The Instrument


1. Allegro

With a shoe in the small of his back, his face down, snarling, and trying to push up into the living room from his trembling elbows, Kay Tian first noticed the bruises on his left forearm on the night his brother came to take back his piano. His face cleared and he drifted for a second, a single roller skate launched from the top cone of a pyramid.

“Wonder how that happened,” said Kay Tian. And then he was smashing back into the carpet, his face grinding into the shag, his teeth snagging on and ripping out curls of nylon from his own milk- and ash-stained floor.

“You are supposed to be listening, not talking,” said Gertie, Kay Tian’s oldest half-brother.

“Sorry, Gertie,” said Kay Tian.

“How come there’s a brick on the floor?” asked Gertie. “A brick from a construction site. Where did it come from? Why do you have it?”

“It’s a brick.”

“Is it stolen, too?”

“I use it to hold the door open sometimes,” said Kay Tian. “Otherwise, it closes pretty hard.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Gertie. “I can’t believe I’ve been robbed by my own blood. Can you believe this? Can you believe what you’ve done?”

“I don’t know, Gertie. I didn’t think you’d mind. I mean, you’ve got three pianos. How come you have THREE pianos?”

“Well,” said Gertie, relaxing on his hips and pondering this. Gertie rested all his weight on the one punching foot, waggling his knee. Finally, reaching a conclusion, he removed his loafer from between Kay Tian’s shoulder-blades.

“Thanks,” said Kay Tian, blinking and rubbing his face.

“You may have a point there,” said Gertie. “I may have had an easier time in life than some of the rest of you kids. As the old one and the smart one. I didn’t think about that.”

Gertie sat down in the only piece of furniture in Kay Tian’s apartment – a sprung lawn chair with a bathmat thrown over the back to cover the splayed holes where the plastic cords had melted and warped.

“But what am I supposed to think?” continued Gertie. “You’ve been stealing things from me my whole life. Maybe you are experimenting. Maybe you and your drug friends are about to launch a comprehensive campaign to clean me out of every last luxury I’ve earned.”

“I only steal little things,” said Kay Tian. “Things that don’t matter. Things you wouldn’t miss, man. And I don’t have any drug friends.”

“I missed my piano,” said Gertie, standing again, his bottom lip poking out. “It’s my favorite piano. The children have their pianos, and then I have MY piano.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Kay Tian. “I need to practice, man. I have to stay in shape. You don’t know how it is. You never get pissed, and drink too much, and get in people’s faces at clubs.”

“What happened to the piano you took with you from home? The one from high school?”

“I left it at this guy’s house after I played one of his parties. But then he got busted for dealing, and all his stuff got impounded and auctioned off. I didn’t have enough money to bid.”

“I’ve still got to take this one back,” said Gertie. “I can’t encourage you. What would mother say?”

“Yours or mine?” asked Kay Tian.

“Ha ha,” said Gertie. “Nice try. Boo, I’m your dead fucking mother, Kay! That’s what she’d say. Ha ha. No, MY mother of course. Your REAL mother, if you have any gratitude left in those slack rubber bones. Anyway, help me move this thing down into my truck. I’m glad I came by: you make me laugh.”

Kay Tian hung his head and picked up his half of the piano. He and Gertie hefted the mouse-gnawed piece of ivory-shunted oak down ten flights of stairs into Gertie’s waiting panel truck. The truck was baby blue, and there was a picture of Gertie on the side smiling and holding his hands in the air as if to say: I can’t believe I just posed for a picture! But if I gotta, I’m gonna smile! The name of his deli (Fast Food Fresh) wreathed his head in a blister-etched golden arc. It was classy.

Gertie closed the back doors of the truck and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Hey Gertie,” said Kay Tian, holding out his forearm like a jeweled dagger to catch the light. “Does this look strange to you?”

“I didn’t do that,” said Gertie.

“I know,” said Kay Tian. “I don’t know how it happened.”

Five dark bruises, all in a line along the top ridge of his left forearm. Eyes on a potato.

“Somebody must have grabbed your wrist when you were reaching into their coat to steal their wallet,” said Gertie, uninterested.

“Nah, then there would only be FOUR bruises, and one underneath. Nobody’s thumb does that.”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” said Gertie, getting into his van. “Come by the shop sometime. I’ll make you a sandwich. Half price. For a half-brother.”

“Okay, Gertie,” said Kay Tian. “Seeya.”

As Gertie drove away, Kay Tian poked each of the bruises in turn, wincing at the little bite of pain that puckered from his arm and exploded in the roof of his mouth. The bruises were soft, but there was something tough under each, like the pit of a rotten peach.

“NOW what am I going to do, man?” asked Kay Tian to his arm.

His arm did not respond.

Kay Tian stared at the curb in front of his apartment building. He had planned to spend the whole night practicing. Now he would have to cancel tomorrow’s gig down at Gary’s -- the bar on the corner where he spent most of his time. It had taken forever to finally convince Gary to let him play. And now he was going to have to back out.

He walked up the stairs to his apartment, sat down in the lawn-chair, and started picking at his arm, watching the world outside through the single window. The window was painted shut so you couldn’t open it, but from ten floors up there was a pretty nice view.

“I have no instrument,” said Kay Tian. “That’s my problem. Without an INSTRUMENT, I’m nothing. I don’t even have drumsticks. If I had drumsticks, I could beat on the floor in time and then they’d still have to pay me, even if I drove everyone out. I don’t even have a harmonica. If I had a harmonica, I could blow on it until people paid me to STOP. Can’t even do that. All I can do is sing, but you can’t just sing. Anybody can do that. Singers are instruments themselves. They are played by managers and agents, and I don’t have one of those. To tune me. To turn my key. To make me spin.”

He put the five fingers from his right hand on the bruises on his left arm. The bruises had started to itch.

“This is a musical city,” said Kay Tian. “Maybe I can find something in the trash.”

He watched the turf wars in the power lines between the squirrels and crows, and watched people come and go at the bus stop in front of his apartment building. He joggled his leg until it got quiet outside, and then he put his hand on his knee and made it stop. He wiggled his toes instead.

“Yeah, down in the dumps,” said Kay Tian. “That’s where I’ll get lucky.”

He stood up, opened the door, breathed a full face of fresh night air, and descended the steps into his neighborhood’s lower intestenate clench.


2. Lento con moto

As soon as he hit the pavement, frustration welled up inside him like a balloon inflating inside his head. Up high, it was easy to disengage. But down on the ground, the sky and the future settled down on your naked shoulders like a scratchy wool blanket – rubbing against the zits on your back and turning your neck red with sharp tangles and useless, sprung Velcro.

Sometimes Kay Tian got stuck on the verge of tears for entire days at a time. He would rub his head on the walls and try to think depressing thoughts, but he simply couldn’t drain away the sadness. If he put the meat of his palms into his eye sockets and pushed, he was sometimes able to squeeze a poor semi-circle’s worth of damp into his hands, but it wasn’t very satisfying.

He screwed his hands into his eyes now, but there was nothing. Oh well.

If he waited, and if he slept enough, eventually the tears would go away and he could relax. And sometimes while he banged on the piano keys he could reverse the burning pain in his forehead and dump the pressurized saline on the inferno he made in his heart, where it would burn off into forgettable steam. It was jazz.

But it was impossible to do this unless he had something to play. He couldn’t reverse the fluid dynamics inside his head without a tune.

For the time being, Kay Tian shrugged off the well of despair, thumbed his nose, snuffled, and started walking, looking for a likely-looking trash can. It didn’t help that his neighborhood was beaten into a shit-shaped rock by the hammer and tongs of drugs and poverty. You couldn’t even really call it a neighborhood anymore – it was tenements on top, and cat food dishes underneath – cheap, ugly restaurants where spoiled meat and old bread were ground into paste and mixed with spice and milk to make it edible.

You slathered it inside tortillas, or lumped it on top of baked crusts with capers and called it pizza. People came home from work in downtown clubs, restaurants, stores, and offices, laid down three hours worth of wages for a meal and a beer to wash it down with, and fell into a coma for another day. Kay Tian had a job like that, but he fought at both ends of his day for time to play, time to practice, time to be a human being for a little while. It was an extravagant life in ways (a life he had to keep secret from his peers who would mock him mercilessly), but it kept him going.

In the alleys, he listened for music. For homemade music. He sniffed for the strains of tunes in the drainpipes between ramshackles, trying to hear between the arguments and crying babies, listening for something sad and dirty.

He needed to find somebody with a new toy, because that meant that they’d thrown out their old ones. There was no other reason to get rid of a good instrument.

As he meandered between buildings and noisy streets, poking into piles of garbage and looking for the tell-tale signs of wood, ivory, or steel, he almost enjoyed himself. At least he was doing something. His arm was itching to high hell, but if he rolled up his sleeve, the wind numbed it enough to make him forget.

Down a dead-end street near the highway, there was a rustle above him and he looked up into the steep ramparts of a forty story apartment building that seemed to sag in the middle like a wet cardboard box. Somebody was calling to him.

It was a ten year old boy, casually smoking a cigarette and drinking a tallboy. The kid looked as if he had been tanned and cut professionally at a leather factory, and his pinched lips and flared nostrils quivered with the smoke and the night’s chill like the damper on a smokestack, ready at any moment to start shrieking – belching fire, erupting in tufts of caky black soot.

“Hey, what are you doing down there?” shouted the kid, instead of exploding. “Going through garbage? You want me to call the cops?”

“No, I’m looking for an instrument,” said Kay Tian, scratching his arm. There were bumps now. He could feel them, but he couldn’t see them in the dark.

“An instrument? What the hell for?”

“To play music, man,” said Kay Tian, softly.

“What?”

“To play music.”

“That’s gay. What kind of music?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You can play anything?”

“Yeah.”

“Any instrument?”

“Yeah.”

“You some sort of genius?”

“No. Yeah, maybe. I’m a genius.”

“Are you ribbing me, slanty?”

“A little bit.”

The kid took a long swallow of beer and then spit it out, aiming at Kay Tian’s feet. Kay Tian raised his hands over his head and scowled. What the fuck, kid?

“I missed on purpose,” said the kid, taking a long drag from his cigarette. The kid glanced over at the window to watch his reflection as he let loose a thin trickle of smoke from his dancing nostrils and then sucked it back into his mouth. The old French inhale.

Kay Tian lowered his head and started walking again.

“Hey wait!” shouted the kid. “Hey, don’t go anywhere.”

Kay Tian stopped a good distance out of the way. Out of spitting range.

“I’m sorry I spit at you,” said the kid. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“What do you want?” asked Kay Tian.

“I have an instrument,” said the kid. “It was my sisterses, but she moved out. If I give it to you, will you teach me to play?”

“I don’t know about that,” said Kay Tian. “Actually, pretty much no.”

“Sure, you can come over and we’ll bond and shit. We’ll have a special connection, you and me.”

Kay Tian stepped closer and put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the naked streetlamps and get a better look at the kid.

“Do I know your mom, man?” he asked. “You look kind of familiar.”

“Who knows? Lots of people know lots of things. For instance, you know how to play any instrument. For instance, I know how to fart out of my armpits.”

The kid demonstrated.

“What kind of instrument?” asked Kay Tian.

“Hold on right there,” said the kid. “I’ll go get it. I was going to set it on fire and videotape myself dancing around and playing it. Like the devil. For the internet. But you can have it instead. Sure.”

The kid disappeared inside, leaving his cigarette smoking on the balcony rail. He came back shortly carrying a battered old fiddle.

“Hey, look at me. I’m a FUCKING musician,” he shouted. He looked over his shoulder at the balcony door, but no one came out. After a curt bow to all three sections of his invisible stage, he started banging on the fiddle with the bow, bouncing his knees and kicking up his heels. He whittled the bow back and forth as if it were a hacksaw, gritting his teeth, shutting his eyes, sticking out his tongue.

A string popped loose. Then another. Finally, the last three strings snapped down the middle all at once with a noise like an iron door twisting off its hinges. The fiddle was completely cut.

“Well shit,” said the kid, looking at the fiddle as if it were a snake on his shoulder. “It’s all busted. Here. YOU take it now.”

The kid held the fiddle over the balcony and leered.

“No!” shouted Kay Tian. “Wait! I can fix it!”

The kid dropped it. It fell crooked to the ground, spiraling awkwardly like a piece of shredded newspaper or a pierced popinjay. It hit with a quiet squeak and cracked in half. It didn’t bounce or jump, but just lay there broken, like the world’s tiniest plane crash.

“You can keep it,” said the kid, tossing down the bow, his cigarette, and the empty beer can for good measure. He went inside.

Kay Tian looked at the sky and tried to find Orion as he counted to ten. It was the kid’s fiddle, after all. He could do what he wanted with it. Break it; smash it. Shove it up his ass and use it as an emergency flotation device if someone were to, perchance, throw him into the sea.

Kay Tian picked up the bow and bent it against his hand.

He put it in his jacket pocket and decided to go home. Sometimes you just knew when you were beaten.


3. Adaggio con brio

He still had no idea what he was going to do tomorrow night. If he skipped out and didn’t show, he would not only be out of a gig, he would have to find a new bar to hang out at. And Gary’s was so convenient.

After he turned on the lights in his apartment and took his jacket off, and after his bones started to warm up, he remembered his arm. He ran to the bathroom and looked at his itching wrist under the lipid fluorescent lights to see if the marks were oozing or if the bruises had melted together.

Under the buzzing gleam, he saw something he didn’t expect. Not hardly. No, not hardly at all.

He let out a whizzing geeeeezus of surprise and sat down cross-legged on the bathroom floor.

Every year that Kay Tian was in elementary school it had been part of science class to grow bean sprouts. Every year, teachers found a different reason to make bean sprouts happen – from aphid counting, to soil manipulation, to in-depth analysis of genetic inheritance over four or five different bean generations. Every year, the students had planted the beans in little terra cotta pots on Friday and watered them with heavy dreams, antsy over the weekend, hoping their beans would be the first to sprout. It was dice, but there was some art to it. There could be timid green tendrils poking out of the soil overnight if you situated the seeds right: not too deep, loose soil on top, the pea-eye facing topside.

Did somebody plant beans in Kay Tian’s arm? Who had watered them? What was the experiment, and what sort of bar graph would he have to make with map pencils?

From each bruise on Kay Tian’s arm, there was a tiny sliver of white filament poking out of the top, curled over exactly like a newly-planted bean sprout.

Kay Tian pinched one of the fibers between his fingers and unsprung it like a pig’s tail. It burned in a crawling shiver along his arm that made his head swim. He let it go and it snapped back to place.

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Kay Tian to his arm.

His arm did not respond.

Kay Tian threw open his medicine cabinet and tore open his Dopp kit. He kept a few tools in there that he had collected over the years. He rooted around until he found a pair of pliers. His first instinct when he saw the fibers growing from his wrist was to get rid of them as soon as possible. He could only deal with them when they were no longer attached. But if he cut the cords at the skin, and there was more wire curled up inside, he would only prolong the pathology. He had to pull the suckers up – roots and tackle -- like weeds.

Kay Tian took a firm grip on the pliers and yanked. The filament gave, sickly, unraveling a full foot before catching and then holding. He pulled harder, but the wire didn’t give. Was it bone? Skin? Some kind of tumor?

Kay Tian went back to the Dopp kit and grabbed a pair of heavy black scissors. He jogged the wire way back into the crotch of the blades and shut his eyes.

“Better cut it,” Kay Tian said to himself. “Got to get rid of this business.”

He opened one eye. His hands tensed on the scissor grips, but didn’t squeeze.

“But I don’t even know what’s wrong with me,” said Kay Tian. “Maybe I should get a second opinion.”

Kay Tian set the scissors down on the floor next to his lawn chair and got a beer from his refrigerator. He took a slurp, set the beer down on the carpet, took a bigger slurp, set the beer back down, knocked the whole thing back, and then got another.

He looked around for his health insurance card, but he couldn’t find it. He tried the phone, but he hadn’t paid his bill in months, and it was dead in his hands. It was late: too late to bother anybody who might have some experience with this sort of thing. He sat back down. Finished his beer; had another.

It wasn’t long before his thoughts returned to tomorrow night’s gig. Maybe this would be a good excuse to get out of it.

“An EXCUSE!” said a voice in the back of Kay Tian’s head. “I thought you wanted to be another buggy damn musician!” The voice echoed and rebounded, nearly making him fall out of his chair. Kay Tian put his head up against the wall, but no, no, yes, the voice was all inside his head.

Kay Tian frowned and put his thumb in his mouth.

“I say buggy because buggy means parasites, and that’s what musicians are,” said the voice. “You want to muck around with gel in your hair and be a scraping, carping minstrel for all the girls and boys with too much money and not enough sense? Well, say hey, Mister Kay: you’re not pretty and no one is going to buy for a second that you’ve got anything deep to say. I mean, look at you – with those glinty pig eyes and that body built for sitting in beanie-bag chairs all day and eating slop. Your own brother thinks you are wasting your time. Your OWN BROTHER: the blood that raised you. If you can’t trust flesh, what can you trust?”

Kay Tian whimpered, and slowly wrapped the long cord peeling from his arm around one finger, winding his arm up in front of him like a roll of kite string.

“So you DO want to be a musician,” the voice continued. “All right, then. All right. No EXCUSES. But if you think you can compete with what everybody else has – talent, looks, a message, charisma -- then you are just deluding yourself. It’s not going to come easy for you. Ha! The whole world is conspiring against you. Why? Because you don’t NEED to be a musician. You aren’t one of the especially gifted -- the bagged and tagged, the God-chosen few. Your name’s never gonna be up in lights, my son, my son. You’ll never slouch in a recliner moodily for the cameras as a perky blonde interviews you about your influences and your latest rehab. Don’t go shitting yourself and dreaming beyond your possibilities.”

Kay Tian drank another beer. Number four; only two left. He lay face-flat against his carpet and put his fingers in his ears.

“I’m still here, you know,” said the voice.

“I know,” said Kay Tian.

“You don’t have any hope, you know.”

“I know.”

“Look, if you want to play music, you will find a way to do it, and you should stop crying about it and buck yourself up, champ. See OPPORTUNITIES where you see EXCUSES. You gonna wait for somebody to hand you your future in a velvet chafing dish with parsley and sherbet? Or are you gonna try and make something out of yourself?”

“Make something out of myself,” sniffed Kay Tian. He gave one of the strings another yank. It was bone. It had to be. For some reason, coils of bone were bursting through his skin in runnels of lanky fiber. He could probably find the exact name for the condition, if he had an Encyclopedia. He remembered seeing something about it on TV once, on one of those shows where people do free surgery on freaks who are trying to get laid.

“Pitiful by a damn sight,” said the voice. “But I’d like to see you try. Maybe you’ve got an instrument you don’t know about. Maybe what you really are is one lucky son of a bitch.”


4. Prestissimo

Kay Tian was sitting at the bar, wearing his heaviest pea coat, when Gary came over and clapped him on the shoulder.

“Heya, kid,” said Gary. “You ready? How about a hug? Wow, what a busy night. How come it’s so busy?”

“It’s another band,” mumbled Kay Tian. “Lotsa publicity, man. They are shooting a concert video. You must have doubled booked.”

“A real band?”

“Looks like it.”

“You heard of ‘em before?”

“Oh yeah?”

“Ha!”

“They like the…ambience of the place. It’s authentic.”

“My bar?” said Gary. “A real band, here? Wow! Maybe I’ll get famous!”

“Maybe,” said Kay Tian.

“Wow! Lookit me! Out in front of the cameras with a real band! Shaking hands with famous people and standing there, right up next to ‘em, right up to my ankles in the goddamn puddle of fame leaking right up out of their shins. Ha ha ha! Yeah, right. Not me, nuh-uh. Look at me. What’s this band’s name? You know ‘em? Can you introduce me?”

“This is your bar!” said Kay Tian.

“Yeah, but I’m not a MUSICIAN,” he said. “It’s different. I’m an authority figure. There aren’t any famous authority figures. Except the president. And I ain’t the president, case you noticed.”

“Maybe I’ll introduce you after the show,” said Kay Tian.

“Don’t look so glum,” said Gary. “Hey, listen, go up there and play right now. It will be great. Come on. It’s my bar, and I say you can play a few songs tonight while the crew sets up.”

Kay Tian frowned.

“So what are you gonna play? What kind of equipment do you need? And how come you are holding a brick?”

“Just one mike, man,” said Kay Tian. “And never mind about the brick.”

Gary shrugged and walked over to the stage, cutting his way through the crowd of slouching pastel teenagers, and the middle-aged regulars in red-hot primary who were leering and snapping at them.

The place was full to capacity. There were even people sitting on top of the bar, waggling their feet and talking about last week’s shows and how much better they had been. A video crew was assembling a tripod in one corner and a man in horn-rimmed glasses was busy putting xes on the ground with orange tape, marking the camera range for the band and ensuring that they wouldn’t leap out of the frame at an inopportune moment and kill a solid gold rockumentary rockportunity.

Gary set up the mike stand and stood there grinning. He waved. He laid his finger aside his nose and gave a big thumbs up to the guy with the camera. The guy, barely awake, closed his eyes and nodded slightly.

Gary waved Kay Tian over to the stage and put his hand over the mike as Kay Tian climbed up next to him.

“Big chance, kid,” said Gary. “Where’s your piano? Weren’t you gonna play piano?”

“No piano,” said Kay Tian.

“What should I introduce you as?”

Kay Tian looked at the crowd. Someone called his name, and he scanned the faces till he found them. It was Gertie in shorts and knee socks, oblivious to the scorn of the other patrons, carrying Kay Tian’s half-nephew Seth on one meaty shoulder. Gertie’s curly, bright red hair had been smoothed down in strokes away from a pink, glistening center part. He wore a blue windbreaker with his deli logo on the lapel.

Good luck, shouted Gertie. Seth crossed his eyes, and lolled his head against his shoulders.

“Just call me Kay,” said Kay Tian to Gary. “That’s my name. I’m nothing bigger than myself.”

“Oooo,” said Gary, laughing. “Humble.”

Gary leaned into the mike.

“Here he is, everybody!” he shouted. “Let’s all give it up for KAY! My very good friend! LIVE, tonight, RIGHT HERE, for YOU down at Gary’s bar! Enjoy yourself ladies and gentlemen: and remember to drink up, tip your bartenders, and come back again next week!”

Gary gracefully moved aside, clapping. There were a few scattered bursts of applause, but they seemed more hostile than laudatory.

Kay Tian shrugged off his jacket and kicked it away from the stage.

He dropped the brick he was holding.

Tied around the brick in five knots were the five strands of flesh that stabbed from the inside of his arm. The brick hit the floor with a weak thud. Kay Tian lifted his arm so that the brick dangled, grimacing and sweating with the pain of the pull.

In his other hand, Kay Tian held the bow from the broken fiddle. The brick anchored the strings from his arm and tightened them just enough. As soon as the brick stopped swinging back and forth, Kay Tian lay the bow aside the strings and began to play.

Even though he wanted to, and even though each note felt as if it were being pried from him by force with a flathead screwdriver, he never started screaming.

When he was done, no one remembered to clap. Kay Tian knelt to pick up the brick, stumbled as he bent, and collapsed, knocking over the microphone.

How to Panic


I couldn’t believe it. He was back, again. It was the man’s third time in the store today, and something like the fifteenth time this week.

He slipped in through the sliding glass doors as if stunned that the automatic sensors would still register for his palsied, atrophied frame. I even heard him bawk like a chicken – once, sharply; surprised, clueless. He stared at the open doors with confusion, and only moved inside when they started to close again.

“Have you seen this guy?” I said to Madalyn. She was working check-out.

“I’ve seen him around,” said Madalyn. “He’s street. Comes in here a lot though, doesn’t he? That’s kind of weird.”

“He not only comes. He BUYS.”

“What does he buy?” asked Madalyn.

“Watch,” I said.

The man was tall and thin – but whispery, like a suit of clothes without a body. He wore brown knee socks, a camouflage t-shirt and shorts, and bright orange wristbands that were as fluffy as they were flagrant. He had long arms that twitched and twisted, covered in curly white hair that matched the kinky mop on top of his battered and crispy head. His nose had been broken several times. It was inflated and listed severely to the left. Thin lips worked and chewed at the tip of his chin, and his eyes moved back and forth across everything like a typewriter tube, clacking words across each item for later filing and retrieval. He writhed when he walked and left muddy footprints from thick-soled canvas shoes that were insensible, beaten, and slapped the ground as they peeled apart.

“Do you want me to kick him out?” asked Madalyn, nervous.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “He may be our best customer.”

The man stopped in the middle of the store, looking at the shelves of electronics and walls of display car stereo equipment, turning slowly as if hanging from a rope. I thought he might fall down. Instead he brought a quivering hand to his mouth and sucked it inside his clenching lips.

He bit it. He bit it hard, and then let it drop back to his side like a piece of spoiled fish. I think he even drew blood, but his hands were so pinched and mottled with other sores and abrasions that it was difficult to tell.

His eyes cleared and he disappeared down one aisle. I looked at Madalyn.

“I am going to find out what’s going on with that guy,” I said.

“He looks dangerous,” said Madalyn. Madalyn was eighteen, and had cut all of her hair off when she decided that she was a lesbian. Then she had dyed the ends white, pierced everything that she could pinch between her fingers, and tattooed the rest. She had demanded a job, and I had hired her, surprising us both. She worked five days a week after school, and she said that she was putting money aside for college. I respected that. Not everyone’s dream was to manage a suburban electronics store.

It was good. We got along. We had the same taste in women, I think.

“Nah, he looks DISEASED,” I said. “Not dangerous. Infectious; not threatening.”

“That’s part of the genius of a catching sickness,” said Madalyn. “You feel pitiful for the person suffering, so you try and help, and then you get it, too. The best thing you can do is to let a person die, wait awhile, and then burn the body. Otherwise, you are going to get somebody else sick, probably somebody you love who tries to help YOU, and so on, and so on.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going to find out what his deal is.”

There was a grunt from the back of the store and the man returned. He was carrying a television in a chest-sized cardboard box. He staggered under the weight, but his elbows were locked and he had no trouble bringing the box forward to the counter. He wheezed a little bit, but didn’t choke or stumble.

“I want to buy this,” he said.

“That’s the third television today,” I said. “What’s going on, man? What’s the story?”

The man reached into his shorts and pulled out two hundred dollar bills. They were fresh and clean. Folded, not crumpled.

“I want to buy THIS,” he said again, dark stripes forming on his forehead.

“You have to tell me why,” I said pleasantly. “Or I’m not going to sell it to you.”

The man grunted and walked away, back to the aisles. I looked at Madalyn. She shrugged.

The man returned shortly, carrying a blender.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I want to buy this.”

“Look,” I said. “You can buy whatever you want. I just want to know WHY. You come in here two or three times a day and buy TVs and radios and blenders. You can understand how strange that is, can’t you?”

The man shuffled.

“Like,” he said. “This ain’t the only place I come, you know. I could go sommeair else, you know.”

“I don’t mind selling you whatever you want,” I said, smiling. “But the mystery of it is killing me.”

The man stared at his shoes.

“It’s no big secret, like,” he said. “I just need the money, so.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You are SPENDING money,” said Madalyn. “Not making it.”

“I’m not buying stuff for me, you know,” said the man. “What would I do with all this stuff?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said, gritting my teeth.

“What’s your name?” asked Madalyn.

“Pat,” said the man.

“I’m Madalyn.”

“Okay,” said Pat.

“So who are you buying it for?” I asked.

Pat shut his eyes and put his hand back in his mouth.

“I don’t know her, like,” said Pat. “But she don’t know what things cost, and she don’t leave, like.”

“So you are working for somebody else, then,” I said. “I guess I have to believe you.”

Pat started waddling back and forth on his feet, his shoes slapping the ground and a line of drool slipping out of the corner of his mouth. He smelled like whiskey, but I don’t think he was tossed yet. He would be soon, if he was making some kind of percentage here.

At least he wasn’t spending his pension, or charity from some guilty relative. I felt better about that.

“I want to buy the television,” said Pat, pointing. “THIS. Are you going to sell it?”

“If you need help, you should get it,” I said. “Whoever this person is, she isn’t helping you. She just thinks she is.”

Pat started to bite his hand again, sinking his teeth hard into the webbing between thumb and forefinger. He bit deep, squeaking, the pupils in his wide eyes retracting to pinpricks. His orange wristband slid back along his arm and rested on his elbow. Blood followed in a thin trail, navigating the forest of his white curls like a snowmobile.

“Jesus Christ!” said Madalyn. “Get him out of here!”

“He’ll be back again in a few hours,” I said.

“Then do what he says,” said Madalyn, looking around the store at the other customers who had stopped browsing and were staring at us. “We’ll close early or something.”

I took Pat’s hundred dollar bills and rang him up for the television. He stopped biting and smiled. His eyes swam again. I set the change on the counter and he picked it up. I didn’t want to touch him.

“Okay,” said the man. “Thank you.”

He hefted the television, bowed his legs, and lurched squatly out of the store, stopping once again at the sliding doors to seize them with a hateful glare until they started to close, at which point he yelped and scooted onward. Then he was gone, out into the street, headed into the neighborhood behind the strip mall where we worked.

I pulled my nametag off of my shirt and set it down on the counter. I took my keys out of my pocket and handed them to Madalyn.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to follow him,” I said. “He can’t be going far. I’ve got to talk to this person who is buying these goods off of him. Perhaps we can arrange something that won’t fund a homeless man’s drinking habit. I’ve got to see what’s going on here.”

“Do you really want to get involved?” asked Madalyn.

“We are already involved,” I said. “I’ll be back in a minute. You are in charge. If you need change, call down to the pet store. They will send somebody over.”

“This is dumb,” said Madalyn.

“I have to keep selling him things because he pays,” I said. “But I’d rather not sell to him if I don’t have to. It’s simple.”

Madalyn groaned and I scampered outside, un-tucking my blue manager’s shirt and tossing it into the passenger’s seat of my car as I passed.

I brought the blender. It fit right under my arm.

I could see Pat struggling with the television on the corner at the crosswalk and I waited for the light to change before following.

Pat couldn’t look around behind him while he was carrying the television, so he was easy to follow. I tried to stay a block behind as he waddled into the tree lined streets of the housing settlement. It was late afternoon on a Sunday, so there were quite a number of men and women out working on their lawns and enjoying the day’s dying light. They didn’t notice me at all, but Pat was something of a spectacle. Kids stopped running through sprinklers to watch him pass, and old men and women on porches leaned against each other from their deck chairs to whisper.

I was frankly surprised that no one had called the cops on him yet, since he must go back and forth from electronics stores to his destination all day long. It was a wealthy neighborhood, and an old one. But there was something hypnotic and disarming about him. You could just tell that he was harmless.

I felt bad for him as he struggled with the bulky box, sweating and muttering – but he was tenacious. I marveled as he weaved his way through sidewalk cracks, yippy neighborhood dogs, and stray roller skates as if guided directly by the crooked, black finger of providence. There were easier ways to earn drinking money. Begging, for one. Something else was going on here.

After twenty minutes, Pat turned left into a secluded cul-de-sac. I stopped at the bottleneck and peered into the gloom of the houses, leaning against a wrought-iron mailbox and trying to blend in with the foliage on the shady side of the street.

A cul-de-sac was something like a stagnant pond when it came to neighborhoods. They always unsettled me. A terminus, the idea was that a cul-de-sac would promote community involvement by not having drive-by traffic. Maybe this was true fifty years ago, when people had barbecues and tried to seduce each other’s spouses out from under one another with fascinating, twisted schemes that left a whole generation with divorced parents. Nowadays, cul-de-sacs were desert islands. Dead places, where dark houses, like numb flesh, peered out from exile, jealously watching the vibrant and circulating places of a neighborhood; crouching, dead junkies in alleys, sprung jacks in boxes, suffocated vipers in mailboxes; the time to pounce past, waiting for oblivion, to be bulldozed, to be torn down and forgotten. Yes, I am a house! No, I don’t fucking want to be!

The house that Pat lurched toward with the television was a pink Gothic contortion, with heavy gables, three floors, year-round Christmas lights and brevets -- architectural tumors on the shoulders that poked out and smiled. The lawn was closely cropped and green. There were flowers in the beds, and despite the gloom, the house shined – radiating an electric crackle that I could feel in the hairs of my arm and in the fibers of my clothes against my skin. Even the grass seemed to be pulled toward the house, causing me to take an involuntary step away from my hiding place before I caught myself.

Pat limped down the walkway that led to the frosted-glass front door. He set the box down on the porch, where an overhang shielded pots filled with aspidistra and ficus. He leaned over backwards – popping out his sciatic nerve and clacking his teeth.

He rubbed his hands together, straightened his back, and then rang the door bell.

Then Pat got down on his knees beside the box and gently lowered his head until it was nearly resting on his chin. He put his hands down on the ground in front of him, as if he were injured or searching for a missing contact lens. It was impossible to tell whether he was kneeling because he was exhausted from his walk, or as a sign of deference.

After a few tense seconds, somebody came to the door and slowly opened it. Pat remained where he was on the ground. A pale, well-coiffed face peered out from the darkness of the house. It was a small woman – early forties, with shoulder-length blonde hair. She was wearing a red blouse, and had on a green skirt that drooped a few inches below her knees. No shoes, but she wore pearls, and earrings, and she was made-up as if she were about to head out to a formal dinner.

She walked slowly onto the porch. She looked at the television, and then walked back inside as if in a stupor. She returned with a pocketbook and pulled out a fat hunk of bills. She set them on the ground beside Pat (who had yet to move or even breathe), picked up the TV (using her knee to get a good hold), and then disappeared back into the house.

Pat waited, and then slowly stood up. He picked up the money, but didn’t count it. He looked up into the sky. He shook his head and punched his own ears. And then, muttering and writhing, he started walking toward me. I ducked behind a Range Rover and watched him pass. He didn’t notice me, and he went quietly on his way, heading the opposite direction from where he had come into the neighborhood. This meant that he was either done for the day, or that he was going to hit some other electronics store.

That was good at least. I didn’t want to worry Madalyn, or aggravate her while she was all alone at the shop with another visit from the deranged man.

He was gone, though. In fact, I’d never see him again.

After he was out of sight, I crept closer to the house. The first thing that caught my eye was the mailbox: it was a relatively normal stainless-steel job with a flap mouth, but it was completely overflowing. There was a crate underneath that was catching cascading letters. I bent down and picked up one of the pieces of mail – a manilla envelope that had bent corners and something like seventeen canceled stamps. “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Fazio,” it said. But someone had gone through and struck out the “Mr.” and the “Thomas” with a black marker.

I looked at the box of mail.

Each piece was the same. Sometimes the marker was blue instead of black. Some of the mail was mottled with running ink, probably on account of being left in the rain.

She wouldn’t open the letters, but she would take the time to scratch out her husband’s name? That was dedication. There was a battle of wills going on here, but I suspected that the postman would give up soon. Perhaps Mrs. Fazio would just move the plastic trash barrel from the side of the house and wedge it permanently under the lid of the mailbox until the post office got the idea.

I walked to the door and raised my hand back to knock. I stopped myself. I reached for the doorbell, instead. I stopped myself again.

There was a buzzing coming from the door that I could feel in my chest. It seemed to percolate from underground – like mist coalescing from the loam of an evening swamp as the sun fell, and the temperature tanked.

I started to feel a bit nauseous. I knew, for a fact, that there was a colossal amount of consumer electronics piled in this house. The whole place could be wired.

I slowly backed away from the buzzing porch and walked over to the side of the house where the meter was. I took a look. All three dials were spinning around like biplane propellers. I could feel heat steaming from the metal tube. What was going on?

The hum was louder here, but there was something else filling my head with static. Voices. Loud voices, as if there were a party.

I walked over to the nearest window and tried to peek in between the curtains. The blinds were drawn, and, furthermore, a thick black curtain that appeared to be made of leather or burlap hung behind them. I didn’t see it at first. It was nearly invisible, tucked as it was behind the curtain and blinds, and blending in with the ink of the cul-de-sac’s densely grown hedges and sycamores.

Was I the first person to notice this shell? How long had this barricade against light and life been raised?

I noticed that the gate leading into the backyard was open. No dog. Still carrying the blender, I walked into the unexceptional backyard. There were rocks. Patio furniture. In one corner, grackles were perched, staring at me, on a stone fountain with an Ionic trunk. There was a rusting steel barbecue pit.

The kitchen window was left wide open. I walked up to it, compelled. The curtains drifted in and out, buffeted by the blowing and sucking of the houses mysterious drafts and currents. There was still a heavy black curtain, but it had been rolled up and tied with a red-twist tie – the kind you use to seal up a bag of bread or a cheap trash bag.

I stuck my head inside the window and set the blender down. The smell was overwhelming. I put my hand over my nose and tried again.

“Hello?” I said quietly. “Anybody home?”

For some reason, it felt less strange to do this than go in through the front. Maybe because that’s what I’d seen Pat do.

The voices were deafening.

“Anybody home?” I shouted again, louder.

The kitchen was a wreck, despite a beautiful oak table and rack of marble shelves that propped up expensive-looking bits of stained glass. There were plates piled on the floor, crusted with half-eaten convenience store lasagna whose tins lay nearby, and the corpses of macaroni and cheese dinners, which had turned orange and hard, glinting in the sunlight like baked paint. Florid trash (tampons, toilet paper, plastic tubs of frosting, tubes of toothpaste, pizza boxes, empty cans of vegetables), broken dishes, and clothes were knee high on the tile floor in places, and there were shifting constellations of cockroaches competing for space with jet trails of sugar ants along the walls.

I could hear rustling in the garbage. Rats? Squirrels? There was a clean crescent around the kitchen’s single swinging door. I assumed she was simply opening the door up, and tossing her trash inside as if the whole room were a dumpster. She had opened the window to do something about the smell, but it was an open invitation to the neighborhood’s opportunistic critters.

Like me.

Experimentally, I put my hand on the window frame. It buzzed, but nothing else happened. I wasn’t blown backwards into the backyard like a beer can out of the back of a pickup-truck.

I lifted myself over the window-frame and entered the room, trying not to let any of the decaying trash cling to the cuffs of my pants.

“Hello?” I shouted. “It’s the man from the electronics store. I’d like to talk to you.”

There was no answer. Instead, the voices roared like the imprisoned thoughts of lost souls let loose to shriek through the thin eardrums of un-revenged tormentors. I walked to the kitchen door and pulled it open.

A hallway.

I crept down the darkness, through softly flickering strobe. Crazy lightning flashes lit up pictures that had fallen off of the walls. Wedding pictures that had been busted. Pictures of a happy couple sitting on a boat and drinking martinis. Friends and well-wishers mugging as a man held up a bowling ball and kissed it.

All broken – the glass swept to the sides so that you could walk and not cut your feet.

I saw at least two empty pill bottles. I picked one up, but I couldn’t read it in the stabbing light.

I walked into the room at the end of the hall.

Mrs. Fazio was there imprisoned in a nest of bright orange cords and remote controls. Naked. Crouching. Her hands over her ears. Still wearing her pearls and ear-rings.

Tears fell from her face in rivulets that looked like spit. Her head grazed the ground as she leaked. She looked as if she had been punched in the eyes, and by miracle, her blood was clear. Sopping. Falling.

Inside the room -- the house’s capacious first floor den – four hundred televisions were stacked to the ceiling along the walls. Extension cords ran down the stairs and from bedrooms, along the ceiling and looped around the chandelier. Blenders, toasters, massage devices, and stereos were all close inside the ring of televisions stacks, like gilded wainscoting.

The lights were off.

Nearly every television was turned on.

Voices screamed and squawked; pitched and hurled themselves at us.

“Tomorrow only, fresh peas, a dollar ninety nine on sale for.”

“He’s a moron. A moron and an imbecile. You can’t have those kind of tax cuts under a deficit with so much.”

“Oh, mercy. Oh mercy, me. The power and the glory. We live alone on the rocks that burn like.”

“Catch ‘em all while you can, available with purchase from now until.”

“One teaspoon of vinegar…don’t burn it…and then swirl and stir until.”

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

The laughter was the killer. The laughter was constant, and it shifted around the room as different quadrants of tube caught the competing bleats of different studio audiences. But it was constant, moving across the television sets like fireworks, or flashbulbs. The different pitches of laughter caught you up in a rolling boil and pushed you in the chest, making you stagger.

“Send your rag, and your love gift to 709 Cherry Tree, and Pastor.”

“Who sent you, Rico? Who pushes the buttons? Who makes the calls?”

“Better stay indoors this weekend. It looks like rain is in our future. But more on that after we.”

“Oh my god, look at that dress, who does she even think she is wearing what.”

And the faces that flickered. Faces filling each TV screen, coming and going, zipping and dashing, screaming and smiling, leering and nodding. There were explosions, and car crashes, and the crawl of statistics against shimmering blue foam.

“The state department released.”

“But I’m the one with the outboard.”

“Can’t you see that I’m trying.”

“The opportunity that only comes.”

“Foreign sanctions threaten.”

“Tha baby! I knew I forgot something. Well.”

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

And the blenders buzzed, and the stereos blared music you couldn’t hear. It was worse than static because it wasn’t random. There were patterns: blocks of television crescendoed into commercial, and the volume peaked for products, and the lights flashed incrementally faster.

“Be the eleventh caller and.”

“Good, good, good, good vibrations.”

“Did you see that! What a play! And now Miami has possession, with only.”

My teeth rattled in my head and my stomach shrunk into a finger-sized curlicue under my ribs.

“Excuse me,” I said to no one but myself.

Mrs. Fazio raised her head anyway.

She started to scream. I could hear her, even though I shouldn’t have been able to in the fat electronic madness. Her eyes were blank, and she screamed – her face etched with black streaks and her lips smeared down her chin and into her nose. She held it, and I had to shut my eyes.

It held -- the noise of it -- until it broke. Her lips quivered. But instead of sobbing, the chest wracking stuff that filled lungs and tore up sweaters, there was only another scream, until she lowered her head and began to weep silently once more.

“Excuse me,” I said again, this time stepping into the room.

She saw me. She turned and stood up, shocked, stunned – but still not really there. I was just another face. Just another creature making words and trying to flash her my face over and over again until it was time to break.

“I don’t think this is good for you,” I said. There was no way she could hear. She was gone, blank, a mirror, a marble, a piece of plastic wrapped around a crystal goblet.

She walked toward me, slowly. I wanted to run, but I didn’t.

She stood there, in front of me, breathing, leaking. Instead of running, I took off my own clothes. Then, I got out a comb from my back pocket and made my hair as neat as I could.

I put my hand out. Her own hand twitched at her side, but didn’t move. I grabbed her, I hugged. I smooshed her up against me so tight that she had nowhere to go, and buried her ears in the sinews of my arms.

And then the sobs came, wet against my chest, rough against my hair. She howled, and then slept, as we slowly knelt to the floor and sat very still -- very still for hours.

Fear of Children


The tiny class of students sat very still and quiet on their individual squares of carpet.

In came Miss Green, clutching and twisting her hands behind her back as if she were wringing out blood from a towel.

“Look at all these little lambs,” said Miss Green. “Good morning, little angels.”

“Good morning, Miss Green,” said a few of the sleepy 4th grade girls. The boys gawked and fidgeted, looking stung and out-of-sorts in their clean, bright clothes. It was the first Sunday school after vacation, and she recognized many of the pert faces from the summer pasteurization process.

Mrs. Gable in Church Administration insisted that 4th graders were the easiest of all the grades, and that they would be the best to start on. Looking over them, Miss Green relaxed – her shoulders bending and sinuses clicking. These children were big enough to behave, and young enough to be afraid of her for merely being an adult.

“Say, Miss Green,” asked one of the few troublemakers – an energetic, weedy fellow named Owen. “When do we get to be old enough to go to real church? What grade?”

“Shut up, Owen,” said his friend, Lucas. “You still have to go to Sunday school, even if you go to real church. It’s like, double church.”

“Sucks,” said Owen.

“Big church is for big people,” said Miss Green. “Now let’s all go around the room and we can talk about what we did this summer before we start today’s lesson.”

“Miss Green!” said a short, pale girl named Brianna. “Miss Green! I have a question for you.”

“Yes, darling?”

“I brought my friend Amanda with me today. I am supposed to ask you if it is okay that she stays here. She slept over last night, and so she had to come to church with me this morning. But she doesn’t go to our church.”

“I can wait outside,” said the girl in question.

Miss Green looked at the interloper. She was an unfortunate girl. Brianna would be trouble soon for the boys, but Amanda had lanky, oily blonde hair and a sour expression pasted across thick lips. She was no charmer. She looked like a girl that would really need religion one day as a comfort and an answer.

Miss Green wondered whether or not Brianna’s parents were taking matters into their own hands and adopting Amanda’s religious education as their own paschal responsibility. If so, Miss Green heartily approved.

“Of course you can stay with us today, Amanda,” said Miss Green. “But let’s not make a habit of it unless we get proper authorization and your mother signs a release form.”

“You have to pay the tuition fees for books, and juice, and crayons,” explained Brianna.

“So what church do you go to then, darling, if not here?” asked Miss Green.

“Amanda doesn’t go to church,” said Brianna. “She says it’s stupid.”

The class giggled. Amanda turned bright red and lowered her eyes. Not to be outdone, Miss Green reddened up as well, looking as if she had been punched in the neck.

They say that a blush is the body’s reaction to the chemical squashing of untenable emotions. If so, then Amanda was swallowing, digesting, and crapping out buckets of anger through the pores of her face. Anger of a highly refined and complicated sort.

Miss Green, for her part, was processing an equally complex emotion in an equally staggering amount.

Fear.

“I’m sure she doesn’t think THAT at all,” said Miss Green, finally. “Shame on you, Brianna, for saying such a THING about your friend.”

“I didn’t say it!” said Brianna, standing. “She did! I told her she was wrong. I told her you were smart, and that her parents were going to hell.”

“Brianna!” said Miss Green. “Be nice!”

The class snickered. Hands were raised. There were confused looks, and children restlessly scooted carpet squares across the cold tile floor like dogs rubbing their assholes in the grass.

“Of course,” said Miss Green. “Anybody can go to hell if they are evil. But evil people always have a chance to be saved. That’s the glory and power of our Lord.”

“Amen,” said a few children, twitching as if their underwear had been snapped.

During the rest of the week, the Sunday school classroom was a nursery. There were short shelves sheathed with golden books, colored plastic donuts on rocking plastic dills, fluffy things, interlocking people, tiny pots and pans, board games with pegs, flash cards, beeping toy telephones, plastic swords, plastic shields, plastic helmets. No plastic nails or crosses. No tombs, slabs, or burning brush. There WERE Bible character cut-outs tacked up on squares of corkboard, but no stuffed whore of Babylon to cuddle up to.

“Say,” said Owen, standing up and smoothing out the creases in his khakis and then sitting back down, this time hugging his knees. “I went to Italy over the summer with my dad’s company. People don’t go to church over there, either. Instead, they go to museums with all these dead bodies.”

Amanda was in the same English class as Owen. He had problems sitting still there, too. Amanda was glad to know that the problem was universal, and not merely a function of public education. That Owen truly had to run the show everywhere – even when God was looking.

“God is a murderer,” said Amanda, surprising herself. “He wakes some people up to show them the things he has done. To have company for the blood and misery of a world that shouldn’t be. To make them understand his crimes, and then make them agree.”

“Holy shit!” said Lucas. He covered his mouth with his hands, but no one had noticed.

“Where did you ever hear such a thing?” said Miss Green.

“I don’t know,” said Amanda. The class giggled.

They knew Amanda was in trouble, and she wasn’t even a part of them.

“You didn’t get that from your parents, I hope?”

What could Miss Green do? Nothing.

“Not parents,” said Amanda. “It’s just my mom. I don’t have a dad.”

“So your parents are divorced,” said Miss Green, relaxing. “I see.”

Miss Green looked around the room. A big bear of a boy named Jeremiah was picking his nose like it was a lock he was trying to crack.

“So what did you do this summer, Jeremiah?” asked Miss Green.

“Don’t know,” said Jeremiah.

“My mom also says that God is like a wife beater,” said Amanda. “He is an abusive man that we should all try and avoid, but we always go back to him, because we are afraid. And we know that he will beat us, so there is comfort in the raw predictability. The rest of the world doesn’t have any easy answers, but God gives us easy beatings.”

“Amanda,” said Miss Green. “I think you need to wait outside until class is over.”

“Yes, ma’m,” said Amanda.

She stood up. She looked at Owen.

“My mom is a cop,” said Amanda. She walked to the door, opened it, and stepped outside. The air outside was heavy and fresh. The gust of in-blown air made the room smell like pillowcases.

“Can I go, too?” asked Brianna, raising her hand. Miss Green ignored her. It seemed like the right thing to do. Brianna put her hand back down.

“Alright,” said Miss Green. “That was interesting. And it leads right into today’s lesson. I want to talk about what God mean to YOU.”

Everybody was silent, remembering what Amanda had said.

“Jesus,” said Jeremiah. He had forced his way into the chest of his nose and was wiping the treasure on his trousers. “God means Jesus.”

“Very good, Jeremiah,” said Miss Green. “But Jesus is the SON of God, our savior. What about God himself?”

“I don’t know,” said Jeremiah.

“God is like, really big!” said Lucas. “He is like a monster truck, and he can crush anything! He has huge tires, and this sword made of FIRE, and he knows everything bad you do. Also, he smokes.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said Miss Green. “Jesus said that God is love. What does that mean?”

“I think God is a beautiful castle,” said Brianna. “The castle floats on clouds, and then when God breathes the whole castle shakes and all of the flags flap in the wind. When he talks, the drawbridge comes down…”

“And fire shoots out his mouth!” said Owen. “And angels are like all of God’s soldiers, and they pour boiling oil on sinners and shoot arrows.”

“Is that what love is?” said Miss Green.

“Maybe,” said Owen sullenly.

“That was very good, Brianna,” said Miss Green. “Jesus also said that his father’s house had many different rooms, like a castle does.”

“Don’t forget about the clouds,” said Brianna. “And there are dragons on each cloud, and they are all fierce and beautiful, but they do what God tells them to do, even though they are monsters. And then Satan has his own dragons, but they are all ugly and never listen to anybody. Not even Satan. That’s why God is better.”

“Hmmm,” said Miss Green.

“I think God is like my kitten,” said a breathless girl named Clementine Marie. Her black hair lay across her slim shoulders in ebony ringlets, and she had sparkling blue eyes that looked everywhere but where they were supposed to. Her father was a doctor, and her mother was an art teacher for FUN. They never came to church, but Clementine’s nanny still dutifully dropped off Clementine on Sunday mornings for school – brushed and beautiful – and then picked her up again afterwards. Miss Green suspected her parents supported Clementine’s religious education to get Clementine out of their hair for Sunday brunch, or yachting practice, or something even more sinful.

“God is like your kitten?” asked Miss Green.

“My kitten is named Colette,” said Clementine Marie. “But she is dead, like Jesus. I see her in my dreams sometimes, and she sits in my lap and lets me pet her and she bites my hand so soft. I pet her and pet her and then I wake up.”

“How is that like God?” asked Miss Green.

“I love my kitten, but she isn’t real anymore,” said Clementine Marie.

“But God is real,” said Miss Green.

“Yes, in your dreams,” said Clementine Marie. “And when you pray, you get what you ask for in your dreams, too. And then life, when you are awake, is for eating and learning how to do math.”

Clementine Marie sighed.

“Can I talk?” said Owen.

“Please,” said Miss Green.

“I went to Italy this summer, like I said, and I saw a lot of pictures of God, so I know all about this. He has a big white beard, and he is always frowning because his children are so disappointing.”

Miss Green frowned. Owen coughed and stood up from his square.

“Except for Jesus, of course, because Jesus came back from the dead. But the rest of his children STAYED dead. Like, some of them had their heads chopped off, and others got pulled apart by horses and were eaten by dogs. This one guy had all of his skin peeled off his body and then they put him in a big pot like they were going to cook him and eat him. But he stayed dead, so God didn’t love him. Like your cat, Clementine Marie. He’s dead, so God doesn’t care.”

Lucas laughed really hard. Owen grinned.

Clementine Marie breathed in and then out again with despondent difficulty, like somebody was sitting on her chest.

“So God is big, and has a beard, and can fly, and he’s mad,” continued Owen. “And so you’ve got to be nice to each other, otherwise NOT ONLY will you not get presents, but your soul will get eaten by all of these horses and this guy with a knife who has no face.”

Owen sat back down.

“Thank you, Owen,” said Miss Green. “But what about what Jesus said? That God is love?”

The class was quiet.

“Jeremiah? What do you think?” asked Miss Green.

Jeremiah had glasses.

“Jesus loves me?” said Jeremiah.

“Very good,” said Miss Green, exasperated.

“But does that mean that love is bigger and stronger than Jesus?” said Lucas. “I don’t get it. How can you pray to love? What is love going to give you?”

“That’s why we pray to Jesus,” said Miss Green, closing her eyes.

“So we can get stuff,” said Lucas, making sure.

“That’s right,” said Miss Green.

“Okay,” said Lucas.

“Can I go sit outside with Amanda now?” asked Brianna. “She doesn’t know anybody. My mom said not to let her out of my sight.”

“Sure,” said Miss Green.

“Thank you, Miss Green,” said Brianna.

Brianna picked up her skirts and meekly slipped out the door. Whenever Miss Green had sex, which wasn’t very often anymore, she liked to slip her finger into her partner’s sphincter and push until his cheeks clenched around her hand and he told her to stop. That’s how her mind felt. She just wanted to go back home and go to sleep.

Miss Green walked over to the supply closet and got down the paper and crayons. She handed them to Jeremiah, who dutifully began handing them around the room. Miss Green sat down in the only chair, falling back a bit accidentally on the chair’s wheels, but catching herself with her hard shoes.

“Let’s all quietly color until it is time to go,” said Miss Green, trembling. “Color something out of the Bible. Draw Romans, or something. And no talking. No talking whatsoever.”