of the crowd. He was right behind Amelie Darfani. I saw the camera in his hand.

Apparently, so did one of the security guards. “Hey, you—freckles—no pictures.” He pushed through the crowd as Pat tried to scramble away. “How’d you even get that in here?”

More security was coming from the other direction to grab Pat and escort him out.

“I think it’s time to escape,” Danny said.

The Break

“What is it?” I asked. It was like something had been haunting the corner of her eye—something heavier than the usual shadow that stalked both of us in those days.

Gina blinked and then looked at me. “When I go out to Seattle, it will be alone.”

I sank down on the bed. “What?” Somewhere, my head was rolling around. Somewhere, my blood echoed in its ears.

“I’m going by myself.”

“What?” Then, confusion corkscrewed into anger. “What!?” All that talk about apartment-hunting, job searches for me, the perks of Seattle—all that dissipating like smoke?

“I think I need to work on myself.” Her voice revealed the invisible script—the fake pauses between words, to pretend she was actually grappling what to say next. No, this was all packaged. No, this was a trap.

I should have been angry. I should have felt betrayed, maybe. Instead, I felt hollowed out by an ice-cream scoop from frozen Pluto. I knew—I knew—but I had to ask. It was a last-ditch hope; it was a lust for misery. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying…” she sat down on the bed beside me. “I’m saying—” She took a breath. I knew that was real—that wasn’t in the script. “I think we need some time apart. Haven’t you wanted to breathe?”

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(Last time, the guys received an unexpected invitation.)

As the dark settled, we drove up the winding road off the state highway to Ralph’s cabin—well, getaway with rustic allusions—in the Adirondacks.

In cargo shorts and a blue-plaid shirt, Ralph waved to us from the front porch. “Welcome! Welcome!” As usual, he was barefoot. He had grown out his hair and cultivated patches of brown stubble on his pale cheeks in some attempt at sleezeball chic.

He gave us a quick tour. The countertops were granite, and the circular stairway climbing up to the loft bedroom was made out of logs with such a thick veneer of stain that they seemed polished. “The real-estate agent called it, ah, carbon neutral,” he boasted when talking about the phalanx of solar panels on the roof. “And you should check out the jacuzzi in the bathroom.”

“Relaxing after a hard day of rhyming?” Pat asked.

“Oh, yes, uh, sure. And look at how big the TV is.”

Ralph had rented this place for the summer. Ralph didn’t like to talk about how much things cost, but Pat once whispered to me that Ralph had a five-figure annual allowance from the estate of his grandmother. On the kitchen table, two bound notebooks were dwarfed by a cluster of beer bottles, a tipped-over bong, and a pile of glossy magazines.

As he opened up a bottle of wine, Ralph said, “You know, it’s good to see you all. It can be a bit, um, remote here.”

“You’ve been here for like two weeks, PL,” Pat said as he dug his cellular phone out of his backpack. “How are you going to stand the whole summer?”

Ralph’s flush was the only answer.

Pat scowled at the small blue brick. “You don’t get much reception out here, do you? I gotta use your regular phone—to check in with Mistah Speakah.”

Ralph’s freezer was full of prepared foods. So we had potstickers and (for Pat, grimace-inducing) edamame. “Tomorrow, after the mountain,” Ralph said, “we’ll have to go to this café nearby. The vegan veal is supposed to be spectacular.”

After months, it was strange to see all of us together again. It sometimes felt like memory was what kept us together. Playing poker at Danny’s house. Pat sneaking some cigars from his cousin’s wedding. Throwing up after smoking those cigars. The overnight school trip to Montreal in eighth grade, when our friendship had solidified. Then, college intervened. Then, life. Going on this road trip together was almost a homage to our youth—to what we were then. When Pat listened to Mickey Kent now, how much did he enjoy the music simply because we had listened to it at sixteen? He and Ralph had first started the Mickey Kent thing—as a way of liking something different from grunge and rap and the fading light of rock and roll. At the end of history, a throwback might seem the most promising way forward.

When we talked about going to Kentucky, Ralph slouched forward in his chair—the equivalent of a leap for other people. “A wedding? Well, ah, that could be kind of cool.” Suddenly, his eyes widened. “Oh, Charlie, has Pat told you…”

Pat laughed, even louder than usual, and swung his gaze like a double-barreled shotgun to Ralph. “I already told him, PL, that he’s gotta keep his eyes on the prize this time.”

Ralph’s lips quivered like they were munching on invisible words—and then he turned back to the edamame.

Between Worlds

What is it to share a world with another person? She taught me how to bungee jump and how to make a really good margarita and how to fill a day and a night. We played her favorite board games and spent so many Saturdays at house parties in Cambridge and Sommerville and Allston and Brighton. Gina pulled me from the library with a smirk. “OK, dreamer, time to enter the real world.” Time to enter our world.

When does an embrace become a restraint? Day after day, we built a horizon of habits and associations: what shouldn’t be mentioned, lines in the sand, fallback jokes. Part of sharing that world is holding your tongue. “OK, dreamer…”

Sometimes, I transgressed. I writhed in the harness of habit. “It’s almost like you resent it when I go to the library.”

“Reading books isn’t going to change the world, you know. It’s not living. I just think you should remember that.”

“Not living—what does that even mean? Isn’t that why we’re in college—to read?”

“Or, you know, to start a career.”

Oh, that was it. She was still bitter that I wouldn’t be pushed into one of the tracks—one of the ruts—so appealing to so many around us. “Can’t you at least go to one of the investment-banking recruiting sessions?” she had said.

I didn’t say anything back. I knew when to keep quiet. It was only now, in our own world, that I understood how much self-strangulation was part of a relationship.

Lost in trees and clouds, the mountain peak reached an unfathomable height above us the next morning. It had been a long time since I had tried to climb a mountain. My brother Hank had taken me once, when I had graduated high school. As I struggled on the side of the mountain, mallets pounded on my forehead and played my spine like a xylophone. Yet all that pain washed away in the sudden clarity of the mountaintop. Hank had grinned at me like we were sharing some incredible secret up there, at the doorway of the clouds.

Ours was the only car in the parking lot, and the path up the mountain forked after only a few steps. One way charged up the mountain, cutting through tree and rock with a fierce intensity. The other route slithered alongside a trickling mountain stream and then crawled at a gentle incline upward.

The paths divided us. Ralph and I opted for the steep; Pat and Danny preferred the flat. So Ralph had a proposal: “Why don’t we split up?”

“Well, they both go to the top, right?” Pat said as he considered with crossed arms. “Sure—you’ll take the high road, and we’ll take the low road.”

“You would take the low road,” Ralph said.

The “high road” was a path of rock and leaps, struggles and dirt. Trees lined our way and, though they obscured, they also gave us handholds at a few crucial moments. My hands began to ache from the effort to grip the rock face and pull myself upward. Fire tremored in my biceps.

“Is it supposed to be this hard?” I asked.

“Maybe we should have taken the low road,” Ralph said through a frown.

We didn’t cross paths with anybody. The only other sounds were rippling bird-calls and the rustling of the brush and mountain trees. We had escaped to nature, and the heights rebuked the tentacles of mortal technology. No pavement, no bathrooms, no pay phones—the pinnacle of remoteness.

At a certain threshold, the path became almost pure stone. The dimples of our sneakers dancing across the articulations of rock, Ralph and I teetered from one rocky outcropping to the next. Nothing steady, nothing still. Sometimes, a wild force—rushing frantically forward—was the only hope for balance.

But that very excess of force could also endanger us. Too sudden, too quick, at the wrong instant, and we risked tumbling from the fragmented path.

The continual struggle with steepness eventually wore us down. I tried to dart across a narrow portion of stony path, and I felt like I was slipping a little with each step.

“My muscles feel like putty,” I said to Ralph.

“I feel all stretched out,” he replied, “but I, uh, don’t think my arms are any longer.”

With all our toil, we did seem to be rising. The ground below grew more and more distant. Through the parted fingers of the trees, I couldn’t see the car.

Then we hit a blank wall of rock. It was like a giant hand had taken a trowel and drawn it straight up the mountain. I couldn’t even reach the top of it. The waverings of its face were not deep enough to hold feet or hands.

“It looks like the path is gone or blocked,” I said.

“If there ever was any path,” Ralph said as a little verbal shrug.

I looked around. “What now? Should we jump?”

“I, ah, don’t think we can jump that high.” Ralph shook his head. “I think there’s an easier way.” He turned away from that almost-impossible stone.

“Where are you going?” I followed.

“I saw something back here.”

Beneath a snapped, rotting tree, a path twisted off at an obscure angle. It featured no calamitous caverns or ankle-snapping stretches. After a few steps, it led to soft dirt and clear walking. Perhaps, after all the earlier difficulties, we had now reached the genial reward.

This sort of walk suited Ralph as much as his thrifted t-shirt with the peeling façade of Donald Duck. Ralph pulled his pipe (his preferred method of tobacco delivery) out of his backpack. “You mind if I…”

“Sure.”

With pursed lips, he coaxed a few gray tendrils into a deepening fog. Soon, the thick, jasmine-tinctured plumes of smoke floated around us and blocked out the fainter scents of the forest.

 One comfortable step after the other, we no longer seemed to ascend. If anything, the path seemed to dribble downward. “You know, Ralph,” I said, “we don’t seem to be getting any higher.”

Ralph’s faint eyebrows lowered, and he shrugged. “Does it really, uh, matter if we make it to the top of the mountain. We can just let our feet walk wherever. Perspective is all.” His eyes drifted along, maybe perusing some vernal writ. “I sometimes wonder about nature.”

“What?”

“I mean, the poets—the poets of the past were able to look at a tree or a river and just see something mystical and profound in it. They could become transparent eyeballs. Has that ever happened to you—becoming a transparent eyeball?”

I laughed. “I don’t think so.”

“And this whole land used to be nature nature nature. When the first Cudmore came, there was just the barren wilderness here.”

“There was no Cudmore Court?”

Little whinnying chuckles rose from Ralph’s lips. “No, no.” I had known Ralph’s family name before I ever knew him. The Cudmores had settled in our town in the 1600s, and my bus in elementary school had a stop at Cudmore Court. Not that the Cudmores had ever lived there; a real-estate developer in the 1970s had simply labeled the development’s streets with colonial names in order to inflate cookie-cutter suburbia with a sense of history.

“But I look at a tree and find no rapture. I thought maybe that, if I got here, I could,” Ralph continued. He sighed, and the corners of his mouth smoked like an exhaust pipe. “You can’t tell Pat this—he’d never let me forget it—but you and he were right to avoid graduate school. It can be so, ah, stultifying.”

“Danny doesn’t seem to find it that way.”

“Danny’s a man of rationality. But, well, being a poet…We’re all sitting around and scribbling and watching each other. One of my teachers says that there’s poetry all around us. We just need to know how to see it. That’s easy to say.”

He drifted into talking about Mickey Kent. “There’s such a vigor to his voice,” Ralph said. “And his lyrics have such poetry. I think that, if I saw him in person…I don’t know—maybe some of the magic would rub off on me? Is that, ah, silly?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Just a change.” Smoke dribbled from his mouth. “Maybe I should do something really different, like move to Chicago or something. Maybe things are different out west. But that’s what I need: a change.”

I laughed. Maybe it was the smoke, but the air’s flanged molecules caught in my throat. “I understand that.”

A chipmunk darted across the path ahead of us.

“I wonder what that’s thinking right now,” Ralph said. “Of us.”

I shrugged. “Maybe please don’t eat me?”

“Who would eat a chipmunk?”

“A lot of things. Maybe a lot of people.”

“Who’d want to eat chipmunk stew?” he muttered with a sickly frown. He didn’t look like he wanted to ponder an answer to that question. “Haven’t you ever wondered about that—how it must feel to be that chipmunk? Scurrying from tree to tree. I mean, that’s like climbing a skyscraper for us. And they just leap from one tree to the next, careless as can be.”

I thought of the chipmunk’s constant agitation, every moment watching for the predatory hawk or coyote. Always twitching nose and quivering body, the frantic burst from one spot to the next. The chipmunk raced because it knew that every day its life could end in a predator’s jaws—a final splat of blood and pain.

“Isn’t it nice to just think of nature?” Ralph said as he swung his arms wide. “There’s such a, such a pristine peace to it.”

I smiled.

He looked around. “It’s gone now. But that’s life—always flowing. You rake the leaves in the yard, and you’ve got a whole new yard. Jump in the ocean, and it’s not the same anymore. Everything’s always next.”

One moment dangled on the next. Ralph marched along with a happy, spondaic gait. Through the pipe-cleaner horizon of pine needles and spindly trunks, we got a hint of the sky. The path continued to wind; we blew along the circuits of the wind.

The serpentine bars of trees broke at a sudden vantage point, as we walked into a clearing. A haze like wax paper slid across the green-capped peaks of the Adirondacks.

“What a vision!” Ralph called. A few dying gray coils drifted from the embers of his pipe.

Maybe because of the length of our wandering or the elevation of those hills or the demands of the view, we sank down on two level stones to have lunch. The lukewarm water was cool to my throat, and the peanut-butter sandwich mushed easily in my mouth.

Hefting his water bottle and sandwich, Ralph declared, “I feel like a shepherd here—in Arcadia! Just look at these clouds, Charlie. Look…look at the sky!” The swollen, fanciful puffs drifted in an ocean of air.

 I stretched out on the stone. It had drunk of the sun’s light, and its warmth bled into my palms. Pulling a flannel shirt from my backpack, I stuffed it under my neck.

Ralph and I gazed at the azured vault above and the lazy train of clouds dragged along by the summer breeze. “That cloud looks almost like a horse,” I said.

Ralph offered a slight hum in appraisal as he looked past the book resting on his chest. “Indeed. It does look like a horse, even rearing up a little.”

“Or sorta like a pig.”

“It’s got a snout like a pig.”

“Or even like a lobster.”

“Very much like a lobster.” Ralph yawned. “You know, it could be almost anything you want. A walrus, a rhinoceros, a giraffe.”

“You think it looks like a giraffe?” I asked.

Ralph hesitated for a moment. “It’s possible.”

I shrugged and closed my eyes. I let the contention pass from me. “I guess,” I murmured in the white darkness.

I sighed and then drank deep of the mountain air. Ralph’s tobacco had receded to only a shadow of a scent. My arms felt heavy. Like the clouds, my thoughts drifted.

The sun warmed my face. My cheek tingled at the bright strokes. My joints released—the gentle stretching of a bow, the loosening of muscle. Two great billows, my lungs kneaded the emptiness and air—faint, fading streams through my lips and nostrils. Slowing. Slowing.

I felt the snare-drum of my pulse at my neck—slow, slow, slow. My fingers uncurled as my palms turned upward to weigh the sky. The emptiness—the vacuum’s vast encumbrance—stretched my hand flat. The miles of air fell over my body. Each heft of my chest a struggle with emptiness—the crushing fathoms against the boney fingers arched over my lungs.

Beep beep beep beep the timer on my digital watch rang out. Groggily, I pressed one of the buttons on the side of the watch. We had said we would turn back after two and a half hours.

“Ralph,” I said, “time to go.”

“Oh, there will be time,” Ralph said, rubbing his face. He tossed aside the book that he had been using as an eyeshade.

 “What is it?”

“Petrarch. Some of his writings…letters.”

I picked up the slim volume and read from a random page. I thought in silence of the lack of good counsel in us mortals, who neglect what is noblest in ourselves, scatter our energies in all directions, and waste ourselves in vain show, because we look about us for what is to be found only within. I wondered at the natural nobility of our soul, save when it debases itself of its own free will, and deserts its original estate…

“See? Isn’t that tiring?” Ralph had relit his pipe, and nimbus-trails of smoke rose from the bowl.

“I wouldn’t say that.” Petrarch conjured some vague echo of yearning. But—but—ah, but Ralph’s pipe smoked beside me like a beacon of fog. And the gray mist ebbed and flowed and coagulated into little clouds, which curled and rewove and faded as they drifted on the flat canvas above.

While we took the same path to the base, the ground felt strange and soft to my tired feet. Even the surest step had a moment of trembling, as though I walked upon drops of water.

Danny and Pat hadn’t made it to the top of the mountain, either. “We walked and walked and walked,” Pat explained. “I think we were rising for a while, but we must have missed a turn or something, and then somehow we ended up in this forest.”

Danny added. “I took some pictures of some very fine examples of metamorphic rocks.”

“But no summit,” I sighed. I looked up and couldn’t even tell anymore at which peak we had been aiming.

“Maybe there is no path to the peak,” Pat added.

“There must be,” I replied. “There has to be.” The existence of that path suddenly seemed very important to me. “Maybe it’s just hidden or something. Maybe we’re starting from the wrong place.”

For dinner that day, we ate at the Electric Café, which was, Ralph averred, the place to be in the summer’s poetic scene: “Everyone goes there—Marc Trully, Greve Sanchez, Sandraa Fox-Woole—everybody just sitting there swapping stanzas.” But, though her picture was on the wall, Sandraa Fox-Woole was not there; neither were Marc or Greve. We were the only patrons, and the vegan veal’s tofu almost expurgated Ralph at the first taste, but he valiantly ate on. Ralph did buy a bright red t-shirt with the motto “Verse for Wear” sketched out in white lettering, so at least he got a trophy from his visit.

As we walked back to the car across the empty parking lot, Ralph’s shoulders drooped as though they were made of running ink. “It could have been so much different,” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” Danny said, “but it wasn’t.”

Mello Schemes

The smoke swirled like tentacles out of Pat’s mouth. “You weren’t kidding—or exaggerating—PL. This is the good stuff.”

“And it’s so mellow. It’s like…it’s like floating on a cloud. Mello Mello—that’s what they call it.”

“Poetic.”

“So, Pat, about the letter—”

“Dude, you almost blew that one, like you always do when you’re high or drunk…”

“No way—”

“Way. Like my ‘surprise party’ in college.”

“Yeah…” And Ralph’s voice dissolved in a fizz of chuckles.

“Man, heh heh, man you gotta trust me on this. If we talk about that letter, you know and I know—we all know—that he’s gonna build a maze for himself. He’s like the master of mindgames. Like grandmaster. Grand. Master. And he plays them against himself.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“We need to keep our plans fluid. We’ll talk about Seattle later. Let’s just play it cool. Like the Mello Mello. The wedding—that’s the thing.” He smiled. “And just for the record—I’m not inhaling….”

The giggles rose in clouds.

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