In front of him the Sunday foot traffic moved warily along, ignoring him now, concerned by the developing scene in the park. If they thought of him it was only to wonder what he was doing over here, outside the protests. Circumstances were evolving and now the sounds seemed charged, and he thought about how crowd density, like personal tragedy, was able to slow time.

He did not agree with the term “predatory.” They had come to him, after all, in search of a dream that was not his to peddle, nor Schwitters’, nor even the senior executives’. The dream was their own and they arrived unbidden, unlured, fantasy-starved.

There was a man moving toward him, walking sideways to keep his eyes on the park. He was in sandals and a grey, fairly clean sweatshirt. He leaned familiarly against the same wall of the storefront where Michael stood.

“This, I will tell you, is about to get ugly,” the man said.

“I don’t know,” Michael said. “Let’s hope not.”

The man put a finger to the green vest and said, “I guess you’re as willing as anyone to get violent if you have to.” Michael didn’t understand. “Not like you guys have much choice though, is it? And now look how far we’ve been pushed. Those kids over there deserve our thanks. If you’ve got your camera, get it ready. My guess is five minutes, maybe less.”

“Nobody wants that.”

The man gave him a pitiful sideways look Michael couldn’t quite bear, so he moved to the edge of the street to see what was happening. The air was jingling with assorted energies he recognized from the bank, just before a signing. There was a helicopter now, hovering and thwupping. The man behind him was yelling but Michael ignored it. Time, again. Slowing. And then, almost without meaning to, he was climbing onto the short fence around the café’s patio. From here he had a clear view to the patch of concrete beneath the monument. It was full with the bodies of protestors all facing to the east, where the police were aligned in obvious clamshell strategy. He saw dogs with them, waiting for command with triangular ears perked.

Michael could try as well as anyone else to plaster his life upon a wall and read with a finger. Isolate moral bankruptcies that were Chinese in origin. He would recall the smell of a Beijing back alleyway, the rasp of buzzing engines and a single unavoidable man wearing an orange hat, and chickens hanging in windows, a man by a doorway open to a descending staircase. Telling Michael and the others, Women here, yeah the best. A video arcade that contained a private club with a dozen or so women and only three men visible, but two of them giants, Europeans, and the third the kind of jittery, manic little fighter who could not speak a word or make a face that did not imply an invitation. Go ahead, the little fighter seemed to say, his eyes laughing.

Everyone had an opinion. Enraged citizen journalists likened it to domestic abuse, the banks feigning trust, doling out such resources they knew full well would never come back. The public would have preferred stagecoach robbery, horseback men whooping from beneath bandannas. Old browning posters of sketchbook faces, torn at the edges.

Someone beneath him was saying get off the fence, get down from there. Without turning, Michael lifted a flap of the vest, like a credential. Then it began – they were moving as a single blue unit. How brief a march, he thought. The screams sang out and the people at his feet were confused. It both was and wasn’t happening before them, couldn’t be, so they pulled out their phones to capture video. The police dogs barked and pulled on their leashes and he understood now that the man in the sweatshirt was right – it was everyone’s dream.

He dropped from the fence into the street and made it several steps into the park before he was tackled from behind. As he fought back he realized it was the man in the gray sweatshirt, and that he was holding something in one hand, and then the jolt rang through Michael’s frame, every muscle flexing before going completely useless.

He drove beneath the flashing blue lights of police cameras mounted high on streetlights, alongside small-change car lots swinging last decade’s luxury. At a stoplight a man stepped from the curb and approached his passenger window, leaning to peer inside, pressing a hand to the glass but saying nothing. At green Michael lurched from the line.

He could hear the voice but couldn’t place it. Each summer the bodies mount, it said. Jittery zeitgeist of American despair, a voice from movie trailers or NFL Films. Jealous rage and medieval honor in Chicago’s Southwest Side. These were criminals officially, the shadowy figures immortalized as vague sketches. Between five foot nine and six foot. Black male. Hispanic. White male wearing a Bulls jacket and skull cap. Goateed Asian or some such male wearing a dark but not too dark shirt. Rough shape of a male or female between two and seven feet tall, dressed in clothing, human being of flesh and bone, according to witnesses.

It was darker down here, for one. The shadows seemed to him blacker and more diverse in shape. He drove past vacant lots fenced and dark, the prison with its guard towers like unsecret villain headquarters. Liquor store and currency exchange and taqueria and laundromat and currency exchange and supermercado.

*   *   *

In the wake of his termination he suffered quiet and long weeks that weighed on him with geologic force. Within a month he had left the apartment downtown, selling off any possessions that shined or glimmered. His instinct was to quantify everything he owned, transfer it to his central account’s singular, pudgy number. He found a garden unit small enough for his purposes, a slight, dank pair of rooms mostly underground. From his mattress he could hear neighbors in the washing room and watch the feet of strangers through three slim windows high on peeling walls.

Now the protest was growing louder, and three additional police vans arrived and unloaded, leaving the back doors open. Their helmets gleamed in the sun. Two girls, roommates, strolled childless in hats, carrying hemp bags full of kale. Nobody would be forced to stop, he pressured no one and they could tell as much, and were grateful.

His own financial descent, calm and regular, provided a schedule by which he could abide. As reliable as German trains, he thought, though he wasn’t sure why. Every month, one-thousand six hundred and fifty-two dollars and nineteen cents were automatically transferred to his ex-wife. Additional deductions for clothing, vaccines and video games. The divorce itself had been brief, efficient, and affordably devastational.

Had he, wait. When had he ridden German train?

He spoke to another couple and then a single aging woman. Everything came out right. He worried at times the effect his new life would have on the communication skills he’d honed at the bank, speaking as if downhill to those who sat across his desk. With Robyn he was cautious – anything could become evidence to keep him from the boy.

Last night he’d stood in the doorway of her kitchen. The boy was at the table and she hovered, watching closely. His nightly hour wouldn’t begin until the meal was over.

She said, “I see what you’re doing, Eric, moving it around like that. The point is to consume the food by way of mouth.”

Afterward, he sat with his son on the floor with their backs to the couch, watching as the boy played his game. Robyn had her legs folded beneath her in the spacious living room’s recliner, a magazine on her lap. One advantage of his job’s disappearance was, of course, time. He spent mornings sipping coffee he ground and dripped himself, the standard beverage sans foamy indulgence. Online, these daytimes broadened his scope, a process of accrual. Once in the boy’s presence, he would unload. He told him that 8,000 waves break on any given shore on any given day. He told him that Kobe Bryant — if he’d heard of the basketball player in Los Angeles? — was due the largest contract extension in the history of the game. As Eric’s character regenerated onto the game’s map, he told him that rotting food was frequently deployed as a metaphor for human age and decay. His son stepped into gunfire and regenerated nearby, then was quickly exploded by a grenade.

“I love you, son,” Michael added. Robyn looked up briefly from her magazine and the boy stared fixedly into the gorgeous demolition on screen.

He took comfortable pride in being present whenever he could. This would be the standpoint from which he would describe his side of this story. A good father, overall. The Benadryl smoothies had been his idea, but it was not as if Robyn had opposed.

*   *   *

He felt the pedal give way beneath his foot and saw empty dark lots of gravel piled into mounds, another bridge, La Canasta Mercado, and then he pulled onto a side street and began canvassing the neighborhood, turning at corners, up one then down the next. The streetlights were out and the houses replied in kind. This was bungalow country – long rows of pale-bricked, single-family units with lawns overgrown and metal awnings lopsided above windows. Numbers stood out, certain addresses he knew from loan applications and mortgage statements. He saw signs in yards and lock boxes on screen doors, phone numbers spray-painted onto boards on doors and windows. Bank-owned short-sales, foreclosures, theoretical auctions that would be postponed due to lack of interest. A sign in the window of a home clearly vacant said Never mind the dog, Beware of owner.

Turning a corner, he found himself on the edge of a great, dark, open expanse. He pulled alongside the curb and parked behind an old Buick with a license plate two years expired. He turned off the radio, then his phone, everything within reach. It was another city park, huge. Deep inside he could see a basketball court lit by a glowing aura of flickering yellow. A truck passed blaring the syncopated off-beat of reggaeton, every song of which Michael was sure was the same.

He stepped through grass and felt the wind and sensed something burning in the autumn air, catching bits of a screamed argument. As the court grew clearer he saw that they were playing three-on-three, like at the gym. Sharp laughter, shadows against darkness and someone was singing and then rap music, the aquatic bass rumbling. They shifted, shadows, but this was only wind blowing wrappers and torn bags of convenience-store snacks, empty bottles of juice. People lived here. A woman’s voice screeched from the court, she screamed, and up above it all was another blue light of police camera flashing in silence.

The sun blazed upon the man standing among pedestrian traffic, wearing the faded green vest. He established eye contact early and nodded affably, and when a man and woman approached he spoke to them in the language he had practiced, hemmed into meaning by a belief he did not happen to share. Time after time he found faces that were open to him, awash in the day’s light, greeting him with trust abundant and, it felt, precious.

From where he stood he saw the farmers’ market lining the inner strip of boulevard, the fading colors of late-season produce, the dogs investigating snout-to-ass in a way that seemed perfectly thorough. Across the street was a small neighborhood park contained within an oversized traffic roundabout. The trees around its outer rim were sparse with muted oranges and crispy browns, and the grass still green despite a summer of concerts and lawn sport. Toward the park’s far end towered an obelisk monument peaked by a stone eagle, wings halfway open, with a gathering of protestors around its base that seemed larger today, or louder, or perhaps just better documented. He saw pigeons crowded onto the eagle and thought, someone is going to be shit on.

He was still allowed to laugh, after all. And how terrible was it, really, if these market-goers could walk their strollers and dogs beneath an unbridled sun? How condemnable was his crime if the café up the block maintained steady crowds in slick denim and gorgeous leather, swiping fingers across touchscreens while waiting for brunch? Until this week he’d forgotten all about the vest that he’d bought years ago off the back of some undergrad art student stationed between the bank and where he and Schwitters would toddle leisurely to lunch. He remembered uncoiling a single bill that the girl received with a leery reverence, already guilt-struck before it was crumpled and hidden away. Halloween four full years ago, the vest a triumphant gag about volunteerism and the bank’s pay scale for junior execs like himself.

His name was Michael, if anyone asked. He wasn’t young anymore, nearly thirty-six, and pedestrians understood that this meant something. Age and close shave, his professionalism, he knew what worked in his favor. He felt their credence in his bones, like something postural. The neighborhood was one of few in the city where housing values hadn’t plunged quite so deeply. After an hour facing the market he turned toward the patio of the restaurant. A woman approaching with her young daughter seemed eager, so he spoke about carbon emissions and the clearing of vast foreign forests, classic talking points that he kept necessarily vague.

“Peak oil,” he told them in a voice that was not quite his. “Frankenfoods. Do you know what they’re doing? These are seeds that literally commit suicide after a single use.”

In yearbooks Michael was marble-eyed and cautious, a face that came at you like a deer’s did, sinisterly cocked, curious, with nostrils like knuckles. His most recent employee photo showed a facial apparatus with firm percipience, a man difficult to impress but eager to help. Across his desk, hopeful buyers would go googly on him, melting as he nudged them toward commitments they could not possibly uphold. And here now were weekend sidewalkers similarly inclined to that easy fraction of the story’s whole. This woman, for instance, who wanted him to speak skewedly from inside the vest to frighten straight her little girl.

*   *   *

Ten days later Michael sat cramped inside his basement apartment, rereading what Schwitters had admitted, this friend or man he had called bro and debauched alongside. He scrolled to the article’s top. Schwitters who when reached for comment described how they’d “shoveled money” with malefic strategy and impure intent. The listings swam in his head, streets and numbers that sorted into sharp lines and came at him like one of Schwitters’ jokes.

He closed the computer and put his shoes back on and stepped once more into the night, remembering where he’d parked his small BMW. He brushed weeks’ worth of fallen leaves and branches from his windshield and plucked two orange ticket envelopes from beneath the wiper. He blew into ungloved hands as the car warmed, then pulled from his spot and moved along streets toward Western Avenue, where he turned southward.

He passed bars and historic concert venues, watching as street numbers sank and downtown flashed through gaps in the buildings on his left, the notable towers shining white into hazy nighttime sky. He continued beneath rusted El tracks and alongside condominiums, vacant still and marked for closeout pricing. Many others were stalled mid-construction. The vest was gone now, having been shredded between the razorous teeth of a German Shepherd. Eventually addresses hit zero and began slowly to climb. He was not certain why but he had a sense, at least, where. He drove beneath stoplights and past corner liquor stores, churches with signs written in something not English.

*   *   *

The sun was a blessing and the crowds were everywhere. In the park across the street he saw placard signs and old blankets and felt an implicit unity with those who believed. The vest was faded and did not fit, quite, but was working better than he could have imagined. He held no binder or signup sheets, asked for nothing, and savored the plurality of the first-person pronoun.

“Who else is going to make the change if not us? What’s the song, we won’t get fooled again? I don’t have to remind you the risks of nuclear power, I hope. After what we saw in Japan.”

He spoke with two men in beards and Bears jerseys who stayed for several minutes, chatting amiably against the background of protest chants that were beginning in the park, called through megaphones, echoed by chorus.

“Who are we going to trust?” he asked. “Times like this one, fellas I’m afraid there’s only one answer. I can tell you guys know already. Hell yeah you do.”

Standing at the park’s far end, where the teardrop narrowed, was a reasonable police presence. One or two vans, or four if he counted the two stationed across streets, and no more than a dozen uniformed officers for safety. This too seemed sensible, perfectly thorough.

It was a Sunday nearly three years since losing his job and he was moving among the public, absorbing trust from strangers. He would keep the concept active or metaphorical to avoid thinking of himself in ancient terms. Objects fell. Prices fell. At the most: seasonal. He was a father of one, a boy he was currently allowed to see for an hour each weeknight, two on Tuesdays, but only in the immediate, hawkish presence of the boy’s mother.

The Boston Globe called it “an unusually good, and unusual, coming-of-age story.” Entertainment Weekly added that “Kyle Beachy has a knack for fantastic little nuggets of observation…Like his protagonist, the first-time author is brimming with potential.”

His essays and fiction appear in The Chicagoan, Knee-Jerk Offline, Another Chicago Magazine, St. Louis Magazine, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, Pank, and elsewhere. This story will appear this summer in Hair Lit, an anthology of stories inspired by Poison’s “Talk Dirty To Me.”

An assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Roosevelt University, Kyle hs received fellowships from The Danish Arts Council and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His skateboarding criticism appears regularly at The Classical.

Visit him online at www.kylebeachy.com.

Sandy Stodermeyer was sitting at the kitchen table scanning her Fellowship cookbook for a mushroom soup casserole when Troy came home from school and announced that he’d be having a Jewish Sabbath for supper.  Sandy looked up, confused.  Ever since her husband had moved the family from Minnesota to Coral Springs, Troy had been abrasive and sullen.  Indeed, it had pained Sandy to yank Troy out of his old school and Fellowship youth group and try to graft him down here in the strange soil of southern Florida.  Troy was a small and weak.  He was not taking root.  Still, Sandy had faith in the Lord.  She believed in His guiding light.  And she knew, as she told Troy the afternoon he failed to make JV basketball and again the afternoon a couple of beastly football players pushed him into some lockers, that the Lord would guide him.  Jesus was an underdog too, Sandy said.  He’d have been thrown against lockers, if there’d been lockers in the Bible.

But now Sandy reflexively clutched the gold crucifix around her neck.  Troy stared back, defiant.  He dumped his large backpack on the kitchen table, nearly knocking over Sandy’s mug of tea, and started pulling objects from its musty depths.  Out came two silver candle sticks, a silver wine goblet, and a pair of yarmulkes.  Sandy grabbed the Fellowship cookbook away from the encroaching Jewish paraphernalia.  Troy reached his hand into the bag a final time and withdrew a lumpy loaf of bread.

“What’s that?”

“Challah.  It’s what Jews eat.”

“But where did you get it?”

Troy shrugged.  “Simon Green gave it to me.”

“I don’t understand.  Troy, we don’t celebrate Shabbat.”

“You don’t, but I’m fourteen and according to the Jews I’ve been an adult for over a year, so you can’t stop me.”

“But you’re not a Jew, Troy!”

“We’ll see about that.”

And then he was gone and she heard the bedroom door slam.  Sandy sat in the silent kitchen holding the Fellowship cookbook to her chest.  She reached out and picked up one of the yarmulkes.  It was shiny and blue and on the inside was a string of gold print that read, “I Shook My Tuchas at Simon’s Bar-Mitzvah.”

When her husband first announced his new job in Coral Springs, Sandy went to her pastor for guidance.  Not to fear, he assured her.  There was a Fellowship branch just thirty minutes outside Coral Springs.  “A Big Mac in Florida tastes exactly the same as one in Alaska,” he said.  “Just think of Fellowship as your spiritual McDonalds.”

Sandy’s Sisterhood friends peppered her with questions about Coral Springs, until Noreen (whom Sandy had never cared much for to begin with) said, “That’s not really a Christian community, is it?  I’ve heard they teach children how to masturbate — in the schools!”  The other women gasped.  But Sandy just shook her head.  She was a fair-minded person, a firm believer in not forcing Jesus down anybody’s throat.  And as long as Troy continued to attend the Fellowship youth group, she wouldn’t have to fear for his spiritual education.  “I’m sure everyone down there in Coral Springs is perfectly nice,” she said.  “Even if they don’t walk in the way of Christ.”

“You just wait,” Noreen said.  “Wish those people in Coral Springs a Merry Christmas and they’ll try to have you arrested.”

*   *   *

The Stodermeyers settled down in a beautiful, manicured neighborhood, but Sandy never saw anyone outside and the houses were separated from each other by coarse, thick grass that felt like needles under her bare feet.  Meanwhile, Sandy felt Troy’s loneliness like a wound in her own flesh.  And then one day, as though God had truly been listening to her prayers, Troy came home and said he’d made a friend, a Simon Green who lived down the street.  In fact, Troy said, he’d be sleeping over at Simon’s house that very Friday.  The next weekend, Troy announced that he had sleepover plans with another neighborhood boy, Jacob Shivivitz.  Then the following Friday it was over to Daniel Goldstein’s.  And so on for the next month.  But when Sandy asked what the boys did during their sleepovers, Troy was evasive.

“We eat a lot,” Troy said.  “And we read.”

Read? Sandy thought.  But who was she to complain.  Clearly, Troy’s new friends were wholesome boys.  Then came the Friday afternoon when Troy announced his intention to be a Jew.  Sandy knew full well that the Lord worked in mysterious ways, but this seemed like a heavenly practical joke.

Part Two

In retrospect, Sandy should have called Deborah Green on the telephone before going over, because when Deborah opened door, Sandy saw six women in the living room, squawking like birds.

“I’m Sandy,” Sandy mumbled to the small, wiry woman standing before her. “Troy’s mom.”

“Sandy! How wonderful to finally meet you!  We’ve been meaning to have your family over for Shabbas, but things have been crazy — you know how it is.” Susan waved her hand vehemently in welcome.  “We’re in the middle of our monthly book club.  But between you and me, we’re big on the eating and light on the reading.  All chatter and chew. Ladies!”  Susan Green commanded, her shrill voice echoing in the stone-tiled living room.  “I’d like to introduce Sandy, Troy’s mother.”

The group fell silent and fixed their wide, heavily made up eyes on Sandy.  The group of them wore black and sand-colored slacks and silken tank tops that revealed tanned and fleshy upper arms.  Their sandals flashed toenails painted outrageous shades of orange and pink.  Not a single one had Sandy’s wispy bangs or stonewashed jean shorts.

“Sit, sit!” The women burst out and started all talking at once.  “Would you like some coffee cake?  Some coffee?  Cream and sugar?  Just cream? Really, try some cake.”  Everyone was nodding.  “Are you sure?  Just a sliver.  A sliver never hurt anybody.”

Their nasally voices clashed with the Floridian sunshine streaming through the windows.  Their accents, Sandy felt, were just like the sharp, thick blades of grass outside. And then she realized something strange; all these women sounded like they came from New York.

“Troy is so sweet,” one mother was saying.  “Danny won’t even say ‘thank you.’”

All eyes were on Sandy now, though it seemed the women were trying hard not to stare at her bangs.  “You’ve all met Troy?”

The women nodded vigorously.

“Eli brought Troy home last month for Shabbas,” one mother said.  “I have never seen a boy so eager to eat my brisket.  My son only complains, but Troy, asked for seconds!  He said he’d never had brisket before.”

The women gaped.  Somebody tsked.  Sandy shifted uncomfortably.  The sofa was too white and too soft.

Deborah Green nodded.  “When Troy slept at my house, Simon went to shul without a fight.  Usually it’s all yelling and screaming before 9 a.m.”

The women shook their heads and began sharing their stories about how Troy had asked for second helpings of Tzimmes and how even though their sons were teaching him the dirty versions of Hebrew prayers, at least the boys were taking an interest.  At this point, the mothers started to argue about who would host Troy next.

“I’m telling you, Sandy,” Deborah said and grabbed hold of Sandy’s arm.  “I don’t know what you’ve done to make your son love Judaism so much, but he’s been a huge influence on my kid.”

Sandy’s coffee cup trembled in her hand.  She set it down carefully, as though it might crash through the glass tabletop.  “And you lent him all that stuff he brought home?”

“Oh the candle sticks and extra challah?  Sure.  I just assumed you were having guests and I’m always happy to help.”

“But Deborah…I don’t think you understand.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“You know we’re not Jewish”

“You’re a funny one, Sandy!” Deborah flashed a wide smile and nodded at the other mothers. “Whoever met a Meyer that wasn’t Jewish?” Everybody chuckled.

Sandy decided that just this once, she was going to defy God’s law and kill Troy when she got home.  “Our name is Stodermeyer, not Meyer.”

The room went silent.  Sandy reached into the neck of her shirt and pulled out the gold crucifix.  Deborah Green clamped her hand over her mouth.  Someone tsked.  “Meshuga,” one of the mothers whimpered.

Part Three

Sandy couldn’t help but feel that there was something disappointing (if not a little blasphemous) about celebrating Christmas so close to the equator. This year, her first without snow (or at least sub-zero temperatures), just didn’t fill her with that familiar spirit and Christmas cheer. Christmas in the sun was garish. Down here, the multi-colored lights had no purpose. They were meant to brighten up those long winter nights, to be a beacon of hope. Instead, they made the house look tacky, kind of dinky Sandy thought, as though the building was a knickknack from a twenty-five-cent plastic egg. Meanwhile, the puff-up Santa Clause she’d brought from Minnesota looked ridiculous on their verdant lawn. Of course, Santa was just plastic, but Sandy swore she could see him sweating through his suit, like at any second, he was going to keel over from heat stroke.

Sandy played Christmas music during the day while Troy was at school, but it didn’t sound the same when you were wearing thong sandals.  She made a batch of eggnog (adding a double helping of brandy — she was feeling stressed!), but later, in the 90-degree heat, she felt bloated and nauseous. She baked cookies shaped like Christmas trees and reindeer, decorated them liberally with sprinkles and frosting, but they just looked wrong, sitting on the counter of her ultra modern kitchen counter. (The kitchen, Sandy thought, resembled a window display, which she supposed suited some people, but made her feel like her dinners needed to be both fancier and more health-conscious. Like her dinners were a disappointment to the kitchen.) Also, Troy refused to eat her Christmas cookies.

“I’m Jewish,” he reminded her, as he seemed to do on a bi-hourly basis.

“Troy,” Sandy said, “If there’s one thing I know about Jews, it’s that they like to eat. And I’m sure that includes cookies.”

“Not cookies that look like that. Eating a Christmas tree would be a denial of my Jewish heritage!”

You don’t have a Jewish heritage, Sandy wanted to shout. Instead she said, “Why do you care what the cookie looks like? It could have started out in the shape of the Koran and it wouldn’t matter by the time it reached your stomach.”

Troy rolled his eyes. “You make me dreidel-shaped cookies and we can revisit this subject at a later time,” he said and stomped out.

Sandy pulled opened her baking drawer and rooted through the cookie cutter trees and wreathes and reindeer — all of them from the “Holiday Kookie Kit” she’d bought years ago at Target. Her fingers pushed aside a few stray birthday candles and a package of red and green toothpicks. Then, from the clutter, Sandy found what she was looking for: a cookie cutter in the shape of a dreidel. She’d kept the dreidel simply because it had come with everything else in the Holiday Kookie Kit.  She ran her finger around the object. It looked like an upside-down triangle with a thick apple stem on top. What was it doing here with the other cookie cutters? Why had the manufacturers of the Holiday Kookie Kit decided to include it? It had something to do with the fact that the package had been called the “Holiday” Kookie Kit instead of the “Christmas” Kookie Kit (that much was clear). But for who was this dreidel intended? Certainly not a family like hers, where one errant member refused to eat baked goods that deviated from his (professed) religious beliefs and who said things like “revisit this subject at a later time.”

*   *   *

Later that afternoon, Sandy took a walk. She rarely did this — it was so hot and she burned so easily. But she told herself that she needed fresh air, a chance to get away from the uber-modern kitchen and the Christmas cookies that seemed to mock her with their sprinkles and bright frosting and good cheer. It wasn’t until she’d walked a number of blocks that she realized she hadn’t passed a single house strung with lights or bearing a wreath on the front door. So this was how it felt to be the odd one out. Back in Minnesota there were usually a couple of houses in the neighborhood that remained dark between Thanksgiving and New Years. Sandy always felt sad for the owners of these houses. Why did they have to spend the winter in darkness? Why couldn’t they simply participate in the joy around them? You didn’t have to believe in Jesus to put a pot of poinsettia on the front porch or string some red bows and fern around your lamppost. Of course, it would be preferable if you did believe in Jesus, but Sandy wasn’t going to be one of those fundamentalist Christians. She thought about the group of women back home who had attempted to outlaw gift giving among church members and prohibit alcohol at holiday parties. She remembered their campaign to ban shoulder-revealing tank tops, because shoulders were apparently the “gateway to sexual deviance.” Sandy had found all of this nonsense. It was the one part of Minnesota she’d been happy to leave behind.

She started back toward home. She remembered what Noreen had said about the Christmas-hating Jews. To be fair, Sandy hadn’t experienced any of that. The Jews down here seemed indifferent to the holiday. Moreover, they were perfectly happy (too happy, Sandy thought) to welcome Troy into their homes. Even the mothers in Susan Green’s living room had recovered from Sandy’s confession fairly swiftly. Nobody called her a Nazi or fainted at the sight of her cross or tried to chase her out of the house. Sure, they might have been a little stiff. A little chilly. But she was the new person in the neighborhood. She couldn’t expect to make best friends right away.

Sandy stood on the sidewalk outside her house and admired the fluffy fake snow her husband had laid out along the flowerbeds. There was no snow here — not even a chance of snow — and yet her family had made due. They were like Jesus, she thought, who fed scores of hungry people with only five loaves of bread and two fish. And what made that possible? Well, it was faith. Jesus’ faith in God. Sandy needed to be like Jesus. She needed to have some faith. She needed to believe that if that shown enough Christian goodwill and Christmas cheer, the Jews of Coral Springs would come to appreciate the goodness of this most sacred holiday. And then maybe, Sandy thought, once Troy saw his friends and their families reveling in the joy of Christmas, he’d quit all of this Jewish business. Maybe all he needed, Sandy thought, was the chance to return to Christ in a manner that saved some face.

Part Four

Troy had always considered himself enterprising, somebody who thought outside the box. If his parents were forcing him to move away from his school, his youth group, and his girlfriend to Florida, where the kids walked around with their stinky feet exposed and everybody ate dinner at four in the afternoon, then he wasn’t going to sit around on his butt, waiting for life to improve on its own. No, he was going to force improvement, so help him God, in the most expedient way possible. So the kids at his school were Jewish? He could be a Jew. No problem. He’d gone onto the Internet and started studying up. He read all about this mountain called Masada, where a couple hundred people committed suicide instead of letting the Roman army taken them prisoner. That was pretty cool. Also cool: the Jewish God apparently thought it was a really great thing if you had sex on His Sabbath. (Back at home, the Sabbath was so friggin’ boring. They went to church and then they ate lunch and then they didn’t do anything for the rest of the day except sometimes go back to Church again!) Troy could just imagine telling his mom that God wanted him to get busy with his girlfriend on a Sunday afternoon. And his mom would freak out, because he was supposed to be saving himself for marriage and all that. But a God who wanted Troy to get it on? He could get behind a God like that.

He’d tried watching Seinfeld and found it insanely boring. Curb Your Enthusiasm was funnier, but if Larry David was what most Jews were like, then Troy definitely did not want to be one, whether God wanted you to have sex on the Sabbath or not. In any case, he’d done his homework, and after a rough start, he’d begun to conquer the social scene. It wasn’t long, however, until Troy’s plan had started going straight to you know where. Somehow, his trying to fit in as a Jew had put him in the bizarre position of being beloved by all of the neighborhood mothers. And the more attention and praise they heaped on him, the less his new friends seemed to want him around. He was invited over every weekend, but he could tell these visits were enforced. He could imagine the mothers telling their sons that if they wanted to have friends over, then they’d better invite that nice boy Troy. And he could just hear the sons groaning: Aw, Mom, do I have to? And the moms: Why can’t you be as considerate and helpful and as INTERESTED IN JUDAISM as Troy? And the sons: Jesus Christ! And the moms: If I was Troy’s mother, I’d send you to your room for that kind of talk.

What Troy needed was a radical change in course. He needed to increase his street cred with the Jewish kids. Trying to be like them had failed, so it stood to reason that he should try to be unlike them. At the very least, he needed to prove that he wasn’t the nice Jewish boy they thought he was. But he couldn’t simply revert to the way he was before, because that would mean giving in to his own mother, which was not an option. He needed a way to piss off all the moms at once. It was going to be a challenge, perhaps the greatest challenge of his life. His mom believed Christ died for the sins of all humanity, while all the other moms thought Christ was just a hairy guy in sandals. And how in the world, Troy wondered, was he going to find a common hatred between these two groups? He thought about going Muslim, but that just seemed like a big pain in the ass and potentially dangerous, since everybody down here seemed to think that the Muslims were responsible for 9/11. Yes, this would be his greatest challenge yet, but by God, Troy was up to it.

Part Five

All of the families in Deborah Green’s group had received the same invitation. A red envelope, which opened to reveal a card in the bulging shape of Santa Claus. It was a little grotesque in Deborah’s opinion — how overweight Santa was, how his thighs were thick as turkey drumsticks and his belly protruded like a gigantic matzo ball. Santa was not a good role model. And let’s face it, despite the substantial meals that Deborah served her family on Friday night and the high holy days, hers was a very health conscious household. She did not allow fast food or candy or soda. Sugar cereal was verboten. But she’d heard from her son Simon that Troy brought sandwiches to school made with pinkish-brown, perfectly circular meat (ham, Deborah wondered. Bologna?) on bread “the color of Grandma Mindy’s upper arms.”

“Wonder Bread,” Deborah breathed. A shanda, she thought. Wonder Bread was an ominous sign indeed. Who knew what Simon was eating when he went over to Troy’s house — bacon! Cheeseburgers! — though frankly that had been happening less and less.”

“Listen,” Deborah had told her son. “If Troy offers you any of his lunch, just tell him you’re full.”

“What about his cookies? He never eats his Oreos.”

“We eat Hydrox, honey. You know that.”

The mothers agreed they would all accept to the Stodermeyers Christmas invitation. To decline would be rude and they didn’t want to appear intolerant. Secretly, Deborah was excited. She hadn’t been to a Christmas party in years, and she’d always found Christmas trees and mistletoe charming. She’d never tried eggnog, and she was fairly certain there would be some at the Stodermeyer’s house. Eggnog seemed very Midwestern. And hadn’t Troy’s family come from Duluth or Columbus? One of those quaint places where everybody had a front porch, and you could walk to the post office, and milk was delivered in bottles? Sometimes Deborah wished that she could walk to the post office — or anywhere, really, without shvitzing through her Ann Taylor shell. As far as the holiday party was concerned, she dreamed of wearing a chiffon, off-the-shoulder holiday dress in ruby or emerald green. But after walking around Saks for a few hours, she realized that a Christmas party in the Midwestern tradition wasn’t going to be as sophisticated as the ones she’d seen in the movies. The Stodermeyers were definitely more down-to-earth. So Deborah settled on a gold tank top in honor of Hanukkah with her gold Star of David necklace. She ordered Simon to put on khaki pants and a button-down shirt, no ifs or buts.

“Troy’s such a nice boy!” Deborah said as they walked the block and a half to the Stodermeyer’s house.

“Troy’s such a nice boy!” Simon mimicked under his breath. “Jesus, Mom.”

“Now listen,” Deborah said, stopping on the sidewalk. “You can’t use that kind of language in the Stodermeyer’s house.”

“Fucking Moses,” Simon said.

*   *   *

Deborah and Troy walked into the Stodermeyer home to find the place lit up like a department store Santa land display. The layout was almost identical to Deborah’s own, except that in the corner, where Deborah had a large reproduction Chagall, Sandy had put a gigantic Christmas tree, blaring with flickering lights and cluttered with candy canes. This could be my house, Deborah thought and felt an uncomfortable sensation envelope her: Excitement mixed with fear. It was almost like Christmas was catching, an air-borne virus that she might contract here and carry home with her.

Meanwhile, Simon headed for his friends. They were clustered around the food and poking at a plate of cheese puffs, like the foreign hors devours were on the verge of spawning alien life. Over by the punch bowl, Deborah spotted Mr. Stodermeyer chatting up Rachel Berkower, Leah Goldberg and Lois Feifer. Their husbands stood a few feet away, watching with obvious disaffection. Mr. Stodermeyer was tall with a dark, heavy brow and an imposing, almost brutish torso. He looked like a woodsman, or a man who drove a tractor, or maybe a world-class bowler. He did not contain a nebbishy bone in his body.

“Who’s the mountain man?”

Deborah turned to receive a kiss from her husband, who had just arrived from work. He was half an inch shorter than her, but at least, Deborah thought, glancing at the other, unhappy husbands, he still had a full head of hair. “That’s Mr. Stodermeyer,” she said.

“Jesus!” her husband said.

“Language!” Deborah hissed, but Stuart was already making his way to the drinks.

Sandy walked into the room carrying a tray of steaming mugs. She wore a corduroy skirt and a dark green turtle neck with a blinking Santa pin. Her hair was pinned up in a half ponytail and her bangs had been freshly styled. She looked quite pretty, Deborah thought.

“So good of you to come!” Sandy beamed and set her tray on the coffee table.

“Thanks for opening your home,” Deborah said. “Everyone seems to be having a lovely time.” She glanced at Rachel, and Leah, and Lois, who were practically falling over each other for Mr. Stodermeyer’s attention. She saw Leah pinch his bicep. “But where’s Troy?” Deborah asked.

Sandy’s face fell. “He’s in some kind of mood. He won’t come out of his room.”

“I know all about boys and moods,” Deborah said. There was a moment of awkward silence as the two women surveyed the room. Deborah knew every person here; she’d known them for years. And it occurred to her, suddenly, that this party was full of her friends. Sandy didn’t have any of her own friends here, Deborah realized. She was entirely alone. Even her son had abandoned her for a different religion.

At that moment, boyish snickering erupted from the cheese puffs. Troy had arrived, carrying a leather-bound book in each hand. He was wearing a white T-shirt painted with the word JEWS in big block letters on the front, a yarmulke on his head, and a Star of David the size of a fist around his neck. The necklace resembled the jewelry in those awful rap videos Simon liked to watch.

“I have an announcement to make,” Troy said and turned around once, making sure that everyone in the room had a good look at both his front and his back. On his back, Deborah saw, was a gigantic cross and the words FOR JESUS.

Troy held up the book in his right hand. “The Old Testament,” he announced. He held up his left hand. “The New Testament.” He stood there with his arms raised in a V for Victory.

“Why don’t you all go and BLESS yourselves,” he spat, his face contorted with disgust. Then he stomped out of the room.

The room was silent except for a jaunty rendition of Holly Jolly Christmas on the stereo. The mothers’ faces were stricken, white with shock. But Sandy Stodermeyer looked even worse. She turned her eyes on Deborah, imploring. But what was Deborah supposed to do?

“Trust me, Sandy,” she said, feeling suddenly bitter at the way things had turned out. “Jews for Jesus are Christians. It’s not even a question. You win.”

Gary Shteyngart says that “Year of the Gadfly” is “Hysterical and moving, Jennifer Miller’s debut fiction fuses ‘Special Topics in Calamity Physics’ and ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ for girls. This book is an imaginative delight.”

Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Men’s Health, Smithsonian.com, Salon.com, Guernica.com, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Millions and the Daily Beast. She has taught writing at Columbia, WritopiaLab and the Free Bird Writer’s Workshop.

Jen holds an MFA in fiction-writing and a MS in journalism from Columbia. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and currently lives in Brooklyn.

Visit her online at www.byjennifermiller.com.

I open the back door and slide past Harry, into the narrow space between his toddler’s throne and Dylan’s booster. I’m a thin man (not a short man — I’m nearly six feet) but even so the car seats hurt my hips. Paige (she’s driving because she gets carsick) reaches for the sun visor, gives it a pinch. The garage door lifts. We back toward what, in the rearview mirror, looks like a scalding square of steel. I think: we’ll remember this trip forever.

It’s our first road trip since moving here from California. For five years I’ve been saying it’s a sin to live in Colorado and not explore, together, its vaulted valleys and ethereal peaks and rustically romantic mountain towns and for five years Paige has held me off, arguing (with merit) that the boy/boys was/were too young to appreciate it and such a trip would be too dislocating for them, especially Harry, who falls apart without routine (he falls apart with routine too, I countered), and they wouldn’t have their toys and blankets and friends and the rec center pool and it wouldn’t be like a vacation for us it would be work except unlike work there would be no breaks and the whole time we’d be hemorrhaging money.

The babysitter (she gets the passenger seat because she doesn’t fit between the boys) cranks the air conditioner. Paige guns us up the street. Why did she finally agree? Are the boys old enough now? Was this a gesture of good will to me? Did I simply wear her down with my talk of sacredness and beauty and the romance of exploration? Is it something about the trip’s main attraction, a few gorgeously tortured acres known as Garden of the Gods?

The car seats dig into my hips but I’ve done this before and I know the discomfort will dissipate and soon I won’t notice anything but the glorious glare of the oxygen-starved air, the calming hiss of desiccated prairie-grass, the ancient pottery-shard sky.

*   *   *

Mud-spattered four-door Jeeps and thumping black BMW’s and vintage Camaros from California clog the road. College-kids wander into crosswalks without even bothering to look up from their phones. Soon we’re through, though, and rising out of the valley, banking atop a flat plateau that melts on the left into the interminable plains, and to the right into the Rockies, those granite fathers. We pass Rocky Flats Lounge and as I do every time I pass this place I think I’ve got to stop in there sometime for a beer. It’s exactly the sort of renegade place my buddies and I from California would kill, or at least have killed before getting married, to drink in. It’s a dilapidated roadhouse in a cattle pasture, backed by up-swirling peaks. Sometimes when I pass this place I call my divorced buddy from way back in sixth grade and we try to one-up each other by voicing our most vile thoughts (at forty-plus those are really vile and really funny). Of course I only call him when I’m alone.

Which, on this road, I realize, is a lot. I guess that’s because Paige doesn’t love skiing anymore. Just too damn cold, she says. And it is. It’s damn cold in the high country. It’s other things too, but I suppose if she’s that cold she can’t get there. So I end up driving up at seven in the morning alone and skiing hard and getting home before Harry wakes from his nap. I go up during the week, which eliminates traffic. I’m lucky I can do that. I work for myself, at home, in my basement, redoing the sound to movies so they can be resold to airlines. I did the same thing in California but back there I had to fight traffic and smog to get to a dreary office, and then at the end of the day fight my way home. When I told them I was leaving they begged and threatened me and I didn’t blink and they said OK, fine, you can work from Colorado. I’m the only guy in the entire sound department to ever get this deal. Usually their thinking is if you don’t suck it up in the Calimegalopolis like the rest of us, you don’t deserve a job. Maybe I don’t.

*   *   *

South of Denver and its new-built high-rise glass condos, something stirs in my temples. A hum. A hum I haven’t heard in forever. I slide forward, trying not to jostle the car-seats and my dozing boys. I look out. Where we live the land is either horizontal or vertical. Here it tilts. A sandstone cliff crumbles on our left but on our right a meadow swings coolly downward and rides shining through a golden valley. In the valley’s darkly creviced palm, cattle graze, oblivious, or so it appears, to the tilt’s rush beneath their hooves, to its triumphant resurgence just to their west, to its sun-striving acceleration and transmogrifying vault into snow peaks bright as lighthouses shuddering atop black, wave-wracked cliffs.

I sit back. Out Harry’s window, I imagine Cheyenne warriors appearing on the ridge, cresting the tilt and pausing, quivering, sensing everything with their eyes, their noses, their naked glinting torsos. From their tan leggings strips of sacred cloth flash redly. Their harshly focused faces register not only what is—the tilt, the warmth, the honey-light—but what was—the deer that slept in those ovals of pressed grass last night, the rattler that shed its translucent skin–and what will be — the thunder foretold by the lotion breeze.

When was the last time I envisioned? Ten years? Fifteen? Twenty? God, I think — I used to do it all the time. Starting around sixth grade, when I happened upon biographies of famous Indians in the school library. I read about Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Cochise — all the books I could find about the grand people born astride that ecstatic tilt. I would envision myself as one of them and run grinning through the pines around my house, convinced this imagining made me faster, stronger. In my twenties and thirties, running through the woods was replaced by solo road trips through the high desert, and music school (I had this idea of making a living playing jazz drums). But it was at college (before music school) that I discovered the Aztecs, whose motivations, if viewed through my parents’ meekness-worshipping morality (or, for that matter, today’s pentium wisdom), would be deemed criminal or suicidal or absurd, but which I found thrilling and freeing. To me the Aztecs were gods on earth, and as such wholly free and beautiful and lethal (each of these words, by the way, means all of the others), and yet because they were of this earth they possessed something gods didn’t — sensuality. How I longed to live as they had, and, oddly enough, as their executioners had, the conquistadors, who set sail across an ocean many believed ended in cosmic dropoff; who were greeted on the beach as returning gods; who hacked through vine-laced trees and slow-torture rain and diabolical diseases in search of a city of gold and a fountain sprung from god; who in a few years with a few guys downed an epoch.

*   *   *

We arrive at our motel, the Silver Saddle. Paige pulls in front of the office. She and the babysitter — she and Tara de Alvarado, her name’s Tara de Alvarado, I have to remind myself often or I’ll forget — laugh. They laugh quietly, so as not to wake the boys.

“TripAdvisor,” I say, “loves this place.”

“TripAdvisor,” says Tara, with her hint of a foreign accent, which is actually not foreign at all; she grew up in New Mexico, a little town in the north where everyone’s Hispanic and morbidly obese.

We sit. The air conditioning blasts. They’re right. I’m wrong. Or rather, TripAdvisor was. This place sucks. The pool’s in the parking lot surrounded by metal mesh, and the mesh is surrounded by yellow caution tape. The sign is missing its first S. The parking spaces are filled by Suburbans and Broncos with Texas and Missouri plates, and cheap Japanese Harleys. The road in front of the motel is a six-lane superhighway, or might as well be. Beside the Silver Saddle is a 7-Eleven. Down the hill, beyond the overpass, I have the feeling things get really seedy. The boys wake and begin to whine. Actually, Dylan’s whining. Harry’s crying. Our first family road trip in Colorado. If I were alone right now, I too would cry.

In the rearview mirror, Paige’s eyes are stalking mine. “Are you going to check us in?” she says.

I think it would be easier if she did. I mean, here I am wedged between the boys.

As if she read my thoughts, she says, “If I go, Harry will go ballistic.”

She’s right. I squeeze between his little pink knees and the back of Tara’s seat. Harry lands a fist on my shoulder and then I’m past and out the door and god, dear god it’s hot. And bright. And my sunglasses are in the back seat. I need to get out of this glare and this heat, but instead of heading into the office, I pause, and glance back at my family (and the babysitter, silent, hunched, track-suited) in the car. I must stand there for a while because the next thing I know the babysitter looks up from her hunch — looks right into my eyes.

Part Two

The room is way better than you would expect from the outside. No shag carpet  No brown stains in the bathroom. Only a little stupid cowboy art. And it’s genuinely a suite. Two queens in the front room and a king in the back. There’s even a door between the rooms, and two full bathrooms. God I’m relieved.

The babysitter, Tara, fills the doorway. The boys squeeze past her and squirt inside. They discover the back room and squeal, delighted no doubt by the jump-potential of the massive bed back there. Sure enough, I hear the little thumps of their jumps. Paige’s face appears behind Tara’s right shoulder. It’s her scrutiny face. (Tara jokes with her sometimes that in another life she was a drill instructor in the marine corps and that’s why in this life everything to her is “shitbird” and “maggot.”)

Paige whispers something into Tara’s ear. Tara bows, smiling. Paige looks at me. She’s smiling too. At me. God, why did we wait so long to do this road trip? If we hadn’t waited, would we be better off now? Better off — what does that even mean? Who the hell knows? One thing I do know is we want the same things. Just a few months ago we affirmed this. I was in the bedroom. She was just out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, standing beneath the peg from which hangs her peach-colored bathrobe. It’s a short bathrobe, made of some thin, slick material. (As far as I know, she hung it up there when we moved to Colorado and has never taken it down) I asked Paige some questions and the upshot of her answers was that, yes, we still want the same things — we want a full-blooded marriage, full of thrill and desire and warmth and not some co-worker arrangement; we want to explore the physical world, to revel as a family in the epic adventure that is existence and to resist those silver-tongued sirens Meekness and Comfort and Sense; we want to travel, together, the gnarled alleys of feeling and thought and we will never consent to cruise-control the interstates with their punishing truck traffic and deep-fried stench. (To that last bit Paige responded, “What does that even mean?”) It was a tough talk we had, there on the pile carpet between the bedroom and the bathroom, by the dueling walk-in closets, and affirming.

Paige pushes past Tara. She palms the beds (I’m not sure what she thinks that will accomplish). She goes into the bathroom. She disappears into the back room. Tara sits on the bed closest to the door, facing the TV, which is off; the mattress bows. In the back room, the boys squeal with laughter. Paige is tickling them. She does that a lot. They love it. Though I can’t see how. As a kid, I always hated being tickled. To me, it was like being suffocated, or driven insane.

Paige comes out of the back room. She’s massaging her third eye, as they say in yoga classes. “I’ll sleep in the back room with the boys,” she says.

“You don’t have to do that,” I say. I say this because I want to sleep back there with the boys.

“It’s OK,” she says, still rubbing her forehead.

“Are you OK?”

“I’ve got sinuses.”

I look at the floor. Look up. “I forgot the Sudafed.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll get some.”

“I can do it.”

I glance at the black TV screen, suddenly angry. Why did she say that? She knows I’ll go.

“Harry,” I say, gathering the keys, “will go ballistic.”

*   *   *

Down the hill, past the overpass, I drive by liquor stores and cheap-looking motels and quickie restaurants. It feels seedier than where we’re staying, but really it’s not that different. Navigating a Wal-Mart’s labyrinthine parking lot, I nearly clip a dualie (that’s a pickup with four back tires— I learned that from Tara) pulling out of a parking spot. The driver, wearing a jean jacket in this heat, glares. I back up. He guns his throaty engine and reverses to within inches of my front bumper. I park and get out, entering the Wal-Mart, wandering its fluorescent folds until I find the pharmacy. At the counter, a heavy woman talks syringes and blood tests with the pharmacist while her daughter, a chubby cherubic blond in a pink dress, about Dylan’s age, takes dental floss off the racks. One after another. She’s making a tower. Harry loves to make towers. So does Dylan. It’s one of the few things they do together besides fight — make towers. The mother thanks the pharmacist profusely and turns around and her face transforms. She lumbers over to the little girl, hoists her into the air with a mastodon paw.

On the way back up the hill I fully expect to see biker hordes come thundering straight at me, or junkies reeling into traffic and going thump under my tires, or guys with jail tattoos slouching, watching, waiting for my car to break down. On the steering wheel, my knuckles pale and crinkle. Christ. Since when did I get freaked out by Wal Mart and cheap motels and diabetic mothers? I might have been brought up with money but the spoon in my mouth was stainless rather than silver, and my parents were practically Confucian (actually Pennsylvania Quakers) in the way they eschewed displays of wealth and preferred criticism to compliments.

I pull into the Silver Saddle’s comic parking lot, and see the babysitter walking across the hot asphalt wearing an orange bathing suit with ruffles at the waist. She looks like a shaggy fruit. She doesn’t see me, and neither do the boys, who follow her to the pool. How do they not see me in their mother’s car? Then Paige appears, also in orange, only it’s a bikini. I didn’t even know she owned a bikini. I thought she didn’t like bikinis. She looks amazing. Her skin is brown, as if she’s been laying out (the lack of tan lines suggest she’s been laying out in this very bikini, or naked). And her body is so taut and muscular. I feel like I’m looking at another woman even though I lie down not far from this one every night. Maybe that’s because she’s so transformed from what she was after Harry was born. Even a year after Harry was born, she was heavy all over. Butt, face, arms. She wasn’t diagnosed but I’m sure she had postpartum. She did a lot of lying on the couch. Then something happened, I don’t know what, but she started working out and watching her diet. I offered to watch the kids every morning so she could go to the gym (she said she wouldn’t do it at all if she didn’t do it first thing). I wanted so much for her to have a hot body and the pleasant feeling (and demeanor) that goes with it that I began ignoring her grumpiness, which had begun in earnest post Harry and, surprisingly, continued after she started working out. I figured she was just tired from exercising every morning. To have a hot happy wife, I figured, you’ve got to absorb a few right jabs.

Sweat trickles down my abdomen. Something in my throat has congealed. But I don’t get out of the car. Across the parking lot I watch Paige lower herself, belly first, onto a lounge chair. The little bikini rides her taut butt. The babysitter, Tara, smoothes sunscreen on the boys. A fortysomething man, a thin guy but with the rough look of a biker, approaches Paige. He squats and says something. Whatever she says back, it sends him away. My wife, I think. That’s my wife. I watch Tara jump in the pool with surprising agility. The boys jump in after her and though I can’t hear their happiness I know it’s there and I think: who cares about the caution tape. The boys sure don’t. For them, for our family, this place is perfect.

*   *   *

The restaurant I picked for dinner is perfect. TripAdvisor is redeemed. The place is called the Carriage House and it’s in an old hotel called the Cliff House, which, like its name suggests, is built into, or against, a cliff. The building is white stone, with dome-topped towers. Wide white stairs lead up to the double front doors. The lobby is all dark wood and red Persian rugs. The people staying here have that thin, attractive look of the wealthy. Evening sun lights a high, round, stained glass window. It’s like a richly colored candle dripping wax on the black and white tile floor. Why didn’t TripAdvisor tell me to say here? I would have sprung for it. For this trip I would have.

As usual when we eat out, I order a glass of wine and glance quickly through the menu and tell Paige what I want while she looks over the kids’ menu.

“Do you guys want a cheeseburgers,” she says, “or chicken quesadilla?”

“We want pancakes,” says Dylan.

“Yeah,” says Harry. “We want pancakes.”

“They don’t have pancakes for dinner,” says Paige.

Dylan scowls. “We want pancakes.”

“OK then,” Paige says, “cheeseburgers.”

The arrival of the wine is my cue to coax the kids away from the table so Paige and Tara can have a moment of peace.

“Want to go outside, guys?” I say, sipping liberally. “There’s a creek out there. We can throw rocks.”

“Cheeseburgers?” says Paige.

“No,” says Dylan.

“Pancakes,” says Harry.

Tara leans toward the boys. She gives them a conspiratorial look. “Hey Dylan, Harry, come here.”

They go to her. She whispers in their ears. They turn toward Paige. They’ll have cheeseburgers.

*   *   *

There’s a horse-drawn carriage outside the restaurant. Dylan climbs up and inside. Harry tries to but can’t so I lift him up. It’s red velour in there. The boys play carriage driver. They’re driving down the hill (we’re on a hill) and through the creek. Dylan whips the imaginary horses. Harry yells, “Yah!” I ask them why they’re going so fast and Dylan says they’re escaping monsters.

“Help! Help!” yells Harry.

Monsters. It figures. Their favorite show is Scooby-Doo. The new ones, the ones with ax murderers. Not the old Scooby-Doo’s where the worst thing that happened was a mummy reached out for Shaggy with his arms and missed.

Harry yells again, but it sounds different. I peek inside. Dylan is punching his brother. How do these guys go from love to hate in six seconds?

“Stop it,” I yell. I don’t mean to yell. I never do. But it makes me so angry when they fight. Why can’t they just play together like everyone else’s kids? Why can’t they love each other and take care of each other, like they’re supposed to? “Stop it, guys,” I say in what I hope is a normal tone of voice.

Harry wants to get out of the carriage and Dylan’s scared to be in there alone so we go down the hill to the creek and I try to teach them about skipping rocks, finding flat ones. We stand in the shadow of a red cliff that makes me think of The Lord of the Rings, and Mordor. We scour the creek bank. Dylan’s got a rock he thinks is flat. He throws. It does not skip. I tell him it takes practice. He gets another. There might have been a skip, I can’t be sure, I wasn’t’ watching closely enough. I was watching a huge black hawk spiraling against the red cliff, waiting for it to dive, wondering if it was strong enough to lift Harry up to its red cave. I tell Dylan to throw another rock, this time I’ll be sure to watch. He throws. It skips, twice.

“Awesome, bud,” I say.

He’s so happy. He’s beaming. Rightfully so; this is big. This is like riding a two-wheeler for the first time. I rub his head. Remember this, I tell myself.

“Watch again,” says Dylan.

Quickly, so Dylan doesn’t catch on, I look around for Harry. I don’t see him.

Dylan’s lining up his shot. His tongue’s out, a sign of focus. It’s super long, his tongue. I’m always amazed by how long.

“Harry,” I call.

The creek makes a sucking sound.

“Harry,” I yell.

Shit. Harry. I run down the bank, peering into the spitty black water. I sprint up the hill to the carriage. I dash back down to the creek and leap across, soaking my canvas sandals. Harry, Harry. I crash back across the creek.

“Did you find him?” Dylan says.

“No.”

“Did you look inside?”

“No.”

“He was cold.”

“He said he was cold?”

Dylan nods.

“When?”

“He went inside.”

We go inside. Harry’s in his mother’s lap. She strokes his hair. She looks at my wet sandals. My crazy face. There’s that smile again.

“Everything’s OK,” she says.

Part Three

The food arrives. Dylan and Harry don’t immediately reject their cheeseburgers. I can’t imagine what Tara said to them. Paige and Tara are having chicken and vegetables, hold the pasta (they’re on the same workout-nutrition plan) and I’m having buffalo pot roast. The waitress assured me it is remarkable. I’m hungry; it’s OK. I order another glass of red. It’s my third. It’s barely OK.

“What do you guys want to do tomorrow?” I say, addressing Harry and Dylan.

“Swimming,” says Harry. “With Tara.”

“Yeah, swimming,” says Dylan.

“We’ll do swimming,” I say. “But what else?”

“Nothing else,” says Dylan.

“We can do Garden of the Gods,” I say. “You can see it from our hotel.”

“Motel,” says Tara.

She looks at Paige, who giggles and bows.

Garden of the Gods, I explain for the seventeenth time, is an otherworldly assemblage of red rock towers and other amazing formations. You really feel, I say, this place was sculpted by gods to please gods. Gods or monsters, because the towers are of such fantastical, otherworldly shapes as to blur the distinction. Tara asks how I know it feels like this and I say I’ve read up. She crosses her arms. The only downsides, I say, are it’s hot as hell and has rattlers and here and there the red earth cracks, revealing a blackness, no one knows how far down it goes. “Just the sort of challenges,” I say, “that a hero, in the true, classical sense of that word, must vanquish.” Then there’s Cave of the Winds, an hour’s drive up the canyon. It’s a deep cave, with a couple of tours tailored to children. It boasts a wind phenomenon that’s supposed be interesting. I glance at Tara. I’ve heard, I say, it’s pretty kitschy.

Paige lifts peas and tiny, chopped carrots to her mouth. “The cave’s a great thing to do in the heat. And the moms in my mom’s group all say their kids loved it so much they were talking about it for weeks afterward.”

“It’s an hour’s drive,” says Tara.  “On curvy road.”

“So?” says Paige.

Tara shrugs.

I notice that neither boy has touched his cheeseburger. So much for the babysitter’s magic touch.

“But what do you want to do?” Paige says to me.

I look at her, wary. “What do you mean?”

She’s got that smile again. Harry removes from his bun the cheesy meat-patty, studies it, lays it down on the table.

“You’ve got a role to play here,” Paige says.

She stabs a scrap of iceberg. For a nice place like this, the salad looks pretty standard. A role? Paige slips the lettuce into her mouth. I can hear it crack, that’s how crisp it is. She chews, and looks at me. “So what do you want to do?”

“Garden of the Gods,” I say.

“No,” says Dylan.

“No,” says Harry.

“Cave,” says Dylan.

Harry says, “Cave.”

“If you do the cave,” Paige says, “you might not have time for swimming.”

“We don’t care,” says Dylan.

“I don’t care that,” says Harry.

“Fine,” I say. “We’ll do the cave.

“No,” says Paige. “We’ll do Garden of the Gods.”

“No garden,” says Dylan. His pitch has ascended to a whine.

Harry does that thing where he bows his head and looks up with his eyes. The kids call it the ugly face. “No garden.”

“This is your father’s trip.”

“This is all of ours trip,” I say.

“Would any of us be basking in this sacred splendor,” Paige says, glancing at Tara, “if not for you?”

Tara makes squeaking sounds.

“Sounds like a trick question,” I say.

Paige opens her small eyes wide and lays her palms on the table between us. It’s an all-clean gesture. The boys perform it for her after going potty to prove they’ve washed their hands. To make sure they’ve used soap, she smells their little digits.

“Smell,” she says.

I stiffen; as usual, she got me. Of course I’m not going to smell her hands. Then, maybe because of the different environment here — maybe because of the tilt and the vision — I think: why not? Who’s here but family? My family. And the babysitter. I lean over the table and slowly lower my nose into her left hand. I sniff long and loud. I do the same for the right. I sit back. My scalp swims. My breathing is shallow. I look at Paige. She’s staring at me with a shocked look. Her palms still lay face-up on the table. Her breathing, too, is shallow, and suddenly I want to kiss her. Right now, in front of the kids and the babysitter and everyone else, I want to slide my tongue inside her mouth, feel hers flirt with mine, the way it did in the early days. Did we ever do that in public, kiss? I remember doing it with a couple of unstable old girlfriends, but not with Paige, grounded ironic Paige with whom I’ve got so little in common and yet that’s always been the power of it, of us — we complement one another. I’m idealistic, she’s practical. I’m air, she’s earth. I’m passionate, she’s reserved. I’m in the moment, she’s thinking far down the road. On this point, this complementary business, we have always spoken as one.

Paige draws back her hands. She inhales. Picks up her fork. Looks at it. “Compromise,” she says. She looks at Dylan. “You know what compromise is.”

“No I don’t,” says Dylan.

“Yes you do,” I say.

“What’s the compromise?” says Tara.

I turn to her. She’s looking blankly out the window, as if avoiding everyone’s eyes.

“Swimming,” says Paige. “Tomorrow is swim day at the world renown Silver Saddle Motel.” She glances at Tara; surprisingly, the babysitter does not crack a smile.

“Cave day,” says Dylan.

“Yay swimming!” says Harry.

*   *   *

Paige is wearing that orange bikini again and lying on her stomach. I approach, barefoot in swim shorts. I slow, I don’t know why. Maybe it’s on account of how good she looks. Her back, her legs, her butt. I’m walking quietly but not quietly enough. Without moving her head she gestures with a limp hand toward the lounge chair next to hers. I sit. I don’t know what to do next. My back is straight. Should I lie down? Should I lie on my stomach? My back? I feel like the creepy stranger hitting on the hot mom. Yet I’m the husband.

Shouts sound from the pool. Glad for a distraction, I turn to look. Tara’s in that same old fashioned-looking swimsuit. Only white this time. Acres of white. She’s found some sort of inflatable boat. It’s big, like a ten-foot square. And it’s white, like her swimsuit. Where in the world did she come up with that boat? Atop the boat the boys kneel, trying to maintain balance. They’re wet. I can tell by the way their nylon swim shirts (Paige requires a swim shirt, on account of her fear of skin cancer) cling to their heartbreakingly frail bodies. Paige rocks the boat and the boys shriek and laugh. Dylan shimmies but stays upright. Harry tumbles off the boat’s side and suddenly I’m standing, ready for rescue.

“Relax,” says Paige. “Tara’s got it.”

I watch Tara lift Harry back onto the boat. Paige is right. He barely got dunked.

I sit. I wish Tara was not here.

“She’s a godsend,” says Paige.

From the pool, I hear Tara roar. She’s playing some sort of sea monster. I’ve seen her do this before. She’s loud and convincing. Harry loves monsters. His favorite book is called I Need My Monster. He’s got a stuffed-animal monster in his bed. He told a story in pre-school about getting swallowed by a monster and being burped out and then swallowed again. The teacher wrote it down and “published” it on the school website, complete with Harry’s drawings. Story and illustrations by Harry. I never understood why he had to get eaten again after being eaten the first time and mercifully burped out? It’s double jeopardy. Or like you’ve slain the dragon, and then — surprise! — the scaly bastard’s tail twitches on the castle’s cold stone floor. Does Harry love monsters? Does he hate them? Does he think the only way to avoid annihilation is to pretend to like them more than anyone has ever liked them ever in the world? God, I hope he loves monsters. The alternative would murder me. Judging by the shrieky hilarity coming right now from the pool, it could definitely be either. I wonder: if I played the sea monster, would I elicit such a spirited response? Why aren’t I playing the sea monster? Why is she along on this trip in the first place?

“Are you paying her to come on this trip?”  I say.

Paige lies back down. “She wanted to come. As a friend.”

“So no.”

“No.”

“It must be tough, balancing your relationship with Tara the employee with Tara the friend you punch in the shoulder and watch chick shows with and text with nonstop.”

“Not so . . .” Paige yawns. “Not so tough.”

I should let her sleep. She probably didn’t sleep much last night. She never sleeps when the boys are in the bed. She has a hard time sleeping in general, which is another of our “complements” (I’m generally out within five minutes of hitting the pillow). Thing is, I can’t imagine how it’s not not tough for Paige, the balancing. It’s tough for me and I’m not friends with Tara the babysitter. Hell, I can barely come up with her name. Though I don’t know what I mean by it’s tough for me. In fact, I’ve never thought that before. Tough in what way? Not in the way it is (though apparently it’s not) for Paige. Does tough-for-me mean third-wheel tough? Do chick shows and punches and texts mean Paige is bestowing upon Tara an intimacy once reserved for the two who took the vows? Is two years too long to have the same babysitter? What if I suggested to Paige we give Tara the boot — would she say I was being insecure and weird?

I watch Tara shove the boys out of the pool. She does it with the brute warmth of a mother dog pushing her pups with her nose. The boys lie flat on the hot concrete, shivering. In this evil heat they’re shivering.

From across the concrete, Paige reaches out and lays her (cold) hand on my hand. She makes a warm sound. Mmmm. Like I’m a muffin and she’s just eaten me. Then burped me out and eaten me again.

I am so insecure and weird.

Part Four

I walk outside the room, step beyond the balcony’s shade to the sun-bright parking lot; it’s hot. Not even eight in the morning and already white-spider hot. Like there’s a reason for the heat, an intention.

I make a stab at convincing the others to accept Garden of the Gods as our morning activity, and give it up quickly — even I have to admit it’s too damn hot — accepting as consolation the prospect of a late afternoon or early evening Garden expedition. Maybe even a dusk expedition. The kids, Paige says, could stay up late. I’m shocked. She never lets them stay up late. A sign of loosening? Of softening? Is this a pivotal (fragile) moment? Remember, I think, and decide to say nothing about the probability that Garden of the Gods will be closed by dusk.

Cave of the Winds looks like something from Coney Island built into a cliff. We wait in line for tickets, in merciful shade. To our left is a cafeteria and ticket booth and gift shop and even an arcade with old fashioned games. Through the gift shop the limestone-arch marks the cave entrance. To our right is a sheer drop. What separates us from the drop is a railing with spaces wide enough to admit Dylan, not to mention Harry, who can’t help himself — he’s got to hang on the bars and poke his head through and hook a leg in. By the time we get to the ticket booth my nerves are shot.

We’ve got forty five minutes before our tour leaves. Paige and Tara head to the car for Paige’s diet coke, which she forgot, and which she needs as a palliative for carsickness. There’s something conspiratorial about the way they head off together, and I wonder if something else is going on between them. Like what? God I’m bizarre. I take the boys downstairs to the kid play area. There’s an enclosure containing three levels of tunnels that the kids can climb through, assumedly to get them used to climbing through cave tunnels. Harry and Dylan disappear inside. I’m a bit worried about Harry. What if he gets frightened in there and can’t find his way out? He’ll go ballistic. And Paige is not here. I yell Dylan’s name.

“What?” I hear from somewhere amongst the tunnels.

“Stay with your brother. Make sure he’s OK.”

“I’m OK,” says Harry in his singsong toddler’s voice.

“Stay with him.”

“OK,” says Dylan.

But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Harry is screaming and crying, trying to find his way out. Someone taps me on the shoulder. It’s a middle-aged woman of Ohioan bulk, which happens to be where Paige hails from.

“There’s an escape door,” she says, pointing.

I run to the door, pull it open and there’s Harry, his face a mask of tear-streaked fear. I pull him out and hug him hard. Dylan emerges. He looks at me with that look like he knows he’s fucked up and he’s not sorry. Normally that look makes me livid. But I’m not livid now. I’m struck by the ingenuity of the escape door. I think: how did they ever come up with that?

*   *   *

“Under Colorado law,” our tour guide says, “touching the walls of the cave is a crime punishable by a $35,000 fine and/or three months in jail.”

We’re standing in a group of about twenty, mostly young parents in their twenties and thirties, and little kids. Behind us is the gift shop. Before us is the white limestone arch. Someone asks the inevitable: why?

“It may look like solid rock,” the tour guide says, “but the cave is actually a very fragile environment that is easily altered or damaged. Think of it like an organism, like a living being. Which, in truth, it is.” The tour guide, a gangly, blond twenty year-old, gives us all a serious look. Normally such a look from such an obvious boy would strike me as funny. Or geekily cute. But not now. Now I take him at his word. I brace myself. We’re about to enter an organism.

“Everybody ready?” he says.

We file inside. At regular intervals the walls bulge, forcing us to undulate. There’s a rock in my sandals. I stop, trying to dislodge it with my finger. Harry raps the back of my knee with his little knuckles.

“Go, dad.”

“Go dad, please,” says Paige.

“Humph,” says Harry, hugging himself.

“You don’t speak to your father like that,” says Tara.

“It’s OK,” I say. “We’re underground.”

“They’ve got to respect you,” says Paige. “You’ve got to teach them to respect you.”

I look at Paige, but she’s found something interesting on the cave wall. It looks like a gold barnacle. A field of golden barnacles. My children don’t respect me? Since when?

“Dad,” says Dylan. “The whole class is waiting.”

I look back. A line of people stand in the batty shadows of the hip-height guide-lights, looking at me. I peer beyond the line of people, but the bulges have obscured the opening. I can’t even find a scrap of daylight. And we’re barely twenty paces into the cave. It’s like we all just stood there at the entrance, and got absorbed.

We descend. Harry’s holding Paige’s hand. Dylan’s holding mine. Tara brings up the rear. It’s cool, fifty four degrees cool to be exact. From the ceiling descend rose-colored stalactites. Many are broken. I think of fingers. The tunnel flattens and turns. The tour guide tells us to stay close and watch our heads. We crouchwalk into a round, gray room he calls the Bridal Chamber. It doesn’t seem like much to me. Rockpiles appear to be the primary feature. And those gold barnacles. The tour guide points to a rock formation he says looks like a canopied bed. I can’t see it. I do see, though, just to the right of the so-called bed a hardcover book lying open. Or two tablets.

We go on. Harry is whining that he’s tired. Tara offers to pick him up. “Mama do,” he says, employing the baby-talk device he knows works on Paige. Behind me, Paige sighs. A rustling; she’s picking him up. Dylan pulls at my hand.

“C’mon dad,” he says. “We have to get to the Giant’s Bleeding Heart.”

“You can’t go in front of the guide,” I say.

“Why?”

“We could get lost. We could never get out of here.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, gripping my hand tighter.

We follow the tour guide out of the Bridal Chamber, up a kind of hill. The ceiling’s amazing. Maybe it’s the lighting, the artistry of modern cave lighting, but I really do feel like we’re inside a creature. On the walls the rock folds like skin and also lies in great, pale, skin-like expanses. There are reddish protrusions that look like organ tissue and haphazard, erotic puckers and white, bonelike columns and something called flowstone that the guide says looks like Victorian curtains but which to me looks like the massive hairs inside a whale’s mouth that filter its dinner.

Without stopping, the guide points out a hole in the ceiling, and says this is where the men who discovered the cave first entered. They were unbelievably brave, he says. Or crazy. They had no idea where the tunnel would lead, if they would ever find their way out. And they went anyhow, driven by their thirst for exploration. At this phrase, thirst for exploration, the guide pauses and turns and gives us all that same look he gave us outside, and as outside, I’m under this kid’s pimply spell.

He walks on. We follow. People were braver then, I think. People were driven by a different drummer. Ours is a generation that thirsts for comfort and ease. Aztecs, conquistadors, men who wriggle into unexplored caves—these were men. These were godlike men. To these men, death was an acceptable price to pay for the privilege of glimpsing mystery. These men were the ones who deserved to inherit the earth.

The guide calls a halt. We huddle in a tilted chamber. It’s small. Two of me could lie across its width. It’s low too: three of me could touch the broken fingers on the ceiling. And dark. There’s a light up high and one by the floor, and that’s it. Dylan asks if this is the Giant’s Bleeding Heart. I don’t know. I say, Shhh.

The guide says the Indians believed the Great Spirit of the Wind lived in this cave because before the limestone arch was discovered there was just one small entrance known as a blowhole—a blowhole!—that moaned when it exhaled. Did we know, the guide says, that one million cubic feet of air enter or leave this cave every hour? In winter, when the cave is inhaling, the temperature can drop twenty five degrees in less than ten seconds.

“Everyone ready?” he says.

Dylan backs against my leg. Then Harry appears. He’s slipped away from the women somehow. He grabs my other hand. “Daddy,” he says.

“I’m going to turn off the lights,” the guide says. “All the lights. I’m going to return you to the cave as it was, as it is, as it always will be. Do not move. Do not talk. Just . . . Listen.”

The cave lights go out. The guide extinguishes his flashlight. It is dark. Absolutely. The boys shift their grips on my hands. I don’t know where Paige and Tara are. I listen. Nothing. Something. A hum. A moan. An inhale. It’s me, inhaling. Or the cave is inhaling through me. One million cubic feet of moaning air, moving through me. I pull the boys in closer, wrapping an arm around each of them, pressing a palm to their hearts. They don’t know it — I hope they don’t know it — but I’m holding onto their little hearts for dear life. If not for their hearts, the warmth, the beating, I would be sucked into this cave creature’s furthest deepest blackest tunnel. I would be lost forever. I would be re-swallowed.

The lights come back on. No one moves. No one speaks. Then I hear Paige’s voice. Tara giggles. Paige’s voice does not comfort me. Has it ever? It must have, once. I recall a road trip I took alone in the high desert just before I met Paige. Or rather, I had already met Paige, but I hadn’t decided to be serious about her yet. I was driving through the high desert of eastern Oregon alone feeling like I should be feeling like a romantic hero, like Lord Byron, and instead feeling like frightened little boy about to break down crying for his mother, and then feeling like I was no longer me—I had become the very air, that achingly lovely and infinitely lonely high desert air. I remember forcing myself to continue on to the day’s destination, a bighorn sheep refuge complete with eight-thousand foot plateau and cataclysmic cliffs, where I pitched a tent and made a fire and did not sleep for fear the drunk guys with the roaring fire and the Dodge pickups down the dirt road would sneak into my camp and slice my throat for sport. When I got back home, the next evening, I went straight to Paige’s and proposed.

Another tour group arrives behind us and our guide says we need to keep moving. Harry dashes back to walk with his mother again. I expect Dylan to do the same (why do I expect this?) but he tightens his grip on my hand, and asks why those men first entered this cave. To explore, I say. Dylan keeps his eyes straight ahead, which tells me my answer was unsatisfactory, so I suggest that maybe, deep in the cave, there’s a secret gold mine. Dylan looks up at me. Where are the miners now? he says. It’s an abandoned mine now, I say. What’s abandoned mean? It means the miners aren’t there anymore. In a hushed voice, Dylan asks me why the miners are not there anymore. I say, oh, a lot of reasons. He’s says like what? Maybe the gold ran out, I say. What else? Maybe they got tired of working deep underground — working deep underground can be brutal. What else? Maybe they got lonely working in a cave high in the mountains. Lonely? They wanted people around them. But they had people, right? They wanted more people. How many? I don’t know? Who? I don’t know. Their kids? Absolutely. Their moms and dads? Sure. Wifes? Why do you ask that? I say, clasping him tighter, gathering up a clump of his shirt in my fist. He shrugs. I look straight ahead. We pass into the tunnel of undulating bulges, and I realize we’re nearly back at the entrance. So, says Dylan. So what? Wifes? Of course, I say. He nods, bowing toward the tunnel’s flinty floor, turning his face slightly away from me, and I picture his little lips mouthing, why?

I glance back. Paige carries Harry. His head’s on her shoulder and by the way it bobs to her pigeon-toed gait I can tell he’s asleep. Tara follows Paige with her hands over Harry’s ears, presumably to keep him from waking. It’s just the sort of strange demand Paige would make of Tara. Tara, hold your hands over his ears. Please. To accomplish her task, Tara’s got to lean toward Paige in a way that looks quite uncomfortable, and that makes it appear as if they’re sharing a moment of serious intimacy. I notice a poop smell. Harry. I wonder how long he’s had a poop in his pants. I look behind Paige and Tara, but no one’s back there. They must all be outside already. We’re the last of our group in this cave. And no wonder. Our family, I think, following Dylan through the tunnel’s undulations, toward the light, Jesus, our family smells like shit.

Part Five

Paige takes it slow on the drive back down in order to avoid getting carsick again. It’s hot as hell when we pull into the parking lot of the Silver Saddle, yet it’s nearly four o’clock. Paige pulls into a parking spot directly in front of our room.

I inform everyone in the car that Garden of the Gods closes soon.

“What time?” says Tara.

“I don’t remember exactly,” I say.

“There’s brochures in the office,” says Tara.

Paige turns off the engine. Her hand pauses on the door handle.

“We could go right now,” I say. “Without getting out of the car.”

Paige’s eyes find mine in the rearview. She gives me a look, a confusing brew of fatigue and carsickness and amusement. Fond amusement. I know I see it, just like I know we want the same things. And I know this fondly amused look is one way she shows her love. For me. Why now? A dusk visit to Garden of the Gods, I think. That would be magic.

Paige takes the boys into the back room and tells them it’s rest time. They lie on the bed and watch a DVD she brought of Scooby Doo shows. The new Scooby Doo shows. I see a pumpkin-headed scarecrow with razor teeth and scythes for hands. In the past I’ve suggested to Paige the new ones are inappropriate, and it turned into a fight. I do not want a fight now.

Paige comes out of the back room. “The boys are resting,” she says. She looks at me. “I’m sorry, it’s just too hot for Garden of the Gods. I know you had your heart set on it.”

“Did you forget about dusk?” I say.

“No.”

“Well.”

“It closes at six.”

“How do you know?”

She holds up her phone.

“And you didn’t tell me?” I say. “You let me go the whole day thinking we’d finally be going to Garden of the Gods and you knew it closed at six?”

“You didn’t?”

Paige looks at me, looks at her phone, pockets the phone. She says she needs her diet coke fix. Tara stands, as if readying to go. With her eyes, Paige bids Tara sit

“Next road trip it’s a date,” Paige says to me, and goes out.

The Scooby Doo theme song plays. The boys pile out of the back room and leap onto my bed and begin jumping and Dylan, because he can, jumps as high as he can and bounces his brother onto his ass.

Tara and Dylan laugh.

Harry gives Tara the ugly face. “It’s not funny.”

“It is funny, Harry,” Tara says. “It is very funny, Harry.”

Harry looks like he’s about to cry. He gets that pout. His lips quiver. I brace for the howl. And then he smiles. I can’t believe it.

“How did you do that?” I say.

“Old Indian trick,” Tara says.

“Indian?”

Tara shrugs. I look into her face. I’ve never really looked into her face before. She’s got that long, monument nose of an Indian, and the black hair, but she’s got the pale skin of a European. I realize she’s not kidding—she is an Indian. Back in that cow town she’s from, they’re all Indians. Indians mixed with Spanish. Or rather, Aztecs mixed with conquistador blood.

Dylan says, “Swimming!”

Harry stands. “Yeah, swimming!”

“Is that OK with you?” says Tara.

“Why wouldn’t it?” I say.

Tara and the boys disappear into the back room and emerge dressed in their swimsuits. Tara’s wearing that white swimsuit. The one with the ruffles. I decide the ruffles look like feathers, and that she resembles a huge white bird.

Tara says to me, “I could talk to Paige. Maybe she’ll change her mind about Garden of the Gods.”

“No,” says Dylan.

“No,” says Harry.

“Or you could take them swimming,” Tara says.

“No,” says Dylan.

“We want Tara,” says Harry.

“Boys,” says Tara.

“What other Indian tricks do you know?” I say.

Tara looks at me. “You don’t want to know.”

I look at her. “Yes I do.”

Tara shrugs. “You don’t really want to go to Garden of the Gods. You never really wanted to. It scares the hell out of you, a place like that.”

“Why?”

“Monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“I don’t know.”

Dylan and Harry each take hold of one of Tara’s hands.

“C’mon, Tara,” says Dylan.

“C’mon,” says Harry.

“Go,” I say.

“Go please,” says Harry.

“Please,” I say.

Through the window I watch the three of them walk into the parking lot’s shimmer. I’m standing at the foot of my queen bed, looking at the black TV, realizing Tara spoke the truth. Ever since that day in the Oregon desert, I haven’t had the courage to do more than talk. And Paige knew this. Has always known. Since the day I proposed. Since that day, good loyal wife that she is, she’s played along with my high-hearted notions and lectures and admonitions. She’s protected me from my own cowardice, my smallness, my meekness.

I step to the door, open it. I see Paige standing on the pool’s white concrete, just inside the yellow caution tape, sipping diet coke. In the pool, in her white swimsuit, Tara bears the boys on that great white float across the water. They’re laughing. She’s doing her sea monster roar. Only she’s not a monster, not to me, not anymore — to me she’s brave and beautiful and gleams with majesty. To me she’s not just a godsend, as Paige would have her, she’s a god. She’s Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god whose return on a mighty white wing the stone tablet foretold. Who manifested on a tall ship in the form of the pale-skinned white-bearded Hernando Cortez on the day, on the very day, of the tablet’s foretelling. Who believed, with the blood of thousands, in the city paved with gold and the fountain sprung from god. Who downed an epoch.

*   *   *

I stumble into the parking lot like a man half waked. The asphalt’s hot and I’ve got no shoes on and I fling myself across the gluey blacktop to the safety of the pool’s white concrete. Paige steps toward me, hugs me long and warm, kisses my neck. She steps back.

“I’m going to Garden of the Gods,” I say.

She smiles at me.

“I’m taking the boys.”

Her smile falters.

“Now.”

“Honey,” she says. “It’s already been decided.”

“Not by me.”

“Yes,” she says. “By you.”

I look at Paige. I’m being unfair, changing the game on her without warning after all these years.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and walk past Paige to the pool. Tara and the boys are on the other side, readying for the return ride. “Tara,” I yell. “Tara de Alvarado.”

I gesture with my arm; she bears the boys back across the water. I tell them to get out of the pool, that they can swim later, that Garden of the Gods is closing in twenty minutes and we’re going.

Tara looks past me, toward Paige. Without turning around I know Paige is shaking her head no.

“Now,” I say.

Tara hands up my dripping children to me, then bows, hiding (I believe in this) a smile.

“We want to keep swimming,” says Dylan.

“No garden,” says Harry.

Paige draws alongside me.

“Stop this,” she says.

With a boy writhing under each arm, I trot back across the burning parking lot. In the room, I order them to get dressed. They refuse. I lift Dylan high into the air, pausing before heaving his little body hard against the hard bed. Dylan’s face goes white. Eyes like ponds, Harry stares up at me. Tara enters the room.

“Get dressed, boys,” I say.

Paige walks through the open door. She halts just inside the room’s dark. I finish dressing the boys. I put on my sandals. I take hold of the boys’ hands. They try to wriggle away but I’m stronger than ever.

“You’re hurting them,” Paige says, but she steps aside when I lead them out the door (my face must be really crazy) and after I buckle the whimpering kids into their seats and slide behind the steering wheel she sits between the car-seats and Tara’s grand language-less form hunches in the passenger seat and I accelerate beneath the overpass, past the liquor stores and cheap motels and grease joints and Wal Mart. At Garden of the Gods, a red-and-white wooden arm blocks the entrance, and the peak-roofed booth is empty. I get out of the car, leaving the engine idling (and my family buckled). I duck under the wooden arm. I hear Harry protesting. A door slams shut. There’s the clunk of the car shifting into gear. I walk on, toward Cathedral Spires, which look like the name suggests, Gothic church spires, red. Behind the spires Pike’s Peak looms, black. Above the Peak the sun is setting, every forsaken color. If man was not built to receive them all at once, I think, why do it to him? Night after night? Behind me, Paige backs my family up the narrow entrance road, turns, guns them away.

It’s all here. As written. The Tower of Babel. The Three Graces. Kissing Camels. Siamese Twins. All set there as if dropped from a dying comet. All striving upward, thirsting to return. All flanked by gnarled, stunted junipers that would make Job feel at home. Or Cortez.

The sun finishes. The Peak flies, a hawk above the Garden. I call out. Here I am, Dusk. Black Pillars with Martian Heads. Here Giant. Here Salt. My toe snags and I’m flung onto slick serrated stone. My knee bleeds. I bend to the seep. An acceptable price. What does that even mean? I stand. Walk on.

Of Cohen’s fiction, James Salter wrote, “There is a powerful, innate tension in his writing which comes not only from his voice but from his particular way of looking at things, an unusual way, and in art — in fiction — the only real worlds are likely to be the unusual.”

In his letter nominating Cohen’s novel The Glamshack Chronicles (currently under reconstruction) for a Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award, senior Viking editor Josh Kendall wrote that the book “is that exceptionally rare, uncategorizable novel that not only finds its greatest achievements in its singularity, but also serves as a reminder of how very familiar and commonly un-daring contemporary fiction is in general.”

Cohen earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded a teaching scholarship as well as the Prairie Lights Prize for Fiction. He has taught writing at UC Berkeley Extension,  the University of San Francisco MFA program and the University of Iowa, and has guest lectured at California College of the Arts. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

To read synopses and excerpts from his novels A Blue Sun and The Sleeping Indian, please visit www.paulcohenfiction.com, coming later this week.

If Andrew knew anything, it was that he was on the side of the righteous. It was late in the twentieth century, and his law degree could have allowed him to pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars shuffling corporate paper, or politick at the district attorney’s office, or mug for cameras as an entertainment representative. He could have been basking weekends in the sun beside his parents’ Mulholland pool.

Instead, he went to Bosnia, where he eased the discomfort of material austerity with the satisfying knowledge that he was shaping history for the better.

“I’m off to save the world,” he had joked, before leaving.

But in September that year, Sarajevo was cloudier and grayer than anywhere he had ever imagined. Besides righteousness, his law degree had secured him a small office at a development organization, a modest, tax-free salary, and the admiration of his Bosnian colleagues.

“They think I know what I’m talking about,” he said.

Increasingly though, he found it oppressive. Every day from his office window, he watched the pedestrians as they trudged along Marsala Titova Street, hugging the dark buildings, keeping the bullet-pocked stone walls always between themselves and the hills surrounding the city. Andrew found this both depressing and eerie, similar to the feeling he once had when he saw re-enactors at Colonial Williamsburg.

A history buff, Andrew felt he could look out his office window at the end of the twentieth century and see the beginning of it. He saw an earlier, more desperate time, full of anarchists and nationalists and fanatics who would kill wantonly in their zeal. Specifically, his window looked out on the intersection where Franz Ferdinand was shot, and beyond it, at a section of the deceptively shallow Miljacka river. He had been told that one of Gavrilo Princep’s co-conspirators had planned to kill himself by taking cyanide, only to find that the pill he had been given was old and impotent. So he threw himself off the low bridge into the river, which he was shocked to discover was only inches deep. Soaking wet but alive, he was hauled out, beaten, and imprisoned, dying of typhus a few months later, just as the war he helped start started.

But Andrew couldn’t help feeling this knowledge was trivial, a series of dates and events entirely unmoored from the daily reality surrounding him: the babushka clad women and the primal smell of grilling chivapchichi and the rumbling, ancient tram-line outside his apartment and the proud old men in their partisan berets and the trudging pedestrians under the cloud-filled sky.

“It just sometimes feels like I’m giving up a lot to be here,” he once said, calling home at a low point. “I should be driving around the Palisades with the top down.”

Sun in the midst of the clouds: Nathalie was a nurse from Quebec, and spoke English like a child, but she had been in Sarajevo three months longer than Andrew, and this made her an old hand, a veteran, a sage. A week after he arrived, Andrew spotted her walking with a group of four or five into a party thrown by some staff from the World Bank. She was tall with auburn hair and big, dark eyes that Andrew felt he alone understood.  She had come to Bosnia, she said, because it was the right thing to do. “I had to follow my heart,” she said, although with her accent she pronounced it like “art.” And perhaps that was what she meant to say.

His own conversation with her had been brief — the basics in basic English — before she had been whisked away by friends and would-be lovers.

It was the end of the twentieth century and the world was filled with organizations meant to care for the sick and aid the disadvantaged and settle the refugees and prosecute the killers and feed the impoverished and improve the world, while at the same time balancing all the caring and aiding and settling and prosecuting and feeding and improving with the fundraising needed to ensure their own survival. Andrew worked at one of them, a development organization, the object of which was the development of Eastern Europe. They tended to be fairly open-ended about what, exactly, the development of Eastern Europe might look like, but it was usually discussed with great enthusiasm. It was an enthusiastic time, and they were creating a better world.

In theory, the organization brought the blessings of prosperity and democracy and a free-market economy to the poor, sheltered, communism-scarred landscape. In theory they tried to make it more like America, or at least England. It was thought that this would make the region less likely to self destruct. In theory they were there to help.

Despite his occasional melancholy, Andrew was committed, determined, focused. On his desk sat a thick, blue, three-ring binder, and on the wall behind the desk was posted a large map of Bosnia. The binder was labelled “Agency Regulations,” and a new one arrived from Washington every few months. The map on the wall was labelled “Land Mine Areas, Bosnia-Herzegovina,” and each land-mine area was marked on it by a tiny, pale-red dot. Andrew could look at the map from twenty feet away and easily discern Bosnia’s entire road system, as though it had been traced in pale-red highlighter by an eager toddler.

Part Two

Andrew’s days consisted mostly of sitting at his desk and reading applications, which came from local politicians who wanted to travel to America on expense-paid trips to learn how to found a bank or generate electricity or produce a television show. Or at least learn how these things were done in America. He read hundreds of applications every week. According to the book of “Agency Regulations,” all applications had to be printed on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheets of white paper. But because Bosnia, like much of the rest of the world, used size A4 paper, paper-size-related administrative issues had required much time and considerable ingenuity to resolve.

It was the end of the twentieth century, and Andrew took comfort knowing that he was helping to build a better tomorrow, but the weather was bleak, and if there was one thing Andrew knew, it was that he could use a vacation.

“This weekend, do you want to go to the coast?” he said over the phone to Scott, a friend whom he hoped would offer the use of the brand new Chevrolet Suburban to which he had access.

“Sure,” said Scott. “You just have to help me do something first.”

And then Andrew hung up the phone and read applications until his Bosnian assistant, Sabina, walked in and said, “Andy, hey listen, I just heard this one. You’ll like it. How many Serbs does it take to change a light bulb?”

Sabina’s long brown hair was streaked by grey strands, and she was missing several molars. Deeply etched lines surrounded her bright green eyes and full mouth. She was twenty-six, and Andrew had thought many times that if she were twenty-six somewhere else in the world, Spain say, or Canada, she would be gorgeous. Not simply pretty but modelesque.

“Well, how many?”

Andrew confessed that he had no idea how many Serbs it took to change a light bulb.

“Four,” she said. “One to change the light bulb and three to man the checkpoint!” She laughed at this, throwing back her head and opening her mouth to reveal her missing teeth. “You know how they all want to grow up and have their own checkpoints, right? What, you don’t think it’s funny?” She laughed some more, her brilliant green eyes flashing almost crazily.

At five o’clock Scott carried a small sledgehammer into Andrew’s office.

“Ready?” said Scott.

“Let me get my jacket.”

Scott worked for a large accounting firm that was bringing modern, transparent accounting methods to the region’s backward, communism-scarred accounting services industry. It was thought that this would make it easier for Western companies to do business there. According to the accounting firm’s literature, they were getting the region ready to do business in the twenty-first century. The twenty-first century, thought Andrew when he read the brochure. Two thousand. A new era.

Once, over several Sarajevsko Pivos, Andrew had asked Scott why he came to Bosnia. “Because,” Scott had said, “if you hit a home run in this game, you can pretty much write your own ticket.”

They crossed the street to a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Among the cars inside sat a white, polished Chevrolet Suburban with the words World Medical Organization printed on the side with a symbol, like a globe surrounded by a stethoscope. Although Andrew thought to himself that it could also have been a globe surrounded by a double-headed snake, which might have made as much sense, because he remembered something about the ancient symbol for a doctor being a snake. Didn’t they use snakes to draw blood, or suck poison, or maybe just scare people? You know, Andrew imagined the old doctors would say, using a tone that would have implied inherently superior wisdom, you better really be sick, or we’re going to use the snake on you!

Fraud prevention, really.

“You wanna go first?” said Scott, drawing Andrew out of his thoughts.

“No way, man. You bought it,” said Andrew, meaning, he realized, both the sledgehammer and the car, the purchase of which Scott had arranged mostly to impress Bernadette, who was both the deputy director at the Sarajevo branch of the World Medical Organization, where she worked with Nathalie, and Scott’s new girlfriend.

Scott lifted the sledgehammer and walloped the passenger-side door, careful not to hit the snake/stethoscope/globe symbol. He didn’t use everything he had, only enough to make a small dent. Andrew was surprised at how easily the metal yielded, bending like aluminum foil, divots and scratched craters replacing the glossy white finish.

“So, Bernadette and Nathalie want to come, too,” said Scott, between hammer blows. “To the coast. That okay?”

Andrew smiled as he nodded. “Let me give it a try,” he said.

They spent a few more minutes banging up the Suburban so thieves, who lurked everywhere, wouldn’t try to steal it, and Andrew found it the most satisfying thing he had done since he arrived.

*   *   *

The next evening the four of them had dinner together as a prelude to the drive to the coast. Bernadette looked vaguely like Scott, but very thin with black, untameable hair and a French nose. She spoke English with almost a clipped British accent, which was good, because when they met, Scott couldn’t speak a word of French. But he was learning fast.

Nathalie sat close next to Andrew at the small table in the Café Mostar, and every so often he could smell her hair in the heavy air. It smelled sharp like wet apples and something musky. Leaves or maybe grass. He remembered smelling something like it before, long ago, but he couldn’t quite place it. Their voices were a mumble around him as he tried to figure it out, thinking back to a summer years earlier he had spent on a cousin’s farm in southern Virginia, the neighbor’s two-room shack, and his daughter, her puppy eyes and her thick, slippery drawl, how he thought he could pull her out of it, her situation, as he now realized he thought of it, as surely as rescuing a drowning puppy.

Then he realized he had been absent from the conversation and forced himself back, like coming up from underwater.

“We’ll have to leave by eight to catch the Makarska ferry,” Scott was saying.

“But this does not give enough time,” said Bernadette, and Andrew realized they were subtly arguing. Bernadette was translating parts of her argument into French for Nathalie, who was quiet either because she agreed, or because she was only getting part of the story, the conversation spinning and swirling between languages.

“Mais, arrête,” Nathalie finally broke in, adding a final syllable for emphasis, ah-ret-UH, and they all went quiet, caught off guard by the authority in her voice. She smiled, eyes bright and a little mischievous. “Alors,” she said, and followed it with a dense stream of French that Andrew couldn’t catch. Scott and Andrew looked automatically to Bernadette for a translation.

“She says we must relax and let the universe work as it will,” said Bernadette, rolling her eyes and waving her hands in the air like a sarcastic magician. Scott and Bernadette sat back in their chairs, obviously skeptical of the universe’s power to help them catch a ferry. But for Andrew the tension ebbed as though he had been given a sedative.

Part Three

Later that evening, Bernadette slammed Andrew’s finger in the car door. Scott had offered to drive everyone home after dinner, and as Andrew got into the backseat, Bernadette didn’t realize he was using the passenger-side door frame as a handhold and slammed the door shut. He yelled once and pulled and pulled, trying to yank his wedged finger out of the tightly shut door. Bernadette, who was by now sitting comfortably in the passenger seat, very calmly and, Andrew thought, very slowly turned to find out why he had yelled. The expression on her face said Why on earth are you making such a racket?

Nathalie comprehended first. “La porte!” she said.

When the door finally opened, Andrew pulled back his hand and saw that his index finger was dented and bloody, although he could no longer feel much of anything after the initial pain, and he sat down quietly, gently in the back seat and tried not to pass out.

They drove to the Sarajevo emergency room, where the doctors smiled despite themselves at the injury that was nearly causing Andrew to lose consciousness. His head was getting lighter and lighter, and from time to time little spots appeared in his peripheral vision. He wondered aloud if these were the same spots Wile E. Coyote saw when the Road Runner allowed an anvil to drop from great height onto his head.

“Perhaps you should lie down,” said a nurse.

The doctors and nurses were trying hard to take the injury as seriously as possible. They took an X-ray. They poured brown iodine onto his finger and wrapped it in an impressive bandage. They gave him a large, oblong pill that they said would help with the pain.

After some time one of the doctors, a short man with a touch of grey in his temples, walked into the emergency room carrying a large X-ray.

“The good news is that it’s not broken,” he said.  “You may lose the fingernail, but your chances for survival are very good.”

*   *   *

The morning dawned overcast and they all slept in, started late on the road, which was lined everywhere along its length by triangular landmine-warning signs. Scott drove southwest out of Sarajevo, heading urgently toward Croatia, with Bernadette in the passenger seat, Nathalie and Andrew–his finger throbbing and bandaged on his lap — in the back. The tension of the previous night had lifted, replaced by the drive’s purposefulness.

They passed through rolling farmland with peculiar piles of hay, cone-shaped and stacked around tall polls stuck in the ground, down the narrow, two-lane road, past quaint, stucco houses with thatched roofs that speckled the unfurling hills, all of it looking to Andrew like a landscape painting from an earlier time.

Most of the homes were well-kept, but the road’s endless curves occasionally concealed a bombed-out, empty house, dark burn marks and bullet pocks decorating the mortar, though without any comment as to the reason for its destruction, and no tidings of its former inhabitants. These, too, seemed to be from a hundred years prior. As the dented white Suburban passed the destroyed dwellings, Andrew stared, transfixed by the proof of his geography.

Gradually the farmland steepened and fell, the rolling hills sheered and plunged until the travelers were surrounded by vertical, rock-wall cliffs and steep drops, every curve inviting the miscalculation that would send them sailing over the guardrail-less edge. Around each bend Andrew tried to see the boiling white Neretva river at the bottom of the gorge. Eventually the chasm opened onto the wide, dry plain around Mostar, rock-strewn and sage-tufted. The clouds broke and the temperature soared.

Andrew blinked in the sudden sun.

The road separated from the river, which continued on toward the center of Mostar and the ruins of its old bridge, and headed west around the city. When they passed a sign pointing the way toward the city center, and Scott yelled over his shoulder like a father shouting to his children while driving on a summer road trip: “It’s a shame we can’t stop,” he raised his voice against the half-open windows. “We’re late for the ferry.”

Sometime later, Andrew spotted something ahead, low and square in the far distance, to the right of the road, set out in the middle of the nothingness of the rocky plain. As they drove closer, it resolved into two things. The first, closer object was a low square building and the second, about fifty meters further on, was a narrow guard shack flanked by two uniformed men, marking the border with Croatia.

Closer still, Andrew saw that the low building was a small hut, plywood and stone stacked under a corrugated metal roof. Plastic tables and chairs sat in the dust to the side of it, and on the roof was a hand-painted sign on splintered wood that read, in dark lettering, Café. As they drove past, an old man with a sunburned, wrinkled face stopped what he was doing beside the shack and looked up expectantly at the passing Suburban. He wore a faded white shirt and a Chicago Cubs baseball cap. Behind him, two boys kicked a brown, scarred soccer ball.

“Maybe we should stop,” said Andrew. “You know, support a local business.” Scott half turned to look at him.

“Yeah, we should,” he said. “But…” Bernadette glanced at Scott, who seemed to be preoccupied with the approaching guard shack.

“We really must catch the ferry,” she said.

Andrew looked out the window at the old man and the two boys and their ball, and as he looked everything seemed to slow down to a crawl. He wanted to reach out to them. For a fleeting moment he seemed to remember that he had been sent there to do just that, to pull them out of the dust and stand them up, and then he was lost momentarily in other thoughts too many and fast to enumerate, and then they were past. The Suburban stopped at the checkpoint, then rolled on after a few pleasant words, passed like hors d’oeuvres between Scott and the gendarmes.

Part Four

The road stretched on, straight and flat, occasionally interrupted by a curve built to circumvent a hill or avoid an outcropping of rocks. As they turned through one particularly abrupt curve, Scott over-steered slightly and Nathalie slid across the leathered back seat, landing nearly on top of Andrew. She smiled over at him and didn’t move back right away, allowing her thigh to press warmly against his. Then the road straightened again and she slid herself slowly back across the seat.

And then the straight road made a few squiggly turns up a shallow bluff, like the EKG readout of a patient returning from the dead. They crested a rise and suddenly all was blue and brilliant, the wine-dark Adriatic Sea dotted by countless islands, like massive ships in a harbor, echoes of the puffy-cloud sky above. They rounded a bend and were suddenly, disorientingly on top of a cliff hundreds of feet above both the sea and the port town of Makarska, which they hoped, despite their late arrival, still held their ferry in its harbor.

They descended hairpin switchbacks into the limestone and terra-cotta town. Following signs depicting the blue-and-white silhouette of a ferry, they made their way along the palm-dotted bay toward the hectic port. They were over two hours late, yet as they approached the berth, the frenzied port traffic seemed to part before them, opening a narrow space of calm in which the ferry sat placidly at the dock as though it had been awaiting their arrival. It was a great, white ship with car-loaded decks and the word Spašavanje printed on its bow in blue letters. Andrew sighed audibly upon seeing this floating marvel, this feat of tourist-driven civilization that would — he was increasingly certain of it now — transport them to an island away from everything. Bernadette announced excitedly that there remained room for exactly one car on the deck.

“See, we have good chances!” exclaimed Nathalie.

It wasn’t until after they pulled the dented Suburban aboard and into that one remaining space and the Spašavanje was underway that they had the chance to talk to some of the other passengers and discover the reason for both the ferry’s late departure and the extra place onboard. The boat had cast off, they were told by a Spaniard in lispy English, and was half an hour out into the Adriatic when a fire in the engine forced it back to port, where a superstitious driver took the fire as a sign of something larger and drove off, leaving behind the empty place.

The decks of the Spašavanje were dotted with passengers, most of whom wore shorts and T-shirts and stood around as though waiting for ice cream. It was nice, thought Andrew, as he looked at their deep tans, their sunglasses, and their easy manner, to finally be among people who did not need saving. Standing at the stern rail, washed by the rattle of the newly repaired engine and the swirling din of multiple languages, he spent the better part of the two-hour voyage staring into the azure depths.

Sumartin, on the island of Brač, was like Makarska only quainter, more colorful, less crowded, more palm-lined, less frenzied. It was well after dark when, thanks to Bernadette’s limited Serbo-Croatian, they were able to negotiate the rental of a two-room pension in a house at the end of a terraced street.

“Think you can handle sharing a room with Nathalie?” said Scott to Andrew with a smile as they unloaded the bags from the Suburban and into the two white-walled, simple rooms. A clean, tiled hallway led Andrew to their room, where Nathalie was arranging her things on one of two twin beds set against opposite walls. He was suddenly aware of being alone with her for the first time, of having never spoken directly to her without being overheard, of the two of them uncomfortable in the same language. This both excited and intimidated him, and he was unsure how to proceed. He glanced up at the room’s small, dark window in the wall between the two beds that looked out onto a landscape, he imagined, vast and undefined.

“Do you have an alarm?” he asked. He was just trying to make conversation, really, but in response Nathalie looked mystified.

“You know, a clock. I forgot mine.”

She raised her eyes in recognition.

“Oh, a … clock, yes?” she said, pointing to her wrist.

“Yeah, a clock,” said Andrew. Her raised eyebrows furrowed as she understood the question. Then she looked at Andrew like he was an idiot.

“Why a clock?” she asked. “C’est la vacance. You have vacation now.”

*   *   *

That night Andrew lay in bed and listened to the gentle sigh of Nathalie’s sleep from across the room. A breeze whispered through the pines outside the window, and Andrew thought back to the old man, working next to his shack, the children playing in the dirt behind him, and a distant, puppy-eyed girl. And then he was asleep.

Part Five

When he woke, Andrew was mildly shocked to find himself alone in the bright room, a markedly warmer though still-gentle breeze flowing in through the open window. He briefly suspected that they had all left without him. Then he saw that on Nathalie’s bed was a hastily scrawled note – At the beach. Didn’t want to wake you.

He was further surprised to walk groggily down the hallway and through a screen-door and into the screaming blue morning of the pension’s back terrace, which looked over the shining sea and hung a hundred feet or more above a thin, half-moon bay. Skinny pines covered the hillside and their pungent scent roused him to the day’s possibilities. A narrow cement staircase led down the hill, through pines and lavender and flowering cacti to a narrow beach, curved and pebbly.

Andrew found the others there, laughing in the gentle surf. He waded out into the clear water and donned a snorkel and mask that somehow appeared in his injured right hand. In moments he was under the water, cool and deep, and so clear he felt he could see forever. He floated face down on the surface, looking through the mask at a small reef, its sounds crackling in his ears like cereal in a bowl of milk. He drifted further away from the shore, the anemone-covered bottom falling away steeply until he hovered motionless over the aqua-marine depths. He experienced a sudden fear, almost panic, not of drowning but of vertigo, of falling to his death among the dark coral heads now fifty feet below him.

He shifted his attention from the blue depths to his breathing, focusing on the great lungfuls of air that poured down the snorkel and into his greedy chest. As he focused, his breath leveled out, the panic passed, and he was still, floating motionless and detached, inhaling gently, his respiration keeping time with the shallow undulation of the sea.

He turned back toward the shore and drifted in until, still floating, he could once again reach out with his hand and touch the pebbles, hear them give way, clicking together like marbles as he knelt, then slowly stood, rising up out of water he was shocked to find was only inches deep.

*   *   *

The rest of the weekend passed in a blur of blue and water and seafood, of missed passes and awkward conversation and long swims, and then they were on their way back to Sarajevo, late in the afternoon, stopping this time, by popular agreement, at the ramshackle café by the side of the road. No one was in sight as they got out of the Suburban, the echo of closing car doors mingling with the dissipating road dust that glowed golden in the setting sun. Then the old man appeared from somewhere, eyes big and excited.

“Dobra dan,” he said.

“Dobra dan,” said Bernadette, glancing at the landmine signs lining the other side of the road.

“Ahh…,” he looked at them, “English?”

“Yeah,” said Scott.

“Moment,” said the old man, and disappeared into the shack. He reappeared a few moments later, followed closely by a teenage boy, tall with dark hair and a band of sweat along his hairline.

“You English?” asked the boy.

“American,” said Scott.

“And French,” said Bernadette.

“Canadienne,” said Nathalie.

“Well, cool,” said the boy. “A regular UN delegation. You wanna sit over in the shade?” They followed him over to the plastic tables around the corner. “We don’t really have much to offer except chivapchichi and maybe a couple cans of cola. Not very cold, but you won’t get better until Mostar, at least.”

“Thanks, that’d be great,” said Andrew, and the boy and the old man disappeared back inside.

“Where the hell is he from?” asked Andrew when they had gone.

“Must have hung around one of the U.S. bases or something,” said Scott.

“Yeah,” said Andrew. “Must have.”

A few minutes later the boy reappeared carrying paper plates of small sausages and pita bread and set them down on the tables.

Andrew asked him if he was from Bosnia.

“I was born in Mostar,” he said, “but my dad moved us to the U.S. when the war started. Temporary asylum. I lived in Waukegan for six years.” He looked down at the table. “I’ll get your drinks,” he said, and once again disappeared inside.

“So how come you’re back here, now?” asked Scott, when he returned a minute later.

“Well,” said the kid, “just when it looked like we might be there for good, the war ended. Our petition got rejected and they told us we had to come back.” For an instant he looked flatly at them, as though weighing the possibility that one of their hands had wielded the rejection stamp.

“Oh,” said Scott, “It makes sense. Politically, I mean. Wouldn’t look good if people were fleeing from the peace you just brokered.”

“Sure,” said the kid, “But right now I should be starting my last year at Grover Cleveland.” He looked up when the old man’s voice shot a staccato stream of Serbo-Croatian out of the shack. He turned back to them, his lips pursed. “And yet here I am,” he said.

They finished their chivapchichi and pita in punctuated silence, occasional empathies cut short, a goodbye sympathetic and awkward, but Andrew was only distantly aware of any of it, because he was consumed by a strange unease, an anxiety, by an odd, discomfited sense, late in the day, of failure.

It wasn’t until they were back in the Suburban that Andrew realized he hadn’t even asked the kid his name, and he briefly thought that somehow this would make a difference. He sat down in the back seat. The car door thudded closed. He had a fleeting urge to jump back out and ask the kid his name, but he felt stuck to the seat, unable to move. Then the car started and pulled out onto the road and away, and Andrew turned around and looked out the back window.

The road stretched back behind them as far as he could see, all the way to the horizon and beyond. The air filled with their kicked-up dust. He watched through the dust as the little stone shack by the side of the road slowly receded into the distance.

Kirkus Reviews raved that “Dau’s novel offers deeply resonating truths about war and culture, about family and loss that only art can reveal. A literary tour de force.” Marisa Silver called it “an utterly riveting debut,” and Jean Thompson said it’s “first-rate, original, powerful storytelling.”

Stephen Dau attended the University of Pittsburgh before working in post-war reconstruction in the Balkans and international philanthropy in Washington D.C.

He subsequently studied creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

His work has appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, McSweeney’s, and MSNBC, among other places.

He lives in Brussels. Visit him online at www.stephendau.com.