“Are you in your office today, Father? I need to talk.”

“I can see you at four,” Adam Reed the pastor, priest or minister said. “Will that work?”

“Yes. I’ll come in the side door. And don’t lock it, for God’s sake. It’s cold out there.”

The side door, however, was always locked. A camera high on the outside wall displayed the sidewalk, mounds of snow, and the door where people rang and had to wait. Plenty of crazies came to downtown churches seeking spontaneous healing, free meals, and money. Most were harmless but not all—a Roman Catholic priest at nearby St. Peter’s was stabbed to death the week before; the gay clergyman, his white hair soaked with blood, was found in the hallway, naked under his black cassock. No sign of a forced entry, no missing items, just Father Sylvester dead in a pool of blood. There was little beside the basics on the news that night, an exterior shot of the building, the entrance to the hallway where the body was found, a voiceover recounting how the housekeeper found him, interviews with two shocked parishioners, a sound bite from Archbishop Feebleman expressing grave concern. The next night, the quarterback said he was thinking of leaving and the lead story changed; video segments showed him passing, jumping into the stands, picking up teammates, horsing around, some interviews with anxious fans, clips from shout shows offering advice. The next night, a series began on deadbeat dads, then one on chemical leaks, then one on dirty restaurant kitchens, then one on internet predators. Somewhere between the dangerous leaks and the rat-infested kitchens, the murder was forgotten.

The Vestry ordered the installation of a second camera in the rafters, letting the clergyman watch callers transit the hall to the office door. Two monitors were mounted behind his desk, both showing static, he noted as he entered his appointment with Parker Brown in his calendar book. The mounts had sharp corners that frequently bruised his leg when he swiveled without thinking as he did when his cell phone rang, playing a Bach toccata. He rubbed his thigh and reached across the desk to retrieve it.

“Hi,” Penny said. “Want to fuck?”

He grinned and looked at his watch. “I might have a minute. Where are you?”

“Look at the screen.”

A grainy miniature image of Penny danced into view. She removed her scarf, revealing a tiny face, a face that he loved to kiss, he often thought, coming along the communion rail, aroused beneath his chasuble. He thought of Penny on her knees, her open palms rising in front of her smile toward his freely-given gift of freshly baked dark bread.

Her screen face broke into pieces, her breath in each one visible in the frigid air like empty dialog balloons in a Sunday comic, the missing words a piece of the puzzle, too.

Reed pressed the release and the door lock popped.

A few minutes later the scarf was on the floor beside her lilac Manolo Blahnik Spoleto heels and Penny was on the desk, her legs up around him, the priest grunting as he thrust, then slowly withdrew, then thrust again then slowly withdraw and thrust again and again until he was finished

A minute was all he had, but a minute, he laughed, was all that he needed. Penny blotted herself and gave him the sticky tips of her fingers to nibble and lick, looking into his eyes as he did, pressing against him, moving in a slow circle until he was stiff again. Then backed away and pulled up her lavender slacks.

“Got to go,” she said, stepping into her heels and swinging her hips toward the office door. “You have fun now, hear?”

“Ah! The girl that Mattie Walker killed, the real Mattie Walker.”

“Ten points,” said Penny. “Very good. Are we still having dinner?”

“Sure. I’ll call when I’m done. I have an appointment at four.” He smiled. “Hey, thanks, lady. That was yummy.”

Her laughter was muffled by the closing door. He watched her move down the hallway from the angle of the camera, then through the outer door, her distorted form an elastic image in a fun-house mirror.

The intercom buzzed. He pushed a button, activating the speaker.

“Yes, Eleanor?”

“Florence Schmitz, your three o’clock, is here.”

“Oh, right,” he remembered. “Send her in.”

A moment later, a knock at the door. He opened it with a smile.

“Florence. How nice to see you.”

Florence Schmitz had gained more weight. Her loose dress, embroidered with shiny purple and yellow flowers, was like an artist’s smock. Her body was hidden by the draping folds but he felt it when she hugged him too tightly and held on too long. He returned her embrace lightly, an A-frame hug, aware of the desperate assurance she needed, her perspiration, and—always, these days—the threat of litigation. Jerry White, the veteran assistant at Holy Redeemer, had been caught in a nightmare that started when a deacon claimed he brushed her breast in the sacristy before the Sunday service. Jerry said he was just helping her on with her alb, but with the new rules, he had to step down while the trial went forward. That would take months and the parish would split into factions, the noise of their warring fluctuating like an oceanic roar.

By the time he was cleared he was broken and quit.

Ironic, thought Adam, that Bishop Wheat directed the lengthy process. The stories about the bishop when he was out of town drinking were legion. Anyway, Jerry was gay—Adam had seen him twice on Water Street late at night, just walking along, whistling, innocent as a lamb, wearing civvies. He cruised events at the Cathedral looking for friends, went to a nearby city on his days off, and quietly with trusted colleagues disclosed his likes and loves without a qualm.

Florence released her priest and sat as always to his right. She tried to cross her legs but failed, letting one slide down and cross at the ankle where her thick opaque pantyhose gathered in wrinkles.

She looked into his eyes and his open expression cut through her defenses. Her guard was already down from the fact of entering the warm familiar office, soft red-shaded light from the lamps on the dark wood tables, soft warm air exhaled from the vents. The white ceiling curved like the one in the chapel, evoking a safe haven, a refuge for the weary soul, a shelter from the cold.

Reed waited, watching her face subside. After a final sigh, Florence began quietly to cry.

“Dear Florence,” he said softly, reaching for a tissue in a box on the table between their chairs. She took it and blotted her tears.

“Tell me,” he said gently, leaning and patting her hand. “What’s going on?”

She reached for another, blew her nose and crimped the tissue in her hand. Her eyes moved from her lap to the floor, then back to her lap.

“You know that Paul came home—“

“Yes.”

“And we’re so happy to have him home, oh Father, I can’t tell you! He made us so proud, Leon would have burst with pride, he did his duty and came home in one piece. We’re so thankful.”

“I understand.”

“And Terri, his girl friend—do you remember Terri?”

“I do.” Her dark hair and intelligent eyes, quietly taking it all in, sitting next to Florence in the second pew. She had watched Penny go to the altar rail, Adam noting that she saw how Penny looked at her priest with a guiltless seductive smile.

“Terri was wonderful while he was gone. When he came home, she said he could stay at her place until he was settled. But Paul wanted to be on his own. You know how young men are. So he moved into a little apartment on Tippecanoe. He went right out and got a job and—“ then she was crying again and Reed had to give her another tissue.

Observing her grief but not knowing its source, he stayed as present to her distress as he could. Fucking Penelope left him wide open, rolled over inside and lying on his back, paws in the air. The longer Florence cried, the more it felt like he scraped his knuckle against a grater. He crossed his arms protectively, watching her expressions, searching for pointers and listening as it were with the back of his mind, as if impressions streamed like iron filings around behind to the base of his brain.

He reviewed the history of the Schmitz family. They came to Holy Innocents before he did, changing churches back when the once-beloved Clarence Francis Connolly, the old priest at St. Hilda’s, a nearby Catholic parish, was outed for loving “his boys” neither wisely nor too well. Three victims grew up enough to say what had happened. Thirty more joined a lawsuit and within a year, four other dioceses were involved. The dominoes fell, leading to accusations and confessions, editorials and lawsuits. Then Archbishop Feebleman admitted paying a young male lover to keep quiet and left too, retiring to Arizona, replaced by a glad-handing moon-faced portly prelate whose gee-whiz smile filled television screens with benign reassurance. Just a regular guy, he was, a baseball fan, a clap on the back and a hearty laugh. He sold off buildings, rearranged clergy, gained weight, and told the faithful that, inside their still-secret meetings, their leaders “were doing everything possible to prevent these terrible events from recurring.”

Of two hundred seventy families at St. Hilda’s, half a dozen left. The little ship rocked in the turbulent waves but stayed on course.

Connolly admitted that when he was depressed or bored or excited, he relieved himself by touching, fondling and puffing on little children after he had ejaculated in them or on them. (The word “puffing” became a staple in newspaper stories after a litigant described how the older man exhaled with intense pressure on his cheek when he finished, apparently a common occurrence since others called him The Puffer, too.) For decades, his ministry was littered with tears. He was moved quietly from parish to parish, diocese to diocese, under a cover of silence. When other bishops refused to accept him—word gets around—he was sent to an orphanage for boys in Uganda. After a few years, they sent him back. An outraged bishop objected and was sent to Fort Wayne. The city bishops who sheltered the man were moved to bigger cities, rewarded for being team players and ensuring that the system stayed in place, that the creaking machinery breathed.

It went all the way to the top, Reed knew. But when he looked for connections he could name, he felt as if he was staring at the fine threads of a web against the sun. Close to his eyes, he could see nodes leading to nodes, but when he tried to focus out a little further, all he saw was a bright shining mist.

During the scandal, Florence and Leon Schmitz, concerned for their children, became Episcopalians, sort of. They never formally changed religions but it didn’t matter as long as they attended and contributed. Aside from the fact of the Pope and how some decisions were made, it was similar enough, and the differences seldom filtered down to the pews. That was particularly true under the leadership of Adam’s predecessor, Rogers Cloudbank, who was vicar of the parish when the Schmitz family switched.

When Mister Cloudbank retired after twenty-seven years, Adam applied for the job. They knew Adam because Grace Church, the larger downtown parish where he was assisting, had for years sent staff when counseling or a pastoral visit was needed. This unusual arrangement suited everyone. Young clergy practiced their craft and Cloudbank was able to skip the more odious parts of the ministry like visiting or counseling parishioners. So when he retired, Adam had the inside track.

Bishop Wheat loved to lecture parishes sternly whenever he had an opportunity, and the transition was a good one. He held forth every Sunday on what they had done wrong, how they failed to live up to their vows, and insisted that they follow an extensive process that mandated detailed surveys, endless self-examination, and interminable committee meetings. The long process, overseen by the Bishop’s staff; appeared democratic, but the end result was never in question. After months of interviews, paring a list of applicants from dozens to a handful, Adam was hired.

After years of Cloudbank’s leadership style, the personality of the congregation had become a bone-in-the socket fit for his neurotic inclinations. Those who wanted something more, better or different had left long ago, while those who stayed, stayed because it suited them. The diocese was full of little parishes like that, and so long as the cash flow was adequate for salary and overhead, a parish could remain locked in that dance for decades. Especially in small parishes, the personality of a congregation mirrored the dynamics of the pastor’s family of origin. Cloudbank’s father was cool and distant, a professor who lectured with erudition and never kissed his only son. Cloudbank accordingly created a community similar to a public library, where people hovered about and occasionally spoke to one another but never came too close. The don’t feel-don’t tell-don’t trust ethos of his family was the unconscious template for parish life. The little fish, already habituated by their own histories to those tepid waters, swam happily about.

Because the clanging symbols of sexual scandal continued to echo, it was a plus that Adam obviously liked women. When one of the few attractive women in the parish walked through the coffee hour, he would continue the conversation in which he was engaged while his gaze followed her to the cookies, her tapping stilettos on the hardwood floor impossible to resist, his eyes rising slowly from her heels to her careful hair. Recognizing his predilections, everyone breathed a sigh of relief, although no one said a word. Cloudbank had been deemed safe because the parish labeled him a “celibate gentleman.” The ruse worked as long as everyone colluded, and everyone did. Well into middle-age, Cloudbank hosted famous parties, but no straight man or woman suspected his secret night-life. They extolled his academic sermons, bound and printed with footnotes for each of the six church seasons, because they conferred status, they believed, on the little parish and more than made up for his shyness: he raced away after the service, disappearing into a room he had built high in the bell tower where he hid until everyone left. Then he tiptoed down the spiral stairs to join his longtime companion Burton Rusk and then to brunch with special friends.

In contrast, Adam was like a large puppy that jumped up and planted its huge paws on a person’s chest. Perhaps, they thought, he would learn to stifle himself – they call it the “shake down cruise,” that period of a year or so when a parish either molds a priest to its style or drives him away. If the pastor bends sufficiently, the ministry is considered a success. If he doesn’t, like a marriage, there are always grounds for divorce.

On Adam’s first Sunday, forty-three attended the late service, seven the earlier, conservative one. The church had seventy-three members on its rolls, mostly women, mostly old. Some had not been seen in years.

“It’s a congregation mostly of elderly ladies,” Reed said, “and their mothers. A few friends will come over from Grace, I imagine.”

“Why in the world do you want it?” Penny asked. They were having lunch downtown, a few weeks into their affair. The trendy cafe, remodeled with a classic bottle-filled bar straight from Manet, was filled with cool modulated light.

“It’s a perfect starter parish,” he said. “It’s short term – no one follows a long pastorate like Cloudbank’s, as a rule, without being transitional—and there’s nowhere to go but up. We’ll pick up some of the disaffected people who float from parish to parish, you lose about ten per cent and pick up the same. They’re easy to spot—they love you, they tell you how incredible you are, but oh, by the way, they tack on what was wrong with the last pastor. If you believe either, the diatribe or the praise, you’re sunk. In another year, you’ll be the one they hate. Their projections turn on a dime. They always think you’re much better than you are or much worse. That’s the essence of ministry, Pen, and the energy of it, too, learning how to handle those projections, not getting sucked in. You put on the armor of righteousness,” he laughed, “but always in the background you better be thinking, fuck them, as my dear mentor says, love them, sure, but … fuck them. If you need them too much, you’re dead. They’ll sniff it out and eat you alive.

“And … it’s a city parish, which I like. And … of course … you’re here,” he leaned and kissed her across their lattes, tasting her coffee and inhaling her pale scent. “And it’s tied into the endowment at Grace Church through a complicated arrangement, wills and bequests and all that, which means the salary and overhead are covered so I don’t have to kill myself generating cash flow. In this market, that matters a lot. It’s a huge relief.“

The year before Adam arrived, Florence became Assistant Director of the Altar Guild when Agatha Cowling died. She worked easily with Miriam Rausch, deferring to the matriarch who, in a rare moment of closeness, confided to Florence that “she and Miriam Spade run this parish.” That was fine with Florence who preferred a subordinate role. The church became her home away from home when Leon died. Some Sundays she attended both services because “they give you different things.” Terri came once in a while when she and Paul became serious, and when he left for the war, the family came for a special blessing. They put their hands on Paul’s head and Adam prayed for his safe return.

Florence found the shallow waters of minimal community just right. If she needed more, the priest was there; he was conscientious and knew how to listen as he did that afternoon, waiting patiently to discover the source of her upset. When she stopped sniffling and apologized for being silly, Reed said she wasn’t silly at all, she was just human.

But he still didn’t know the foundation of her grief.

Crumpled tissues filled the table between them. She said again and again what a good boy Paul was, how wonderful it was to have him home, Adam nodding with what he hoped was adequate empathy, unable to stop thinking of Penny, flashing back on the weekend, how the warm flesh of her thighs squeezed with an irregular pulse the sides of his happily lapping head.

That’s when he noticed the tip of his dick sticking to his shorts, pulling his attention to his lap. He willed for it to release, but it held fast.

He uncrossed his legs, shifting a little, but it didn’t work. So he wobbled between two centers of attention, the unhappy woman talking now about Terri, her change in behavior, her lack of understanding, making Paul think twice—it was like day and night, she had been so helpful, helping in the kitchen, chattering about their future together, and now, when all she had to be was patient and wait until Paul was back in spirit as well as body, why was she making everyone so uncomfortable? Why did she have to keep saying Paul had changed?

The other center of attention was his dick which he tried to dislodge with stealthy gestures. He leaned in his chair, legs crossed and feet flat on the floor, feeling his shorts shift, but stayed stuck. Florence noticed his fluctuating attention—they always do, he thought, they always do—and looked at him queerly. Reed uncrossed his legs, widening his thighs and moving forward onto the edge of the chair, hoping to distract her. In that moment, inexplicably, he was intensely present to Florence and they connected. She felt it too. All of a sudden she felt relieved.

She dabbed her eyes, smiling through tears. “I guess I needed to cry.”

“Florence, I’m still trying to understand, what’s so upsetting … I hear you, Paul and Terri have lots of adjustments to make, which is only natural, right?”

“I suppose.”

“But—what’s really happening?”

She shifted in her chair, Reed feeling her conflicting emotions as distinctly as if they were his. He tilted his head, waiting. Then came free.

“Ow.”

“What?”

He half-rose in his chair.

“I’m sorry, Florence, I was stiff from sitting so long.”

“Oh.”

“Let’s get back to what you were saying. Can you be more specific? Is Buddy OK?”

“Oh, Buddy’s fine, he was angry at Terri, too, last night Paul and Terri came for dinner, we were talking about Buddy’s hockey team, they have a chance to win the league, and Terri said out of absolutely nowhere, so am I the only one who’s worried?

“Everybody stopped talking. What are you talking about? Buddy practically shouted. That’s not like Buddy, you know that. Paul looked at Terri like he wanted to kill her. Terri looked at me like she wanted me to back her up. Of course, I couldn’t. Not with Paul sitting right there”

“How is he different?”

She looked away. She went out of phase. Too direct, he thought. Back up and come around.

“It isn’t easy,” she said. “Since Leon died, nothing is.”

He waited.

“Of course the war affected him. Wouldn’t it affect you?”

“Of course. Is that what Terri’s getting at?”

A cobweb was blowing in a ceiling vent and she watched it flutter. She thought she heard the muffled thrumming of the furnace in the basement. She began thinking of what to make for dinner. Macaroni and cheese, hot and bubbly, filled her mind. She could smell it, she was suddenly hungry, very hungry, and wanted to leave.

“Florence, what do you think she means?”

“Terri thinks Paul was hurt. But the way she says it makes me upset. As if he did something wrong.”

“Maybe it’s affecting her too. These things have a way of spilling onto everyone.”

“And maybe she isn’t right for Paul. Maybe it’s better to find out now.”

“Maybe.”

He felt her coming back into the room. He looked into her eyes, hoping she would feel that he was still on her side.

“I don’t know what’s wrong. She won’t say. All she does is drop hints.”

“Can you talk to Paul directly?”

Imagining the scene, her eyes filled with fear. He felt her recede.

“I could talk to them, Florence. Maybe I can help.”

“Maybe.” Gone. She was out of the room and wasn’t coming back. “I’ll ask.”

But Florence was done. She gathered herself and made a little noise, an “oof!” as she unfolded and rose stiffly.

“Well. Thank you, Father. I feel much better.”

“Good.”

He gave her another hug and she let him, confused by what she had heard herself say. It would take time for her own words to percolate, telling her the truth she already knew.

Reed returned to his desk and watched her shamble down the hallway.

The Bach toccata played in his pocket.

“Hey, your hotness.” said Penny’s playful voice. “Is your three o’clock gone?”

“Yes. I’ve just got a couple of minutes. Another’s due at four.”

She was silent. “Hey, thanks, lady,” he made his voice smile. “That wasn’t bad.”

“But you have to go.”

“I do. Pen –“

The intercom buzzed. “Parker Brown is here, Father. He said you were supposed to leave the door open. He called your cell phone but it’s busy.”

“I can hear,” Penny said. “Bye.”

“Are we still on? Dinner at your place?”

“Father,” Eleanor said on the speaker. “Will you buzz him in?”

* He saw Parker on the screen and pressed to free the lock, said “Gotta go,” turned off his telephone and opened the office door.

“Parker, forgive me,” he said, stepping out of the way so Parker could enter.

“It’s cold out there,” said Parker Brown, rubbing his hands together. His face was glowing above the gray lapels of a plush overcoat, a soft gray muffler neatly tucked, his fringe of white hair cut short. Liver spots on the shiny skin of his forehead.

He looked around, still rubbing his hands. “Something’s different.”

“The Miriams.”

The older man laughed.

“Miriam R bought new furniture. Didn’t even ask, just ordered from the store. I asked her to send it back. No one has said “no” to her for years. She went crazy. She called every single member of the Vestry, then each of them called me. Then Miriam S weighed in. A bull in a china shop was one of the nicer things she said. The chairs, as you see, are still here. Geraldine suggested we let the dust settle. What dust? I said. It’s my office and I don’t like the chairs—yes, yes, she said, still, it’s better to wait—“

Parker laughed. “No one said it would be easy, did they?” He sank into the chair and stretched, crossing his legs at the ankle. “You could fall asleep in this chair.”

“You could,” the priest agreed, sitting on the other side of the table. “That’s the problem. Like the Tonight Show sofa. Anyway, how are things?”

Brown thought a moment, looking out the window at a honey locust covered with snow. The window was framed by heavy dark crimson curtains with gold tassels. The church was near a strip of shops he could see obliquely—a Korean nail place, a discount drug store, cell phone shop, a noodle take-out, a cleaners, light from their neon signs illuminating snow banked high on the walk. Beyond the shops, a dark brick three-story walk-up, its windows opaque in the dark afternoon.

A passing truck blocked Parker’s view. He focused after a moment on a branch in the foreground. A small bird, a wren or sparrow, he guessed, some irrelevant nameless small brown bird in any event was perched on a snow-covered branch.

He drew himself up and sat straighter.

“Things aren’t bad,” he said. “Everything is pretty good.”

So they spent the next fifty minutes talking about football, would the quarterback come back, the investments in the endowment, the fortunes of Brown’s investment firm in a difficult economy, his wife Helen who wasn’t well, she had something like lupus but not exactly, Reed couldn’t remember what, she was tired all the time and still depressed. Then Parker talked about Brad, his remarkably dumb son-in-law who married his daughter Marilee, and their new grandson, Fletcher—Parker showed him an accordion folder of photos of a fat baby with Brad’s blank face—then asked Adam about the parish, listening to the priest’s concerns with care and attention. Then he went back to Helen, why she didn’t come to church, how grief never let her go, grief was the field of her life, the frame, and as twilight deepened, despite the heat inside, dry as a desert, Reed felt an inexplicable chill that signaled the onset of night. As he shivered, drawing his arms in closer, Adam tried to find a path through the labyrinth of Parker’s words. Something amplified his anxiety, making Parker hop from branch to branch like a restless bird—Helen perhaps? The economy? His business, his Washington contacts?.

None of his guesses stuck, however, and when the hour was almost over, when Adam had decided that Parker just wanted to bleed off feelings and not address the reason he called, when the clergyman had uncrossed his legs and was pushing back and saying, “Well—“ … only then did Parker say, “Adam, I’m afraid. I haven’t been this afraid in years.”

Half out of his chair, Adam stopped and sat back down. He glanced at the digital clock on the shelf. They always wait until the last minute. They chitchat about this and that, then say over their shoulders when they leave, their coats on, halfway through the door, oh by the way, I got a divorce, I was fired today, I shot my dog.

He heard Penny’s snippy greeting whenever he was late, an anticipatory hallucination, and pushed it away. He looked closely at Parker’s face which was grave, felt his anxiety rising, more than anxiety, closer to dread. Parker’s feelings were suddenly within easy reach of Adam’s antennae. The lateness of the hour, the suffocating warmth of the steam-heated office, the cold twilight outside, all worked on Parker Brown, softening him up, making him accessible.

“OK, Parker,” Adam said, sitting back. “What’s going on?”

Despite his sudden disclosure or, more likely, because of it, Parker quickly covered, turning to abstractions instead of responding to Adam’s question. He liked skirting issues anyway, rambling off on what he called an orthogonal pursuit of unlikely solutions to problems that remained undefined even after he found the solutions, a practice that let him talk on and on without, he thought, having to reveal specifics. Specifics, however, leaked through the cracks, framed by the things he was careful not to say. The more he talked, circling his feelings, the angrier he became. Adam could feel the pressure rising.

Like most of his friends, school friends, club friends, client friends, Parker distrusted feelings and approached them obliquely, hating the authority they exerted on his analytical mind. He had learned as a child to fear them, never disclose them, and in the end, deny their influence or existence. The more he resisted, however, particularly when they were pressing and he felt them intensely as he did that afternoon, he literally squirmed in his chair, looking for a way to escape. But his psyche was a closed circle: there was no way out.

He wished he hadn’t said anything at all. He wished he had gotten up and left.

He said suddenly, “Some things are better left unsaid,” as if Adam had suggested otherwise. “Most things, in fact. Most history, you know, has disappeared. The historical record is nothing but graffiti on crumbling walls.

“Look,” he sat forward urgently, “if human memory were a translucent cube,” he went into lecture mode and fashioned an imaginary cube in the air with his hands, “it would be mostly empty space, like atoms. If we rendered memory digitally in the form of a city or skyline, it would look like Hiroshima after the bomb. A few spires sticking up, nothing else.”

Adam sort of nodded, unsure where he was heading, waiting for more.

Then Parker was talking about war. Adam missed the transition, felt as if he were squinting up at a pop fly, losing it in the sun. When Parker talked about war, whether current wars, the wars that were, or the wars to come, he alluded to his experience without ever disclosing what it was. The theme this time was history, again, how history played peek-a-boo with our hubris, our self-deception, the pretense that we could know.

“You can play but you can’t win. Orders aren’t always written, you know. Did you know that?”

Adam half-nodded. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Not for the most important things. One person says them quietly to another, aside. When the mission is finished, it didn’t happen. If there’s no record, it doesn’t exist. Oh, I know, Adam, I know, you hate it when I talk like this. You’re always preaching about openness, self-disclosure, everything being above board.”

“I am,” the younger man said. “That’s part of the job.”

“It’s bullshit,” Parker said with intensity. “It’s counter-intuitive, counter-culture even. Things don’t work that way. Who wants openness? Gadflies, malcontents and radicals, that’s who, meddlers who are never successful. So they bite at the ankles of those who are like frustrated middle-aged academics sniping at the people who pay their salaries. They resent our success. They’re never team players. Their power comes from outing people, accusing them, from judgment. But doesn’t the Book say, leave that to God? He’ll take care of it? Every goddamn one of them is so holier than thou, excuse my French. You don’t want to get like that, Adam, find yourself in mid-life making a crappy salary while the people in your parish send their kids to the best schools and take vacations in the Caribbean. You could tend that way, you know. Most of your heroes were whistle blowers, right? Didn’t most of the people you extol get whacked, or, excuse me, assassinated?”

Adam reflected. “Maybe more.”

Parker nodded with a thin smile.

“Right. So there it is. When the mission is finished,” he repeated, “it never happened. It’s impossible to get the whole story. Try using FOIA. All that does is tell the guardians of the interface what you think you know or want to know or where you think it’s hidden. Then they move it to another file. What do you get? Blacked out pages, that’s what. If that. Bullshit bureaucratise after ten months of pretending to look. Never enough ground to define a figure. See what I mean? When I say you can play but can’t win?”

Adam went into the neutral zone. “Are you still talking about war? Or something that happened lately? Or what? What does this have to do with what you said about being afraid?”

Parker frowned. “Everything. Everything connects.”

He sat back, looking at his hands. The knuckles were purple, not bruised. Not like he hit someone. That wasn’t his technique.

Adam tried another tack.

“I’ve noticed,” he told the older man, “at the start of the service, you know where the liturgy says, Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid? Sometimes you start. It catches you off guard if you’re thinking of something, doesn’t it? And you hear what those words mean?”

“It’s not helpful,” Parker said. “A general confession should bleed off feelings, period. Not everything is a big deal. You should be able to talk to God like he’s Chair of a Congressional committee. Skip the fifth if possible but use it if you have to. Never just blurt it all out.”

“In fact, you did testify for a subcommittee, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Parker said. “Once upon a time. That has nothing to do with this.”

Had there been a ticking clock, they would have heard it tick in the silence that followed. But those clocks were gone, consigned to the silence of a history that mechanical clocks had tried to make more orderly. Digital time passed as silently as the night that had filled the window while they were talking. When he looked up, looking past the pastor’s gaze, Parker saw the room mirrored in the window, the back of the pastor’s head with a full head of dark hair, a picture of angels by Chagall, a cheap print, he imagined, high on the wall behind.

“Some of my colleagues talk to their wives,” he said. “I don’t. Helen learned early not to ask. Client communications are always confidential. So is the political stuff. Some go to therapists, I guess” he looked away. “Give me a break. This isn’t The Sopranos. This is real.”

“It is,” Adam said. “But what exactly is it?”

This sort of relationship, though, Parker might have said next, instead of just thinking it, this talking with the pastor thing, this can work because it’s nothing, nothing at all, off to the side, it’s there if I need it, I can stop by and see how you’re doing and maybe whatever is on my mind will wander into the open, maybe not, but the fact of a casual chat is nothing. It’s a detour into the cold lake, you jump in, shiver and splash around, then leave, like the polar bear club. Maybe you feel better, maybe not. But nothing, really, has taken place.

Parker suddenly laughed. “Do you remember when I asked, what was your shortest sermon? You didn’t miss a beat. ‘Nothing is what it seems,’ you said.”

Adam smiled. “I remember. And you were saying … ”

“I was looking at that bird.”

Adam turned and looked at the window, It took a moment for the bird on the branch to become visible through the bright reflection.

“How does it live through the winter? How does it survive?”

Adam watched him. Parker did not seem to know he was close to tears. He couldn’t hear his own voice.

“Parker,” he said softly, “you’re not talking about the bird. You know that, don’t you?”

Parker looked at the clergyman’s earnest face. He threw in the towel and sighed.

“That’s the whole thing, right there,” he said. “When one of them falls, does He really know? Does He really care?

“Or not?”

Compared to Parker Brown and his labyrinthine verbal defenses, the Schmitzes were simple people. Florence would never hurt a soul, not knowingly. But Florence loved and protected her own.

Adam respected that, however much it was mired in denial and a lack of awareness. He was learning not to say what he saw clearly because others didn’t see it, didn’t want to see it, either. Saying things outright sometimes made them race into the night with a cry. He knew that Florence would die if she thought someone knew what was said in the privacy of their bungalow. So what follows must remain strictly off the record.

When Florence left the church, she felt uneasy. She thought she would feel better if she talked it out, but when she kept hearing echoes of what she said, it made her anxious, made her, in fact, a little angry. Her opinion of the clergyman, poking and prodding the way he did, making her say those things, went down a whole notch.

She didn’t tell anyone she had seen him. When Buddy came in from school—he was a freshman at the local campus—he turned on his loud music and Florence didn’t object. It was noise, to her, but she welcomed the pounding thrumming bass. She busied herself preparing dinner, making macaroni and cheese from scratch, adding an extra cup of cheddar. She fried some sausage, loving the spicy sizzle and thick sweet-smelling smoke that set off the smoke alarm again, making Buddy get on a chair and shut it off.

They watched Wheel of Fortune, eating on trays in the living room, guessing at puzzles. They liked beating the contestants as much as watching jaywalking. Both shows let them laugh at the LCDs and feel better about themselves. They could not believe that people could be that stupid.

Buddy solved every puzzle. Florence pretended to let him, making jokes to cover how she felt (she missed “blue skies and white sand beaches,” for heaven’s sake, on a prize puzzle) and Buddy rubbed it in. She pretended to feel hurt so he had to get up and hug her and say, Mom, I was kidding, and she said she knew that, sort of.

But she couldn’t forget. Her words were like seeds stuck in her teeth no matter how much she worked them with her tongue. Before she talked to the pastor, she had not known that Paul was hurt. She had not admitted to herself that maybe Terri wasn’t nuts.

The next day, she called Terri and asked her to come over. She said she would make her favorite dessert, hot chocolate bombs. Buddy was off with Kelli and Terri came early and they chatted in the kitchen until the chocolate concoction was done. Florence carried the molten mounds into the dining room and went back for the hot fudge. Terri told her she was going to be on Oprah in a couple of weeks. Florence was not paying attention and let it pass, not realizing then that Terri, as Buddy would say later, was going to fuck over the family.

Florence told her she went to the church. Terri thought she meant to fold linens.

She was well into her chocolate cake, frosting smearing her face, already pouring more fudge from the little blue pitcher, covering every bite with additional delicious addictive dark chocolate, nodding to what Florence said, going into a trance. Florence told her the priest asked about Paul, how was he doing, because sometimes vets had adjustments. Terri nodded, ferrying cake from plate to mouth in a regular rhythm. So how did she, Terri, think Paul was doing? Now that he had his own place.

Terri put down her fork and wiped her face with a paper napkin. Florence was nibbling at her desert, not the way she usually ate.

Terri said, well, and sat there for a minute, not sure what she ought to say. Florence’s question triggered a memory of Paul sobbing. She hadn’t mentioned that to anyone. She got another piece of cake, but once she had finished that one, too, feeling stuffed, feeling a little sickish, too, once she had scraped the plate with her fork and the sugar rush was ebbing, the memory was intensified by the feeling of emptiness that followed. Would you like another piece? Florence asked. Terri said no, shaking her head, thinking it wouldn’t help. It would make things worse, in fact. Florence was turning her plate slowly clockwise on the plastic tablecloth, not looking at Terri, not looking at anything, really. Terri told Florence how dark it was the other night at Paul’s place, how cold, the heat was off, the furnace wasn’t working, she woke up at three in the morning shivering and went to the window and looked out at the streetlights making the snow look icy and ghostly cold, there was no moon, just low clouds reflecting the dull glow of the city, when behind her Paul suddenly screamed, he cried out, then screamed so loudly the hair stood up on the back of her neck. She rushed to him and held him in her arms and he was sobbing, Terri told her, sobbing like you wouldn’t believe, and she rocked him and said there there, there there, she didn’t know what else to do, and he told her through gasping sobs that he had tortured people Terri he had tortured people he said it like that again and again and she couldn’t understand what he meant, what he had done. Maybe he was confused because it was unthinkable, really, maybe he was saying someone else had done these things and everything was all mixed up. It didn’t make sense. So she held him until he was sleeping again and lay beside him for a long time looking at the streetlight on the shade until she fell asleep herself. In the morning, they showered and dressed and had breakfast and Paul went to work.

She told all this to Florence in a rush. The fact of family made her feel safe. It was such a relief to tell someone. But Florence did a mini-freak, her eyes darting back and forth, she took Terri’s plate and went into the kitchen to rinse dishes, rattling dishes into the dishwasher, slamming it shut, getting a spatula stuck in the holder, having to shake it loose. Then she came back into the dining room where Terri was staring at where she, Florence, had been a moment before and sat down in her chair and then got up and sat down again and said, Things like that don’t happen, Teresa, they do not happen, and Terri was crying and Florence was crying too and they cried in each other’s arms.

Florence stopped crying first. She said, well, so—Paul had a nightmare. Lots of veterans have bad dreams. She heard that on Doctor Phil. That didn’t mean they were real. Terri shrugged and said nothing, and Florence said nothing except, well, so—a few more times, then the women hugged and Terri left.

On Sunday after the service, Father Reed greeted Florence with a smile and asked about Paul. Florence shrugged and said he was fine, Father, thank you for asking. After a pause he said he missed her on Wednesday—their second appointment?—and she looked confused, then laughed and said, oh she must be getting old, she had totally forgotten. So he said, do you want to reschedule? Florence said, no no, that won’t be necessary now, everything is fine, now, everything is just fine.

She went on to coffee hour but it was upsetting, the way he brought it all up again, and pretty soon, everything about the church was boring or upsetting, services were dull, sermons too long, Mildred Pierce was a royal pain, so she went less frequently, sat more often in back, and never called Terri again. She was very busy, but that wasn’t the reason. The reason was, Terri went on Oprah and talked about Paul. Florence knew no one would remember after a while because everything on television blurred into everything else. That’s what Parker was saying, too, maybe, about missing chapters in history, how history books had so many blank pages.

Before he left, Parker did tell Adam why he was frightened, Terri told Florence about Paul, and Florence told the priest as much as she knew. But Adam had no idea what was real. Parker’s story sounded like something out of a movie. Florence’s sounded like a morning talk show. Terri’s sounded like a post on a conspiracy web site—and anyway, he wouldn’t hear it until later, until after Parker. So he had no point of reference. Nothing connected to anything else. He held everything lightly—sometimes it pays to be agnostic—but knew it was real for them, whatever the ultimate truth, so that’s how he approached it. That’s what mattered on the ground. What people thought was real framed their anxieties and fears, or didn’t. Organized the questions they could even think, or not.

In addition, Adam had other things to think about. It was late, it was cold, there were sure to be calls to return that Eleanor left in his box, and then, there was Penny, there was always Penny and what she would say when he tiptoed in, late again, with the same excuse. Telling her someone needed to talk. Never saying who. But it was always someone else, someone not Penelope, who needed his attention.

Florence found herself thinking and saying and doing things in the days ahead that were not like her at all. Paul was her son, so Terri was off-base. Terri was wrong. She had not seen the real Terri inside the fakey friendly act. But now that she did, Terri was damned to hell. So let Terri do whatever she wants. Let her go. She doesn’t belong to us any more. The Schmitz family protects their own.

So it was that Florence found herself saying aloud to no one in particular as she walked to the grocery store, Well, fuck Terri, then. The woman ahead of her turned to look. Thank God she didn’t know who she was. Florence raised her fist in its purple mitten to her open mouth. She felt like a dummy, mortified by the words a ventriloquist put in her mouth. Those were Buddy’s words and Buddy’s voice, not hers, words that were not to be spoken aloud outside the walls of their house. Fuck her, Buddy had said. Fuck her. Kicking the ottoman through the living room into the hall and down the hall to his bedroom. Kicking it and kicking it and kicking it and shouting at the top of his lungs, that fucking bitch! Fuck her! Fuck that lying bitch in the goddamn ass!

Between jobs, Terri watched Oprah.

Surprisingly, she bonded with the black woman quickly. As a rule, eastern and northern European whites passed straight through to her inner life, Italians and Greeks met significant resistance, and blacks, Jews, and Hispanics were stopped at the border. Oprah, however, like a good hacker, broke herself into little pieces, slipped through the perimeter, and reassembled herself inside.

It wasn’t her achievements that did it, nor her money, nor all of those millions of adoring minions; her infiltration was facilitated by a confluence of circumstances, above all, the erosion of Terri’s self-confidence, the breakdown of her belief that she understood even simple things, thanks to Paul’s unpredictable behaviors which interrupted the feedback loops that had made her surroundings and her inner map a seamless coherent whole, and the sheer force of the celebrity’s personality, the power of her will, her intellect, her empathy, caring and understanding, her generosity of spirit, her deep feelings shared with such ease (she was so articulate!), the money, sometimes cars and all kinds of other stuff given away in little and big public gestures, her relentless drive to get inside and connect with every woman who had been educated to a certain level, stayed home most days, and plotted to her demo- and psychographic maps. All of that enabled Oprah quietly to shoulder Silvia, Terri’s mother, out of the foreground of her mind. Terri didn’t even notice that it happened, much less how.

It didn’t happen all at once, of course. At first a tiny image of Oprah hung in the upper corner of her waking thoughts like a Christmas tree ornament used to correct an overabundance of evergreen. The image winked off and on throughout the day, a benevolent spirit manifesting at the right times. As Terri watched her program every afternoon, however, as she laughed and cried and learned as she might have learned from her mother, had Silvia been more inclined or capable of teaching, the earnest strong-willed big-haired personality moved toward the center. Her image grew larger and brighter until it glowed in Terri’s imagination, stuffed and plump or slender and sexy, depending on Oprah’s weight. She was no longer an ornament but a shining star, lighted from within. Her complexion lightened and her face became more Aryan. One day Oprah’s features and her mother’s merged, Oprah’s mapping onto the older woman’s Polish, German and Serbian traits as if an invisible hand were photoshopping their portraits.

The hypnotic power of television was absolute, its imprinting indelible. Her mother’s high cheekbones disappeared into the plump chocolate cheeks of the star, then her forehead darkened and was absorbed, her eyebrows tightened and her nose widened until all that remained of her mother’s face was a constant anxious frown. By that time Terri had become so discipled to the entertainer that Oprah’s voice and her mother’s were equal in impact. Then Oprah‘s pulled ahead and her mother’s sounded silly, whiny, and irrelevant. Telephone calls from her Mom and interviews conducted by the superstar elicited similar feelings, but oddly, Oprah’s tone seemed more familiar, as if her own mother were one of the cousins while the Big O was an older sister who had always been around.

And something else happened. Along the way to resident status in her mind and heart, Oprah became a woman who was not exactly black. She was something else, a check in the “other” box, the many pejorative qualities of her race scrubbed clean like a man – Stedman, in point of fact – washed out of her big hair. Her internalized voice echoed after everything Terri thought or said like the still small voice of her conscience, accessible any time of the night or day for wisdom, consolation, or strength. By definition and ontological status, no black person could occupy that position. So her race went missing while her womanhood, powerful but bleached, arrived inside.

Unless one understood this, Terri’s behavior at the Christmas party was incomprehensible, given her usual demeanor. The party was hosted as always by her cousins Chris and Chris because they had a bigger house. There were too many children, step-children, newly adopted babies, even one from China, cousins uncles aunts and all, for anyone else to think about having it at their place. The result was an inflow of friends as well as relations, including people from the north side and a Jew or two from the swank suburbs up on the lake—Lox Cove they called Wolf Cove, Bagel Bay instead of Bream. One of those people, a friend of her Uncle Dan’s, apparently, someone he knew from work, a lawyer for the union he told her later, you could tell from how he held himself so fancy-schmancy and how he used big words to make sure they knew he had gone to an expensive school, he was Morris or Meir, Michael or Micah, one of those, when he made dismissive remarks about people who watch sitcoms, soaps and talk shows as if they were all idiots, Terri bristled but said nothing, but then he ridiculed serious people like Regis and Terri had to bite her lip, and then—then he made the mistake of beating on Oprah, mocking how she promoted books and book clubs and–shit! Terri thought, shit shit shit! and sprang for his face like a rottweiler, snarling, go fuck yourself you arrogant prick! Yes, you heard me, she repeated when he took a step back and expressed wonder and disbelief. You can shove your superior North Shore Jew act up your ass.

Terri! said Florence, looking at Paul to do something. Terri! said her mother, but it came out “Trrr” because Silvia’s mouth was full of cream cheese and chutney. Her uncle Dan chuckled, but Aunt Minnie, sustaining the ethos of the subculture, got real quiet, the back of her hand at her open mouth. In the dining room, everyone else got quiet too, their silence like a thunderclap in contrast with the loud laughter and chatter in the other rooms. The hush expanded like spilling ink over their merriment, ticking off six seconds, seven seconds, eight, nine, ten, a lot of silence in the middle of a traditional Christmas party.

At ten seconds, Paul said, Terri! Jesus!

One of the cousins said to anyone who was listening, I didn’t know that young ladies talked like that these days.

But Terri did. Terri burned. There was no quenching her righteous fire, no way to stop her defending her mentor. She knew she was well within bounds to shut Mister North Shore Know-it-all once and for all the fuck up.

Oprah had become the most dependable person in her life. Her mother loved her, sure, but had less and less support to offer and little understanding; her relatives were there but not there, if you know what she meant; and Paul had come back damaged in some way she didn’t understand. The fabric of her life and understanding was corroding. She walked constantly on leafy branches over a pit, afraid they would give way. Only Oprah with her deep wisdom continued to flow like a river to her troubled heart.

And the asshole did shut up, she did accomplish that. He left the party in a huff. Terri was getting ready to chase after him but Paul grabbed her by the arm and said, Jesus, leave him alone, Terri! Let it go.

She turned and looked at her boyfriend, her steady, her significant other, not her fiancée yet but almost, almost, more than a fuck buddy, much much more, the man she had intended to marry as soon as he returned from his tour and narrowed her eyes and folded her arms in a tight cross and glared.

The relatives buzzed among themselves and then someone shouted that the kringles were out of the oven and everyone shifted gears. The kids ran for the big kitchen and the smells of diverse kringles (almond and maple walnut, strawberry raspberry and cherry, Bavarian cream, chocolate walnut and toffee pecan for Terri’s mom) mingled with the scent of evergreen in the hot dry house and grown-ups wandered around and Paul took Terri by the arm into the livingroom, mostly empty, and asked her what in the fuck was the matter.

“If you don’t know, then I can’t tell you,” she said, still glaring. “You heard him.”

“Yeah, but it’s no big deal. You worry about the little shit, you’ll make yourself nuts. You’ll never see him again.” He breathed deeply. “So what’s going on?”

Terri couldn’t tell him because Terri didn’t know. But she could tell him what she did know.

“I don’t know,” she said, “how much more I can stand.”

“How much more what?”

“The way things are, now,” she said as if it were obvious to anyone with half a brain. Then she was crying again and running out of the house without a coat into the cold gray afternoon.

So when she heard that Oprah was having a show on returning vets and their “issues,” she didn’t say anything to Paul, she just got on the Internet and went to the Harpo Studio site and found out how to apply. She did it all online, answering their questions as honestly as she could, and of course she went absolutely insane when she got an email saying she had moved to the second round. They told her to expect a call.

An assistant producer named Naomi called that week.

Terri responded without forethought or guile. She told them how long she had been with Paul (five years), how he had been before he left (fine, really nice), how he was acting now. She told her about her family, how they mostly talked about other things and changed the subject whenever she wanted to bring it up. She told them about Buddy, Paul’s younger brother, how mad he was when she said even the least little thing. She said how Florence was crying all the time, saying it was from happiness, but Terri wasn’t so sure about that.

Naomi asked about her background. She told her about growing up in Lake View in a bungalow like everyone else, her age (23), her education (high school with a C+ grade point, three semesters at the local branch of the state university), even her criminal record (none), embarrassing incidents in her life (the time they covered themselves with body paint in high school and crawled in through the basement window and ran naked into Jerry’s livingroom where Jerry and Paul and Steve and Andre and Louie were playing poker but Jerry’s parents (oh my God!) were there, too, and the time they pretended to kidnap Andre’s brother Bucky, turning over the furniture carefully so as not to wreck anything really, making it look like there was a fight, dipping a kitchen knife in ketchup, leaving it on the floor and the door open, but his parents freaked and called the police and the cops gave them a long lecture about simulating crimes and wasting resources, how much it cost, why it was a crime which of course they had not known, not before that night), and did she do drugs or use any illegal substance? no, not really, they all smoked a little pot now and then, but she never did coke or meth like some of her friends or sniffed anything, and sure, she had a few drinks with friends, but not to excess, maybe one night of drinking, oh I don’t know, five or six but only once or twice a month, maybe more in cold weather. Maybe once a week. Yes, she was a Caucasian and a good Catholic, but Anglo Catholic now (that’s a whole other story, Terri laughed) and she still did Hail Marys and went to St. Peter’s with her mother, she was five feet five with brown hair some called mousy but Terri thought it was kind of pretty. Yes, she would do it the way they wanted, yes oh yes she would be thrilled to go to Harpo and have them do it right there in the studio before the show. No, she wasn’t working now, she was between jobs. I’m sorry, what was that? Well, just jobs, not a career: she had been a barista at Java Jive and could always go back, she had been a photographer’s helper in a studio here in Lake View, she had sorted books in the library for a school job in exchange for financial aid, and for two summers during high school she held the stop sign when her Uncle Dan got her the job through his friends at the county. Did she (Naomi) have any idea how much you got paid to stand there and turn the sign from stop to go slow? It was really something, considering what you did. No, just union dues, which come to think of it were pretty high. No, they never had a meeting. Nope.

Naomi said they had lots of applicants, of course, asked her to email a picture which she did at once, before the call had ended, and said they would let her know in a week or two. Terry thanked her very much and when she was off the telephone, she leaped and woo-hooed and danced in a circle around the small livingroom she and her roomies shared until she was winded and dizzy and fell down on the carpet they had rescued from the old couple moving out upstairs. Please God please Jesus, she said aloud, the question about religion reminding her to pray, knowing it was a long shot but my God! Oprah! and in the meantime she was bleeding off anxiety, the mere possibility of telling her mentor what was going on a means of feeling much better for the moment despite nothing really changing in her life.

She didn’t tell anyone what she had done. She did not want to argue, justify her actions, or listen to critiques. There was time enough for that if they let her on. What her roommates noticed was a heightened cheerfulness, whistling and humming and even skipping a step or two with her mind off in another world. Christine said with that sly smile, come on, Terri, what’s up? Did Paul propose? You’re not pregnant, are you? Terri laughed and said, no, God forbid, then added that she would tell her all about it, but in due time.

Paul didn’t notice anything different except if he stopped to think about her behavior, which he didn’t, Terri wasn’t as crabby. He felt the difference without knowing it. So it did make it easier for a bit, and God knows, he did not need distractions. It was all he could do to show up at work and do his job. It felt like he was riding a huge bubble of something hot and elastic that might blow at any moment. He straddled it as he imagined you straddle a mechanical bull except a bull was hard and this was slippery, a balloon filled with some kind of weird liquid pushing out unpredictable bulges every time he tried to grip it with his knees. It took all his energy to ride the goddamn thing, not make mistakes at work and get paid, play into Terri’s extreme expectations of what a boy friend did or was like based on how the world was before he left, a world that was gone for Paul forever, and once a week he had dinner with Buddy and his mother at the old house. He had moved his stuff to a two-room flat above the barber shop on T and stayed there a lot, watching TV, looking out the window, thinking about things.

Naomi’s assistant, a woman named Taylor, called to tell Terri she made it.

“Oh my God!” was all she could say. “Oh my God! Oh, thank you! Oh my God!”

But how would she tell Paul?

She decided it might be best to have the roomies around for a cushion in case he reacted. So she asked him to come by the apartment when Christine and Karen were having dinner. She asked them to make something vegetarian, not telling them why, just saying please, can you please just not make hamburgers or roast beef, just for tonight? So they made a vegetarian lasagna with lots of cheese and salad and garlic bread. They were still sitting at the table with the empty dishes, Christine smoking and dropping ashes onto her plate, her legs up and her feet on the chair next to her, looking reasonably mellow and content in her sweats, Karen leaning across the oval table to tell her about some moron at work, this guy named Boris who they moved into the cubicle across, Karen still wearing her white blouse and navy suit, she usually changed the minute she came home but said she was going back to Butch’s to meet Harry for a drink, she was talking non-stop about Boris when Paul rang the buzzer and Terri buzzed him in and listened to his footsteps coming up two stories of carpeted hallway stairs to her door. She looked through the fish-eye and saw him all distorted, ready to knock, and opened the door.

“Hey!” Paul said. He looked tired and stomped snow from his boots and threw his blue parka onto the beat-up yellow sofa. He followed it there, sinking into the cushion which rose on his flanks like waterwings. Terri leaned and kissed him on the forehead, tip of the nose, and lips.

“Hey, babe.”

He kissed her back when she reached his lips. She could feel him in the room now, wanting to be there, wanting to come out. That was encouraging.

Karen stopped talking and looked over. “Hey, Paul,” she said. Christine turned her head, looking in his direction. Her hair was a complete mess and she wore a disheveled gray sweatshirt with maroon letters. She didn’t uncross her legs and he saw her toe sticking out of a hole in her white sock. They exchanged mute greetings with nodding faces, then the women went back to talking about Boris, like how do these Russians grow up? I mean, what makes them behave like that? Are they orphans? Were they all in prison or something? Wasn’t anybody home?

Paul turned back to his girl who was waiting patiently to say:

“I have some news.”

He sat up straighter and looked concerned.

“No no,” she smiled, “nothing like that.”

Paul waited, watching her eyes do the anxiety thing, shifting side to side.

“Well?” he said. “What?’

“Ok,” she said. “Well. You know how Oprah has different themes depending on the show?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ok. Well. I heard that she was planning a show about vets coming home and how it is, you know, for their girlfriends and families and kids and all.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“So I wrote in and they called and we talked and they called back and they want me to be on! They want me to be part of the show!”

Paul was silent. Christine was telling Karen about the Russian Jews coming out in the eighties, how it was all planned out and now the Russian mafia was everywhere, into construction, gambling and stuff, even here, behind the scenes, and they practically own Israel now and their politicians, Karen confused because she thought mafia meant Italians, so Christine explained about the Russian mafia, she had seen a program on Dateline and read something in the doctor’s office, waiting for the official word which was negative, thank God, how Italians like Tony Soprano might kill you but these guys were crazy, they’d kill your whole family, Terri not hearing anything they said, watching Paul’s eyes, balancing on her toes like a diver on a high platform, waiting for something to show up but nothing did.

“Uh-huh,” he said, a little different in tone but she wasn’t sure how.

“OK. So, in a couple of weeks, I go down to Chicago to Harpo where Oprah does her shows? can you believe that? They’re going to send a limousine! and I am going to be on Oprah!”

He caught her excitement this time, not exactly into Oprah or any of the programs she told him about, the reality stuff, the one with the bunch of women talking all the time, the interns sleeping with each other and with nurses, other doctors, even patients in a daisy chain shot through with medical crises, so he thought OK, if that’s what you want to do. Be on TV. That’s fine.

“Well, good for you,” he said, and Terri exhaled, not even knowing she was holding her breath. She couldn’t know that Paul was thinking of Gene, Eugene, really, his boss, and how he had been less than helpful that afternoon, taking the customer’s side, thinking too off and on of Cerie who for some reason he could not get out of his mind, and thinking always about the bubbling or froth on the edges of his feeling, how it never went away, whatever it was, thinking in short of everything but what she was talking about or what it meant, exactly, what was the content of the show or what Terri might say, so it meant nearly nothing to him, not that night, the girls talking after dinner, the shadeless windows of the livingroom black with night, the smell of garlic strong in the apartment but nothing got triggered, luckily, nothing at all. So when Christine said, “You guys want some chocolate chip cheesecake?” Terri and Paul said “Sure” at the same time, laughing about it as Paul got up feeling like a creaky old man instead of a kid of twenty-four and they went into the kitchen looking for the big white box among the mess so they could help themselves to two huge pieces of cheesecake and put on coffee and take it all into her bedroom and eat and straighten out the sheets and get into bed for some seriously restorative recreational sex.

Six weeks later Terri stood outside her apartment building thirty minutes early, waiting for the limo. The sun was coming up earlier but you wouldn’t know it—the overcast made everything look the same and the temperature had been below freezing for a week. Terri was stomping around like a rain dancer, squeezing her fingers in her gloves in her deep pockets, when the big stretch limo navigated the corner and crunched through the snow. The long white vehicle double parked and the older guy who was driving slid down his window. Are you Terri Metzger? Terri said yes, giggling like a schoolgirl despite her freezing fingers and toes and he came around and opened the door.

The limo seemed like a yacht, it was so big, so warm and cushiony, with a little fridge with water bottles and snacks, magazines in side pockets, a place to put up her feet. The driver was so far forward she thought she would have to shout but she must have been amplified—anything she asked, he gave her the answer. She asked a million questions and Curtis responded in short clips, giving her data, not the kinds of fascinating narrative she hoped to hear. The limo rode on air, gliding through the bleak landscape, the early spring fields patches of black and white, trees without leaves except maybe willows yellowing a little, then office parks of anonymous glass and noise containment fences all the way to Chicago. The traffic wasn’t bad until they hit the city. Then they crawled through the morning war of fender and horn to the downtown exits and went west to Harpo. Monsieur le Chauffeur as Terri thought of him led her inside through a side door. She had to stop for security, a big matronly woman making her empty her purse and pockets, take off her shoes, stand with her arms out to be wanded, just like at the airport.

But then—then! Oh my God! it was like a cruise, she told Christine and Karen later, something you’d win on Wheel of Fortune. It was incredible! They had all this food and plush leather sofas and everything was so elegant, so … classy. Naomi, the one I spoke to, met me at the door and led me to the Green Room. The others on the show were already there, I guess they flew in the day before and stayed at a hotel. Naomi did most of the talking and told us what to expect. They do lots of shows on the same day, I hadn’t realized that, and guess who was there! Harrison Ford! doing a show! while we waited! We had to wait a long time, too, because apparently he wouldn’t say anything interesting and Oprah had to stoke up the crowd like a cheerleader. We saw it all from the Green Room on monitors. Oprah played games with different parts of the audience, getting them all excited, and finally he must have said enough because then it was our turn.

When they took us to make-up, the guy who was doing it, this obviously very gay guy? was looking sideways at my hair and I asked if it looked Ok? and he said, well, you’re the one who’s “average,” right? I didn’t know what he meant so he told me they had one black, one Hispanic, one Unknown Soldier—wait, I’ll tell you in a minute—and apparently I was picked because I’m white and Midwestern. Apparently I stand for middle America. He said my plain hair fit the part perfectly, that he thought the photo had made up their minds. I asked if he couldn’t do something with it without losing the effect, and he curled it, you’ll see when you see the show, he did this little thing but it looked so different. I love what he did.

So the others in the Green Room were this black girl, LaDonda, and a short bald guy from Nogales, and me. It was funny, they kept this fourth person in a separate room and disguised her face and voice and all. They did her after we finished. Naomi called her the Unknown Soldier. I guess she was tortured. Her voice sounded like a cancer patient using one of those boxes and they made her face like a mask. So it wasn’t like a real person or someone you knew, it was more like a movie. You’ll see what I mean.

Ernesto, the Spanish guy, his wife was over there a year and I guess he had to deal with how much sex he thought she had with different guys. You could barely understand anything he said. LaDonda, the black girl, was just plain angry, but I couldn’t blame her, the guy she’s living with sounds like a whacko. He carries a gun and beat up some guy in a bar fight and got arrested – LaDonda said he had gotten into some stuff before he left but hadn’t done time, so she blames it all on what happened over there. I don’t know why she stays with him. Anyway, I wore my new suit, the beige, the one from Boston Store? And they led us into the studio and … there was Oprah, big as life, wearing this incredible green dress and her shoes were absolutely fantastic, she came over and it felt like coming home for dinner, except better, the way she made us feel. She is so natural, so down to earth, like she knew you forever. I told her how much she meant to me and she squeezed my hand and gave me a little hug. Then Taylor, the one who works with Naomi, sat us in chairs in the order she would talk to us. I went last.

So … that was it. We all talked and when we finished, the limos were lined up outside, waiting. I had a different driver coming back, a guy named Julius, and while he was walking around the limo to open the door, these huge silent flakes of snow started drifting down from the overcast sky and everything was muffled, even close to downtown, the snow absorbing the traffic noise and I looked through it toward the skyline you could barely make out and I started to cry. I don’t know why. Everyone had been so wonderful and I talked so much about Paul and what was going on and now it was all over. Here, Julius said, let me help you, Miss, and the way he said it was so nice. He asked if I was Ok, and I said fine, I’m fine, let’s go, and he gave me a Kleenex and got me settled in the back and—that was that.

The show will be on in a couple of weeks. But listen, you guys, listen to this—Oprah thanked me for coming. She thanked me! Can you believe it? Just thinking about it is enough to make me cry again.

The day the show was on, she had Paul come over to be with her and Christine and Karen and Karen’s latest guy, Harry, who worked with her in the office, they all got together after work. Terri made herself go out and walk around when the program was on in the afternoon, not wanting to see it until everyone was together. She used the DVR and Paul’s mother made a tape, too, using a VCR, just in case.

They had beer and pizzas and Christine made tons of popcorn. There were three big ceramic bowls of the hot buttered stuff on the table in front of the sofa, the fridge was right there if anybody needed more beer. Paul pushed into the corner of the sofa, Terri taking his arm and putting it around her, saying, silly, come on! Karen sitting on the left side of the sofa, Harry on the arm, his arm lightly around her, Christine in the big flowered chair with wings. Karen asked, is everybody ready? and they all shouted YES!

It was hard to remember, Terri said later, who said what and when. Some people said things she didn’t remember anyone saying, and there were things she could swear they said that were missing. They taped for a couple of hours and edited the thing down to a seamless illusion of a short conversation that never happened, or so she tried to tell Paul, you have got to try to understand what they did, how they make it look, leaving things out or having it sound like people clapped when nobody clapped.

She was talking to his back then, going down the hallway stairs, and his back didn’t answer.

Before she started the recording, she explained that LaDonda went first. Oprah asked her to say what happened when Donald came home. The girl’s mouth was like a machine gun, spitting bullets of rage. He didn’t want to talk to her at first about anything. Then he told her too much. She didn’t need to know about the women, did she? Or what it was like to watch some guy DeWitt from Bisbee Arizona die in the street? He told her his blood was all over him and forming puddles in the street, he was crouching behind his dying body, trying not to die himself. Go talk to a shrink, she told him. I don’t need to know all that.

But you wouldn’t know that she said that, Terri explained, as they watched the tape of the show. It opened with LaDonda talking about Donald waking up screaming every night. Most nights he didn’t sleep at all, trying to keep himself from dreaming. Terri did remember her saying that but at the end. There was nothing on the show about the women or the guy dying on the street which was amazing because you couldn’t possibly know why she was so pissed off. Then they cut to Ernesto who could barely speak English but the editors must have spliced his different sentences together so he sounded like a genius, talking about his wife and how he took care of the kids while she was gone, how they had to learn how to be a family all over again. Tears welled up in Christine’s eyes, listening to the guy, and Terri tried to tell her that he wasn’t like that, not at all, as Oprah introduced the woman who was tortured.

What the hell? said Terri said, pausing the remote. She came last! The audience never saw her. But it looks like she was sitting right there on the stage. In fact, Terri said, what really happened after the Spanish guy got done was that I talked to Oprah for at least twenty minutes. Oprah asked questions and I told her how we met (he waited every morning when she stopped traffic, chatting through the window of his beat-up Stratus) and one thing led to another and he got into the Guard while she started college but then they sent him over.

Paul wrote letters for a while, she said she had said. Then they stopped. He never got into combat, from what she understood, which made what happened hard to understand. He went to a special place and they flew him to other places, too. He never told her where or what he did, exactly. She knew it had to do with talking to people and getting information and he worked with a bunch of other guys. His team (she told the whole fucking world, Paul began to think, unable to believe what he was hearing) had a doctor in it and a Jew who spoke different languages and two guys Paul said were real good at getting people to talk and a Spanish kid they called Menudo who could be pretty tough and, of course, Paul.

What was his job? Oprah asked.

His job, Terri said, was to do what he was told. Defend freedom. And keep bad things from happening.

She told them all that, and more, was what she really said, before the one in the hidden room came on, and Paul became very very quiet. Terri was aware that his arm, still around her, was unmoving and he didn’t say a word which was scary. Everyone else was quiet, too, and at last he said, “Are you aware that you gave away our group? That anyone who wants to know knows now who we were?”

Terri stared, not even shaking her head, no.

“Are you aware,” he said, “that you betrayed us?”

The room was quiet. Everyone waited.

Terri pulled out from under his arm and turned. “I don’t even know what you did! How could I betray you or say what you did when I don’t even know what you did!”

“Paul,” Karen said, “it wasn’t even on the show. Even if Terri revealed some details, not meaning to, of course—everything was cut. Isn’t that what you’re saying, Terri?”

Terri tried to catch her breath and say, “Yes. That’s what I’m saying. I was third but they make it look like that woman went next.”

Karen reached across Harry to take the remote. “Let’s see what really happened, Ok? Paul? Don’t get upset about things that didn’t happen.”

“She said that she said it,” Paul said. “She said that it happened.”

“Yeah, but if it wasn’t on TV, it never happened. Right? Not in terms of anybody knowing.”

She clicked the remote. Oprah introduced “a woman we are calling the Unknown Soldier.” She looked earnestly out of the screen and said that “some of what you will hear will be graphic and shocking. If you don’t want to hear this or want to get your children out of the room, now is the time.”

She turned as if she were facing someone but the woman wasn’t really there. Some kind of black screen flexed in front of a person who looked like a young women, more or less. Oprah asked when she was captured, how it happened.

They were on patrol and were ambushed. Three guys were killed, the rest got away. She was the only one captured.

Oprah leaned toward the phantasm with concern in her eyes. She lowered her voice, too. “If you can … please … tell us what happened.”

They put a hood on her, said the raspy voice of the apparition, tied her hands and legs, and threw her in back of a truck. They bumped along over rocks for a long time. Yes, she was terrified. She had no idea where they were going. She lay there bouncing around, hurting and afraid, when someone worked her pants down to the ankles. They played with her like she was a toy.

After a long ride, they carried her into a stinking place where she stayed for days.. They took turns punching slapping and kicking her. They untied her hands so they could tie them to something high. They cut off her uniform with a knife. No, she never saw anyone’s face, not once. They took turns hitting her, sometimes punching her with fists, sometimes lashing her with something that felt like a dog whip. I don’t know how many times. When she went unconscious, they threw water into her face. Yes, the hood was on me the whole time. No, I barely ate, they pushed this crap under the hood into my mouth. They gave me enough water so I didn’t die.

Now, this is a very very sensitive question, Oprah said, so please don’t answer if it’s too painful—

Yes. I was raped.

Oprah turned away, looking stricken.

They never asked questions or anything. I never heard anyone speak English. I didn’t know anything anyway and they knew that. They didn’t do it to get information. They did it to break me or because they enjoyed it.

One day there was silence. They disappeared. She was alone for a long time and then someone found her and got some troops.

Oprah explained that this young woman had agreed to tell her story so people could understand what kind of enemy we were fighting.

Then a commercial break.

Christine fast forwarded through ads for medications, restaurants, cars. Then Oprah was back letting the audience ask questions. She went through that fast too. At the end of the session the applause was long and loud.

According to the recorder, only three minutes were left. It must be Terri’s turn now.

Oprah introduced her as the face of mid-America, the heartland soul who stayed behind while her young man went to war. Oprah asked Terri to “tell us about the place you grew up. Tell us about the people.”

While Terri’s voice answered questions in the background, Oprah provided a voiceover telling the audience what she said. She described the small town where she was born, then the bigger city to which she moved. The narrative was illustrated with images of bungalows, neighbors talking over fences, an elderly woman pausing on her walker to wave to a friend.

Then Oprah said, “Tell us about Paul. What was he like when you met?”

Her answer was clipped to a single phrase. Paul was “a wonderful sweet guy.”

Now tell us, Oprah said, her face grave, what he was like when he came home.

Terri’s voice said, “I don’t know how to describe it. Something in him had died.” A close-up of her face showed tears. “Fuck!” the real Terri cried. “That shot was taken when we came out and they turned on the bright lights! I wasn’t crying, then!”

Oprah reached to take Terri’s hand. There were seconds of silence, then they went to a commercial.

When the show returned, it was all Oprah, recapping the stories of the four guests and how the war had knitted their lives and their stories. Their faces came on the monitor, one at a time, finishing with the distorted face of the Unknown Soldier, then they morphed into one, their features bleeding together, as Oprah described tomorrow’s show.

The recording stopped. The DVR said: Would you like to erase this show now?

Karen clicked no, save it, and turned off the television.

Terri was aghast. “They cut out almost everything I said and turned the rest into captions for those silly pictures!”

Harry said, “Well, what did you expect?” He took a long pull at his beer. “Paul? What do you think?”

Paul looked at the guy from the office, still wearing his Brooks Brother shirt and his wide silk tie, although he had taken off his jacket and hung it carefully on the knob of a closet door. He watched the guy put his bottle back on the table, then his eyes looking from Karen to Christine, then back to Paul.

“I think it’s a betrayal.”

Terri looked up, thinking he understood. “I’ll say it is,” she said, hopefulness flooding her heart. “They sure didn’t tell me what they intended.”

But Karen saw the expression on Paul’s face. She jumped up and collected bottles and cradled them into the kitchen. Christine reached to retrieve a bowl of popcorn, set it on her lap, and began eating handful upon handful, turning her buttery fists in front of her mouth to lick whatever stuck. Harry looked at Paul, waiting for a little more.

Instead, Paul stood and put on his parka. He didn’t need to look at Terri, not any more. He opened the door and walked out. Terri rose and went after him, talking to his back, telling him what had happened, how they make things look, but Paul wasn’t listening. Paul was intent on making it to the downstairs door without swinging at Terri or anyone else, without screaming, without saying so much as a single word to her or to anyone in the street who had the balls to be walking where he intended to walk and didn’t get out of the fucking way in time, daring him to a fight by the mere fact of their miserable existence.

Paul went early to meet the Captain when he called, parking blocks away so he could walk. The cold damp wind stung his face but he didn’t mind. He liked the way it made him pay attention. He was hatless, hands deep in his pockets, his new black leather jacket snapped to the top. He was hoping for the first big snowfall of the season. They said it might start after midnight or maybe miss them entirely. Everything depended on the wind.

Paul pulled open the heavy outer door. He went up a narrow flight of stairs in near-dark to the warm bar, into a scent of wet hardwood floor, liquor and heavy coats. A bartender was shaking a shaker, two cold glasses waiting before him. A middle-aged guy in an overcoat, still cold, apparently, leaned on the counter, talking non-stop. Paul watched his lips move, overhearing his words now and again, and became aware of a fuzzy filter of white noise from numerous conversations going on at tables, sofas, conversation pits in the corners, punctuated with bursts of random laughter. A large window framed a building across the street and Paul watched a woman walking through what must be her apartment in a light blouse and slacks. Her face was pale, indistinct, and she carried a drink. He guessed that she might be listening to music, the way her head was tilted, lips maybe moving to lyrics he couldn’t hear. There was music in Butch’s too, barely perceptible. Butch kept the sound down nicely. Ella Fitzgerald, he thought. In the Still of the Night. Then laughter and chatter was back in the foreground, making the music diminish.

“Are you waiting for someone, Sir?” said a playful little filly in a leather vest, a short leather skirt and a straw hat with leather fringe.

“Yes, I’m meeting a friend.”

“How about over there?” she said, pointing with her face toward a table for two along the front window.

“Sure,” he said, letting her lead him.

A cold draft filtered in from the window and he kept his jacket tight. He pressed his fingers to the glass, watching them make marks, then rubbed his hands together above a candle in a squat yellow pot.

“Like to order? Or would you prefer to wait?”

“Bring me something hot, an Irish coffee, OK? No whipping cream.”

She went to fetch it and Paul looked down on the traffic and pedestrians below. The traffic light changed and refugees from daylight and work and what they called normal surged across the intersection. A cocoon of warm solitude suddenly descended and surrounded him like a mother’s love. The voices from the barstools and booths along the wall diminished, the office girls looking for pickups’ shallow laughter vanishing into silence. Suddenly, he was inside. He did not want to move, ever. He did not want to break the spell of the inexplicable slowly expanding soporific bliss.

But the coffee came. The waitress set down a great steaming cup, pulling him back into the room. He smelled the Irish whiskey, saw the whiskey slick on the black skin of the aromatic brew. He lowered his lips, sipping the hot liquid from the edge. The coffee was delicious.

Even hell can be paradise, he thought, apropos of nothing at all, if you really feel it.

Then for no real reason at all, he wanted to cry. He felt a tidal surge of sobbing breaking from an ocean of grief, making him grip himself tightly and hold on, biting his lip. The needling prickling in his head, his eyes, now in his throat, intensified for a moment before going away. It left him a headache, the raspy friction of sandpaper somewhere inside where he couldn’t reach.

“Hey, soldier,” Frank said, arriving at his side, punching his buddy’s shoulder. Paul made himself get up and shake his friend’s hand.

“Captain, hey,” Paul said, sitting back down. The last time he saw the doctor he was in uniform. Now he was wearing a beautiful suit and a really nice expensive tie. He unbuttoned his copious overcoat, pulling buds from his reddened ears, and pressed himself and the bunching coat back into the tight chair.

“Damn but it’s cold. Why do you live in such a god forsaken place?”

Even across the table, Paul heard serious music playing faintly from the buds. He cocked his head but couldn’t make it out.

“It’s a Schubert string quartet,” Frank said. “Recognize it?”

“No,” Paul smiled. “I wouldn’t unless it was in a movie.”

“Actually, it was,” he said, tucking the buds in his jacket pocket. “I forget which, one of the serious Woody Allens.”

“I remember when you found a fiddle and played for us all night. Sitting outside on a moonless night, looking up at the stars. Your music kept us sane.”

“I’m back in my old quartet now. We play together every week. They waited for me, thank God. You’re right, the music keeps us sane.”

The doctor scanned a menu as Paul said, “I like seasons. That’s why I’m here.”

“Yeah, bullshit you do,” he closed the menu, looking across the table with a smile.

“I do. You know what it was like, always hot and sunny. I hated it.”

“Yeah, so did we all, so did we all, but it wasn’t just the climate, was it?”

“Not entirely, no.”

“No, it wasn’t just weather,” Frank said, a little too cheerful.

“You seem jolly. What’s the occasion?”

“It’s been a good day. I did a tutorial on setting up a practice. We just did that, back home, and judging from the feedback, we did it right—you know, how to incorporate, do the taxes, buy the building,” he rubbed his hands briskly, Paul noting that his hands were long and unblemished.

“Are you a surgeon, Frank? I never thought to ask.”

“A surgeon? No. I’m a cancer doctor. I’m an oncologist. I try to keep people who are dying alive – for a little while, anyway.”

“Huh,” Paul said. “Like over there.”

Frank smiled. “In a way.”

“That’s quite a deal. If they live longer, you did it. If they die, it couldn’t be helped.”

“That’s the racket,” Frank admitted. “No argument from me on that.”

“Would you like to order, gentlemen?” said a frisky pretty girl with a little pad in her hands. The edge of fringe on her straw hat gave her face a mildly wild frame, getting Frank’s attention. He looked at her maybe a little long before looking back to the menu.

“Bring us some artichoke dip, and hummus. And I’ll have a manhattan.”

“Thank you,” she took the menu from his hands. “Anything more for you, Sir?”

Paul shook his head.

Frank watched her walk away, maneuvering through the men at the bar by touch, parting them gently with a smile.

“Nice,” he said. “See how she does it? Very slick.”

“That’s how we should have done it,” Paul said.

Frank laughed a laugh that sounded more like coughing. “Different schools of thought on that.” He examined the younger man’s face. “You can’t put it down, can you, Paul? I wondered if … you were able to move on. Not have to talk about it all the time, the way those crazy docs at the vet say you should.”

Paul looked back to the street and fewer walkers below in the cold. A yellow taxi began honking when the light turned but there was nothing for the next car to do. A guy on a walker was taking his sweet time crossing the street against the light. His white hair was blowing in the wind, his lightweight jacket was too thin. What was the Camry supposed to do, hit the cripple?

Frank followed his gaze from the traffic back to his friend’s eyes. “The rules are different here, Paul. You understand that, right?” He sat back as she set down a plate of dip and another plate of pita pieces. Then she turned to retrieve a platter of hummus ringed with garbanzo beans. She asked did he want to refresh his drink and Paul said no. Again Frank watched her move through the small crowd staking out the bar. She was friendly but nobody touched her. He admired her style.

He dipped a little pita piece in the hot dip and chewed with obvious relish.

“Has it been difficult, getting back into a practice that’s … more normal?”

Frank was eating compulsively, his hand reaching for the next piece before he had finished chewing. Paul helped himself to a little hummus while it was still there, scooping up a few beans too. Frank replied through his nonstop munching.

“It’s not as different as you think.”

Paul sort of laughed. “Are you putting me on?”

“No. Think about it. I mean, think about it really. What I do all day, every day, is deal with dying people, Paul, people in extreme pain. Now, let’s go back to first causes. Why does anyone do what they do? For a living, I mean? Not just doctors, anyone. Most people if they have a choice do what they like to do. Isn’t that obvious? So think it through. Boy scout leaders, Catholic priests, school bus drivers – why do lions go to water holes, Paul? Because the antelopes are there.”

“So … I don’t see what you’re getting at, Captain.”

“Stop calling me Captain, will you? I’m not a Captain any more. I’m just a doctor, Paul. And a lot of my patients are dying. But I’m not. You see what I mean? I get to be strong. I’m a reassuring presence. I am alive.”

Paul wanted to nod but wasn’t sure. It must have shown on his face for his friend sighed as if he were explaining to a slow child.

“Things are often the opposite of what they seem, Paul. Being nice is a way to be powerful. Take our waitress,” he gestured with his jaw toward the young woman engaging in flirty banter. “She’s a master manipulator, isn’t she? Well, so are we. You think doctors or cops feel strong and secure, deep down? Hell, no! We feel powerless, Paul, maybe more than most. So we need a role that makes us feel invincible. We get off in our own way on the pain of our patients, on their weakness, their need, their fear. I don’t cause their cancer, Paul, any more than I created the pain in that room. Neither did you. They created their own pain, over there, doing what they did. They thought it was a game. Well, it wasn’t. The sources of the pain may differ, but how different really is what I do here from what I did there? People are in pain and I try to keep them alive for as long as I can.”

Paul didn’t move.

“You asked about surgeons. OK. What do surgeons do, Paul? They cut people. If they did on the street what they do in the O.R., they’d call it assault. You think they just happened to fall into that profession? They had better love to cut people, Paul, because that’s what they do. You think they don’t love the rush? So I’m just saying, I like my rush, too. I look compassionate, sure, but compassion means pity and pity means power. Isn’t that how it was, over there? The job is to prevent untimely dying and manage pain. Over there, we kept it within limits, if we could. And it served a higher purpose, when it worked, didn’t it? We found out things and put them to use. Sure, we made mistakes, just like here. To err is human. But when you stand back and look at the big picture, the biomass seems to be indifferent to the loss of a few people, don’t you agree? Do you weep when you shed a few flakes of skin?

“So don’t make yourself nuts. Binary thinking destroys your peace of mind. It’s all on a continuum. There’s nothing to judge.”

“Gentlemen? Refills?”

“Sure,” Frank said. “One more for the road. You?”

“Yes, thanks.”

When she set down the next round, she leaned over the table, letting Frank catch her scent, letting him think about her a little before figuring the tip.

Paul watched the doctor slide a piece of pita through the last of the hummus and scoop it up. But it dripped on the way to his mouth.

“Damn!” Frank said, grabbing a napkin. Paul shut his eyes, hearing a roar like the ocean in a shell. But the storm passed, and when he opened them again, his companion was blotting his tie which had bunched on his belly like a paisley snake. One button of his fine white shirt was unbuttoned above his belt.

“Frank, why did you call?”

The doctor shrugged. “I wanted to see how you were doing. Nobody here can understand what it was like. They don’t understand why we did what we did. We have to stick together, bud. We have to shore each other up.”

“I’m doing OK.”

“You got a job you like, you back with that girl?”

“The job’s a job. It’s not a career. No, I don’t like it a lot. Terri is still around, yeah. She’s adapting, she tells me, to how I changed.”

Frank leaned closer, his face an earnest, caring invitation. “How did you change?” “I wish I could tell you. I don’t know. I have more trouble than you seem to, getting the different worlds to connect.”

Frank spoke softly, confidentially, like a good friend. “I don’t see it as two worlds. That’s the difference. It’s a sliding scale, like I said. It’s a difference in intensity, mass, maybe, not a difference in kind. We have what we have here because we did what we did there.” He looked directly into the younger man’s eyes. “How much do you tell her?”

“About what we did? Nothing.”

He turned over the check and fished out a couple of twenties. When she took it, he told her to keep the change. “Oh, thank you so much!” she said with a wonderful smile, knocking a decade or two from his age.

“See?” Frank said. “Everybody gets what they want.”

“Thanks for the drinks.”

“Yeah, better get back. It’s good to see you, man. Just stay steady and get back into your life. Call me if you need to talk, OK?”

They rose, the doctor brushing crumbs from his coat. He started to shake Paul’s hand but said “hell, man,” and embraced him instead. He held him for seconds, letting him know that what they had done was OK.

When he stepped back, Paul had tears in his eyes.

“Oh, buddy. Buddy buddy buddy.” He gripped Paul’s upper arms in his strong hands. “Don’t worry about the maybes. I read the papers too but they won’t get to us. The Colonel has our backs and the General has his. It won’t get any higher than this,” he extended his hand above the tabletop maybe a foot. He lowered it then, making it more like eight inches. Then six. “Everything conspires against it getting bigger. When everybody does it, nobody does it. Right?”

Paul tried to smile. “Yeah. Right, Captain.”

Frank gave him a final hug and stomped off down the stairs, plugging his buds into his ears, humming before he hit the street. Paul went into the restroom. The last guy in there had stopped it up and water was all over the floor. The floor was a mess of paper towels, toilet paper, and stinky liquid. Paul straddled the mess on tiptoe and pissed into the full bowl, making it even worse. Then he stepped carefully out and around and scraped his boots on the hardwood floor until they were dry.

He saw the waitress and told her there was a mess in there. She said she would tell someone to clean it up.

“Was everything else satisfactory?”

Paul looked at her smile and saw how thin it was, how fragile she seemed, but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t believe his friend. The young woman’s warmth was authentic. Her delight in life was real. She liked people genuinely, and she loved being of service. She was transparent; she meant what she said.

“Everything was fine,” he replied, putting his hand on her shoulder and giving her a thank you squeeze. The feel of her warm flesh was elemental, an irreducible fact as basic as her pleasure in waiting on tables, flirting with everyone, getting good tips. She smiled and said,” Thanks,” Paul growing suddenly aware of the dreadful accessibility of her flesh. His hand flinched from her shoulder as if he had burned his fingers. She had no idea how soft skin is, Paul thought, how easily torn.

“Stay warm,” she said, turning to another customer, moving away.

He wanted to say something else but it caught in his throat. He hurried downstairs and into the cold.

The walk back to the car seemed twice as long as the walk to the bar. There was no snow so the wind must have shifted. Maybe a few flakes in the air, paper blowing around. The wind was fierce, giving him a good reason to blink away tears and giving him something to think about besides the rising decibel level of the woman’s screams, how the Captain had said “Oops!” when he couldn’t find a pulse.

“I forgot how to cry,” Cerie said, “so I don’t. They say cry if you can but I can’t. They told me to write everything down, even a poem or a song, but who the fuck knows how to do that? I can’t make up a song. I don’t know how to write a poem. I walk around downtown thinking about it but nothing comes. And it’s spring, now. Spring is supposed to be some kind of release but all it does is wind me up. They tell me to let it out but you know how it feels? Like a bone stuck in my throat. I can breathe but it never goes away. I keep clearing my throat, but … it’s not really my throat—ya’know?”

“I know,” Paul said.

“What do you think? Am I fucking nuts?”

Cerie had a light rash extending from her chest up onto her neck. The black t-shirt did nothing to hide it. At a distance it looked like a blush. Come closer, it looked like sun burn. Closer still, close enough to smell her breath, it looked like what it was.

Some of the guys called her a dwarf, but Paul thought “short” was good enough. She was built like a little fullback. Thick strong thighs. Small breasts, barely puckering her shirt. Short and squat, her spout stuck out, he thought with a smile. But she looked all right when the light was down. She kept the lights down whenever she could, but not because of how she looked. How she looked was the last thing on her mind.

“What the fuck are they going to do with us?”

Paul was in the chair beside her in the waiting room. Her breath made him wince, an exhalation of something sour in her gut. It was really bad. He angled his face away and breathed through his mouth. She couldn’t help it. She said they gave her some pills to clear it up but it took time.

“It was easier over there, in a way,” Paul said, turning to talk. But he saw that Cerie had left the room. He watched her eyes, waiting.

She came back into focus in a minute. “You say something?”

“I said, it was easier over there, in a way.”

“Uh. Yeah, in a way,” she said. “There was nowhere else to go. Nowhere to put it. When you got filled up, you went and got drunk. Then you started again the next day. There was no way off the roll call, was there? Did you know Lewpinski?”

“I know who he was. I heard about him.”

“Then you know. Would you fuck with a guy like Lewpinski?”

“I don’t know, probably not. Go along, get along.”

“That’s right. And he made sure you knew what he could do. He did it, too. He did it to Kenny Love, this good old boy from Mississippi? You know Kenny?”

“No.”

“He had a problem with it, OK? So Lewpinski sent him out on patrol. Over and over again, until he got killed.”

“I didn’t know him. I heard about one other, Mickey Felts. I think he was a colonel. He didn’t like it and said so, so they did the equivalent to him, too. From what I understand, he never came back.” He thought about what he had heard. He thought about clouds of dust moving over the landscape like some kind of malicious spirit. He thought about the coppery taste he would get in his throat. “Where were you?”

Cerie said nothing. “I’m not even supposed to say, now, am I?”

Paul shrugged. He looked around the waiting room. The infrastructure etched into the ceiling, sprinklers and wiring and framework, might have easily concealed a bug. For that matter, so could the lamps, the telephone on the check-in counter, anything at all. They could turn on the mic in your cell phone, for Christ sake, and listen to every word.

“No,” he thought it best to say. “I don’t need to know.”

Cerie in her cut-off jean shorts and black t-shirt stretched her hands out in front of her, cracking her knuckles. She kept her left hand out, up where he could see it. With her right thumb she pressed the top of the lifeline.

“You know?” she said. “Know where I mean?”

“Yeah, I think so. That other place, not the one where everybody thinks.”

“That’s right. OK, so … ” Her broken thumbnail traced a line to the center of her palm, then turned right across the lifeline and stopped at the base of her fourth finger. “Ya’know?”

“Ah. Right,” he said. “I heard about that.”

“I bet you fucking did,” she said. “But you didn’t hear the half of it.”

Paul nodded. He extended his own hands and cracked his knuckles, interlacing his fingers, some kind of futile cover move as she continued to do the same. Maybe like yawning they would think it was contagious, cracking our knuckles together like that.

Across the room, a guy who was also waiting had one leg. Paul examined the contraption the guy used instead of a foot. It looked pretty slick. Better than flesh in some ways.

Cerie’s soft belch made him angle away.

“Sorry,” she said. “I know it stinks.”

A nurse appeared from around the counter.

“Cerie Bowden?”

Cerie got up and moved with more grace than Paul expected, her center of gravity low to the ground. He watched her glide across the room after the nurse and disappear into a hallway. The nurse led her to an office. “Make yourself at home. The doctor will be with you in a minute.”

Cerie sat back in the chair, her body sinking into the brown cushion. She closed her eyes. She wished she could sleep but felt as if she had too much caffeine, her closed eyes wide open inside a shell. The dream machinery started to work, making crazy images move around the top of her mind. Maybe she did sleep a little, because she jumped when the doctor touched her arm. She sat up with a jerk.

The dentist said hello and told her to open wide. He wore a mask so she didn’t worry about her breath. He examined her teeth and gums. Some of his poking made her wince.

“You have two cavities,” he said at last, “that need drilling. They’re pretty deep. I better give you some Novocain.”

“Forget it,” she said. “I hate that shit. Just drill.”

The assistant beside him, her prettier face making Cerie aware of what mattered, was looking down at her, looking concerned.

“It’s pretty deep,” the dentist said. “Are you sure?”

She nodded.

“OK,” he sighed, turning to look at his assistant with eyes that shrugged. “Raise your hand if you want a shot. We can always stop and do it, OK?”

Cerie nodded, closing her eyes again and breathing very deeply. She concentrated on her breathing, how it came in, then how it went out. She was lulled by the rhythm and settled down, focusing on a longer out and a shorter in, then a longer in and a shorter out, riding the measured tide. The next thing she knew, it was real quiet; she opened her eyes and the dentist and Miss Pretty were staring down, looking different.

“What?” she said.

“I’ve never seen anyone do that,” he said. “Have you?”

“No,” said the pretty woman.

“Do what?”

“We’re done,” he said. “I just drilled both teeth. We went pretty deep but you barely moved.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. “I don’t know. You just move out here,” she gestured with her left hand.

“Come again?”

Cerie sat up, using both hands to show him. “You take yourself from wherever you are like in the center,” moving her right hand toward the left, “and go out here. You go outside. Then you watch. Like it’s happening to someone else.”

The doctor watched her hands drop to her lap. “I see.”

“Yeah, so you going to fill them now?”

“Yes,” he said. “Compared to the drilling, this’ll be nothing.”

“The drilling was nothing,” she said. “I told you. You just go out of the room.”

“Ah,” the doctor said. “I see.”

But he didn’t see a thing. Cerie wouldn’t waste her breath, telling him a third time. What did it matter, anyway? The guy stayed at the VA. He stayed inside. He never had to leave so he never learned how.

She saw Paul in the waiting room, both of them going out. She told him she got a couple of fillings. He said all they did was tell him to stop grinding his teeth. The pain was real, but nothing was wrong with his teeth, it was all what he did when he fell asleep.

“Fat chance controlling what happens during sleep.” He shook his head. “At least we don’t have to pay for this shit.”

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “Buddy, we already paid for this shit.” She laughed, making Paul think maybe she wasn’t as dumb as they said.

“You want to get some coffee before we split?”

Cerie shrugged so they walked toward downtown until they found a coffee shop. They hadn’t been back long enough to get used to coffee that cost so much. Paul said he guessed you could sell anything to anyone, is how it looked to him.

They sold the goddamn war, Cerie said. People want to believe it. They believe their leaders know what they’re doing. People need beliefs, I guess. They’d rather die than give one up.

“I can’t even begin to talk to one of these fucking assholes about even the littlest shit,” she said. “Nobody wants to hear it. Nobody wants to know.”

They had ordered lattes and Paul scooped foam with a wooden stick, sucking it off the end, waiting while Cerie dumped in a lot of sugar. The coffee shop had a fireplace with a gas fire going although it wasn’t really cold, not for that part of the world. The pastries heaped in the glass looked like a royal feast. Muffins and scones and cookies of all shapes and hues. The lighting was subdued, earth tones off-color, and through the plate glass window, he could see people coming and going and the traffic and buses and buildings behind.

“Booth OK?”

“Sure,” she said.

Cerie sat with her back to the window and scratched her rash with a spoon, using the smooth. She didn’t seem aware that he was watching, treating her body like condiments or a coffee cup, a thing that was simply there. When she finished she used the spoon to stir more sugar into her foam. Then she sipped it, making a face.

“Pretty shitty coffee.”

“Yeah, well,” Paul said. “That’s what they do.”

He watched someone stop and look in the window. He went on alert, searching the guy’s face for a motive or intention. What the fuck was he looking at? The guy examined the people inside as if he had something in mind. He started to leave but stopped and stood at an odd angle, half on his way to somewhere else but not moving. Not going anywhere.

Paul half-rose in the booth, feeling the wood on his back. He looked to see what lay between the window and himself. Damn near nothing, he realized, getting up and sliding out of the booth.

“What is it?” she had her coffee in her hand and was up and out, turning to see the guy at the window. She set her coffee down and stayed facing the window, daring him by her stance to make a move. Her hands were loose at her sides, then her right hand felt for a fork and picked it up. She was almost in a ready crouch, watching the asshole take the measure of everybody in the shop.

Then the guy walked away from the window and down the street. They waited for a minute, then picked up their coffee and went to the back of the shop. Cerie got in so she faced the window across the longer distance, telling Paul, “My turn to ride shotgun,” making him laugh. She sat with her back to the wall and all of the furniture, tables and booths, between them and the street. They both knew now that the rear exit was just around the counter then down three steps to the alley behind the shop.

The nice thing, Paul thought, was not having to explain what they were doing. It didn’t matter that they had little to say. It mattered that nothing had to be said, at all.

Paul went back to his apartment and Cerie went downtown. In her cut-off shorts and t-shirt and thick boots with her short hair and rash, no one would notice her knuckles. No one would see the scars. She was pretty much invisible, she concluded, having been home for weeks now, no one thinking to ask anything, no one thinking to speak to her, ever.

She walked an easy leisurely pace on the uncrowded sidewalks. People stayed inside, here, something she hadn’t noticed before but now saw everywhere, having lived in a place where the streets were crowded, the cafes crowded, the moon huge over the desert and the midnight heat stifling. The moon looked like you could climb a ladder and be there in a minute. The desert moonlight illuminated people, traffic, animals, everything, all the time. Here you could fire a mortar down the street at high noon and not hit a soul.

But an hour, two, three, of walking the downtown streets was enough. A welcome fatigue set in and she headed back to her brother’s place. It wasn’t that she liked it there, but unless she went home to the rented room in the big house they had split into little apartments, there was nowhere else to go.

She made sure it was after dinner. She did not want to sit through another one of those.

“Hi, Aunt Cerie,” the twelve year old said. Lucy was her name.

“Hi, Lucy,” said Cerie. “What are you doing?”

“Chatting,” she said, “and homework, and listening to music.”

“All at the same time, too,” Corey’s wife, Charlene, said, making it sound funny. Charlene was out of shape and always shopping for loose-fitting clothes. She wore sweatshirts and big-woman slacks that had plenty of room for ballast. She seemed to need to overflow, and not only her clothes, like she filled the walls of their small house with wooden shelves, then filled the shelves with dragons – plastic, glass and ceramic dragons – an idiot way to spend more money than Corey could make. Lucy had a computer, a TV, and her own cell phone, and while the computer played music, she worked on a paper for school, plucking quotes from here and there using google, plugging them in, while a box in the corner let her send text to her friends who were always popping up, sending her music and pictures, saying stupid shit, and Lucy asked if Cerie wanted to look at, search for, play with anything, Cerie saying no, she would just watch.

She stood behind her niece for an hour, Charlene watching cable in the other room. Corey wasn’t home and Lucy’s brother Fred was out with friends. She liked how Lucy’s hands danced on the keys, clicking the mouse now and then, changing the background, the music, her friends. They plugged in and played like the flash of a kaleidoscope and Cerie didn’t mind that she didn’t always know what was happening on the screen, it was something to do, stand there and look, her hands on the chair in which her niece was sitting and bouncing as if the computer was a pinball machine and she needed some English to make it work, Cerie engrossed in the constantly changing screens.

“Cerie!” Corey said, not exactly shouting but damn near.

She jumped and turned.

“What the fuck are you sneaking up on me like that? Are you fucking nuts?”

“Christ!” he said, “I been trying to say hello for ten minutes. You were gone again.”

Lucy’s hands hung for a moment over the keys. The music played but her friends had to wait. BRB, she told them, typing. BRB.

“Daddy, be nice,” she said, sounding like her mother who had said the same thing a million times since Cerie returned. “Aunt Cerie was just out of the room for a while.”

“Everybody makes excuses,” said her brother. “All you women stick up for each other all the damn time.”

Lucy went back to full immersion. Corey was standing too close, making Cerie back off. She backed all the way to the kitchen door.

Her dumb-ass brother, a beer in his hand in that stand-there slouch that he thought was so cool, had that goddamn look in his eye again. She didn’t even have to ask. He didn’t have to say a word.

“You don’t know,” she said, her voice real low, so low in her throat that he put down the beer and backed into the hallway without even knowing. “You don’t have any fucking idea.”

He watched the way she said it, the way she held herself, and he didn’t have to know what was going on to know that she only seemed to be inside his house, in the kitchen, his wife in the livingroom watching one of her soaps on HBO, Freddie out there somewhere and Lucy doing her homework, the only sound that made any sense the voices on the TV, the melodramatic formulaic story at least coherent, characters so familiar they seemed like friends.

“There he is!” his mother shrieked. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Look at him—Paul! Paul!”

He was twenty-fourth. His mother had counted. They marched through the door from the quiet transport into a screaming mess, cameras and lights, frantic wives and husbands and kids. The chaos hit him like a shockwave. Paul abstracted out the irrelevant faces in the crowd as he had learned to, looking for anomalies, tells that said he was going to die. The anomalies in the Midwest airport were friendlies, his mother, his brother Buddy, his girlfriend Terri, the rest just faces floating in the glare of lights that followed the booms and cameras in a fierce hunger for the right kind of crying, a smile of relief breaking through visible tears.

Then Terri was in his arms weeping and his mother behind her and Buddy waiting until they had finished. His mother was screaming something but it didn’t matter what. The cameras turned and the bright lights and a falsely perky plastic bimbo thrust a handheld mic in his face.

“Tell us how it feels to be home, soldier!” she said with a Barbie smile. Except her hair was brunette, sprayed on top of her make-up. The microphone poked him like a prod and he knocked it away.

“I just got off the plane,” he said. “I don’t know how it feels.”

“It’s great to see everyone waiting isn’t it,” she said without a question mark. He stared at her set smile. She blinked, made a decision, and turned to a black guy. “Hello soldier!” she shouted and the big guy gave her the smile and nod that she wanted. “Tell us how it feels—“

Terri was still crying, climbing the front of his body as if he were a tree. As if she wanted to find a hole and get inside. His mother was hugging both of them and weeping with what she would later say was happiness that he was back, he was back in one piece, but it sounded like screeching in a horror movie to Paul. As if the girl going down the cellar stairs alone saw the slasher in the shadows.

Buddy waited for them to finish and took his older brother’s hand and gave it a shake.

“Hey, Paul,” he said with a smile.

“Hey, Buddy,” Paul said back.

The lights were a swarm of bees humming in search of a place to nest. Families and friends swarmed in a chaotic swirl, noisy and cloying. Other passengers tried to get past them to get to their flights. The hallways were smeared with wet footprints from snow outside and dirt on their boots. It was hot and dry in the airport like the desert. He wanted a drink. He wished he had his sunglasses handy. Terri gripped his arm so hard it was starting to hurt. His mother was pressing her face into her hands and waddling beside him, his brother walking behind by a step or two, the only one of the bunch that he didn’t want to hit.

The duffel bags came slowly around the carousel and the milling crowds crumpled around the bags, stumbling along the conveyor belt to pull them off. Families and friendlies … felt … strange, was how Paul said it, later, talking to the doc. It was standard to check in at the VA, and he did. It was strange to be somewhere he didn’t have to examine every second the surrounding crowd for a too-thick coat, a face out of phase, some inadvertent movement.

“To be expected,” the doctor said. “Yes?”

Paul shrugged. “I guess.”

The doctor waited.

“And your mother?”

“What about my mother?”

“You were starting to say–?”

He shifted in the chair. Anxiety prickled his eyes and fretted his chest. His chest felt hollow for a moment, waiting for something to fill it. He tried to fill it with his voice.

“She keeps crying. She keeps holding on, and crying.”

“Also to be expected. Yes?”

“It makes me want to hit her. Just shut her the hell up.”

“Also to be expected. Did you?”

“What, hit her? No.”

“Will you?”

Paul rearranged himself. “Who the hell knows what they might do? Do you? Do you think you know what you’re going to do next?”

Doctor van der Haag controlled his emotions, a little too much, Paul thought. “Yes, Paul, I do.”

“Then you’re as much of a liar as they are. You never been there. Have you?”

The doctor’s look was angled away. “I haven’t been in combat, no.”

“I’m not talking about combat, ” Paul said. “Jesus fucking Christ. I’m talking about that room.”

“Ah,” the doctor sat back, folding his hands out of sight in his lap. He smiled across the desk as if a door had opened and someone he liked was waiting inside. “Tell me about the room.”

Terri was in his bedroom naked under the sheets. The cold winter twilight was blue on the drawn shade. The smell of too much food cooking in the kitchen filled the little bungalow. It made him gag.

“Come here,” she said, trying to be sexy. She let the sheet down exposing her breast. Paul knew he was supposed to be excited. He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on her thigh.

“Later,” he said. “After the rest of them go to sleep.”

She tried not to be disappointed but Terri was never much good at deception. She would have lasted about ten minutes, over there.

“I just want to make you feel good, honey.”

Paul moved his hand on her leg. He made a smile. “I know. I know you do.”

He felt as if he were talking to her through a window. He could feel her there, somewhere, under the tented sheet. But he couldn’t be sure it was Terri yet, not by the simple feel of a leg.

She was further away than she ought to have been, judging by the distance to her face, her breast, the angle of her knee,

“I do want to fuck you, honey,” he said, making himself sort of feel his words.

She reached over and let her hand come to rest on his crotch. She felt it stir a little and massaged it lightly, giving him her best smile.

“I am just so glad you’re back,” she said.

He looked at her, waiting for more.

She didn’t intend to say it but did. “Aren’t you?”

“Of course,” he said. “Sure I am.”

Her hand stopped pressing. She rested it there, letting him feel the pressure, and she felt him against the back of her hand. She could not make out his expression in the dim room. It was like he wasn’t moving a muscle or anything inside. Like he was still coming back.

“Hey!” Buddy shouted, knocking on the door. “Dinner’s ready. You two want to come out?”

“Sure,” Paul called. Terri let him stand up and leave the room before she threw the sheet back, dressed in a hurry, and stopped crying long enough to make up a face.

Dinner was predictable. The script had been written. Paul had seen Born on the Fourth on July and The Deer Hunter and Platoon. He saw Jarhead and Three Kings and Full Metal Jacket. He made himself sit through Apocalypse Now. Back in school, they made him read Big Two-hearted River, both parts. So he knew the story. He just couldn’t get his mind around how they kept doing it. Over and over again.

So he made an effort not to think about things he couldn’t understand. He was not going to let himself be one of the stereotypical crazy guys who came back and acted nuts. He knew the routine and refused to play the game.

He sat through dinner and later that night, when his mother finally went to bed, he fucked Terri spasmodically in the chilly bedroom where he had been a kid. It felt weird, doing it in there, after he had gotten his own place before he left. He needed to get his own place again, more than ever. Terri said he could come in with her and her roommates and he said thanks a lot. No, he needed a place of his own, somewhere to be quiet and get away from all the commotion.

“What commotion?” Terri asked.

“The noise,” he told her. “It’s like always pins and needles in the background now, waiting for something to happen.”

“I remember your Uncle Galvin saying after World War II how they took him out to Kettle Moraine thinking he would enjoy the woods and every time a twig snapped he fell to the ground.”

“Yeah, well it’s something like that, but not exactly.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

She was sitting on the bed putting cream on her feet, one leg crossed. He watched her rub it in and looked out the window at the Greubers’ rusted air conditioner still in the upper window.

“It’s waiting,” he said at last. “Waiting for something to trigger. It’s hard to explain.”

She crossed over the other leg and worked the cream between her toes. “Trigger what?”

He inhaled the scent of the lotion and remembered putting wads of cotton into his nose. He was barely able to inhale through the heavy perfume.

The first time he went into the room, four oh four was in the corner, a young naked guy, soaked and cold. It was really cold in there and the air conditioner blasted. The kid was holding himself and shivering. Everyone else wore coats. Paul went over and saw his teeth chattering, maybe he heard them or maybe he made it up. He thought he remembered the uncontrollable staccato. There were cuts and bruises on his body and his arms and legs. Someone had worked him with a razor blade. His eyes looked like animals’ eyes. Then Paul heard a sound like a bug zapper hissing and that set the kid to screaming. He screamed and screamed as Johnny came around with the rod in his hand and thrust it toward him. Johnny and Carl and Frankie laughed as the kid tried to shrink into the corner, disappear into the wet floor. Johnny poked the cold prod into his shoulder, making him wail like a baby.

Perry Mirsky said something in his language and the guy stared up at him, shaking, shaking his head. Mirsky said something else. The kid replied. Then Mirsky again. Then the kid. He jabbered for a long time, anything to keep it away. But Mirsky had the last word.

“Zap him,” he said.

Johnny hit him with the live prod. The kid shrieked and he held it there, the odor of burning flesh fighting with the sweet chemical reek in his nose. Then the kid was shitting all over himself, a greenish liquid ooze. The odors mingled, forever.

“I don’t like the smell of that cream, whatever it is.”

She finished rubbing it into the arch. “You like it when my soft feet are on your chest when you get up like that.”

He watched her finish then pull on high blue socks.

“I don’t like the smell of that cream,” he repeated.

She pushed her feet into loafers and stood up. “Then I better wash my hands,” she said, and she did.

Leaving Paul in the hallway waiting because he didn’t know at the moment where to go, what else he might do, where to turn. He stood there waiting while she ran the water and then it stopped. She opened the door and almost walked into him, coming out.

“We’ll go to the mall and you can pick out whatever cream you like, OK?”

She looked up into his eyes and smiled.

He knew she was doing everything she could. That’s what made him a little anxious. Everybody was doing everything they could. But they lived far away on a plain so vast he could barely see or feel them or hear what they said. The distance and the wind diminished everything. The wind was the kind that never stopped. The plain was without perspective and all of the people out there looked like ants.

“OK?” she said again, coming into what would have been his arms, had they been raised.

He made himself say, “OK.”

Made himself put his arms around her, made himself hold her close.

Made himself be like a puppet, a marionette, making the right moves, saying the right things, being every bit as regular as everybody else.

Outside the door, Paul thought it was more difficult. He had not been inside, not yet, so his conclusion was academic. He knew he didn’t really know. But even so, conclusions had to be drawn. Otherwise there was no firm ground on which to stand.

One must have firm ground on which to stand, Paul decided the first day, the first hour, the first minute. The world had tilted and he had to hold the wall to steady himself, once they left him alone.

Free fall is endurable only when a bungee cord is attached to your leg. Here, there was no bungee cord. When the ground tilted, Paul nearly slid off the edge of the known world into the void.

He was in a room outside the door – that’s how he thought of it, making it more contained. Through the door was another world. But he was on this side of the door. He had been there about an hour.

He was in a room with cabinets on one wall, a book shelf on another, and a sink with water and blood thinned by the water pooling on the porcelain. A towel on a hook above the sink was stained with blood but not the blood of his friends. His friends were the only people on earth between Paul and people who wanted to kill him.

There was also a table or desk and three wooden chairs. There were no windows. On the desk were a pair of pliers, a small ball peen hammer, a telephone book several inches thick, some tangled barb wire, a coil of rope—some tools of the trade left as silent communication to those coming into the room, then out through the door.

When the sacks were walked into the room, they removed their blindfolds and made sure that they saw what was on the desk. They paused to let it register. Sometimes they played a tape of screaming and pleading that echoed faintly through the walls. Some of the ones to be questioned had been kept awake by similar tapes playing through the night—amplified sounds of prisoners walking down the hall, sometimes crying, a door slamming, then screams filling the hallways. Cold naked prisoners huddled in the corners of their cells, when they could, trembling from cold or the sounds of interrogation. Some could not sit down, had to half-sit in cells that prevented positions like standing or sitting or lying down. Some had very bright light and some had none.

After they made sure they saw the tools, they gently escorted the prisoners through the door into the other room. Then they closed the door, leaving Paul alone with his orders and his mission.

A scream was muffled by the closed door. It made Paul shiver. The hair on his neck stood up. It was not just a story, not just something in books, that stuff about the hair on the back of your neck. It was a deep unconscious response to terror, fear that became contagious, spreading quickly through a tribe and eliciting fight or flight. Paul’s heart raced and perspiration soaked his clothes, his face, his hands. Fight or flight, but no one was in the room with him, no one to hit, and he couldn’t escape.

The room was all his. There was nowhere else to go.

He breathed deeply, focusing on his breathing, as they taught him. He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. His sweatshirt said “I Heart the USA.” They never wore uniforms in the work room, never wore tags with their names. Just that, red letters on gray. Making sure the prisoners understood why they were there.

Another scream elicited a lesser response. Becoming habituated, perhaps. Maybe it would be commonplace soon, like sirens in the city, mosquitoes buzzing after a summer rain, the television his mother was always watching in the livingroom at home. Background noise, white noise, his brain safely contained.

Paul thought he heard a faint whimpering through the door. He quieted his breathing, listening. He did not hear the voices of his colleagues who were quiet as a rule. The only one who ever raised his voice, Pony Menudo, was in Turkey, taking a break. Frank, who sustained the process with care, having the medical knowledge, keeping them awake and responsive and alive, never raised his voice. Perry Mirsky, Johnny and Carl had done this for a long time, practicing their craft. They simply did their best to elicit useful data from motherfucking assholes who wanted them all dead. They did it to save the lives of their friends and families back home. They did it to advance the mission.

Everyone talks, Paul was learning. You too will talk, they told him during his training. That’s why we have to limit what you know. You will know what you need to know to carry out the mission, nothing more. The sergeant was in his face, he remembered garlic on his breath and perspiration under his nose. Soldier, you will tell them everything, everything you know, you will make shit up to make them stop, you will sell your mother, so don’t even pretend you aren’t flesh too, boy. Flesh tears. It isn’t rocket science, shit-ass, it’s more like a negative of medical knowledge, black on white. Reverse engineering.”

“What’s a negative?” Paul asked, a child of the digital era.

“Mother fuck!” the sergeant said. “How stupid are you?”

“Very stupid, Sir,” Paul had learned to say.

“It’s a reverse image, you ignorant prick. Where the fuck you grow up anyway? ”

Paul knew what he meant. He understood that flesh-and-blood would do what it could to stop pain. It did not matter what made the pain—burning, electric shock, stress, beatings – it was all pain.

Burning was bad, veterans told him, because afterward, every time you walk into a steakhouse or barbeque, the steaks you once loved have become an emetic. Smell, they said, is ancient, encoded deeply in memory. You will never get the smell out of your brain.

Paul had memorized some of the old catechism, once upon a time, but they made him learn a new one. A threat is a sin, it said. A threat is anything that looks like a threat. A sinner is whatever looks threatening. Anything that diminishes the ability of the sinner to hurt us is a virtue. Ethics is simple. Whatever you need to do to accomplish the mission is ethical. Back home, they do not understand. They can not understand. Only the dogs who protect the sheep from the wolves can understand. We are the dogs. Your mother, your sister, your wife are the sheep.

A scream pierced the door, catching him off guard. He found himself trembling, his hands shaking uncontrollably, so he held one hand tightly in the other and squeezed hard. He was glad that no one was in there to see him.

He sat in one of the chairs and put his booted feet up on another. He closed his eyes and crossed his arms and held himself tightly. He breathed deeply again until the trembling diminished.

The door opened. Paul opened his eyes.

“Hey!” said Johnny, closing the door behind. He went over to a sink and washed his hands and dried them on the towel on a hook. There was blood on his shirt. “This asshole thinks he’s tough.” he forced a laugh. “Who knows? Maybe he gets off on it.”

Paul shrugged. “I don’t even know who’s in there.”

“What does it matter? A sack’s a sack. Potatoes potatoes. Who knows? This one is seven oh four. Six thirty two was last night. Frank calls this one four for short.”

Paul removed his feet from the chair and leaned forward.

“Are you getting anywhere? Is he telling you anything?”

Johnny shrugged. “He will. We’re cutting through the bullshit. He’s learning that nothing he says or does will stop us.”

“Who else is in there, again?”

“Doctor Frank, Perry Mirsky, and Carl. Carl said this is his hundredth. He ought to get a citation.”

“Jesus. Has he been here that long?”

“No, not that long. He’s good at this so he does it a lot. He had an oops deaths last week but that was only his third, I think. Maybe his fourth. I don’t know.

“Frank said it was a stroke. He was tired of saying coronary.”

“He must know what he’s doing. Carl, I mean.”

“He’s worked with a lot of partners. His uncle helped write the manual for Central America in the eighties. He trained a lot of our allies, in DC and down in Georgia. Carl’s been around. He worked with the Uzbeks in Bosnia.”

Johnny laughed.

“You know what he said about them? He says and I quote ‘it was a novelty when the Uzbeks were told that one purpose of interrogation might be to get information.’” Johnny laughed a higher-pitched laugh. “They did it for sport, I guess.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yeah. You hear weird shit doing this shit.”

“So Carl was in Europe?”

“He’s been all over. Central America, Israel, Africa, even China.”

“No shit? China?”

“He was ‘an observer.’ He learned a lot, he says. In Israel, too”

Paul watched Johnny look around the sparsely furnished room, then sit in one of the chairs.

“You ready for a turn?”

Paul turned away, facing a different windowless wall. “I don’t know. I guess. I looked through the book last night—“

Johnny smiled. “The one with the pictures and descriptions of what these guys did? So you know why we’re doing this?”

“Yeah.” The book contained pictures of faces of soldiers and civilians arranged like mug shots. Many were stabbed, broken, burned. “It makes you think.”

“Yeah, it does.”

A long drawn-out scream was followed by a wail and words they could not understand. Johnny said, “Perry knows what he means. He understands.”

The other door, the door to the hallway, opened. The colonel came in. He carried two hoods that looked like ski masks. He tossed them onto the table.

“You might need these later,” he said. “They have a couple of women.”

“Thanks, Colonel,” Johnny said. Things were pretty informal. No salute was needed.

The colonel closed the door as he left.

Johnny saw Paul looking at the black hoods. “You know why, right?”

Paul said, “So you don’t see their faces.”

Johnny said, “Yeah, but especially the eyes. The eyes can get into you. It’s better to blot that shit out.”

“The noise doesn’t?”

“No, not like eyes. Or smells. Smells do.”

A muffle of voices came through the door, some speaking English.

“He’s talking now,” Paul said, not telling Johnny something he didn’t know.

“About time, too.”

They sat in silence listening to occasional sounds coming through the door.

“How long you got?” Paul said.

“What, until I go home?”

“Yeah.”

Johnny frowned. “Is that what you think about, sitting around? How long you got?”

Paul shrugged. “Not often. Sometimes.”

“Don’t think about that,” Johnny said. “Stay in the day. What we have to do. We have to protect the sheep. We keep the wolves away. That’s it.”

Paul said nothing.

The door opened. Carl stuck his head through the open door. “Come on, pussy,” he said with a grin. “We need your magic. Get your ass in here, John.”

Johnny smiled and rose from the chair. The open door allowed the strong odor of excrement into the room.

“Jesus, close the fucking door,” Paul said. “I haven’t got that stuff in my nose.”

Carl laughed. “Stay cool, dude. Always put it on when you come in. You never know when you’ll shit yourself, do you?” Johnny laughed and followed Carl into the room. They shut the door.

Paul tried to put his feet up again but couldn’t sit still. He stood up and walked around the room, looking at the cabinets containing tools, clothing, towels, the shelf on which someone had put a few books, something to read while waiting. Someone had to be outside the door, just in case. This week it was his turn. He was the big dog guarding the other dogs who did the work.

He didn’t hear anything now, just the sound of his own breathing. That and little noises he couldn’t seem to help. Maybe those were the whimpers he thought he heard earlier. It’s all right, he told himself, think about other things. Think about Terri. Think how she smells when you wake up. Think about the pepperoni pizza they deliver from Palermo on T Street, think how it smells when you tear open the paper.

He thought of those things as long as he could. But he was restless, not bored, exactly, but something like it. He chose one of the paperbacks, any one, whatever the fuck it was, and read the words as if they were in another language, not following the story, not knowing what he read.

It didn’t matter. Words didn’t mean much of anything, really. Words were just words. But he forced himself to look at them, shivering now and again, turning pages randomly.

It was something to do while he waited.